Presidents Tend To Get Their Way On Wars

Neil Sinhababu says the real Bush steamroller was over the war in Iraq and the “war on terror”.

That’s fair, in some ways, but again recall that Bush had a major Democratic partner on Iraq: House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt who played the role of Ted Kennedy on NCLB or Max Baucus on Medicare. But more generally, I would say national security is just different. Bill Clinton went to war with Serbia over the objections of most Republicans. President Obama’s launched air strikes on Libya over the objections of most Republicans. On the more dovish side, he’s also withdrawn troops from Iraq on a schedule Republicans disagree with, scrapped Bush-era missile defense commitments to Poland and the Czech Republic, and eased the embargo on Cuba.

It’s probably true that Bush’s success in getting his way of foreign policy adventurism helped prime people to develop unrealistic expectations of what to expect from presidential unilateralism. But that’s just a kind of mistake. The president’s “head of state” and “commander in chief” roles give him a larger weight vis-a-vis foreign issues than domestic ones.