The President as International Leader

Abstract

Before taking office in 1913, Woodrow Wilson remarked to a friend: It would be the irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly with foreign affairs.1 Today, a President comes to office assured that he will spend most of his time and make his most difficult decisions in the field of global politics. Wilson's hopes were shattered by the First World War; Roosevelt's similar hopes by the Second; and within the last ten years, international leadership-a function that was thought to be temporary-has become a firm institutional addition to the American Presidency. Any President taking office today knows that one of his major responsibilities will be to attempt to exert leadership abroad, if not actually to'lead. The emergence of this presidential function in recent years has added to the already distended powers of the chief executive, has changed in important respects the nature of the office, and has complicated the already complex problems of the Presidency. That this is true is demonstrated by the fact that the major constitutional struggles since the Second World War-the Bricker amendment, the Steel seizure, the Great Debate over presidential dispatch of troops to Europe, the McCarthy episode, and the intervention in the Korean War-were provoked by presidential responses to the demands of the new role. The purpose here is to identify the conditions under which the President can most successfully function as an international leader, to sketch briefly the historical development, to analyze the constitutional and institutional setting of his leadership, and to discuss some of the effects his new responsibility has on his traditional functions as a domestic leader. The phrases used to describe the President's new role are various and frequently misleading. Some speak of the President as world leader, or as exercising world leadership. The existence of the Soviet Union, of course, precludes the use of this term, if taken literally. Others depict him as leader of a of free or of a coalition of the free,2 a title which is closer to the truth but overlooks the conflicting pressures of leadership, the persuasion of neutrals, and the fact that the President tries to lead those, like Tito and Franco, who are not, ideologically speaking, free. The only term reasonably free from ambiguity is international leader, and even this phrase requires severe qualification, for the President's offer of leadership is often rejected. But still, the phrase implies at least an attempt by the President to work in concert with other nations in order to defend the national