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Foreign policy issues have been more prominent in the 2004 presidential contest than in
any other election in recent memory. Developments in Iraq could well determine November’s
outcome. In George W. Bush’s generally polarizing presidency, his aggressive foreign policy
has been perhaps the most divisive issue of all, with few Americans remaining neutral,
ambivalent, or even tepid in their assessments of it. The strong disagreements engendered by the
invasion and occupation of Iraq are often expressed with a hard moralistic edge not seen since
the Vietnam era, with common ground seeming to be not only impossible but not worth finding.
The poisonous political climate surrounding current U.S. foreign policy raises some important
questions that are worth investigating. For example, are the sharp divisions pitting different
segments of the American public against each other in these debates strictly a disagreement
about the relative merits and costs of one controversial policy, or do the different interpretations
of that policy rest on deeper and more enduring differences in society’s culture, values, and
ideology? On the policymaking level, did the very decision to invade Iraq depend in any
meaningful way on culturally derived predispositions on the part of the key policymakers, or
were systemic causes and correctable misperceptions rooted, for example, in faulty intelligence
most responsible? Finally, are there any connections between the policymaking process and
society’s ideological differences that we should expect to find reflected in the parties’ respective
foreign policy positions? To provide a short answer to this last, catch-all question, an emerging
body of empirical studies shows that there is in fact a connection between parties, ideologies, and
foreign policy positions, but what is lacking is a framework for analyzing these issues in a way
that blends international relations theory with American party analysis.
This paper is an effort to bridge this gap by combining the insights of constructivist
theory with the growing recognition that ideologies are important to the constitution and
Convention