Special Orders

Congress and Critical Foreign Policy Issues:
Past, Present, and Future

An international relations perspective provides the theoretical insight to understand why Congress is assertive on foreign policy only every generation or so and only on certain salient, critical issues. This perspective argues that critical issues come onto the foreign policy agenda from the international arena. When such an issue comes onto the agenda, it produces a great deal of debate within society as a whole, within Congress, and between Congress and the president. During this period of debate, Congress has the opportunity to take a role in shaping the overall policy regarding the critical issue. However, once an overall policy is chosen in response to the critical issue, the executive dominates because the policy is set and the executive branch's role in implementation naturally gives it an advantage. Thus, the overall pattern in congressional activism on foreign policy is that it rises and falls with the rise and resolution of critical foreign policy issues that originate in the international system.

A critical issue produces a major orientation that defines United States foreign policy and organizes public discourse surrounding it. Since the U.S. emerged on the world stage in 1898, there have been three critical issues: imperialism, isolationism vs. internationalism, and anti-communism. In the late 1800s, the U.S. faced an economic crisis punctuated by the booms and busts of capitalism and had to choose whether to take external colonies as a response to this problem. It ended up with the Philippines as a formal colony, Cuba as an informal satellite (under the terms of the Platt Amendment), and eventually the Panama Canal and an entrenched policy in Latin America. The tension between isolationism and internationalism came center stage during and after World War I. Imperialism had led American into Latin America, but had not defined the country's relationship to Europe. When war broke out in 1914 the United States began a dialogue, lasting until World War II, about the proper U.S. role in the world. Congress agreed to declare war and acquiesced to the president during the war, but afterwards, in rejecting the League of Nations Treaty, the Senate handed Wilson one of the most famous defeats a president has suffered. This isolationism prevailed until the bombing of Pearl Harbor, after which internationalism won out almost immediately. After World War II, communism emerged as the new critical foreign policy issue. The U.S. had been hostile to communism from the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, but the issue became critical to its foreign policy only with the emergence of the Soviet Union as a superpower and major rival.

The theory predicts that it is in the transition from one critical issue era to the next that foreign policy issues become most contentious and Congress is most likely to become involved. If the policy response to a critical issue appears to be failing, that will also cause an increase in debate and activism. The policy response to communism was, of course, containment, which eventually failed in Vietnam. Not only does such a failure cause a new cycle of debate, it produces institutionalized changes: Congress was not just participating in shaping policy, but working on trying to prevent the same type of thing from happening again. The War Powers Resolution is a "classic" of this type, even though it was watered down through compromise in order to get passed and it has not been implemented by presidents.

In order to test this theoretical perspective it is necessary to observe congressional behavior over a long period of time. The study includes indicators of activity on and disagreement over foreign policy in the Senate from 1897 to 1984. These indicators are the number of roll call votes taken on foreign policy each year and the number of close votes taken on foreign policy each year. This shifts the focus from the votes of the members to the behavior of the institution as a whole.

Figure 1 reveals two patterns in the data.² One is cyclical confirming the critical issue theory; the other is a steady increase in activity since World War II.

The critical issue pattern begins with peaks of activity preceding and following the Spanish-American War. Then there are very large peaks produced by the Versailles Treaty. There is modest activity around 1950, but it is produced not by the U.N., the Truman Doctrine, the passage of the Marshall Plan, or the Korean War, but by contention over aid related to the Marshall Plan, mostly regarding whether to give economic aid only or to include military aid. This confirms that even though contention over the UN was minimal and there was bipartisanship due to the perceived threat of communism, members of Congress were still concerned about how their constituents' money was spent and the implications of the types of aid granted and its recipients. The last surge is a four-year season of high activity on Vietnam. Roll call voting as an indicator of activity, then, seems to confirm the critical issue theory. The other pattern in Figure 1 is an upward trend that is consistent with various descriptions of increases in congressional activity on foreign policy deriving from its role in appropriations for foreign aid, defense, routine bureaucratic operations, and, less often, authorizing or halting the use of force.

The data go up to the year 1984. What does that tell us about the current era and about the future? The critical issue theory helps us understand current developments in at least three ways: it explains why the current era seems to be one of drift and contradictions; it suggests that a familiar pattern will emerge again with a new critical issue and what the characteristics of such an issue would be; and it suggests how we might eliminate competing explanations.

The end of the cold war marked the resolution of the anti-communism critical issue. This development was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, activity should go down because there is no longer a critical issue over which to contend. On the other hand, the potential for contention increases because the constraint of the bipartisan consensus over containment, as fractured as it was by Vietnam, is now irrelevant. Thus we witnessed within a very short space of time two nearly opposite reactions by Congress to presidential use of force: nearly no congressional concern about the invasion of Panama, even when the press was restricted, and then a very serious debate over the Persian Gulf War.

These developments have led to recent research presenting seemingly discordant findings. One researcher demonstrated increases in the entrepreneurial activities of individual members of Congress in foreign policy, while another showed convincing evidence that President Clinton has been seizing increasing prerogatives without consulting Congress. So is Congress on the rise or on the decline?⁴

There appear to be two contradictory dynamics occurring simultaneously, each of which needs to be explained theoretically. First, the overall increase in activity since World War II, observed in the data up to 1984, presumably continues after the end of the cold war. This trend is due to the role of foreign aid and spending in other areas, including the use of force. The contradictory tendency is a significant damper on the increase in assertiveness that Congress will exhibit for the simple reason that a new critical issue has not yet really emerged. Contention is bound to increase as soon as a new critical issue comes onto the agenda, but this does not necessarily happen right away.

Presently, American foreign policy is in a period of transition in search of a critical issue that will define policy alternatives in the years ahead. The United States has not been consistent in its role as sole superpower. In the Persian Gulf War, President Bush took the limited position of defending the territorial integrity of Kuwait and reversing the invasion, but not ousting Saddam Hussein. By contrast, President Clinton pressed for a more assertive human rights foreign policy. The Clinton Doctrine has clearly been an attempt to shift from supporting anti-communist regimes to supporting democratic regimes and human rights, for example in Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo. However, there is also opposition to such a policy from those who believe that the U.S. should be militarily strong but avoid costly adventures that are not necessarily in the national interest, narrowly defined.

The "human rights versus national interest" motif pertains to U.S. policy towards the People's Republic of China as well.⁵ Here, Clinton reversed his 1992 campaign position to adopt a "realist" posture towards China. Congress's support for the Clinton administration's proposal for normal trade relations shows that there is bipartisan support for a more realist than idealist approach to this rising power. Yet there was certainly not complete consensus. Observe the "strange bedfellows" of Paul Wellstone (D-MN), who opposed the Vietnam War (failure of containment) and opposed free trade with China on human rights grounds (candidate for new critical issue), and Jesse Helms (R-NC), who opposed free trade with China mostly because it is communist (the old critical issue). They were on the losing side of the debate, but they represent a richness of debate that was not there for most of the early cold war.

This is a time of transition, and it remains to be seen whether the "New World Order" or some other issue will become the critical issue in the first decades of the twenty-first century.⁶ However, the critical issue theory helps us understand that the present period of transition is likely to be temporary, and that at some point a new consensus will emerge that will drive foreign policy and Congress's role in it. The present lack of consensus means that contention over a new critical issue will be intense; however, it is likely that eventually a consensus will emerge on a future critical issue, just as it has in the past.

A problem with looking at current behavior without a long-term theoretical perspective is that it can give rise to an analysis that is weak on explanation and judgmental from a normative point of view. For example, Cecil Crabb writes that, given the opportunity to "steer the ship of state" on the Kosovo issue, Congress was "Frozen at the Wheel."⁷ What was going on over Kosovo was not inaction, but disagreement. There is a difference between being "frozen at the wheel" and giving a rubber stamp to a policy, such as that given to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. There was real disagreement over Kosovo, both as a specific case and as an application of the Clinton Doctrine. Disagreement within the society in general and within Congress, however, does not have to mean disagreement between Congress and the president, or defeat of the president by Congress. The U.S. Congress is a legislature with a legitimate right to debate and pass various resolutions and bills, and if they are contradictory with each other, then so be it. In an era between critical issues, it is pointless to wax nostalgic for the bipartisanship of the Vandenberg era, as Crabb does. There will continue to be debates like this until consensus on an issue emerges. That is why it is not surprising that Clinton ended up attempting to avoid engaging Congress constitutionally on nearly every use of force he ordered.

Finally, the critical issue theory helps in understanding how competing theories may be limited in explaining and predicting future behavior. Congressional reforms, increased partisanship, and the impact of war are some other variables that have been linked to variations in congressional behavior. The argument regarding war is that Congress is submissive to the president during the war and then reasserts itself afterwards.⁸ The exception is World War II because the cold war broke out right away. However, if we look at a larger number of cases, we can see that Congress is not always assertive after a war: for the Spanish-American War, Congress was assertive and war-mongering before the war, encouraging McKinley to get involved; and with Vietnam, Congress did not wait for the war to end to become assertive. The predictive variable is thus not war, but the critical issue (or failure of a response to one). When a critical issue is dividing the country and Congress is deciding which way to come down on it, this is when Congress is most assertive.

The key is not party. The key is not divided government. The key is not war. The key is the critical issue. And it is critical issues that shape congressional contention over the course of history. When will Congress be more assertive? When a new critical issue emerges. When will it be less assertive? Once a policy is hammered out on that issue.

1. Marie T. Henehan, Foreign Policy and Congress: An International Relations Perspective (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2000).

2. Henehan, 94. Tariff was removed both because of its strongly domestic component and because it has its own pattern, discussed elsewhere in the book, which masks the critical issue pattern (93, 185n, 128-30).

3. Henehan, 112.

4. Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, "Taking the Lead: Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs in U.S. Foreign Policy," presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 21-24, 2001; Ryan C, Hendrickson, "War Powers and the Clinton Presidency: Clinton's Constitutional Legacy as Commander-in-Chief," presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, Chicago, February 21-24, 2001. This debate is apples and oranges to some extent because Carter and Scott are explicitly showing individual behavior in the absence of behavior of Congress as an institution (p. 4), while Hendrickson is talking about war powers, which cannot be exercised unless Congress does manage to act as an institution. Nevertheless, why do members feel they need to work as individuals and not as an institution?

5. "The Asian Challenge," in Ronald L. Tammen et al., Power Transitions (New York: Chatham House Publishers, 2000).

6. Some might suggest that globalization and foreign trade might define the next critical issue. The twenty-first century may well be more like the nineteenth century, when the tariff issue, with its combined domestic and foreign aspects, dominated debate. However, economic issues seem to be less likely candidates for critical issues, since critical issues are usually linked to the possibility of war.

7. Cecil V. Crabb, Jr., "Frozen at the Wheel: Congress and the Kosovo Crisis," Miller Center Report 15, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 22-24.

8. Hrach Gregorian, "Assessing Congressional Involvement in Foreign Policy: Lessons of the Post-Vietnam Period," Review of Politics 46 (January 1984): 91-112.