Politics stops

Donald Trump recently waxed nostalgic about the days when politics stopped "at the water's edge." The expression dates back to the Cold War, when Republican Senator Arthur Vandenberg, breaking with his longstanding isolationism, joined with Democratic President Harry Truman to support an iron-clad security guarantee for Western Europe, which would go on to form the basis for NATO. Vandenberg’s phrase ushered in a bipartisan consensus that would ably guide American foreign policy through the travails of superpower competition with the Soviet Union. As this thinking goes, we might have had our squabbles at home, but when it came to facing adversaries far from our shores, we acted as one people. We refused to play political games when our national security was at stake. Like many things Trump says, this vision is part fact and part fable.

"At the water's edge" will serve as my tagline for this coming semester. In keeping with the conventional meaning of the phrase, my columns will engage with issues at the intersection of American domestic politics and American foreign policy. I seek to understand how our political culture at home informs our country's actions overseas. I want to see where we still have broad consensus and where long-held points of agreement are beginning to fray.

In addition to the phrase’s historical resonance, there is another reason I've chosen "at the water's edge" as my tagline. Over the past few months, the 2016 presidential primaries have unnerved me. Perhaps this disillusionment is merely the product of my “youth and inexperience” or maybe I have been spoiled by the relative civility of the last two election cycles. Nonetheless, I remain convinced that we are at an inflection point marking the edge of the political unknown.

The candidacies of Bernie Sanders, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump in particular have posed starkly different visions for what America should be, each of them a radical departure from a set of norms that have endured from Reagan to Obama. These norms include supporting deregulation and free-market policies at home, promoting democracy and human rights abroad, lowering tariffs and other barriers to trade, weighing the just and proportional use of force in international relations, recognizing the indispensable value of NATO and other multilateral organizations, championing immigration and integration, expanding the meaning of First Amendment rights and respecting our institutions even if we disagree with the people who run them. Their challenges are legion. At numerous points throughout the 2016 campaign, candidates and their supporters have thrown down the gauntlet to question these norms and offer up new ones in their place.

Today we stand, like the explorers of old, on the cusp of departure from familiarity, leaving behind much of what we know, unraveling the steadiness and certainty of our political moorings. Without a doubt, 2016 will serve as a point of departure in our history. We could be venturing out toward a new horizon. We might just be bound for the abyss. It’s up to us to right the ship and trim the sails.

Note: This column is the first of three that will flesh out what I mean by "at the water's edge." Here I introduce the phrase and explain some of my reasoning in choosing it. My second column will focus on contemporary debates in American foreign policy, how we imagine America’s place and purpose in the world. The third will take note of changes in our domestic politics.

Matthew King is a Trinity junior.