Senate Foreign Relations Research Articles

Opposing the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in the U.S. Congress: Ideological analysis of Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee Hearings

The United States Senate voted to ratify the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia in 2010 by 74-26, all 26 voting against being Republicans. The change in the voting outcome compared to the 95-0 result in the 2003 SORT vote was dramatic. Using inductive frame analysis, this article analyzes committee hearings in the Senate Foreign Relations and the Armed Services committees in order to identify competing narratives defining individual senators’ positions on the ratification of the New START. Building on conceptual framework introduced by Walter Russel Mead (2002), it distinguishes four schools of thought: Jacksonian, Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, and Wilsonian. The argumentation used in the hearings is deconstructed in order to understand the increase in opposition to the traditionally bipartisan nuclear arms control regime. The results reveal a factionalism in the Republican Party. The argumentationin opposition to ratification traces back to the Jacksonian school, whereas argumentation supporting the ratification traces back to Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian and Wilsonian traditions. According to opposition, the Obama administration was pursuing its idealistic goal of a world-without-nuclear-weapons and its misguided Russia reset policy by any means necessary – most importantly by compromising with Russia on U.S. European-based missile defense.

Constitutionalism Abroad and At Home: The United States Senate and the Alliance for Progress, 1961–1967

assistant secretary of state for interAmerican affairs in John F. Kennedy's administration, Edwin Martin, testified on 3 October 1963 before a closed session of the senate's Foreign Relations Committee to defend the administration's handling of a military coup in the Dominican Republic. While the administration privately conceded the coup to be a grave setback, committee Republicans generally supported the restrained welcome given to the military regime which had replaced Juan Bosch's democratically elected government, whereas most committee Democrats were sharply critical. Wayne Morse (D-Oregon) attributed the disagreement to Kennedy's failure elsewhere in the Americas to promote 'constitutionalism' with enough vigour.1 Morse's testiness was more remarkable given that, three years earlier, both the executive and legislative branches had thought generous economic aid combined with rhetorical support for democracy the best way to wage the cold war in Latin America. But they soon parted company. Support for the Alliance for Progress waned not only because the administration rarely achieved its stated goals in Latin America; it also fell victim to ideological differences between the president and various senate factions which coloured other disputes over how much freedom of action the executive branch should be allowed in its conduct of foreign affairs. In this sense, the fate of the Alliance illustrates not only the difficulty of promoting democracy during the cold war, but also how differently the executive and legislative branches approach foreign affairs. Latin America provides some of the earliest evidence of the emergence of an empowered congressional perspective on US foreign policy, fuelled by the reaction against executive power caused by the war in Vietnam.

Canada and the Pan American Union: Twenty Years On

Two decades ago Eugene Miller decided to explore Canadian attitudes toward the fifty-eight-year-old Pan American Union, In April 1947 United States Senator Arthur Vandenberg, in his capacity as chairman of the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee, had repeated the invitation to Canada to join the Pan American Union (pau) . There had been a slight flurry of interest among Canadian politicians and diplomats. But what Miller believed to be a reaction to dose war ties with the United States and a strong Canadian commitment to the United Nations, as well as widespread public ignorance of the pau a 1947 poll by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion had shown that 70 per cent of those polled had little or no knowledge of it led to little being done.1 Canada is still not a member of the Pan American Union, or, as it became in 1948, the Organization of American States (oas).2 But there has been more than a flurry of interest in Latin America and the oas in the