Between 1887 and 1907, Alabama Democrat
John Tyler Morgan played a leading role on the committee. Morgan called for a canal linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans through Nicaragua, enlarging the merchant marine and the Navy, and acquiring Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba. He expected Latin American and Asian markets would become a new export market for Alabama's cotton, coal, iron, and timber. The canal would make trade with the Pacific much more feasible, and an enlarged military would protect that new trade. By 1905, most of his dreams had become reality, with the canal passing through Panama instead of Nicaragua. File:Refusing to give the lady a seat - Rollin Kirby Trim.jpg|thumb|Refusing to give the lady [Peace Treaty of Versailles] a seat—by Senators
Borah,
Lodge and
Johnson, 1919 During
World War II, the committee took the lead in rejecting traditional isolationism and designing a new internationalist foreign policy based on the assumption that the United Nations would be a much more effective force than the old discredited League of Nations. Of special concern was the insistence that Congress play a central role in postwar foreign policy, as opposed to its ignorance of the main decisions made during the war. Republican senator
Arthur Vandenberg played the central role. (left) with Senator
Wayne Morse during a hearing on the Vietnam War in 1966 In 1966, as tensions over the
Vietnam War escalated, the committee set up hearings on possible relations with Communist China. Witnesses, especially academic specialists on East Asia, suggested to the American public that it was time to adopt a new policy of containment without isolation. The hearings Indicated that American public opinion toward China had moved away from hostility and toward cooperation. The hearings had a long-term impact when Richard Nixon became president, discarded containment, and began a policy of détente with China. The problem remained of how to deal simultaneously with the Chinese government on Taiwan after formal recognition was accorded to the Beijing government. The committee drafted the Taiwan Relations Act (US, 1979) which enabled the United States both to maintain friendly relations with Taiwan and to develop fresh relations with China. In response to conservative criticism that the state department lacked hardliners,
President Ronald Reagan in 1981 nominated
Ernest W. Lefever as
Assistant Secretary of State. Lefever performed poorly at his confirmation hearings and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations rejected his nomination by vote of 4–13, prompting Lefever to withdraw his name.
Elliot Abrams filled the position. Republican senator
Jesse Helms, a staunch conservative, was committee chair in the late 1990s. He pushed for reform of the UN by blocking payment of U.S. membership dues.
Bertie Bowman served as a staffer on the FRC from 1966 to 1990 and as the hearing coordinator from 2000 to 2021. ==Members, 119th Congress==