GRAPE VINE
We Can't Have 50 Foreign Policies
Source : Carla Hills and Lee H. Hamilton,The Washington Post
Carla Hills was U.S. Trade Representative from 1989 to 1993. Lee H. Hamilton, a former Republican representative from Indiana and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
The Post recently editorialized in favor of Massachusetts's position in an important case now awaiting decision by the Supreme Court. It deals with the question of whether Massachusetts may pursue its own foreign policy by imposing a coercive secondary boycott on U.S. and foreign companies that have dealings with Burma--denying these companies the opportunity to compete for state contracts if they do any business with that country. The goal of the Massachusetts law is to change Burmese government policies.
We have filed an amicus brief, together with former President Gerald Ford and 25 other leading government officials from both Republican and Democratic administrations, opposing the Massachusetts Burma law. Although we have no financial interest in the outcome of this case, we believe that The Post's position is both ill-advised and ill-informed, since such state laws seriously threaten the ability of our country to develop and implement a coherent foreign policy. The lower federal courts have agreed, without dissent, that the Massachusetts law is an invalid intrusion into this exclusively federal domain.
No one can defend the human rights record of Burma; it has been terrible. That is not the issue. Rather, the question is whether the 50 states and 39,000 municipal governments should each be able to establish their own foreign policies, or whether our nation's power to conduct foreign policy resides exclusively in the federal government.
This is not a debate about a theory of American government. It is a debate about the ability of the United States to successfully conduct this nation's foreign policy and to function effectively in the modern world--serving its diverse interests of foreign diplomacy, international trade and human rights.
Our national government has imposed sanctions on Burma that are less sweeping than those mandated by the Massachusetts law. Representing traditional carrot-and-stick diplomacy, these sanctions are severe enough to get Burma's attention, but not so severe as to lose all leverage. It does not take much imagination to understand that widespread state and local laws imposing more severe and possibly inconsistent sanctions would undermine national policy. And such sub-federal action would disrupt our relationship with our allies in the European Union and Japan, which object to state and local regulation of the activities of their nationals.
The Post would solve this problem by allowing Congress specifically to overrule state and local laws. But that won't work. The Framers well understood that local politics could straitjacket national action, and for that reason gave the foreign affairs power exclusively to the national government.
Equally important, requiring affirmative federal action to override state law in every case that jeopardizes U.S. interests or policy is not practical, given the demanding national legislative agenda, and necessarily defeats a national policy of deliberate silence, which can be an important tool of diplomacy.
Contrary to The Post's editorial, the courts do not assert an improper "foreign policy role" when they enforce the vision of the Framers by confining state and municipal governments to dealing with state and local matters rather than foreign policy.
Saddling federal diplomats and negotiators with a patchwork of state and local sanctions was not intended in the Constitution, nor can it be tolerated if Americans expect their federal government to establish and maintain a coherent U.S. foreign policy.