Needed: New Progressive Leaders to Address US Foreign Policy Crisis

In this run-up to the 2026 mid-term elections, progressive movements and candidates remain caught up in the challenges of rising authoritarianism and militarism both at home and around the world.

We are mobilizing against new US-Israeli wars against Iran and across the Middle East/West Asia region, including Israel’s US-enabled genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We face explosive US bombing raids and illegal military interventions in Latin America, Africa, and beyond, as well as threats to Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and elsewhere — with President Donald Trump at the center of all of it.

What’s different now compared to past crises is that many bold progressive leaders have won competitive primaries in this year’s midterms — often putting opposition to war and genocide at the center of their messaging.

While all of the self-defined democratic socialist and progressive candidates around the country have their own sets of priorities, the most common areas in their electoral platforms include opposition to ICE and military support for Israel, support for expanding health care, affordability, and housing, and anti-authoritarianism writ large.

What’s still needed, beyond the broad principles of progressive foreign policy (see also my 2018 article on the same question as the Squad was winning primaries) is a set of ideas for specific policy proposals to address at least some of the key priority foreign policy issues that will face a new Congress during two more years of the Trump administration and going forward into the elections of 2028.

What Should Progressive Foreign Policy Look Like?

Part 1 of this series identified key principles of a progressive foreign policy. Briefly, foreign policy should reject the goals of US military and economic domination and instead be grounded in global cooperation, international law, human rights, and real diplomacy. It must also take responsibility to repair damage that US military, economic, climate, and other policies have wrought.

This section looks at some of the key global issues that progressive members of Congress will face — and what initiatives may best respond to them.

Official “US foreign policy” will never completely match the much broader internationalist goals of progressive and left movements. But there are examples of good (however limited) and bad foreign policies chosen by past governments.

The Obama administration chose some of each. Its foreign policy victories were all diplomatic: the Paris climate accord, moves towards normalization with Cuba, and especially relevant now as the US-Israeli war against Iran continues to rage, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Its greatest foreign policy failures occurred because Obama chose military action instead of diplomacy, including its escalations and new illegal interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.

The Biden administration’s important (though still completely insufficient) domestic successes have already been largely relegated to the sidelines and will likely be forgotten by history when weighed against his massive international catastrophes — including the failure in execution (though not in principle) of the Afghanistan withdrawal and, especially, Biden’s enthusiastic arming, financing, and defense of Israel’s genocide against Gaza.

During both of those administrations, including during the periods when Democrats also controlled both House and Senate, only a few progressives in Congress directly challenged the White House — never enough to force an end to the dangerous policies. With more candidates winning elections backed by explicitly left and socialist organizations, as well as the broader progressive movement, their political base will likely expect much more. And the work of movements in highlighting the human and economic costs of wars means that the public will accept — and increasingly will demand — much more as well.

Here are some brief ideas on a few global priorities — and potential crisis points — with some ideas of what policy responses should look like.

Nuclear Weapons

• Recognize that as the only country to have actually fired nuclear weapons in wartime, with horrific human consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as holder of one of the two most powerful nuclear weapons arsenals in the world, the US bears particular responsibility towards ending the threat of nuclear war. That means developing a congressional response to the weakening of international anti-nuclear norms (including by the US abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2026 ending of the New START treaty with Russia) towards the goal of real disarmament and ultimately nuclear abolition.
• Reaffirm US obligations as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires (in Article VI) moving towards “nuclear disarmament and a treaty on general and complete disarmament.” Move the US towards taking the lead among nuclear weapons states in joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
• Push Congress to recognize that the goal of nuclear non-proliferation (preventing any other country from getting nuclear weapons) can never work in the long run without nuclear disarmament by the official nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, the U.K., the US) and unofficial nuclear weapons states (India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan).
• Accept the South Korean president’s recognition that nuclear disarmament of the Korean peninsula will not start with unilateral North Korean disarmament as a precondition. Instead, it will require recognizing North Korea’s nuclear status and then moving towards freezing its nuclear capacity as the starting point for a disarmament process.

Sanctions, Drones, AI, and the Changing Nature of Warfare

• Mobilize in Congress to reject strategies based on broad economic sanctions. Sanctions, especially secondary sanctions, are not “alternatives to war.” Instead, they damage entire populations and are themselves acts of war.
• End the glorification of military “lethality” and prevent the Pentagon from carrying out recruitment campaigns in language coded to appeal to white supremacists.
• Cut overall numbers of US troops, and stop allowing the Pentagon to escalate recruitment by targeting high-poverty areas or reducing standards for joining the military. As air wars replace most large-scale deployments, far fewer troops are required, but it is important to reject the “doing more killing with fewer soldiers” framework.
• Ban all AI-controlled weapons or military systems.
• Stop allowing the ostensible “dangers” of munition shortages to justify increasing military budgets and escalating weapons production. The danger is not munitions’ absence but their use against civilians and civilian infrastructure around the world. Even as cheap drones replace multi-million-dollar rockets and missiles, expensive anti-missile weapons systems do not make us safer — they make US wars easier to wage by reducing US military casualties, while at the same time causing far more civilian deaths and injuries around the world.

Climate Change

• Rejoin the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and implement its requirements to publish comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) reports on Pentagon emissions, and include military emissions in all emission-reduction plans.
• Redirect funds from the Pentagon budget to support the Global Just Transition Fund.
• Support the creation of an international Fossil Fuel Treaty to coordinate the phasing out of military fossil fuel consumption, including phasing out weapons production and closing military bases.
• As AI and other advanced technology expands, support serious local, state, federal, and global governance regulation to address the dangerous climate impact of these technologies.
• During trade negotiations, stop pressuring other countries and multilateral groups to purchase more US fossil fuels, a tactic that undermines global efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and replace it with renewables.
• During treaty negotiations, stop using pressure tactics designed to prevent the passage of global climate justice regulations, such as the recent US-forced postponement of the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework to limit and tax large ships’ CO2 emissions.

Global Poverty and Inequality

• Recognize the interconnections of nations, economies, and especially peoples around the world, and how economic and human crises caused by war, climate change, and legacies of colonialism and resource theft across the Global South always come back to impact the lives of people — especially poor people — in the United States.
• Acknowledge the role the US has played in creating the current economic crisis facing the Global South — including crises of debt, privatization, “free trade,” austerity, and more. Take responsibility for reversing those crises, including by expanding the Third Reconstruction Bill now pending in Congress (which calls for challenging domestic poverty, systemic racism, militarism and inequality from the bottom up) to include the Global South.
• Through institutions including the UN and the G20, call on the US, its allies, and others to challenge international inequality through such means as a global wealth tax and the creation of new systems of enforcement of global rules and accountability.
• Expand the common foreign policy goal of stability to include human and environmental security, and work for implementation of that goal through new collaborations between governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society and social movements.

The US Role in Global Institutions and Its Obligations to the World

• Pay all back dues owed to the United Nations, and rejoin and repay assessments owed to UN and related global agencies that the US has left or has stopped or reduced paying, including the World Health Organization, Paris Climate Agreement, UNRWA, World Food Program, UNESCO regional commissions, UN Women, Office for Children in Armed Conflict, and more.
• Stop using the veto to prevent the UN Security Council from acting when it tries to hold the US or its allies accountable for violations of human rights, international law, and UN resolutions.
• Support campaigns for the US to join the International Criminal Court, and in the meantime recognize and commit to enforce its indictments and arrest warrants.
• Recognize the international legitimacy of the International Court of Justice, and commit to supporting and implementing ICJ decisions that impose obligations on Member States of the Court. Particularly urgent is recognition and implementation of the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion finding the Israeli occupation illegal, and its provisional ruling determining that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide.
• Stop preventing other countries’ implementation of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution ES-10/24 based on those two decisions, by ending the threats and punishments designed to prevent realization of the arms restrictions, trade and banking sanctions, and other non-violent pressures aimed at achieving Israeli compliance with international law, human rights, and UN resolutions.

This is the second article in a two-part series. The first part, Progressive Principles for a New US Foreign Policy, can be found here.