I was at the American Political Science Association panel on foreign policy bipartisanship that Chris Preble organized last weekend (see his descriptions here and here). And I was struck by the consensus on the panel: essentially everyone agreed that the Republicans and the Democrats pretty much agree about foreign policy strategy (they disagree about tactics — more on that in a second). But I thought that Peter Feaver had the most interesting comment. Not the one that Steve Clemons, who was on the panel, blogged about (in which Feaver responded to my question by challenging the world to find instances in which the Bush administration had ever questioned its critics’ patriotism). Peter’s most interesting point was one that I think most people in the room agreed about, rather than the one that shocked the audience.

Peter suggested that even as Democrats and Republicans have come closer together in their substantive beliefs about foreign policy, the level of vitriol has risen substantially. Actually, most people intuitively sense this, although perhaps they just don’t remember the level of partisan hostility over such issues as the Vietnam War, the deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, and aid to the Nicaraguan contras. But Feaver had a very interesting way of making the point, in his naturally pro-Bush administration talk (after all, he works in the administration). Feaver quoted the very sharp Democratic response to a series of Bush administration strategy documents on Iraq, and then he described the policy that Democrats offered in place of Bush’s strategy. And, of course, the Democratic “alternative” was almost exactly the same as the Bush policy.

Democrats excoriate Bush for doing the wrong thing, then they say something like “we should train the Iraqi police” or “we should clear and hold certain key cities in Iraq.” While the Bush administration may not have initially emphasized those activities, that’s certainly exactly what the Bush administration is up to now. A real debate over Iraq policy would be broader — questioning the administration’s goals in Iraq, whether training police or holding cities are policies likely to achieve those goals, etc. We actually have almost no debate at all. All smoke, no fire.

I was intrigued by Feaver’s clear formulation. And when the University of Texas hosted Ohio State’s football team this weekend (for a very traumatic Saturday night game), the LBJ School of Public Affairs, where I teach, also had the opportunity to host retired Senator John Glenn. Senator Glenn has been a prominent Democrat for a long time, and he’s a smart guy, so I asked him about Feaver’s comments. I got an interesting response, too.

Senator Glenn had talked in his opening remarks about rising partisanship and how it turned him off of politics (along with the need to focus on campaign fund-raising all the time). He told stories about when he entered the Senate thirty years ago, the leaders of each of the parties — people like Republican Senator Javitz and Democratic Senator Mansfield — interacted civilly even on subjects about which they strongly disagreed. In his view of those “halcyon” days (of post-Watergate partisanship and Vietnam-era vitriol!), the partisan differences were over substance not style, which struck me as the exact opposite of the way that Peter Feaver described the current situation.

So I asked Sen. Glenn what had caused the change.

And Senator Glenn couldn’t get past the premise of the question. He gave a very engaging answer, made a good faith effort to address the question, and realized that he had totally missed it. His answer focused on “Republicans believe in a new pre-emptive strategy; Democrats don’t.” He talked about cooked intelligence in the lead-up to the Iraq War (whether or not intelligence was “cooked” is a separate issue; the important thing here is that Glenn used the word “cooked”). And then Glenn asked me to follow up — the only follow-up question during the event — because he realized that he hadn’t answered “what has changed since the 1970s.”

The problem was that Glenn couldn’t accept that Republicans and Democrats were very much alike on foreign policy. (BTW, I think they are very different in some very important ways on domestic policy, but this is a foreign policy blog.) So in my follow-up, I tried to make it more clear that the mainstream of the Democratic party is on the same page as the Republicans. I asked why so few Democrats were willing to stand up with Rep. Murtha and raise questions about withdrawal from Iraq.

And that was my mistake. I made the question about Iraq. Senator Glenn simply said that most Democrats didn’t agree with Rep. Murtha, that everyone knows we need to stay in Iraq. Incidentally, he could have made an alternative point: more and more Democrats are now calling for an explicit withdrawal timetable, which is tactically different from Bush’s “we will stand down as they stand up” line but doesn’t engage on the issues of America’s goals in Iraq or on the substance of the best way to achieve those goals. But neither of those points addressed the core issue of my question. I accidentally let Senator Glenn off the hook.

In one sense, I learned something from Senator Glenn’s response. Two things, actually. First, that it is hard for people in the political environment to see when their positions are very similar, because they are caught up in the back-and-forth of debate. Perhaps an obvious point. Second, I was reminded that a broad range of debate doesn’t always make sense. Some issues are so obvious that they should not be the source of much debate. On September 11, it’s easy to point to one of those issues: everyone agreed that we had to get rid of the Taliban government in Afghanistan five years ago. There was no reason not to have bipartisan consensus very quickly on that point.

But Iraq is not like Afghanistan in that sense: what the United States stands to gain from stabilizing Iraq is not clear (although what Iraq stands to gain certainly is), and the best way to stabilize Iraq is also not clear (whether to flood the place with American troops or to lower the American profile, for example). Is counter-insurgency in Iraq like it was in Vietnam or not? (for a good debate on that question, see recent issues of Foreign Affairs; for an interesting argument about means and ends from where we are now in Iraq, see this long Washington Post piece by Dan Byman and Ken Pollack.) That is, we should have much more debate about Iraq than we do. We have debate among intellectuals but not among politicians.

The other point that I should have made in my follow-up question was that the issue of bipartisan foreign policy consensus is not just about Iraq. Senator Glenn talked about the doctrine of pre-emption as something that divides Republicans and Democrats. But that’s not true. Since September 11, leaders in both parties have talked about the need to act first in foreign affairs to prevent WMD terrorism. And even before September 11, many Republicans (though not so much President Bush) talked about aggressive American foreign military policy to keep down “peer competitors” like China. On the other side of the aisle, Democrats talked about intervening in “failed states” and overcoming old-fashioned ideas like sovereignty — that is, pre-emptively intervening in areas that they thought were so bad that they might someday evolve into a threat to the United States. The continuation of that consensus has been seen on this blog, too, as left-leaning bloggers have talked about a “responsibility to protect” that justifies intervention in nasty places all around the world (for example, here). Democrats are pre-empters, too.

But I didn’t make that point at the time, and “gotcha” questions don’t usaully get responses that are all that useful anyway. The point is that the Glenn speech gave me a chance to think about these issues again. I still believe that the parties agree about foreign policy far more than they have at other times in our nation’s history — and far more than they should at this point in time. But we still need to explain why the non-debates today are so nasty.

And Senator Glenn did, perhaps, suggest one answer, as I thought about it. In the old days, a lot of a candidate’s campaign funds came from official party coffers. The party did fund-raising, and individual members just ran for their local constituents’ support. Today, candidates raise a lot of their own funds, and to do that, they need to be making strong statements to attract attention. Maybe this is a case where decentralization promotes nastiness. Of course, that doesn’t explain why voters don’t find statesmanship attractive — why wouldn’t they give campaign support to civilly stated policy alternatives that were really substantively different from the other party’s views? So at best, this theory is a description rather than an explanation. But at least it is food for thought. Perhaps partisan vitriol on foreign policy stems from the relative financial weakness of parties.

So what is the real role for parties in American foreign policy, anyway? Would strong parties provide cover for a substantive foreign policy debate? I made that case in an earlier blog, about parties’ ability to resist local interest group pressures for protectionist trade policy. Maybe I’m coming around to a view on this question. I’m just not quite there yet.

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4. Afghanistan Debate Tonight
5. Bipartisan breakthrough on climate change