The Ezra Klein Show - What’s the Left’s Vision for Foreign Policy After Trump?

Episode Date: June 9, 2026

The Democratic Party is in the middle of a rupture over foreign policy – with Israel and Palestine at the center. In recent weeks, the Democratic senators Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen both called for a break with the Biden administration’s policies toward Israel. Schatz said the next administration needs “a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers,” while Van Hollen went further, accusing Biden’s senior decision makers of “complicity.” And Gaza has become a central issue splitting Democrats in primaries around the country. It’s become such a profound fault line, it reminds me of how the Iraq war remade the Democratic Party years ago. And Democrats face huge foreign policy questions beyond Gaza, too. Trump has taken a wrecking ball to the rules-based order, and the American public has become increasingly cynical about U.S. interventions abroad. Do Democrats want to try to restore what came before Trump? Is that even possible? Or is there a vision for something new? Matt Duss is at the center of foreign policy thinking on the left. He’s the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, previously served as Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser and is currently advising Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So I thought he’d be the perfect person to ask: What would a left foreign policy actually look like? What would it try to do in the world?Mentioned: “The Hard Truth My Party Needs to Face” by Chris Van Hollen “Democrats Can’t Avoid a Reckoning With Gaza” by Matthew Duss “Why We Need a Progressive Foreign Policy” by Chris Murphy “Congressman Jason Crow’s New Vision for American Foreign Policy” by Jason Crow Book Recommendations: Crisis of the Common Good by Chris Murphy From Life Itself by Suzy Hansen Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Julie Beer and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Johnny Simon. Our recording engineer is Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Shows is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I think we may be in a moment of foreign policy rupture in the Democratic Party. It reminds me of years ago when the Iraq War we made the Democratic Party. The Iraq War, which is why Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, changing the course of American politics. Because I will offer a clear contrast. As somebody who never supported this war, thought it was a bad idea. I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us in the war in the first place. That's the kind of leadership I'm going to provide.

Right now, Israel, in Gaza feel to me like they are becoming the center of a similar rupture. The thing that started here for me was a few weeks ago, Brian Schatz, who is a Democratic senator from Hawaii. He's often talked of as maybe the next Senate Democratic leader after Chuck Schumer, so a guy with an incredible sense of the pulse of the party. He tweeted, I'm not into blacklisting anyone from future work in their area of expertise, but I do think it's fair to want a whole new crop, a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers in the next Democratic administration. It's not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything. Then Senator Chris Van

Holland, again, very well respected in the party, very much someone in its mainstream. He wrote an opinion piece for the Times, laying out how different he thinks the Democratic Party's policy on Israel needs to be, how badly thinks the Biden administration's policy failed, and then he went on to say, primary voters won't trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs, even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza, nor will they support a candidate who plans to reenlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.

complicity is a strong word in an internecine democratic fight here. Then we've seen a number of Democratic primaries beginning to split over Gaza. It has become an essential issue in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Abdul al-Said leads in many of the new polls. You're watching Democrats bend over backwards in the most pretzel-like way to justify the war. They're like, this is an illegal war, but if they asked me, I'd fund it. If you don't have the courage to call out the moral abomination of, a genocide, then what do you have the courage to call out in the first place?

This is a moral roar shock test for our party. It was very present in the New Jersey House primary that Adam Hamawi, a doctor who had treated the injured in Gaza, just one. I was running on something very simple, is that we should be spending on health care, not bombs. We should be spending on our communities here, you know, in New Jersey, in America, and not funding bombs overseas for, you know, atrocities and genocide. We should not be funding the endless wars that we're seeing.

It's been at the center of the House primary in my district in New York, where Brad Lander is running against the incumbent, Dan Goldman. And much of Lander's attack is centered on Goldman's support for Israel. Representative Goldman does not view what's happening there as a genocide. I've been fighting against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1990. I've never heard him say the word occupation in that context. Lander, too, is well ahead in recent polls. Into all of this comes Trump's war in Iran, a war he has.

fought alongside Israel, and just the general failure of his tariff and foreign policy. And so it's made this moment a moment when something new really could emerge. The Democratic Party is not going to go back to Bidenism. It is not going to try to replicate Trumpism. So what would something different actually look like? Beyond just Gaza, though of course including Gaza, what would it do differently? Matt Duss is the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He's worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for American Progress.

He served as Senator Bernie Sanders' foreign policy advisor, and he's advised Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Thus is really at the center of foreign policy thinking among the elected left. I want to have them on to explore a question that I think might come to define the 2020-P primary. What would a left foreign policy look like? What would it actually try to do in the world? As always, my email, Ezra Client Show at NYUTimes.com. Matt Duss, welcome to the show.

Thank you. So you were to peace in the nation recently saying that Democrats can't avoid a reckoning on Gaza. What is that reckoning? Well, I think first it involves understanding that we're not going to sidestep Gaza as an issue as the party it moves forward. I do think the Gaza debate, the Gaza debacle, the Gaza genocide stands for a lot that is wrong with our politics. And I think if Democrats are going to be able to offer a compelling, alternative vision of how they're going to govern. They really need to have a discussion, have a debate, have a reckoning with what the Biden administration did, not just with the policy,

but with the campaign of what I think was clearly disinformation that accompanied that policy. And that's going to involve some very tough conversations. That's going to be putting, you know, a spotlight on some key officials who served in the Biden administration, and some of whom probably hoped to serve again and probably should not get to. What do you mean by a campaign of disinformation? I mean, I'm looking at, you know, the way that the Biden administration talked, the White House, the State Department, you have this constant refrain of, oh, we're not seeing that. We've not made that assessment or drawn the conclusion that they are in violation of international humanitarian law when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance into Gaza. Given the nature of Hamas's track record of co-locating itself with civilians, using civilians as humans shields, we're unable to make a conclusive determination as it relates to violations of international humanitarian law.

We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law. And it was clear that they were choosing not to see things that were happening. Everyone else in the world could see these things were happening. Palestinians themselves were reporting these things were happening. Israeli and Palestinian-Hun Rice groups, international NGOs, were reporting that these things were happening. This is one of the things that I really, I think, underlines this disconnect here is the Biden administration made an assessment within a month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2020.

Within a month, Secretary of State Blinken came out and made an assessment that Russia is committing war crimes. Yesterday, President Biden said that, in his opinion, war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Personally, I agree. The idea that they could not make a similar assessment of a military into whose operations the United States has vastly more visibility, I think, is just, it's just not credible. So you know many of the people in the Biden administration. You've talked to them. What do you think happened? And when I asked, I mean, in a very specific way. What do you think were the set of commitments or values, because these people see themselves as having deep commitments and deep values, that in your view went wrong and

led to the policy that we had? Yeah. I mean, I think first, this really does come down to Joe Biden, not only Joe Biden, but Joe Biden, I think, had a very particular conception, both of how U.S. policy toward the Middle East, how U.S. policy toward Israel should work. And he had a very serious confidence, I would say misplaced, but he had great confidence in his own judgment about how to use U.S. foreign policy. He had a view of the U.S.-Israel relationship, he said many times there should be no daylight. If there were differences in opinion, differences in policy, those should be expressed privately, whereas in public, the United States should remain essentially in lockstep with whatever the Israeli government was doing. And I think he has had that view for a very

long time. His view was this, okay, we're going to express some differences with what Israel's doing here and there, but we're not really going to put any real pressure on them to change policy. You know, as a former staffer myself, I know that once the boss has kind of laid down the parameters of where he or she is willing to go and not go, I think staffers start to tend to shape, you know, you stop arguing and you say, okay, these are the guardrails. And you start to shaped policy within those guardrails, and Biden made clear repeatedly, and he made clear actually during the 2020 primary, when Senator Sanders kicked off a debate about conditioning military aid to Israel. I mean, Biden at the time called that a preposterous idea. There was maybe,

there was that one time when he withheld one shipment of 2,000 pound bombs. But other than that, there are really no consequences for what the entire world could see was an ongoing set of atrocities. I have a question about this, that maybe you know the answer to. because it's always confused me. I think it's fair to say at this point for the left, Gaza exists as a, if not the central failure of the Biden administration. And I agree with you that much of that comes down to Joe Biden himself. When Biden was being pushed to step down, some of the strongest people fighting that effort trying to keep Biden in place were Bernie Sanders and AOC. And I never quite understood why. You know them better than I do. Pretty given like the centrality of

Gaza now, and obviously that was true in 2024. What was going on there? I mean, I can say what I know. From my perspective, I think their view was, you know, they knew Biden. Obviously, they disagreed with the Gaza policy. They were two of the most vocal critics of the Gaza policy. But they knew that when it came to other policies in domestic economic policy, trade policy, they at least had an ear in the White House. Joe Biden and his team had been willing to talk with, engage with them on a whole range of issues beyond foreign policy. But I also, I got to say, I feel like there was also, I think, a pragmatic sense. And this is just my suspicion. I'm not, you know, this, I don't have any insight information. I think it makes sense like, listen, if someone's going to push Joe Biden out,

it's not going to be the progressive left. They're very aware, I think all progressives in the Democratic Party are aware that we have a centrist establishment that is always looking for reasons to call. as disunifying wreckers. So I think that kind of played into their hesitance as well. I mean, then to ask you about the way the policy was changing. As you say, that in the 2020 campaign, Bernie Sanders kicked off a debate on conditioning aid, which is something that has been anathema in the Democratic Party for a long time. All of a sudden, it's not. I thought the op-ed by Senator Chris Van Hollen was a pretty significant moment. I mean, he's an establishment figure who's been very outspoken on Israel for a long time, it's worth saying.

Let me ask it directly. What, in your view, should the Democrats position towards Israel be? What is the right policy here? Well, I think, first of all, it's to end aid. It's to end, I mean, Israel is a wealthy country. There's really no need for American taxpayers to continue to subsidize their defense budget. I mean, that's a position that was put out there by AOC, and I think about five minutes later, Rahm Emanuel came up right behind.

So very interesting. These are two people who kind of represent. different polls in the party, but I do think we're getting close to that. But then moving from that, I think it's not just aid. It is sales. And we do have laws on the books. I mean, this is why I found the whole conditioning aid, conditioning arm sales debate so bizarre the way it was treated as some kind of, you know, kind of weird punishment. We have laws on the books that condition aid to every country, according to a set of principles, whether it's the Leahy law, whether it's the Arms Export and Control Act. There are existing laws that, you know, prohibit,

restrict the sale of arms to militaries or military units that have a proven record of human rights abuses. We have simply not upheld those laws. Multiple administrations have simply ignored them. And again, this is what I was saying about the Biden administration. Do we, I have a question for you, would you say we follow those laws in general and make an exception for Israel, or do we not follow them in general? I think there are certain countries, Israel being one, Egypt, others, countries that we have determined. Saudi Arabia. Yes. I mean, So I think, listen, the arms lobby is an extremely powerful one. There is a strong incentive to just kind of push these sales through.

Do you think it comes from the arms lobby or do you think it comes from the American foreign policy establishments or the president's feeling that the alliances with these countries are important for other reasons? I think it's all those things. I mean, in some cases, it might be one more than the other. But I do think this gets to a much bigger problem is that the security state, the military industrial complex, whatever word. we're going to use now. I mean, this is a real problem. This is how we, part of how we ended up in this ridiculous war with Iran, but getting back to what the Democrats' position should be on Israel, I think, yes, first of all, you know, uphold our existing laws when it comes to arms sales, but also let's really tee up a policy that empowers, you know, the best actors in Israel and

Palestine rather than the worst ones, because unfortunately, as I see it, that is what our policy has been doing for the past 20 plus years. Can you describe how it's done that? And then what the alternative would look like? Right. I mean, I think we've had a policy where basically all the consequences and disincentives and punishments and sticks, so to speak, have been focused on one side, not entirely, but mostly. That's on one side, the less powerful side, the Palestinians. There's always some kind of new condition that's placed on them to receive aid. And, you know, and again, some of this is legit. Obviously, we should impose consequences for terrorism. I mean, that that is true. But at the same time, there are zero consequences that are imposed, any real

meaningful consequences that are ever imposed on the more powerful side, the Israeli side. And I think this, this dynamic has really, you know, given Israel a very reasonable belief that they can just press forward with de facto annexation, which is ongoing as we speak, which is entrenching their control over all of the land of Israel and Palestine in perpetuity, and to weaken and diminish the Palestinian national movement to just, you know, a completely, you know, controlled subject population within a greater Israel. That's the situation we're in right now. And the reason this keeps ticking in one direction is because there's no reason for it not to. I mean, there are no consequences for more and more extremist leaders in Israel to raise and implement more extremist policies.

At the same time, you know, Palestinians look at that and they look at their own kind of ineffective, corrupt leadership. And they're like, what is this? They see only more occupation. And it empowers extremist voices who are saying, no, the way to get our freedom is through the gun. And that's what I mean when like we have pursued policies that have empowered some of the worst actors who don't want peace. So be specific for me. What are these policies and what would their alternative or opposite look like? Yeah. I mean, I would say first of all, let's look at Gaza. You need, first of all, governance basic, you know, Gaza, as I'm sure your listeners, no, I mean, it's a ruin now. It's still, it's a series of tent cities. But the way to bring order, the way to bring services to

people, the way to bring real control is to have it governed by Palestinians. That's ultimately the only way that you're going to be able to. Can that include Hamas? I think it has to include some kind of tacit agreement with Hamas. As we as we all know, Hamas remains in Gaza. It has not been destroyed. So they continue to be a relevant force. But I think what we have to come around to is just understanding that, you know, the disarmament of Hamas will never happen under a situation of occupation. It will only conceivably happen under a situation of legitimate Palestinian self-governance. And what does it look like on the other side? What have these policies been and what would they be towards Israel? I mean, first off, let's start to create disincentives for these policies. Let's let's

state plainly that these the settlements are illegal, that officials who support them and facilitate their growth should face consequences. They should face sanctions. I think, you know, one of the very few good things that the Biden administration did on Israel-Palestine was, you know, sanctions against violent settlers, but I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. But I think it will start to shift the dynamic once you show that there are real costs for these policies. Let me ask you about attention here. Something Biden administration officials often told, me was, including on the show at times, was that there was only so far they could push or restrain Netanyahu. And they thought it was better to remain in conversation, to remain

with some leverage over the Israeli government. It's funny, when you were talking about why AOC and Bernie might have wanted Biden to stay on the ticket, despite deeply disagreeing with him on Gaza, well, they had his ear. And, you know, even right now, there is huge amounts of criticism from the Israeli opposition, that Netanyahu is listening too much to Donald Trump and not launching the scale of assault on Lebanon that he has promised and that they want him to launch. So, like, even the incredibly modest level of concession

Netanyahu appears to be making to Trump has become a political liability for him in Israel. So there is some tension here between kind of maintaining, you know, the line of communication and the possible, you know, influence over Israeli decisions, but then you're complicit in them, arguably. How do you think about that? Yeah, well, I would say three things.

One is, first of all, even if you don't change their behavior at all, you are at least no longer providing arms for a genocide. I count that as a win in and of itself. Second of all, this idea that, okay, they could just move forward without us. I don't, I mean, we have enough, you know, Israeli security officials, not just recently, but going back many years saying, listen, without U.S. support, we could not, we simply could not continue. I mean, that is what the Israeli security echelon believes. And third, this idea that they were just staying engaged to have influence, I don't buy that. And the reason I don't is,

I'm going to go back to, I believe it was 2019. This is when I was working with Senator Sanders on a war powers resolution on Yemen. The United States was involved in support of the Emirati and Saudi war on Yemen, massive humanitarian crisis. At that time, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And Senator Sanders, and along with Senator Chris Murphy, Senator Mike Lee, offered a war powers resolution, which basically says the president has taken the United States into a conflict without the appropriate authorization from Congress. And at the time, a number of former Obama administration officials published a letter, which we really appreciated, saying that they had made a mistake because this war started under the Obama administration. And

initially, President Obama and his team supported it for exactly the reason you just said, Israel, which was to say, okay, we don't necessarily like this war on Yemen, but staying engaged and saying supportive of what the Saudis and the Emirates are doing, we'll give us some influence in how this war is conducted. They said in that letter, that was a mistake. We were not able to have meaningful influence. And in fact, what we did was just give affirmation to a terrible war. And some of the people who signed that letter went on to serve in the Biden administration and are now out here offering the exact same argument for why it was better to continue supporting Netanyahu and Israel in Gaza, and I don't buy it. The other argument you'll hear, this sometimes from Democrats, very often from

Republicans, is that Israel's an American ally. We stand with our allies. Israel is a important strategic partner in the region and intelligence and cooperation and other things. And so there is an American strategic interest, more of a realist take than a values-based take, in maintaining a tight alliance. Do you buy that? What, I mean, are we benefiting from our relationship to the Middle East right now? What's happening? Are we benefiting from this relationship? I mean, yes, I hear this argument a lot. It's kind of almost, it's like a holy writ in Washington. But I do question it. Yes, it's good to have allies. It's good to have democratic allies. I think the United States should work with allies to defend their legitimate security interests. I think what Israel has

been doing is not remotely legitimate. When I hear people bring up, oh, like, do we have this cooperation on technology, on tech? And my answer is, well, for what? You know, obviously, this is very, very good for Israel. This alliance has been very, very good for Israel. But when I look at the costs and benefits, both strategically, ethically, morally, politically, diplomatically, to the U.S. Israel relationship, I don't think it works out in the U.S. favor. I think it's up to a larger foreign policy debate that is happening right now about what should drive American foreign policy. And when I listen to some of the people, some of whom you have advised, who are articulating this on the left, AOC, Bernie Sanders, people like Chris Murphy and Jason Crow, congressman, something they center is that our foreign policy should be based on values. Here a lot of talk of interest, but they will talk a lot about values.

What values, what does it mean to have a values-based foreign policy? Well, I would say democracy is one, self-government, a government that delivers, you know, for its people. And that sounds simple, it is. But I would kind of take things back to some very first principles about what foreign policy is for. Any country's foreign policy is meant to advance the safety and the prosperity of that country's people. That's what American foreign policy is for. I think as a progressive, I would add the word, you know, solidarity. to that. I mean, I want to be in solidarity, not only with people in my country, but communities

outside our country. And I feel like, even though we don't have the ability to fix the world, I think what we can do at the start is to do less harm. There are places where the United States has done and is continuing to do enormous harm. That's not the entire story of our foreign policy by any means. I think the United States has done enormous good. Over the past decades, I think there's enormous good we can do into the future. I would also say, and this is something you've heard, you know, from people like Congressman Crow, from AOC, obviously, from Bernie, from Senator Murphy, the people you mentioned is, you know, we need a foreign policy that really delivers for America's working families. I think we need to take things down to the wheel, so to speak. And, you know,

I'm not in the habit of really complimenting Trump all that much, but I do think he has provided an opportunity, or at least revealed an opportunity, by challenging some of the very basic kind of preconceptions of, you know, post-war, unipolar moment American primacy that is enabling us to have a debate, and we have to have it. So I want to explore what that foreign policy would look like, and I think a good place to start is a speech that Congressman Crow, who's from Colorado, former Army officer, gave at the Center for American Progress. I think it was last October.

I want to play a clip of it here. The biggest divide that I see right now and how we view this problem is those who believe that Donald Trump is the cause of it versus those who believe that Donald Trump is a symptom of it. And that requires looking back over the last 30 years and looking at it through the lens of the people that I grew up with in a working class town in the number of Midwest, those who I fought with and those who have fought with and those who. I now serve? In those last 30 years, we've had over 20 years of failed military interventions, $3 trillion, $3 million combat tours, over 7,000 of our own dead, tens of thousands of others dead. And what's not in those numbers is the unequal burden that was born by the working class. He goes on to say in that speech that we often mistake the core debate here for being a policy conversation. But what is is a conversation about trust and that the foreign policy establishment has lost trust.

It has broken faith. So you're sort of half in and half out of that establishment. I think a good place to start is how do you see this question of trust? How was it lost if it was and what builds it? Yeah. Well, again, I mean, what Congressman Crowe said right there about the, the key divide being between those who see Trump as the problem and Trump as a symptom, I think, is right on. I think that explains a lot of the debate right now. I'm very much on the symptom side.

And I think, you know, the lack of trust, I mean, it really does come down to this one line from Trump that others have used, and that is the system is rigged. And Trump gets traction with that because he's right. The system is rigged. Americans can see it. They can feel it in the lack of control that they feel over their own lives, economic lives, political lives, social lives. They feel, I mean, I think confronted by technology that is designed to entrap them. They feel kind of exploited by different, you know, costs, you know, to, you know, to extract the maximum amount of wealth of every step they take, every symptom of every disease, every, you know, every game that their kids play in sports. And I think that attaches to foreign policy because one of the big, you know, whether it's,

you know, the war in Iraq, which was, you know, again, sold to the Americans on what people understand now where misstatements are outright lies. You had the interneedal financial crisis in 2008, which, again, not necessarily a foreign policy crisis, but I think it's a global impact and certainly its domestic impact. All of these things add up to, you know, an elite establishment that either doesn't know what it's doing or is simply looking after its own interests. And I think one of the speeches that I've referenced a lot is the speech that J.D. Vance gave at the Republican National Convention in 2024, where he talked about his own personal story, you know, as Congressman Crowe did there. But J.D. Vance, I think, spoke very, very effectively about, you know, someone who grew up

in rural America as he did and what communities, deindustrialized communities suffered. The lie that was told about, you know, neoliberal trade economics, NAFTA, the war in Iraq that he served in. He laid out a whole story of elite failure, of lies that were told to working people like the ones that he grew up with. In small towns like mine in Ohio or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan, and states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war. And somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong. And I think what Democrats really have to do, and I think what Congressman Crow was starting to talk about in that speech, what I think was a really good speech, is, you know, Democrats need to come up, first of all, with an acknowledgement of the real problem that connects with the one that Americans are feeling, but offer a compelling vision, okay, this is how we're actually going to govern in a way that can change your life and make it better.

You mentioned J.D. Vance in the 2024 campaign. I mean, Vance ran that campaign very much articulating a view. that Donald Trump was the anti-war candidate, that Donald Trump meant an end to these kinds of foreign entanglements, these dumb wars. Now, obviously, we are enmeshed in Iran. What happened?

Well, it turns out that Donald Trump lies. That is one of the things that happened, but you're right. I mean, both Vance and Trump, in the months and especially the weeks before Election Day, 2024, leaned in hard on this anti-war message. Trump was a pro-peace president.

We were going to get out of the, he's dumb, endless wars. That's actually something he ran on in 2016 as well. And, you know, I think it is very interesting. If you go back every election since the end of the Cold War, in every elections, including starting with 1992, with the one exception of 2004, the more anti-war candidate has won. I'm not going to say that they won because they were anti-war, but I do think that is a very interesting set of data, which I think says at the very least that there is an audience for a much less militaristic vision of America's role in the world. I mean, even Joe Biden in 2020, he ran on a pledge to end the Forever Wars. He ran on a much less militaristic platform that he ended up

teeing up for Kamala Harris in 2024, and Trump took advantage of that. Democrats just abandoned the anti-war lane and left it wide open for Trump. And again, I said then and I say now, obviously, should believe Trump. But I do think he had at least the political intelligence to recognize that that was an attractive message. And I think Democrats really need to understand that. Let me try to make the case for the other side of this, right? Putting aside the question of who performs electorally, because I think that's kind of tricky and why they perform. You take Biden as an example. I think Biden thought he had learned some important lessons. And one thing that his people always bragged about was it he was the first president in some time to have not

committed American troops to new wars. They ended the Afghanistan war. People hated the way that looked at the very least. That's when Biden's approval rating fell beneath 50 percent and never recovered. But then it wasn't Joe Biden who invaded Ukraine. It was Russia. I mean, you named earlier the very first value that a left foreign policy based on democracy, right? You have Russia invading a democracy. Biden, I think, is trying through this period to calibrate a response to that that does not enmesh American troops, but nevertheless does not abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. You know, Hamas attacks on October 7th. It's another thing Biden responds to as opposed to something he is creating. How do you think about those from this perspective? Maybe not where the Gaza war

eventually went, but these are early moments because a lot of foreign policy is not what the president decides to do. It is something has happened. And now he has to make a decision. Right. I mean, let's take all of those. You know, first, yes, I mean, personally, I think all things considered his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a good one. He's gotten, you know, criticism from his right, those who believes that he should have just given Ukraine all the weapons immediately, some on the left who say, no, we were provoking Russia. I mean, my own view is like, yes, Russia what invaded Ukraine, it was reasonable to help Ukraine defend itself. I think there are legitimate, you know, criticisms that the Biden administration should have been more willing to,

you know, get into talks with Putin along the way. I am still unconvinced that Putin was ever interested in ending this war. I don't think he's interested in it right now. Obviously, he gets a key vote. But I think, you know, comparing that to Gaza, and I think he made a huge mistake in twinning Ukraine with Israel in the speech he gave in October of 2023. Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilated, neighboring democracy, completely annihilated. Because, yes, the precipitating factor for the Gaza war, what became the Gaza genocide, were the attacks of October 7. But that war did not begin on October 7, as you know.

I mean, it did not come out of nowhere. You know, Israel was not just sitting quietly minding its own business. There was an ongoing campaign of expulsion, of ethnic cleansing, of violence that existed in the Palestinian, territories and had done so for many years. Biden came into the Middle East, having promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. He came in and more or less kept Trump's policy in place. We're going to keep pressure on them to try to get a longer and stronger deal. And I think this was based on a belief of the need to maintain the U.S.'s position as the regional security guarantor in the Middle East. And I think that was a huge mistake. So I don't think it's quite right to say just that

he was responding to the events of October 7. I think his administration had taken steps that led to October 7. Obviously, Hamas deserves the blame. Say more what you mean by that when you say they took steps that led to October 7. I do think by buying into the idea, I mean, let's understand the Abraham Accords were about a number of things, but one thing they were about was sidelining the Palestinian issue. Do you just want to describe these quickly? Because they started under Donald Trump, not Trump, not Joe Biden. That's right. So the Abraham Accords were announced in August of 2020, an agreement first between Israel and the UAE, brokered, I guess, to some extent, by the Trump administration,

although they always like to take more credit, I think, than they really deserve, quickly joined by Bahrain, but they were significant because these were the first agreements in a very long time that normalized relations between Israel and regional Arab governments. They were presented as, you know, major peace agreements, despite the fact that UAE had never really been at war with Israel. Still, the fact that this relationship between Israel and the UAE

which had gone on for years under the surface, it was now public, was an achievement. There's no doubt. But from Netanyahu's perspective, and I think from Netanyahu's supporters' perspective in the U.S., part of why this was a success is that it kind of demonstrated their longstanding argument, which was that we don't need to solve the Palestinian issue first, as many have claimed. We can kind of just push this to the side and move forward and have normal relations with the rest of the region. And I think it's pretty clear that even though the Abraham Accords weren't like the precipitating factor for October 7, it was one of the factors that led to Hamas's thinking about why they needed to take action, horrific action, no doubt, to kind of

put the Palestinian issue back on the regional and global agenda. So to stay there for a minute, although I want to ask broader questions about this. What do you think the Biden's administration should have done immediately after October 7th. Because I mean, that attack is a, yes. I mean, it is a more than horrific attack. Yes. It is a genuine act of war. It is war crimes. And done to an American ally, certainly at that moment. What should the response have been? I mean, I think the response initially was the right one, which was to show, you know, strong support for Israel, for the people of Israel, for, I think Joe Biden going there himself. But he didn't use that credibility to do what I think he should have done, which was very quickly, within weeks,

certainly I would say by the middle of November, it was abundantly clear that this just was not an act of self-defense anymore. This was a series of atrocities meant to just obliterate Gaza and to kill civilians. I mean, I think this is kind of the core understanding is that, you know, the way that the Biden administration and many in Washington talk about this issue is that They treat civilians suffering, civilian casualties as if it's a regrettable, you know, kind of consequence of an overall just objective. It is not. Civilian suffering is part of the policy. And I think that became very, very clear, certainly by November.

I think by the end of Biden's presidency, the feeling many Americans have about him is not so much that they dramatically disagree with any one of his decisions. The public opinion on Israel and Gaza is split at that point. It's not like a winning issue in one direction or another. Ukraine is a kind of complicated issue. It's that they don't like the way America seems focused on these places that are not important to them. Prices are high here. And yet we're spending all this money, army Ukraine, were engaged in somehow this war that Israel is waging in Gaza. that seems like a mess that seems horrible that you're seeing on your phone the atrocities of.

And in some way, I think what people hated about Bidenism by the end was that the world felt out of control. There's something Chris Murphy, Senator Murphy, wrote on his substack just recently. He wrote, we would be misreading a lot of the essential elements of Donald Trump's foreign policy. If we just said it was about jingoism or xenophobia. Because a lot of what he talks about is really about power. his message is that these global forces that we are endlessly told are just out of our control

can be inside of our control. I think this is actually a pretty important insight because I think one of the tensions of American foreign policy and particularly American public opinion towards foreign policy is on the one hand,

we do feel a sense of responsibility. We don't want bad things to happen elsewhere in the world and particularly some set of them we feel that we should engage in them. On their hand, we don't want to engage too much. And then when we do engage, engage and it turns out we cannot control them at an acceptable cost or maybe as we found in

Iraq or Afghanistan at any cost, we get angry about that. And this tension of wanting control but not having it is, I think, a real knot at the center of the politics of foreign policy here. And I'm curious how that lands for you. Yeah, I mean, I do, you know, I think Senator Murphy has really been a, he's one of these, you know, obviously he's a strong voice on foreign policy, but as you noted there, I think he also has a very strong, compelling theory of the deeper case of what the problems in our politics right now. And I would agree with that. Although I think part of this, you know, the tension between wanting to do good, wanting to have control and losing control, I mean, that's going to keep happening as long as we have this foreign policy that is driven by,

you know, sustaining American primacy, by trying to sustain America's role as a global, you know, Hedgeaman. What do you mean by that? Because the things we're talking about here, I actually don't buy that what we were doing in Ukraine is trying to sustain America's role as a global hegemon. I don't buy that in Gaza, what we were trying to do is sustain America's role as a global hegemon. I don't think that's how the Biden administration justified it to themselves. I don't think that's really how they thought about it. So either, do you disagree that that's what they were really trying to do? I would agree with you a bit more on Ukraine. I do think there were habits of mind, especially from Biden, you know, who's not even a person, not a creature of the post-Cold War,

who's creature of the Cold War. So I do think that, you know, this idea of the U.S. helping to confront Russia was something that was kind of deep in his foreign policy DNA. And I think part of what we saw in Gaza and what led up to it, as I was saying, was driven by an effort through the Abraham Accords, through this proposed U.S.-S.-S.-S.-Srael peace agreement, which would involve, you know, security guarantees with Saudi Arabia. was based, in my view, on sustaining America's role as a regional security guarantor and also to box China out of the region. I mean, because that was kind of the overriding focus

of Joe Biden's foreign policy. And if we remember going back to, I think it was, was at June 2021, where he had a summit with Putin. I think the goal of Biden's Russia policy initially was to be like, all right, let's just park Russia and Putin over here. We're not going to have a relationship with them, but we want to kind of bring some predictability to the relationship so we can focus on the real problem, which is China. And I do think that China focus, you know, the kind of obsession with strategic competition with China, I do think that what underlies that is an effort to sustain America's, you know, global primacy. So I do agree with that. I agree with this on China. But I think all these are a little bit different. I think the reason this distinction might be

important is that obviously people's goals matter. And the way, I read these different events, involvements is the reaction of the Russia of the nation is really a view about Ukraine and Europe and what America's role was in that, and not wanting to allow Putin just begin taking territory, because that would be destabilizing for the world, and we had to do it because nobody else could. I think if it was the case that Europe was more capable

of, you know, being the munitions factory for Ukraine, America would have been happy to have led them do at least to some degree. I don't know. I hope they are doing that now. I mean, yeah, I hope they're doing that. Yeah, because ultimately that's where this needs to go. On Israel, I think a lot was driven by Joe Biden's actual commitment to Israel, which is something sort of you said earlier as well. And then China, I think there's a different set of questions that are very real there about American primacy.

But the reason I'm focusing on this for a minute is that I think that there is a difference that gets conflated often in foreign policy. and we move on different sides of it. Between is what we are trying to do uphold responsibilities that maybe we don't really want to be doing, the American people don't really want to be doing, but in the long term it's better for the global system that somebody is doing it, versus are we actually trying to dominate the system,

bring it in our favor, keep competitors from rising up? And those are sort of two different problems because on one level, if you say we should stop just trying to, ensure American hegemony, which I think is also a little bit different than primacy, right? Hegemony is a control primacy as a leadership. I think a lot of people like nod and agree, and I probably nod and agree. And on the other hand, I just think, say, Ukraine is a hard problem.

Yeah. And that we don't really want to be doing this, but a lot of things happen in the world that we don't like, and we have to kind of make kind of tough decisions around them. But I'm not sure that, you know, in some of these cases that a president, Bernie Sanders, a president, AOC, a president, Chris Murphy would be free from the pull of American responsibility, the sense that if we don't stop something from happening, it'll happen. And then we will be blamed, both, you know, they, we here being this imaginary administration by either the American people who don't like what just happened or bad things will happen in the world, which will eventually end up on our doorstep. I think that's all, I mean, I agree with that. I mean, there are certain things, you know,

that are beyond the U.S.'s control. It's not, I've, you know, never said, and I don't. believe that it's all part of some grand plan. There are a lot of contingencies that popped up, a lot of unforeseen events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the Biden administration certainly did not want to happen. And as I said, I think all things considered, they respond to that pretty reasonably. But I do think that when you look at the sweep of Biden's foreign policy, you know, kind of captured in, you know, one of the things that he said upon taking office when you went to Europe, America's back. You know, we've gotten past this brief little hiccup with this this weirdo Donald Trump and now America's back doing America things and everybody can chill

and America's back in the business of helping, you know, the global system run. And I think we had already moved beyond that, both in terms of what America was capable of, what others in the, you know, others in the world were interested in. So yeah, I would certainly agree. There are times when only the United States, as of right now, certainly, the United States, you know, has the capacity, whether it's in arms, whether it's in convening capacity, whether it's in influence, whether it's in economic power, whether it's in diplomatic power, to help solve and address certain problems. But I think the debate has to be, okay, what are those situations and what tools should we deploy in those situations? Let me take the American global hegemony question

from a broader perspective. You said that the American foreign policy establishment often ask a question, how do we better sell continuing American global military hegemony to the American people rather than hearing that Americans just aren't that into it. Americans, you said, are just not that into global military hegemony because it's destructive, it's wasteful, it increases inequality, it steals money from the working class, and it funnels it upward to a tiny, unaccountable elite. I think there's a broader than Ukraine or Gaza or even China. I think there's a broader view on the left that America's view of its role in the world and what it puts into maintaining that role in the world is destructive. So make that broader case to me and what it would look

like to turn away from that in our foreign policy? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, Americans want their country to be strong, to be powerful, to play a major role in the world. I think any country's people do. And more than that, I'll say, I think Americans want their country to do good in the world. That's how I feel. I think that's broadly shared. But I do think we have to look, really, really take a very, very hard look at what this,

what global military hegemony, global, whatever term you want to use for it, is actually delivering. And this is where I would go back to J.D. Vance's speech at the 2024 RNC. We've had just multiple wars. We have them ongoing right now. They're not as big as Iraq and Afghanistan were, but we have many American troops deployed around the world on counterterrorism missions. Do we actually need all of this to keep us safe. How much are we spending on this? And to whom are the benefits really accruing? I think the question a lot of Americans ask when they, you know, they see their communities having been deindustrialized, their children face a worse feature than they do, is, okay, I want America to do good. I want America to be strong. But again, as you said earlier in the conversation,

I don't understand how these conflicts and our engagement in them is actually doing that. You have this line that elite impunity is at the core of our political crisis. Tell me what you mean by that. I mean the sense that the wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected, the influential don't pay a price. They operate according to a different set of rules than the rest of us. I think this is part of political corruption. It's part of the loss of control. It's a reflection of the system being rigged.

So there's that broad version of it. But you've also made this point. And I've seen others begin to make this point around the foreign policy establishment and around people in Democratic politics, people in Republican politics, Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii recently put up this tweet where he said, look, I'm not trying to blacklist anybody. But I think that the next Democratic administration should have sort of a full turnover in its foreign policy staff. You know, I've seen you sort of connect this to the need for a reckoning around Gaza. So what does it actually imply? I mean, I think there's two things about that. One is, you know, from Senator Schatz's comment, I think there's a sense that there has been just this kind of kind of group of Democratic foreign policy professionals that tend to cycle in and out of Democratic administrations and they move up to the next job and that we need to reach out to a much broader pool of talent. There are a lot of very smart young foreign policy folks in Washington and beyond who want to get engaged. We need to be, we need to draw them in to the

process so we don't keep repeating and, you know, regurgitating the same policies and the same approach. But I think there's also a second piece of it. And I think Senator Chris Van Hollen got to it a bit more sharply in the op-ed that he wrote in the New York Times a few days after Senator Schatz's tweet. And that had to do with specific actors inside the Biden administration, who he said should not serve in future administrations. And I think this is part of accountability as well. We're going to have policy disputes, policy disagreements, policy debates. I do think that the Biden administration's Gaza policy was beyond just a policy dispute. It was a policy of supporting genocide. And I think if, you know, part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials

who carried out that policy should not work in government again. So does Gaza here become, is it becoming? I mean, I'm sort of watching this in primaries, and I think it's a pretty important thing happening right now. You see it in the Michigan Senate primary. You see it here in New York, where Brad Lander and Dan Goldman are running against each other. You saw it in a New Jersey congressional primary. Does Goss here become sort of like the Iraq war in the Democratic Party? Or are Democrats more divided on that than they were on the Iraq war? I mean, there is this question of, like, do Democrats split over this? In the same way that I wonder about this for Republicans after Donald Trump, I mean, Israel and support for Israel really seems to me to be a question that is splitting both parties internally.

I hope it doesn't become like the Iraq War because I don't think anybody really paid a price for the Iraq War, at least the officials who carried it out. I want to see some consequences for the people who carried out the Gaza policy. I mean, in terms of the debate, you know, I do think, yes, this is becoming a litmus test. your position on Gaza, you know, it really does go to credibility. The way someone chooses to talk about this, for example, you know, Kamala Harris, the way she, you know, the language she used, oh, too many civilians have died and were pressing for a ceasefire. It just didn't convince anyone. Even for people who perhaps didn't care about the issue all that much, they could tell that this was not genuine.

And I think, you know, the reverse is true, I think, for Zoran Mondani. the way that he he didn't raise Gaza by the way. I mean, Gaza was raised by his critics because they thought it would be an effective way to weaken and criticize him. And they did that because they don't know what time it is. He stood firm on a set of principles under fire. And I think even for people who probably don't know or maybe care about the issue as much, they saw that. And that added to his credibility. So I do think, yes, for a lot of Democratic voters, many of them care about the issue. And the issue. They want their leaders to be on the right side of it, but it also gets to a much larger idea of, can I trust this person? Are they for real? Or are they just going to regurgitate the usual set of established talking points? So I want to play here is something that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said at Munich. So I don't know if it's necessarily that we were in a post, if we are in a post-rules-based order. I think it's possible that we were in a pre-rules-based order. And we have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy,

human rights, trade that actually centers working class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest. Tell me about that idea that we were actually in a pre-rules based order. Right. I mean, I think it's a great line. I mean, what I've, you know, when I'm in conversations about the so-called rules-based order. I've often referred to, you know, I think it was Gandhi's comment when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization.

He said, I think it would be a great idea. That's what I think about a rules-based order. I think that's what the Congresswoman was getting at there. Yes, there is a lot about the post-World War II order that is admirable, that's very optimistic. There are elements of it that we definitely should try to revive and save. I think the United Nations and all the various organizations,

that work under its umbrella are very important. Having a global center where people can talk about their problems rather than fight over them is hugely important as a concept. Yet I do think we've gotten to a point where the double standards and the hypocrisies had gotten so stark that the system has just lost legitimacy. And what about the international system can we really revive and strengthen such that we can use

the term rules-based order unironically. So you've been bringing up, J.D. Vanson, and I think one interesting difference between the way, even skepticism of the foreign policy of the past 20 or 30 years emerges on the right and the left is on the right, it has taken shape as a critique of rules. And Donald Trump, I think, in particular, holds to the view that America should not be bound by rules, should not be bound by institutions. To the extent we are as you just create our own that we dominate in a more thoroughgoing way. I think J.D. Vance has certainly been supportive of Donald Trump and his project to do that.

I think on the left, there's more of this idea that actually the rules might protect us more than we think they do. That allowing ourselves to be bound by them would be better than where we have ended up, that it would have kept us out of Iraq, right, because we cannot, in fact, get the UN to go along. So I'd like you to go a little bit further with this when you say, okay, like if we did try this rules-based order, if we were bound by rules, in these slow, frustrating multilateral institutions where Russia and China can veto things on the UN Security Council, there is a tension between positive restraint and then being subject to the agendas about actors. How do you think about it? Yeah. I mean, I think what you just laid out there is right. It's basically a zero-sum critique versus a positive sum critique. I mean, for Trump, for Vance, it's, as you said, it's all. about America should be able to do whatever we want. If we're getting a good deal, others have to lose,

and vice versa. But also this is the kind of positive sum, kind of, you know, principle that kind of undergirded the creation of the international system, the idea that countries, including the United States, will agree to be constrained by a set of rules. And that ultimately makes us safer. I mean, I think that's it right there. But the process and the project of re-acrediting the concept of international order, the concept of international rules, I think is when we have to undertake. It's not going to be one administration.

And in order to do that, I think we have to reacredit it with the American people. So I hope that we'll have candidates and hopefully a president. Is that possible to do? I mean, here I'm mindful of what Murphy said because this to me is one of the deep

contradictions here. I don't think people, I don't think Americans want what we've ended up doing. And also, I mean, I was around in Washington at a time when the rules-based international order was stronger, let's call it. And it was a man who is very unpopular. I mean, we got here on a pathway that comes, I think, from in the 90s people feeling that the UN and others made it almost impossible to respond to genocides and, you know, Rwanda and Yugoslavia. It goes to, to, so, of George W. Bush after 9-11 and the feeling that America just has to do whatever it needs to and it can't be held back. And that, I think, was obviously a terrible mistake. There's a sort of amazing moment in the Obama administration where he says there's a red line if in Syria, Assad uses

chemical weapons. And then at the last minute, he says, I want congressional authorization if I'm going to do this. And he doesn't do it. And I supported that. I thought he made the right call. but I think certainly in Washington, he got an enormous amount of ongoing criticism from it, including, by the way, from Donald Trump for being weak, right? And this goes to this broader point

of like the fight over control because what you're kind of saying to people is you will get better outcomes by giving up control, by binding yourself and the power you have to these rules and these institutions

that you do not have full authority over. And you might end up up not being able to do things that you think are a good idea, that you were elected to do. And, you know, in the teeth of this moment, where we have a completely, I think, unaccountable president acting wildly, erratically recklessly, all of a sudden there's a lot of interest in, you know, should we, should Congress retake its war powers? should we, you know, reinvest energy in the UN and the World Bank and, you know, all these organizations. But it feels like we just end up a little bit on this pendulum. And this pendulum, I think, is very much, again, about control.

So how do you sell people on the idea that binding American power in rules that will bind us even when we don't want to be bound is a good idea? Yeah. I mean, first of all, you have to show people that they have to be able to feel that it's true. And let's be honest, I don't think an election is necessarily going to be won or lost on this argument. You know, it's, you know, just since you mentioned the red line comment, I think that gets to a lot of what we're seeing right now in terms of Congress taking control and taking responsibility. You know, there are some, as we see, that most, if not all Republicans, are fine with letting

Donald Trump just carry forward. I mean, they have had multiple opportunities to vote for war powers resolutions, whether it's on Venezuela, whether it's on Iran, whether it's now on Cuba. I mean, they're choosing not to take ownership. And I think this goes to a much deeper problem. It's not a problem of one president or one administration. I think it really goes to the deeper political problem of how we've just, you know, the use of military violence has become just such a regular occurrence. And I think people do have an kind of, I think, an innate understanding that it is not supposed to be this way because it is not. This is something that Congressman Crow really emphasizes in that speech you gave a cap that

I think is really correct. The first question you should ever ask a member of Congress before they ever start talking about foreign policy is, are you willing to reclaim your foreign policy powers? Our founders believed that Congress had fundamental role in our foreign policy, from trade, to treaties, to war powers, and to appropriations. For decades, Congress has ceded and given up many of those powers. Our founders knew that these things were too important to be entrusted simply to the executive, because it needed accountability to those closest to the people.

I think, I mean, let's premise here, the Iraq War is a absolute unmitigated catastrophe. And I think about the debate that led to it and the absence of debate that led to Iran. And I think that given how little support there was for Iran, you could not have gotten that vote through Congress. And so I'm not saying that having Congress will always stop you from making dumb decisions. Ultimately, Congress did give Bush power to go to war in Iraq. But nevertheless, it at least forces, it slows things down and forces a debate and forces a process that I think is valuable. And I think foreign policy can often seem very, like, hard to pin down because, well, it's Ukraine, it's Gaza, it's China, it's Venezuela. I mean, all these are different situations.

But I think something connecting many of them is that they're operating without a process that restrains the president. It's very strange to me how little the president can do on most domestic policy right now, given the filibuster and a polarized Congress and much else. And then we give him all this power on foreign policy, which of course also creates an incentive for the president when he can't get much done domestically to start trying to create a legacy through ambitious foreign policy adventurism. And that feels to me like an interesting place where something could really change. And I've seen it from Bernie Sanders, from O'Connor, from AOC, from others, a real focus on Congress should reclaim its role here. because at least forcing that through the more representative body where the American public has more say in the moment, you can imagine that as a kind of more procedurally based order that, at least to the extent it binds us it binds us domestically. I mean, I think that's right. It's not the whole story. Let's not put too much into the process. The process matters. But I do think that the criticism that some have.

made of arguments around war powers, and I tend to agree, is that, you know, for example, the problem with the Iran war is not that Trump failed to file the appropriate paperwork. It is a manifestly stupid idea from the beginning. And I think keeping that second part in mind is really important. Yes, I agree with that. I want leaders. Yes, it's important to reassert Congress's constitutional authority over military violence, but we need leaders out there articulating why this is just a horrible idea. But this is your whole argument. I mean, I agree that we need leaders, particularly why it's a horrible idea, but I think your whole argument, at least some of the rules-based argument, is it sometimes you're going to have stupid ideas. Yes. And sometimes

you're going to have stupid leaders. Yes. And the point of having rules and processes is because you don't believe you will always be governed by the wisest of philosopher kings. Absolutely. That's right. The other dimension of a lot of the foreign policy arguments I've heard from people like AOC and Sanders is the idea that you need a foreign policy that centers are working class and that foreign policy is a domestic policy on some level, that this kind of division we've created is not real.

Now, Joe Biden also said that. He said he was going to have a foreign policy for the middle class. That was a big way that he and Jake Sullivan and others expressed themselves as having a pivot from what had come before. So what is different in the way that you and others more on the Democratic Party left flank are imagining this compared to what Biden and his team were doing when they sort of announced this transformation. Yeah, and I do think that the foreign policy for the middle class

I think was good. I mean, that's something I really think that deserves praise, like, to the, you know, Trump shocked everyone by winning in 2016, and I think that the foreign policy for the middle class kind of represented a real effort, a real self-critical effort to say, what have we missed about what Americans believe and don't believe about foreign policy? I mean, in the language of recovery, the first step is admitting you have a problem. And I think that those, that, that effort was a recognition of the real problem. And I think it's, it's kind of, conclusions were represented in a speech that Jake gave at Brookings in April 2023. And this was interesting because it was the national security advisor offering essentially a speech on the global

economy, America's trade policy. And it represented a turning of the page, so to speak, from the old neoliberal era. So recognizing, first of all, that a lot of the theories that underlie that era, the idea that, okay, if we just get rid of taxes and we'd kind of let,

you know, free trade, people trade and make money and kind of constrain states from imposing, you know, restrictions and regulation. Then, you know, rising tide will lift all boats, so to speak.

That was an important recognition that, yep, you know, that turns out that's not really true. It's produced a lot of very bad consequences that have led us to this moment. But I think the question is, having acknowledged that and having come back to the idea that, yes, it is right and appropriate for governments to play a major role in shaping and guiding the economy. The question is to what end?

And I think obviously one of the main ends is to benefit the safety and prosperity of the American people, but going back to what we've talked about with China being the kind of guiding focus of the Biden administration's foreign policy, you know, I think there are a couple ways you could have gone from that speech. One is how do we really invest in a genuinely more equitable global trade order? How do we invest to, you know, build an order that protects workers not just in the United States, but empowers workers around the world, including in China and does not pose American workers and Chinese workers as in a kind of zero-sum competition with each other. And then there's the other path, which I think they took, was to say, okay, now we're

getting back involved in the economy because we are in this strategic competition with China and we now see trade as yet another weapon in a toolbox to kind of assert America in this competition. And I think that was the wrong choice. I think we need to go with Option A. So what would Option A have looked like in practical terms? What would they have not done that they did or what would they have done that they didn't do? I think certain ideas, I mean, the global minimum corporate tax is one thing that they worked on. I think discussing a global minimum wage is another thing. Just for an example, that's something that Senator Sanders has proposed for starters.

Because I think part of the challenge that we face is, you know, we have, you know, a developing world, whatever term we want to use, Global South, you know, that has very young populations. They are already engaged in shaping the global agenda. the United States needs to have a relationship with these countries. Obviously, China has done a lot of work to build its own relationships in these countries. I don't want to treat these countries as simply an arena for U.S. and China competition. But I think we need to approach this in a positive some way. What would the global minimum wage look like?

How would you apply that to a country? I was in Kenya not long ago. I mean, huge amount of Kenya is in the informal economy. Country where much of the country is very, very poor, right? and certainly not the poorest country in Africa. When you're imposing a global minimum wage on these countries, presumably with some of the stick being American trade opportunities, what does that actually look like?

Yeah, I don't know what it looks like, but I'm saying the United... Wait, these job is this? Yeah. I mean, getting the United States to propose this and putting the United States in the position... But I'm asking, is it a good idea? You have to know what it would look like to know if it's a good idea. Yeah, okay, fair question.

I'm still working on what it exactly looks like. But what I'm saying is proposing, you know, putting the United States in the position of we are not just there to extract wealth. We're not just here to empower the people that have been dominating and exploiting you. I guess maybe the question I was getting at it is, because it's interesting to me where you went with that. I think the question I was getting out there is, is the global minimum wage an effort to protect American wages or to raise other country's wages? Because those are two actually quite different projects. I mean, I think it's based on the idea that Americans' security is bound up. with the security and prosperity of others around the world.

I mean, this is not just a, you know, a high-flown bit of rhetoric. I do think it, I mean, as someone on the progressive left, that's an understanding that I bring, is that if we can diminish deprivation, disease, and suffering in other communities around the world, ultimately that is going to accrue to our own safety. I agree with that. I think the thing I'm pushing on here is,

in what way would America imposing wage standards on other countries whose economies it doesn't really understand and certainly does not directly manage, right? You know, when I do foreign economic reporting and probably when I do it from places that are poorer, I am always struck with how maddeningly hard it is to make a poor country, forget rich, just middle, middle income. And so it's like I could see a version of this that is actually, you've found another way to talk about a kind of protectionism because we're not going to do trade with countries that can undercut our wages by a certain amount. That's not going to help those countries. That will hurt them.

I think that's right. But ultimately, ideally, this wouldn't be just the United States saying we're doing this by ourselves. This would be something the United States could work with other countries, including China on, to propose. But this is also a place where the foreign policy for the middle class ideas that Biden had some ones I read from Sanders and AOC and others, it seems to me that people don't always define clearly what it is the middle class wants. And one thing I think we've seen in recent years is, yes, the middle class, the working class, the country wants good jobs and good wages. And also they want things to be cheap. And people talk about the era of neoliberalism now as a sort of a huge failure. And I think one thing we've seen is that whether it was a failure

in some respects or not, and I think in many respects it was, people like. People like, the cheap goods. And being in this extended period where post-pandemic and then in the Trump tariff regimes and, you know, the Russia invasion of Ukraine on energy prices and then the attack in Iran, people are very angry about goods getting

more expensive. And we could have much cheaper electric vehicles in this country if we would let the Chinese electric vehicles in. The Biden administration put huge tariffs on those to make sure we couldn't have those. But then also people were very mad about the cost of cars in that same period. And so,

So there is this hard balancing of you can do quite a lot, actually, to protect American jobs and industries by making trade harder or raising the various forms of standards, wage, floors, et cetera, within our trading regimes by walling off parts of the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut. But then you make things here more expensive. And then you get hit from the other side. and the middle class is like, I feel stretched, right? So how is somebody who's been part of these discussions about a foreign policy for the middle class? Do you balance the effort to protect jobs, the effort to raise wages, and also the now demonstrated fury that people have when tradable goods increase in price?

Yeah. I mean, I think part of it is the, you know, people are outraged not just at the rising cost, but they're outraged to the idea they're being nickel and dined for everything, you know, whether it's for health care, whether it's for. education, as I talked about earlier, I mean, every step, it seems like someone is extracting some little bit of value from everything that you do. I think in order to address this question, we really have to take a bigger look at our entire social safety net or lack of one. I mean, I think, you know... That feels to me like a dodge. I agree with you that we need to improve our social safety net and get rid of junk fees and things. But on these questions like trade, you'll have a direct

question. Like, you can make things cheaper by taking down the tariffs on China. you could make them more expensive by increasing the tariffs on China. Those things might have meaningful effects on American manufacturing jobs and wages. The question of what you're prioritizing, like, feels like that feels like a fair question. I think it is a fair question, and I don't think it's a dodge because I do think that part of what we lack right now is a sense of a common project. I mean, people feel that they're just being victimized and exploited. They don't have a voice. They're susceptible to demagogues like Donald Trump who come in and say,

say, listen, I will be the instrument of your righteous grievance. So again, I'm not going to say that we can tee up a good argument, restore America's, you know, the shared sense of the American project, and people suddenly won't care about rising prices of goods. But I do think that is part of the answer, is just addressing the idea that people just feel like they're getting hit with costs all over the place. These problems go back a long time, but I think the crisis that we're in right now is a legitimation crisis. People just don't feel that the systems under which they live are representing their interests, are really delivering for them. And I know this is a much bigger problem than I have an answer for, but I think that recognizing the conversations that we're having about foreign policy,

you know, we can propose all the good ideas we want for how America should act in the world. But if they're not rooted in an actual durable political consensus, they will fall apart. I think one interesting, like maybe the sub-theme of some of what we've just been talking about is, is what you're trying to build here, a left nationalism or a left internationalism? And the reason I ask it like that is that there have been some moments where what I've sort of heard is a, you know, very much a rising tide lifts all boats that, you know, America can be out there making other countries more stable, richer, more prosperous. That would, you know, rebound to our benefit as well. You know, and then there's also a question about our common project. There are a lot of policy tools that I think are, I mean, it's not all zero-sum, but some of it is about privileging American workers over people in other countries.

And I think that's a very reasonable thing for a national community to do, privileging American industries over industries and other countries. But there are choices on the margin of these two projects. Sure. How do you see that? I mean, I see myself very much as a left internationalist. But I also recognize that to develop a durable and solidaristic internationalism, it has to be rooted in an American domestic political consensus. And a lot of Americans, probably most Americans, for very good reason, are mainly interested in themselves, their family, their community. And in order to kind of offer a workable foreign policy that people will support, it has to, I have to show, and leaders have to show, we have to show that it is answering those concerns. What does that imply for how America and Americans understand the relationship, the competition, whatever you want to call it with China?

You know, you earlier were sort of critiquing the idea that our relationship with China should be built on maintaining America and primacy. But if not that, then what? Like, how do you understand what we want vis-sive China? I mean, first, we have to understand we need to coexist with China. China has a huge economy. it is already a major player on the global stage. And I think there's a school of thought in Washington who believe that China's ultimate goal

is to supplant the United States and to reshape the global order in its image. I'm less convinced of that. But for me, the question always comes down to, okay, what does the United States want? We're going to need to find ways to cooperate with China. There are going to be areas where we have competition. There's going to be areas where we have conflict.

but I think the problem with defining the relationship as competition is one that eventually will lead to conflict. And I do think it's interesting. I mean, Donald Trump, a lot of people were surprised, including me, given that in his first administration, he is really the one who made China the focus. And Washington very, very quickly shifted focus to that. And Biden picked up the ball in his presidency. And interesting Trump, when he came back, relatively little attention on China. compared to what a lot of people assume would be the case, given how prominent was in his first administration. And I think you saw some of that reflected in the recent summit.

If anything, you know, I think we should be conciliatory. He was very conciliatory because I think Xi has shown him that China has cards to play. The United States simply cannot assert its will on China. And that's a reality that I think Washington needs to grasp, is that we don't get to just set the rules and have China follow them at the same time. I haven't really seen evidence that China just wants to supplant the United States. I see China acting within an order that the United States essentially help develop. And I think we can work with that. Should American primacy be a goal? I think the question is, is American primacy necessary to keep Americans safe, prosperous, and free?

And I don't think it is. I mean, I want an America that is powerful. I want an America that is influential. I want an America that can advance, you know, the safety of the American people. And as I conceive of that safety, it involves, you know, promoting safety and prosperity in other communities around the world. And then how does that make you think about immigration? You know, there's this interview I did many years ago with Bernie Sanders that always goes around, where I asked about open borders. And he's like, no, no, that's a Coke by this plot. I think if you take global poverty, that's seriously, it leads you to conclusions. that in the U.S. are considered out of political bounds, things like sharply raising the level

of immigration we permit, even up to the, up to a level of open borders, about sharply increasing even more than boarders. That's a Coke brothers proposal. Really? Of course. I mean, that's a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. I think people thought that I was asking him that because I support open borders rather than I was interested in what he would say.

But the reason I asked him that is that I have always thought the question. of immigration is very hard on the left. Because if you have solidarity with people in other countries, people who are trying to come here because their countries are unsafe, people are trying to come here because the money is here, because the better jobs are here, because you can make a better life for your family here, and you actually do believe in the equal dignity of all people, it becomes hard to say, well, why shouldn't we let you in? Like the limiting principle of immigration at a moral level is a very difficult one. And I think it's more difficult on the left. when there's less of a kind of bounding nationalism.

But I think immigration is a much more central question in our policy, foreign policy than it was, and it is very tied up with a foreign policy for the middle class. I mean, and it's also tied up in this question of control. I think part of what people hated about the border under Biden was he was out of control. So what should the left's position on immigration be? And I think a left's position should be that, you know,

we need a legal and orderly system for people to immigrate here. But it's also based on understanding that we have long been a nation of immigrants. And I don't think that's just a slogan. Listen, I'm the son of an immigrant. They too. This country gave my family a lot. This country let my family in when they were fleeing war. That's true of so many other families right now today.

That means a lot to me about, you know, that's part of being American. as I define it. In addition, I think there's clear evidence that immigrants are a driver of economic growth. This country is stronger and more prosperous because of immigrants. So I think we need leaders who are willing to make that positive case while acknowledging, yes, of course, we need to enforce the law. We need people to apply for asylum and migration legally. Unfortunately, it's one of these many issues that seems to have just become, you know, just an issue in the culture war.

But I think that the, I think there are two questions here that are hard and that Democrats are going to have to come up with an answer for, Democrats of all stripes. One is ideally how many people should immigrate here, including legally. You know, in the first term, Trump would often fuzz was he talking about illegal immigration or legal migration? Yeah. True and I was talking about all immigration. Yes. Right. He doesn't want basically anybody coming into this country.

I mean, not literally nobody, but they have, what they meant by seal the border was. White South Africans are welcome. Yeah, white South Africans are welcome. So there's that. There's also the problem that the Biden administration faced. I mean, Kamala Harris took heat when, you know, she went and said, like, our message to you, I'm paraphrasing here is don't come here right now. I think that's an actual quote.

I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking. about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexical border. Do not come. Do not come. And one of the things that I think we saw in the Biden administration was when the broad impression was that we were very, very friendly, the immigrants coming here, that a lot of people came, you know. And so, you know, part of how Trump closed the border is a pulse of cruelty, like a constant impulsive cruelty. And for the Biden demonstration, they lost control in part because they, I think,

were caught between the desire for an orderly border, which they did desire, and the belief in kindness. Like, that seems harder to balance. No, it clearly is. I think part of it is also addressing, you know, the sources of anger and grievance that drive support for dramatic crackdowns on immigration. idea that people believe that now these immigrants are coming and unfairly taking what's mine. They're coming and changing the way that I have to live. I think there's a way to address that. That has to be part of the debate we have on reordering our immigration system. And then I want to end on this, because it's already, I think, a very unifying idea for Democrats, but the question of how to make it tangible is harder. You, like many others I've seen, have said

that corruption and probably anti-corruption should be at the center of foreign policy. that we should understand that as a domestic question, we should understand it as a foreign question, and that Democrats, particularly as the Trump era wears on, should find a way to make that core to their vision of the world. So how do you make that core to your vision of the world? What does it look like to center that

in the way you've been describing? Yeah. I mean, I think this goes back to the kind of key claim that we discussed earlier, Trump's refrain that the system is rigged. And again, this system is rigged. People can see it and feel it. I mean, there are ideas that we have and we've put out there as for like international efforts against kleptocracy, closing down international money laundering for which the United States is a main destination.

I mean, who knew that trusts in South Dakota would be one of the main ways that kleptocrats abroad hid their money. But South Dakota apparently very popular. But I think starting here. with campaign finance. And I know that's a tall order. We've got Supreme Court rulings that have determined that money equals speech. But I think teeing up a conversation about what Congress can actually do to change the laws around campaign finance, it may take a constitutional amendment. And again, given our political polarization, that sounds completely unrealistic. But I think Americans will really respond to an argument that really addresses their sense of,

of loss of control, that elites have taken control of a system for their own benefit, not for the of a country, the country at large. And I think one of the best messengers on this has been George's John Ossoff, who seems to drop an amazing video on this every couple months. And I think something he said, you know, a few months ago that really struck me, he was like, even before Donald Trump came on the scene, the United States was the most corrupt modern democracy. And I think that's true. And I think, you know, getting out there on that message is a way to start addressing this. And so, but you think the way, I agree with you that the way to start in the domestic scene is campaign finance reform. And I also agree that, look, it's hard to change a constitution,

hard to change the Supreme Court. But you can build a politics as the right did on overturning row on an extended long-term effort to do that. And you can eventually succeed. And there's a lot you can do on that particular issue in the meantime, too. But in terms of foreign policy, what does it mean to make that? Are the people we don't work with? I mean, you know, one thing I remember seeing with the Biden administration was that they were holding Saudi Arabia a little bit more arm's length, and then oil prices started to go up. Then all of a sudden, they felt they couldn't anymore. And so all the questions of human rights abuses and other things began to dissolve. And that often is where I watch our foreign policy shift away from values. People have good intentions, but then there

are other things that the American middle class wants, right? The American working class wants, like cheap oil, that means you're working with autocratic strongmen in highly corrupt countries. So what happens when the values you want to put forward and center in your foreign policy conflict with the things that, you know, you believe the American people want and can only be, got at the price they want, you know, from working with these countries. I mean, again, it's going to sound like a punt, but I'll acknowledge, yeah, there's going to be tradeoffs. There's going to be decisions you have to make. Sometimes you're going to prioritize those values. Sometimes you're going to have to kind of back foot them a little. I guess I'd have to look at the

particular situation to give an answer. But I would say internationally, you know, the United States is a major destination for global collectocrats, as is UK. I would say the U.S. and U.S. and U.K. can do a I mean, even from where we're sitting here in New York, you know, a lot of these buildings are just, you know, their parking spaces for ill-gotten gains. The same is true of London. I think the U.S. and U.S. and U.K., just addressing their own houses could start to have an international impact. I know that's separate from the question you're asking, but I do think that is a way to internationalize in any corruption policy. I think that some of these issues we're talking about, it raises this question of where is the line between domestic and foreign policy? partly when we're talking about a foreign policy for the middle class, like how do you think about what falls in one bucket, what falls in the other, what's in the wrong bucket, is buckets even the right metaphor?

Yeah, I don't have a great answer to it. I think a lot of the things we talk about, I mean, I'll say this, I think we talk about foreign policy in ways that we don't often recognize as foreign policy, like when we talk about immigration. There are obviously huge international implications for immigration, climate, obviously same thing. America's foreign policies impact these things. Global trade, global economics, jobs here. These all have a foreign policy component. And this is, again, something that I did appreciate about, you know, when I mentioned the Biden administration's global economic approach,

they ceded that as a part of foreign policy, trade was not over here and foreign policy over here. These things are deeply connected. I think, I guess the way I would try to answer, it is to say whenever we are talking about foreign policy, whether it's about the Middle East, whether it's about Russia, Ukraine, at least being mindful of, okay, how does this actually serve American communities? Even if every speech doesn't necessarily have to have that paragraph, you need to be able to answer it. What do you think about places where, I'm trying to think about the right way to frame this, that it doesn't serve American communities, but it is important elsewhere. And I'm thinking here about possibly interventions in humanitarian crises, certain forms of

foreign aid. Obviously, the Trump administration has really gutted foreign aid. How do you think about those moments when you kind of can't say our foreign policy is actually a domestic policy? We're actually doing these things because morally we think it is good. We are a rich country. We are a powerful country. And we are going to use some of that power elsewhere. Yeah, I think there are going to be cases like that. And we need a president who's able to articulate that strongly to the American people. I think a lot of Americans, are receptive to that, but they need to hear a convincing argument for why this is doing the right thing, even if that doesn't end with and here's how it's going to create new jobs in your community.

Like I said, I think Americans generally want the country to do good. That doesn't mean we need to get up in everyone's business all over the place all the place all the time. But I think when they're, you know, for example, I think it's very interesting how fairly steady support for Ukraine's defense has stayed, despite Donald Trump taking a very different approach to it than Joe Biden to say the least, I think there is something about the justice and the morality of helping a country defend itself from the aggression of a more powerful neighbor that Americans get, even if they might not connect it directly to how that's good for them in their community and their family. I think it's a good place to end.

Always our final question. What are three books to recommend to the audience? Well, the first is, you know, you mentioned, Senator Chris Murphy in his new book, The Crisis of the Common Good, I've just been reading. And I really, I really recommend it because, as I said, I think Senator Murphy has been one, someone who has really articulated a strong theory of the case of what really ails our politics, the loss of a sense of community, the idea that these systems are out of control and they are unaccountable, the idea that just wealth is being extracted from us at every step and what it takes to rebuild a share. sense of purpose. Recommend that one. The second one is by journalist Susie Hanson. It's called From Life itself.

It's a book about Turkey through just exploring one neighborhood in Istanbul that she's reported on over 10 years how this neighborhood changed, the influx of immigrants, refugees from Syria, looking at the country's politics, obviously the ride of Erdogan and the AKP, how Turkey's democracy has changed and diminished. And the last one is book by Leonard Cohen. It's called Book of Mercy. So my mom recently passed away. She was, among other things, a woman of deep religious faith.

And I was raised in the church. And when I was younger, I remember I've just been thinking. about the time we would spend talking about the Bible and the book of Psalms was a particular favorite of ours, the Psalms of King David and the Book of Mercy, or just Book of Mercy is what it's called. It's by Leonard Cohen, who people will know as a famous songwriter and singer, but this is a book of modern Psalms. And like all of Cohen's work, it struggles with pain and beauty and suffering and meaning. And it's just been something that I shared with her in her last months, but has also been a great deal to me as I've been dealing with this

and as I struggle with what this all means. Matt does. Thank you very much. Thank you. This episode of Isfranches produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Julie Beer. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelt, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Marie Cassione,

Annie Galvin, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kellebeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amun Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience Tragedy by Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.