Senate Foreign Relations Committee Research Articles

AGING AND FOREIGN POLICY: EXPERIENCING THE GLOBAL TRACK OF THE HEALTH AND AGING POLICY FELLOWSHIP

Abstract The Health and Aging Policy Fellowship includes a Global Track that provides fellows with the opportunity to shape global policy or U.S. foreign policy for an aging society. The author, a global health expert and 2022-2023 fellow, sought a fellowship placement with a member of Congress with jurisdiction over U.S. global health policy. Although global health is a significant foreign policy priority for the U.S. government, U.S. global health programs do not include dedicated funding for activities designed to benefit older adults or help development partners adapt to population aging. The result is that US-funded programs on issues from infectious disease to health systems strengthening to disaster relief lack a focus on older adults, despite their many links to this growing population. To help address this policy gap, the author secured a fellowship placement with Senator Benjamin Cardin (D-MD), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC) and Chair of the SFRC Subcommittee overseeing the State Department, US Agency for International Development, and bilateral development assistance. With his track record of legislation and oversight on issues such as Medicare, health disparities, medical research, oral health, health systems strengthening, and retirement security, Senator Cardin is well positioned to help integrate the needs of older adults into U.S. development assistance. The author used his fellowship year to help advance the global health-related legislative priorities of Senator Cardin and his Health Team, bringing his expertise and perspective on aging to the policy table while gaining invaluable skills in the policy process.

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

The US Congress and the Issue of Beginning the Iraq War: the Kurdish Factor in 2002-2003

The political discussions in the US Congress on the start of the war in Iraq and the fate of the Kurdish minority in this country are being explored. The arguments of supporters and opponents of the war in Iraq are analyzed through the prism of the Kurdish factor based on the transcripts of the US Congress, as well as materials from hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It emphasizes the insignificance of the Kurdish issue in the initial period of discussion (the discussion on giving the US President the right to start military operations in Iraq), and the growing interest of legislators in the fate of the Kurdish population in January-March 2003. It is concluded that for the supporters of the invasion the Kurdish factor became the main one and the stake was placed on the need to overthrow Saddam Hussein because of his cruel attitude towards his own people, and in the camp of the opponents of the war the stake is placed on the thesis that the fate of the Kurds was known in 1980s but no one then decided to provide them with military support. The problem of double standards in American foreign policy towards both the Kurds, US allies in the region, and Saddam Hussein was first identified by the US Congress in 2003.

Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy: What to Expect from the New United States President

Joseph Biden came to the oval office with his wealth of experience in government affairs, including as the chair in the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to his campaign promises, the upcoming Biden administration’s foreign policy is aimed at improving the US’ international credibility based on liberal values. This article will further examine his political aspirations, based on the speech, campaign promises, and official statements. The argument is that although the US would be likely to embrace liberal values under his administration, international constraints may limit his ability in foreign policy agenda-setting. In managing its relations with China, for example, the US would be more likely to be driven by its interest rather than its values, particularly by continuing the anti-China coalition with its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Joe Biden’s Foreign Policy: What to Expect from the New United States President

Joseph Biden came to the oval office with his wealth of experience in government affairs, including as the chair in the United States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. According to his campaign promises, the upcoming Biden administration’s foreign policy is aimed at improving the US’ international credibility based on liberal values. This article will further examine his political aspirations, based on the speech, campaign promises, and official statements. The argument is that although the US would be likely to embrace liberal values under his administration, international constraints may limit his ability in foreign policy agenda-setting. In managing its relations with China, for example, the US would be more likely to be driven by its interest rather than its values, particularly by continuing the anti-China coalition with its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

Senator Byrd Shepherds a Bill

Senator Byrd Shepherds a Bill Katherine A. Scott In 1974 the fifty-six-year-old senior senator from West Virginia prepared to shepherd through the Senate a bill to overhaul the congressional budget process—a project that would have long-term consequences, both for the nation and for his political future. It was a massive undertaking, and one that would require careful attention to detail and much patience. It was a challenge—that is to say, it was custom-made for Senator Robert C. Byrd. Through the late winter and early spring of 1974, as the battle among the three branches of government reached a climax in the Watergate scandal, Byrd quietly tended to the less dramatic but equally consequential work of reforming the federal budget process. He devoted months of time and energy to crafting a bipartisan solution to a problem that had plagued the legislative branch for six decades—the federal budget. Throughout the twentieth century, Congress had struggled to develop a mechanism to fund—effectively and efficiently—the exponential growth of the federal government. "I would venture to say there is no more complex, no more important legislation before this session of the Congress than [this] subject matter," Byrd remarked at a Senate hearing on January 15, 1974.1 Byrd's bill, the Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974, signed into law by President Richard Nixon on July 12, 1974, would help Congress to regain its position as a coequal branch of government. When Byrd embarked on this journey in late 1973, he may not have been confident that his efforts would succeed. The Senate had lost two recent battles with the executive branch over national budgets and federal spending. The first confrontation with the president came with Congress's growing opposition to America's continued involvement in the war in Vietnam. Then, as senators reluctantly acquiesced to the administration's request to raise the debt ceiling—the third such request in a calendar year—they also battled the president over his impoundment of funds. By 1974 Senator Byrd and a growing number of his colleagues had become increasingly alarmed by [End Page 37] Congress's inability to shape and implement policy through its constitutional power of the purse. Ending the War in Vietnam The first battle in this war of the budget erupted shortly after Richard Nixon became president. Though Nixon had campaigned on a pledge to end the war in Vietnam, it wasn't long before senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee received disturbing news. A classified Senate investigation found that while the administration was drawing down troops in Vietnam, it was expanding the war into neighboring countries—without consulting members of Congress. These developments forced some senators to take a fateful step to confront the administration. On September 16, 1969, Senator John Sherman Cooper, a moderate Kentucky Republican, offered an amendment to a military procurement authorization bill to restrict military funding the following year. "I want it clearly understood," Cooper explained when introducing his proposal, that my purpose "is to prohibit . . . the use of any funds appropriated by the Congress . . . to the Armed Forces . . . for sending our [military] into war, armed conflict, combat . . . in Laos and Thailand."2 Cooper aimed to prohibit the war's expansion by halting the flow of congressionally approved funds. He hoped his plan would force the administration to withdraw troops from the region.3 The Senate unanimously approved Cooper's amendment, 86–0, on September 17, 1969, but in conference House negotiators stripped that language from the bill. Undeterred, Cooper tried to amend another defense authorization bill a few weeks later. Joined by colleague Frank Church, a liberal Democrat from Idaho, the Cooper-Church amendment sought to limit the use of congressionally approved funds to "finance the introduction of American ground troops into Laos or Thailand."4 This amendment became law on December 29, 1969. Four months later, President Nixon announced that he had sent US ground troops into neighboring Cambodia without advising Congress. Frustrated and irate, senators denounced the action. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, William Fulbright, a Democrat from Arkansas, was characteristically blunt: "The Executive is conducting a constitutionally unauthorized Presidential war...

A Giant from Georgia: The Life of U.S. Senator Walter F. George, 1878–1957 by Jamie H. Cockfield

Reviewed by: A Giant from Georgia: The Life of U.S. Senator Walter F. George, 1878–1957 by Jamie H. Cockfield Justin P. Coffey A Giant from Georgia: The Life of U.S. Senator Walter F. George, 1878–1957. By Jamie H. Cockfield. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 521. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-676-8.) When Walter F. George died in 1957, over thirty of his former U.S. Senate colleagues attended his funeral in Vienna, Georgia. The turnout was a testimony to the respect his fellow senators had for George, who served Georgia in the Senate for thirty-four years. Although George is little remembered today, Jamie H. Cockfield offers an insightful portrait of a public servant and, Cockfield argues, a true statesman. Born in 1878 to tenant farmers, George developed a love for politics at an early age. Intelligent and ambitious, George graduated from Mercer College (now Mercer University), read for the bar, earned his law degree, and practiced law. When Senator Thomas E. Watson died of a heart attack in 1922, George, a Democrat, ran successfully for the vacated seat. When George retired in 1956, he was the Senate’s senior member. Eventually rising to chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, George played a pivotal role in ensuring passage of the 1941 Lend-Lease Act. George’s championing of Lend-Lease was remarkable given the tension between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and George. A supporter of the early New Deal, George by 1935 had begun to express doubts about the direction of Roosevelt’s programs. Roosevelt’s proposal to pack the Supreme Court offended George’s cherished ideal of an independent judicial branch, and he helped lead the fight to quash the bill. Embittered at what he saw as George’s apostasy, Roosevelt targeted George in his 1938 purge of conservative Democrats, going so far as to travel to Georgia and publicly endorse his handpicked candidate in a speech that became known as the Barnesville Manifesto. Standing on the dais while Roosevelt denounced him, George waited stoically for the president to finish. When he did, George walked up to Roosevelt, handed him a written statement accepting his challenge, and left the usually unflappable Roosevelt flummoxed. The masterful handling of the situation helped George keep his seat, which he held until deciding not to run for reelection in 1956. Professor emeritus at Mercer University, Cockfield developed an interest in the university’s most famous alumnus and spent years researching George’s life. Writing a biography of George presents a challenge, because, for reasons [End Page 513] unknown, George had his personal papers burned after his death. Cockfield ably overcomes this disadvantage by consulting an exhaustive array of sources. The bibliography runs nineteen pages, and the author diligently tracked down an impressive variety of materials, including interviews with George’s law partner and other close associates. Although a specialist in Russian history, Cockfield demonstrates a command of American politics, especially the peculiarities of Georgia’s byzantine electoral system. As the title attests, Cockfield is clearly partial to his subject. He notes that there was never a whiff of scandal in George’s career, though Cockfield does hint that in his later years George had a bit of a drinking problem. The one area in his career that George failed was the racial issue. A child of the Jim Crow South, George’s views on racial equality never evolved, but Cockfield argues that George was a moderate on the race question. Unlike Tom Watson and Herman E. Talmadge, his predecessor and successor in the Senate, George was no demagogue and rarely took part in the race-baiting campaigns that were endemic among his southern colleagues. Cockfield also contends that, compared with his Georgia colleague Richard B. Russell Jr., George had almost enlightened racial views, but that does not say much in light of George’s lifelong commitment to segregation. Though Walter George might not have been a giant of the Senate, he was a significant legislator, one respected and even a bit revered by his fellow senators of both parties. In this well-written account, George gets the biography he richly deserves. Justin P...

Senate Gives Advice and Consent to Ratification of Four Bilateral Tax Treaties

In July of 2019, the U.S. Senate gave advice and consent to protocols updating tax treaties with Spain, Switzerland, Japan, and Luxembourg, after a nearly decade-long period during which no tax treaties were approved by the Senate. This drought was primarily due to the privacy concerns of a single senator, Rand Paul of Kentucky, who deployed the Senate's procedural rules to increase the difficulty of the advice and consent process. Tax treaties with Hungary, Chile, and Poland, as well as a protocol to a multilateral tax convention, remained pending in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as of mid-August of 2019.

Breaking Ranks: Robert McNamara, Adam Yarmolinsky, and the Montreal Speech*

On May 18, 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal entitled “Security in the Contemporary World.” Building on remarks that he had made in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), the title was deceptively bland and belied its significance. McNamara, heretofore loyal to Johnson, was publicly breaking ranks with official administration policy on Vietnam. In the weeks prior, back in the Pentagon, McNamara had considered and authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (JCS) proposals, which National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow had endorsed, to expand Operation...

Senate Treatment of Select International Agreements, 2013–2018

When I finished reading Julian Nyarko's “Giving the Treaty a Purpose: Comparing the Durability of Treaties and Executive Agreements,” I found my mind wandering through memories of the more than five years I spent working on Capitol Hill as Counsel for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC)—a role that often required me to figure out how best to preserve the constitutional prerogatives of Congress in the face of the various types of international agreements the executive branch produced. This essay recounts my impressions of how the Senate handled different agreements in the 2013–2018 timeframe—Article II treaties, the Paris Climate Agreement, and the Iran Nuclear Agreement. Unlike Professor Nyarko's ambitious and impressive work to categorize and statistically analyze the durability of Article II treaties and executive agreements—which I applaud and find useful—this essay is modest in purpose. I contend that how Congress handles different types of agreements is largely a product of specific political dynamics—including political ownership, policy entrepreneurism, and electoral risk—that can be unpredictable. Because of these dynamics, the differences that Nyarko reveals regarding the durability of Article II treaties and executive agreements are unlikely to produce a significant change in official practice.

Bill and Ed’s Big Adventure: Cold Warriors, William Fulbright and Right-Wing Propaganda in the US Military, 1961-62

This article analyses a notorious episode of the early 1960s when Senator J. William Fulbright, then Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, investigated the anti-communist propaganda activities of right-wing ‘ultras’ in the US military. The episode is used to investigate the phenomenon of ‘cold warriors’, those figures who associated their entire political identity with the ‘fighting’ of the Cold War. One particular figure soon stood out as epitomizing the anti-communist paranoia that so worried Fulbright: Major General Edwin Walker. The contest between Fulbright and Walker (and their supporters in Congress) was not a political side-show, since it soon involved President Kennedy and saw Defense Secretary Robert McNamara testifying before a Senate investigative committee. It also marked a contest between an orthodox anti-Soviet position and the new, uncertain but more flexible world-view to be known as Détente. The Walker case encapsulated the debate and the widening divide in US politics and society between those who saw the Cold War as a do-or-die struggle to the bitter end, and those who were willing to accept the existence of the Soviet Union for the sake of a stable Détente. By drawing on the work of Anders Stephanson, this article explores the broader political ramifications of the Fulbright-Walker contest in the context of the changing dynamics of the Cold War.

The Emergence of the Gulf States: Studies in Modern HistoryEdited by J. E. Peterson

At time of writing, in mid-July 2017, the Qatar crisis is in full swing. Senator Bob Corker, Chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, says that Saudi support for extremism dwarfs that of Qatar, French Foreign Minister Le Drian comments that the blockade should end, while, according to the UAE’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash, Al Jazeera may not have to close down after all. All in all it seems a mad spat, but the region has faced three major wars in the last 30 years, so the possibility of a fourth should not be excluded. The Emergence of the Gulf States edited by J. E. Peterson is an unusual book, for the humanities at least, because it’s the product of real teamwork. With the support of the Al Tajir Trust, Peterson has assembled ten really expert contributors supported by four experienced advisory editors. He held two conferences with them before they started writing and it shows in the impressive result. Anyone who wants to understand the Qatar crisis at a deep level, or indeed the Persian Gulf as a whole, will profit greatly from it. It will be a standard work of reference for many years to come.

Roundtable: The Trump Presidency and Southeast Asia

The accession of Donald Trump to the US presidency has triggered serious discussion within Australia's policy community over the future of Australia-US security relations and Australia's role in Southeast During his first days in office, President Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal, an integral part of his predecessor's pivot strategy towards Asia and an initiative strongly supported by the Australian government. The United States' withdrawal from the TPP has led various Australian commentators to question Washington's commitment to maintain a viable economic and strategic presence in the Asia Pacific. (1) Such uncertainty is aggravated by Canberra's growing disquiet over intensified tensions between China and the United States in the South China Sea. President Trump's posture of challenging Chinese sovereign control over its man-made islands in the South China Sea has increased Australian concerns that it could soon face the nightmare of being compelled to choose between its largest trading partner--China--and its long-term security ally--the United States--if the two Great Powers were to clash militarily in Southeast Asia's critical maritime littorals. (2) ASEAN Fragility and Australia's Concerns Shortly after Trump's election victory, former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating called for Australia to cut the tag of unmitigated support for US foreign policies and recognize that our future is basically in the region around us, in Southeast Asia. (3) Since its inception in 2011, successive Australian governments had extended unqualified backing to the Barack Obama administration's pivot strategy which was largely designed to reassure members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) that Washington was committed to playing a vigorous and sustained strategic and economic role in Southeast Asia in the face of China's rising power. (4) Trump's decision to withdraw America from the TPP undercut Australia's commitment to regional order-building by pursuing multilateral free trade arrangements and promoting an inclusive approach to shaping future rules for security conduct in Comments by Trump's nominee for US Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, during his confirmation testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee--that the new administration would reserve the prerogative to resort to military force to oppose Chinese territorial claims and would ask US regional allies to provide backup for any such military operation--exacerbated Australian uncertainties about future US policy directions. Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop reiterated that her government's position would remain consistent: the South China Sea dispute should be settled by international law. For the Australian government to respond to such hypothetical situations prematurely, Bishop noted, would not be appropriate. (5) However, Keating and other Australian critics warned that any such US action would be tantamount to initiating a Sino--American war that would disrupt Australia's vital sea lines of communication (SLOCs), devastate its economy, and render global security null and void. Australia, he insisted, should tell the Trump administration from the get-go that it would not be a part of such adventurism. (6) ASEAN's brittleness in the absence of a regionally engaged United States ranks as perhaps Australia's most fundamental concern about Southeast As ASEAN's self-appointed locomotive, Indonesia's willingness to push back against China's maritime expansion southwards--in conjunction with China's territorial claims embodied in the so-called line--is viewed by Australian policy planners as increasingly critical. While Indonesia is not formally involved in the South China Sea dispute, and its control of the geographically critical Natuna Islands has not been formally challenged by Beijing, some Chinese maps have demarcated Indonesia's 200 nautical miles exclusive economic zone (EEZ) as being partly inside the nine-dash line. …

The Most Dynamic Club: Vandenberg, Fulbright, Helms, and the Activism of the Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee

Relying on a multilevel approach to the behavior of members of Congress, this article explains why Arthur Vandenberg, J. William Fulbright, and Jesse Helms were particularly active chairs of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It draws parallels between their careers and shows that similar factors explain why they were active: (a) crucial international events convinced them to play a leading role in the foreign policy debate; (b) the US political and social environments created policy windows for their activism; and (c) they possessed the necessary skills, interests, and convictions to play such a role. Our approach also explains why the three chairs displayed different types of activism (Vandenberg relied on legislative and nonlegislative collaboration with Harry Truman, Fulbright primarily on nonlegislative opposition to Lyndon Johnson, and Helms on legislative and nonlegislative opposition to Bill Clinton). Furthermore, this article explains why Fulbright was less successful than Vandenberg and Helms in convincing Congress and the President to adopt key legislations he introduced in the Senate.

The Political Determinants of Ambassadorial Appointments

Media accounts of presidential appointments have often characterized the ambassadorial appointments process as overtaken by patronage concerns, with the most attractive posts set aside for those responsible for the president's election, few of whom have diplomatic experience. Here, using original data on all ambassadors, envoys, and other chiefs of mission appointed during the 68th through 112th Congresses, I leverage the credentialing process of the Foreign Service to conduct an empirical test of the determinants of professional versus nonprofessional appointments. I find that Foreign Service appointments are more likely when there exists significant ideological distance between the appointing president and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the difficulty of the posting is high, and when the attractiveness of the posting is low.

Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age, by Christopher McKnight Nichols

Christopher McKnight Nichols Promise and Peril: America at Dawn of Global Age Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press;, 201 I ; 464 pp., ISBN: 978-0-674-04984-0, $37.00 (cloth).Christopher McKnight Nichols opens his study of American isolationism by quoting George W. Bush's warning, in his 2006 State of Union address, that the road of isolationism and protectionism may seem broad and inviting-yet it ends in danger and decline (1). The bipartisan proclivity for employing solely as an epithet, Nichols writes, along with its binary opposition to internation- alism, misconstrues rich complexity of origins of isolationism'' (1). Nichols seeks to reinterpret and rehabilitate isolationist thinkers of period from roughly 1898 to 1940, whose ideas he frames as response to turn-of-the-century imperialism and Spanish-American War. This modern isolationism was a constellation of ideas rather than single principle or policy position (352) and compatible with widely divergent approaches to foreign relations. Nichols is intent on proving that isolationism did not entail cultural, economic, or complete political separation from rest of although such separation from world is first reaction that comes to mind. Isolationism was also rooted in conceptions of American domestic arrangements and frequently turned, in fact and in debate, on inner life of nation (352).This is nowhere near as daring and pathbreaking as it sounds. Not for decades has any serious student of American diplomacy believed that isolationism entailed construction of impermeable barriers between America and rest of world. And there is already rich literature (indeed, Nichols cites it extensively) that demonstrates how deeply rooted isolationist precepts were in conceptions of good life at home. For example, Wayne S. Cole's many works on interwar isolationists amply illustrate centrality of their Midwestern and agrarian roots to their suspicion of entanglements abroad. Yet if these elements of Nichols' larger argument are all too familiar, its parts are often greater than whole. The ana- lyses of individual figures are discerning, well judged, and show commendable grasp of varied archival materials and relevant scholarly literature, even if Nichols' prose is often sloppy and copy-editing is abysmal.Nichols gets off to shaky start by choosing as one of his exemplary figures Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge, vehement imperialist and navalist. Lodge was prominent supporter of Large Policy against which Nichols sees most of his other illustrative figures reacting, and his one isolationist trait was an absolutist conception of national sovereignty. In his case, this ruled out participation in League of Nations as an intolerable abridgement of Congress's prerogative to decide if and where American troops were deployed and led him, as chairman of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to play crucial role in preventing American ratification of Treaty of Versailles. If Lodge can be shoehorned into isolationist camp, questions arise of just who could plausibly be excluded and whether what Nichols surveys is in fact coherent tradition or world view at all.Fortunately, most of other individuals to whom Nichols devotes chapters fit isolationist mould more consistently and amount to something better resem- bling unified school of thought. Their principal shared preoccupation is with fate of individual liberty in wake of giant industrial and military organizations ushered in by new century. Nichols turns first to philosopher William James, previously apolitical but stalwart of Anti-Imperialist League after American troops were committed to occupying Philippines. Aptly enough for founder of Pragmatism, James judged America's dalliance with empire by its consequences, and feared that however elevated motives and rhetoric of empire, reality would be brutality abroad and conformity at home. …

‘Please be a lady… you are not going to be heard’: The Debate over the Ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women

Why did the United States fail to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women? This overarching question forms the basis of this paper and will be answered using an array of primary and secondary sources. This paper gleans most of its evidence from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings of 1994 and 2002, letters from both President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Congressional Research Service reports on CEDAW from 2013 and 2007, several Senators’ statements in the Congressional Record, Congressional testimony, and the text of the CEDAW treaty. This paper integrates these primary sources with secondary sources, citing legal analyses by former Attorney General Harold Hongju Koh, positions taken by lobby groups such as Amnesty International, the Heritage Foundation, and Concerned Women for America, the text, “Circle of Empowerment” by CEDAW Committee veteran Hannah-Beate Schopp-Schilling, and research on the legislative impact of CEDAW by Dutch legal analyst Rikki Holtmaat. This paper contends that CEDAW’s failure stemmed from: 1) the belief that U.S. women’s rights are already “covered,” 2) the convergence of federalism and inherent constitutional restrictions, 3) the belief that CEDAW will subvert American sovereignty, and, 4) distorted interpretations of the CEDAW Committee’s recommendations.

The Domestic Politics of US Treaty Ratification: Bilateral Treaties from 1949 to 2012

Treaties represent an important policy mechanism in US foreign policy. There are good reasons to expect that the political process underlying treaty ratification in the United States is structured by the partisan political context, the policy context including the policy agenda, and, in the case of bilateral agreements, the relationship between the treaty partners. I analyze the duration of the ratification process for all bilateral treaties transmitted by the president to the Senate from 1949 to 2012. I focus the analysis on two key stages where delay is most common: the presidential transmittal stage and the Senate Foreign Relations committee stage. Analysis indicates that presidential resources, partisan polarization, the broader policy agenda, and the value of the treaty structure presidential decisions on treaty transmittal. I find less support for these factors at the committee stage; however, the committee processes treaties with democracies more quickly than treaties with other states. The results have important implications for US foreign policy.

Amateurs or Ambassadors? The Political Determinants of Professional Diplomats

Media accounts of presidential appointments have often characterized the ambassadorial appointments process as overtaken by patronage concerns, with the most attractive posts set aside for those responsible for the president’s election, few of whom have diplomatic experience. Here, using original data on all ambassadors, envoys, and other chiefs of mission appointed during the 68th through 112th Congresses, I leverage the credentialing process of the Foreign Service to conduct an empirical test of the determinants of professional versus nonprofessional appointments. I find that Foreign Service appointments are more likely when there exists significant ideological distance between the appointing president and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, when the difficulty of the posting is high, and when the attractiveness of the posting is low.

How to Survive a Plague

A quote from the late Jesse Helms (1921–2008), Republican politician and latterly the chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “nothing positive happened to Sodom and Gomorrah and nothing positive is likely to happen to America if our people succumb to the drumbeats of support for the homosexual lifestyle”. His views were hardly representative of mainstream American opinion in the 1980s, but nor could they be readily dismissed as a screed from a furious extremist. This was a man who played a pivotal role in Ronald Reagan's advancement, and who the people of North Carolina elected to the Senate five times.