In my follow-up post about Trump’s undoing of Biden’s Ukraine policy, I pointed out that we ought not to be surprised about Reaganites’ inability to prevent that shift, given that foreign policy making is essentially insulated from anything resembling democratic oversight or control. My argument on that issue was quite abstract, and because of the great importance of the topic, I want to return to it in greater detail.
There are at least two ways in which foreign policy making is not democratic. One, which I limned already, has to do with the way in which potentially countervailing actors are prevented from doing almost anything about foreign policy because of their lack of knowledge about what the executive is actually doing. I’ll return to this point in a moment, but there is an additional feature of foreign policy making in democracy which, paradoxically, is also antithetical to democratic principles and practices: the securitization of dissent.
What does it mean for policy making to be democratic? At the simplest level, it means that a) authoritative actions are known to the general public, b) debated against alternatives by elected representatives of the public, and c) approved by those representative, whether in advance or after the fact; if d) that approval is not forthcoming, the policy is either rescinded or not chosen. Note the first condition, that actions be known to the general public. If, for example, elected officials are briefed behind closed doors but are sworn to secrecy, or if, as happens occasionally, floor debates take place with closed galleries and only partial subsequent transcripts, we can therefore say that this is compatible with republican oversight, but is clearly nondemocratic.
It would be wrong to imagine that only policy making about secret matters (military actions, intelligence activities) is undemocratic. Monetary policy fails to satisfy conditions c) and d), although if Congress, or its counterparts in other countries, wished to change statutes relating to central banking, it could in principle do so. The same goes for most other policy domains, regardless of whether the executive branch agencies in question are Cabinet departments or “independent”: legislation following on either regular oversight or scandal-driven hearings is the means by which in most domains, policy making is at least potentially democratic. However, what matters is whether condition a) is satisfied, i.e., whether the general public really has knowledge about a possible or actual authoritative action. And here we return to the first factor that militates against foreign policy making being democratic.
In domestic policy, the immediate effects of this or that decision, or even potential decision, are subject to what we can call the “squeaky wheel” effect. Those who benefit from the policy will applaud loudly (often with campaign contributions); those who lose will scream even more loudly (again, with money to amplify their voices); and elected representatives will duly swing into action. In foreign policy, on the other hand, there are relatively few squeaky wheels regarding actions carried out beyond U.S. borders. Part of the reason for this is that, as I pointed out the other day, most of the money spent is either in the form of salaries of military or civilian personnel, who neither lobby for, nor scream against, being paid; or else goes to primarily domestic military contractors, who do indeed scream and on whose behalf Congress is certainly involved. A second reason for the absence of squeaky wheels overseas is that because the consequences, including the beneficiaries and victims, of foreign policy actions pertain to noncitizens and nonresidents, who almost by definition have far more limited access to media and elected U.S. representatives, the chances of the latter groups hearing about what is going on are much more slim. (This ignoring of foreigners is one reason why, as mentioned above, military contracting is not really part of foreign policy in the way that, say, base agreements, combat training, and joint exercises are; the same can be said of U.S. importers, exporters, and other collateral damage from Trump’s tariff wars.)
Beyond these two points, there is a third reason for the absence of squeaky wheels, namely that most foreign policy actions are not even announced. In domestic policy, actions both potential and implemented are publicized in the Federal Register; in foreign policy, this is true of only a relative handful of actions in a small number of agencies. Diplomatic actions, notoriously, do not fall into that category, and only a tiny fraction of such actions are the subject of press briefings or news releases. Meetings of interstate working groups are almost never reported; communications from embassies are almost always classified as secret, remaining so for decades; and so even if we are not talking about actions considered as bearing on “national security,” foreign policy making takes place almost entirely outside of public knowledge. Finally, we can add to these points the fact that on the relatively rare occasions in which news organizations do report on foreign policy actions, they tend to adopt the state’s framing of those actions. The conclusion is thus that neither the general public, nor, on the vast majority of issues, elected representatives, have any idea what foreign policy actions are either being proposed or carried out. For this reason, foreign policy making is a no-democracy zone.
However, the problem goes beyond lack of knowledge, important as that may be. For there is a second factor which makes foreign policy non-democratic even in the rare situations in which the policy is being openly debated. That factor is what we might call the plebiscitary effect or, especially for the last century or so, the securitization of dissent. In democracies, where legislators stand for election, the tendency of the public to “rally ‘round the flag” means that dissenters are likely, at the least, to find it difficult to speak out. Thus critics of the Mexican War found their careers hampered, if not ended, and, like Lincoln, were constrained to vote to supply the army and to agree to annex Mexican territory. The same thing happened half a century later, when the broad coalition (including Andrew Carnegie, Samuel Gompers, and Mark Twain) opposing annexation of the Philippines lost several key members, notably William Jennings Bryan, for electoral reasons, thereby enabling the Treaty of Paris to be ratified. However, the screws turned much further during World War I, with antiwar activists being thrown into jail (Eugene Debs) or deported (Emma Goldman). Further crackdowns, as well as bureaucratic purges, took place on foreign policy dissenters from the 1940s to the 1970s; during the Iraq War, fear of being seen as soft on terrorism or not supporting the troops hobbled elected critics of the war; and most recently, opponents of U.S. support for Israel’s Gaza War have routinely been castigated as pro-Hamas and antisemitic.
Of course, state officials are never happy to have their actions criticized. But the advent of mass democracy, combined with the talismanic invocation of “security,” makes it easy to multiply a thousand-fold the constraints on dissenters. If, at the time of Edmund Burke, opposition to a war might mean that one was on the outs politically, over time, the potential consequences became graver: one’s political career could be ended; one could be forced into exile or lose one’s freedom; and, as opponents of Trump’s policies have now found, there is even a slight, but real, risk to personal safety, including family members. Understandably, in the face of these consequences, foreign policy critics will water down their views, at least as expressed in certain fora. We can put it this way: as democracy has grown, that growth has led, in a very real way, to the shrinking of the space for democratic debate over foreign policy.
It might be thought that both of these factors are too broad to explain the acquiescence of Reaganites such as Lindsey Graham on Trump’s Ukraine policy. After all, Trump’s policy is indeed covered in the press, and Graham cannot really be considered as someone soft on security issues. But in fact, both factors apply: what Trump will do on Ukraine in a month and a half is still unknown, so there can as yet be no debate on it; and Graham has already backed off of some of his pet escalation ideas. If I am correct, we should expect that if, as I assume will be the case, no ceasefire is reached by Trump’s deadline, there will be much blood-curdling rhetoric from Graham – and little action.
To return to the issue of the lack of fit between foreign policy making and democracy, one final comment. Up until now, we have been accustomed, so to speak, to a simulacrum of democracy in discussing foreign policy: commentators focus on the bitterness, or the persistence, of foreign policy debates, ignoring the narrowness of those debates and their relative paucity. In this one respect, what Trump is getting away with is simply the latest in a long line of largely unexamined and uncontested foreign policy actions by past U.S. presidents (and, I might add, British prime ministers and French presidents). However, if we look at the substance of what Trump is doing, and the issue domains in which he is doing it, he is not, unlike his predecessors, acting undemocratically in a democratic context. Rather, he is energetically and systematically undoing that very context, whether by intimidating his critics at home or defending authoritarians abroad. Those in Europe who are tempted to sup with him should have a very long spoon.