Partisan Polarization and Foreign Policy

Recent polls reveal that Americans are deeply skeptical of U.S. foreign policy and increasingly dissatisfied with the country’s progress in the war in Iraq and in combating terrorism abroad. Meanwhile, bitter partisan battles in Congress persist, as Democrats and Republicans divide over America’s role in the world, curtailing any coherent foreign policy consensus.

On November 30, the Brookings Institution hosted a discussion on partisan polarization in the United States and its effect on foreign policy, a topic addressed by Peter Beinart of the Council on Foreign Relations in the forthcoming Brookings book Red and Blue Nation: Volume II. Brookings’s Pietro S. Nivola moderated a discussion with Beinart, Peter Rodman of Brookings, and Michael Hirsh of Newsweek.

Red and Blue Nation, a joint project between Brookings and the Hoover Institution, explores the extent of political polarization in the United States and its potential causes, consequences and corrections.

After the program, panelists took audience questions.

Red and Blue Nation? Volume II
David W. Brady and Pietro S. Nivola, eds.,