Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy

Now, this view of mine that the Congress and the President have a shared responsibility in the formulation of policy requires that the Congress is able to act competently and effectively. I must say that the Congress’ performance over a period of some years gives me pause on that point. It is obvious to all of us that the international agenda is so formidable today that it requires the sustained involvement and the best thinking of people in the executive and the legislative branches.

I find Congress often acting erratically in foreign policy. It is often engaged primarily for political reasons, displaying little sophistication about very complex and difficult problems.

Sometimes Congress Goes Too Far, Sometimes Not Far Enough
Sometimes I think the Congress goes too far, acting unilaterally; sometimes I think it doesn’t go far enough. Let me begin with those instances when I think the Congress goes too far.

Congress goes too far in its unilateral approach to U.S. foreign policy. There are a number of examples. I’ll not go into a lot of detail on these examples because this is a very sophisticated audience. The HelmsBurton law, with its extraterritorial sanctions, punishes business entities in other countries that are daring to differ with American foreign policy. That law has created huge problems with our friends and our allies and has not accomplished, as far as I can see, very much. We recently celebrated the entry of three more countries into NATO. If you look back on that, Congress insisted that only these three specified countries be included in this round of NATO enlargement. We are unwilling to pay our UN dues on time and in full. We dictate the reform measures that we want the Secretary-General of the United Nations to bring about; we don’t negotiate them. We delayed paying our share of the IMF quota increase for almost two years. Congress often complains about international institutions, and I think a lot of those complaints have considerable merit. But it wants to impose unilateral solutions rather than negotiate reforms.

These unilateral demands often have a high price. What an extraordinary rebuke and spectacle it is for the United States, which pays roughly 25 percent of the UN bill, to be excluded from the UN’s key budget committee. If I understand correctly, if the United States does not pay much more of its arrearages this year, we will lose our vote in the General Assembly.

Congress does not like to be reminded that the U.S. has to work with its allies in order to carry out its policies. You can go down a long list of foreign policy problems—the Middle East, Haiti, North Korea, Bosnia, Iran, Iraq, terrorism, drugs, nuclear proliferation—and you can see that we depend heavily on allies for support to help us reach a satisfactory conclusion.

We like to call ourselves the indispensable nation. That phrase has always bothered me a great deal because there is a touch of arrogance to it and, of course, it infuriates many of our friends. But the fact is that many important goals that we have in the United States remain out of reach unless we work with friends and allies.

I think the Congress often goes too far and makes judgements that are politically driven. In the final hours of the first session of the 105th Congress, the House of Representatives passed nine anti-China bills, which expressed displeasure with China’s policies on everything from human rights to nonproliferation. There were no hearings on any of the bills. The Administration was not consulted about the impact they could have on U.S.-China relations. From my point of view at least, those bills were politically driven.

With regard to the Chemical Weapons Convention, we needed legislation to bring the United States into compliance with the convention. The Senate of the United States passed it unanimously. The House refused even to consider it. It attached the CWC implementing legislation to another bill and tried to force the President either to accept that flawed bill, or to veto the implementing legislation.

Congress, quite unwisely I think, loves linkage. Rather than considering issues on their individual merits, the Congress links them together. We link UN funding to the abortion issue. We link the Russian-Iran sanctions bill to the CWC implementing legislation. The principal issues in American foreign policy are tough enough without trying to link several of them together. When you link them to another divisive issue, you make it almost impossible to solve them.

Now, my second major concern with the Congress and the way it approaches foreign policy is that it often does not go far enough. We often exercise our constitutional obligations timidly. The clearest case of Congressional timidity in exercising its constitutional responsibility is its failure to authorize the use of force. In almost every case over the last 15 years save for the Gulf War, Congress has failed to grant prior authority, or subsequent authority, for intervention. The list is long: Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and earlier this year, Iraq. Congress has refused to take a stand. Often, it doesn’t even debate it. Instead, it leaves it to the President to make the most difficult decision that any government can make, which is whether or not to intervene militarily.

Take a look at Somalia. We had 25,000 American forces there at its peak, often engaged in combat, and the Congress never authorized or approved it. Or, take Bosnia. U.S. troops have now been deployed in Bosnia for better than three years, 20,000 men and women at the peak. Not once in that time has the Congress exercised its constitutional responsibility to authorize the deployment. The House did not authorize action in Kosovo, it merely expressed a non-binding opinion.

Congress also expresses its timidity by passing the buck. For example, Congress loves unilateral sanctions. From nuclear testing to terrorism to religious persecution, it wants to address virtually every foreign policy problem with a unilateral sanction. Unilateral sanctions allow the Congress to moralize and to posture, but they seldom have much of an impact. The President is left to make the hard decisions on the use of any waiver in the legislation and on when and whether to impose sanctions. Congress punts.

Congress also takes a stand on foreign policy issues and tries to solve them on the cheap, or we try to have it both ways. We want to be the country of leadership in the world, but we cut dramatically the 150 Budget Account, and we’ve done that over the last 10 years. We have done this to the point now that it is difficult for one embassy to communicate with another or with Washington immediately because their technology is so outdated. We favor NATO expansion, but we ultimately approved it only after the President assured us that it wouldn’t cost us much. We support the Dayton Accords, but we do not want to take the risk or pay the high cost of implementation. We complain about the refugee flows from Haiti, but we refuse to provide the resources, human or financial, to stabilize the country. This kind of posturing weakens U.S. foreign policy.

Another way in which the Congress fails to take responsibility in foreign policy is by criticizing the President’s policy without offering any alternatives. We passed a resolution last summer in the House of Representatives that detailed all of the grievances we have against Saddam Hussein. In the end, the resolution says the President should take “appropriate action.” We failed to spell out anything, not a single thing, that the President should do to deal with Iraq. So, for too many members, foreign policy has become just another battleground for political advantage over the President. They see foreign policy today as an extension of the open conflict that characterizes much of American domestic policy. They see no difference between criticizing the President’s policy on health care and education, for example, and criticizing his policy on Iraq. They do not see the Congress as a partner with the President in developing American foreign policy. They miss any sense that Congress has a responsibility under the Constitution to help make good policy. Don’t misunderstand me. The President needs criticism. I have done it myself scores of times without reference to the political party of the President, but I am troubled by the failure of the Congress to offer alternatives and to criticize constructively.

Presidents Should Consult More
Now let me mention the role of the President because I have been pretty tough on the Congress. On almost every problem I have mentioned the President must bear some of the responsibility. If a President consulted appropriately, many of the problems I have suggested could have been avoided. I have served with seven Presidents of the United States and not a single one of them has consulted enough with the Congress on important questions of American foreign policy. The result is that every President has experienced deep trouble or failure at some point from an inability to convince Congress of the merits of his policies.

I have a suggestion for dealing with this problem. In 1993, I joined several other members of the House in introducing a bill to create a standing consultative committee or group made up of key members of Congress to meet regularly, maybe once a month, with the President or his senior advisers to discuss the full range of foreign policy issues. Every single President with whom I’ve discussed that proposal likes the idea, gives me a pat on the back, nods his head affirmatively—and nothing happens. While every administration seems to like the idea, none of them has shown sufficient interest in implementing it, and I really do not know why.

A President, of course, has the responsibility to articulate policy. More than one failure in American foreign policy has occurred because the policy was neither clearly articulated nor well understood. The President has the obligation to educate the American people about the world in which we live and show them the connections between their lives and events around the world and speak with great clarity about the demands on American leadership in the world. Presidents are often unwilling to take on the burden of articulating policy and educating and guiding public opinion, but this is the essential task of leadership.

The Attitudes of the American Public
Let me say a word about the mood in the United States today. The trend in U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period, as I have suggested, is away from international engagement. It is reflected in many of the things I have already mentioned—the reduction of spending on international diplomacy and foreign aid, and resistance to paying arrearages or to contribute to UN peacekeeping operations. Those of you who are in my generation grew up with the idea, at least the Americans, that the American role in the world was a given, and that America would try to shape the world of which it was a part. Many younger politicians in the Congress today across the political spectrum are more questioning of our role. They do not take a dominant role by America as a given. They have to be persuaded.

I think the public mood would tend to agree with those younger politicians more than it would with me. The public no longer supports the U.S. taking on a disproportionate share of the world’s problems and it shies away from a dominant role. At the same time, the American public is willing to take on a fair share of international responsibility. I am impressed that there continues to be a very deep moral element to public opinion. Americans really do want the United States to do the right thing. They want to be proud of our role and our national self-image.

There is a gap, however, between the dominant perceptions of public attitudes held by policy practitioners, especially members of Congress, and the attitudes held by the American people. Surveys indicate, over and over again, that Americans are not isolationists, anti-UN, anti-UN peacekeeping, or anti-foreign aid. But many policymakers tend to believe that they are. What is so striking today is that a gap remains between the policymakers’ perceptions and public opinion on the breadth of support for international engagement. Reducing this gap is a prerequisite for a successful policy and for giving policymakers more confidence by ensuring that there is public support for American international engagement.

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I conclude with this: The Congress, at its best, has a lot to contribute to foreign policy. The President is isolated in our system of government. Unlike the British Prime Minister, he rarely faces his critics face to face. George Reedy, a former press secretary of one of our Presidents once said, “No one ever tells the President to go soak his head.” I have seen this phenomenon of deference to the President a hundred times or more and, in my view, it is usually unhealthy. Members of Congress can offer the President unfiltered, independent advice. He can not get that from his own appointees. He may not always take the advice of Congress, but that advice is invaluable to him. When the President does take it into consideration, I think a better policy emerges.

In short, Congress needs to step up to its constitutional obligations and take a full share of reponsibility for the formulation of American foreign policy. Our policy works best when the President and the Congress both measure up to their constitutional responsibilities and work together.