THOMAS E. PATTERSON: I'm on the north side of the White House.
To your right is the famed West Wing, where
the president and top presidential advisers have their offices.
Many important decisions have been made in that wing of the White House.
It was there the President Lyndon Johnson
decided to escalate the war in Vietnam.
It would last for eight more years.
It was there that President George W. Bush
made the decision to invade Afghanistan after the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
And two years later would make a decision to invade Iraq.
Those wars would also last for years.
Each of those times the president went to Congress
to get formal authorization for the military action.
More often, however, presidents have ordered military action
on their own authority.
When the first President Bush sent troops into Panama,
congressional leaders were told of the invasion
only a few hours before it happened.
The troops were already in the air on their way to Panama.
More recently, when President Barack Obama ordered air strikes
on Islamic State in Iraq, he did so on his own authority
as Commander-in-Chief.
Later he went to Congress to ask for authorization
to expand the operations in that area, but he
made it clear that as president he had the authority on his own
to order the air strikes.
That's a lot of power to put in the hands
of a single individual, the president.
[THEME MUSIC PLAYING]
In the previous session we examined presidents' domestic policy role.
Here we'll examine their role in foreign policy,
which rests on two constitutionally assigned responsibilities.
One is that of chief diplomat.
This authority derives from two modest-sounding constitutional clauses,
one that says the president shall have the power to receive ambassadors,
and one that gives the president the power
to make treaties subject to approval by 2/3 of the Senate.
The second responsibility is that of military chief.
It's granted by a brief constitutional clause that says simply the president
shall be "commander-in-chief."
Now compare those three words with what the Constitution says
about Congress's war-making authority Congress has the power "To declare War
and make Rules concerning captures on land and water.
To raise and support Armies.
To provide and maintain a Navy.
To make Rules for the government and regulation
of the land and naval forces.
To provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the laws of the union,
suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.
To provide for organizing, arming and disciplining the Militia."
Now you might conclude from all that that the writers of the Constitution
intended Congress to be in charge of war.
That's exactly the case.
James Madison wrote that, "The only case in which the Executive can enter
on a war, undeclared by Congress, is when the state of war has been
[initiated by] another [country].
But that's not been the history of America's recent wars a point
we'll discuss later in this session.
We'll start this session by explaining the information and leadership
advantages that presidents have over Congress
in the making of foreign policy.
Then we'll describe the ability of presidents to act on their own
in the area of foreign affairs.
Finally, we'll turn to the president's war powers.
In the 1960s, the noted political scientist Aaron Wildavsky
claimed that though the United States has but one president
it has in effect two presidencies, one in the realm of domestic affairs,
and one in the realm of foreign affairs.
Wildavsky based his claim on the tendency of Congress
to defer more often to the president's initiatives
when they dealt with foreign policy.
We now know that Congress's greater support for president's foreign policy
initiatives was a product of the Cold War.
The United States was facing the threat of Soviet communism,
and Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike rallied behind the president
on security issues.
The Vietnam War shattered that consensus.
Ever since Vietnam, presidents have had to struggle
with pretty much the same problems-- partisan opposition, strong lobbies,
money limits-- when proposing foreign policy to Congress
as when proposing domestic policy.
Nevertheless, presidents continue to have advantages over Congress
when it comes to foreign affairs.
One of these advantages is their greater control over information.
As I've noted in previous sessions, information is a source of power.
To decide complex issues of policy, you first have to know.
You have to have access to relevant information
and to experts who can make sense of it.
When it comes to foreign policy, much of the policy-related information
is held by the State and Defense departments,
and they're tied closely to the president.
White House officials are briefed daily by State and Defense,
members of Congress are not.
The intelligence agencies such as the CIA and NSA
are even more closely tied to the president, who
receives a daily intelligence briefing and has
access to the nation's most closely guarded secrets, members of Congress
do not.
In fact, their access intelligence reports is strictly limited.
During the debate over the invasion of Iraq,
West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd repeatedly
asked the Bush administration to put forth
the intelligence on which it based its claim that Iraq was a terrorist threat.
Byrd's request was ignored, leading him to ask whether the administration's
claims were a "manufactured excuse" by a president who is determined
to take the nation to war.
Secrecy, however, is less Congress's information problem
than easy access to it in the formative stage of foreign policy.
The presidency permits a level of policy planning
that is beyond Congress's scope.
Often, when Congress is brought into a foreign policy decision,
the policy has already been shaped in large part by the executive branch.
That doesn't stop Congress from having a role,
but it can have the effect of limiting Congress's influence to adjustments
in what the president has decided.
Even in areas where Congress has relatively full access
to foreign affairs information, presidents
have the edge because they have a leadership advantage.
This advantage rests on the fact that foreign relations are based
on government-to-government contacts.
Someone in each government must have the authority to act on its behalf.
No member of Congress is positioned to do that.
Congress is an institution where authority is divided among its members
and between two chambers.
Congress has no single leader that can act authoritatively
on behalf of the legislative branch.
In contrast, the executive branch is unified.
Executive authority is not divided.
The president alone has the final authority over executive decisions.
As President George W. Bush put it, "I'm the decider."
This feature of the presidency was a deliberate choice
on the part of the writers of the Constitution,
a choice they made with an eye toward foreign affairs.
In Federalist Number 74, Alexander Hamilton
wrote that "the exercise of power by a single hand," that of the president,
is essential to the conduct of foreign policy.
Accordingly, the president has the unquestioned lead when the United
States negotiates with other countries.
Members of Congress can make their views known,
but they do not have a seat at the bargaining table.
Take, for example, the trade agreements that presidents
have negotiated in recent decades, including the North American Free Trade
Agreement or NAFTA, a trade pact between the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
Each pact was negotiated by the White House,
and when it came up for a vote in the House and Senate,
their members effectively had two choices, vote yes or vote no.
Now to be sure, in negotiating these pacts,
presidents had to keep in mind what Congress would be willing to accept.
Presidents risk defeat in Congress if they ignore its concerns.
But each of these trade agreements reflected primarily
the president's priorities.
Now consider how different that type of situation
is from what can happen when domestic policy is at issue.
Take, for instance, the 2014 farm bill, which
provides support to America's farmers.
President Obama helped shape the bill, but the details
were largely worked out by members of Congress,
particularly those in the leadership and those on the House and Senate
agricultural committees.
When the 2014 farm bill finally emerged from Congress,
it was President Obama who effectively had a yes or no decision to make.
He could sign the bill or he could veto it.
At one point when the bill was working its way through Congress,
Obama said he would veto it unless they contained more money for food stamps.
The amount was increased, but even so, to Obama's displeasure,
the final bill included $8 billion in cuts to the food stamp program.
Nevertheless, he chose to sign the bill.
Now there's a second way in which the foreign policy
presidency is more powerful than the domestic policy presidency.
It lies in the fact that presidents have more opportunities to act on their own
when it comes to foreign affairs.
For example, although the Senate must approve any treaty
that a president negotiates, presidents can make treaty-like agreements
with foreign countries without Senate approval.
These arrangements are called "executive agreements."
Based on the president's constitutional authority as chief diplomat,
they have the same force in law as treaties, with one exception.
With a stroke of a pen, a subsequent president
can amend an executive agreement.
Treaties, in theory at least, are binding on future presidents
unless the Senate agrees to the modification.
Because executive agreements are more easily negotiated than treaties
and do not risk defeat in the Senate, presidents have increasingly
preferred that option.
Since World War II, presidents have negotiated
roughly 15,000 executive agreements with other nations,
covering everything from trade arrangements
to overseas military bases.
That's more than 10 times the number of treaties
to which the United States is a party.
Many executive agreements are worked out in secret negotiations
and then announced by the president, denying Congress even the chance
to make its views known beforehand.
In no area, however, is the president's capacity for unilateral action
clearer than in the use of military force.
Since World War II, the United States has engaged in war roughly 150 times.
None, not one, was authorized by a congressional declaration of war.
In some cases, as with the Iraq War the president
asked Congress for a supporting resolution,
but even that's the exception.
More than 80% of the time, presidents have taken the United States into war
solely on their own authority.
In some instances, Congress has been caught nearly by surprise.
When President Reagan ordered the invasion of Grenada in 1983,
he waited until after the invasion had been
launched to tell congressional leaders.
Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill was among the leaders told by Reagan
that combat was imminent.
Said O'Neill, "We weren't asked for advice we
were informed what was taking place."
Other members of Congress learned of the invasion through the media.
They awoke to news that US Marines had landed in Grenada
and were engaged in heavy fighting.
Now presidents' ability to start a conflict
does not mean that Congress has no influence over war.
In the closing days of the Vietnam War, for example, Congress
barred the use of funds for any military action that
would serve to intensify the conflict.
Nevertheless, Congress has no truly good way to stop a president from starting
hostilities, and once they begin cannot easily withhold funding.
To do so could put the troops in the field at risk.
As well, members of Congress from the president's party
usually shy from attacking the president for fear it will hurt the party.
So rather than Congress, public opinion has
proven to be the chief restraint on presidential wars.
When the public gets fed up with a war, presidents cannot easily persist.
More than anything else, it was the loss of public support
that led to American withdrawals from Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Public opinion can also limit presidents' options.
In the decade or so after Vietnam, it was clear
that Americans would not support another large war in which the nation's
security was not directly threatened.
The public's disillusionment with the Afghan and Iraq wars
is a similar constraint at the moment.
While Americans are willing to accept the use of air power
in the Middle East, they are leery of backing another major US ground
war in the region.
On the other hand, presidents have some capacity
to convince the public of the need for war.
A case in point is President George W. Bush's efforts more than a decade ago
to gain support, in Congress as well as with the public,
for the invasion of Iraq.
The first public indication that Iraq was being targeted
came in Bush's 2002 State of the Union address,
when he lumped Iraq with Iran and North Korea
in what he called the "axis of evil."
Five months later, speaking at West Point,
Bush announced a new doctrine-- the Preemptive War Doctrine.
Bush declared, "If we wait for threats to fully materialize,
we will have waited too long-- Our security will
require all Americans to be ready for preemptive action."
Now in that speech Bush didn't identify Iraq
as the target of a preemptive strike, but two months later he did so.
He asked Congress to authorize an attack on Iraq
if it refused to turn over its weapons of mass destruction.
To justify an American attack on Iraq Bush
claimed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction
and was preparing to use them.
Citing intelligence reports, Bush said, "The evidence
indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.
Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities
at sites that have been part of this nuclear program in the past."
Bush's claim that Iraq had such weapons and was
prepared to use them carried the day in Congress.
His House and Senate opponents lacked evidence
that could have refuted the claim.
The House vote was 297 to 133 in Bush's favor,
while the Senate vote was 77 to 23.
Now throughout the months that Bush was building up to an invasion of Iraq,
news outlets were hanging on every word coming out of the White House,
allowing it to control the message.
A study of the pre-invasion news coverage
found the Bush administration sources were quoted roughly 10 times as often
as the war's congressional critics.
Gradually, public opinion fell into line with the president's message.
When Bush first indicated the possibility of an invasion,
opinion polls indicated that less than half the public
thought it was a good idea.
But by the time of the invasion, in March of 2003,
public opinion had swung in Bush's favor.
72% in the Gallup poll expressed approval of the invasion,
with four out of every five of them saying they strongly approved of it.
As it turned out, the Bush administration's claim
that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction was faulty.
Although US weapons inspectors searched high and low in Iraq, for such weapons,
they found none of consequence.
Critics accused the administration of fabricating the case for war.
Supporters of the administration said it been misled by bad intelligence.
But one thing is clear, Iraq was a presidential war,
conceived and carried out by the President of the United States.
Now let's step back from that case to think
about the historical changes that have shifted control over war
to the president.
As I indicated earlier, the writers of the Constitution
wanted Congress to control the decision to go to war.
So why the miscalculation?
Why did the framers get it wrong?
Which of these do you think is the most important reason?
Congress's reluctance to exercises constitutional authority over war?
Presidents' refusal to obey Supreme Court decisions
aimed at limiting their war power?
Or changes in the world that have tipped the balance in war decisions
away from Congress and toward the president?
It's the last one.
The security demands of the modern world favor presidential action
over congressional action.
During the nation's first century and a half,
transportation and communication were slow.
As a result, it took time for threats to the nation's security to develop.
And it took time for the nation to gear up for a military response.
That gave Congress, a slow-acting institution,
a major voice in war decisions.
But we live today in a world where threats can materialize overnight,
from almost anywhere on the globe, and where
the United States has the military power to respond quickly
to protect its interests.
These developments have shifted power to the president
because the president can act swiftly and decisively.
One can debate whether presidents have sometimes been too quick to act,
but their capacity for swift action is beyond debate.
That point was reluctantly conceded by Senator William Fulbright,
a leading congressional critic of the Vietnam War.
Said Fulbright, "It has been circumstance which is given
the executive its great predominance.
An entire era of crisis in which are urgent decisions
have been required again and again, decisions
of a kind that Congress is ill-equipped to make.
The president has the means at his disposal for prompt action:
the Congress does not."
OK, let's wrap up what's been covered in this session.
We pointed out that presidents' authority
in the realm of foreign affairs rests on constitutional clauses that
establish the president as the nation's chief diplomat
and as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
We then noted that though presidents can have difficulty getting foreign policy
initiatives through Congress, they have substantial control
over the content of such initiatives because of their greater access
to the relevant policy information.
We also noted presidents' leadership advantage in foreign affairs, the fact
that presidents, because they have sole executive authority,
are positioned to take the lead in dealings with foreign governments.
Finally, we pointed out that presidents have more opportunities
to act on their own authority in the realm of foreign affairs
than in the area of domestic policy.
In making this point, we cited as examples
the power to initiate war and the power to negotiate executive agreements.