Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from an essay written by Associate Professor of Government Peter L. Trubowitz and Charles A. Kupchan from Georgetown University.
The greatest challenge facing the next president will be bringing the nation’s foreign policy back into balance with its political will. For most of the last 50 years, bipartisanship at home steadied U.S. statecraft abroad. But today, Congress is bitterly divided over the Iraq war, as is the public. Even after Gen. David H. Petraeus testified to Congress that the “surge” was working, a Rasmussen poll revealed that 82% of Democrats want the forces home within a year, while 71% of Republicans believe that the troops should remain in Iraq until the mission is complete. Arguably, U.S. foreign policy has not been so beleaguered by partisanship since the early 20th century, when the nation lurched incoherently from the brash realism of Teddy Roosevelt to the expansive idealism of Woodrow Wilson, before settling with the false security of isolationism in the 1930s.
Los Angeles Times
Making Peace with Americans: For the U.S., the Next Great Foreign Policy Challenge is Building Consensus at Home
(Oct. 21)
