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.Foreigners who assume that the presidency wields great powerare baffled by the difficulty presidents actually have in gaining optimal andcoordinated support for their policies.U.S.voters are accustomed to the radical rejection and wholesale review ofan incumbent s foreign policy by an incoming administration.But despitethe presumptions of a wholesale shakeup, the basic assumptions that haveguided American foreign policy since the end of World War II resist the com-plex changes around the globe.Where is the innovation that characterizes somany other realms of democratic politics? Why, after sixty years, does thepresidency, regardless of who occupies it, resort to the same rhetorical devicesin the conduct of foreign affairs? Because the president has inadequateauthority or control over the foreign policy apparatus, he often turns to thepublic his constituency and employs declaratory history or declaratoryprinciples of persuasion, as happened after Truman s so-called loss ofChina, when cold war rhetoric became the most effective way to gain publicsupport at home.In fact, perhaps the greatest privilege of the office is thepower to shape the nation s sense of historical memory.But cold war rheto-ric and declaratory history left few opportunities to address developingcountries on their own terms.Likewise, contemporary cold war rhetoricresults in oversimplified and irrelevant responses and in overseas hostility.This is one reason why, despite all the power of the presidency and all theenergy that presidential candidates expend convincing the public that theywill avoid the mistakes of their predecessors, their promise of transformationrarely survives a single term.With the influence of the bureaucracy and pri-vate interests difficult to surmount, the president has to speak as if what isdone is in the general interest.Reliance on past cold war anti-Communist 04-7556-0 ch4.qxd 5/9/08 9:53 PM Page 5454 The Legacy of the Cold Warrhetoric and today on post cold war antiterrorism rhetoric is a tool for thechief executive to satisfy the broad mass of voters.No one has exploited this tool more purposefully for enhancing executivepower for partisan purposes than George W.Bush.The war against terror wascentral to the president s strategy to recruit Republican candidates and mobi-lize support during the 2002 and 2004 electoral campaigns.The primacy ofnational security made the presidency the pivot of government action, so thatthe congressional campaign of 2002 became a celebration of presidential lead-ership.The White House urged congressional candidates to run on the war.Thus the president transformed the salience of international threats into loy-alty, facilitating an enormous increase in executive power.The 2002 Republi-can landslide in Congress was a great victory for the presidency itself.How-ever, the landslide linked future electoral outcomes to the president s approvalratings, which caused the Republican candidates to lose much of what theyhad gained in 2006 from their prior loyalty.By escalating the rhetoric aboutthe menace of global terrorism, the president was able to gain significant par-tisan advantage while reducing the limits on presidential action. 05-7556-0 ch5.qxd 5/9/08 9:53 PM Page 555Social Bifurcation and UltimatumBargaining: The Vision Gap inU.S.Reconstruction EffortsThe most common and durable source of factions has been the various andunequal distribution of property.Those who hold and those who arewithout property have ever formed distinct interests in society. James Madison, Federalist No.10 (1787)American presidents are compelled to tailor their appeals to the elec-torate in a language that draws from domestic experience.Unfortunately, thedomestic models and belief systems on which U.S.foreign policy are baseddiverge from the experience of developing nations.Worse, U.S.models andassumptions have created a gap between American conceptions and theimperatives of social change faced by third world populations.U.S.policiesend up appearing simplistic, misdirected, and hypocritical, generating deepaversion instead of trust among potential partners.To understand how the most salient foreign policy issues are defined, wemust first understand America s historical imagination and the public beliefsthat shape it.The president must create broad consensus among citizens yetstill cater to elites and interest groups Congress, federal departments andagencies for foreign policy support.Richard Melanson has written:Presidents and their foreign policy advisers try to provide interpretiveimages of the international situation that are compatible with domes-tic experience to justify the necessity, urgency, and character of theiractions.Legitimation establishes the broad purposes of policy by trans-lating its objectives into an understandable and compelling reflection ofthe domestic society s dominant norms.As such it represents a politi-cal act within the context of national politics and characteristicallyrelies on politically potent symbols to link foreign policy and theseinternal norms.155 05-7556-0 ch5.qxd 5/9/08 9:53 PM Page 5656 The Legacy of the Cold WarDrawing on America s legacy, U.S.politicians use cultural and historicalmodels of social progress and political processes that are familiar to Ameri-cans but rarely are comparable to the experiences of third world peoples.Therelationship between U.S.social institutions and economic development isunrecognizable to most developing nation populations.Even ideas thatAmericans take for granted, like the primacy of property rights, assume dif-ferent political meanings in other historical and social settings.As a result,efforts to harmonize foreign policy goals with beliefs endorsed by the U.S.public are frequently at cross-purposes with the imperatives faced by thirdworld governments.State Building in Europe and the Third WorldGradual industrialization in the United States has endowed policy plannerswith models that reflect poorly the full context of economic change in thedeveloping world.For example, America never had to achieve a political-social transition at the same time that it transformed its industrial structure.2Even America s revolution and break from Britain are often represented, inboth contemporary and historical accounts, as expressions of continuityrather than a wrenching break with the past.3 In America the institutions ofthe capitalist marketplace emerged in tandem with the institutions of demo-cratic politics.Such co-evolution is not universal.A common standard of civic ethics or shared moral standards to facilitatearm s-length market transactions is unrealistic in regions where, for instance,states were organized around artificial national borders drawn by colonial-ists,4 or where social organization is derived mostly from interactions with thesame people in a small group.5 The identities of third world populations arefrequently independent of formal institutions.South Vietnam had no socialcontract a large body of laws or social institutions that applied to groupssharing a standard of civic ethics.This is one reason that America s mostexpensive effort at state building failed.John D.Montgomery, one of the mostperceptive early analysts of U.S
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