280d - foreign policy
TRANSCRIPT
American foreign policy seems to be haunted by Alexis de Tocqueville’s famous
appraisal of democracies as severely lacking in effective foreign policy. In his Democracy
in America Tocqueville argued that “it is especially in the conduct of their foreign relations
that democracies appear to me decidedly inferior to other governments.”1 Democracies like
America cannot, in Tocqueville’s opinion “combine its measures with secrecy, or await
their consequences with patience” and there was a “propensity which induces democracies
to obey impulse rather than prudence, and to abandon a mature design for the gratification
of a momentary passion.”2 Tocqueville was not the first to worry about the potentially
detrimental effect of democracy on foreign policy, and his judgment still looms over
American historians and policy makers today. However, if Tocqueville predicted and
observed this aspect of democracy on foreign policy, why is it that historians of American
diplomacy have yet to come up with a uniform definition of the impact of domestic politics
on foreign policy? It is clear that realists like Kennan and revisionists like Williams drew a
distinct line between domestic and international, however they lamented the fact that they
were still so severely intertwined.
As much as realists or neorealists try to eschew the idea, domestic politics and
foreign policy have an intimate relationship. Nevertheless, historians of American foreign
policy have been trending more towards the international. International histories should
have a disclaimer attached to them as Thomas Zeiler points out in his recent article in The
Journal of American History entitled “The Diplomatic History Bandwagon” that “one must
be careful here, for rooting the field in international history risks losing sight of the
1 Tocqueville – Democracy in America Volume 1 2992 Tocqueville 300
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Americanness that is the very character of U.S. diplomatic history.”3 Though many works
mention domestic politics as a source of foreign policy decisions, they are hesitant to do so.
There could be many reasons for this: historians might be afraid of bringing an even more
complicated set of variables into the mix or perhaps utilizing only American sources might
not tell an objective tale. This historiography will take a chronological look at works over
the past few decades on foreign policy during the Cold War, specifically works that include
the role of domestic politics, in order to understand the progression of how the issue is
handled and whether there is a single aspect that draws some historians in and repels others.
Before delving into the historiography, it is important to look at some terms and
how they help explain the relationship between the domestic and the international. Realism
emphasizes that the international system is fundamentally anarchical and that there is not a
single authority that can settle international disputes. Also, the crucial unit in realist
ideology is the state, it is a “unitary actor” and “because the central problems for states are
starkly defined by the nature of the international system, their actions are primarily a
response to external rather than domestic political forces.”4 Liberalism emphasizes the
coexistence of a state of war with a state of peace; the state is also not a unitary actor but
composed of a diverse conglomeration of groups and interests.5 Aussenpolitik is a concept
that emphasizes that international relations affects domestic arrangements and that states
conduct foreign policy for strategic reasons, in response to international pressures not to
achieve domestic ends. Innenpolitik on the other hand roots foreign policy in the social and
3 Zeiler - 10604 Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations - 545 Ways of War and Peace 19
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economic structure of the state, rejecting the notion of rational statewide objectives.6
Domestic politics has to do with specifically “with the development and impact of
governmental institutions, along with the proximate influences on their action.”7 Mark
Leff’s definition of political history thus includes not just congressional politics, but also
public opinion, the media, economic policies, and much more. Defining domestic politics
can be tricky in itself because in doing so, one is emphasizing the difference between the
international and the domestic, and perhaps the very demarcation between the two is a
factor in the intense debate this essay looks at.
Whichever school of thought historians find themselves in, especially if they don’t
fit perfectly into a single theory, most historians of American foreign policy do not neglect
the role of domestic politics. However, certain historians pass different judgments on this
role. Realists, such as Kennan, emphasize the corrosive effect domestic politics has on
strategic foreign policy. Revisionists, mainly Williams, focus on the specific relationship
between politics and economics and their role on foreign policy. The various approaches to
domestic politics all focus on a fundamental division between the domestic and the
international; however, the blurring of this line, or a trend towards the international has
created a backlash and an even more vehement emphasis on “centering” America in the
history of American foreign policy. Can this line be effectively blurred? Are those that
“center” America correct in saying that international history simplifies as much as it
complicates? Nevertheless, authors such as Melvin Small and Frederik Logevall, whose
6 Fareed Zakaria. “Realism and Domestic Politics: A Review Essay”, Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambition. by Jack Snyder. International Security, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Summer, 1992), pp. 177-198.7 Mark Leff, "Revisioning U.S. Political History," American Historical Review (June 1995), 829.
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focus was on domestic politics, still leave gaping holes in their works, especially when it
comes to actually defining the specific impact of domestic politics and its own driving
factors.
George Kennan’s American Diplomacy, published in 1951, was a foundational
realist text which emphasized the line that should exist between domestic and international
policy. A line that Kennan insisted should not be crossed. Kennan illustrated that “we have
seen that a good deal of our trouble seems to have stemmed from the extent to which the
executive has felt itself beholden to short-term trends of public opinion…and fro what we
might call the erratic and subjective nature of public reaction to foreign policy questions.”8
Though the state was in theory supposed to act rationally and unified, the state had been
guided and would guide public opinion throughout many unfortunate decisions during the
course of the twentieth century. Kennan blamed the Truman and Eisenhower administration
for distorting the public opinion into thinking the Soviet Union had “aims and intentions it
did not really have.”9 Kennan felt that the only kind of foreign policy being made to combat
the Soviet Union was fuelled by public opinion’s falsely formed fears. Another aspect of
American diplomacy which Kennan argued was overrun with public passion was “the
inevitable association of legalistic ideas with moralistic ones: the carrying-over into the
affairs of states of the concepts of right and wrong, the assumption that state behavior is a
fit subject for moral judgment… And when such indignation spills over into military
contest, it knows no bounds short of the reduction of the lawbreaker to the point of
complete submissiveness - namely unconditional surrender.”10 He argued that when public
8 Kennan 939 Kennan 17010 Kennan
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opinion was utilized to extend military conflicts, the cost would be too great to bear, namely
Vietnam and Korea.
In the expanded 1984 edition, Kennan elaborates on the relationship between
diplomacy and the military. He argued that the “commitment to massive civilian
destruction” would seriously lead the American people astray.11 The sheer amount of
militarization after his containment policy took form, led Kennan to question his own
policy. The militarization process for Kennan had helped to work “ourselves into a blind
alley,” because of the lack of precedent Kennan believed there was no “rational way to
relate to the other processes of our society the industrial and financial effort required to
maintain a great armed forces establishment in what is nominally a time of peace.”12
However, Kennan argued that the real problem with maintaining such a large military might
be “compounded by certain deeply ingrained features of our political system.”13 In this
explanation Kennan emphasized the “domestic political self-consciousness of the American
statesman,” because his decisions were more concerned with the domestic political
repercussions to his actions.14 To Kennan, the congressman and senator, were more
dedicated to their constituencies than the national state as a unitary actor. Unless diplomacy
could be dealt with rationally and uniformly by the state, there would always be mistakes.
Kennan’s work is one of the first where a clear line is drawn between the domestic and
international spheres. Even though certain histories did not align perfectly with the realist
ideology.
11 Kennan 17512 Kennan 17613 17614 178
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William Appleman William’s foundational revisionist work, The Tragedy of
American Diplomacy, published in 1959, offers a scathing look into the gap between
American rhetoric and practices in foreign policy. Williams emphasizes material and
economic factors as drivers of foreign policy decisions. While this is not a traditional
definition of domestic politics, economic factors should be considered as immensely
relevant to domestic issues and in turn foreign policy decisions. Williams utilizes this logic
to argue that the United States did not become an imperial power by accident, it was eagerly
in pursuit of overseas markets, and its role as a leading power only increased that eagerness.
Williams’ central thesis also included the idea that the transformation of the American
economy gave rise to the powerful elite who exerted “preponderant influence” on the
economic and political decisions of the nation, thus echoing Lenin’s stance on imperialism
as the highest stage of capitalism. Though he did not identify completely with the realist
ideology, he does emphasize that foreign policy decisions, instead of responding to actual
problems abroad (like the rhetoric stated), responded to economic and political from within.
However, the revisionist approach to the Cold War would soon be challenged by the
“post-revisionists” who insisted on moving past revisionist and orthodox interpretations
because the influx of new sources meant that a new interpretation was necessary. John
Lewis Gaddis, the first to attempt a move away from revisionist thought, wrote The United
States and the Origins of the Cold War in 1972 and Strategies of Containment in 1982, that
both emphasize that while the United States was not to blame for the Cold War, many of its
decisions did result heavily from the tensions between domestic and international. In the
Origins of the Cold War Gaddis analyzes the years 1941 to 1947 to illustrate the many
factors that constricted American foreign policy. First, America and the Soviet Union,
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emerging from World War II as the leading powers, wished not to repeat the mistakes of the
interwar period. Gaddis, quoting Roosevelt to emphasize his opinion on domestic politics
“while power politics should not control international relations, ‘we cannot deny that power
is a factor in world politics, any more than we can deny its existence as a factor in national
politics.’”15 As Kennan had postulated, domestic problems should theoretically have no role
in international relations; however, Gaddis, like his predecessors, argued that domestic
factors led to a series of missed opportunities for the United States to formulate a stronger
foreign policy. Gaddis’ examples include the pressure to avoid the mistakes of the past,
disregard for the power of Soviet ideology, the tension between the ideological path of self-
determination in the Eastern-European case versus a strategic route of cooperation with the
Soviet Union, and the inability of the US to abandon its nuclear monopoly or extending aid
to the Soviet Union because public opinion was rampantly anti-Soviet.
One aspect that Gaddis touches upon, but does not delve further into, is the issue of
public opinion on foreign policy. Though he gives examples of Roosevelt’s manipulation of
the public and Congress in terms of Stalin’s motives, he does not develop the role of the
government in fostering the anti-Soviet sentiment. Perhaps this is because he hopes to
eschew as much as possible the revisionist ideology that places blame on the United States.
Instead of focusing on who or what specifically was to blame, Gaddis is looking into
structural changes and issues that helped transform the nature of American foreign policy.
1946 was a crucial turning point for Gaddis, because it signaled a shift from conciliatory
towards aggressive confrontation. While he detailed the increase in aggression by the
Soviets, it is the influence of this aggression on the US combined with the rising discontent
15 Gaddis 17 – US and origins of cold war
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over “appeasement” that pushes the United States over the line into the aggression that was
the Truman Doctrine.
In Strategies of Containment Gaddis offered a detailed analysis of the strategies and
motivations that created American foreign policy from the Truman to the Nixon
administration; he told the story of the growth of containment into an unruly policy that
predisposed the end of a coherent American foreign policy. The origins of containment lay
for Gaddis in Roosevelt’s insistence on restricting the consequences of the American-Soviet
“bargain” during World War II, which promised the Soviet Union a prominent place in the
postwar order in exchange for assistance in the war. Roosevelt thought Soviet hostility had
to do with external problems, but as his plan of Soviet integration failed, the Kennan’s
thesis in his “Long Telegram” that the Soviet Union suffered from internal problems that
could not be solved with foreign policy. Gaddis divided his progression of containment into
five stages: Kennan’s original thesis, Truman and NSC 68, the New Look of Eisenhower,
flexible response from Kennedy and Johnson, and Nixon’s and Kissinger’s détente.
While Gaddis argued that containment was supposed to have taken the path of
maintaining its integrity and security in the international arena, the intensely psychological
path containment took made it vulnerable to failures. In Origins of the Cold War, Gaddis
outlined the limitations of the US government because of domestic factors, this book looked
at the consequences of these factors. The burdens of public opinion, congressional politics,
and strong anti-Soviet sentiment were too heavy for the policy of containment to balance.
Gaddis’ approach in both these books is nothing less than impressive because of the vast
amount of primary sources utilized. His pursuit of sources outside the United States
borders, however, signaled a shift in the historiography, as historians became more
Venkatasubramanian 8
interested in placing the United States within the context of the overarching transformations
in the international arena.
Peter Gourevitch’s article “The Second Image Reversed: the international sources of
domestic politics” illustrated the beginnings of the process of internationalization in
American diplomatic history. Writing as an international relations specialist, Gourevitch
argued that the comparative approach had been neglected, and he used this approach to
reverse the question. In reversing the question, postulating that domestic structure and
politics may actually be a consequence of international politics, Gourevitch promoted
internationalization as a viable method to study the Cold War period. His article was
outlined into three main parts: the first discussing the impact of the international system on
domestic politics, the second emphasizing the traditional factors that make domestic
structures far from apolitical and a huge influence on the international system, and the final
part discussing the role of interdependence as a theory that combats classical realist
ideologies. Gourevitch believed that “international relations and domestic politics are so
interrelated that they should be analyzed simultaneously, as wholes.”16 However, this
relationship was not new to the Cold War period, it had been present since the early modern
era. Gourevitch’s analysis of the interrelationship is crucial, especially as a part of the I.R.
school because it illustrates that the shift towards internationalization did not just erupt in
the field of history.
Nevertheless, the internationalist trend did have a serious effectiveness lag, as there
were many historians still emphasizing the domestic problems of the twentieth century as
16 Peter Gourevitch “The second image reversed: the international sources of domestic politics.” (International Organization Vol. 32 Iss. 04 September 1978), pp 881 - 912.
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key sources in the blunders of foreign policy. Robert Dallek, in his The American Style of
Foreign Policy, published in 1983, discussed how Americans have greatly misinterpreted
foreign policy because they have been longing for a past that no longer exists, a past
containing a distinctive kind of American individualism and communality which no longer
existed. In his chapters on the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, he argued that the
communist threat from outside “justified the need for ‘togetherness,’ conformity, or
organizational loyalty as a substitute for traditional individualism.”17 Dallek uses key
foreign policy decisions, such as late-nineteenth century expansionism, containment, and
Vietnamization, as more atavistic and inward-looking than actually focused on creating new
policy. Similar to Kennan’s analysis, Dallek believes that American foreign policy, in its
pursuit of rational decisions, has actually “continued to use foreign policy in nonrational
ways to express current hopes and fears.”18 Though realists emphasize a clear border
between domestic and foreign affairs, historians of American foreign policy were clearly
troubled by the fact that there was a serious intermingling of the two spheres. While Kennan
argues that the foreign policy was far from rational, Dallek offers more tenable reasoning as
to why it was irrational.
Returning back to political science, it is important to make note of one of the most
important models created to measure the impact of domestic politics on presidential
decision making, and in turn foreign policy decisions. Ostrom and Job’s 1986 article “The
President and the Political Use of Force” created a cybernetic model of decision making
that would illustrate that between the presidencies of Truman and Ford, political uses of
17 Xix - Dallek18 Dallek xix
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force are more prevalent than for other reasons. Ostrom and Job emphasize that the
president, "in seizing certain opportunities to use force but rejecting others, the president
clearly operates in a 'political' fashion. He assesses a range of actors, not only in the
international context, but also in the American domestic context and in the context of his
political leadership."19 Ostrom and Job argue that the president acts not “as a rational
decision maker, but in a fashion similar to that suggest by the cybernetic approach to
decision making. Operating in a context that has been described as 'structural uncertainty',
the president is not able to determine the state of the environment, locate available
alternatives, or assess the consequences of those alternatives, in short, the raw materials of
rational choice are absent.”20 Their analysis accounts for international, domestic, and
political pressures in presidential decision making, but the application of the cybernetic
model revealed that during the years of 1948 to 1976, domestic political factors played a
larger role. Observations in this study include that during national campaigns, the
propensity to use force increases, as well as the inverse relationship between popularity and
the use of force.
There are studies that disagree with Ostrom’s and Job’s conclusions, mainly on the
fact that domestic and political factors overwhelm the international factors. Moore’s and
Lanoue’s 2003 study questioned not if domestic factors mattered in the international arena,
but if they truly mattered most during the Cold War period. They argued that “conflictual
foreign policy behavior can be explained adequately without reference to presidential
19 Ostrom and Job 542-54320 543
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popularity or domestic electoral politics."21 While Ostrom and Job postulated that presidents
did not focus their attention on solely international factors, Moore and Lanoue argued that
“foreign policy is driven by a rational expectations process that presidents prefer
international tools to domestic tools for solving foreign policy problems, and that presidents
generally seek to match the conflictual behavior of other countries.”22 So while there is still
a debate over the extent to which domestic factors play a role in foreign policy, the
existence of domestic factors has not been neglected.
As stated previously, the trend towards internationalization was much more drawn
out than expected, and some histories took a fused approach to the history of the postwar
period, discussing global issues but maintaining an overarching focus on the United States.
Thomas McCormick’s America’s Half Century, published in 1989, offered an explanation
of America’s rise and fall in the postwar period. McCormick argued that a hegemon has
possession of enough economic, military, and ideological power that no other nation can
challenge it successfully. However, for McCormick, as was for his predecessor Williams,
economic supremacy was the base of all hegemonies, especially the American hegemony.
McCormick, unlike realists, made the unit of analysis the global capitalist system instead of
a state. Though McCormick does attempt to focus on relating foreign policy to domestic
politics, he does end up simplifying the hegemony into its own actor, thus in turn neglecting
the intense domestic confusion over certain policy decisions such as the Truman Doctrine
and NATO. McCormick’s work, while a laudable reprise of New Left ideas in a widespread
21 Moore and Lanoue, “Domestic Politics and U.S. Foreign Policy: A Study of Cold War Conflict Behavior” (The Journal of Politics, vol. 65) 376.22 Ibid 379
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history, did not approach the level of domestic observation and complexity contained in
Dallek and Gaddis.
Melvin Small rejects looking at American foreign policy through an international
lens outright, focusing exclusively in Democracy & Diplomacy on the role of domestic
politics on foreign policy. Instead of focusing on the liberal relationship between
democracy and diplomacy, Small emphasized the traditional view that democracies, as
Tocqueville suggested, were ill-equipped to conduct successful foreign policy. Small
looked a cases where domestic politics have had an influence on foreign policy, from the
1790s to the 1990s, and the continuities were remarkable. Party conflicts, electoral
considerations, media and public opinion, and lobbyists have always shaped foreign policy.
However, the problem is, that Small has nothing to compare this vast and meaningful
“impact of domestic politics” to, because appraising domestic politics value in foreign
policy requires a counterfactual that was not influenced by such factors. He does offer a
realist “rational actor” model of the state, but what state truly acts objectively and
uniformly? Also in his counterfactual state citizens are all informed and judge issues based
on utilitarian reasons. Now the fact that this is a ridiculous image may give us the answer to
our question: yes, domestic politics is inseparable from the history of foreign policy in
America.
Craig and Logevall in their 2009 book, America’s Cold War, make the same
argument, that “for much of the Cold War, the domestic variables predominated over the
foreign ones.”23 Though one could spend the postwar period just focusing on America’s
decline, Craig and Logevall suggest that it was nevertheless always supreme and “had
23 Craig and Logevall - 6
Venkatasubramanian 13
primary responsibility for much that happened during the epoch.”24 Unlike Dallek or
Gaddis, Craig and Logevall have to defend their focus on the domestic arena because the
trend towards internationalization was in full swing. Thomas Zeiler stated that diplomatic
historians were driving on “the bandwagon of internationalization.”25 Historians in the past
couple decades have begun to argue for a “holistic approach” to American history, focusing
mainly on how American decisions influenced the world and vice versa. However, Craig
and Logevall emphasized that “America-centered questions demand immersions in
American sources and knowledge of American institutions.”26 Though the approach is
commendable, Craig and Logevall do suffer some of the same problems that Small did.
They do argue that domestic pressures prolonged the conflict, but this counterfactual that
the Cold War could have ended in the 1950s is problematic because it lies on the
assumption that states are unitary actors that cannot be swayed by irrational choices, which
almost every author mentioned here cannot seem to find an example of. Boxing presidents
and their administrations into realist or idealist camps does emphasize the impact of
domestic pressures; however, it also seems to unnaturally overshadow pressing
international concerns that surely played a larger role.
It is usually at a nexus where the most interesting behaviors can be observed, and
the intersection of domestic and foreign policy during the Cold War is no exception. While
realists, revisionists, and post-revisionists differ on the extent and nature of the influence of
domestic politics on foreign policy, they all observe that it does exist. However, in
24 Craig and Logevall 525 Thomas W. Zeiler, The Diplomatic History Bandwagon: A State of the Field. The Journal of American History, Vol. 95, No. 4 (Mar. 2009), pp. 1053-107326 Craig and Logevall 5
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observing this wide set of historians and political scientists, it is clear that the judgment they
give to domestic politics is very different. Kennan blames domestic politics for
transforming foreign policy into a severely moralistic form that construed ideology to be
more important than it really was. Williams and McCormick focus instead on foreign policy
being influenced heavily by domestic economic concerns, and it was not the state acting as
a whole, but an elite group of people pursuing overseas markets. Gaddis, though he hopes to
transcend the revisionist stance, returns back to a strongly realist one, insisting that the
American state was constrained heavily by its decisions that transformed domestic politics
and in turn foreign policy. He observes the structural deficiencies of the foreign policy
during the Cold War, in an attempt to qualify certain decisions. Dallek focuses distinctly on
the deficiencies of the motivations behind domestic politics, as a result he does champion
the realist standpoint, but he does take the analysis of domestic politics and its irrationality
much further than his predecessors. The political scientists have had skin in the game since
the beginning, and Ostrom’s and Job’s cybernetic model of decision making attempts to
empirically prove the Innenpolitik stance. While Moore and Lanoue have accepted the
influence of domestic politics, they question whether it was the most significant influence in
Cold War foreign policy. Thus the question of gradation in this case was prevalent in all
arenas of academia. Small, Craig, and Logevall all hoped to describe a history of American
foreign policy, with a distinct emphasis on the “American.” However, their approach was
not able to answer why domestic politics, more so than international pressures, affects
foreign policy decisions. Both their works end up assuming a rational state as the ideal, but
this counterfactual does not take them far enough.
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The key dilemma is that a focus on America makes the history vulnerable to gaps
when it comes to context. In asserting the importance of domestic politics, historians may
artificially downplay other factors. However, at the same time, an international approach
can also lose the nuances of domestic decision-making that was key in a certain event. It is
difficult to describe a truly “intermestic” history of the Cold War because it has yet to be
written; such a history would have to maintain a level of detail that may be impossible for
international historians as well as a strong grasp of the importance of each detail in a larger
narrative and context that might be foreign to certain political historians. If such a work
wanted to make a significant mark, it would have to refrain from turning into a reference
book, but taking a strong stance with such a broad area of study risks generalization.
Whatever is in store for the relationship between domestic politics in foreign policy, these
above works have addressed it effectively enough for one to notice a pattern. Bringing
attention to this consistent undercurrent in the scholarship has offered an interesting study
into the development of the continuities and breaks in the historiography.
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