On 8 May 2024, as I was sitting down to write this introduction, an unusual event was unfolding at the United States Capitol: 163 Democrats joined with 196 Republicans to kill a motion to oust Representative. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the House. The effort to remove Johnson, which was sparked by members of his own party, was itself rare; that an overwhelming majority of Democrats crossed the aisle to save his job was essentially unprecedented.[1] Two weeks earlier, Johnson had earned the ire of hardliners in his caucus by bringing to the floor a bill to provide $61 billion in military aid for Ukraine. That measure passed with support from all of the Democrats and just under half of the Republicans in the House. A companion bill providing $14.3 billion in aid to Israel also passed the House with bipartisan support, despite sizable defections on the left and right.[2]
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Roundtable Review 16-10
Jordan Tama. Bipartisanship & US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age. Oxford University Press, 2024. ISBN: 9780197745670. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197745663.001.0001
28 October 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-10 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo
Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Seth Offenbach
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan
Contents
Introduction by Kenneth A. Schultz, Stanford University. 2
Review by Ralph G. Carter, Texas Christian University. 6
Review by Jeffrey A. Friedman, Dartmouth College. 10
Review by Patrick Homan, Dominican University. 15
Review by Sarah Maxey, Loyola University Chicago. 23
Review by James M. Scott, Illinois State University. 27
Response by Jordan Tama, American University. 34
Introduction by Kenneth A. Schultz, Stanford University
On 8 May 2024, as I was sitting down to write this introduction, an unusual event was unfolding at the United States Capitol: 163 Democrats joined with 196 Republicans to kill a motion to oust Representative. Mike Johnson (R-LA) as Speaker of the House. The effort to remove Johnson, which was sparked by members of his own party, was itself rare; that an overwhelming majority of Democrats crossed the aisle to save his job was essentially unprecedented.[1] Two weeks earlier, Johnson had earned the ire of hardliners in his caucus by bringing to the floor a bill to provide $61 billion in military aid for Ukraine. That measure passed with support from all of the Democrats and just under half of the Republicans in the House. A companion bill providing $14.3 billion in aid to Israel also passed the House with bipartisan support, despite sizable defections on the left and right.[2]
These events run counter to a common narrative that partisan polarization has made cooperation across party lines a thing of the past. In Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy, Jordan Tama shows us that rather than being exceptional, this kind of cooperation is very much alive. Through an effective combination of quantitative and qualitative evidence, Tama demonstrates that bipartisanship in foreign policy, while declining, is still quite common. And while party-line voting in Congress is becoming more frequent, focusing too much on inter-party conflicts risks overlooking important inter-branch and intra-party cleavages. Of particular importance, Tama emphasizes the prevalence of ‘cross-partisanship,’ when a substantial minority of one party joins the majority of the other—as in the Ukraine vote.
As the contributors to this roundtable all agree, Tama’s analysis is clear and careful, bringing together an impressive mix of evidence. His systematic analysis of roll-call voting reveals the main patterns, especially the persistence of bipartisan outcomes on foreign policy issues. Case studies from the presidencies of Barack Obama and Donald Trump look under the hood at the cross-party deal-making on issues from use of force authorizations to sanctions on Russia. While it is common to lament the loss of bipartisan bridge builders, such as Senators Sam Nunn (D-GA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN), the cases show that there are still members of Congress who try to cross the aisle and forge agreement. Tama also identifies some key factors that can account for the persistence of inter-party cooperation, including foreign policy issues that cut across the partisan divide, advocacy groups that lobby both parties, and conflict with the president over institutional prerogatives or policy differences.
While those readers who are hoping for a fight in this roundtable will be disappointed, the reviewers do suggest some ways in which Tama’s analysis could be enriched. Jeffrey A. Friedman seeks more direct evidence for the claim that advocacy groups have contributed to cross-party cooperation. Patrick Homan wonders whether polarization would be more evident in some issue areas that the book does not examine, such as immigration, alliances, and climate change. Sarah Maxey and James M. Scott suggest that greater attention to the strategic role of the president, who can affect levels of congressional assertiveness, and to the degree to which an issue becomes polarized, would have been welcome In his response, Tama addresses these issues thoughtfully, and the exchange suggests some fruitful lines of inquiry, particularly in thinking about patterns of cooperation and conflict between the branches.
Like the reviewers, readers will inevitably grapple with the question of whether Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy offers a dose of good news to counteract the gloom of the polarization narrative and its warnings of foreign policy dysfunction. The answer is not simple. There is a “glass half empty/half full” quality to the findings. Bipartisanship is still prevalent, but declining; polarized voting patterns are not the norm, but “polarization has soared to new heights” (37). Should we focus on the level or the trend? The observation that bipartisanship is harder on high-salience issues also raises some red flags. Friedman wonders “whether Democrats and Republicans can come together in the cases that really count.” Maxey suggests that international audiences may not see these patterns as offering reassurance about the United States’ ability to exert a steady hand in world politics.[3]
As Scott emphasizes, an underlying dynamic is the fragmentation of foreign policy orientations, which is breaking up the centrist, internationalist coalition that contributed to bipartisanship in the early Cold War. This fragmentation has not just pulled Democrats and Republicans apart from one another but has also pulled them apart internally.[4] While both parties have long contained blocs that were skeptical of international engagement, these blocs have become more consequential, with Trump showing that a Republican could win the party’s nomination and the presidency in part by mobilizing that skepticism. Thus, some of what we observe as cross-party cooperation—for example, anti-presidential bipartisanship in the effort to sanction Russia under the Trump presidency, the divided vote on Ukraine, the “strange bedfellows” opposition to aiding Israel—reflects this factionalization (50).[5] The ability of a small number of Republican hardliners to hold up military aid to Ukraine for months or, as Homan notes, to scuttle a bipartisan immigration bill shows how the growth of these blocs can complicate foreign-policy making, especially when there are narrow margins or supermajority voting rules. Even if partisan polarization is not the right diagnosis for these challenges, cross-party cooperation can reflect a pulling apart, not a coming together.
In his response, Tama provides the most succinct statement of the book’s implications for contemporary US foreign policy: “while conditions are far from ideal, they could be much worse.” Readers will have to decide whether they consider that assessment reassuring or not.
Most fundamentally, even Jordan Tama is appropriately cautious in this book about whether bipartisanship is necessarily a good thing (223). Bipartisanship can foster stability of policy across presidential administrations and permit the United States to send unified signals to allies and adversaries. But bipartisan acceptance of unexamined assumptions helped bring about the Vietnam War;[6] cross-partisan cooperation in the lead-up to the Iraq War left incorrect claims unchallenged.[7] Echoing these concerns, Jessica Chen Weiss warns in a recent article that a “reflexive” consensus on confronting China risks foreclosing “pluralistic debate” about the costs and benefits of that course.[8] Tama provides us with a valuable analytical framework for thinking about the prospects for cooperation in a polarized age. Readers will benefit from these insights as they contemplate the implications for the quality of American foreign policy.
Contributors:
Jordan Tama is Provost Associate Professor in the Department of Foreign Policy and Global Security at American University, Co-Senior Director of Bridging the Gap, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He has published four books and numerous articles on the politics, processes, and institutions of US foreign policy.
Kenneth A. Schultz is William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His research and teaching interests focus on international security, interstate and intrastate conflict, and US foreign policy. He is author of Democracy and Coercive Diplomacy (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and co-author of World Politics: Interests, Interaction, and Institutions (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022). His articles have appeared in journals including International Organization, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, and Security Studies.
Ralph G. Carter, Piper Professor and Professor of Political Science at Texas Christian University, teaches courses in international relations, US foreign policy, Russian foreign policy, and Mideast conflicts. His books include IR: Seeking Security, Prosperity, and Quality of Life in a Changing World, 5th ed. (Sage/CQ Press, forthcoming 2024), Teaching International Relations (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021), Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy: Activism, Assertiveness, and Acquiescence in a Polarized Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Contemporary Cases in U.S. Foreign Policy: From National Security to Human Security, 6th ed. (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021), Making U.S. Foreign Policy: The Essentials, 2nd ed. (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2019), the 44 essay “Foreign Policy Analysis” component of the International Studies Encyclopedia (Blackwell, 2010), Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs (Duke University Press, 2009), and Making American Foreign Policy, 2nd ed., (Dushkin/McGraw-Hill, 1996). He is a former editor of the journal Foreign Policy Analysis. His research agenda focuses on the making of US foreign, defense, and democracy aid policy, with a particular emphasis on the roles played by members of Congress.
Jeffrey A. Friedman is an Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in U.S. Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2023) and War and Chance: Assessing Uncertainty in International Politics (Oxford University Press, 2019).
Patrick Homan is a Professor of Political Science at Dominican University. His research and teaching interests focus on United States foreign policy, Congress, and international security. Homan is the author of The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy: Congress, Parties, and Factions in the 21st Century, with Jeffrey Lantis (Springer 2020) and Getting to 67: The Post-Cold War Politics of Arms Control Treaty Ratification (2015) – both of which are on foreign policy decision-making. He has published articles in journals including Foreign Policy Analysis, International Politics, and The Nonproliferation Review.
Sarah Maxey is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Chicago. Her research focuses on international security, the domestic politics of foreign policy, and public attitudes towards the use of force. Her current book manuscript investigates the power of human rights language to turn traditional doves into temporary hawks, enabling presidents to sell intervention to a broader audience. Her research is published in outlets including the Journal of Politics, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Research Quarterly, and International Politics. She holds a PhD in Government from Cornell University and was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House.
James M. Scott is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics and Government at Illinois State University. His primary research and teaching interests are in international relations and foreign policy analysis. He has special interests in US foreign policy-making, the role of Congress, and US democracy promotion and democracy assistance. He has authored/co-authored ten books and his many scholarly articles have appeared in such journals as Conflict and Cooperation, Congress and the Presidency, Democratization, Foreign Policy Analysis, Global Society, International Interactions, International Political Science Review, International Studies Perspectives, International Studies Quarterly, Journal of International Relations and Development, Political Science Quarterly, Politics and Policy, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Social Science Journal, Third World Quarterly, White House Studies, and others.
Review by Ralph G. Carter, Texas Christian University
Jordan Tama has produced a new book which adds welcome depth and nuance to our understanding of the roles played by members of Congress in foreign policymaking in the United States’ current polarized political context. Building on his prior work on the surprising bipartisanship that occurs in both the House and Senate, Tama provides the richness of detail to drive home a better understanding of how US foreign policy is shaped in the contemporary era.[9]
During the Cold War, the conventional wisdom among most scholars was that Congress played a subservient role to the president and other administration actors in the shaping of foreign policy. The president was the commander in chief and chief diplomat, and politics seemingly stopped at the water’s edge. A generation of scholars grew up reading Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision and emphasizing understanding how bureaucratic politics within the administration played out in foreign policymaking.[10]
The end of both the Cold War, and its foreign policy consensus on containing the Soviet threat, opened the window for change in Washington.[11] Although the conventional wisdom maintained that the president’s unique role in foreign policy and ability to speak for the country as a whole made him the predominant figure in foreign policy making,[12] scholars Like Cecil Crabb, Pat Holt, and James Lindsay began to reemphasize the political nature of the foreign policymaking process.[13] A few even noted the role of Congress in influencing use of force decisions.[14] Even so, based largely on roll call vote analyses, the conventional literature still largely clung to the idea that Congress played only a very secondary role to that of the president.[15] As Rebecca Hersman pointed out, however, focusing primarily on roll call votes was akin to trying to measure the ocean by counting the waves; one only looks at what is most easily visible and not what lies beneath.[16] More scholars began to focus on the day-to-day foreign policymaking that occurred on Capitol Hill, which studies that had focused on major foreign policy events ignored. For example, Ralph Carter and James Scott proposed that a significant and rising number of members of Congress were foreign policy entrepreneurs acting on their own policy agendas.[17]
As the political arena became more polarized, Jeffrey Lantis argued that junior members of Congress who wished to influence foreign policymaking turned to policy advocacy via both mainstream and social media, advancing their own agendas by working around more senior party leaders.[18] Increasing polarization at times produced strange bedfellows at times. Patrick Homan and Jeffrey Lantis documented how minority factions within the Democratic and Republican parties became increasingly active in foreign policymaking.[19] On particular foreign policy issues, members of these factions often found like-minded counterparts in the opposition party, such as when Democratic Progressives aligned with Republican Freedom Caucus members in opposition to new uses of force.
It is in this contemporary, polarized policymaking setting that Tama’s most recent book is situated. Tama acknowledges that polarization has made congressional policymaking more difficult, and that Congress is more active in foreign policy issues which “involve spending or are connected to the domestic economy than ones that involve the use of military force” (21). Nonetheless, Tama argues there is more congressional bipartisan cooperation in foreign policymaking than most observers realize. While most scholars associate bipartisanship with support of presidential initiatives, Tama demonstrates that bipartisan cooperation is more nuanced than a simple for or against position vis-à-vis a president’s requests. He distinguishes between pro-presidential bipartisanship where “majorities of both parties in Congress support the president,” anti-presidential bipartisanship where “majorities of both parties in Congress are at odds with the president,” and cross-partisanship where “a substantial share of elected officials in one or both parties oppose their own party’s dominant position” (8).
Tama notes that foreign policy decisions are also influenced by the ideological setting. If issues resonate on a left-right continuum with either voters or policy elites, members of Congress can be expected to follow the lead provided by those voters or elites either due to policy agreement or fear of being primaried. On the other hand, when voters or elites do not see the issue in ideological terms, members of Congress are more likely to rely on their own policy positions to guide them, which often creates the possibilities of cross-partisanship. Foreign policy advocacy groups can also push bipartisanship through their lobbying and campaign contributions. The individual agency possessed by members of Congress cannot, however, be ignored. As former House Speaker Jim Wright once noted, members of Congress get involved in foreign policymaking because they believe strongly in certain principles. In Wright’s words, “they have convictions.”[20]
Tama’s evidence begins with an overview of House and Senate voting behavior. He finds that bipartisan votes are more common in foreign than in domestic policy. Bipartisan voting is strongest for national security, international affairs, and international economic issues. In order to illustrate examples of pro-presidential bipartisanship, anti-presidential bipartisanship, and cross-partisanship in congressional foreign policy, Tama then compares six case studies from the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations: military intervention in Syria, war-powers authority, sanctions against Russia, sanctions against Iran, the Trans-Pacific Partnership and international trade issues, and foreign aid and diplomatic spending.
Tama’s most important finding is that bipartisanship still exists, but that it is different than what often occurred during the Cold War era. He argues that “Democrats and Republicans are rarely unified, but subsets of elected officials regularly form substantial bipartisan coalitions” (215). He also notes that
these insights also reveal that forces contributing to polarization and bipartisanship operate at multiple levels of politics and society, from the bottom-up pressures generated when voters have strong preferences, to the top-down pressures created when elected officials have strong views, to the outside-in pressures triggered when advocacy groups push for certain courses of action (219).
His analysis provides both macro-level and micro-level examinations of contemporary congressional foreign policy behavior in the early twenty-first century.
Jordan Tama’s Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy updates and enriches the literature that depicts the daily reality of congressional foreign policymaking which exists beyond the media headlines.[21] Although polarization dominates US politics, Tama shows how it may be circumvented in congressional foreign policy. Importantly, this book pulls back the curtain on the many instances where Democrats and Republicans cooperated to help or oppose the president, or to oppose the majority positions of their own parties. His argument is well-structured and is supported by convincing evidence. Thus, this volume adds to our theoretical understanding of the forces which shape congressional foreign policy behavior. For those who wish to better understand why US leaders make the foreign policy decisions, or how and why polarization influences foreign policy decision making, Jordan Tama’s new book is a welcome delight.
Review by Jeffrey A. Friedman, Dartmouth College
Jordan Tama’s Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy uses novel data to demonstrate that most Congressional votes on important foreign policy issues from 1991-2020 featured bipartisan agreement. It then deploys a series of interesting case studies showing how legislators frequently forge a cross-party consensus in dealing with international problems. It marshals a wide range of polling data to establish that Democratic and Republicans voters agree on many major foreign policy issues. And it offers compelling insights about how the interplay of ideology, advocacy groups, and institutional incentives create opportunities for bipartisan collaboration on some issues more than others.
This is a major contribution to scholarship on the politics of US foreign policy. In particular, the book succeeds in its stated goal of showing that “the full reality of contemporary American politics is more nuanced than what many headlines and high-profile partisan battles suggest” (1-2). Yes, Democrats and Republicans have been sharply at odds with each other in recent decades over measures such as the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement or the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal. But Tama’s data and case studies demonstrate that these episodes are not representative of where the two parties stand on international affairs. By showing that bipartisanship remains the norm in US foreign policy, Tama meaningfully reframes debates about the domestic foundations of America’s global role.
At a more granular level, four elements of Tama’s book are particularly noteworthy.
First, Tama’s data on “important” Congressional votes advances empirical analysis of bipartisanship in US foreign policy. Several prior studies, most notably Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz’s 2007 article on “The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” have used Congressional voting data to document a sharp rise of political polarization in recent decades.[22] The difficulty with interpreting those data is that Congressional partisanship data often pertains to amendments or procedural matters with limited practical significance.[23] It is thus challenging to know what to make of broad trends in Congressional voting data—but it would also be enormously time-consuming, and inherently subjective, for scholars to sort every roll-call vote by its perceived importance. Tama offers an elegant and clever solution to this problem, explaining how Congressional Quarterly has spent the last three decades highlighting what it considers to be the most important votes in any legislative session.[24] The statistical patterns that Tama draws from these data are thus the most reliable indicators that scholars currently possess for tracking political polarization in US foreign policy over time.
Second, the book shows that Congress is often surprisingly willing to buck presidential leadership on foreign policy issues. According to Tama’s data, 13 percent of votes on important foreign policy issues involve “anti-presidential bipartisanship,” in which a majority of both parties in Congress vote against the president’s position (31). By contrast, in domestic politics, this happens just five percent of the time (31). The book’s case studies then show how this behavior has important consequences, particularly in the chapter that examines US sanctions policy towards Russia. In 2017, for example, the US Senate slapped sanctions on Russia by a vote of 97-2, despite the fact that President Donald Trump had made clear that he preferred to establish friendlier relations with Moscow. The fact that all but two Senate Republicans repudiated Trump’s position provides clear evidence of how bipartisan consensus and Congressional independence remain alive in US foreign policy.
Another of the book’s compelling themes is that “legislators have greater political freedom to cooperate across party lines on issues that lack intense public scrutiny or large political stakes” (44). Tama’s strongest evidence on this point comes in the chapters on trade and foreign assistance. Both of these issues involve significant splits between public and elite opinion: for example, the elites of both parties overwhelmingly back expanding trade and maintaining foreign assistance programs, whereas the voters of both parties tend to be ambivalent about trade and Republican voters want to slash foreign aid (178, 203). Tama shows that the high salience of the 2016 debate over the Transpacific Partnership trade deal made elected officials fear backlash from supporting their preferred policies. By contrast, he finds that the low salience of debates about foreign assistance have allowed Congress to repeatedly expand the country’s foreign aid budget, even when Trump called for cutting those expenditures. This argument resembles the dynamic that Simon Bazelon and Matt Yglesias have termed “Secret Congress,” in which legislators are often willing to work together on issues that do not receive a great deal of mainstream attention.[25] As Tama and Bazelon and Yglesias argue, the lack of public attention to these issues may be exactly what facilitates bipartisan compromise.
Finally, Tama’s case studies provide a wealth of interesting details about how bipartisanship shapes the content of foreign policy-related legislation. We see Senators Bob Corker and Tim Kaine drafting legislation to revise the authorization to use military force in Iraq and Syria (93), Senator Max Baucus and Representative Dave Camp developing a clever strategy to shepherd Russia sanctions legislation through Congress (122), Representatives Ed Royce and Eliot Engel teaming up to block cuts to America’s foreign aid budget in committee (198), and so on. Some of these names and episodes will be familiar to readers, but I suspect that many will not—which, of course, is exactly Tama’s point. Beneath the surface of high-profile partisan combat, it turns out that a large number of legislators work closely together on a broad range of foreign policy issues. That collaboration does not just show up on roll-call votes: it shapes virtually every stage of a bill’s life cycle. This is an interesting and important story that only the most seasoned Congress-watchers are likely to know well before reading Tama’s research.
There are three areas where I think that Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy could have developed its arguments in greater depth. None of these critiques undermines the book’s central contributions; if anything, they indicate that the volume provides significant foundations for future research.
First, I was not entirely convinced by Tama’s discussion of “cross-partisanship,” which he defines as “instances where more than 10% of the members of a party oppose their party’s dominant position” (12). Throughout the book, Tama argues that the prevalence of cross-partisanship shows that true political polarization in US foreign policy is rarer than many readers would expect. But the 10 percent threshold Tama sets for defining cross-partisanship seems quite low. For example, when discussing Congressional debates about authorizing the use of military force (AUMF) in Iraq and Syria, Tama writes that “in an indication of the cross-partisanship that would continue to mark the AUMF debate in subsequent years, Democrats voted 155-39 in support of the amendment while Republicans voted 30-197 against it” (96). Though it is of course true to note that these votes did not display complete cross-party separation, I think this case safely falls within the scope of issues that raise reasonable questions about whether the two parties share compatible visions for US foreign policy. At the very least, I think the book could do more to explain why these votes–which scholars would normally code as reflecting partisan polarization–are not as worrisome as they might otherwise seem. Can the United States really maintain a coherent foreign policy if that depends on a handful of legislators breaking with party orthodoxy?
A second drawback with the book’s analysis involves its argument that advocacy groups shape the prospects for bipartisan collaboration on US foreign policy. Here, Tama argues that “when Democratic-affiliated groups and Republican-affiliated groups stake out opposition positions on an issue, they drive elected officials in the two parties apart. But when advocacy on an issue is dominated by groups that have close ties to both parties or when influential groups are inactive on an issue, broad bipartisan agreement or cross-partisanship becomes more likely in Congress” (53). These claims are entirely plausible, but I do not see how the book supported them in depth. The main difficulty here is that the behavior of advocacy groups tends to correlate quite closely with ideological divisions between each party’s voters. The book’s case studies thus provide relatively little direct evidence that the landscape of advocacy groups materially impacts legislative behavior in a manner that one would not expect to see based on the other variables in Tama’s framework. The book’s claims about the impact of advocacy groups thus largely rely on interviews in which public officials say that they faced external pressures, for example, members of Congress reporting that “they had Ukrainian-Americans in their district who were very concerned with what was going on in Ukraine” (132), but it is not generally clear how many votes those pressures actually shifted.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I think that the book could have done more to explain what its findings imply for the future of US foreign policy. In his introduction, Tama contrasts his research against prominent claims about how “The domestic consensus that long supported US engagement abroad has come apart in the face of mounting partisan discord,”[26] or how “political polarization has irradiated the marketplace of ideas,”[27] or how political polarization is currently “the most critical threat to the United States”[28] (7). Tama’s research makes it abundantly clear that these kinds of statements understate the degree to which Democrats and Republicans work together on foreign policy issues. But is the problem with these statements mainly just one of emphasis and tone? Are these authors actually wrong to worry about the degree to which partisan divisions undermine US foreign policy?
To see why these questions are hard to answer, let’s return to Kupchan and Trubowitz’s seminal essay on “The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States.” As noted above, Kupchan and Trubowitz base those claims on Congressional voting data that document a decline of bipartisanship on foreign policy issues since the 1970s. By the end of their study period, Kupchan and Trubowitz found that 60 percent of foreign policy votes involved bipartisan cooperation. That figure is actually higher than the 54 percent of bipartisan votes that Tama identifies at the end of his study period (34). Moreover, Tama’s data confirm that political polarization on foreign policy issue is on an upward trajectory that is “soaring to new heights” (37). Thus, while Tama’s data are clearly more reliable than that of his predecessors, I was not sure how these data should change my attitude towards debates about the supposed demise of liberal internationalism.
In fact, some elements of Tama’s analysis raise additional reasons to be concerned about whether the United States continues to possess the political wherewithal to run a coherent foreign policy. Tama notes up front that bipartisanship does not always result in “better” policy than polarization (5). For example, Tama’s discussion of anti-presidential bipartisanship reveals that Democrat and Republican legislators sometimes work together to block the president’s foreign policy agenda. This suggests that conventional measures of Congressional bipartisanship actually understate political divisions in US foreign policy. Similarly, while Tama’s discussion of cross-partisanship shows that party members do not always operate in lockstep with one another on foreign policy issues, he finds that these intra-party divisions sometimes “make it more difficult for Congress to act” by “making it harder to marshal legislative majorities behind policy measures” (216). The fact that legislators appear to find it harder to work together on high-salience issues also raises questions about whether Democrats and Republicans can come together in the cases that really count for upholding a credible vision of international leadership.
In the end, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy thus did not directly upend concerns about whether the domestic political foundations of American internationalism have collapsed. But doing that would have required significantly extending the book’s analysis, and it is not necessary for establishing the book’s value. Readers will likely continue to disagree about how much they should worry about the politics of US foreign policy, but they can now base those discussions on a much more rigorous understanding of the nature, sources, and consequences of political polarization in that domain.
Review by Patrick Homan, Dominican University
Jordan Tama’s new book, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age, is an extremely important addition to the burgeoning scholarship on how domestic political conditions can impact a state’s international relations.[29] In fact, Tama has been one of the scholars at the forefront of studying this topic within the American context whose recent research leading up to this book has opened the doors for expanded thinking about how polarization is impacting foreign affairs.[30] In particular, I would argue that Tama’s book, and its nuanced focus on “developing a new conceptualization of political alignments that goes beyond the binary distinction between bipartisanship and polarization,” is exactly the type of research that is needed today to help dispel the idea often perpetrated in the media that partisan dysfunction rules the day in Congress (7). Thus, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy should be required reading not just for students of political science and foreign policy, but also for the public at large in an effort to lower the stakes in how we think about partisanship and polarization in today’s American political landscape.
Tama’s book is novel not only in its overall ideas about how to analyze US foreign policymaking, but also in its methodological approach. As he mentions, Tama’s model “departs from perspectives that emphasize a single overriding motivation for congressional behavior, such as partisan goals or ideological commitments” and instead the book illustrates “the variety of pressures that shape the behavior of elected officials and how different incentives sometimes come into conflict with each other” (44). Not only does Tama argue that bipartisanship takes on multiple forms beyond the traditional definition, but he also includes a broader range of inputs for trying to explain why, when, and how these outcomes might happen. These variables include the ideological commitments or landscape that members of Congress operate within, the role and influence of advocacy groups, and the institutional incentives or prerogatives of lawmakers and the president. Tama claims “that these factors have received relatively little attention in prior studies of polarization and bipartisanship” and I would whole heartedly agree that we need to see more studies like this one that will offer more holistic accounts of why elected officials act on matters of foreign policy (44).
The strength of Tama’s book can also be found in the depth and breadth conveyed while exploring these variables. His inclusion of statistics on congressional voting data provides an essential quantitative foundation for the investigation of the case studies in later chapters. Too often, studies like this do not attempt to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative analysis, but Tama is able to do so not just via voting statistics but also in his inclusion of public opinion data during the rich narratives of the policy debates. Tama’s approach, while noting the actions of individual members of Congress, takes on a macro viewpoint in order to explore the varieties of bipartisanship. Thus, while individual-level data on polarization (e.g. Voteview’s NOMINATE scores for congressional members’ ideologies) or electoral competitiveness could further complement his hypotheses, they are out of the scope of this particular book and would throw off its nice balance between statistics and storytelling.[31] Furthermore, the inclusion of advocacy groups provides for a much more nuanced account of the environment in which lawmakers operate when making decisions. This is something that recent scholarship is trying to increasingly include in foreign policy debates in Congress.[32] Last, given the current electoral and institutional landscape, where many members of Congress have “more political leeway than presidents to place principle and pragmatism when making foreign policy decisions,” Tama’s inclusion of a varieties of pressures is essential in trying to better pinpoint how the agency-structure debate plays out amongst legislators (59).
Tama’s book examines these factors during the Barack Obama and Donald Trump presidencies and across a variety of foreign policy issues, including war and national security, economic sanctions, trade, and spending on foreign aid/diplomacy. As Tama mentions, “the debates covered in the book should be hard cases for generating any type of bipartisanship” given that they occurred during a time of record levels of polarization (65). This premise is sound, but I do wonder if the issue types that are examined provide enough variety in terms of salience. In his conclusion, Tama highlights the “need to distinguish among issues when making claims about the relationship between ideology and polarization” (218). However, only one of the issues examined, war/national security in chapters 4 and 5, would be considered “high politics” and thus we would predict higher levels of congressional action.[33] How that action translates into the varieties of bipartisanship is still an important question worth probing, but it is also valuable to consider what other issues might have been included in order to provide greater variation within the cases examined. Other high politics issues that involved debates on security or sovereignty, including alliances, arms control, border/immigration debates, and climate change, would also be worthwhile areas to explore in today’s environment of polarization, although Tama’s book should not be penalized for not examining every possible foreign policy issue. Alternatively, a discussion of why we might be seeing more low-politics foreign-policy issues being debated (and resulting in more bipartisanship) could have been provided, as this question of salience is highlighted throughout the case studies as well as in the conclusion. In fact, on the very last page of the book, when Tama reiterates that bipartisanship is much more alive than people realize, he states that “Democrats and Republicans have continued to cooperate under the radar on many important international issues” (227). I wonder if this cooperation is below the radar because the relevant foreign policy issues in which it happens are really are not as important or controversial as many think they are. Or conversely, is American foreign policy moving more towards low-politics issues and thus new windows are opening for varieties of partisan cooperation? Today’s foreign policy debates around supporting Ukraine and Israel are certainly putting these questions about issue types and saliency to the test.
In examining these foreign policy issue debates, Tama brings a vast array of sources and data to bear in the excellent case studies that are detailed throughout the book. In particular, Tama’s use of in-depth interviews on top of his extensive research provides for a much more thorough examination than the typical analysis of secondary sources would offer. Conducting over 100 interviews with well-connected sources across the political spectrum and within the American foreign policy apparatus is no easy feat. Moreover, the interviews are an important component in measuring the influence of foreign-policy advocacy groups and elite opinions, as the nuances of these variables can often only be found within Washington, D.C., itself and are understood by those who lived and worked on these debates on a daily basis. I particularly found the broad range of interviews and quotations from them in the chapter on spending on foreign aid and diplomacy to be enlightening in how the pro-aid coalition came together in a remarkably bipartisan fashion. For instance, one aide admitted that “when members [of Congress] first come to the Hill, they don’t usually have foreign policy backgrounds, but as they learn more, they see the importance of aid. If you sit down with members and talk to them one-on-one, you can really shift minds” (201). This is a quotation well worth examining in order to debunk the impact of polarization. Thus, the depth and breadth of evidence that Tama provides makes the book stand out in terms of recent scholarship on the politics of current US foreign policymaking.[34]
While the individual case studies are presented in a clear and coherent manner, it is not evident what Tama uses as an input for examining a congressional foreign policy debate. For instance, some chapters focus on more significant pieces of legislation (e.g., the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015), while others seem to be a catch-all for any activity or debates that are related to the topic at hand. This brings up the question of what exactly constitutes a case for examination within the broader categories of each substantive chapter. For example, did a piece of legislation need to be proposed, voted on, or just discussed amongst members? And by including debates within both the House and the Senate, does such a wide range of inputs capture the nuanced policy process and political dynamics of each body? More specifically, one way to think about this question of treating all efforts similarly is to assess where the policy was at within the “policy cycle” that government decision goes through. Some scholars identify five stages of the policy process: agenda setting, option generation, selection, implementation, and review; this would have provided an interesting layer to add onto some of the issues and cases that Tama examines.[35] In particular, the review stage would seemingly provide more explanatory power when thinking about foreign-policy congressional alignments that are made in relation to the president. Do anti-presidential bipartisan alignments normally take place later in the policy cycle as a direct response to the president as Congress reviews or approves the executives’ actions? Do other bipartisan alignments occur earlier in the policy process since members have their own motivations for passing foreign policy legislation? From this perspective, a clearer conceptualization of the inputs could provide even more clarity in examining how the agency-structure debate plays out amongst legislators and the bipartisan alignments they create.
Another methodological question concerns how Tama’s bipartisan alignments are able to capture the outcome of the foreign policy issue being debated. From this perspective, the question is not why bipartisanship continues but what these alignments achieve when they come together? Or to put it another way, not all bipartisan cooperation has the same outcome. To use the example of anti-presidential bipartisanship, these groups of lawmakers could be impacting a debate in two different ways – they could be against a policy that the president is for or they could support an initiative that the president opposes. Thus, Tama’s alignments can play different roles that lead to a variety of outcomes. Recent research on intra-party dynamics continues to discuss this question of how these members and groupings impact foreign policy debates, and whether they are almost always inherently against a policy that its proponents are trying to have passed and thus should be noted as playing a “spoiler” role?[36] Thus, if the outcome for certain types of alignments is that they are obstacles in the policymaking process, do they also have a lower threshold in trying to create a “minimum winning coalition” of votes or influence? This type of question also ties into earlier ones raised about the variation of policy debates within the bodies of Congress. The potential for being an obstacle in the Senate is considerably different than that of being an obstacle in the House, not just because of the upper chamber’s fewer members but also because of the power of the filibuster. We have seen recent congressional bipartisan efforts on immigration reform collapse in the face of powerful minority groups and it has not taken much for them to bring these efforts to a stop.
Overall, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy is a wonderful book that will be required reading for my students for years to come. The issues raised above are not criticisms of the book; they rather point to questions that the book raised as I was reading it, which is in itself a clear sign that Tama’s book is an excellent piece of scholarship. No work can capture the entire spectrum of issues, inputs, and inner-desires of lawmakers when it comes to current American foreign policymaking. But Tama’s book brilliantly succeeds in many ways where others have not, and thus it should be celebrated as an enormous achievement in the field of foreign policy analysis and in scholars’ attempts to better capture the full reality of contemporary American politics.
Jordan Tama’s new book, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age, is an extremely important addition to the burgeoning scholarship on how domestic political conditions can impact a state’s international relations.[37] In fact, Tama has been one of the scholars at the forefront of studying this topic within the American context whose recent research leading up to this book has opened the doors for expanded thinking about how polarization is impacting foreign affairs.[38] In particular, I would argue that Tama’s book, and its nuanced focus on “developing a new conceptualization of political alignments that goes beyond the binary distinction between bipartisanship and polarization,” is exactly the type of research that is needed today to help dispel the idea often perpetrated in the media that partisan dysfunction rules the day in Congress (7). Thus, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy should be required reading not just for students of political science and foreign policy, but also for the public at large in an effort to lower the stakes in how we think about partisanship and polarization in today’s American political landscape.
Tama’s book is novel not only in its overall ideas about how to analyze US foreign policymaking, but also in its methodological approach. As he mentions, Tama’s model “departs from perspectives that emphasize a single overriding motivation for congressional behavior, such as partisan goals or ideological commitments” and instead the book illustrates “the variety of pressures that shape the behavior of elected officials and how different incentives sometimes come into conflict with each other” (44). Not only does Tama argue that bipartisanship takes on multiple forms beyond the traditional definition, but he also includes a broader range of inputs for trying to explain why, when, and how these outcomes might happen. These variables include the ideological commitments or landscape that members of Congress operate within, the role and influence of advocacy groups, and the institutional incentives or prerogatives of lawmakers and the president. Tama claims “that these factors have received relatively little attention in prior studies of polarization and bipartisanship” and I would whole heartedly agree that we need to see more studies like this one that will offer more holistic accounts of why elected officials act on matters of foreign policy (44).
The strength of Tama’s book can also be found in the depth and breadth conveyed while exploring these variables. His inclusion of statistics on congressional voting data provides an essential quantitative foundation for the investigation of the case studies in later chapters. Too often, studies like this do not attempt to bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative analysis, but Tama is able to do so not just via voting statistics but also in his inclusion of public opinion data during the rich narratives of the policy debates. Tama’s approach, while noting the actions of individual members of Congress, takes on a macro viewpoint in order to explore the varieties of bipartisanship. Thus, while individual-level data on polarization (e.g. Voteview’s NOMINATE scores for congressional members’ ideologies) or electoral competitiveness could further complement his hypotheses, they are out of the scope of this particular book and would throw off its nice balance between statistics and storytelling.[39] Furthermore, the inclusion of advocacy groups provides for a much more nuanced account of the environment in which lawmakers operate when making decisions. This is something that recent scholarship is trying to increasingly include in foreign policy debates in Congress.[40] Last, given the current electoral and institutional landscape, where many members of Congress have “more political leeway than presidents to place principle and pragmatism when making foreign policy decisions,” Tama’s inclusion of a varieties of pressures is essential in trying to better pinpoint how the agency-structure debate plays out amongst legislators (59).
Tama’s book examines these factors during the Barack Obama and Donald Trump presidencies and across a variety of foreign policy issues, including war and national security, economic sanctions, trade, and spending on foreign aid/diplomacy. As Tama mentions, “the debates covered in the book should be hard cases for generating any type of bipartisanship” given that they occurred during a time of record levels of polarization (65). This premise is sound, but I do wonder if the issue types that are examined provide enough variety in terms of salience. In his conclusion, Tama highlights the “need to distinguish among issues when making claims about the relationship between ideology and polarization” (218). However, only one of the issues examined, war/national security in chapters 4 and 5, would be considered “high politics” and thus we would predict higher levels of congressional action.[41] How that action translates into the varieties of bipartisanship is still an important question worth probing, but it is also valuable to consider what other issues might have been included in order to provide greater variation within the cases examined. Other high politics issues that involved debates on security or sovereignty, including alliances, arms control, border/immigration debates, and climate change, would also be worthwhile areas to explore in today’s environment of polarization, although Tama’s book should not be penalized for not examining every possible foreign policy issue. Alternatively, a discussion of why we might be seeing more low-politics foreign-policy issues being debated (and resulting in more bipartisanship) could have been provided, as this question of salience is highlighted throughout the case studies as well as in the conclusion. In fact, on the very last page of the book, when Tama reiterates that bipartisanship is much more alive than people realize, he states that “Democrats and Republicans have continued to cooperate under the radar on many important international issues” (227). I wonder if this cooperation is below the radar because the relevant foreign policy issues in which it happens are really are not as important or controversial as many think they are. Or conversely, is American foreign policy moving more towards low-politics issues and thus new windows are opening for varieties of partisan cooperation? Today’s foreign policy debates around supporting Ukraine and Israel are certainly putting these questions about issue types and saliency to the test.
In examining these foreign policy issue debates, Tama brings a vast array of sources and data to bear in the excellent case studies that are detailed throughout the book. In particular, Tama’s use of in-depth interviews on top of his extensive research provides for a much more thorough examination than the typical analysis of secondary sources would offer. Conducting over 100 interviews with well-connected sources across the political spectrum and within the American foreign policy apparatus is no easy feat. Moreover, the interviews are an important component in measuring the influence of foreign-policy advocacy groups and elite opinions, as the nuances of these variables can often only be found within Washington, D.C., itself and are understood by those who lived and worked on these debates on a daily basis. I particularly found the broad range of interviews and quotations from them in the chapter on spending on foreign aid and diplomacy to be enlightening in how the pro-aid coalition came together in a remarkably bipartisan fashion. For instance, one aide admitted that “when members [of Congress] first come to the Hill, they don’t usually have foreign policy backgrounds, but as they learn more, they see the importance of aid. If you sit down with members and talk to them one-on-one, you can really shift minds” (201). This is a quotation well worth examining in order to debunk the impact of polarization. Thus, the depth and breadth of evidence that Tama provides makes the book stand out in terms of recent scholarship on the politics of current US foreign policymaking.[42]
While the individual case studies are presented in a clear and coherent manner, it is not evident what Tama uses as an input for examining a congressional foreign policy debate. For instance, some chapters focus on more significant pieces of legislation (e.g., the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015), while others seem to be a catch-all for any activity or debates that are related to the topic at hand. This brings up the question of what exactly constitutes a case for examination within the broader categories of each substantive chapter. For example, did a piece of legislation need to be proposed, voted on, or just discussed amongst members? And by including debates within both the House and the Senate, does such a wide range of inputs capture the nuanced policy process and political dynamics of each body? More specifically, one way to think about this question of treating all efforts similarly is to assess where the policy was at within the “policy cycle” that government decision goes through. Some scholars identify five stages of the policy process: agenda setting, option generation, selection, implementation, and review; this would have provided an interesting layer to add onto some of the issues and cases that Tama examines.[43] In particular, the review stage would seemingly provide more explanatory power when thinking about foreign-policy congressional alignments that are made in relation to the president. Do anti-presidential bipartisan alignments normally take place later in the policy cycle as a direct response to the president as Congress reviews or approves the executives’ actions? Do other bipartisan alignments occur earlier in the policy process since members have their own motivations for passing foreign policy legislation? From this perspective, a clearer conceptualization of the inputs could provide even more clarity in examining how the agency-structure debate plays out amongst legislators and the bipartisan alignments they create.
Another methodological question concerns how Tama’s bipartisan alignments are able to capture the outcome of the foreign policy issue being debated. From this perspective, the question is not why bipartisanship continues but what these alignments achieve when they come together? Or to put it another way, not all bipartisan cooperation has the same outcome. To use the example of anti-presidential bipartisanship, these groups of lawmakers could be impacting a debate in two different ways – they could be against a policy that the president is for or they could support an initiative that the president opposes. Thus, Tama’s alignments can play different roles that lead to a variety of outcomes. Recent research on intra-party dynamics continues to discuss this question of how these members and groupings impact foreign policy debates, and whether they are almost always inherently against a policy that its proponents are trying to have passed and thus should be noted as playing a “spoiler” role?[44] Thus, if the outcome for certain types of alignments is that they are obstacles in the policymaking process, do they also have a lower threshold in trying to create a “minimum winning coalition” of votes or influence? This type of question also ties into earlier ones raised about the variation of policy debates within the bodies of Congress. The potential for being an obstacle in the Senate is considerably different than that of being an obstacle in the House, not just because of the upper chamber’s fewer members but also because of the power of the filibuster. We have seen recent congressional bipartisan efforts on immigration reform collapse in the face of powerful minority groups and it has not taken much for them to bring these efforts to a stop.
Overall, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy is a wonderful book that will be required reading for my students for years to come. The issues raised above are not criticisms of the book; they rather point to questions that the book raised as I was reading it, which is in itself a clear sign that Tama’s book is an excellent piece of scholarship. No work can capture the entire spectrum of issues, inputs, and inner-desires of lawmakers when it comes to current American foreign policymaking. But Tama’s book brilliantly succeeds in many ways where others have not, and thus it should be celebrated as an enormous achievement in the field of foreign policy analysis and in scholars’ attempts to better capture the full reality of contemporary American politics.
Review by Sarah Maxey, Loyola University Chicago
Do politics stop at the water’s edge? Jordan Tama’s exceptional new book, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age, constructively upends both the question and its conventional answer. By showing that “bipartisanship is not necessarily what you think it is” (4), the book brings depth and clarity to the relationship between polarization and the water’s edge, offering the nuance needed to make sense of a complex reality. Tama’s contributions cross the boundaries of domestic and foreign policy, as well as theory and practice, making the book critical to our understanding of both contemporary politics and the future.
Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy begins by challenging what scholars thought they knew about polarization. Rather than being mutually exclusive, bipartisanship and polarization coexist and vary in their political relevance. From this insight, Tama derives four main political alignments: pro-presidential bipartisanship, anti-presidential bipartisanship, strong polarization, and cross-partisanship. Capturing the full range of potential alignments is the book’s first pathbreaking contribution, as it changes the picture of contemporary polarization. The conceptualization picks up on patterns of bipartisanship that are otherwise overlooked—for example, that “the United States has never experienced a period of consistent bipartisan congressional support for the president” (9). By introducing cross-partisanship, the framework also reveals an often neglected but important form of cooperation that helps explain the influence, limitations, and general decline in congressional power over foreign affairs.[45] Additionally, by going beyond extreme cases of bipartisanship and polarization, the book revitalizes the agency of different actors, reminding us that foreign policy can be shaped by a relatively small number of politicians who have the leeway to act on principle.
The book brings an impressive range of evidence to bear on its argument, analyzing patterns of important congressional votes to establish variation across time and between issues before conducting case studies of six different policy areas across the Barack Obama and Donald Trump presidential administrations. The cases are laudable for their depth, for tackling contemporary presidencies at a time when party brands are expected to dominate, and for their treatment of the dynamics between multiple actors. Tama breaks down not only how members of Congress and the White House understood each issue, but also incorporates detailed information about public and elite opinion, as well as the actions of a variety of interest and advocacy groups. The result is an analysis that is comprehensive in every sense of the word.
Beyond providing detail for detail’s sake, this approach to the case studies facilitates two key and less obvious contributions. First, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy captures the full foreign-policy landscape, recognizing that it includes far more than high-stakes, high-salience moments of military crises. Previous scholarship has often divided US politics into two presidencies,[46] thereby deeming foreign policy to be defined by the hard issues of national security and consequently insulating it from partisan considerations.[47] Tama’s findings helpfully complicate this perspective, showing that the influence of partisanship varies based on the issue, public attention, the advocacy environment, and ultimately, the individual policymaker. This approach significantly advances arguments that foreign policy is not a monolith.[48] Instead, the book directly outlines and validates how foreign policy is and is not distinct from domestic policy, arguing that not all issues break down along ideological lines, that the advocacy landscape is less consistently polarized, and that lawmakers and the president face different structures of accountability. As a result, it clears a path for future research agendas that build on this observed issue-level variation.
Beyond the study of partisanship, the case studies also map out the conditions under which different actors matter more or less in specific foreign policy decisions. Again, the book frees scholarship from unhelpful binaries, this time moving beyond debates over whether foreign policy is a top-down or bottom-up process. Instead, Tama welcomes the reality that foreign policy—and likely all policy—is made in multiple directions at once. He does so while maintaining a framework for systematic study. When combined, the case studies reveal that presidential power peaks when the political stakes are high, that the public’s voice is loudest when issues are either high in salience or map neatly onto left-right ideological dimensions, and that channels for advocacy-group and congressional influence are widest when the public is inattentive. Embedded in this study of bipartisanship is thus a structure that can be used to generate expectations about whose preferences are most likely to be reflected in a given policy decision. For scholars of foreign policy in democracies, these insights are game changers, providing a template for future research that systematically capture the interactions between multiple actors at the same time.
The many strengths of Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy stem from its embrace of complexity and its willingness to acknowledge that the answer to the question of whether politics crosses the water’s edge is often: it depends. The intricacy of the theory and analysis also raise important questions about the sources of polarization and its implications for the future.
First, when do actors have incentives to polarize a given issue and who has the most power to do so? The book recognizes the agency that actors have to pursue bipartisanship, but polarization can also be an intentionally chosen political strategy. Within the cases, Obama’s red line in Syria and commitment to the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as well as Trump’s approach to the 2016 Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) highlight the power of the White House to give issues “greater political stakes” (151) and increase their salience among the public. From this view, the president appears to be at least a first among equals when it comes to promoting polarization versus bipartisanship. While anti-presidential bipartisanship offers important checks on executive power, the JCPOA and TPP cases in particular suggest that given enough time and effort, strategic leaders can steer lawmakers away from this pattern. The possibility that presidents may associate polarization with political benefits and thus face incentives to actively pursue it raises additional warnings about the avenues through which democratic checks and balances could be undermined in the future.
Second, what are the necessary conditions for bipartisanship to remain possible? The book expertly demonstrates that there are multiple pathways to bipartisanship and cross-partisanship. Favorable conditions among the public stand out as a central, potentially necessary condition for alternatives to polarization to be feasible. For lawmakers to have the leeway they need to cross the aisle, it is necessary for the public to either not care very much about the issue and/or view the issue in non-ideological terms. With these dynamics in mind, Tama notes “Pushing for bipartisanship on issues where the electorate itself is not already polarized will therefore tend to be more fruitful than pressing for it on issues where it is” (226). This advice for fostering bipartisanship raises the question: does public polarization make bipartisanship not only less fruitful, but impossible? Is there any condition in which public polarization does not rule out bipartisanship? Or are public attitudes the key limiting factor?
Finally, separating polarization and bipartisanship into four distinct political alignments magnifies our understanding of the domestic politics of foreign policy. An important question for future research is how these alignments extend to the international arena. Many of the red flags raised about foreign policy polarization center on its ability to cast doubt on the continuity of US commitments, undermining America’s role as a leader of the international world order and reputation more broadly.[49] Recent evidence that a minority of Republicans now think that the US should take an active part in world affairs—47 percent compared to 70 percent of Democrats—suggests that international concern is warranted.[50] To what extent are the differences between alignments visible to international audiences, and do they have distinct implications for the US reputation in international affairs? Specifically, does the prevalence and domestic importance of cross-partisanship appear as function or dysfunction on the international stage?
Ultimately, Jordan Tama’s Bipartisanship & U.S. Foreign Policy is a fantastic contribution that clearly defines but is not limited to the realm of foreign policy. In avoiding the appeal of all-or-nothing categorizations, the argument brings much needed clarity and direction to the study of polarization, partisanship, and foreign policy. It will be foundational for future research agendas on these topics and for individuals who are committed to safeguarding bipartisanship in the face of ongoing political turmoil.
Review by James M. Scott, Illinois State University
Conventional wisdom often dismisses Congress and its role in US foreign policy, frequently relying on a highly simplified “water’s edge” argument that stresses Congress as supportive, uninterested, inactive, compliant, and/or deferential.[51] However, as Rebecca Hersman suggested, “The complex and often troubled relationship between Congress and the executive branch over foreign policy defies simple explanations and convenient caricatures.”[52] Since the late 1980s, a significant body of literature has established that Congress and its members can and often do choose to assert their institutional prerogatives and policy preferences in foreign policymaking, thereby presenting challenges for presidential leadership.[53] One obvious consequence of this research is to highlight the importance of understanding the role of Congress and its impact on US foreign policymaking.
A theme from this literature is that simple frames such as “deferent,” “inactive,” and dichotomies such as “acquiescent-assertive” are of limited value in seeking to understand the more complex politics of Congress and foreign policy. Scholars such as Ralph G. Carter, James M. Lindsay, Eileen Burgin, James M, Scott, and Scott and Carter[54] have emphasized a wider range of avenues of congressional activity and engagement and multiple forms of congressional foreign policy orientations vis-à-vis the executive branch.[55] As Andrew Rudalevige also argued, “Congress is not truly an ‘it’ but a ‘they,’” and individual members of Congress (both junior and senior) can play a variety of consequential roles.[56] As William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse note, “Congress does not check presidential power, individuals within it do.”[57]
Jordan Tama’s important work, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age, is situated in and contributes to this stream of scholarship. Tackling the topic of bipartisanship, which is itself one of those oft-oversimplified concepts, Tama focuses on unpacking the term (and practice). In so doing he develops a disaggregated, three-part typology of its variants, and understanding the nature and dynamics of congressional bipartisan cooperation and its persistence in the contemporary context. Set in the landscape of increasingly severe ideological polarization and often vitriolic political partisanship, Tama focuses on the foreign-policy environment of the last three presidents and argues that
this polarization coexists with bipartisanship that remains surprisingly common….[and] remains most prevalent in foreign affairs….Democrats and Republicans lack overarching consensus about foreign policy, but they nevertheless work together on international issues in a variety of ways (4).
In examining the how and why of this central argument, Tama rejects a simple view of bipartisanship as consensus between Democrats and Republicans and support for presidential policies and leadership. Instead, he argues for a much more nuanced and useful typology that identifies three categories of bipartisan cooperation. First is pro-presidential bipartisanship, which involves cooperation in support for presidential policies and is most like the classic understanding of bipartisanship. Second is anti-presidential bipartisanship, which involves cooperation in opposition to presidential policies. Third is cross-partisanship, which is based upon cooperation within competing coalitions that cross party lines and emerge from intra-party divisions. Tama acknowledges the role of legislative realities, in which support from both parties is usually necessary for legislative success on a wide variety of matters, the role and agency of individual members of Congress, and the role of foreign policy crises and international threats in generating rallying dynamics in the public and Congress. He focuses on three additional factors that shape the dynamics of partisan polarization and bipartisan cooperation: the ideological landscape of the particular policy issue/debate, chiefly how the issue maps onto existing ideological positions and divides; the advocacy landscape, chiefly how advocacy groups are positioned and engaged on the issue; and the institutional incentives of members of Congress and the president, chiefly the institutional prerogatives and electoral calculations involved.
To develop and test his argument and explanation, Tama examines congressional voting behavior from 1991–2020 in order to identify the nature, dynamics, and patterns of polarization, partisanship, and bipartisan cooperation. Overall, his voting data show that partisan polarization is increasing over the years of the study, Tama’s evidence on the overall trend toward greater partisan polarization in foreign policy reinforces the findings of other studies that the partisan and ideological polarization that marks US domestic policy now deeply affects foreign policy as well.[58] Indeed, many other studies show that bipartisan cooperation began to erode before the Vietnam War ended and that the post–Cold War environment has been one of increasing ideological polarization and partisanship.[59] These ideological and partisan divides now affect virtually every congressional arena including party leaders, the voting of rank- and-file members on foreign and defense policy issues, and the behavior of individual members of Congress who are especially attentive to foreign policy.[60] Even in this context, however, Tama’s evidence also indicates that bipartisan cooperation persists, and that that foreign policy issues have experienced less partisan polarization than domestic policy issues.
The most significant part of Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age is Tama’s comparative case studies of six foreign policy issues in the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations that spanning multiple foreign policy domains. He discusses military intervention in Syria, war powers and the authorization of the use of military force in the post-9/11 context, sanctions on Russia in response to its aggression in Ukraine and electoral interference in the US, sanctions on Iran for its nuclear programs, trade and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, and foreign aid/international affairs budgets. The case studies provide thick descriptions of the activity and behavior of members of Congress across a selection of issues. They are richly grounded in primary documents, memoirs, surveys, contemporary reporting, over 100 interviews of members of Congress, their staff, executive branch officials, policy analysts, and advocacy group members, along with other relevant scholarly literature. Skillfully assembling this material into clear and compelling narratives Tama reveals the impact of the three key factors he emphasizes on partisan polarization and bipartisan cooperation and draws out the theoretical and policy implications of his examination.
Well-organized and carefully researched, Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age is an insightful analysis with many strengths. First and perhaps foremost, Tama’s conceptualization of bipartisan cooperation into pro-presidential, anti-presidential, and cross-partisanship subtypes brings much needed clarification to a concept that is central to much discussion of US foreign policy and at the same time imprecise. Tama’s conceptualization, with its differentiation between support for and opposition to presidential policies and its recognition of cross-aisle coalitions that compete over policy preferences, effectively and usefully unpacks the otherwise blunt concept. And it does so with consequence. This more subtle, nuanced understanding reveals both the persistence of bipartisan cooperation in various forms, the prevalence of cross-partisanship as the most common form during the period of study as intra-party disagreements divide party members from each other and often result in (sometimes strange) coalitions competing over policy, and some of the key factors and drivers of both partisan competition and bipartisan cooperation.
Moreover, although Tama’s case studies are not directly focused on doing so, they also provide a rich accounting of the many activities and avenues of influence that are available to members of Congress to try to influence foreign policy. While the overall data on polarization and bipartisanship focuses on formal voting in Congress, the cases themselves abound with examples of less direct and less formal activities, from framing in the media, to communication with executive branch officials, to the use of the courts, and many others.[61] Indeed, while formal voting is a feature in each case, what stands out are the many less direct and more non-legislative avenues of congressional activity as members engaged in partisan competition or one of the various forms of bipartisan cooperation to shape policy. Indeed, one is tempted to note that if those who are in search of congressional influence in any of the six cases in Tama’s work focus only on the direct legislative activities and formal votes, much understanding of the congressional role and the politics of US foreign policy will be missed.
In many ways, the cross-partisanship subtype is the most interesting. Tama argues that it is the most common form of bipartisanship since 1991. It represents cooperation, but involves smaller factions who are driven by intra-party cleavages and who find common cause with members of the opposite party. In the post-Cold War context, this version of bipartisanship seems less about cooperation per se and more about the erosion and fragmentation of congressional foreign policy orientations that have been underway since Vietnam. As Tama rightly notes, the foreign policy views of US elites map poorly onto the simple liberal-conservative spectrum. For much of the post–World War II period, discussion of the foreign policy orientations of American elites turned on variants of the isolationism–internationalism debate rather than on liberal-conservative terms. Ole R. Holsti characterized this in terms of a “three-headed eagle”: Cold War internationalism, post–Cold War internationalism, and semi-isolationism.[62] Holsti and James N. Rosenau later developed four orientations: hard-liners, internationalists, isolationists, and accommodationists.[63] Eugene Wittkopf described foreign policy orientations based on their militant and cooperative elements, identifying four orientations: internationalists, who support both cooperative and militant internationalism, accommodationists, who support cooperative internationalism, hard-liners, who support militant internationalism, and isolationists, who support neither.[64] Much of the bipartisan cooperation of the Cold War years turned on the dominance of, and bipartisanship among, internationalists, hardliners, and accommodationists (to use Wittkopf’s terms).
With the end of the Cold War, which is the period of Tama’s study, these broad orientations gave way to more fragmented orientations. For example, less than a decade into the post-Cold War years, Jerel A. Rosati and John Creed argued for six competing orientations with adherents in both parties: global crusaders, global containers, selective containers, global reformers, global transformers, and selective engagers.[65] Just over a decade later, in the wake of the changes of the twenty-first century and the global war on terror, Chris J. Dolan further expanded the arena, identifying nine competing orientations that cut through the political parties: missionaries, hegemonists, globalizers, global capitalists, narrow realists, progressive internationalists, anti-imperialists, neighbors, and disengagers.[66] Finally, in 2018, a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that traditional foreign policy orientations among members of Congress were yielding to three very different archetypal foreign policy orientations or worldviews with members in each party: the order-driven, who were committed to defending the liberal international order and its alliances and institutions; the values-driven, who were committed to promoting US values such as human rights, democracy, and religious freedom and democracy; and the limits-driven, who were committed to minimizing the commitments and costs of the US in its international engagement.[67] In many respects, what Tama identifies as cross-partisanship reflects this fragmentation and competing perspectives, policy priorities, and other factors that are driven in large part by the potential realignment and reshuffling of foundational foreign policy orientations. The absence of a broader consensus thus translates into these cross-partisanship coalitions whose most significant result, as Tama suggests, is to confound efforts to make policy.[68]
One last observation concerns the role of the president in partisan polarization and bipartisan cooperation. Tama’s case studies do not ignore the often-significant effects of presidential (or executive branch) activity that contribute to partisan or bipartisan outcomes on Capitol Hill. Because this activity can foster, fuel, or dampen either partisan polarization or bipartisan cooperation, building it more explicitly into the explanatory framework would strengthen the analysis, as well as the implications for efforts to foster bipartisanship. An example may be helpful, especially since Tama notes the impact of foreign policy crises and international threats in generating rallying dynamics in the public and Congress. As Howell, Saul Jackman, and Ron Rogowski argue, when political debates focus on national threats and priorities, Congress is more likely to defer to the president’s policy preferences (thereby generating pro-presidential bipartisanship, in Tama’s terms).[69] When the threat context is amplified in the national debate, congressional assertiveness tends to be muted and White House foreign policy leadership enhanced, as was the case in the high-threat environment during the height of the Cold War. This has led to a “politics of threat,” in which variation in the clarity of threat and interests—and the claims of these things by presidents and members of Congress—have affected levels of congressional assertiveness or support toward the White House, especially by the party opposite the president, with obvious implications for bipartisan cooperation.
In sum, Jordan Tama’s worthy entry into the growing body of scholarship on the nature, role, activity, and impact of Congress and its members in US foreign policy stakes out new ground in its focus on the nature and persistence of bipartisan cooperation in US foreign policy in a time of partisan polarization. Though it too is on a downward trend–and perhaps increasingly so in the time since the writing of Tama’s book–it persists in significant ways. As Tama states, “bipartisanship is not necessarily what you think it is,” and his book goes a long way toward clarifying and reconceptualizing this key concept and practice in US foreign policy.
Response by Jordan Tama, American University
I am deeply grateful to Ralph Carter, Jeffrey Friedman, Patrick Homan, Sarah Maxey, and James Scott for reading my book so carefully and offering such thoughtful comments on it, and to Kenneth Schultz for writing the introduction to the roundtable. Their own pathbreaking research has shaped my understanding of the politics of US foreign policy in many ways,[70] and I am heartened that they see my book as an important contribution to the field.
My goal in writing Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy was to bring more nuance and depth to scholars’ understanding of the political dynamics on foreign policy. Public and scholarly discussions of the role of the two parties in American foreign policy in recent years have focused almost entirely on the rise of polarization and decline of bipartisanship. But in observing contemporary US foreign policy debates, I had noticed that many of them were marked by some degree of cross-party cooperation, suggesting that bipartisan coalitions remained common on international issues. At the same time, this cooperation across the aisle seemed often to coexist with intraparty or interbranch division, resulting in a more complex—and interesting—political landscape than that which is reflected in most accounts. I set out to write a book that would capture and conceptualize this somewhat messy contemporary reality, while advancing our understanding of the factors that influence it.
I am gratified that the roundtable contributors appreciate the book’s nuance and generally find its argument and evidence to be compelling. In particular, I am pleased that they find that the book’s typology of political alignments represents a step forward in our understanding of the topic, consider the book’s quantitative and qualitative analysis to be well-executed and thorough, and value the book’s emphasis on both outside pressures and individual agency as drivers of the foreign policy activity of lawmakers. The reviews by Ralph Carter and James Scott also very helpfully situate the book in the existing literature on the role of Congress in US foreign policy, explaining how Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy adds to the knowledge established by prior work.
The contributors also raise some important questions about the book’s argument, evidence, and implications. In the book, I argue that ideology, advocacy groups, and institutional incentives influence the political alignments of elected officials. I assert that ideology matters because some issues break down on a left-right ideological spectrum, whereas others do not, and elected officials are less likely to divide along partisan lines on the latter set of issues. Using similar logic, I claim that advocacy groups matter because some issues feature opposing advocacy efforts by groups with close ties to just one of the two parties, whereas others do not, and cross-party coalitions are more likely in the latter cases. The differing institutional incentives of lawmakers and the president, meanwhile, help explain why interbranch clashes often occur on foreign policy.
Regarding the role of ideology, Scott’s review supplements and reinforces the book’s argument by providing an overview of the intellectual configurations on foreign policy. His review underscores that foreign policy worldviews do not neatly align with liberalism or conservativism but instead group together in cross-cutting ways, thereby facilitating the formation of intraparty divisions and competing bipartisan coalitions in Congress. These cross-cutting intellectual configurations also explain the prevalence of intraparty factions that act as spoilers in the legislative process on foreign policy, as Patrick Homan discusses in his review.
Relatedly, Jeffrey Friedman suggests in his review that the threshold I use for measuring significant intraparty division—10 percent of the members of a party voting against the party’s prevailing position—seems low. I adopted this threshold because, in a closely divided Congress, the defection of 10 percent of the members of a party can easily make the difference between the passage or the rejection of legislation. But Friedman is right that there is a big difference between the defection of 10 percent of the members of a party and the defection of 40 percent of the members of a party. Future work could better capture this difference by employing a more fine-grained measure. It could, for instance, distinguish between low intraparty division (the defection of less than 10 percent of the members of a party), moderate intraparty division (the defection of between 10 and 25 percent of the members of a party), and high intraparty division (the defection of more than 25 percent of the members of a party).
With respect to advocacy groups, Friedman finds the book’s argument plausible, but writes that he would have liked to see more evidence of the independent impact of advocacy groups on legislative behavior. I think two of the cases in the book do provide strong evidence of this type. In a case study on trade policy (163-188), I show that the opposition of labor unions to the Trans-Pacific Partnership resulted in few Democrats in Congress supporting the agreement in 2015 and 2016 even though most Democratic voters supported trade liberalization at the time, while the support of labor unions for the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement in 2019 and 2020 led most Democrats in Congress to back that agreement. In a case study on spending on diplomacy and foreign aid (189-212), I further show that advocacy by a politically diverse advocacy coalition led Republican members of Congress to join Democratic lawmakers in defending this part of the federal budget from cuts proposed by President Donald Trump during his presidency, even though most Republican voters favored reductions in foreign aid. In both of these cases, politicians endorsed the positions of advocacy groups even when those positions did not reflect the positions of voters.
On the interaction between Congress and the president in foreign policy, a few of the contributors seek more analysis of the presidential side of the relationship. Sarah Maxey raises the important point that political actors, including the president, can intentionally polarize issues, and asks when the president might opt to do so. This is a great question for further research. Usually presidents should not have an incentive to polarize foreign policy issues since their domestic and international standing tends to be strengthened when their policies get bipartisan support. But on issues where their position is more popular than the prevailing position in the opposition party, presidents might amplify the difference between the parties and then use that difference to their electoral advantage. Relatedly, Scott discusses how presidents can fuel or dampen bipartisanship by highlighting national security threats. I chose not to focus on this “politics of threat” in the book because it has been the subject of a considerable amount of prior research,[71] but it is certainly a major contributor to political alignments. Further work could helpfully integrate the politics of threat with the variables that are the focus of my book.
Patrick Homan, for his part, observes that, in discussing interbranch disagreement, we should distinguish between cases where Congress objects to a policy that has been instituted by the president and cases where Congress initiates a policy that the president subsequently objects to. In the book, I consider both types of disagreement to be instances of anti-presidential bipartisanship, but distinguishing between them would indeed provide important additional nuance. More generally, Homan helpfully calls for greater attention to the different stages of the policy process, asking whether certain political alignments are more likely to occur at certain stages of the process. Overall, pro-presidential bipartisanship and anti-presidential bipartisanship should tend to occur relatively late in the policy process, since they usually occur after the president has established a policy. But this is also a ripe subject for further research.
As I discuss in the book and as several of the contributors note, the salience of an issue also can greatly affect the way Democrats and Republicans line up on it. Greater salience usually results in greater polarization because elected officials have more incentive to try to score political points by differentiating their party from the other party when voters are paying a lot of attention to an issue.[72] Given that pattern, Homan asks whether I found many instances of bipartisanship only because I was looking at issues that are low in salience or involve low, rather than high, politics, and Friedman asks whether the pattern suggests that it is particularly hard for Democrats and Republicans to come together on the most important foreign policy issues.
To the extent that importance correlates with salience—and it usually does—it is indeed harder to generate bipartisanship on important issues. But there remain some important and high-profile issues that feature high levels of bipartisanship, such as China[73] and trade policy (163-188). Nor is bipartisanship limited to issues of low politics. Standard understandings of high and low politics treat the former as involving issues of national security and the latter as involving economic or social issues.[74] The congressional voting data analyzed in my book show that bipartisanship has been common in recent decades on both high and low politics issues (37-42). The book’s case studies further document bipartisanship in issue areas as varied as military intervention and war powers authorities (high politics), trade and civilian foreign policy spending (low politics), and economic sanctions (which bridge high and low politics) [69-212].
In a comment concerning both salience and ideology, Maxey asks whether I could take my analysis a step further and indicate whether certain configurations of salience and ideology represent the necessary conditions for bipartisanship. The short answer is yes. Generally, in order for bipartisanship to occur, an issue must not be highly salient or, if it is highly salient, it must not break down sharply along left-right ideological lines. But, importantly, these are necessary but not sufficient conditions for bipartisanship, as advocacy groups and the individual agency of lawmakers influence whether these favorable conditions are translated into actual cooperation across the aisle.
A final set of contributor comments concerns the implications of my findings. Given that I find rising levels of polarization as well as high levels of intraparty and interbranch division over foreign policy, Friedman asks whether there is any reason to doubt that political support for liberal internationalism is on its last legs, as scholars like Charles Kupchan and Peter Trubowitz have argued.[75] Raising another implication, Maxey asks how different political alignments over foreign policy influence America’s international reputation.
There is no question that the base of US support for liberal internationalism is weakening, and that it is increasingly difficult to muster the bipartisan backing that is needed to carry out an effective foreign policy. As Kenneth Schultz has explained, the harmful effects of polarization include greater difficulty pursuing major foreign policy undertakings and making international commitments.[76] As I discuss in the book, intraparty divisions have similar effects, since they also make it harder to build the majorities that are needed for congressional action or durable policies (215-219). Work by Rachel Myrick further shows that domestic polarization harms America’s reputation, making people overseas more skeptical of America’s leadership and less inclined to partner with the United States.[77] While I am unaware of scholarly work examining whether intraparty divisions weaken America’s reputation, anecdotal evidence suggests that it does so too. As Republican Party infighting prevented Congress from passing a new round of aid for Ukraine during 2023 and early 2024, America’s European allies began to increasingly question their reliance on the United States, and momentum grew for efforts to bolster European military autonomy.[78] Conversely, when Democrats and Republicans in Washington come together to take strong action, as they did when finally approving a new round of aid for Ukraine, this bolsters foreign confidence in the United States.[79]
Ultimately, the main takeaway I want readers to get from the book is that when it comes to the contemporary politics of US foreign policy, while conditions are far from ideal, they could be much worse. Yes, polarization is on the rise, and yes, it is getting increasingly difficult for America’s leaders to address global challenges effectively. But a surprising number of bipartisan coalitions remain active on international issues, and these coalitions do still sometimes carry the day. Consider that, in April 2024 alone, Congress passed legislation that approved $95 billion in aid for Ukraine, Israel, Gaza, and Taiwan; authorized the seizure of $5 billion in Russian assets for distribution to Ukraine; placed new sanctions on Iran; banned TikTok based on concerns about Chinese influence over the platform; and reauthorized a major intelligence surveillance program used to prevent terrorism.[80] Whether all of these steps represent “good” public policy is another question, but they clearly show that foreign policy bipartisanship is far from dead. All the more reason to continue studying it.
[1]Marianna Sotomayor and Mariana Alfaro, “House Speaker Mike Johnson Survives Vote to Oust Him from Leadership,” Washington Post, May 14, 2024, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/05/08/motion-to-vacate-house-speaker-marjorie-taylor-greene-mike-johnson/.
[2]Richard Cowan, Moira Warburton, and Patricia Zengerle, “US House Passes $95 Billion Ukraine, Israel Aid Package, Sends to Senate | Reuters,” Reuters, April 20, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-house-vote-long-awaited-95-billion-ukraine-israel-aid-package-2024-04-20/.
[3] Rachel Myrick, “The Reputational Consequences of Polarization for American Foreign Policy: Evidence from the US-UK Bilateral Relationship,” International Politics 59, no. 5 (October 2022): 1004-27, https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-022-00382-z; Myrick and Chen Wang, “Domestic Polarization and International Rivalry: How Adversaries Respond to America’s Partisan Politics,” The Journal of Politics 86, no. 1 (January 2024): 141-57, https://doi.org/10.1086/726926.
[4]Patrick Homan and Jeffrey S. Lantis, The Battle for U. S. Foreign Policy: Congress, Parties, and Factions in the 21st Century (Springer International Publishing AG, 2019).
[5]Homan and Lantis, 233; see also Carter’s review in this roundtable.
[6]Robert S. McNamara and Brian VanDeMark, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam(Vintage Books, 1996).
[7]Chaim Kaufmann, “Threat Inflation and the Failure of the Marketplace of Ideas: The Selling of the Iraq War,” International Security 29, no. 1 (2004): 5–48.
[8]Jessica Chen Weiss, “The China Trap: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Perilous Logic of Zero-Sum Competition,” Foreign Affairs 101, no. 5 (September/October 2022): 54.
[9]Lee Hamilton, with Jordan Tama, A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress (Woodrow Wilson Center, 2002); Tama, “Anti-Presidential Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy in the Trump Era,” in Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, eds, Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy: Activism, Assertiveness and Acquiescence in a Polarized Era (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021): 21-36; James D. Bryan and Tama, “The Prevalence of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Important Congressional Votes,” in Polarization and U.S. Foreign Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Implications, Special issue of International Politics 59, 5 (2022): 874-897.
[10] Graham T. Allison, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis (HarperCollins Publishers, 1971); Allison and Morton H. Halperin, “Bureaucratic Politics: A Paradigm and Some Policy Implications,” World Politics 24: S1 (1972): 40-79.
[11]Richard Melanson, American Foreign Policy Since the Vietnam War: The Search for Consensus from Richard Nixon to George W. Bush, 4th ed. (M.E. Sharpe, 2005).
[12] Bert Rockman, “President, Opinion, and the Institutional Leadership,” in David Deese, ed., The New Politics of American Foreign Policy (St. Martin’s, 1994).
[13] Cecil V. Crabb, Jr. and Pat M. Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy (CQ Press, 1989); James M. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of US Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
[14] William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton University Press, 2007); Douglas L. Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (University of Chicago Press, 2010).
[15] See Barbara Hinckley, Less Than Meets the Eye: Congress, the President, and Foreign Policy (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Stephen R. Weissman, A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy (Basic Books/Harper Collins, 1995).
[16] Rebecca K.C. Hersman, Friends and Foes: How Congress and the President Really Make Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2000).
[17] Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs (Duke University Press, 2009).
[18] Jeffrey S. Lantis, Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress Is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World (University of Michigan Press, 2019).
[19] Patrick Homan and Jeffrey S. Lantis, The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy: Congress, Parties, and Factions in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
[20] Quoted in Carter and Scott, Choosing to Lead, (33).
[21]See Crabb and Holt, Invitation to Struggle; Hersman, Friends and Foes; Carter and Scott, Choosing to Lead; Lantis, Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship; Homan and Lantis, The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy.
[22] Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz, “Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States,” International Security, 32:2 (2007): 7-44.
[23] Stephen Chaudoin, Helen V. Milner, and Dustin H. Tingley, “The Center Still Holds: Liberal Internationalism Survives,” International Security, 35:1 (2010): 75-94.
[24] Tama originally developed these data with James Bryan in James D. Bryan and Jordan Tama, “The Prevalence of Bipartisanship in U.S. Foreign Policy: An Analysis of Important Congressional Votes,” International Politics, 59:5 (2022): 874-897.
[25] Simon Bazelon and Matthew Yglesias, “The Rise and Importance of Secret Congress (Shh, Don’t Talk about It), Slowboring.com, June 21, 2021: https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-and-importance-of-secret.
[26] Kupchan and Trubowitz, “The Home Front: Why an Internationalist Foreign Policy Needs a Stronger Domestic Foundation,” Foreign Affairs, 100:3 (2021): 92-101.
[27] Daniel W. Drezner, “This Time is Different: Why U.S. Foreign Policy Will Never Recover,” Foreign Affairs, 98:3 (2019): 10-17.
[28] Dina Smeltz, Joshua Busby, and Jordan Tama, “Political Polarization the Critical Threat to U.S., Foreign Policy Experts Say,” The Hill, November 9, 2018.
[29] For examples, see Binnur Ozkececi, “Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Gordon M. Friedrichs and Jordan Tama, “Polarization and US Foreign Policy: Key Debates and New Findings.” International Politics 59:5 (2022): 767-785.
[30] For examples, see Jordan Tama, Bipartisanship in a Polarized Age: The US Congress and Foreign Policy Sanctions. School of International Service Research Paper No. 2015-2, 2015 and Jordan Tama, “Anti-Presidential Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy in the Trump Era,” in Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, eds., Congress and US Foreign Policy: Activism, Assertiveness and Acquiescence in a Polarized Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021): 21-36.
[31] See Jeffrey B. Lewis, Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet, Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. 2021; https://voteview.com/.
[32] For example, see Patrick Homan, Getting to 67: The Post-Cold War Politics of Arms Control Treaty Ratification (Routledge, 2016).
[33] For example of high/low politics, see David Auerswald and Forrest Maltzman, “Policymaking through Advice and Consent: Treaty Consideration by the United States Senate,” The Journal of Politics 16:4 (2003): 1097-1110, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00127.
[34] For example, see Gyung-Ho Jeong and Paul J. Quirk, “Division at the Water’s Edge: The Polarization of Foreign Policy.” American Politics Research 47:1 (2019): 58-87.
[35] For example, see T. Knecht and M.S. Weatherford, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making,” International Studies Quarterly 50:3 (2006): 705-727, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00421.x.
[36] For example, see Jeffrey S. Lantis and Patrick Homan, “Factionalism and US Foreign Policy: A Social Psychological Model of Minority Influence,” Foreign Policy Analysis 15:2 (2019): 157-175.
[37] For examples, see Binnur Ozkececi, “Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Foreign Policy Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2018), and Gordon M. Friedrichs and Jordan Tama, “Polarization and US Foreign Policy: Key Debates and New Findings.” International Politics 59:5 (2022): 767-785.
[38] For examples, see Jordan Tama, Bipartisanship in a Polarized Age: The US Congress and Foreign Policy Sanctions. School of International Service Research Paper No. 2015-2, 2015 and Jordan Tama, “Anti-Presidential Bipartisanship in Foreign Policy in the Trump Era,” in Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, eds., Congress and US Foreign Policy: Activism, Assertiveness and Acquiescence in a Polarized Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021): 21-36.
[39] See Jeffrey B. Lewis, Keith Poole, Howard Rosenthal, Adam Boche, Aaron Rudkin, and Luke Sonnet, Voteview: Congressional Roll-Call Votes Database. 2021; https://voteview.com/.
[40] For example, see Patrick Homan, Getting to 67: The Post-Cold War Politics of Arms Control Treaty Ratification (Routledge, 2016).
[41] For example of high/low politics, see David Auerswald and Forrest Maltzman, “Policymaking through Advice and Consent: Treaty Consideration by the United States Senate,” The Journal of Politics 16:4 (2003): 1097-1110, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2508.t01-1-00127.
[42] For example, see Gyung-Ho Jeong and Paul J. Quirk, “Division at the Water’s Edge: The Polarization of Foreign Policy.” American Politics Research 47:1 (2019): 58-87.
[43] For example, see T. Knecht and M.S. Weatherford, “Public Opinion and Foreign Policy: The Stages of Presidential Decision Making,” International Studies Quarterly 50:3 (2006): 705-727, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00421.x.
[44] For example, see Jeffrey S. Lantis and Patrick Homan, “Factionalism and US Foreign Policy: A Social Psychological Model of Minority Influence,” Foreign Policy Analysis 15:2 (2019): 157-175.
[45] William G. Howell and Jon Pevehouse, “Presidents, Congress, and the Use of Force,” International Organization 59, no. 1 (2005): 209-32; Douglas Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Jon Pevehouse and William G. Howell, While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton, 2007).
[46] Brandice Canes-Wrone, William G. Howell, and David E. Lewis, “Toward a Broader Understanding of Presidential Power: A Reevaluation of the Two Presidencies Thesis,” Journal of Politics 70, no. 1 (2008): 1-16; Richard Fleisher and Jon R. Bond, “Are There Two Presidencies? Yes, But Only for Republicans,” Journal of Politics 50, no. 3 (1988): 747-67; Aaron Wildavsky, “The Two Presidencies,” Trans-Action 4 (1966): 7-14.
[47] Edward Carmines and James A. Stimson, “The Two Faces of Issue Voting,” American Political Science Review 74, no. 1 (1980): 78-91.
[48] Alexandra Guisinger and Elizabeth N. Saunders, “Mapping the Boundaries of Elite Cues: How Elites Shape Mass Opinion across International Issues,” International Studies Quarterly 61, no. 2 (2017): 425-41; Joshua D. Kertzer, Deborah Jordan Brooks, and Stephen G. Brooks, “Do Partisan Types Stop at the Water’s Edge?,” The Journal of Politics 83, no. 4 (2021): 1764-82; Helen Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 2015).
[49] Rachel Myrick, “The Reputational Consequences of Polarization for American Foreign Policy: Evidence from the US-UK Bilateral Relationship,” International Politics 59 (2022): 1004-27; Kenneth Schultz, “Perils of Polarization for U.S. Foreign Policy,” The Washington Quarterly 40, no. 4 (2017): 7-28.
[50] Dina Smeltz et al., “2023 Survey of Public Opinion on US Foreign Policy,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, October 4, 2023, https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/2023-survey-public-opinion-us-foreign-policy.
[51] Cecil V. Crab and Pat M. Holt, Invitation to Struggle: Congress, the President and Foreign Policy (CQ Press 1992); Bert Rockman, “Presidents, Opinion, and Institutional Leadership,” in David Deese, ed., The New Politics of American Foreign Policy (St. Martin’s Press, 1994): 59-75; Stephen R. Weissman, A Culture of Deference: Congress’s Failure of Leadership in Foreign Policy (Basic Books/HarperCollins, 1995); Barbara Hinckley, Less than Meets the Eye: Foreign Policy Making and the Myth of the Assertive Congress (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Andrew Rudalevige, “The Executive Branch and the Legislative Process,” in Joel D. Aberbach and Mark A. Peterson, eds., The Executive Branch (The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands/Oxford University Press, 2005): 419-451.
[52] Rebecca K. Hersman, Friends and Foes: How Congress and the President Really Make Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2000):105.
[53] Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs (Duke University Press, 20009); Hersman, Friends and Foes; Patrick Homan and Jeffrey S. Lantis, The Battle for U.S. Foreign Policy: Congress, Parties, and Factions in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); William G. Howell and Jon C. Pevehouse, While Dangers Gather: Congressional Checks on Presidential War Powers (Princeton University Press, 2007); Douglas Kriner, After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents, and the Politics of Waging War (University of Chicago Press, 2010); Jeffrey S. Lantis, Foreign Policy Advocacy and Entrepreneurship: How a New Generation in Congress is Shaping U.S. Engagement with the World (University of Michigan Press, 2019); Jeffrey S. Lantis and Patrick Homan, “Factionalism and US Foreign Policy: A Social Psychological Model of Minority Influence.” Foreign Policy Analysis 15 (2019): 157-175; James M. Lindsay, Congress and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); James M. Lindsay and Randall B. Ripley, eds., Congress Resurgent: Foreign and Defense Policy on Capitol Hill (University of Michigan Press, 1993); Helen V. Milner and Dustin Tingley, Sailing the Water’s Edge: The Domestic Politics of American Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 2015); Jeffrey S. Peake, Glen S. Krutz, and Tyler Hughes, “President Obama, the Senate, and the Polarized Politics of Treaty Making.” Social Science Quarterly 93 (2012): 1295-1315.
[54] Ralph G. Carter, “Congressional foreign policy behavior: persistent patterns of the postwar period.” Presidential Studies Quarterly. 16 (1986):329-59; Lindsay, Congress; Eileen Burgin, “Assessing Congress’s role in the making of foreign policy.” Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds. Congress Reconsidered, 6th ed. (Congressional Quarterly Press, 1997), 293-324; James M. Scott, “In the Loop: Congressional Influence in American Foreign Policy.” Journal of Political and Military Sociology 25 (1997): 47-76; James M. Scott, James M. and Ralph G. Carter, “Acting on the Hill: Congressional Assertive- ness in U.S. Foreign Policy.” Congress and the Presidency 22 (2002): 151-70.
[55] Carter and Scott, Choosing to Lead.
[56] Rudalevige, The Executive Branch, 428. See also Carter and Scott, Choosing to Lead; Lantis, Foreign Policy Advocacy; Kevin Marsh and Jeffrey S. Lantis, “Are All Foreign Policy Innovators Created Equal? The New Generation of Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurship.” Foreign Policy Analysis 14 (2018): 212-234; Jordan Tama, “The Multiple Forms of Bipartisanship: Political Alignments in US Foreign Policy Items: Insights from the Social Sciences.” Social Science Research Council (2018), https://items.ssrc.org/the-multiple-forms-of-bipartisanship-political-alignments-in-us-foreign-policy/.
[57] Howell and Pevehouse, When Dangers Gather, 34; See also Kriner, After the Rubicon.
[58] Gyung-H Jeong and Paul J. Quirk, “Division at the Water’s Edge: The Polarization of Foreign Policy.” American Politics Research 47(2019): 58-87; Brian Rathbun, “Steeped in International Affairs? The Foreign Policy Views of the Tea Party.” Foreign Policy Analysis 9 (2013): 21-37.
[59] Jeong and Quirk, Division; Ashley E. Jochim and Bryan D. Jones, “Issue Politics in a Polarized Congress.” Political Research Quarterly 66 (2012): 352-369; Nicholas F. Martini, “Foreign Policy Ideology and Conflict Preferences: A Look at Afghanistan and Libya.” Foreign Policy Analysis 11 (2015): 417-434 Milner and Tingley, Sailing; Jeffrey S. Peake, “The Domestic Politics of US Treaty Ratification: Bilateral Treaties from 1949 to 2012.” Foreign Policy Analysis 13 (2017): 832-853.
[60] Carter and Scott, Choosing to Lead; C. James DeLaet and James M. Scott, “Treaty-Making and Partisan Politics: Arms Control and the U.S. Senate, 1960–2001.” Foreign Policy Analysis 2 (2006): 177-200, Lantis, Foreign Policy Advocacy; Marsh and Lantis, Foreign Policy Innovators; James M. McCormick, Eugene R. Wittkopf, and David Danna, “Politics and Bipartisanship at the Water’s Edge: A Note on Bush and Clinton.” Polity 30 (1997): 133-150; David W. Rohde, “Partisan Leadership and Congressional Assertiveness in Foreign and Defense Policy.” In The New Politics of American Foreign Policy, edited by David A. Deese (St. Martin’s, 1994); Barbara Sinclair, “Congressional Party Leaders in the Foreign and Defense Policy Arena.” In Congress Resurgent: Foreign and Defense Policy on Capitol Hill, edited by Randall Ripley and James Lindsay (University of Michigan Press, 1993); Steven S. Smith, “Congressional Party Leaders.” In The President, The Congress, and the Making of Foreign Policy, edited by Paul E. Peterson (University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Eugene R. Wittkopf and James M. McCormick. “Congress, the President, and the End of the Cold War.” Journal of Conflict Resolution 42 (1998): 440-467.
[61] E.g., Scott, “In the Loop.”
[62] Ole R. Holsti, “The Three-Headed Eagle: The United States and System Change,” International Studies Quarterly 23 (1979): 345.
[63] Holsti and James N. Rosenau, American Leadership in World Affairs: Vietnam and the Breakdown of Consensus (Allen & Unwin, 1984).
[64] Eugene R. Wittkopf, Faces of Internationalism: Public Opinion and American Foreign Policy (Duke University Press, 1990).
[65] Jerel A. Rosati and John Creed, “Extending the Three- Headed and Four-Headed Eagles: The Foreign Policy Operations of American Elites during the 80s and 90s,” Political Psychology 18 (1997): 583-623.
[66] Chris J. Dolan, “The Shape of Elite Opinion on U.S. Foreign Policy, 1992 to 2004.” Politics and Policy 36 (2008): 542-585.
[67] Kathleen Hicks, Louis Lauter, and Colin McElhinny, Beyond the Water’s Edge: Measuring the Internationalism of Congress (Center for Strategic & International Studies, 2018).
[68] See also Homan and Lantis The Battle for US Foreign Policy; Jeffrey S. Lantis and Patrick Homan, “Factionalism and US Foreign Policy: A Social Psychological Model of Minority Influence.” Foreign Policy Analysis 15 (2019): 157-175; Lantis and Homan, “The ‘Mischiefs of Faction’? The Freedom Caucus, Progressives, and U.S. Foreign Policy.” in Congress and U.S. Foreign Policy: Activism, Assertiveness and Acquiescence in a Polarized World, edited by Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021): 177-194.
[69] William Howell, Saul Jackman, and Ron Rogowski, The Wartime President: Executive Influence and the Nationalizing Politics of Threat (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
[70] See, for instance, Ralph G. Carter and James M. Scott, Choosing to Lead: Understanding Congressional Foreign Policy Entrepreneurs (Duke University Press, 2009); Kenneth A. Schultz, “Perils of Polarization for U.S. Foreign Policy,” Washington Quarterly 40, 4 (2017): 7-28; Jeffrey S. Lantis and Patrick Homan, “Factionalism and US Foreign Policy: A Social Psychological Model of Minority Influence,” Foreign Policy Analysis 15, 2 (2019): 157-175; Sarah Maxey, “Finding the Water’s Edge: When Negative Partisanship Influences Foreign Policy Attitudes,” International Politics 59, 5 (2022): 802-826; Jeffrey A. Friedman, The Commander-in-Chief Test: Public Opinion and the Politics of Image-Making in US Foreign Policy (Cornell University Press, 2023).
[71] See, for instance, John E. Mueller, “Presidential Popularity From Truman To Johnson,” American Political Science Review 64, 1 (1970): 18-34; John R. Oneal and Anna Lillian Bryan, “The Rally ‘Round The Flag Effect In US Foreign Policy Crises, 1950–1985,” Political Behavior 17 (1995): 379-401; Peter Trubowitz and Nicole Mellow, “Foreign Policy, Bipartisanship and the Paradox of Post-September 11 America,” International Politics 48, 2/3 (2011): 164-187.
[72] Frank R. Baumgartner, Jeffrey M. Berry, Marie Hojnacki, Beth L. Leech, and David C. Kimball, Lobbying and Policy Change: Who Wins, Who Loses, And Why (University of Chicago Press, 2009); Frances E. Lee, Beyond Ideology: Politics, Principles, and Partisanship in the US Senate (University of Chicago Press, 2009).
[73] Christopher Carothers and Taiyi Sun, “Bipartisanship on China in a Polarized America,” International Relations (Early View, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1177/00471178231201484.
[74] See Jeremy Youde, “High Politics, Low Politics, and Global Health,” Journal of Global Security Studies, 1, 2 (2016): 157-170.
[75] Charles A. Kupchan and Peter L. Trubowitz, “The Home Front: Why an Internationalist Foreign Policy Needs a Stronger Domestic Foundation,” Foreign Affairs 100, 3 (2021): 92-101.
[76] Schultz, “Perils of Polarization for U.S. Foreign Policy.”
[77] Rachel Myrick, “The Reputational Consequences of Polarization for American Foreign Policy: Evidence from the US-UK Bilateral Relationship,” International Politics 59, 5 (2022): 1004-1027.
[78] Lisa Bryant, “France’s Call for Stronger Europe Finally Gains Traction,” Voice of America (February 22, 2024), https://www.voanews.com/a/france-s-call-for-stronger-europe-finally-gains-traction/7498600.html.
[79] Samya Kullab and Elise Morton, “Ukrainian and Western Leaders Laud US Aid Package While the Kremlin Warns of ‘Further Ruin,’” AP (April 21, 2024), https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-funding-congress-1138337200942ca738ffc28bfc289570.
[80] Reuters, “What the U.S. Congress Passed to Aid Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan,” (April 23, 2024), https://www.reuters.com/world/us/whats-us-houses-foreign-aid-bills-ukraine-israel-taiwan-2024-04-17/; Charlie Savage and Luke Broadwater, “Senate Passes Two-Year Extension of Surveillance Law Just after It Expired,” New York Times (April 20, 2024), https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/20/us/politics/senate-passes-surveillance-law-extension.html .