A Question Of Balance: The President, The Congress And Foreign Policy
The sensible and informed essays in this volume explicitly refrain from pontificating in favor of presidential or congressional primacy. They argue that the Constitution and the practicality of American democracy require a shared role for the two branches in the making and implementation of foreign policy. This truth may seem obvious, but it needs the kind of careful reiteration to be found here. Individual chapters deal with war powers, intelligence, arms control, diplomacy and trade policy.
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The summer of 1987 was unusually hot. To the Reagan White House it must have also seemed unusually long, for the Administration's basic competence in the conduct of foreign policy was on public trial, day after day, on national television.
There have been obsessive anticommunists and responsible ones, and it is important to keep the two straight. Richard Gid Powers does and then doesn't.
Does the American government require a single over-arching concept in order to build domestic support for foreign policy objectives? At a time when foreign policy is clearly vulnerable to pressures from a variety of interest groups, is it even possible to erect a broad foreign policy consensus as was done in the cold war era?

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