When Gov. Scott Walker, a likely Republican candidate for president, evaded foreign policy-related questions in London on Wednesday, he blamed tradition.
“Maybe it is a bit old-fashioned,” the Wisconsin Republican said, according to ABC News, but “I don’t think it’s wise to undermine the president of your own country” while overseas.
The rule is often articulated as politics stopping “at the water’s edge,” meaning any ocean — and it does not usually preclude any foreign policy discussion while abroad. Nor is the rule written in stone: As with most political etiquette, the concept has evolved over time and is still open to interpretation.
That phrasing was coined in 1947 by Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, then the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, as he urged bipartisanship with President Harry Truman in confronting matters of foreign policy, according to Vandenberg’s official Senate biography.
The meaning has evolved to discourage lawmakers traveling overseas from making remarks that criticize the president or send mixed signals about his foreign policy.
Decorum has also evolved in some minds to include holding back criticism of the president while he is abroad.
During the 2012 presidential election, Mitt Romney was quick to criticize President Obama when he told Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he expected more “flexibility” to negotiate after the election.
“Russia is not a friendly character on the world stage, and for this president to be looking for greater flexibility, where he doesn’t have to answer to the American people in his relations with Russia is very, very troubling, very alarming,” Romney said. “I’m very, very concerned.”
But Romney’s attack drew some scorn from House Speaker John Boehner, because Obama was in South Korea at the time.
“While the president is overseas, I think it’s appropriate that people not be critical of him or our country,” Boehner said at the time.
Nevertheless, the unwritten rule has been bent on more than a few occasions.
On a 2009 trip to China, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., told Chinese officials that “the budget numbers that the U.S. government had put forward should not be believed.”
Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner later blasted Kirk in a memoir for those remarks.
“I called him on his way out of China to explain that there was this noble tradition in politics that you don’t criticize the United States while you’re abroad — and you definitely shouldn’t say we’re going to default on our debts,” Geithner wrote. “But partisan politics no longer seemed to stop at the water’s edge.”
More recently, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie toed the line during a trip to the U.K. earlier this month, when he suggested foreign policy weakness on the part of Obama.
“The president has not proven himself to be the most adept negotiator, in my opinion, on behalf of American interests. And so that’s the first hurdle,” Christie said, according to an MSNBC report. “You need someone in the White House who’s going to be a good and effective negotiator.”
But, after that, Christie was tight-lipped on foreign policy matters for the remainder of the trip.
Of course, there are more reasons to travel abroad than to lay out a foreign policy platform. Meetings with foreign government officials and fundraisers with rich ex-pats can also be valuable — and none require violating political decorum.
“In general, candidates and campaigns will want to air on side of being more conservative in their approach,” said a former senior aide to Romney. “There will be plenty of time to critique the president on U.S. soil when it comes to foreign and domestic policy.”
