"Congress Isn't Good At Foreign Policy."
In the midst of the ongoing fracas over GOP congressional officials’ attempt to undermine Obama’s Iran policy initiatives, Max Fisher made the observation that maybe Congress just isn’t that good at foreign policy after all. Other analysts warned that legislators were “bullying” the US back into another Iraq war, and others hyperbolically denounce the insistence of GOP hawks that they sign off on the war against the Islamic State. In particular, Foreign Policy's Micah Zenko, however, was far more puzzled than upset about Congress’s apparent desire for an open-ended war in Iraq juxtaposed with its fury over Obama’s initiative to make peace with Tehran:
Funny when Congress weighs-in on FP: Start open-ended airwar, no problem. Broker non-binding nonpro agreement, outrage.
Zenko, however, is by no means alone. Other critics have similarly slammed Congress, arguing that it acts as if Obama is no longer the president, and ridiculing GOP insistences that Obama must include a ground war plan in his strategy to defeat the Islamic State. To hear some critics, the opposition-dominated legislature is reckless, irresponsible, even potentially traitors against the state. There was, however, something quite fishy about this. Hadn’t the roles reversed, as we had seen this kind of fight before but in the opposite direction?
The biggest problem with many of these criticisms, however, was their denigration of the legislature. The way it sounded, a disinterested observer might be forgiven for wondering if someone should be exercising, ahem, some oversight over that silly Congress before it really makes a mess of things! But it was not so long ago, however, that Zenko and many others had a different opinion about the executive branch and its use of power vs. the legislative branch. That, namely, the latter needed to reign in the former. Oversight was the name of the game, and Congress and the Senate apparently really needed to exercise sorely lacking control, opposition, and critical questioning when it came to an President that was about to drone, Navy SEAL, and air-war America into “endless war."
What brave Americans could stand up to such a tyrant? Who would be the noble Brutus to Obama’s Caesar? The legislative branch, many critics said. Stepping back into the time machine to the height of the debates over “America’s forever wars,” we saw critics that were convinced that an executive branch, armed with allegedly novel drone and cyber technologies and special operations forces, was waging a war without limits in the dark. And it was up to the legislature to put the breaks on the “imperial” president before “dangerous” precedents were set and America’s military and paramilitary establishment completed its allegedly fast-moving transformation into an unaccountable praetorian guard.
Remember, for example, the epic and troubling saga of the “secret wars” revealed within the pages of Confront and Conceal? Were you one of the many Washingtonians that picked up The Way of the Knife from a Kramerbooks shelf in Dupont? Perhaps you also may have argued that Congress was abdicating its solemn duties to weigh in on the Authorization of Military Force (AUMF) as it pertained to America’s creeping involvement in the war against the Islamic State. Maybe you, like I did, shared this excellent piece on the origin of the AUMF, but unlike me felt a tinge of nostalgia at the recounting of Congress’ scrutiny of war powers on other occasions.
I don’t need to say much more to conjure up the mood of the times. It really was a different time and place. How did things change? A new terrorist group (ISIS), the near-complete collapse of the Iraqi military, and Iran pushing its weight in various civil wars makes a big difference in intellectual climate, I guess (I would also say that it feels a hell of a lot closer to 2016 elections, but that’s for another post). But bear with me as I continue my recounting of those good old days of natsec analysis.
Yes, analysts did paint a dire picture. All seemed lost. The US was on the road to “endless war,” with both flesh and blood human SOF operators and tele-operated robotic killing machines leading the way. But all was not lost! It seemed like a war powers clash was looming that would pit an out-of-control, power-aggrandizing executive branch against a legislative branch determined to draw lines in the sand and re-assert control. The moment that many critics of the last few years of the counterterrorism wars had waited for so long for had dawned, and the drones would finally be grounded and the SEALs and JSOC units brought home. Except that wasn’t what happened at all, if the storm of angst the legislative reckoning stirred up is evidenced.
Congress brought the oversight and acted to curb executive power. It did not do meekly, hesitantly, or half-measuredly. It did so in a blunt, aggressive, partisan, and risky manner, and it put Zenko and many of his peers in the odd position of recoiling at such an assertion of legislative will and demanding that this uppity and arrogant legislature sit down, shut up, learn its place, and let the grown-ups talk. The same entity that was supposedly going to provide oversight and reign in the CT wars, in other words, is now being publicly berated for its insolence in defying the President and roundly mocked for trying to sit at the Big Boys’ Table. What happened? Why the big contradiction?
First, let’s note something that is very inconvenient to say right now about domestic politics and foreign policy: domestic politics can be foreign policy, and foreign policy can be domestic politics. Despite the mythologizing at play that casts the GOP move as somehow unique and unprecedented, Congress sometimes does challenge the executive on foreign policy and national security and challenge it by skirting the boundaries of Logan Act violations. But when it does, it isn’t usually in a form that looks as clean, pure, and “aw-shucks” idealistic and unobjectionable as the West Wing and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-esque dreams of many analysts. In short, Congress is populated by politicians who act in a partisan manner, whether they write open letters to Iranians or Latin American jefes in Nicaragua:
The writers stress that they all oppose further money for rebel campaigns against the Sandinista Government. In a veiled reference to the Reagan Administration, the letter says that if the Sandinistas do hold genuine elections, those who are ”supporting violence” against the Nicaraguan leaders would have ”far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.”
In his retort, Representative Gingrich argues that the letter writers ”step across the boundary from opposition to a policy, to undercutting that policy.”
He also notes that the members of Congress offer to discuss these issues with Mr. Ortega and the junta. In Mr. Gingrich’s view, ”This clearly violates the executive branch’s exclusive prerogative of negotiating with a foreign government.”
The letter, by the way, was addressed “Dear Comandante.” And it was also dubbed a possible violation of the Logan Act and an imposition on the authority of the President. In fact, some argued (with some justifiable foundation) that the Dear Comandante files quite blatantly suggested some helpful advice for an adversarial foreign power in its dealings with the US (at the expense of a sitting President):
As Members of the U.S. House of Representatives, we regret the fact that better relations do not exist between the United States and your country. We have been, and remain, opposed to U.S. support for military action directed against the people or government of Nicaragua. …..
If [genuine elections] were to occur, the prospects for peace and stability throughout Central America would be dramatically enhanced. Those responsible for supporting violence against your government, and for obstructing serious negotiations for broad political participation in El Salvador would have far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.
So let’s dispense with the pious outrage and willingness to label fellow Americans “traitors” for something many other fellow Americans seem to have regarded as perfectly acceptable: undermining a President’s foreign policy and speaking directly (and even giving advice) to a hostile foreign government. Apparently that kind of thing is far less taboo in national security politics than is popularly believed.
Now, to be perfectly clear I resolutely oppose chicanery of this sort, regardless of the party and faction that performs it. But it would be dishonest not to observe empirically that many of our elected representatives have no such compunctions about trying to create their own foreign policies and throwing a monkey wrench into the President’s. And that the phrase “politics stops at the water’s edge,” historically speaking, is one of the many myths of American civic religion. Partisanship over foreign policy and national security is as throughly American as apple pie, Mom, the flag, and heart-attack inducing fast-food products.
Now, this doesn’t mean that the legislative branch always is a backseat driver. In most things (especially when the President’s policy is politically popular), Congress would prefer to defer to the President. Indeed, as Joshua Foust has stated more times than necessary, one of the few things about the current President’s foreign policy that is wildly popular among bipartisan audiences for a long stretch of time was its counterterrorism and targeted killing efforts. Why would Congress, one wonders, mess with a politically popular program? Especially when doing so might directly involve Congress in the regulation of a murky, often haphazard covert operational program that they can always blame the President for should it ever go wrong?
Heads, Congress can ride the President’s coattails or at the very minimum get out of his way when he has public support and momentum at his back. Tails, Congress can yell “YOU HAD ONE JOB!” and castigate him for those oh-so-obviously wrong policies they did nothing whatsoever to curtail. If you are a Congresscritter, this is a win-win situation for you. So why would you go out of your way to exercise oversight, especially if it meant picking a fight with the President?
One possible answer is that you have dramatic policy differences with the President. It is no secret that many within the GOP are vehemently opposed to the President’s Iran policy, and view it quite literally as a deal with the devil. One is more likely to see a policy as an executive power grab (as the GOP signatories to the Iran letter have incorrectly argued) if the alleged power grab/overreach concerns a policy choice they deeply and bitterly disagree with. While epically shoddy by the standards of national security law experts, it is not as if the Iran letter signatories’ outrage over supposed executive overreach is really that much more ill-informed than the legal stylings of drone and counterterrorism opponents regarding the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC).
Perhaps one might observe that neither actually understand the relevant law and regulatory institutions in question and simply have an deep-seated policy preference that must by default cast the policy choice they oppose as thoroughly illegitimate. Another possibility is that — *gasp* — the politicians in Congress see an opening and are trying to play to what they perceive as voter ambivalence and negative feelings regarding the Iran deal. Not as idealistic of a motivation I guess, but still “accountability” in action!
When it comes to the war against the Islamic State and the AUMF, Congress has finally stepped up and seems hell-bent on holding the administration to the fire about its war plans:
HASC Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, echoing a slew of Republican senators, wants specifics on the Obama administration strategy for defeating the violent Sunni group.
"Over the past year, the developments in CentCom have been troubling. The rise of [Islamic State], questions about the future security situation in Afghanistan, the government of Yemen’s fall to Iranian backed rebels, and the prospect of a deal ratifying Iran as a threshold nuclear power all have created serious stress on our strategic position and on our alliances," Thornberry said in a version of his hearing opening statement released Monday evening.
"Any notion that the US could pivot away from the Mid East toward other regions has proven to be naïve at best," he said. "Part of the challenge here is the absence of a comprehensive strategy across the Middle East. The limited approach that the president has taken has left instability and weak, or failed, states from Libya to Yemen."
Thornberry wants to hear about “a comprehensive strategy, or at least the foundations of a strategy, which will help provide a roadmap toward a more stable Middle East led by responsible actors.”
A Congressman, and the chairman of an important legislative body at that, demanding a clear strategy? Sounds like oversight in action! And nor is Congress the only body asking the tough questions about the executive’s war-making in Iraq. Sen. Orrin Hatch lobbed this scathing criticism recently:
"And here we have the president coming up with this — I think it’s utterly stupid — proposal," Hatch told KSL News Radio. "And he’s binding the next president also with really stupid language." "Any president worth his or her salt is going to ask for as much authority as they can get, so at least the ISIS people know that he has the authority to come in on them anyway he wants to.” ….
"Most importantly, the president should be asking for an authorization that would not impose any artificial and any unnecessary limitations such as those based on time, geography and type of force that could interfere with our strategic objectives of defeating the Islamic State," he said.
“What he’s doing is tying his own hands, and stupidly tying his own hands,” he said. “I mean my goodness, talk about telegraphing weakness. That’s what he’s doing.
To be sure, not all of the opposition has come from hawks unhappy about limitations in the Obama administration’s war plans. But that’s really sideways to the underlying point at hand here. Regardless of who is holding the administration to account and what they want, analysts like Zenko — logically speaking — should be jumping for joy.
Finally, that unaccountable, imperial, power-grabbing chief executive is getting some oversight and accountability, right? Especially on matters as serious and grave as how to handle an adversarial state’s nuclear program and what scope of war powers to give the President as the existing AUMF continues its decay and the executive looks as if he might commit America to an entirely new front in the ongoing counterterrorism wars. This is exactly what dovish critics of “find, fix, finish, and exploit" have been wishing for, so they should be happy.
Instead, Zenko and others have reacted with shock and horror. Indeed, Zenko carps that:
Wish GOP Senators were as interested debating and challenging who the US bombs, as they are with who US negotiates with.
But Mr. Zenko, they are! Just not, I think, in the way you would like. If oversight, challenge, and asking the tough questions is the desired goal, then the likes of Thornberry and Hatch are doing so and with great vigor and gusto. It’s a flat-out misrepresentation to say that GOP senators (and congressmen) lack the passion of opposition and single-mindedness of purpose in “debating and challenging who the US bombs” that they bring to their furor over “who the US negotiates with.”
This whole sorry affair exposes the real problem: critics of US defense and security policy conflate “oversight” with Congress and the Senate agreeing with their policy preferences. But oversight is……just…..oversight. There is no inherent normative value to oversight, unless you think that any challenge that issues from the legislature to the executive branch is inherently a good thing in at least some shape or form. Moreover, oversight is also not equivalent to adversarial oversight.
Refusing to exercise detailed oversight, and saying “we’re going to put the ball in your court but blame you if you fail” is a kind of oversight, even if it may seem like a negation of oversight. The folks on Capitol Hill still authorize the monies to keep the wars — covert or not — going. It is not as if the legislature is a rubber stamp. As we are now seeing, your elected representatives can make life quite difficult for Obama should they decide to. But this is, according to many critics that previously desired oversight, somehow a problem.
Either the legislature has the wisdom, insight, and duty to meaningfully exercise oversight — even if it means doing so in a way that critics find objectionable — or the President should be unencumbered to confront, conceal, drone, craft the ISIS war policy, and negotiate with Iran. Critics cannot have it both ways, and has been a fascinating journey to watch so many that desired that the legislative branch take a more hands-on role in regulating and rolling back the executive in national security suddenly declare the body they invested with such hopes utterly and completely unfit to do so.
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