What If Washington Is NOT Broken?

Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Bob Schieffer on Friday's "Washington Unplugged" that despite intense partisan debate over domestic issues, the United States government has been able to put party lines aside when dealing with foreign policy.

"If you think about the really big issues that this administration has had to deal with, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, wars expensive potentially controversial, on all three of those issues there is really very little difference between republicans and the administration," Kagan said.

Reiterating his sentiments from an essay that appeared in Foreign Policy magazine, Kagan stated that although the Obama administration began their time in office by adamantly trying to distance themselves from the Bush administration's policies, the president has now aligned himself more closely to his predecessor on Middle East issues, especially Iran.

The only difference now is that President Obama has been able to build an international consensus on Iran's stance.

With the blurring of partisan lines, Kagan said that America will be stronger under its newfound unity.

Kagan also admitted that "bipartisanship is never pretty" but that the Obama administration recognized that their strategies were not working and needed to revert back to similar policies from the Bush era. According to Kagan, this has not meant less support from the Democratic party.

"It is hard to think of a time in recent memory when you have had such bipartisan support on these kinds of major issues," he said.

The former member of the Reagan administration seemed hopeful that this bipartisanship will continue and that Washington is not in fact "broken."

Watch the full interview above. And then following the interview, check out a discussion about the upcoming baseball season with CBS News' Bob Schieffer, Bob Orr, Robert Hendin, Ward Sloane and Rick Kaplan.

"Washington Unplugged" appears live on CBSNews.com each weekday at 12:30 p.m. ET. Click here to check out previous episodes.