The water’s-edge doctrine is the convention, once taken for granted in Washington, that American political parties do not carry their quarrels into foreign policy. John Kiriakou was asked in August 2025 when American foreign policy went out the window, and answered by dating its collapse precisely.
The date he gives
His reply opened with the phrase itself: “you remember the old saying that foreign policy differences end at the shore, and they don’t end at the shore anymore.”[1]
He then named the man. “And I’ll tell you who changed that was N. Gingrich in 199 1995 when when he came out and just eviscerated uh the Clinton administration on on everything.” The attack, in his account, was total — on everything the administration stood for, and on every front.[1]
What followed
The consequence Kiriakou draws is not rhetorical but operational. The United States has now gone thirty years with major changes in foreign policy and major differences over foreign policy from one administration to the next — and his question, left open, is whether that is simply the norm now and whether the country just has to accept it.[2]
Rall put a longer frame around it: that American foreign policy has been essentially aggressive for well over a hundred years, ever since Theodore Roosevelt, and has grown more so throughout. Kiriakou agreed — “Absolutely true” — with the related point that Congress keeps abdicating its war powers, and that a country which has formally declared war five times while intervening far too often to list is one where the separation of powers is not working and the presidency has become imperial.[3][4]
Why presidents prefer it
Kiriakou added an explanation of the appetite rather than the constitutional mechanics. Presidents love to do foreign policy and start wars, he said, because it makes them feel important and it is the one thing they can really control. A president can direct an officer to go to Syria, do a particular thing and draw on a particular resource, without asking anyone’s permission — and nothing domestic works like that.[5] Rall’s agreement was immediate, and Kiriakou’s confirmation was flat: “Nothing domestic is like that. You’re exactly right.”[5]