Dead Center: The Demise of Liberal Internationalism in the United States

Abstract

According to mainstream opinion, the George W. Bush administration's assertive unilateralism represents a temporary departure from the traditional foreign policy of the United States, one that will be rectified by a change of personnel in the White House in 2009. This interpretation of recent trends in U.S. policy is illusory. The Bush administration's foreign policy, far from representing an aberration, marks the end of an era; it is a symptom, as much as a cause, of the unraveling of the liberal internationalist compact that guided the United States for more than half a century. The geopolitical and domestic conditions that gave rise to liberal internationalism have disappeared, eroding its bipartisan political foundations. In today's partisan landscape, the challenge is devising a grand strategy that not only meets the country's geopolitical needs but also is politically sustainable. A strategy that is as judicious and selective as it is purposeful offers the best hope for moving the United States toward a more stable and solvent political equilibrium.

Partisan polarization and US foreign policy: Is the centre dead or holding?

“…Advocates of the dead centre hypothesis have offered a variety of arguments to explain the alleged increase in foreign policy polarization. The most prominent amongst them attribute polarization to the impact of the Vietnam War on the policy preferences of members of the two parties (Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007;Nincic and Datta, 2007;Shapiro and Bloch-Elkon, 2005), the effects of the end of the Cold War (Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007;Marshall and Prins, 2002), changes in the foreign policy issue agenda to include more economic and 'intermestic' issues (Prins and Marshall, 2001;McCormick and Wittkkopf, 1992), and the broad changes in partisan ideology and institutional procedures which are held to be responsible for the general increase in partisan polarization in Congress since the 1970s (Fleisher and Bond, 2004;Jacobson, 2000;McCarty et al, 2006;Theriault, 2008). Whichever individual explanation or combination of these explanations is preferred, however, all are premised on an ongoing and/or permanent change in the independent variable(s) which, in turn, produces a similarly permanent and ongoing change in the dependent polarization variable as a result.…”

“…Kupchan and Trubowitz (2007) Procedural votes are excluded from the analysis, but amendment votes included. 6 The second indicator seeks to capture the trends in foreign policy polarization by comparing the level of party unity votes on foreign policy relative to domestic policy.…”

“…The majority view, then, is that partisan polarization has increasingly affected foreign policy-making and that, just as in domestic politics, the moderate centre ground has been abandoned. In its most stark formulation (Kupchan and Trubowitz, 2007) this argument asserts that bipartisanship in foreign policy is dead. Accordingly, we refer to this position as the 'dead centre' thesis.…”

Presidents, Legislators, and Foreign Policy in Latin America

“…These analysts argue that foreign policy is subject to the same ideological and partisan disputes that characterise the domestic policy-making process. Contrary to the 'two presidencies' thesis, these scholars argue that the end of the Cold War gave rise to a significant decline in the level of foreign policy consensus between Democrats and Republicans in the USA (Canes-Wrone, Howell and Lewis 2008; Holsti and Rosenau 1986), thus negatively affecting support for presidential foreign policy initiatives (Kupchan and Trubowitz 2007). These analyses are highly sensitive to historical context.…”

Political Parties at War: A Study of American War Finance, 1789–2010

“…Although some scholars of the literature on domestic institutions and international conflict minimize the role of partisanship in crisis settings (Gowa 1998) or argue that outside threats unify domestic political elites (Coser 1956;Kupchan and Trubowitz), 7 there are several reasons why politics-as-usual prevails when it comes to the question of war finance. One is that the meaning of bipartisan unity in the context of war finance is indeterminate, because neither taxation nor its alternatives are unambiguously more patriotic than the other.…”