Cite as: 539 U. S. 396 (2003)
Syllabus
employs "a different, state system of economic pressure," and in doing so undercuts the President's diplomatic discretion and the choice he has made exercising it. Crosby v. National Foreign Trade Council, 530 U. S. 363, 376. Whereas the President's authority to provide for settling claims in winding up international hostilities requires flexibility in wielding "the coercive power of the national economy" as a tool of diplomacy, id., at 377, HVIRA denies this, by making exclusion from a large sector of the American insurance market the automatic sanction for non-compliance with the State's own disclosure policies. HVIRA thus compromises the President's very capacity to speak for the Nation with one voice in dealing with other governments to resolve claims arising out of World War II. Although the HVIRA disclosure requirement's goal of obtaining compensation for Holocaust victims is also espoused by the National Government, the fact of a common end hardly neutralizes conflicting means. The express federal policy and the clear conflict raised by the state statute are alone enough to require state law to yield. Pp. 420-425.
(c) If any doubt about the clarity of the conflict remained, it would have to be resolved in the National Government's favor, given the weakness of the State's interest, when evaluated in terms of traditional state legislative subject matter, in regulating disclosure of European Holocaust-era insurance policies in the manner of HVIRA. Even if California's underlying concern for its several thousand Holocaust survivors is recognized as a powerful one, the same objective dignifies the National Government's interest in devising its chosen mechanism for voluntary settlements, there being approximately 100,000 survivors in the country, only a small fraction of them in California. As against the federal responsibility, the humanity underlying the state statute could not give the State the benefit of any doubt in resolving the conflict with national policy. Pp. 425-427.
(d) California seeks to use an iron fist where the President has consistently chosen kid gloves. The efficacy of the one approach versus the other is beside the point, since preemption turns not on the wisdom of the National Government's policy but on the evidence of conflict. Here, the evidence is more than sufficient to demonstrate that HVIRA stands in the way of the President's diplomatic objectives. P. 427.
(e) The Court rejects the State's submission that even if HVIRA does interfere with Executive Branch foreign policy, Congress authorized state law of this sort in the McCarran-Ferguson Act and the U. S. Holocaust Assets Commission Act of 1998. To begin with, the effect of any congressional authorization on the preemption enquiry is far from clear, but in any event neither statute does the job the State ascribes to it. McCarran-Ferguson's purpose was to limit congressional preemption of
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