The progressive foreign policy agenda is in a dark place. Trump has successfully challenged the international system from the right and frustrated the progressive formulations against endless war. He has changed global dynamics and America’s domestic politics for the worse in ways that will echo long after his second term ends.
If nothing else, this troubling moment offers an opportunity for clarity. Progressives have two main challenges to face. The first is winning over the voting public to a new vision of an active yet non-militaristic American role in the world. The second and perhaps bigger challenge—one that is unlikely to be overcome in the next four years—is to restore a sense of consistency to U.S. policy, along with the world’s trust in that consistency.
Rebuilding a movement for progressive foreign policy must begin with a frank assessment of these enormous challenges.
Towering Obstacles
With Trump’s reelection, the already considerable challenge of articulating a convincing progressive foreign policy becomes all the more daunting. The basic goals and principles remain unchanged: building a more just, stable, and equitable world through a greater reliance on diplomacy and institutions rather than unilateral force. But the obstacles to achieving this, both domestically and internationally, have multiplied.
First, Trump’s victory demonstrates that progressives still face an uphill battle in winning over voters on key issues. Where the left criticized Barack Obama for an overreliance on drone strikes, for example, Trump won in 2016 promising less restrictive rules of engagement in the War on Terror. And in 2024, even as the left condemned Joe Biden for giving Israel a blank check in Gaza, Trump won despite a clear record of being even more accommodating of the Israeli right. Finally, some progressives have been encouraged by Trump’s heterodox stance against foreign wars. But the reality is that Trump’s highly selective rhetoric of restraint is far from pacifist—it is underpinned by a mix of bombast, racism, and militarism, without which it would likely prove far less popular.
The second challenge comes from the international uncertainty—about what America stands for or is committed to—that Trump’s victory introduced. This is particularly corrosive to the kind of multilateral and institutions-based diplomacy prized by progressives. Any future administration, no matter how robust its electoral mandate, will have to deal with the skepticism of foreign governments that have seen Trump win twice and will expect similar candidates to win again. Consider the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), which Obama spent years developing and Trump summarily abandoned. The deal represented exactly the kind of diplomatic solution to a pressing geopolitical problem that progressive foreign policy envisions. But it couldn’t survive a hostile administration. Moreover, Biden’s subsequent efforts to revive the deal were undermined by—among other things—Iranian concerns that any new agreement could prove equally short-lived.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, progressives recognized the imperfection of international institutions and the hypocrisy of American foreign policy. But rather than trying to destroy these institutions, progressives sought to perfect them and to push Washington to live up to its ideals. In other words, they advocated for a genuine liberal internationalism in pursuit of an order that was truly based on rules. In contrast, Trump is committed to undermining international institutions and openly abandoning America’s ideals. Where progressives hoped to constructively criticize the status quo from the left, Trump has proved far more effective in attacking it from the right.
As progressives debate the future of U.S. foreign policy over the next four years, this grim reality should serve as the starting point.
The Paradox of Popular Opinion
The American public is against overseas military interventions until it isn’t. Any theory of popular opinion that doesn’t take this fickleness into account misreads the complex political landscape in which progressive foreign policy must be implemented.
America’s ill-fated, mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly fueled a growing skepticism—and even hostility—toward military adventures abroad. In his first administration, Trump capitalized on this mood. He broke with Republican consensus in his criticism of the Iraq war and negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. He also sought, repeatedly if never quite successfully, to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and, after 2022, constantly criticized U.S. support for Ukraine.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that these Trump positions reflect some fixed popular opposition to foreign wars and argue, as some progressives have, that interventionist policies are primarily the product of a perpetually hawkish blob. Public attitudes can shift quickly. The aftermath of 9/11 was one of the most dramatic examples. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 on his opposition to “nation-building,” a catchall term for the interventions the United States had very belatedly launched in the Balkans. A year later, however, public support for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan peaked at over 90 percent. In early 2003, 73 percent of the country favored military action in Iraq, with a mere 16 percent opposed.
In articulating the limits of U.S. power, progressives should insist that the country still maintains a moral commitment to the world at large.
The attacks of September 11 were a unique historical moment. But a similar phenomenon took place, albeit on a lesser scale, with the rise of the Islamic State. After the gruesome public beheading of several American citizens, the public pressed the U.S. government to respond decisively and effectively. Attitudes toward boots on the ground varied—at one point a Brookings survey showed 57 percent of the public opposed sending ground troops while 57 percent of the public also supported doing “whatever is necessary”—but voters consistently backed the U.S.-led air campaign. Trump, for his part, campaigned on fighting the air war more aggressively, even if it led to greater collateral damage. In the fall of 2016, he variously promised to “bomb the shit” or “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State. And indeed, following his election, civilian deaths from U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria rose 215 percent.
Just as public support for intervention can arise suddenly in response to threats, public opposition to intervention can also draw on the same chauvinistic assumptions as interventionism. In justifying their refusal to send troops abroad, both Republican and Democratic presidents have fallen back on dismissive and even racist attitudes toward non-Americans. In 2019, Trump explained his desire to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria by saying that Turks and Kurds had been fighting for hundreds of years and that “there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” But this quip was simply a cruder articulation of a long-standing rationale for staying out of foreign wars, whether it was Bill Clinton blaming Bosnia’s genocide on ancient hatreds or Obama attributing the Syrian civil war to “conflicts that date back millennia.”
As others have previously noted, progressive advocates of a less interventionist foreign policy face a greater challenge than their conservative counterparts. Any movement that is ideologically committed to global justice cannot simply write off genocide or authoritarian land grabs as inevitable tragedies, much less attribute them to the atavistic nature of foreign populations. Of course, this doesn’t mean that progressives should reflexively endorse military responses to injustice abroad. But in articulating the limits of U.S. power, they should insist that the country still maintains a moral commitment to the world at large.
Rather than count on the American public consistently supporting restraint, progressive policymakers should anticipate the forms of pressure they will face. Whether in response to threats or tragedies, U.S. voters have shown an abiding desire for easy solutions to hard problems. In the face of this desire, progressive politicians cannot simply reject the expectation that they “do something.” Instead, their focus should be on finding ways to take action that don’t require military force. The more effective these efforts are, the more content voters will be with a less militarized foreign policy.
The Consistency Conundrum
Unfortunately, finding effective solutions is only getting harder. Whatever the shortcomings of Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the breakdown of any broad commitment to consistency between administrations represents a unique threat to progressive foreign policy principles. It used to be that a president could expect a successor to seek to maintain a degree of continuity in dealing with allies and enemies, but this continuity can no longer be taken for granted. Worse, America’s allies and enemies both know that a new administration can now mean complete policy reversals. As a result, the challenge for any future Democratic administration is not just strengthening institutions and advancing diplomatic solutions, but also doing so in a way that is meaningful beyond a four-year time horizon.
The fate of the Iran nuclear deal offers the most dramatic example of the difficulties ahead. Secured in 2015 through patient negotiations, multilateral coordination, and the judicious use of sanctions, the JCPOA represented a durable solution to a pressing national security threat. Two years after entering office, however, Trump withdrew from the deal, and Iran is now a nuclear-threshold state. Moreover, when the Biden administration sought to revive the deal, Tehran repeatedly pressed for reassurance that Washington would not withdraw again—something that Biden could not provide under the U.S. Constitution. There were certainly many other obstacles to restoring the JCPOA, but Biden’s inability to guarantee that future U.S. administrations would stick with the deal represented a real concern, and served as a harbinger of what’s to come.
Of course, the JCPOA was just one example. Trump also reversed Obama’s opening to Cuba, left UNESCO, exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrew from the Open Skies and Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaties, and left the Paris Agreement on climate change. Whatever one thinks of any of these decisions on their merits, the collective result is clear: any diplomatic breakthrough that requires another country to trust the United States has become significantly harder. At a time when Washington’s commitment to even long-standing alliances like NATO has been called into question, negotiating new treaties or building new institutions will be more difficult than ever.
In this new climate, exerting effective international pressure also becomes harder. Progressives rightly criticized Biden for his refusal to use any leverage, or simply enforce U.S. law, in response to Israeli war crimes. But even if he had done so, the effectiveness of these measures would almost certainly have been weakened by the prospect of Trump’s return to power. Even for policies toward countries that are not subject to the same level of domestic American political debate as Israel, the effect will be the same. Facing U.S. pressure, foreign capitals will be incentivized to play on America’s political divides and bide their time rather than offer concessions.
Facing U.S. pressure, foreign capitals will be incentivized to play on America’s political divides and bide their time rather than offer concessions.
How can future administrations pursue more progressive foreign policies with these constraints in mind? There’s no easy answer. If nothing else, they will probably need to prioritize policies that are likely to prove particularly durable and devote the country’s limited diplomatic capital to areas where the results, if successful, will be self-sustaining. In this context, efforts to strengthen democratic allies, and help them deepen their ties with one another, will be especially valuable. At best, America can build up those who can defend liberal values even in its absence.
Conjuring Possibilities
The world will become increasingly unstable in coming years, a trend exacerbated by rash and inconsistent actions from the United States. In the long run, after considerable suffering, this instability may present opportunities for a future administration to build back better at the global scale. The world will need new institutions to address its problems, and Washington will have a vital role in forging them. Certainly, progressives should think deeply about what these institutions will look like before the time comes.
In the meantime, though, domestic politics will render the United States unreliable and prevent even a well-intentioned U.S. president from playing a truly constructive role abroad. This does not mean future administrations will be limited to doing damage control, although damage control will undoubtedly be necessary. Rather, progressives will be most effective in seizing new opportunities and pursuing new initiatives if they act with these constraints in mind—crafting effective nonmilitary policies and prioritizing goals that can endure an electoral defeat.
Header Image: A woman collects flowers on January 6 in Washington, D.C. at a memorial for Ashli Babbitt, who was killed while in the crowd of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol four years ago. The group at the memorial laid flowers and called for the release of those imprisoned for their actions on January 6, 2021. Source: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Tags: donald trump, U.S. Foreign Policy, progressive foreign policy
The Progressive Foreign Policy Agenda Is in Shambles. It’s Time to Confront the Crisis.
The progressive foreign policy agenda is in a dark place. Trump has successfully challenged the international system from the right and frustrated the progressive formulations against endless war. He has changed global dynamics and America’s domestic politics for the worse in ways that will echo long after his second term ends.
If nothing else, this troubling moment offers an opportunity for clarity. Progressives have two main challenges to face. The first is winning over the voting public to a new vision of an active yet non-militaristic American role in the world. The second and perhaps bigger challenge—one that is unlikely to be overcome in the next four years—is to restore a sense of consistency to U.S. policy, along with the world’s trust in that consistency.
Rebuilding a movement for progressive foreign policy must begin with a frank assessment of these enormous challenges.
Towering Obstacles
With Trump’s reelection, the already considerable challenge of articulating a convincing progressive foreign policy becomes all the more daunting. The basic goals and principles remain unchanged: building a more just, stable, and equitable world through a greater reliance on diplomacy and institutions rather than unilateral force. But the obstacles to achieving this, both domestically and internationally, have multiplied.
First, Trump’s victory demonstrates that progressives still face an uphill battle in winning over voters on key issues. Where the left criticized Barack Obama for an overreliance on drone strikes, for example, Trump won in 2016 promising less restrictive rules of engagement in the War on Terror. And in 2024, even as the left condemned Joe Biden for giving Israel a blank check in Gaza, Trump won despite a clear record of being even more accommodating of the Israeli right. Finally, some progressives have been encouraged by Trump’s heterodox stance against foreign wars. But the reality is that Trump’s highly selective rhetoric of restraint is far from pacifist—it is underpinned by a mix of bombast, racism, and militarism, without which it would likely prove far less popular.
The second challenge comes from the international uncertainty—about what America stands for or is committed to—that Trump’s victory introduced. This is particularly corrosive to the kind of multilateral and institutions-based diplomacy prized by progressives. Any future administration, no matter how robust its electoral mandate, will have to deal with the skepticism of foreign governments that have seen Trump win twice and will expect similar candidates to win again. Consider the Iran nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA), which Obama spent years developing and Trump summarily abandoned. The deal represented exactly the kind of diplomatic solution to a pressing geopolitical problem that progressive foreign policy envisions. But it couldn’t survive a hostile administration. Moreover, Biden’s subsequent efforts to revive the deal were undermined by—among other things—Iranian concerns that any new agreement could prove equally short-lived.
In the aftermath of the Cold War, progressives recognized the imperfection of international institutions and the hypocrisy of American foreign policy. But rather than trying to destroy these institutions, progressives sought to perfect them and to push Washington to live up to its ideals. In other words, they advocated for a genuine liberal internationalism in pursuit of an order that was truly based on rules. In contrast, Trump is committed to undermining international institutions and openly abandoning America’s ideals. Where progressives hoped to constructively criticize the status quo from the left, Trump has proved far more effective in attacking it from the right.
As progressives debate the future of U.S. foreign policy over the next four years, this grim reality should serve as the starting point.
The Paradox of Popular Opinion
The American public is against overseas military interventions until it isn’t. Any theory of popular opinion that doesn’t take this fickleness into account misreads the complex political landscape in which progressive foreign policy must be implemented.
America’s ill-fated, mismanaged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan certainly fueled a growing skepticism—and even hostility—toward military adventures abroad. In his first administration, Trump capitalized on this mood. He broke with Republican consensus in his criticism of the Iraq war and negotiated with the Taliban to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan. He also sought, repeatedly if never quite successfully, to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and, after 2022, constantly criticized U.S. support for Ukraine.
Yet it would be a mistake to assume that these Trump positions reflect some fixed popular opposition to foreign wars and argue, as some progressives have, that interventionist policies are primarily the product of a perpetually hawkish blob. Public attitudes can shift quickly. The aftermath of 9/11 was one of the most dramatic examples. George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 on his opposition to “nation-building,” a catchall term for the interventions the United States had very belatedly launched in the Balkans. A year later, however, public support for the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan peaked at over 90 percent. In early 2003, 73 percent of the country favored military action in Iraq, with a mere 16 percent opposed.
The attacks of September 11 were a unique historical moment. But a similar phenomenon took place, albeit on a lesser scale, with the rise of the Islamic State. After the gruesome public beheading of several American citizens, the public pressed the U.S. government to respond decisively and effectively. Attitudes toward boots on the ground varied—at one point a Brookings survey showed 57 percent of the public opposed sending ground troops while 57 percent of the public also supported doing “whatever is necessary”—but voters consistently backed the U.S.-led air campaign. Trump, for his part, campaigned on fighting the air war more aggressively, even if it led to greater collateral damage. In the fall of 2016, he variously promised to “bomb the shit” or “bomb the hell” out of the Islamic State. And indeed, following his election, civilian deaths from U.S. strikes in Iraq and Syria rose 215 percent.
Just as public support for intervention can arise suddenly in response to threats, public opposition to intervention can also draw on the same chauvinistic assumptions as interventionism. In justifying their refusal to send troops abroad, both Republican and Democratic presidents have fallen back on dismissive and even racist attitudes toward non-Americans. In 2019, Trump explained his desire to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria by saying that Turks and Kurds had been fighting for hundreds of years and that “there’s a lot of sand that they can play with.” But this quip was simply a cruder articulation of a long-standing rationale for staying out of foreign wars, whether it was Bill Clinton blaming Bosnia’s genocide on ancient hatreds or Obama attributing the Syrian civil war to “conflicts that date back millennia.”
As others have previously noted, progressive advocates of a less interventionist foreign policy face a greater challenge than their conservative counterparts. Any movement that is ideologically committed to global justice cannot simply write off genocide or authoritarian land grabs as inevitable tragedies, much less attribute them to the atavistic nature of foreign populations. Of course, this doesn’t mean that progressives should reflexively endorse military responses to injustice abroad. But in articulating the limits of U.S. power, they should insist that the country still maintains a moral commitment to the world at large.
Rather than count on the American public consistently supporting restraint, progressive policymakers should anticipate the forms of pressure they will face. Whether in response to threats or tragedies, U.S. voters have shown an abiding desire for easy solutions to hard problems. In the face of this desire, progressive politicians cannot simply reject the expectation that they “do something.” Instead, their focus should be on finding ways to take action that don’t require military force. The more effective these efforts are, the more content voters will be with a less militarized foreign policy.
The Consistency Conundrum
Unfortunately, finding effective solutions is only getting harder. Whatever the shortcomings of Washington’s bipartisan foreign policy consensus, the breakdown of any broad commitment to consistency between administrations represents a unique threat to progressive foreign policy principles. It used to be that a president could expect a successor to seek to maintain a degree of continuity in dealing with allies and enemies, but this continuity can no longer be taken for granted. Worse, America’s allies and enemies both know that a new administration can now mean complete policy reversals. As a result, the challenge for any future Democratic administration is not just strengthening institutions and advancing diplomatic solutions, but also doing so in a way that is meaningful beyond a four-year time horizon.
The fate of the Iran nuclear deal offers the most dramatic example of the difficulties ahead. Secured in 2015 through patient negotiations, multilateral coordination, and the judicious use of sanctions, the JCPOA represented a durable solution to a pressing national security threat. Two years after entering office, however, Trump withdrew from the deal, and Iran is now a nuclear-threshold state. Moreover, when the Biden administration sought to revive the deal, Tehran repeatedly pressed for reassurance that Washington would not withdraw again—something that Biden could not provide under the U.S. Constitution. There were certainly many other obstacles to restoring the JCPOA, but Biden’s inability to guarantee that future U.S. administrations would stick with the deal represented a real concern, and served as a harbinger of what’s to come.
Of course, the JCPOA was just one example. Trump also reversed Obama’s opening to Cuba, left UNESCO, exited the Trans-Pacific Partnership, withdrew from the Open Skies and Intermediate Nuclear Forces treaties, and left the Paris Agreement on climate change. Whatever one thinks of any of these decisions on their merits, the collective result is clear: any diplomatic breakthrough that requires another country to trust the United States has become significantly harder. At a time when Washington’s commitment to even long-standing alliances like NATO has been called into question, negotiating new treaties or building new institutions will be more difficult than ever.
In this new climate, exerting effective international pressure also becomes harder. Progressives rightly criticized Biden for his refusal to use any leverage, or simply enforce U.S. law, in response to Israeli war crimes. But even if he had done so, the effectiveness of these measures would almost certainly have been weakened by the prospect of Trump’s return to power. Even for policies toward countries that are not subject to the same level of domestic American political debate as Israel, the effect will be the same. Facing U.S. pressure, foreign capitals will be incentivized to play on America’s political divides and bide their time rather than offer concessions.
How can future administrations pursue more progressive foreign policies with these constraints in mind? There’s no easy answer. If nothing else, they will probably need to prioritize policies that are likely to prove particularly durable and devote the country’s limited diplomatic capital to areas where the results, if successful, will be self-sustaining. In this context, efforts to strengthen democratic allies, and help them deepen their ties with one another, will be especially valuable. At best, America can build up those who can defend liberal values even in its absence.
Conjuring Possibilities
The world will become increasingly unstable in coming years, a trend exacerbated by rash and inconsistent actions from the United States. In the long run, after considerable suffering, this instability may present opportunities for a future administration to build back better at the global scale. The world will need new institutions to address its problems, and Washington will have a vital role in forging them. Certainly, progressives should think deeply about what these institutions will look like before the time comes.
In the meantime, though, domestic politics will render the United States unreliable and prevent even a well-intentioned U.S. president from playing a truly constructive role abroad. This does not mean future administrations will be limited to doing damage control, although damage control will undoubtedly be necessary. Rather, progressives will be most effective in seizing new opportunities and pursuing new initiatives if they act with these constraints in mind—crafting effective nonmilitary policies and prioritizing goals that can endure an electoral defeat.
Header Image: A woman collects flowers on January 6 in Washington, D.C. at a memorial for Ashli Babbitt, who was killed while in the crowd of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol four years ago. The group at the memorial laid flowers and called for the release of those imprisoned for their actions on January 6, 2021. Source: Nathan Howard/Getty Images
Tags: donald trump, U.S. Foreign Policy, progressive foreign policy