Yale Law School Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository Faculty Scholarship Series Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship 1988 Why the President (Almost) Always Wins in Foreign Affairs: Lessons of the Iran-Contra Affair Harold Hongju Koh Yale Law School Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Koh, Harold Hongju, "Why the President (Almost) Always Wins in Foreign Affairs: Lessons of the Iran-Contra Affair" (1988). Faculty Scholarship Series. 2071. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/2071 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Yale Law School Faculty Scholarship at Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship Series by an authorized administrator of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Yale Law Journal Volume 97, Number 7, June 1988 Articles Why the President (Almost) Always Wins in Foreign Affairs: Lessons of the Iran- Contra Affair Harold Hongju Koht The Iran-Contra Affair, the latest in a line of disturbing American foreign policy imbroglios, has forced national reexamination of the process by which Copyright 1988, Harold Hongju Koh. - Associate Professor, Yale Law School. From 1983-85, the author served as an Attorney-Adviser in the Office of Legal Counsel, United States Department of Justice. Portions of this article were first presented at the April 1987 Annual Meeting of the American Society of International Law, the November 1987 Federalist Society Conference on "Foreign Affairs and the Constitution" (proceedings to be published in 42 U.