On Consensus in Foreign Policy

The history of consensus is rather surprising. Even if there is dissent in the beginning on such things as Manifest Destiny or rise to great power status, the overwhelming support among the public and leaders has rallied around the organizing themes of foreign policy. In 1946-49, there was selective dissent--over the Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, US nuclear weapons (and the movement to give power over them to the UN), NATO and Korea. The overwhelming consensus emerged to commit to the ideological struggle and to fight it with containment. The consensus theme in American foreign policy suffered its first "post-consensus" split when containment was not prudently applied in SE Asia and the policy of detente partly replaced the aggressive form of containment in the 1960s an 1970s. The consensus in American history on foreign policy, by that I mean the major themes, is quite real.

About political arguments not being rational debates: domestic policy was always argued somehow in front of the public, and it was, as you said, a "go for the gut" process of political determining. Foreign policy, in the 20th Century especially, has been discussed and measured rationally in such places as the Council on Foreign Relations, and openly aired in publications that scrupulously avoid labeling "Left" and "Right" positions. Since the 1970s, while the CFR and a few other places of a non-partisan creed like the Center for Strategic and International Studies, keep up that higher level of inquiry and decision, such new foundations and publications like "The National Interest," founded by Irving Kristol, take decidedly "neo-conservative" interpretations. That partisanship (they have had articles calling policies "left" or "right" and always chose the "right as right") infects all of their ideas. The neo-conservative movement, as a reaction to the detente of Nixon, Ford and Carter, I feel, is primarily responsible for reducing the discussion of foreign policy to "Democrat" and "Republican." Other publications and organizations, like the left-leaning Brookings Institution, are also other examples since the 1970s of such loudly voiced partisanship in foreign policy discussions.