The topic of this episode is, “How is Congress involved in foreign policy?”

My guest is Jordan Tama, a Provost Associate Professor at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author or editor of five books on foreign policy. They are:

· Polarization and US Foreign Policy: When Politics Crosses the Water’s Edge, co-edited with Gordon M. Friedrichs (Palgrave Macmillan, Forthcoming)

· Bipartisanship and US Foreign Policy: Cooperation in a Polarized Age (Oxford University Press, 2024);

· Rivals for Power: Presidential-Congressional Relations, sixth edition, co-edited with James A. Thurber (Rowman and Littlefield, 2018);

· Terrorism and National Security Reform: How Commissions Can Drive Change During Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and

· A Creative Tension: The Foreign Policy Roles of the President and Congress, co-authored with Lee H. Hamilton (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002).

Jordan also has written many papers on foreign policy, so it seems to me he is a great person to have on the podcast to help us understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy.

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.

Welcome to the podcast.

Jordan Tama:

Thanks so much for having me on, Kevin.

Kevin Kosar:

Some months ago, our listeners heard me chat with Alissa Ardito about the formal powers of Congress in foreign affairs. We talked about things like how the Senate has the authority to approve treaties and to consider nominees to fill high positions in the State Department, the military, and other agencies that are involved in foreign affairs. We also talked about the fact that Congress has the power to declare war and the discretion to fund and create agencies that deal with matters overseas, like the United States Agency for International Development. And we also pondered in a philosophical manner about how we're supposed to have a representative democracy influencing foreign affairs.

But I wanted to bring you in because you're so well prepared, well-studied, and scholarly on the matter of where the rubber hits the road and how the wheels actually turn. So let me start by asking, where should the bewildered citizen first look when trying to understand how Congress is involved in foreign policy?

Jordan Tama:

Congress is involved in foreign policy in a lot of ways, more than most Americans realize. This includes both Congress exercising its formal powers and Congress exercising influence in more informal ways. I'll say a quick word about both of those areas, the formal and informal powers.

Certainly, the formal powers are important, and the most important of these tends to be the power of the purse. When it comes to spending on diplomacy, defense—and defense is half of the discretionary federal budget, so that's huge—and foreign aid, the president simply can't act without Congress appropriating the funds. This gives Congress a power that it exercises every single year, and in recent years, Congress has sometimes challenged the president assertively on foreign policy spending. One example of that was when Donald Trump was president. He wanted to cut the budget of the State Department and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) by a third, and Congress said no and instead maintained the budget at roughly constant levels, which was important in allowing the U.S. to continue playing an active role in the world and providing foreign assistance to other countries.

Congress also routinely influences foreign policy by passing legislation that authorizes or mandates foreign policy stances or actions. For instance, Congress has mandated sanctions in recent years on many countries, including Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. This is an area where Congress tends to be quite active legislatively.

But Congress also influences foreign policy through its informal powers, which can include public statements by members of Congress—particularly the more prominent members of Congress like the chairs or ranking members of the key foreign policy committees, or the House or Senate leaders. It also can include trips to foreign countries by members of Congress. It could include private meetings between members of Congress and senior executive branch officials. I'll just say a quick word about a couple of these informal tools.

Public statements by members of Congress on high profile foreign policy issues can sometimes be pretty important because they can generate a lot of media attention, and that can shape public attitudes. So one recent example of this is “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) Republicans in Congress along with Donald Trump and some of the MAGA Republicans running for president have been making public statements in opposition to US aid to Ukraine. And this seems to be moving Republican public opinion away from supporting US aid to Ukraine, even though legislatively the MAGA Republicans don't yet have the majority on that issue in Congress. Foreign trips can be important. A lot of members of Congress have gone to Taiwan in recent years, and this can send a strong signal to Taiwan, can infuriate China, and complicate things the Biden Administration is trying to do with regard to China. And then there're private conversations going on all the time between members of Congress and executive branch officials. Sometimes these can be important, but they're not going to be reported in the media. But that sort of thing is happening all the time.

Kevin Kosar:

One of the things you mentioned is that both individual members of Congress and the committees who have formal jurisdiction have a role to play. And that's interesting because that means you have a president and his foreign policy apparatus, but you also have 535 other people who can be getting involved in these things in one way or another, which—like you said—doesn't create a necessarily clear message all the time for foreign nations to pick up on. They instead may be getting a bit of a cacophony, right?

Jordan Tama:

That's absolutely right, and on a lot of foreign policy issues, there is no consensus position coming out of Congress—there're just a lot of different positions. When that's the case, Congress is often not going to be able to pass legislation on the issue, so all you get from Congress is a lot of different messages. But those messages can sometimes still be quite important, and there are issues where there is a prevailing position in Congress. So I'll again go back to something during the Trump Administration. Trump was very critical of NATO and he privately talked about the idea of withdrawing from NATO. Members of Congress who supported NATO heard that and they passed a resolution reiterating US support for NATO—even though there are some members of Congress who are on Trump's wavelength on NATO, the majority was not. So, it'