Donald Trump is putting America and the world in danger with outrageous and inconsistent international gambits—from his attack on Iran, to the gutting of USAID, to his unbroken support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, to his extrajudicial assassinations and illegal deportations.
Yet in foreign policy as in domestic, Trump’s opponents have so far failed to do much more than chase at his heels with reactive objections as he recklessly plows ahead.
It’s clear that progressives need a drastically new approach—an entirely new vision for foreign policy. This vision should be built around a foundation with three core features: the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability.
These features are the underpinnings of the Blueprint for a Progressive U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East that Century International published a year ago, which included a detailed menu of actions for a prospective presidential administration looking to overcome the stagnation and popular rejection of America’s forever-warrior status quo.
The political landscape is drastically different in the fall of 2025, and our Blueprint hardly stands a chance of being enacted as policy within the next three years. But its animating logic is now more relevant than ever—and urgent.
However, the resurrection of a progressive foreign policy vision will require much more than the policies that Century International has already enumerated. Progressives need to embrace the messy process of creating new ideas and a clear agenda; to be effective, they should welcome friction and fierce debate as necessary ingredients of powerful and galvanizing policy proposals.
Staring Down Generational Defeat
Trump’s audacious approach to international affairs raises a question that is familiar from his domestic agenda: How can the president get away with policies that harm so many American resources and institutions, and put so many Americans at risk, without suffering significant political consequences?
Some critics of Trump’s policies argue that his opposition simply needs to “have a backbone.” Rousing as this call may be, it misses the true source of progressives’ weakness in the face of the Trump foreign policy agenda: they lack a unified and compelling vision of America’s role in the world.
Progressives don’t have a theory of the case, at least not in any organized collective fashion.
The fact is that, when it comes to foreign policy, there are often only marginal differences between policymakers across the American ideological spectrum. This is especially true in the Middle East, where at least fifty years of American policy has treated the region as a chessboard where international laws and rights are mere speedbumps to be negotiated, but not respected. It’s little wonder that American policy in the Middle East remains such a font of problems for U.S. politicians and policymakers—American voters sniff out and reject hypocrisy even when they are not experts on the region, all the more so when they perceive that it somehow poses a danger.
The costs are layered but staggering. American foreign policy has spawned persistent violence and authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa. That disorder has hobbled American soft power abroad, while draining progressive political constituencies at home. Careless and overmilitarized U.S. policies in the Middle East have also eroded the core progressive agenda to bring economic security to the bottom 99 percent in America; the resources and political capital to build a strong social safety net require an efficient and effective foreign policy that keeps Americans safe without breaking the bank.
Progressives don’t have a theory of the case, at least not in any organized collective fashion. Across the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations, military spending has accounted for a huge chunk of the federal budget (currently about 13 percent of the total) and around half of the discretionary spending. Endless wars monopolize White House attention.
Even in areas of foreign policy with clearer differentiation between the left and right, progressives are on weak footing. Take the destruction of USAID. It’s an obvious catastrophe for global public health and American influence, not to mention for the millions of people around the world who depend on international aid just to survive. But progressives have been hamstrung in their attempts to present a counterargument, both because of the long-running, deep contradictions in U.S. foreign policy, and because they don’t have a credible, broader foreign policy vision.
Now, progressives are staring down the prospect of a generational defeat of their ideals and the dismantling of international norms and institutions that were paid for with the blood and treasure of two world wars. It is time to make a radical and decisive change in strategy. Progressives need to mobilize for a new vision of American foreign policy that is clear, coherent, and deeply grounded in values and ethics—and the American interest, properly understood.
Creating a new movement is a tremendous amount of work. But progressives are now frozen out of national decision-making anyway, and can treat their situation as an opportunity to rebuild from within. Trump’s pointless brinksmanship is revealing the fundamental dysfunctions of American exceptionalism with a history that goes back decades. As the costs of the administration’s approach become more apparent, and progressives realize that they have little more to lose, they may finally be spurred to bolder action.
Trump Didn’t Start the Fire
For Americans who value international justice and diplomacy over war, it’s dismaying to take stock of how deeply the United States has turned away from its core values and principles. In just eight months, Trump 2.0 has spawned disasters in almost every policy area that progressives hold dear, domestic and international. But Trump’s foreign policy didn’t emerge from a vacuum; it was built on bad choices by all his predecessors since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Trump has already taken many egregious actions, from his illegal bombing of Iran to his coddling of Israel, flippant proposals to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and flip-flopping on Ukraine. But at least as far as short-term effects go, he has been able to blunder ahead with few acute consequences for the United States or for his administration’s popularity. And he hasn’t acted in foreign policy with much more illegality or immorality than half a dozen previous administrations of both political parties.
For instance, there is a long list of military interventions by former U.S. presidents that, like this summer’s attack on Iran, had no Congressional approval or a tenuous connection to such approval: George H. W. Bush in Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton in Sudan, Somalia, and the Balkans; Barack Obama in Libya. Trump’s bombing of Iran was, legally speaking, of a piece with all of these (that is to say, it did not have U.S. Congressional approval). It was just astronomically riskier and of dubious strategic value.
Trump’s callousness about international rights and justice has a long American precedent, though most American leaders have not been so coarse in their expression.
Similarly, Trump’s callousness about international rights and justice has a long American precedent, though most American leaders have not been so coarse in their expression. Joe Biden funded Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza for more than a year, but paid lip service to Palestinian rights. Trump has continued that funding but has also fantasized about ethnically cleansing Gaza. The rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability: these qualities for many decades have only been temporary features of U.S. foreign policy, often touted as the basis of American exceptionalism but put into practice only when convenient.
It’s as if Trump is malevolently caricaturing the excesses of his predecessors, and demonstrating what the logic of American exceptionalism looks like when pushed to its limit by a parochial leader with no interest in norms, decorum, or alliances. Much of Trump’s foreign policy is broadly consistent with American history—minus the flowery language and moral grandstanding. (This likely accounts for some of his appeal among his base.)
Still, make no mistake: Trump’s foreign policy is on a course to disaster. These policies have been chaotic and reckless, and there will, obviously, be a price to pay. The amount of ill will that Trump is generating around the world, and the number of unknown variables he is unleashing, cannot be cost-free. Further, to the degree that the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability once constituted an American vision, they held out the possibility of a better American role in the world, and a springboard for eventual political movement. The Trump administration is quickly destroying that possibility, by erasing the vision of an American foreign policy based on principles—however poorly realized that vision was.
What Does America Stand For?
Broadly, there are two missions facing progressives seeking to rebuild a compelling foreign policy vision.
One is articulating a top-line statement about what America should stand for in the world. This statement can’t be mere opposition to Trump or any other figure or agenda. It must be positive and objective—a rallying cry that points to the overlap between American values, American interests, and human progress.
Secondly, and just as importantly, progressives must promote a set of clearly stated foreign policy objectives that stand up to an integrity test when compared to the values they espouse (the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability). Century International already enumerated a list of these policies in last year’s Blueprint, such as power through diplomacy rather than war; restoring America’s moral leadership by ending hypocritical policies like Guantanamo; joining the International Criminal Court; taking multilateral action on climate change, including by helping to fund a just energy transition; and supporting a just and durable peace for Palestinians and Israelis.
But the work facing progressives is now much bigger than we anticipated with last year’s Blueprint. Trump is building an ICE deportation machine that has more funding than any other law enforcement agency in the country. With its personal loyalty to Trump and plainly politically motivated crackdowns and stunts, ICE is behaving like a MAGA militia. Meanwhile, not only has Trump not shut down Guantanamo, but he’s also claimed the power to kill drug smugglers as if they were enemy combatants. So much for accountability and the rule of law.
And the administration is expunging the mere mention of climate change in federal documents. It has cut aid not just from supposedly controversial areas like energy transition or climate, but from all manner of projects with a direct and heretofore unquestioned connection to America’s global interests, such as heading off pandemics.
This onslaught of institutional destruction means that progressives need to establish transparent and inclusive processes to finally address the long-simmering political debates over all the crucial foreign policy issues: Israel, Palestine, nukes, sanctions, when to go to war and when to negotiate, and more. For too many decades, Congress has avoided exercising any of its powers, most importantly its power to decide when America goes to war. Progressives have deferred divisive fights again and again, resulting in a distorted order wherein elected officials endorse policies fatally out of step with their constituents, like forever war and Israel’s unending assault on Gaza. The architects of failed foreign policy of the past should not be the ones designing progressive foreign policy visions for the future.
Time to Evolve
Disheartening as Trump’s movement is for progressives, it does contain certain lessons. It is worth remembering that, for several years this century, conservatives found themselves on their heels as mainstream views pushed their foreign policy approach to the margins. Americans ultimately rejected the Iraq war and the philosophy of the War on Terror, for example, and began to question free trade absolutism. In response, the right pivoted away from neoconservatism and came together behind the vision of Project 2025—a document that is cruel, xenophobic, and regressive in every way, but which is also coherent and compelling, such as it is.
Progressives can undergo a similar evolution in their approach to foreign policy—but unlike Project 2025, for good rather than harm. They must be willing to confront and then shed the aspects of their policies that are hypocritical, incomplete, contradictory, or simply not working. They must finally disavow forever wars. They must stand up to Israeli hawks. They must freshly articulate the imperative—and relative cheapness—of providing humanitarian and development aid. They must recapture the moral high ground in all aspects of international affairs. To achieve all of this, they need transparent consultation with constituents that delivers an agenda at the intersection of values and interests.
But progressives need to act quickly. As the months tick by, the international order will complete its collapse, and the few remaining restraints on untrammeled military intervention will disappear. A just solution for Palestine and Israel will hardly matter if Gazans have already been expelled and the West Bank ethnically cleansed and annexed. Progressives, now completely estranged from power, can hold themselves accountable for their own share of the post-9/11 fiascos—by embracing a just American foreign policy built on the country’s most idealistic values.
Header Image: President Donald Trump stands and salutes troops during the celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday on the National Mall on June 14, 2025, in Washington, DC. Source: Doug Mills—Pool/Getty Images
Tags: donald trump, U.S. Foreign Policy, progressive foreign policy
Progressives Can Lead With a Just Foreign Policy. First, They Must Confront Their Mistakes.
Donald Trump is putting America and the world in danger with outrageous and inconsistent international gambits—from his attack on Iran, to the gutting of USAID, to his unbroken support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, to his extrajudicial assassinations and illegal deportations.
Yet in foreign policy as in domestic, Trump’s opponents have so far failed to do much more than chase at his heels with reactive objections as he recklessly plows ahead.
It’s clear that progressives need a drastically new approach—an entirely new vision for foreign policy. This vision should be built around a foundation with three core features: the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability.
These features are the underpinnings of the Blueprint for a Progressive U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East that Century International published a year ago, which included a detailed menu of actions for a prospective presidential administration looking to overcome the stagnation and popular rejection of America’s forever-warrior status quo.
The political landscape is drastically different in the fall of 2025, and our Blueprint hardly stands a chance of being enacted as policy within the next three years. But its animating logic is now more relevant than ever—and urgent.
However, the resurrection of a progressive foreign policy vision will require much more than the policies that Century International has already enumerated. Progressives need to embrace the messy process of creating new ideas and a clear agenda; to be effective, they should welcome friction and fierce debate as necessary ingredients of powerful and galvanizing policy proposals.
Staring Down Generational Defeat
Trump’s audacious approach to international affairs raises a question that is familiar from his domestic agenda: How can the president get away with policies that harm so many American resources and institutions, and put so many Americans at risk, without suffering significant political consequences?
Some critics of Trump’s policies argue that his opposition simply needs to “have a backbone.” Rousing as this call may be, it misses the true source of progressives’ weakness in the face of the Trump foreign policy agenda: they lack a unified and compelling vision of America’s role in the world.
The fact is that, when it comes to foreign policy, there are often only marginal differences between policymakers across the American ideological spectrum. This is especially true in the Middle East, where at least fifty years of American policy has treated the region as a chessboard where international laws and rights are mere speedbumps to be negotiated, but not respected. It’s little wonder that American policy in the Middle East remains such a font of problems for U.S. politicians and policymakers—American voters sniff out and reject hypocrisy even when they are not experts on the region, all the more so when they perceive that it somehow poses a danger.
The costs are layered but staggering. American foreign policy has spawned persistent violence and authoritarianism in the Middle East and North Africa. That disorder has hobbled American soft power abroad, while draining progressive political constituencies at home. Careless and overmilitarized U.S. policies in the Middle East have also eroded the core progressive agenda to bring economic security to the bottom 99 percent in America; the resources and political capital to build a strong social safety net require an efficient and effective foreign policy that keeps Americans safe without breaking the bank.
Progressives don’t have a theory of the case, at least not in any organized collective fashion. Across the Obama, Biden, and Trump administrations, military spending has accounted for a huge chunk of the federal budget (currently about 13 percent of the total) and around half of the discretionary spending. Endless wars monopolize White House attention.
Even in areas of foreign policy with clearer differentiation between the left and right, progressives are on weak footing. Take the destruction of USAID. It’s an obvious catastrophe for global public health and American influence, not to mention for the millions of people around the world who depend on international aid just to survive. But progressives have been hamstrung in their attempts to present a counterargument, both because of the long-running, deep contradictions in U.S. foreign policy, and because they don’t have a credible, broader foreign policy vision.
Now, progressives are staring down the prospect of a generational defeat of their ideals and the dismantling of international norms and institutions that were paid for with the blood and treasure of two world wars. It is time to make a radical and decisive change in strategy. Progressives need to mobilize for a new vision of American foreign policy that is clear, coherent, and deeply grounded in values and ethics—and the American interest, properly understood.
Creating a new movement is a tremendous amount of work. But progressives are now frozen out of national decision-making anyway, and can treat their situation as an opportunity to rebuild from within. Trump’s pointless brinksmanship is revealing the fundamental dysfunctions of American exceptionalism with a history that goes back decades. As the costs of the administration’s approach become more apparent, and progressives realize that they have little more to lose, they may finally be spurred to bolder action.
Trump Didn’t Start the Fire
For Americans who value international justice and diplomacy over war, it’s dismaying to take stock of how deeply the United States has turned away from its core values and principles. In just eight months, Trump 2.0 has spawned disasters in almost every policy area that progressives hold dear, domestic and international. But Trump’s foreign policy didn’t emerge from a vacuum; it was built on bad choices by all his predecessors since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Trump has already taken many egregious actions, from his illegal bombing of Iran to his coddling of Israel, flippant proposals to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and flip-flopping on Ukraine. But at least as far as short-term effects go, he has been able to blunder ahead with few acute consequences for the United States or for his administration’s popularity. And he hasn’t acted in foreign policy with much more illegality or immorality than half a dozen previous administrations of both political parties.
For instance, there is a long list of military interventions by former U.S. presidents that, like this summer’s attack on Iran, had no Congressional approval or a tenuous connection to such approval: George H. W. Bush in Panama and Somalia; Bill Clinton in Sudan, Somalia, and the Balkans; Barack Obama in Libya. Trump’s bombing of Iran was, legally speaking, of a piece with all of these (that is to say, it did not have U.S. Congressional approval). It was just astronomically riskier and of dubious strategic value.
Similarly, Trump’s callousness about international rights and justice has a long American precedent, though most American leaders have not been so coarse in their expression. Joe Biden funded Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza for more than a year, but paid lip service to Palestinian rights. Trump has continued that funding but has also fantasized about ethnically cleansing Gaza. The rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability: these qualities for many decades have only been temporary features of U.S. foreign policy, often touted as the basis of American exceptionalism but put into practice only when convenient.
It’s as if Trump is malevolently caricaturing the excesses of his predecessors, and demonstrating what the logic of American exceptionalism looks like when pushed to its limit by a parochial leader with no interest in norms, decorum, or alliances. Much of Trump’s foreign policy is broadly consistent with American history—minus the flowery language and moral grandstanding. (This likely accounts for some of his appeal among his base.)
Still, make no mistake: Trump’s foreign policy is on a course to disaster. These policies have been chaotic and reckless, and there will, obviously, be a price to pay. The amount of ill will that Trump is generating around the world, and the number of unknown variables he is unleashing, cannot be cost-free. Further, to the degree that the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability once constituted an American vision, they held out the possibility of a better American role in the world, and a springboard for eventual political movement. The Trump administration is quickly destroying that possibility, by erasing the vision of an American foreign policy based on principles—however poorly realized that vision was.
What Does America Stand For?
Broadly, there are two missions facing progressives seeking to rebuild a compelling foreign policy vision.
One is articulating a top-line statement about what America should stand for in the world. This statement can’t be mere opposition to Trump or any other figure or agenda. It must be positive and objective—a rallying cry that points to the overlap between American values, American interests, and human progress.
Secondly, and just as importantly, progressives must promote a set of clearly stated foreign policy objectives that stand up to an integrity test when compared to the values they espouse (the rule of law, moral clarity, and accountability). Century International already enumerated a list of these policies in last year’s Blueprint, such as power through diplomacy rather than war; restoring America’s moral leadership by ending hypocritical policies like Guantanamo; joining the International Criminal Court; taking multilateral action on climate change, including by helping to fund a just energy transition; and supporting a just and durable peace for Palestinians and Israelis.
But the work facing progressives is now much bigger than we anticipated with last year’s Blueprint. Trump is building an ICE deportation machine that has more funding than any other law enforcement agency in the country. With its personal loyalty to Trump and plainly politically motivated crackdowns and stunts, ICE is behaving like a MAGA militia. Meanwhile, not only has Trump not shut down Guantanamo, but he’s also claimed the power to kill drug smugglers as if they were enemy combatants. So much for accountability and the rule of law.
And the administration is expunging the mere mention of climate change in federal documents. It has cut aid not just from supposedly controversial areas like energy transition or climate, but from all manner of projects with a direct and heretofore unquestioned connection to America’s global interests, such as heading off pandemics.
This onslaught of institutional destruction means that progressives need to establish transparent and inclusive processes to finally address the long-simmering political debates over all the crucial foreign policy issues: Israel, Palestine, nukes, sanctions, when to go to war and when to negotiate, and more. For too many decades, Congress has avoided exercising any of its powers, most importantly its power to decide when America goes to war. Progressives have deferred divisive fights again and again, resulting in a distorted order wherein elected officials endorse policies fatally out of step with their constituents, like forever war and Israel’s unending assault on Gaza. The architects of failed foreign policy of the past should not be the ones designing progressive foreign policy visions for the future.
Time to Evolve
Disheartening as Trump’s movement is for progressives, it does contain certain lessons. It is worth remembering that, for several years this century, conservatives found themselves on their heels as mainstream views pushed their foreign policy approach to the margins. Americans ultimately rejected the Iraq war and the philosophy of the War on Terror, for example, and began to question free trade absolutism. In response, the right pivoted away from neoconservatism and came together behind the vision of Project 2025—a document that is cruel, xenophobic, and regressive in every way, but which is also coherent and compelling, such as it is.
Progressives can undergo a similar evolution in their approach to foreign policy—but unlike Project 2025, for good rather than harm. They must be willing to confront and then shed the aspects of their policies that are hypocritical, incomplete, contradictory, or simply not working. They must finally disavow forever wars. They must stand up to Israeli hawks. They must freshly articulate the imperative—and relative cheapness—of providing humanitarian and development aid. They must recapture the moral high ground in all aspects of international affairs. To achieve all of this, they need transparent consultation with constituents that delivers an agenda at the intersection of values and interests.
But progressives need to act quickly. As the months tick by, the international order will complete its collapse, and the few remaining restraints on untrammeled military intervention will disappear. A just solution for Palestine and Israel will hardly matter if Gazans have already been expelled and the West Bank ethnically cleansed and annexed. Progressives, now completely estranged from power, can hold themselves accountable for their own share of the post-9/11 fiascos—by embracing a just American foreign policy built on the country’s most idealistic values.
Header Image: President Donald Trump stands and salutes troops during the celebration of the Army’s 250th birthday on the National Mall on June 14, 2025, in Washington, DC. Source: Doug Mills—Pool/Getty Images
Tags: donald trump, U.S. Foreign Policy, progressive foreign policy