ABSTRACT
The emergence of the United States as an established world power generated as many changes inside the country as it did outside in the international arena. In particular, the transition appeared to lead to a basic recognition that America’s unique set of governing arrangements has been fundamentally altered through the sheer force of international circumstances. By the 1950s, the dangers and disciplines of the cold war were thought to have ushered in a system of foreign policy-making geared to the demands of America’s situation, rather than to the traditional structure of its constitutional dynamics. Foreign policy had not only become central to American government, it was in turn centralizing the government in accordance with its special requirements. The chief beneficiary of this process was the Presidency, which appeared to have developed a symbiotic relationship with the conduct of American foreign policy. By the same token, the chief victim was widely regarded to be the Congress. In spite of the formal powers in foreign policy afforded to the Congress by the Constitution, America’s experience after the Second World War seemed finally to have sealed Congress’s fate and to have dispatched the institution – in this most important of all governing responsibilities – to a peripheral and largely irrelevant position. The Constitution had once been described as an invitation to both Congress and the Presidency ‘to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy’ (Corwin 1940: 200). In the atmosphere of a cold war, that struggle looked to be at an end (Carroll 1965: 150–70; Corwin 1948: 207–74; Rossiter 1960: 20–28; Schlesinger 1974: 127–76; Sundquist 1981: 103–22).
