The Surprising Bipartisanship of U.S. Foreign Policy

Jordan Tama

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In an article in The Atlantic in 2020, shortly before he became CIA Director, William Burns observed that “in the past, a sense of common domestic purpose gave ballast to U.S. diplomacy; now its absence enfeebles it.” Burns is not alone in bemoaning the decline of bipartisan agreement on foreign policy. Writing in Foreign Affairs a year later, Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz argued that the “domestic consensus that long supported U.S. engagement abroad has come apart in the face of mounting partisan discord and a deepening rift between urban and rural Americans.” Indeed, this has become a common refrain, with the stark contrast in approaches between U.S. President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump on such issues as NATO, Russia, and climate change often cited to demonstrate the precipitous decline of consensus politics.

Yet a deeper look at the political dynamics that have shaped U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II reveals that such sharp differences are hardly new. Ever since the rise of the United States as a great power, bipartisan cooperation, partisan bickering, and intraparty disagreement have coexisted in shaping the country’s foreign policy. These tensions were present even during the early years of the Cold War, a period usually regarded as a golden age for bipartisanship. Today, Democrats and Republicans are generally aligned on China and industrial reshoring but are polarized on climate change and immigration. At the same time, the Republican Party is split over aid to Ukraine, reflecting a GOP divide between nationalists and internationalists that dates back to World War II. In short, the politics of U.S. foreign policy has always been more complicated than images of past unity or current polarization suggest.

A NOT SO GOLDEN AGE

Vociferous disagreement over foreign policy marked the United States’ earliest days, when the Founding Fathers argued bitterly over whether the country should intervene in support of revolutionary-era France during its war with Great Britain. A century later, U.S. hawks and progressives fiercely debated the questions of hostilities with Spain and the occupation of Cuba and the Philippines in the Spanish-American War. After World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was unable to persuade Republicans in Congress to vote for the treaty establishing the League of Nations, preventing the United States from joining the first multilateral institution designed to preserve peace.

The United States’ victory in World War II and the onset of the Cold War produced a new bipartisanship in both foreign policy rhetoric and action during Harry Truman’s first term as president. Capturing the mood of the time, Senator Arthur Vandenberg famously stated that partisan politics should stop “at the water’s edge.” Such bipartisan cooperation has always been essential for the United States to address major international challenges by giving allies and enemies alike a sense of the consistency of the country’s policies. Working together, President Truman, who was a Democrat, and Senator Vandenberg, a Republican who was Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, marshaled strong support from both parties for such landmark initiatives as the NATO treaty and the Marshall Plan.

Yet it did not take long for interparty divisions to reemerge. During Truman’s second term, Vandenberg developed lung cancer and was away from the Senate for 19 months before dying in 1951. During his absence, Republican voices became sharply critical of the president’s policies. As the 1940s ended, the Communist Party took over China, the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, and North Korea invaded South Korea. Republican members of Congress blamed Truman for allowing each of these setbacks to happen. Around the same time, Senator Joseph McCarthy and other Republicans alleged that the Truman administration was allowing communists to infiltrate the U.S. government.

Divisions within the parties themselves also resurfaced during the early years of the Cold War. In 1950, conservative Democrats lined up with Republicans to approve legislation establishing a Subversive Activities Control Board to investigate communist infiltration. This coalition also authorized the Justice Department to deport non-U.S. citizens who were deemed to pose a threat to national security. Although Truman argued that this legislation restricted civil liberties, Congress overrode his veto. The same congressional coalition blocked approval of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which Truman had negotiated. Four decades would pass before the Senate finally ratified this treaty criminalizing the world’s most heinous atrocity. Republicans, for their part, were split between internationalists who favored expansive foreign policy commitments and nationalists who wanted to limit U.S. involvement overseas. When U.S. forces became bogged down fighting North Korean and Chinese forces on the Korean Peninsula, some Republicans called for taking the war directly to China, whereas others argued that the United States should never have gotten involved in the first place.

A new wave of bipartisanship took hold following the inauguration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953, facilitated by a growing consensus in Washington that the United States needed to take strong steps to limit and counter Soviet power. Yet members of Congress remained divided on important international issues and partisan rhetoric was common. In 1957, when Eisenhower sought to increase foreign aid as a tool for fighting communism, conservative Democrats aligned with inward-looking Republicans to block him. Conversely, when Eisenhower sought to rein in a ballooning defense budget, hawkish Democratic senators attacked him for supporting spending restrictions that they claimed would allow the Soviet Union to gain a military edge over the United States. Senator John F. Kennedy, when announcing his presidential campaign in 1960, charged that under Eisenhower, “our security has declined more rapidly than over any comparable period in our history.”

New fault lines emerged following U.S. failures in the Vietnam War and presidential abuses of power. During the 1970s, Democratic and Republican lawmakers banded together to enact legislation—opposed by Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—to limit presidential authority in areas including the use of military force, intelligence operations, and human rights. Meanwhile, hard-line conservatives sharply criticized the policy of détente that Nixon and Ford pursued toward the Soviet Union, laying the foundation for the more aggressive anticommunist policies instituted by President Ronald Reagan. Some of those Reagan policies, in turn, generated strong pushback from many Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill. Most notably, Congress enacted laws from 1982 to 1984 prohibiting administration-backed aid to Nicaraguan contra rebels fighting to overthrow the communist-aligned Sandinista government. The Reagan administration’s decision to provide covert aid to the contras in violation of those laws prompted congressional investigations that nearly led to the president’s impeachment.

WASHINGTON WRANGLING

Since the end of the Cold War, disagreement on foreign policy has waxed and waned. The Senate has approved six waves of NATO enlargement since the 1990s with near-unanimous support, enabling the addition of 15 countries to the alliance, with Sweden now only needing Hungary and Turkey’s approval to become the 16th new member. Democrats and Republicans have also voted together to impose sanctions on Russia, North Korea, and other nations in response to human rights violations, military aggression, and other threatening behavior. In addition, broad bipartisan coalitions have approved more than $100 billion to combat HIV/AIDS and other infectious diseases, and greenlighted the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. Despite the deep divisions of the post-Trump era, Democrats and Republicans have also come together during the Biden administration to support actions countering the rise of China. These include major investments in domestic semiconductor manufacturing, an expanded military presence in the Asia-Pacific region, and displays of support for Taiwan.

But the post–Cold War era has also been marked by vigorous disagreements. Although some Democrats initially supported the war in Iraq, positions on the conflict split largely along partisan lines once no weapons of mass destruction were found there. During the Obama administration, Republicans universally assailed the 2015 agreement negotiated by President Barack Obama under which Iran agreed to constraints on its nuclear program in return for the lifting of economic sanctions. Just three years later, Trump exited the agreement, which he called “the worst deal ever.” Republicans attacked the Obama administration for failing to avert a 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, and the Biden administration for its handling of the 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. In one typical comment on the Afghanistan withdrawal, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy called Biden’s “lack of leadership” during the crisis “shameful.” Although it is unsurprising that the opposition party would try to score political points when overseas events make the president politically vulnerable, such scathing rhetoric can have real consequences in eroding the country’s international standing. Debates over climate change and immigration have also been characterized by strong polarization, making it very difficult for the United States to address those critical challenges.

At the same time, both parties have continued to face strong internal divisions over foreign policy during the last 30 years. Within the Democratic Party, debates over the North American Free Trade Agreement in the 1990s and the Trans-Pacific Partnership proposed by the Obama administration, which the United States did not join, pitted free traders against protectionists, while debates over military intervention in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria pitted liberal hawks against progressive doves. Internal disagreement is especially visible today within the Republican Party, as the “America first” agenda of Trump’s wing of the party clashes with the hawkish internationalism of Republicans such as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence. For example, although most Republicans in Congress joined with Democrats to appropriate more than $75 billion in military, financial, and humanitarian aid to Ukraine during 2022, nationalists and isolationists such as Senator Josh Hawley and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene have grown increasingly critical of the scale of this support, and it remains uncertain whether a majority of Republicans will continue to support Ukraine if the war becomes prolonged.

For all these tensions and divisions, both within and between the two parties, however, the current environment in which U.S. foreign policy is shaped is not that different from what it was in past decades. Consider a new study of congressional voting data, which shows the continued coexistence of bipartisanship and division over U.S. foreign policy. Of 424 important foreign policy roll call votes from 1991 to 2020, majorities of House Democrats and Republicans voted together 49 percent of the time, and the figure in the Senate was 53 percent. Strikingly, these rates of bipartisan voting on foreign policy remained rather steady, at 48 and 43 percent, respectively, during Trump’s presidency. In short, bipartisanship is still common in U.S. foreign policy.

CREATIVE TENSION

Certainly, there is much cause for concern about the effects of today’s political landscape on U.S. foreign policy. Trump and many of his political allies propound a highly nationalistic and xenophobic vision of the United States’ role in the world. If Trump is elected president again, his foreign policy decisions and behavior could significantly erode the rules-based international order. At the same time, dramatic swings in policy from one president to the next have reduced the willingness of the United States’ allies and partners to trust its commitments. The magnitude of this problem is greater than it has ever been before.

Yet many Republican presidential candidates, including former Governor Nikki Haley and Senator Tim Scott, as well as such influential members of Congress as Senator Lindsey Graham and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul, reject much of Trump’s foreign policy agenda, and continue to favor a brand of conservative internationalism that owes more to Reagan. Despite being the Republican standard-bearer for seven years, Trump has not succeeded in forging a consensus between inward- and outward-looking Republicans. This divide is likely to persist.

Inconsistent U.S. bipartisanship brings both disadvantages and less obvious advantages. On the one hand, the prevalence of domestic divisions over foreign policy prevents the United States from acting effectively to address many key global challenges, diminishes the credibility of U.S. overseas commitments, and reduces the incentive for other countries to cooperate. On the other hand, vigorous internal debate has long been a strength of the U.S. system, facilitating greater deliberation before important decisions and providing much-needed course corrections when things go awry.

During the Cold War, the father of the containment doctrine, George Kennan, often lamented that freewheeling U.S. democracy prevented Washington from carrying out as coherent and consistent a grand strategy as the authoritarian Soviet Union. Yet the United States made numerous adjustments during the Cold War that enabled it to outlast its communist rival. Going forward, the key imperative for whichever party is in office will be to marshal the country’s vigorous internal debates into policy innovations and refinements that strengthen, rather than weaken, continued U.S. leadership on the most critical issues of our time.