 Welcome to the Naval War College, the Navy's home of thought. We are excited to present a new series titled NWC Talks, where we showcase our world-class experts in discussing national security matters. We hope you enjoy the conversation. Well, good morning. Well, folks, every day we read in the news of conflicts between Congress and the president over all sorts of issues. And this has been something, of course, that has been going on since the founding of the Republic back in 1787, when the Constitution was drafted. One area where you might expect to see more conflict between the executive branch and the legislative branch is the realm of national security. And the hope was, as a later political scientist put it, the Constitution was a kind of invitation to struggle between the executive branch and the legislative branch over control of the nation's foreign and national security policies. But what I'm going to argue this morning is that, in fact, the presidency, since the beginning of our Republic, has had the advantage, has had most of the cards in terms of this struggle between Congress and the presidency. And in fact, I would argue it hasn't been much of a struggle. History demonstrates that a determined president, when it comes to national security initiatives, tends to carry the day. My name is Steve Knott. This is NWC Talks. So why is it that the president seems to have the advantage when it comes to directing the nation's national security? Well, a good place to start would be to go back to the very beginning, look at Article II of the Constitution, which grants the American president certain powers, including the power to be commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and also grants him something called the executive power. That may seem like a kind of throwaway term, sort of pulled off of some template somewhere, but in fact, to the American framers, the executive power meant something very specific in that the president was going to be, in a sense, the point of the spear, the person responsible for interacting with other nations and ultimately responsible to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution as his constitutionally mandated oath requires. And George Washington, our first president, is a great place to start to see how the presidency has these kind of built-in advantages when it comes to control of American foreign and national security policy. President Washington, of course, had presided over the American forces during the Revolutionary War, and he took a number of lessons from that conflict. Even though the United States emerged triumphant from that war, it was a remarkably close call, and Washington's army was repeatedly underfunded, undermanned, stretched to the limits, in part by a Congress, there was no president at that time, by a Congress that was frequently unable to use a colloquialism, get its act together. So Washington, as the nation's first president, under a bolstered national government, was determined to infuse as much energy as his hide kick, Alexander Hamilton put it, into the presidency as possible, particularly in the realm of national security. And you see this in Washington's request in his very first, what today we would call, State of the Union message, where the president requested a secret service fund. And this fund would allow the president to engage in both covert diplomacy, but also covert operations with minimal congressional oversight. Congress had to appropriate the money for this secret service fund, but they were given no details as to how that money was spent, and the president had complete discretionary control over those expenditures, and that secret service fund remained in place throughout the 18th and 19th century in the United States. The other area you can see George Washington taking the lead in terms of foreign and security policy was the Jay Treaty between the United States and Britain, 1795, which President Washington and his envoy John Jay resolved some of the outstanding differences between the United States and the British. And he did so with minimal congressional involvement. Yes, the Senate had to ratify the treaty, which they narrowly did, but when the House demanded all of the correspondence between President Washington and John Jay, the president refused to hand that material over, thus setting the doctrine or laying down the doctrine of executive privilege, saying that the president has the right to confidential sources of information that are off limits to congressional inquiries. So right off the bat with our very first president, you can see this trend towards enhancing the power of the presidency at the expense of Congress. Now I'm going to jump ahead here about 80 years. I'm going to take a look at the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, who arguably faced the greatest crisis any American president had to face in our history, and he did so in a very, to borrow a term from the Washington era, energetic fashion. So much so that some critics have argued both then and now that Lincoln exceeded his constitutional mandate, that he represented a threat to American civil liberties because he was so assertive in his exercise of the war powers during the Civil War. For instance, suspending habeas corpus, suspending essentially the Bill of Rights in sections of the United States that bordered the South, where there are a lot of Southern sympathizers. American Northern civilians were thrown in military prisons, in some cases for the duration of the war, and Lincoln did this at least initially, completely on his own authority. The president also authorized a blockade of Southern ports, which is an act of war. He probably avoided the term blockade precisely for that reason, but nonetheless he did it without any congressional authorization. The types of assertive actions that President Lincoln took to fight the Civil War, and his actions were eventually approved by Congress after the fact, but that's not how the American system was intended to work. Now, I'm not up here criticizing President Lincoln's actions. I'm just pointing out to you another instance where the president pressed his national security powers to the limits and was ultimately upheld both by Congress and in a very critical Supreme Court decision known as the Prize Cases from 1863. So with that foundation in mind, let's jump to the 20th century where the so-called Imperial Presidency really took off and where the president's initiative, the president's discretionary control over foreign and national security policy really came to the fore. And one of the best places to start for that would be to talk about President Woodrow Wilson and his conduct during the First World War from 1917 to 1919. And in that war, President Wilson and his government took over large control of the American economy, railroads, shipping industries, et cetera. Anything remotely related to the war effort was nationalized or placed under some element of federal control. Again, with congressional authorization, but the point of all this is that you can see this further delegation of power to the commander-in-chief in times of war to the point where in Wilson's case, people who objected to the war, who engaged in civil, and I mean civil, dissent, not violent dissent, were frequently arrested and rounded up under this slowly, but surely growing national security state that in times of war looks at dissent with a very suspicious set of eyes, needless to say. And this is the point where a young bureaucrat by the name of J. Edgar Hoover, who will eventually become the first director of the FBI, really cuts his teeth in this security apparatus created by President Wilson in this effort to repress dissent against the war, the First World War. Jumping ahead to Franklin Roosevelt and the Second World War, the same pattern continues. President Roosevelt used the period from 1936 up to Pearl Harbor in December 1941 to slowly nudge his country and his countrymen into a deeper involvement in the wars abroad. Particularly, Roosevelt had his eye on Great Britain and his eye on sort of creating an Atlantic alliance between the United States and Britain at a point when many of his fellow citizens and many of his own party members in Congress were not willing to go that far. They did not want the United States to get involved in another world war abroad. And so Roosevelt covertly, for instance, encouraged his naval commanders to be very aggressive in the Atlantic Ocean in terms of going after German U-boats, German submarines that were attacking convoys heading to Britain. Again, at a time when the United States was ostensibly neutral. Doing all sorts of making private assurances to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill that the United States would eventually enter the war and bolstering Churchill's morale. All of this, again, done with minimal public and congressional awareness. Now I want to mention one court case from the Roosevelt years. United States versus Curtis Wright that seemed to sanction this idea that in the realm of foreign policy and national security, the President had primacy over the legislative branch. In US versus Curtis Wright from 1936, the majority stated that the President is the sole organ of intercourse between the United States and foreign nations. So at a time when the courts were striking down a lot of FDR's domestic initiatives they were giving him initial power in the foreign and national security or excuse me greater power in the foreign and national security arena. Now let's jump to Roosevelt's successor, President Harry Truman. President Truman did not necessarily want the United States to play an active role in post-war affairs, post-World War II affairs. But of course the Cold War is in full bloom by 1947 and that's the year when Congress at Truman's behest passes the National Security Act of 1947 which creates the Central Intelligence Agency, creates what will eventually be known as the Department of Defense, creates the, excuse me, the United States Air Force, creates all of the infrastructure so to speak that will direct America's Cold War policies for the next 50 years. And you can see this national security infrastructure as another instance of Congress delegating some of its authority to the executive branch. Now Congress had approved the National Security Act of 1947 but the point being there's just this constant drift towards putting more of the discretionary decision-making power in the executive branch itself. And you can even see this of course in the whole development of atomic weapons and later nuclear weapons and the control given to the president, the sole unilateral control given to the president over this incredible life and death decision over whether to employ nuclear weapons. Technological advances in the speed of modern war convinced most members of Congress that you had to give this power to this one individual. You couldn't expect a body of 535 people to decide within 20 minutes to a half an hour whether the United States should engage in a nuclear exchange. One more example from the Truman years, the Korean War. When the North Koreans evade South Korea, President Truman responds on his own authority. Well, cites the United Nations, Security Council resolution, authorizing the use of force to direct American engagement in the war in Korea. There's no congressional approval of American entry into the Korean War. None. There's no formal declaration of war. There's no resolution authorizing the use of force. It's completely in a sense a presidential war. And so this precedent that Truman sets in the Korean War is one of the more glaring examples from the 20th century of the growth of presidential power in the national security arena. Now, jumping ahead to the Vietnam War era, there is finally an effort on behalf of Congress to push back against what many are calling an imperial presidency. And you see this with the passage of the War Powers Act of 1973. This act is still on the books. It's an attempt to force presidents to get the approval of the House and Senate anytime a president injects American forces into hostile situations. It hasn't really worked. Every president since that act was passed in 1973 has argued that it does not bind their actions. That it pinches on their Article II authorities as commander-in-chief. And so there's been a tendency to ignore it. And there's also, if you're a believer in congressional prerogatives, unfortunately a tendency for Congress to sometimes roll over when it comes to these confrontations. The president has all the cards. And I'm not saying constitutional cards, I mean political cards. It's very hard to challenge a commander-in-chief in the midst of hostilities. Most presidents are very effective at wrapping themselves in the flag and appealing to the native patriotism of the American public not to undermine the men and women in the field, even if perhaps it might be in the national interest to bring these hostilities to a close. So it takes a really courageous act of Congress to bring these kinds of hostilities to a close. So in the end, let me close by saying all of the cards, most of the cards, maybe all is a bit of an overstatement, are in the president's hands. And even though there was a recent effort to stop the American involvement in Yemen, my guess would be it will not succeed in the end. Thank you all. My name is Steve Knot, and this has been NWC Talks.