American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War

The Search for Consensus from Nixon to Clinton

Richard A Melanson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317477198
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

This book integrates the study of presidential politics and foreign policy-making from the Vietnam aftermath to the events following September 11 and the Iraqi War. Focusing on the relationship between presidents' foreign policy agendas and domestic politics, it offers compelling portraits of presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. In the course of comparing the efforts of these presidents to articulate a clear conception of the national interest and to forge a foreign policy consensus, the author shows the key role of public opinion in constraining presidential initiatives, in particular the decision to use military force overseas. Never more timely, this popular text is appropriate for courses in U.S. foreign policy, the presidency, or contemporary U.S. politics.

Part One

The Rise and Fall of the Cold War Consensus

1

In Search of Consensus

Consensus, like balance of power, national interest, and bipartisanship, is a frequently used and much abused term. More than three decades ago the sociologist Edward Shils offered a now classic definition:

Consensus is a particular state of the belief system of a society. It exists when a large proportion of the adult members of a society, more particularly a large proportion of those concerned with decisions regarding the allocations of authority, status, rights, wealth and income, and other important and scarce values about which conflict might occur, are in approximate agreement in their beliefs about what decisions should be made and have some feeling of unity with each other and with the society as a whole.¹

To claim that consensus exists whenever interested adults are in approximate agreement about what decisions should be made implies that consensus describes social agreement along a wide spectrum ranging from the general to the specific and from the lofty to the mundane. Even the more narrow notion of political consensus embraces a near-universe of activity. In short, because the word consensus has been used to describe agreement about almost anything, it might be a hopelessly ambiguous concept.

Yet investigating the domestic dimensions of American foreign policy virtually compels a discussion of consensus, if only because presidents, their advisers, members of Congress, and the media routinely do so. The term must be taken seriously because of its central role in contemporary American political discourse. And, indeed, if carefully defined and applied, it can provide useful insights into the domestic landscape of American foreign policy.

A brief review of U.S. foreign policy in the twentieth century illustrates this point. Serious foreign policy disagreements dominated in the decades before World War II. The bitter debates over overseas annexations following the Spanish-American War, entry into the Great War, membership in the League of Nations, and neutrality legislation in the 1930s represent important episodes in the internal politics of American foreign policy. Some of these struggles involved vital constitutional issues about executive and legislative powers in foreign affairs. Thus Henry Cabot Lodge opposed the Treaty of Versailles, not as an isolationist, but as a senator convinced that the League Covenant would lure presidents into making commitments and waging wars without congressional approval. The Neutrality Acts of the 1930s, Lend Lease, and Franklin Roosevelt’s undeclared naval war against Germany in 1941 provoked similarly important constitutional questions about presidential-congressional procedures. These serious policy and procedural disputes reflected profound disagreements about the requirements of American national security. What kinds of international conditions promoted or weakened United States security? Should the nation seek merely to protect its physical security or must it also act to preserve or export its political and economic values and institutions? How best could either of these goals be achieved? These questions produced harshly discordant answers between 1900 and 1941.

From the late 1940s to the mid-1960s, however, presidents offered foreign policies that enjoyed substantial public and elite support.² The apparent demands of the Cold War largely overcame the often paralyzing divisiveness of the interwar period and lent a certain coherence, purpose, and predictability to American foreign policy. Some critics, however, have argued that Cold War presidents, by baldly and simplistically inflating the communist “threat,” manufactured an artificial consensus that stifled domestic dissent, rigidified U.S. foreign policy, and ultimately trapped them in their own inflammatory rhetoric.³ According to this view, a rather desperate search for consensus had encouraged Cold War presidents to present platitudinous, highly symbolic foreign policies embodying vague national values masquerading as universal truths.

But to ask if presidents should try to create a domestic foreign policy consensus misses the point inasmuch as most presidents—Nixon was a partial exception—have acted on the premise that consensus is both possible and desirable, have worked hard to achieve it, and have done so despite the fact that there exists no generally accepted definition of consensus!

Cold War presidents from Harry S Truman to Lyndon Johnson shared the conviction that public and elite support for foreign policy could be most effectively built on a strategic framework of global, anticommunist containment. Then from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, U.S. presidents—haunted and constrained by the legacy of Vietnam—tried to sustain America’s international “relevance” in the face of widespread domestic fears about the costs of military intervention and global activism. These post-Vietnam presidents confronted a public increasingly preoccupied with domestic economic interests, but simultaneously demanding that the United States remain a world leader. Presidents Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan attempted to grapple with this post-Vietnam world by unveiling grand designs and foreign policy strategies in conflict with those of their immediate predecessors. These, in turn, provoked vigorous reactions from divided domestic elites now arrayed along ideologically adversarial lines. These presidents, in reaction to such difficult and often contradictory domestic realities, relied heavily on rhetoric, theater, and public relations to mobilize support for their foreign policies, with Reagan and his “handlers” merely continuing a trend begun by Nixon in 1968. The result was that by the late 1980s “rhetorical” presidents had further widened the frequently prominent gap between words and deeds in American foreign policy.

There were, of course, several reasons for this disturbing development. The availability of instantaneous communications, congressional insistence on a central role in foreign policymaking, and the growing cultural diversity of American society since the 1960s conspired to tempt presidents to portray all decisions as “simple and stark choices between good and evil.”⁴ These rhetorical excesses could perhaps be defended as necessary while the Cold War raged, for behind the overheated words lay a reasonable geopolitical analysis that focused on the reality of the Soviet threat. But with the demise of the Soviet Union, and with it the central organizing concept of forty plus years of American strategy, post–Cold War presidents have often reached back to the old rhetoric in order to mobilize public support for international undertakings whose strategic rationales have been very difficult to define. Did George Bush really think that Saddam Hussein was “worse than Hitler”? Did Bill Clinton really believe that the United States is the “conscience of the international community”? Or should statements like these be dismissed as rhetorical flourishes designed to achieve that elusive public consensus about the U.S. role in the post–Cold War world? The answers are not at all clear.

In sum, the quest for foreign policy consensus has been both an understandable presidential response to a fragmented, sometimes stalemated domestic political system, and a dangerous temptation for them to misrepresent their foreign policies and those of other nations. The absence of consensus risks turning every foreign policy issue into a highly politicized domestic dispute; yet the search for consensus has often entailed the articulation of doctrinal, moralistic foreign policies ill-suited to serve the interests of the United States. If anything, the geopolitical uncertainty unleashed by the ending of the Cold War exacerbated this tendency.

The Elements of Consensus

To help clarify the inevitably slippery yet important concept of domestic foreign policy consensus I will disaggregate it into three components: policy, cultural, and procedural. Policy consensus involves substantial public and elite agreement about the grand design, strategy, and tactics of foreign policy. Cultural consensus entails broad, grassroots agreement about an appropriate set of private and public values linked to America’s international role. Procedural consensus refers to presidential-congressional understandings about the respective tasks to be performed by each governmental branch. The meaning of each will be made clearer as concrete examples are given. Here I will suggest that for about twenty years beginning shortly after World War II, American foreign policy was characterized by a relatively stable policy, cultural, and procedural domestic consensus.

Policy Consensus

During these two decades political elites, most notably the so-called foreign policy establishment, and the wider public, especially the better informed or attentive part of it, subscribed to a set of fundamental propositions about the nature of the international system, the requirements of American security, and the nation’s proper orientation to the world. Chief among them were:

1. Alone among the nations of the Free World the United States has both the material power and the moral responsibility to create a just and stable international order. While isolationism lingered for a time after 1945, most prominently within parts of the Republican Party, Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s well-known conversion to internationalism and Dwight Eisenhower’s victory over Robert Taft at the 1952 national convention signified important triumphs for the emerging activist consensus. To be sure, there remained a residue of “Asialationist” sentiment among some Republicans, which led them to equate U.S. interests solely with East Asia’s, while Democratic leaders inclined toward a Eurocentric orientation, but these divergent tendencies largely subsided after the termination of the Korean War in 1953. Public opinion data on this issue of global involvement repeatedly revealed wide support for the proposition that it was better for the United States “to take an active role in,” rather than “stay out of,” world affairs. Typically, support hovered around 70 percent, dipping a bit in 1946 and 1947 and again immediately after the Korean cease-fire and soaring to 79 percent in June 1965.⁵ No comparable surveys were done on elite attitudes until 1974, but most analysts believe that until at least the early 1960s, political leaders led the public into accepting a greater U.S. role in the world.

2. In light of the interdependent nature of the world, U.S. security interests must be necessarily global. As John Lewis Gaddis has shown, George F. Kennan and other Truman administration officials initially wished to limit America’s interests to Western Europe, Japan, and the Western hemisphere because of both the perceived nature of the Soviet threat and the finite resources available to the United States. But the psychological difficulties of drawing and sustaining distinctions between vital and peripheral interests, the reluctance of Congress to provide aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947, the frightening global events of 1949, and the outbreak of the Korean War the following year combined to compel the Truman administration, first rhetorically and then in reality, to embrace a dramatically more expansive definition of the nature of the Soviet threat and the requirements of American security.⁶ The operative metaphors became Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s infectious rotten apple and Eisenhower’s row of falling dominoes, for they expressed the widely held conviction that the United States could not afford to “pick and choose” its overseas commitments. Nevertheless, opinion surveys from these years indicated that the public retained a certain sense of geographical priorities. For example, whereas opinion supported the European Marshall Plan 57 percent to 21 percent in July 1947 and 65 percent to 13 percent in November 1948, the public was considerably more divided in July 1950 about sending military supplies to Chiang Kai-shek in China, with 48 percent in favor and 35 percent opposed. And while 74 percent approved of NATO in May 1950, only 55 percent wished to back this commitment with U.S. ground forces in January 1951. Support for sending American troops to Indochina ranged from 8 percent in August 1953 to 20 percent in May 1954, though approval increased rapidly—to 59 percent in March 1966—once military action was taken. And on the issue of dispatching U.S. armed forces to the Middle East to stop a hypothetical Russian invasion, opinion was divided in January 1957 with 50 percent in favor and 34 percent opposed. On the other hand, a March 1959 poll showed that fully 81 percent favored retention of U.S. troops in West Berlin even if it risked war.⁷ We should be wary of reading too much into these polling results, but in general it appears that the commitment to Western Europe was more important to the public than Asia and the Middle East, and that this support inevitably grew in the immediate aftermath of all actual U.S. commitments.

3. Soviet and Soviet-inspired aggression and subversion constitutes the primary threat to world peace. Here again Gallup poll results help to illuminate the public’s attitude. As late as January 1947, 43 percent thought that Russia would cooperate with the United States in world affairs, but by June 1949 only 20 percent continued to believe so.⁸ The opinion that “Russia is trying to build herself up to be the ruling power of the world” reached 76 percent in October 1947 and remained at comparably high levels for most of the next two decades. This apparently pervasive consensus, however, largely masked two complicating elements. First, even among the elites there remained disagreement about the sources of Soviet expansion, with some analysts stressing Marxist-Leninist ideology, others emphasizing the long-standing aims of Russian nationalism, and still others focusing on the peculiarities of Stalin’s personality. While these divergent perceptions implied policy differences over whether or not Soviet-American cooperation would ever be possible, they remained dormant, for the most part, until at least the 1960s. The Soviet threat appeared so serious and immediate that speculation about its roots seemed abstract and irrelevant to most political leaders and almost all of the public. Second, U.S. policymakers, especially after the outbreak of the Korean War, repeatedly warned of an international communist conspiracy, a monolithic threat to the Free World, an alien way of life dedicated to the extinction of American values, an unholy alliance cemented by an evil ideology. The American public shared this view, yet it was not one actually held by most Truman and Eisenhower officials. Recent scholarship has shown that foreign policy specialists as otherwise different as George F. Kennan and John Foster Dulles believed that real opportunities existed for fragmenting the Soviet bloc, though they disagreed about the appropriate tactics to pursue.⁹ For them the Soviet empire was surprisingly fragile, probably overextended, and vulnerable to fissures. The anticommunist public consensus of these years, in fact, resulted, in part, from ...