Dangerous Gamesmanship By Steve Coll

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/27/dangerous-gamesmanship

THE NEW YORKER  April 27, 2015 Issue

Dangerous Gamesmanship

By Steve Coll

During the early nineteen-thirties, Bolivia and Paraguay fought a war over an arid borderland called Chaco Boreal. Congress passed a resolution permitting President Franklin Roosevelt to impose an embargo on arms shipments to both countries, and he did. Prosecutors later charged the Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation with running guns to Bolivia. The company challenged the resolution, but, in 1936, the Supreme Court issued a thumping endorsement of a President’s prerogative to lead foreign policy. “In this vast external realm, with its important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems,” the majority wrote, only the President “has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation. . . . He alone negotiates.” In this respect, the Justices added, Congress is “powerless.”