This Time, Politics Should Actually Stop at Water’s Edge Bill Scher
“We must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge,” insisted Sen. Arthur Vandenberg on the Senate floor in March of 1947. At the time, the Michigan Republican chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Harry Truman, a Democrat, was formulating a policy of containment to constrain Russian imperialism.
In the decades since, Vandenberg’s words have generally been ignored. Republicans and Democrats often clash during foreign policy crises, sometimes debating in good faith over principled disagreements, sometimes leveling cheap attacks in hopes of scoring political points.
But Vandenberg’s principle can and should guide the behavior of our politicians as they respond to Vladimir Putin’s brazen invasion of Ukraine. This is not wishful thinking. Several factors of this crisis incentivize bipartisanship.
First, Putin is a manifestly dangerous force. As foreign policy analysts Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage recently wrote in Foreign Affairs, a victorious Putin would instigate “a state of permanent economic war,” with the United States and Europe levelling “sweeping sanctions, which Russia is likely to parry with cyber-measures and energy blackmailing.” Russia will also seek to encourage, “through methods fair and foul,” political division within Europe in hopes of weakening the NATO alliance. Neither of the United States’ two major political parties should want to live or govern in a world in which Putin has succeeded in becoming, as Fix and Kimmage foresee, “an anarchic presence” who sows instability. If there ever was a country-before-party moment, this is it.
Second, we already have a bipartisan consensus on a key point. “The President has been very clear that U.S. troops will not be fighting in Ukraine,” a Pentagon spokesperson said Friday. Republicans in Congress have not argued otherwise. To date, disagreements between the Biden administration and congressional Republicans involve the timing and scope of economic sanctions, which is not the stuff of deeply divisive debate.
Third, Republicans need not worry that supporting Biden’s approach, or just going light on criticism, risks helping Democrats on Election Day. Only twice did a foreign policy success buoy a president’s party for a midterm election. John F. Kennedy resolved the Cuban Missile Crisis just 10 days before the 1962 election; Democrats then gained four Senate seats and lost a mere four House seats. And in 2002 – about a year after George W. Bush ousted the Taliban government of Afghanistan after the 9/11 terrorist attack, and one month after Congress passed a bipartisan authorization to attack Iraq – Republicans gained eight House seats and two Senate seats. But these exceptions involved a threat or an attack on or near U.S. soil. Ukraine is likely too far away to have a significant impact in November.
Washington Republicans, who are generally more hawkish towards Russia than Donald Trump and his loyalists, have tried to ding Biden for weakness in the run-up to Putin’s invasion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the day of the invasion, “The President should have exercised his extensive sanctions authorities to impose certain tough sanctions early enough to actually deter invasion and weaken Russia.” Republican Sen. Marco Rubio also threw shade a day prior on CNN, saying, “I wish we would have imposed the strongest possible sanctions … I’m not a big believer in this sanction-as-we-go process.”
But Biden’s approach deprived Putin of any fig-leaf claim that he was acting to defend Russia from western provocations. Putin is so universally reviled now that Trump, who as recently as last week was still referring to Putin as a “peacekeeper” and a “genius,” abruptly shifted his tone on Saturday. The invasion of Ukraine was a “horrible thing,” Trump said, that “can lead to world war.” Similarly, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who had been sounding so pro-Putin that his clips were being shown on Russian state TV, on Thursday felt obligated to tell his viewers, “Vladimir Putin started this war so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it. He fired the first shots. He is to blame for what we’re seeing tonight in Ukraine.”
By denying Putin the ability to shift blame, Biden has made it easier to build broad support for a stern response. (While McConnell argued that Putin could have been deterred with earlier sanctions, Rubio more realistically suggested Putin was hell-bent on taking Ukraine regardless, telling CNN, “I don’t think the diplomatic window was ever open, because he made demands that he knew could not be met.”)
For their part, Democrats don’t have to get overly upset at Republican slights, so long as Republicans prioritize thwarting Putin over throwing elbows at Biden. McConnell’s statement seemed to recognize the gravity of the situation: “Moving forward, how America leads the response from all freedom-loving nations will be measured carefully by our friends, by our adversaries, and by history itself. We cannot afford to fail this test.” And Rubio offered that the Biden administration is “making the right decisions about reinforcing NATO’s eastern flank.”
Complete across-the-aisle unanimity is not required to meet the Vandenberg standard, as Vandenberg himself said at the time. He explained that “bipartisan foreign policy is confined within relatively narrow limits,” and expressed dissatisfaction with some of Truman’s initiatives. He also said Congress “must completely explore and approve the means by which the president’s policy is to be implemented,” and his colleagues should not “yield their judgments … to the political dictates of any party managers.”
What prompted the “water’s edge” allusion – as detailed by Lawrence Haas in the book “Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World” – was an attempt by the Democratic National Committee chair to extract from his Republican counterpart a formal endorsement of Truman’s famous “Truman Doctrine” speech before a joint session of Congress.
Truman, by way of asking Congress to provide Greece and Turkey with economic aid and repel Soviet takeover, set a principle that the United States should “support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures … primarily through economic and financial aid.” Vandenberg supported the aid request, but viewed the DNC’s letter to the RNC as counterproductive, especially since it characterized him as a committed supporter of Truman’s foreign policy. According to Haas, “Vandenberg always portrayed himself as a loyal Republican and stressed his independence from the administration. He knew he would lose influence with Republicans if they began to believe he had evolved from bipartisan collaborator to administration lackey.” His floor speech encouraged all senators to “not act as partisans but as Americans,” but the speech was primarily a brushback pitch at the DNC. It worked. The Democratic chair backed down, and Congress approved the Greece and Turkey aid package with a big bipartisan vote in both chambers.
Biden is presently applying the Truman Doctrine. He could use some Republican Vandenbergs.
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