06 September 2007

Campaign Statements on Foreign Policy Should Be Taken Seriously

Professor says comments show first-year positions with flexibility to follow

 

Democratic Senator Barack Obama defends controversial foreign policy statements he's made. (© AP Images)

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

This article is one of two addressing the link between campaign rhetoric and presidential policy.  See also “Campaign Rhetoric Can Fail to Translate into Official Policy.”

Washington -- Early in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, foreign policy already is an important topic of discussion as candidates set out their presidential agendas and outline ideas for improving the country’s global image while maintaining its leadership position and national security. 

The fact that presidential contenders regularly discuss the war in Iraq, efforts against international terrorism and other foreign policy topics reflects the importance the average American voter attaches to those issues.  (See related article.)

For example, Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois made news by expressing his willingness to meet with foreign leaders normally shunned by U.S. politicians and to attack al-Qaida targets in Pakistan.  Senator Hillary Clinton of New York openly criticized Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government. 

On the Republican side, former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney called for creation of a “Special Partnership Force” to combat terrorism outside the United States, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani opposed the creation of a Palestinian state under current conditions.

Election observers should take foreign policy campaign statements seriously because elected officials “usually act pretty much on their campaign positions at least during the first phases of their incumbency,” according to professor Miroslav Nincic, a political scientist at the University of California Davis.

In an interview with USINFO, Nincic said statements made on the campaign trail often fit the preferences of candidates’ core constituencies and provide “a reasonable predictor of what they’re going to do.”

But, after their first year in office, presidents can leave their foreign policy campaign pledges and promises behind if they determine those pledges do not respond to “the current domestic preference, the preference within the pool of their own advisers and evolving international reality.”

 

Republican former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney calls attention to combatting terrorism outside the U.S. (© AP Images)

FOREIGN POLICY AND ELECTION CYCLES

According to Nincic’s model of how the U.S. electoral cycle affects presidential foreign policy decision making, the third and fourth years of a term “very rarely” reflect the positions stated on the campaign trail.  This includes presidents not facing re-election who often are more concerned with their place in history than their campaign pledges.

For example, he said both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan wanted to be remembered as presidents “who made a very big difference for peace, and that allowed them to exhibit a lot of flexibility in the latter part of their presidencies.”

Nixon and Reagan, both perceived as tough against communism, surprised many observers in the latter years of their presidencies.  Nixon’s 1972 opening to communist China and his pursuit of the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks with the Soviet Union can be compared with Reagan’s summit conferences with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev and his signing of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987.

However, Nincic said he believes the current President Bush, whose 2004 campaign primarily focused on foreign policy issues such as terrorism and Iraq, wants instead to be remembered by historians “for commitment and resoluteness,” and said observers should expect “somewhat less backtracking” from previous foreign policies than his predecessors exhibited.

“I think it’s largely this notion that history has got to remember [Bush] as somebody resolute and determined and unflinching [and] that limits the ability of this administration to respond to the usual electoral-cycle dynamic,” Nincic said.

Observers of U.S. elections also should pay close attention to the foreign policy statements made in congressional campaigns, Nincic said.  Like the current presidential candidates, members of the House of Representatives and the Senate also are elected on foreign policy platforms “much more so than 20 years ago.”

With Iraq and the fight against terrorism occupying a prominent place in the media and the minds of ordinary Americans, “it is not irrelevant to voters where their representative stands on foreign policy issues.”

He said the U.S. Congress also is “increasingly assertive in foreign policy.”

“Much as you had this revival of congressional assertiveness in the wake of the Vietnam War, you have a revival of congressional assertiveness in the wake of the Iraq war,” he said, adding that voters and foreign observers alike would do well to be attentive to campaign statements, given “the likelihood that both the House and the Senate will want to have their voice heard in the foreign policy debate.”