Is impeachment a foreign policy issue?

This post is by Katharine Hall, Lecturer in Politics & International Relations, QMUL Online.

The impeachment hearing in the House and the following trial in the Senate were both front and center of domestic politics in the United States for a few weeks. Despite dominating the headlines - detracting even from a charged democratic primary run - it is unclear if the impeachment process, especially now knowing the outcome, has significance for events beyond the US domestic political realm. Is impeachment a foreign policy issue?

In one sense, the answer is obviously yes - at least with regard to the specificity of Trump’s impeachment. The charges against Trump all revolved around his administration’s handling of its foreign affairs with Ukraine. Through the witness testimony in the House hearing, we gained insight into the functions (and disfunctions) of the United States’ foreign policy apparatus. Marie Yovanovitch became a figure representative of an ‘old guard’ of diplomacy, ultimately losing in contrast to a new approach to making foreign policy deals epitomized by Rudy Giuliani.

Leaving aside for now the details of the quid pro quo made to Ukraine, these testimonies represent both change and continuity. On the one hand they show how the channels of US foreign policy making are being radically remade under the Trump administration. But on the other, the Ukraine example (and perhaps Trump’s ultimate acquittal) shows the power of the president and executive in managing foreign policy dealings. A principle figure here is John Bolton, whose testimony was never heard, but haunted the trial through discussions of his book The Room Where it Happened.

But in a broader sense, impeachment is tied to a longer history of traditions in US foreign policy. Bolton’s The Room Where it Happened was not the only Hamilton appearance in Trump’s impeachment. He was in fact invoked repeatedly, particularly by the democrats, to frame the impeachment trial. Both Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler used a quote from a letter Hamilton wrote to George Washington about his concerns over presidential overreach and the role that impeachment plays in limiting this. Hamilton’s push for a centralized federal government and the debates of the Founding Fathers over checks and balances in the structure of this government, weren’t only with an eye to domestic politics but also to how the US engaged with the world, and their anxieties that the US would be able to engage from a position of strength.

Thus the impeachment, while over, should give us pause to think about how the structure of the US government shapes how US foreign policy is made, and what the limits to presidential power really are in this arena. In a different context, Congress has (weakly) tried to restate its role through the passing of a war powers resolution on Iran but more needs to be done, not just through congressional checks but also more broadly as foreign policy institutions like the State Department are effectively hollowed out.

We explore a range of issues relating to US Foreign Policy, including how and by whom it is made, in Queen Mary Online's MA in International Relations module, ‘Themes And Cases in US Foreign Policy’.