How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy

Dr. Paul R. Pillar

Sr. Fellow, Center for Security Studies, Georgetown University
Fellow, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft

Intense partisanship is a familiar part of the contemporary United States, but its consequences do not stop at the country’s borders. The damage now extends to U.S. relations with the rest of the world. Too often, political leaders place their own party’s interest in gaining and keeping power ahead of the national interest.

In this presentation, Paul R. Pillar examines how and why partisanship has undermined U.S. foreign policy, especially over the past three decades. Placing present-day discord in historical perspective going back to the beginning of the republic, he shows that although the corrupting effects of partisan divisions are not new, past leaders were often able to overcome them. Recent social and political trends and developments including the end of the Cold War, however, have contributed to a surge of corrosive partisanship. Pillar demonstrates that its costs range from the prolongation of war and crisis to the intrusion of foreign influence and the undermining of democracy. He explores the ways other governments respond to inconsistency in U.S. foreign policy, the consequences of domestic division for U.S. global leadership, and how the corruption of American democracy also weakens democracy worldwide. Pillar considers possible remedies but draws the sobering conclusion that entrenched political sectarianism makes their adoption unlikely. Offering insightful analysis of the decline of U.S. foreign relations, Pillar calls for action those concerned about the state of the American political system.

Time will be allocated for Q&A.

"Beyond the Water’s Edge presents an ominous warning from one of the country's most respected former national security officials, chronicling the way that domestic polarization has progressively undermined American foreign policy and weakened the United States." Francis Fukuyama, author of Liberalism and Its Discontents

Paul R. Pillar is a Nonresident Senior Fellow of the Center for Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a Nonresident Fellow of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. He retired in 2005 from a 28-year career in the U.S. intelligence community, in which his last position was National Intelligence Officer for the Near East and South Asia. Earlier he served in a variety of analytical and managerial positions, including as chief of analytic units at the CIA covering portions of the Near East, the Persian Gulf, and South Asia. Dr. Pillar also served in the National Intelligence Council as one of the original members of its Analytic Group. He has been Executive Assistant to CIA's Deputy Director for Intelligence and Executive Assistant to Director of Central Intelligence William Webster. He has also headed the Assessments and Information Group of the DCI Counterterrorist Center, and from 1997 to 1999 was deputy chief of the center. He was a Federal Executive Fellow at the Brookings Institution in 1999-2000. Dr. Pillar was a visiting professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University from 2005 to 2012.

Dr. Pillar received an A.B. summa cum laude from Dartmouth College, a B.Phil. from Oxford University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Princeton University. He is a retired officer in the U.S. Army Reserve and served on active duty in 1971-1973, including a tour of duty in Vietnam.

Dr. Pillar is the author of Negotiating Peace: War Termination as a Bargaining Process (Princeton University Press, 1983); Terrorism and U.S. Foreign Policy (Brookings Institution Press, 2001; second edition 2003); Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform (Columbia University Press, 2011); Why America Misunderstands the World: National Experience and Roots of Misperception (Columbia University Press, 2016); and Beyond the Water’s Edge: How Partisanship Corrupts U.S. Foreign Policy (Columbia University Press, 2023). He is a contributing editor of The National Interest and writes frequently for that publication and Responsible Statecraft.