In the excerpt of her opinion piece in the New Yorker that is quoted in The Wall Street Journal‘s Notable and Quotable section last Sunday, Susan Glasser decried the relative quiescence in DC compared to other nation’s capitals regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) foreign policy moves.
There were no major protests in the quiescent capital…. These acts were a far cry from the popular uprisings that presumably would have convulsed Paris or any other European city if the President of the republic suddenly and unilaterally reoriented the nation’s geopolitical strategy, turned on its major trading partners, and allowed the world’s richest man to cut hundreds of thousands of federal workers and billions of dollars in government services.
Unilaterally reoriented? Never mind the petty cultural differences between the United States and European nations. Those nations’ governments do not have their legislatures and Executives as separate, coequal branches of government. Instead, those nations blur the lines between the two, with many explicitly subordinating the Executive function to the legislative.
The United States is the only nation that separates the Legislative, Executive—and the Judicial (see Great Britain for a subordinated judicial function)—into their separate and equal authority branches. In our Executive in particular, those functions with foreign policy input—State, Defense, Commerce, and some others—are explicitly subordinate to, not equal functions with, the Chief Executive of that Branch, the President of the United States.
And yet she bleated, how dare the chief of foreign policy in our system of governance be the one making foreign policy decisions instead of surrendering that responsibility to a subordinate or to a committee of subordinates?
Glasser’s ignorance of the hierarchical nature and structure of the American Executive Branch is astounding.