A few posts ago, in reference to my post on Bolton's democratic theory, Jefferson wrote in his post on his approval of Pelosi that he believed that the "founders didn't put the president in charge of foreign policy to make him King they did so to provide a reasonable amount of predictability and consistency for the rest of the World." I agree with the first part of this sentence, but not the second.
Certainly, and obviously, it wasn't the goal of the founders to make the executive a king. They needed a branch of government that could act quickly in foreign affairs and respond to external threats in an expedient fashion, and the executive branch is the result. The branch is still subject to public opinion, once every four years at the least.
But I don't think anything in the Constitution speaks to the executive needing to keep any amount of predictability and consistency. If anything, I think it's the opposite. Once every four years the American people get to choose someone for the presidency, and a part of the consideration behind that choice is the candidates' foreign policy. Should someone with a new foreign policy be elected, he or she not only has the right to change the executive branch's foreign policy, but the responsibility to do so, since the people have chosen his or her policies over those of the previous administration. To keep the same policies from the previous administration would essentially be an abrogation of his or her responsibilities to the will of the people.
I guess this is bad in a way, since it makes it harder for other countries to depend on us, but I think it's actually pretty cool in at least one way: it makes it really difficult to fight wars. Wars like Vietnam and Iraq, where the populace is obviously against the war, are nearly unwinnable and stupid to fight. People don't want to go to the war, they don't want to support the war, they don't want their friends and family to fight in the war, and they don't want the executive branch to keep the war going. These kinds of wars can't last more than a couple presidencies, at least after escalation. Vietnam didn't start under LBJ, but he escalated it, and then it ended under Nixon. Iraq started under Bush, and it will probably end under whoever comes next. Popular wars, wars where the whole country is behind things and will fight to the end, can still be fought (see Civil War and WWII). It's hard to fight wars as a democracy, and I think that's pretty sweet.
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Of course from the standpoint of what's actually written in the constitution you could make an argument that the president isn't clearly tasked with leading the country on foreign policy at all. His enumerated powers are quite small in number.
When you put that together with the fact that the founders were much more aware than we are of the history of British kings quarreling with their parliaments over funding for wars ... well I think giving the Congress both the taxing/spending powers it has and the power to declare war show that the founders were very wary of the kind of executive that US presidents have become. They didn't want a president who'd behave like Charles I.
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