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Published By: Ernest R. May
March 6, 2007

Reminiscing about Gerald Ford, Washington veterans marveled at how much less acrimonious were relations between Republicans and Democrats during his presidency, despite the Vietnam War and Watergate.

In the last twelve to fifteen years, partisan animosity has approached that of the 1790s. At that time, anti-French Federalists voted to jail anyone who spoke in favor of France. (In the original draft of the bill, the penalty would have been death.) Jeffersonian Republicans responded with a threat to take their states, Virginia and Kentucky at least, out of the Union.

Partisanship in our time even calls to mind the 1850s, when a pro-slavery member of the House went onto the floor of the Senate to beat unconscious a Senator with an opposing view. From Richmond south, even professedly moderate Democratic newspapers lauded the action and urged dealing similarly with other abolitionists in the Senate and House.

In our time, while partisans have not quite gone to such lengths, communication across party lines has often resembled that between Washington and Moscow during the worst of the Cold War.

While the United States is the most well-off nation in history, Americans nevertheless see challenges both abroad and at home. Islamic radicalism, energy dependence, shortcomings in health care, lagging education and scientific research, and poorly regulated immigration are among them. Yet partisan antagonism makes it difficult if not impossible even to rank these challenges, let alone to debate constructive alternatives or move toward the kind of consensus evident in Containment or Medicare or the rescue of social security in the1980s.

Since domestic issues normally involve clashes among interest groups, Americans expect partisan conflict. They just hope that partisanship will not block sensible compromise. In foreign affairs by contrast, Americans traditionally think partisan politics out of place.

Of course, politics have not always stopped "at the water’s edge." Debates of the 1970s and 1980s about relinquishment of the Panama Canal and the Sandinista-Contra struggle in Nicaragua are among many reminders.

But the presumption draws its strength from the fact that, historically, U.S. foreign relations have been most successfully managed when guided by what one can think of as capital "P" Policies, commanding support across party lines that allows them to survive changes produced by elections.

Containment and Deterrence are the most recent. "No entangling alliances" - later caricatured as "isolationism"-and the Monroe Doctrine were among the earliest. Partly because of the blinding pace of change since the 1980s but partly also because of virulent partisanship, we have had no such Policies since the early aftermath of the Cold War.

If Americans are to conquer this partisanship, it probably makes sense to focus particularly on the question of whether new or reframed capital "P" Foreign Policies can be identified.

Historically, such Policies emerged from widely shared recognition of an urgent challenge. In the 1790s and early 1800s it was the imminent danger of being engulfed in the world war between France and England. Later, it was the fact of revolutions for independence in Latin America. Then it was European imperialism, which threatened opportunities for Americans to benefit themselves and the world by marketing their products and investing their money. In the first half of the twentieth century, it was risk of repeated world wars. In the second half, it was the perceived expansionism of the Soviet Union and of international Communism, complicated by nuclear weapons.

In no instance were either the challenge or the possible responses defined quickly. The war between France and England had been going on for more than three years before President George Washington’s Farewell Address of 1796 clarified the long-term issue of whether the new United States would or would not attempt to be a factor in the European balance of power. Revolutions for independence in Latin America were in course for more than a decade, with American political leaders espousing widely different approaches, before President James Monroe’s annual message of 1823 made clear the risks of either championing republics, wherever they sprang up, or, alternatively, giving other new republics no backing at all. In time, Americans accepted Monroe’s Doctrine, which offered moral - though not necessarily practical - support to republics in the Western Hemisphere but not to ones elsewhere in the world.

European powers had already partitioned most of Africa and were moving to divide up China before Secretary of State John Hay proposed an "Open Door" Policy to protect American freedom to trade and invest. Again, the Policy represented a middle way - neither on the one hand defining areas where Americans would have special business advantages nor, on the other hand, just accepting the fact that European nations were defining such areas for themselves. This Policy persists to the present, influencing all U.S. negotiations about trade and other international economic matters.

It took two World Wars to persuade Americans that their own security could be at risk if military conflicts erupted in Europe or Asia and thus to create an American commitment to Collective Security. Woodrow Wilson tried to commit the nation to participation in a League of Nations capable in some degree of policing order around the world. At the time, just after the Great War of 1914-1918, the U.S. Senate was not prepared to endorse such a commitment. The United States clung to the Policy of "no entangling alliances" until Hitler, Tojo, and Pearl Harbor proved that its time had passed. At the end of the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt designed a United Nations Charter, with terms for Collective Security satisfactory to the Congress and the public.

Even before the last victory parades of World War II, the wartime alliance with the Soviet Union had begun to come apart. George Kennan, a professional diplomat serving as number two in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, sent home in 1946 a "long telegram" diagnosing reasons why Americans should be concerned about both Soviet territorial ambitions in Europe and elsewhere and about missionary work by the Soviet-dominated Communist international. The American body politic was, however, slow to accept Kennan’s recommendation that the United States respond with a patient Policy of Containment. As late as 1949-50 President Harry Truman was still expressing confidence that he could work things out with "Uncle Joe" Stalin, and mounting a major effort to get military spending back to levels of the 1930s, when the U.S. Army had been smaller than Rumania’s.

Actually settling on one of these capital "P" Policies has required not only definition of the challenge and a sorting-out of possible approaches but also a coming together of the President and Congress and - absolutely critically - a lessening of partisanship. "No entangling alliances" could not have become Policy without both Federalist and Jeffersonian endorsement. The Open Door remained a Republican party formula until Woodrow Wilson and congressional Democrats embraced it. Collective Security only became Policy when Franklin Roosevelt enlisted Republican as well as Democratic congressional leaders collaborated in creating the United Nations.

In 1952 many Republican campaigners attacked Containment, associating it with the outgoing Truman administration. John Foster Dulles, who was expected to be Secretary of State in a Republican administration, declared Containment a weak, negative approach, which ought to be replaced by "liberation." After Republican Dwight Eisenhower was elected president, Dulles did become Secretary of State. Eisenhower, however, organized an intensive five-week review of U.S. options, at the conclusion of which he pronounced Containment the only prudent choice. From that time until at least the 1980s, Containment served as agreed-upon bipartisan U.S. Policy.

Despite much thoughtful analysis of our new "unipolar" world and problems such as terrorism, failed states, energy dependence, etc., no one has identified the challenges of the new millennium as George Washington identified those facing the early republic or Kennan those of the era after World War II. To an astonishing degree, discussion of the U.S. role in the world has focused on what the United States should do with its presumed power, not the question of why ordinary citizens should think it in their interest, practical or moral or both, to influence developments elsewhere in the world. In government and outside, the key term has been "strategy." Since a strategy tries to match resources to goals, it seems premature to choose one while objectives remain ill-defined. Moreover, since strategy is a military term borrowed metaphorically for business, sports, etc., use of the term should probably call to mind General George Marshall’s warning that political issues, if discussed in military language, are all too likely to become military issues.

Can the current partisanship be bridged and Americans brought to some new consensus about why international conditions matter and what ought to be done both to serve their common interests and to satisfy their historic aspiration to act so as also to serve wider interests of humankind? The most confident answer is: "perhaps."

The development of capital "P" Policies has always been a difficult but necessary task for Americans. The United States has a several-headed government. The executive and Congress are independent. The Senate and House are almost so. States still hold some genuine sovereignty. Presidents, Senators, members of the House, and governors and legislators in the states do not answer to identical constituencies. Runaway partisanship is made more possible by the fact that American political parties have never been more than loose confederations. For the United States to follow sustained courses of action, Americans in a variety of communities and occupations, with widely diverse leanings, have to become persuaded, first, that conditions pose challenges needing to be confronted without great delay and, second, that political leaders have come to practical consensus about what to do.

It was not an accident that the Cold War challenge was defined by a professional diplomat in virtual confinement in the U.S. embassy in Moscow. By that time, Presidents, Secretaries of State, and others in high office no longer had time for concentrated thinking such as that of Washington and Alexander Hamilton preparing the Farewell Address or that of Monroe and John Quincy Adams drafting the Monroe Doctrine. By now, all counterparts to Kennan are probably also too caught up in day-to-day administrative, political, and news management to be free for sustained analysis. Maybe, however, a small bipartisan group of wise men and women not now in government might be able to accomplish this, if counseled by veteran politicians also concerned about the paralyzing effects of partisanship and by truly knowledgeable and comparatively non-partisan experts.

At this moment, widening appreciation of the dangers of excessive partisanship may create opportunity for Americans again to come together, perhaps in compromise solutions to domestic problems but, if not that, at least in commitment to shared purposes in the larger world - to capital "P" Policies resembling those of the past.

Ernest R. May, Senior Advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center, is Charles Warren Professor of American History at Harvard University. He has been a consultant at various times to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Council, and other agencies. He is currently a member of the Director of Central Intelligence’s Intelligence Science Board and of the Board of Visitors of the Joint Military Intelligence College. In 2003 to 2004 he was Senior Advisor to the 9/11 Commission. May has been Dean of Harvard College, Director of the Institute of Politics and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University. His publications include Thinking in Time: The Uses of History for Decision-Makers (with Richard Neustadt); Strange Victory: Hitler's Conquest of France; and Imperial Democracy.