The global problems facing the next president include dealing with North Korean nuclear ambitions, holding Iran to the terms of the nuclear deal, maritime conflict in the South China Sea and a massive proxy war with a complex web of alliances in Syria and Iraq.
Yet many popular presidential candidates fail to display an understanding of foreign affairs. American voters should demand foreign policy competence from their candidates before they consider their domestic proposals, which largely fall outside the scope of presidential power.
In a press conference early in his second term, President Barack Obama was asked if he still had “the juice to get the rest of [his] agenda through Congress.” He replied by saying to the reporter, “You seem to suggest that somehow, [Congress has] no responsibility and that my job is to somehow get them to behave. ”
This exchange exemplifies the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency, a phrase coined by political writer Matthew Yglesias. It refers to the assumption made by the public and the media that failures of policy can be attributed to a lack of presidential willpower.
The flaw in this mode of thinking is that it defies the actual distribution of power in the U.S. government and underestimates the agency of individual senators and representatives. Wary of a powerful executive branch, the nation’s founders designed the legislative branch to be more powerful than the executive one. In the very first article of the Constitution, they wrote, “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”
Nonetheless, modern political discourse frames all domestic successes and failures around the abilities of the president in office. As political scientist Brendan Nyhan wrote, the GLT is “the impulse behind holding a president responsible for a bad economy and giving him credit for a good one (the most important factor in presidential approval and election outcomes).”
This stems from the drama and prestige of the institution. It’s much easier and more dramatic for the media to cover a single individual than 535 disparate legislators. Furthermore, Congress’ arcane operational procedures make it more complex for ordinary individuals to understand.
The implications of forgetting the GLT during a presidential race are serious. Candidates can make unrealistic, ideologically motivated promises that distract ardent supporters from foreign affairs issues, which tend to be more esoteric.
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, for instance, is presently thriving on his ability to woo liberals with expansive domestic proposals. Yet his supporters forget the failure of Obama to deliver on the political transformation that he promised — despite a much less extreme agenda — largely as a result of the presidency’s limitations.
Presidents, while weaker than we imagine in the domestic realm, actually do have significant leeway in foreign affairs. While the U.S. Constitution requires the “advice and consent of the Senate” on treaties, the advent of executive agreements shifted power to the executive branch. Executive agreements are non-legally binding international agreements into which presidents can enter without Senate approval.
Though the legal authority for this type of agreement is debated, presidents have rarely been challenged. In the 1950s, the so-called Bricker Amendment was an attempt to amend the Constitution to limit this authority, but it failed to pass muster.
Thus, today, presidents still utilize executive agreements, uncontested, in order to conduct foreign policy free of the hyper-partisan political climate. Foreign affairs, therefore, is the one realm where significant change isn’t hostage to our current political dysfunction. The only downside is that the president’s successor is also free to renege on any agreements made because they aren’t legally binding.
Despite this unfortunate caveat, the rise of the United States as a global superpower has made this type of agreement increasingly frequent in the modern era.
While only 31 percent of international agreements were done in this manner during the first 50 years of the Constitution, 94.3 percent of international agreements between 1939 and 1989 — that is, between the start of World War II and the fall of communism — were completed this way, according to the Congressional Research Service.
Given that the execution of foreign relations is almost entirely incumbent upon the president, it is disconcerting that many popular candidates have failed to display any foreign policy competence.
Sanders has avoided the issue when possible, preferring to change the subject or rely on his opposition to the Iraq War to distinguish him from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. On the right, several candidates show murky comprehension and rely heavily on trite expressions of American exceptionalism to reassure voters.
It is time for American voters to withdraw support from candidates who fail to speak intelligently and accurately on foreign affairs, including subjects unrelated to global terrorism. Global governance and international relations shape the current of human history. We can’t afford to elect a vaguely informed person to lead the world’s most powerful country.
