The litmus test of any grand strategy is its ability to win sustained domestic support. One question I pondered while reading Forging a World of Liberty Under Law is whether it could meet this test – whether the proposed grand strategy’s principles can “transcend partisan lines,” as the report puts it. Unfortunately, the answer is probably not. The problem is not the recommendations per se. On the merits, many strike me as quite sensible. The problem is that in today’s domestic climate, calls for the kind of deep international engagement that Anne-Marie Slaughter and John Ikenberry have in mind are unlikely to mobilize broad public support. As a result, they are unlikely to win substantial bipartisan backing on Capitol Hill.

To understand why, one needs to remember what the domestic scene looked like the last time the United States embarked on a broad-gauged internationalist project: the liberal-internationalist agenda that Franklin Roosevelt articulated, and that his Democratic and Republican successors elaborated. One of the remarkable things about Roosevelt’s liberal-internationalism is that it cut across party lines and drew support from regions as politically, economically, and culturally diverse as the Old South and the urban Northeast. While other large-scale foreign policy projects in the nation’s history (e.g. Republican expansionism in the 1890s) have been more firmly grounded in a single party, liberal internationalism drew its support from both the Democratic and Republican parties. Some of this had to do with overlap in the parties’ regional bases, especially in the Northeast. It also reflected the fact that the New Deal party system was significantly less regionally-polarized than earlier party systems in the nation’s history. During the 1930s, the Democratic Party, long based in the South, finally picked the Republican’s “lock” on the urban Northeast. The Democrats therefore spanned the Mason-Dixon line. The Republican Party was divided along East-West lines.

Because core elements of the Democratic and Republican parties stood to benefit politically as well as economically from a commitment to maintain international order, stability, and openness, presidents had a strong incentive to invest their political capital in liberal-internationalism. The big urban-industrial centers stretching from Boston to Chicago constituted the core region of the world economy, having eclipsed the great “iron triangle” in Europe that ran from Stuttgart to Antwerp to Paris. Meanwhile, the South, which had long depended on international openness for its economic welfare, favored the construction of international institutions to prevent the spread of economic nationalism overseas, so long as those institutions did not threaten “the southern way of life.”

Things look very different today. Bipartisanship over foreign policy has given way to increased partisanship. This trend began before George Bush entered the White House, but it has accelerated on his watch. (When historians look back on this period they will probably view the surge in bipartisanship after September 11 as a momentary hiatus in an otherwise polarizing trend.) Many factors have contributed to the decline of bipartisanship, but one is fundamental: the disappearance of the New Deal party system. In its place, a new regional alignment has taken shape. Today’s familiar pattern of red versus blue states, pitting the South and mountain West against the Northeast and Pacific Coast, has fractured the electoral landscape that made liberal-internationalism politically possible.

As the electoral foundations of liberal internationalism have changed, so have the foreign policy preferences of the elected officials that represent these great regions. Southern support in Congress for international institutions and multilateral diplomacy is a pale shadow of what it once was. Faith in international organizations and multilateralism is still fairly robust in the Northeast, although not when it comes to matters having to do with jobs (i.e. trade). The Mountain west, by contrast, is now pro-trade, but is suspicious of the kind of international institution building that Anne-Marie and John are calling for. Today, there is neither a bipartisan or cross-regional coalition to support liberal internationalism.

Does this mean that liberal internationalism is dead and buried? No, probably not. It does mean that building a broad-based Rooseveltian-style domestic coalition in favor of deeper engagement with the international community is not in the cards right now. It is not hard to see Anne-Marie and John’s agenda winning support within the Democratic Party. Indeed, there is very little for Democrats to take exception to in the report. It is however much more difficult for me to see how Republicans who must stand for reelection down here in Texas will be buy into a national security agenda that offers international partnership as a substitute for national power.