Should We Take the 'Foreign' Out of Foreign Policy?

In 2018, I had the honor of being asked to do one-on-one debate prep with a Senator seeking re-election. “It’s good to see you again,” they said when I arrived. “But there’s not really much on foreign policy this year.”

“Great, let’s just walk through some issues,” I said. And for half an hour I tested and prodded: on immigration, refugees and security; trade and China; defense spending and jobs; anti-Semitism and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Eventually, we turned to the more traditional items: Iran, North Korea, Russia. But I couldn’t resist: “Senator, I hope you agree that all these topics are foreign policy, too. They’re what foreign policy is now.”

The divide between domestic and foreign policy that we were all trained in—that structures academic institutions and think tanks like New America, Congressional and White House staff, and media beats—is an artifact of the 1980s and ’90s. Academics have different ideas about why, since throughout history societies and rulers saw the security of incomes and livelihoods as inseparable from the security of countries and thrones.

A few things we do know: In the post-World War II era, the United States was so wealthy that it could afford to conduct international affairs without much reference to its domestic life, and so much wealthier than others that we could be the market and currency of last resort for the entire world. Our oceans and our continental dominance so shielded us from global threats that foreign policy wasn’t the daily necessity that it is for Belgium, Hong Kong, or Uruguay. Though internationalists had believed for decades that trade conflict sparked real wars, those disputes seemed to pale against the threat of nuclear exchanges that could wipe entire trading systems out of existence. Thus, if the job of foreign policy came to be defined as keeping us out of nuclear war, its purpose was no longer clear once the Cold War ended. It became, as former Obama Administration official Jeremy Shapiro has written, perhaps with some hyperbole, a luxury.

In 2016, Donald Trump collapsed the distinction. This hasn’t been obvious to many of his critics, who see his avid use of “national security exceptions” in economic policies and his reframing of immigration in racialized security terms as personal quirks. But his approach is grounded in a larger and more consistent worldview, which, if we’re intellectually honest, has been a feature of American political life since our early days. Its core anxiety about outsiders echoes back to our earliest days—trade is a regrettable necessity, people who want to migrate here are of dubious quality, and international intercourse, whether political or economic, pollutes and dilutes the purity of the American character.

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That idea that the security of an American identity is rooted in holding the foreign at bay comes through in Thomas Jefferson’s anxiety about the seductions of trade with the British after the Revolutionary War. It’s visible, too, in the Senate’s rejection of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations after World War I, and of Harry Truman’s International Trade Organization after World War II. (Bet you didn’t know that Truman signed the Havana Charter, an agreement that established international labor rights and antitrust rules, but couldn’t get it ratified.)

When faced with the threat of every challenge being lumped into this kind of us-versus-them frame, it’s completely understandable that the reaction of many professionals on the left and right has been to insist that foreign policy stands apart. And it’s also true that recent efforts to go the other way, putting domestic concerns into a national security frame, have produced painful and problematic results—before Trump was calling trade and immigration national security issues, there were prestigious task forces suggesting that everything from foreign aid to education to obesity be framed as a national security issue.

So the downsides of re-thinking what national security is are clear. But there are also upsides, and they’re very large ones. In fact, re-integrating foreign and domestic foreign policy thinking could produce more coherent approaches to, and eventually pay major dividends on, a host of major issues, not just Trump’s signature ones.

Start with climate change, which ought to be obvious; the United States produces less than 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions annually. A serious response plan, whether it’s a progressive Green New Deal or a centrist market- and innovation-based approach, needs to spur reductions in other countries, position U.S. industry to take advantage of technology and consumption shifts, and manage instability that results from changes in both the natural and political worlds. Yet centrist climate thinkers shy away from mentioning the international dimension other than new markets opening for U.S. technology; and the Green New Deal refers to the need for international solidarity but offers very few ideas on how to achieve it. Nor are national security thinkers (with a few exceptions like New America’s own Sharon Burke) engaging with climate change as a core driver of policy. When the Center for a New American Security’s Loren DeJonge Schulman recently sought to commission an essay on what U.S. security strategy would look like with climate at its heart, she couldn’t find an author: “My national security peers generally feel we lack the vocabulary and framework to address such a huge challenge.”

Trade and international economic policy are another area in which the global and local interlock—sometimes in the zero-sum way Trump evokes, but also in ways that both build a web of international connections and grow jobs and livelihoods out of them. Volvo-owned Mack Trucks and Daimler-owned Freightliner build heavy trucks in the United States with union labor. International tourism sustains entire communities. Trade has become a third rail in U.S. politics. But any conversation among policy wonks moves quickly to questions of taxation, labor law, antitrust, and transition support for communities—and then onto automation and the future of work.

Most fundamentally, the wall between foreign and domestic needs to crumble in how we think about challenges to our democratic institutions. The obvious response there might seem to be that the challenge of foreign interference is obviously foreign, while other problems such as extreme polarization, the rise of hate speech, the decline of trust in institutions, and the dwindling of democratic norms are purely domestic.

But reality is more complex. Declining trust in democracy, polarization, and the rise of hate groups are all played on by Russia and other actors, using disinformation spread through social media. Political violence of various ideologies spreads and is nurtured through international networks—we’re used to thinking of ISIS and Al Qaeda this way, but the social media trails left by far-right killers from New Zealand to Pittsburgh show convincingly the lethality of white supremacists across borders. Studies suggest that rising economic inequality contributes to the loss of faith in democracy—and that the choices we make in international economic policy are a significant contributor to inequality.

Is this too much, causing the public and even policymakers to throw up their hands and turn back to oversimplified solutions? A variety of actors across partisan lines are betting not, that we can learn different methods of problem-solving. Instead of putting an issue in a bucket—“domestic” or “foreign”—they say, we can cast nets around the set of factors that contribute and then work them together. The old foreign and domestic policy sets, instead of having a hard line between them, become two boxes of tools that we pull from for different jobs.

Take two examples of how that might work. One is election security. The Alliance for Securing Democracy is a bipartisan group led by foreign policy wonks with extensive experience in the campaign trenches. Their comprehensive policy agenda includes cyber defense and foreign alliances, but also tech transparency, reforming the machinery of elections at the state and local level, and increasing support for local and independent media. Longtime Russia expert Andrew Weiss recently tweeted that reforming laws that make it easy to secretly buy and control U.S. businesses might be a more important step against interference in our democracy than threats or sexy cyber-defenses.

Another approach suggests that foreign policy starts from taking a new look at fundamental U.S. challenges in a global light. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams caused a small stir in foreign policy circles when she added gun violence and voter suppression to migration and trade as “security issues.”

Our values espoused abroad must be reflected by the values experienced at home ... One of the challenges ... endemic to gun violence is that we cannot challenge and chastise other nations for the security of their people, when we allow our people to be randomly murdered for the lack of spine to call out the problem.

That approach will make everyone uncomfortable, but with U.S. guns fueling violence in Central America that in turn drives migration that’s used to drive divisive politics here—and foster anxieties that feed on economic dislocation that can be both helped and hindered by international economic policy—it seems likely that it’s the right one. Certainly it turned out that way for the Senator I briefed, who won re-election easily.

Twenty years ago, Madeleine Albright toured the United States proclaiming that foreign policy should be “less foreign to the American people.” It turns out that a necessary first step is ensuring that the practitioners of foreign and domestic policy are not foreign … to each other.