Progressives Can’t Afford to Spend the Next 4 Years Just Playing Defense

The imminent return to the White House of someone as opposed to progressive values as Donald Trump might seem like an odd moment to point to a silver lining, but bear with me. The Democratic establishment has once again screwed it up. The Very Serious People have been shown to be not very serious at all. They got the administration they wanted. They ran the campaign they wanted. And they failed again. This is perhaps even more true on foreign policy than in other areas, given that’s where the Biden administration was the most resistant to progressive influence and the most reluctant to break from decades-old orthodoxy. Not coincidentally, it’s also the area of Biden’s most calamitous and consequential failures, Gaza foremost among them.

Now progressives have an opportunity to chart a new course, to define a foreign policy more fit for the United States, and the world, of today. As we begin, it’s worth sifting through the Biden administration’s record for policies worth preserving—because there are some. The most significant is his break from the neoliberal economic and trade policies that enriched multinational corporations at the expense of American workers. Ending the Afghanistan war and diminishing drone strikes were also important. And Biden steered Washington toward a better relationship with Latin America (his administration’s work in helping avert a possible coup in Brazil should not be forgotten). These are all praiseworthy moves that we should continue to defend and build on.

Just as we decide which Biden policies are the baby and which are the bathwater, we should do the same for Trump. While we absolutely must not understate the danger that a Trump restoration poses to our democracy, we also need to avoid thinking that reflexive resistance to anything Trump does is an effective way to defend democracy.

Trump claims to want to end wars. Let’s be prepared to do what we can to see that he does. Rather than treat his diplomatic initiatives as a chance to attack Trump as “weak”—which too many Democrats made the mistake of doing in 2018 when he met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—the left should be prepared to support talks with adversaries (so long as Trump isn’t putting his personal interests above those of the country, of course). The Iranian government has indicated an openness to talking with the US. We should hope Trump reciprocates, rather than squandering such an opportunity early in his administration, as Biden did. Peace in Ukraine? Yes, great, but we should be clear that the terms of that peace will matter. (Robert Farley and I recently published an article in Foreign Policy laying out parameters for a durable ceasefire that upholds Ukraine’s security and independence.)

Though Trump postures as a champion of the working man, he is more likely to unleash the most predatory forms of capitalism on America’s workers, displacing their resulting anger onto disfavored minorities and foreign enemies. However, if he shows any willingness to build a genuinely more equitable post-neoliberal agenda, we should encourage him. Like Bernie Sanders, Trump has long claimed “the system is rigged”—and he’s right, though obviously it’s rigged on behalf of wealthy elites like Trump. Let’s call his bluff, though, and offer to work together to unrig the system, starting with campaign finance reform.

At the same time, we must oppose the many dangerous and inhumane policies that Trump has promised: mass deportations, a new Muslim ban, war with Mexico, the imposition of new sanctions on a whole range of countries, and the general recklessness that brought our country to the brink of war multiple times during his first presidency.

We can’t just play defense, though. Progressive Democrats need to offer a genuine alternative vision for our country’s role in the world, one that recognizes that our security and prosperity are bound up with the security and prosperity of communities around the world and therefore seeks to build a more equitable and solidaristic global community—a rules-based order, but for real this time. We need to ensure that the next Democratic administration is committed to a new, more progressive foreign policy consensus and does not, as Biden did, simply split the difference between Trump and the old consensus.

We should go about this work with confidence, remembering that the progressive left has been correct on all the key foreign policy issues of the past several decades: the impact of corporate-dominated globalization (November was the 25th anniversary of the labor- and environmentalist-led protests that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999, which the Washington mainstream mocked—they’ve gotten the memo now); the Iraq war; the War on Terror. And for the past 14 months, we’ve been right about Gaza. The same people who scoffed at all those positions are the ones who just drove the Democratic Party into a ditch. We shouldn’t let them, or anyone, forget it.