Part Two: Time to Return to the Founders’ Regular Order in Foreign Policy

By Lester Munson, NSI Senior Fellow

This is the second of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.

The American people are certainly aware of the changing world and look to their government to make the necessary adjustments to meet the new challenges. Unfortunately, they have been primarily looking to the individuals they have elected president to accomplish these things. (In fairness to the American people, the news media and chattering classes, with their obsessive coverage of presidents, and their tweets and every utterance, played a huge role in this misunderstanding.)

As the chief executive, the president is empowered to manage the day-to-day challenges that America faces in the world, but as someone elected to a four-year term in office, he does not have the perspective necessary to be the sole agent of the long-term changes that are necessary to meet the global challenges of today.

The Founding Fathers of our democratic republic understood this and perhaps even anticipated the evolving challenges the United States would face in a hostile world. When crafting the Constitution, its authors provided mechanisms for the president to share power and authority with the legislative branch. Alexander Hamilton — himself a notable advocate of investing great power in the executive — wrote in Federalist 75:

“The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world to the sole disposal of a magistrate, created and circumstanced, as would be a president of the United States.”

The Constitution gives considerable authority in the conduct and management of foreign affairs directly to the legislative branch. The power of the purse, the power to regulate commerce, to raise armies and maintain navies, to declare war, the power to create government agencies and management structures — all these are given to Congress and are essential elements of the national security of our nation. The Senate in particular was given a robust role in the approval of diplomats and international agreements. The Founders fully expected the president to collaborate with Congress on the conduct of international affairs.

When this happened in the 1940s — the amazing partnership between President Truman and Senator Vandenberg — our system functioned magnificently. A successful strategic vision for the United States cannot rest solely on the president, as it will change every four or eight years. It must instead rest on common ground between the executive and legislative branches and also between the two political parties.

Today, as we see president after president reverse the policies of his predecessor, it is time to return to the United States’ balanced decision-making structure. Congress, which rightly empowered the executive branch to manage the institutions that won us the Cold War, needs to reassert its own authority, and provide long-term balance to presidents who are overly focused on daily crisis management. In particular, Congress should be looking to the future and — preferably in collaboration with the president — to set the long-term course for American foreign policy. It should do so with serious purpose and solemn sense of its constitutional responsibilities.

For the president’s part, he should be working directly with Congress to ensure that his policies are sustainable after his time in office ends. If an international agreement would not win Senate approval, it should be modified until it meets that threshold. Long-term military commitments, whether in the Middle East, Europe, or Asia, should be formally subject to regular review and approval by both branches. This is the way our government was designed, and it remains the way that it functions best.

Lester Munson is an NSI Senior Fellow, with a 26-year career on Capitol Hill and in the Executive Branch. He was most recently Staff Director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he led policy, oversight, legislative, and communications efforts for a staff of 25 and negotiated committee priorities with the White House, the State Department, and Congressional leadership.