What Makes United States Foreign Policy?

-8- to judge whether the agents of the Executive acted wisely or not on the basis of the word they alone were privileged to hear. All these new challenges work in their own way to give a new sense of awesome relevance to what de Tocqueville had to say about the inherent difficulties a democracy faces in the conduct of contemporary foreign politics. There is one more difficulty that deserves mention for it arises, paradoxically, from the effort of a democracy to respond to the new challenge. It has to do with the very nature of bipartisanship in theory an instrument of national unity but more often in recent practice a gag on legitimate discussion. Time and again we have lately found ourselves in situations where the Executive, consulting itself, has announced a policy. Whereupon the cry goes out that it cannot be debated, since this would show the world that we are divided. What we must do, instead, is to swallow our doubts about the wisdom of the policy. We must rally to the Executive in a great show of national 'unity. Nor does the matter end there. Later on, when the doubtful wisdom of the policy becomes apparent in the formidable world of actual practice, the members of the opposition party are again silenced. For if they raise their voice, they invite the rebuke: "You voted for that policy when it was sent down here to the Congress. Why are you squawking about it now?" I am not implying that anything and everything ought to be fair game for partisan politics. Far from it