Foreign Policy Belongs With the People, Not in Hiding

When Ronald Reagan took office nearly six years ago, he brought with him the support of the nation’s foreign-policy conservatives. Alarmed by Soviet expansionism in Africa and Afghanistan, skeptical of nuclear-arms control, distrustful of Marxist revolutionaries in Central America and Asia, they sought a renewal of American military power, the return of presidential leadership in foreign policy and, above all, a restoration of national foreign-policy consensus. They looked to the new President as the only man capable of building that consensus.

Lately the gains toward consensus so painstakingly achieved since 1981 seem to be in jeopardy. Pressure to accept Soviet arms-control terms has increased. The defense budget is vulnerable. Now there is the Iran- contras affair, which has revived the issue of congressional control of foreign policy, so divisive and paralyzing during and after the Vietnam War. Whether the affair ends as a result of congressional fiat or executive timidity, it will involve the curtailment of support for the contras and the diminishing of U.S. freedom of action in the Middle East. It will take months, perhaps years, to recover what has been lost.

The institutional deficiencies and apparent illegalities revealed by the affair will be fairly easy to remedy. The solutions are as tangible as the problems. Control over the National Security Council can be tightened. Lawbreakers can be indicted or otherwise obliged to come clean.

It will be much more difficult to repair the damage that this affair has caused to the intangibles that are the very stuff of an effective American foreign policy: a consensus in favor of an activist policy, the recognition of congressional inability to conduct foreign policy, and a grasp of the true international strengths of democracy. They must be repaired and sustained by acts of patience and understanding. Both begin with the Constitution.

The Constitution is emphatically clear about the control of foreign policy. The President is to conduct it, but, through the power of the purse, Congress dominates every aspect. The issue is not who has control; it is how institutional practices affect the nation’s international security and well-being.

In the international arena Congress operates with severe handicaps. By constitutional design, legislators have specific, limited constituencies in which foreign affairs are seldom of direct concern. As Dean Acheson, secretary of state in the early 1950s, put it, senators are at best ambassadors for their states. Members of the House of Representatives have an even narrower horizon. Only the President has a national constituency. Only the executive branch has the staff and institutional memory to come to know and understand the external world.

Given the built-in differences between the branches, only the most careful consultation on all important initiatives can bring the strengths of the two into play. “To bridge these and other gaps in values and understanding,” Acheson recalled, “required hours of tramping the halls of the House and Senate office buildings . . . innumerable gatherings and individual meetings, social occasions of all sorts at which all the arts of enlightenment and persuasion were employed.”

To overcome the legacy of distrust bred by the Iran-contras affair, and to preserve presidential prerogatives, this President must return his officials to the halls of Congress in search of understanding and consent.

At the heart of the affair lies a misunderstanding of the true strength of democracy, a misunderstanding that is even more disturbing to foreign-policy conservatives than the demonstrated ignorance of how to conduct executive-legislative relations in a regime based on separation of powers. Zealots operating under deep cover are not the strength of this nation. They do not keep it safe from its enemies. Only the united strength and sacrifices of the people can do this--the same strength that helped bring down Hitler and stymied the Soviet Union while restoring democracy and prosperity to Western Europe and Japan.

The art in conducting American foreign policy is to tap that strength, the irresistible force of free men and women, both in this country and among its closest allies. In this, and this alone, lies lasting strength and the kind of enduring appeal that strikes fear in the hearts of tyrants.

In their neglect of this fundamental element of democratic power, the architects of the Iran-contras affair showed a distrust of democracy and, ironically, doubt about the persuasiveness of the President’s and their own foreign-policy views.

In united action under the Constitution, and not in the covert maneuvering of a few special operatives, lies the hope of the United States to meet whatever threat may develop to its security and global capabilities, whether in Central America, the Middle East or Western Europe. Foreign-policy conservatives are once again looking for leaders to carry forward that agenda.