In 1947, at the dawn of the Cold War, Michigan Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, a Republican, justified his firm support for the foreign policy priorities of Democratic President Harry Truman by insisting that “we must stop partisan politics at the water’s edge.” Coming from Vandenberg, these words carried great significance, for he had spent much of his tenure in the U.S. Senate as a leading light among Republican isolationists. The Second World War and the rising Soviet threat changed Vandenberg irrevocably, and convinced him that Republicans and Democrats had no choice but to stand together in solidarity against Soviet imperialism.
One wonders what Vandenberg would make of today’s headlines. There is good reason to believe that the Russian government took extraordinary measures to tilt the scales in an American presidential election. While Democrats are furious, President-elect Donald Trump and many of his Republican allies have downplayed the news, suggesting that senior Democratic officials were to blame for leaving themselves vulnerable to Russian hacking. This isn’t partisan politics stopping at the water’s edge: It’s a hostile foreign government successfully interjecting itself in America’s partisan politics.
It’s against this backdrop that Rex Tillerson, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state and until recently the chairman and CEO of Exxon Mobil Corp., faced vigorous questioning from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.
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