That Old Isolationist Feeling

Not since the 1930s, when Congress passed neutrality acts while Europe and Asia were girding for World War II, has Capitol Hill been so insular in its outlook toward the world. By being hyper-responsive to advocacy groups at home, members of Congress are becoming tone deaf to the requirements of global leadership. If current trends continue, there will not be enough legislators with the expertise, temperament and vision to permit the United States to play a constructive role in world affairs.

Nearly two-thirds of Congress has turned over since 1987. New legislators tend to know less about the world than their predecessors. The National Security Caucus Foundation calculates that one in three members do not hold a passport. In the past, service abroad in the U.S. armed forces helped shape the world view of most legislators, but this, too, is changing. During the 1970s, more than 70% of House and Senate members were veterans; today, only 35% are.

In the absence of the Soviet Union as an ideological adversary and the policy of containment as a central organizing principle, members of Congress increasingly view foreign policy as an extension of domestic politics. To paraphrase former House Speaker Thomas P. ‘Tip” O’Neill Jr., all politics, including international politics, has become local.

Of course, the demand for U.S. leadership abroad is as strong as ever, but congressional actions are making it harder for the executive branch to recruit followers. In 1997, one of every eight members of the House of Representatives voted for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations, while one in four House members--including almost half the GOP caucus--support the United Nations’ relocation. The chairmen of the Senate Foreign Relations and House International Affairs committees, Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), drag their feet when it comes to repaying U.S. debts to the United Nations, supporting international inspections under the Chemical Weapons Convention, setting up an international monitoring network for the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and implementing the agreement freezing North Korea’s nuclear program.

Elected officials who commute home by plane every other weekend are usually not eager to fly half way around the world to increase their work load. The PC, fax machine, 30-minute news cycle and cell phone have imposed burdens upon current members of Congress that earlier generations of politicians never knew. Elected officials such as Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), who do serious work abroad, are an increasingly rare breed.

The most ardent isolationist members of Congress during the 1930s, like the former Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman William E. Borah, did not travel abroad. Another key isolationist senator, Arthur H. Vandenberg, visited London in 1942, where he experienced a German air raid. Later he became the key GOP architect of the Marshall Plan to reconstruct war-torn Europe. Like Borah before him, Helms dislikes foreign travel, having taken one official trip abroad during this decade. The second- and third-ranking House Republican leaders, Dick Armey (R-Tex) and Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), travel the U.S. widely, but not abroad.

Other members largely confine their foreign travel to trips paid by private interests, facilitating the public labeling of any foreign travel, no matter how substantive, as junkets. In recent weeks, the Washington Post lambasted members of Congress for planning a trip to Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, while the New York Times took senators to task for staying at too nice a resort during a useful trip to Panama, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. If members of Congress get hammered for visiting these countries, why not stay home?

The internationalist wing of the GOP, once the bulwark of U.S. engagement abroad and the fulcrum for bipartisan initiatives on Capitol Hill, is now barely represented in Congress. Foreign affairs-related support has declined from 4% of the federal budget in the 1960s to 1% today, and at the insistence of the GOP caucus, the percentage is slated to drop to .05% in 2002.

The changing perspective of the Republican caucus was clearly on display during Senate debate on the Chemical Weapons Convention’s ratification. By a slim margin of 29 to 26, GOP senators barely supported a treaty originally negotiated by Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Skeptics conditioned their support to provisions weakening internationally accepted rules for inspections. Many Republican legislators seem locked into Cold War mind-sets: Despite Russia’s steep decline, GOP legislative initiatives call for the continued deployment of no less than 6,000 strategic nuclear weapons, half on hair-trigger alert.

Meanwhile, Democratic members of Congress are turning inward on foreign-trade issues. Fearing job losses despite low national unemployment rates, only 20% of Democrats in the House of Representatives were prepared to support “fast track” authority last November, down from 40% during the 1993 vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Even with scant support from his fellow Democrats, President Bill Clinton could have won had it not been for 25 Republicans who conditioned their approval on the elimination of family-planning funds for Third World countries in a pending foreign-assistance bill.

As long as members of Congress are hypersensitive to parochial concerns and powerful single-issue advocacy groups, they cannot be expected to speak with authority for a broad conception of the national interest. Meanwhile, as the Congress has become more narrowly focused, argumentative and knotted, the exodus of contemplative and pragmatic legislators increases.

Many Americans are now reacting to special-interest politics and mean-spirited campaigns by tuning out Washington’s talking heads. But the more Americans seek insularity from “politics as usual,” the more insular U.S. foreign policy will become. While opinion polls indicate that most Americans support foreign assistance, international trade, the United Nations, nuclear arms reductions and global environmental protection, the political marketplace on Capitol Hill places greater value on intense partisanship than broad-but-shallow support. Constructive engagement abroad is not possible without greater political engagement at home.

The problem of congressional insularity is reaching pre-World War II proportions. Legislators are losing sight of the difference between the United States being an exceptional country, and demanding exceptional treatment by others on our terms. Unless concerned members of Congress find ways to soften and reverse the dual trends of Republican deconstructionism and Democratic protectionism, Capitol Hill will flunk future tests of constructive international engagement, short-changing the voting public and the national interest. Citizens either can blame Congress for political recidivism or reintroduce themselves to their representatives on Capitol Hill.