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foreign policy
Progressive Principles for a New US Foreign Policy
A wave of progressive, left-wing, and socialist candidates and elected officials face an enormous challenge in articulating a foreign policy for the future. Here’s a start.
Sep 21, 2026
For many years, progressive movements and activists have longed for the moment when we could imagine a real foreign policy rooted in true internationalism and solidarity.
But in our efforts to influence actual policy decisions, we’ve settled for important but smaller asks—ending specific wars, blocking the transfer of certain weapons to Israel, reducing military aid, cutting the military budget. That made sense—our movements’ view of the world was rarely fully reflected in Congress, the State Department, or the White House.
Now some of those limitations are fading. There are new possibilities rising as we see new candidates with incredibly progressive politics win their campaigns—and even more importantly, we see in recent years the extraordinary shift in public discourse about the US role in the world, especially (though not only) throughout the almost three years of US -enabled genocide in Gaza.
The escalation of global crises—especially those caused, exacerbated, and sponsored by the United States—means we need to do more as movements, and to demand more from our elected representatives. Israel has lost the battle of legitimacy. US credibility and influence around the world are crumbling, not only as a result of President Trump and his MAGA movement extremism but also because of the foreign policy failures of discredited establishment Democrats like President Biden.
The US, long the wealthiest, militarily strongest country in the history of humanity, is certainly still powerful, but is increasingly losing its ability to impose its will.
The flailing White House and its hollowed-out State Department are stumbling through the huge failures of Trump’s insatiably wealth- and ego-driven foreign policy. They face an unending war with Iran that has spread across the region and is threatening the entire global economy, Ebola exploding across parts of Africa, poverty and unprecedented inequality shattering lives around the world, and a genocide in Gaza visible globally in real time. The US, long the wealthiest, militarily strongest country in the history of humanity, is certainly still powerful, but is increasingly losing its ability to impose its will.
The new cohort of progressive candidates and the movements supporting them face a huge challenge of not only defeating the current foreign policy but also creating the beginnings of an entirely new approach. And for candidates, electeds, and campaigns who have focused overwhelmingly on progressive domestic issues, nothing about that challenge will be easy.
Starting from First Principles
Many countries around the world—from Spain to the Philippines, South Africa to Greece, and Brazil to Uruguay and beyond—have a legacy of powerful left movements morphing into more formal organizations, and from there transforming into political parties. Eventually the parties choose candidates to run for political office, in more or less democratic multi-party systems, and ultimately some of those candidates even reach, at least for a while, the highest levels of government.
That path provides not only a clear arc from organizing to power, but also a set of consistent political principles and policies on which left candidates can ground their campaigns for office. But the left and even the broad progressive movements here in the United States have not been able to claim that particular arc of history for a very long time. As a result, we are operating, in this unusually electorally focused year, without a clear set of unifying principles.
Those principles are not completely missing. Policy initiatives once sidelined as positions only of the left have instead unified broad movements and become part of mainstream discourse. The most prominent probably include Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, the Fight for Fifteen, and the Dream Act/DACA. A generation of young people came of political age mobilizing on those issues alongside the crucial struggles against racist police violence, and many turned towards various strands of socialism to support and build those campaigns.
The central mobilizing issues of today’s Trump era—including ending ICE, rejecting AI/data center construction, housing for all, and challenging authoritarianism and the billionaires—emerged on the scene alongside those earlier priorities. Today’s arguably most influential democratic socialist leader, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, cut his political teeth on those issues.
What we still don’t have is a clear set of foreign policy principles, let alone specific policies responding to particular global crises, around which progressive movements will unite. The one exception, paid for with Palestinian blood, is Gaza. The most massive mobilizations in the country responding to Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza took place during the Biden years. Those mobilizations and the movement behind them animated politics, and shaped big new majorities for ending Washington’s military support of Tel Aviv. Following decades of elite adulation and broad public support, Israel is now widely reviled as a pariah state.
Trump’s re-election changed much of the political picture, but the centrality of Gaza as the moral core of our movements—especially, though not only, among the young—represents a vitally important crack in that pro-Israel consensus. It has profoundly reshaped longstanding political assumptions, normalizing unflinching criticism of Israel and rejecting AIPAC funding as requirements for progressive candidates. As a result, Israel and the legitimacy of Palestinian rights are central issues in many races. Even in places where the assumed campaign focus would be domestic, candidates are inescapably being compelled to talk about it.
What principles should undergird a progressive official US foreign policy?
And yet Gaza is not enough. Certainly, ending the US-Israeli war on Iran emerged quickly as another specific demand within the broad anti-authoritarianism/anti-fascist movement, and there are other foreign policy positions on which most progressives would agree. The easy ones (to agree on—not necessarily to achieve!) would probably start with cutting the military budget, abolishing nuclear weapons, opposing US wars and military interventions, and working cooperatively with other countries on international crises including climate and global health.
But there is no clearly articulated set of principles, or of specific policy goals based on those principles, which represents a consensus position claimed by candidates and electeds, and upheld by the diverse progressive, left, and socialist activist constituencies across this country. We need to step up that process now, both in anticipation of the coming elections of this year and 2028, and to define what US foreign policy could or should look like in the future.
Understanding that official US positions will never completely match all that our movements fight for, what principles should undergird a progressive official US foreign policy? What follows here is an attempt to identify some of those principles, with a few examples of what they might look like in practice.
Foreign policy should be based on diplomacy, not the use or threat of military force.
That means strengthening real diplomacy rooted in a serious commitment to international law and multilateral treaties, diplomacy that aims to prevent and/or solve conflicts through genuine, good-faith negotiations. It means rejecting the use of “soft power” diplomacy designed merely to strengthen US domination and supremacy.
What might that look like in practice?
- End the Iran war, accepting that serious negotiations, not more force or more sanctions, will be required.
- Relatedly, prohibit any use of force against any country, including Iran, with whom the US is negotiating a ceasefire or peace treaty.
- Recognize and engage with China as an economic and diplomatic rival, and a potential partner in solving global crises, not a military threat.
- Recognize that while Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal, past US provocations, including NATO expansion, had raised tensions with Russia and made Ukraine a target for Moscow’s retaliation. Today the conflict must be approached with a far greater commitment to international diplomacy than we’ve seen so far.
- Begin rebuilding the foreign service with staff educated in and committed to using diplomacy and international law as real alternatives to war, not as “force multipliers” to achieve military goals. We must not see a return to earlier years of secretaries of state cheerleading for military force instead of diplomacy.
Foreign policy should end the US war-based economy that has shifted resources away from social needs—especially damaging the lives of poor and low-wealth people across this country—and has destroyed people, societies, and the environment around the world.
That means massive reductions in the military budget and redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars saved to jobs, health care, environmental justice, education, child and elder care, and other social needs across the US , and to increased humanitarian and development needs around the world, especially in countries devastated by past and curren US wars.
- Challenge congressional assumptions that more and bigger weapons and “the most lethal military” will somehow keep people in the US safe—they will not.
- Acknowledge that between the $1 trillion 2026 and proposed $1.6 trillion 2027 military budgets, the increase alone (about $600 billion) is more than twice the total military budget of China, ostensibly Washington’s biggest challenger.
- Move to cut the proposed 2027 military budget by at least half, making sure that the money saved goes to strengthening diplomacy, social needs at home, and support for impoverished, climate-threatened, and war-ravaged communities and countries around the world.
Foreign policy should reject the 250-year-old US search for regional and global hegemony and empire.
That means abandoning efforts towards global military control and “full spectrum dominance,” including by shutting the 750-800 military bases and other installations outside the United States designed for projection of military force.
Other progressive demands stemming from this principle could include:
- Lift all economic sanctions regimes affecting entire countries or peoples, or that impose extraterritorial secondary sanctions on other countries, and reject any new such sanctions (which are themselves an act of war).
- Stop all attacks on civilian boats in or near Venezuelan or Ecuadoran territorial waters based on unproven claims of drug violations. End the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” and acknowledge that even if any of those boats contained smuggled drugs, murdering their crews is completely illegal.
- Recognize Venezuela as a sovereign, not a vassal, state by ending the US seizure and withholding of Venezuela’s oil income and its control of Venezuela’s imports and overall economy, and return Venezuela’s right to solve its problems internally.
- Stop all threats of military attack or regime change against Cuba. Recognize how economic sanctions are creating enormous suffering on Cuba’s civilian population, end the “maximum pressure” campaign, and lift the trade embargo to allow free trade, tourism, cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and medical and health collaboration.
- Definitively end US territorial claims to Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza, Mexico, the Strait of Hormuz, the moon, or elsewhere.
- End the pressure on NATO to increase purchases of US weapons and escalate the militarization of Europe. Reduce NATO’s primacy in Europe in favor of diplomatic/human rights-focused multilateral organizations such as the Council of Europe and the OSCE.
- Officially end the Korean War with a lasting peace agreement to replace the 1953 Armistice.
Foreign policy should be rooted in the rule of law, rejecting all claims of US exceptionalism.
That means recognizing US accountability to international law, including joining the International Criminal Court as a full member and pledging to implement all decisions of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.
Related steps would include:
- Recognize Israel’s settler occupation of Palestinian territory, the existence and expansion of settlements, and the separate and unequal legal systems applied to Israeli Jews and Palestinians (including Palestinian citizens of Israel) in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as completely illegal under international law. Reverse all US policies currently supporting the occupation, including ending all arms transfers, military aid, and efforts to integrate US and Israeli military forces and producers, as required under the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion and Provisional Ruling, and the related UN General Assembly resolution passed in 2024.
- Lift all sanctions imposed on ICC staff, UN experts, and others for their work at the ICC, and abandon all threats to undermine, weaken, or destroy the international courts.
- End the US pressure campaign against South Africa rooted in the country’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, including the exclusion of South Africa from participation in the G20, the denial of visas to South African officials, and US support for the false claim of “white genocide” in South Africa and its resulting privileging of white South Africans as the only people allowed to claim refugee status in the US.
- Stop violating customary international law and the UN Charter Article 2 (4), which prohibit the arrest of a sitting head of state, and release Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.
Foreign policy should acknowledge and implement US responsibility for reparations and repair for the lives of millions of people displaced and the thousands of communities destroyed by US actions (whether military, economic, or climate-related).
That means creating and implementing laws to guarantee legal, social, and financial support for communities and people to rebuild their lives at home, and to recognize, respect, and implement the internationally guaranteed rights of refugees and asylum-seekers to seek and find better lives inside the United States.
Related demands include:
- Stop detaining migrants in the US who are not convicted of a violent criminal offense, and allow them to live and work legally in the US while their immigration status cases go through the court system.
- Abolish ICE and end the collaboration between federal immigration enforcement authorities and local law enforcement agencies.
- Reinstate TPS protections including residency and work permits, ensure individual access to court hearings before TPS is withdrawn against anyone, and expand TPS to broader sectors of the global community.
- Recognize that rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the right to speak and protest, apply equally to all people in the country, whether they are citizens or not.
- Ensure that migrants forced from their homes because of circumstances caused by US actions have full access to TPS or equivalent protections. This would include migrants from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Palestine, among others.
- Begin processes of investigation, apology, and reparations for US crimes, including but not limited to wartime massacres, in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere.
- Be prepared with War Powers Resolutions, specific budget prohibitions, and other means to prevent future military interventions and wars being attempted by current and future administrations.
Foreign policy should embrace democracy and not interfere (openly or covertly) in people’s efforts to build real democracy around the world, and repudiate the claim of “promoting democracy” as a cover for military intervention.
That means rejecting all efforts towards regime change of governments who disagree with the US, and ending all campaigns using claims of “democratization” as an excuse to escalate militarism.
- Stop demands on other governments to spend more of their own money on military weapons and forces, which undermines democracy in those countries and does not make anyone safer.
- Remove Cuba from the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and move towards normalization of relations, including the repeal of all regulations aimed at extraterritorial enforcement of the embargo. Repeal the Helms-Burton Act to ensure a Congressional role in shaping new relationship with Cuba.
Foreign policy should recognize the obligations that come from being the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of humanity.
That means supporting multilateral institutions and creating new US institutions designed to supply urgent and long-term humanitarian aid, speed green energy transition, provide development support and more, while rejecting the hegemony-driven goals of earlier aid systems.
- Rebuild and re-fund USAID or a replacement institution designed to coordinate global assistance—humanitarian, emergency and development-based—at scale, with the sole goal of aiding people, not to achieve “soft power” for political or strategic goals.
- Challenge the politicization of aid distribution to ensure that reaching people in need remains the goal rather than strengthening particular allies, factions, or other groupings.
- Ensure that longstanding crisis areas, such as Sudan, Yemen, DRC, Haiti, Afghanistan, and others are included in access to US support regardless of political challenges inside.
- Provide political and economic support, to scale, for global projects under the control of multilateral and/or civil society organizations, designed to repair the environment and move towards environmental justice.
Foreign policy should aim to create new kinds of internationalism and global solidarity.
That means both creating multilateral institutions and coalitions, and providing support to civil society institutions (without imposing control over them) to address international crises including wars, endemic diseases, extreme inequality, and climate catastrophes (especially those caused or exacerbated by the United States).
Progressives should also support:
- Efforts towards complete nuclear disarmament, not just non-proliferation.
- Abiding by decisions of international courts and other institutions to guarantee universal human rights.
- Ensuring global access to existing and new vaccines, technologies, and more.
- Protecting and ensuring the rights of refugees and other migrants regardless of their point of origin.
- Committing to serious efforts to end fossil fuel dependency and repair the devastated environment.
Hopefully these principles can serve as a beginning reference point for what foreign policy could look like as more progressives, leftists, and socialists are elected to bring those new policy ideas to life in a much-changed—and far more open—political environment.
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How Progressives Can Lead the Dems Out of the Foreign-Policy Blob
What begins as opposition to the conventional Democratic approach to Israel could evolve into a broader challenge to the party’s establishment—and ultimately rescue Democrats from their disappointing foreign policy record.
Sep 19, 2026
For the past two decades, the Democratic Party has struggled to articulate a coherent foreign policy doctrine. From the Iraq War to the rise of China to the Russia-Ukraine war, Democrats have had little exciting to offer. Too often, they have converged with Republicans on militarism, occasionally tinging it with a dose of liberal internationalism in an effort—often fruitlessly—to demonstrate that they are different.
But that uninspiring foreign policy may finally be facing a serious reform movement in the wake of the latest round of Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As the Democratic establishment once again turns to militarism to defend the US-Israel alliance, insurgent progressives—once on the fringes of the Democratic Party—are gaining momentum to reverse that tradition. For all intents and purposes, what begins as opposition to the conventional Democratic approach to Israel could evolve into a broader challenge to the party’s establishment—and ultimately rescue Democrats from their disappointing foreign policy record.
Make no mistake: Democrats once knew how to do foreign policy. Those who succeeded in building a robust foreign-policy identity shared one important trait: They all connected their foreign-policy principles to their domestic agenda. In doing so, they created a coherent foreign-policy philosophy that could resonate with mainstream Democratic voters, who generally care more about domestic affairs than foreign policy.
Connecting Foreign Policy to the Domestic Agenda
The idealist Woodrow Wilson framed American entry into World War I and the creation of the League of Nations in terms of protecting American security and prosperity. Likewise, the pragmatist Franklin D. Roosevelt presented his recognition of the Soviet Union as part of a broader effort to advance American economic interests during the Great Depression. Jimmy Carter framed nuclear arms control with the Soviets as a means of reducing the economic burdens of the arms race and preserving resources for domestic priorities. A business-friendly Bill Clinton presented China’s accession to the World Trade Organization as an opportunity to expand American exports, create jobs, and strengthen the US economy.
That foreign-domestic policy nexus largely disappeared after 2004. When Democrats rallied behind John Kerry, they hoped that his military service in Vietnam and his vote authorizing the Iraq War would give him the credentials to challenge George W. Bush as an accredited commander in chief. But they overlooked a fundamental flaw: Kerry had an internally contradictory foreign-policy record. He supported several US military interventions while remaining committed to multilateralism. The result was that Kerry, the liberal hawk, alienated anti-war Democratic voters without giving hawkish voters a compelling reason to prefer him over Bush. More importantly, in their effort to portray Kerry as a strong grand strategist, Democrats failed to answer the question that mattered most to their own base: How would a Democratic president with an inclination toward Republican-style military intervention actually make Americans better off?
The Kerry puzzle seems to have haunted the Democratic foreign-policy agenda ever since, with occasional exceptions. Yes, Barack Obama had some notable foreign policy achievements, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of US-Cuba relations. And those achievements, pitched domestically either as a means of enhancing US national security or of expanding economic opportunities for Americans, suggested that he had the potential to reform, if not transform, the rigid Democratic foreign policy orthodoxy. But the unexpected rise of Donald Trump abruptly brought that process to a halt, shifting Democrats’ focus from opposing Republican foreign policy in general to opposing Trump, the person.
US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.
Democrats’ obsession with Trump left his Democratic challengers—from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden to Kamala Harris—stuck in the limbo of status-quo foreign policy. They became so eager to deliver an immediate and defining foreign-policy victory, in the hope of reassuring voters of their ability to handle global affairs, that they lost sight of a more fundamental task: developing a set of principles that the party could consistently defend rather than maintaining the status quo through piecemeal policies. Many of the top officials in the Biden administration, for instance, had been involved in negotiating the original Iran nuclear deal, which sought to advance cooperative internationalism, yet his administration showed little appetite for restoring it.
Nor did Biden make good on his promise of a foreign policy for the middle class. His administration proposed redirecting part of the defense budget toward technological workforce development to preserve America’s innovative edge and strengthen long-term readiness. Yet defense spending continued to grow throughout his presidency. Likewise, he promised to move away from promoting democracy through costly military interventions, but his administration repeatedly relied on military force abroad, including strikes against Houthi militants in Yemen without congressional authorization and US involvement in conflicts across multiple regions.
Biden epitomizes the conundrum confronting the Democratic foreign-policy establishment: It has one foot in the present to search for reform while the other remains firmly planted in the past. That dilemma helps explain why liberal hawks so often prefer ad hoc decisions to a systematic strategy for the long game. And the poignant yet unavoidable consequence is that Democrats still lack a robust foreign-policy identity, leaving their pursuit of national security credentials always several steps behind their Republican opponents.
Kamala Harris may have recognized this dilemma and attempted to break with it by making the bold move of picking progressive Tim Walz as her running mate. But putting aside Walz’s progressive domestic agenda, his realist approach to foreign policy rendered the Harris-Walz ticket, at most, slightly-left-of-center and unlikely to bring genuine change to the party’s foreign-policy outlook. Their broad alignment with Biden’s policy toward the Gaza conflict only reinforced the impression that they would remain tethered to a Democratic foreign-policy establishment operating within a bipartisan “Blob” whose worldviews have been monolithic.
That said, the only way for Democrats to escape this quagmire is to stop tinkering with—or, worse, simply repeating—some version of the tired conventional Democratic “wisdom.” That approach has proved ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst over the past two decades. What Democrats need is an outside-in reform. And as quixotic as it may sound, this is something only genuine progressives—the outsiders of the Democratic Party—can deliver.
The Outsider Agenda
Progressives, by nature, embody an egalitarian imagination. Their dissatisfaction with the US status quo can easily translate into opposition to the Democratic foreign-policy establishment’s hunger for “normalcy.” Because progressives view conflict as anchored in structural inequality at multiple levels, they seek to reshape the very inequality-based “normalcy” that gives rise to traditional security problems. Therefore, they possess a quality desperately needed for foreign-policy reform that is difficult to find within the Democratic establishment: a willingness to reconsider America’s changing place in the world increasingly defined by inequality.
The greatest challenge is the Democratic Party’s fixation on US military dominance, which progressives increasingly view as an important contributor to global inequality. In defending that dominance, the Democratic establishment reveals the gap between its ideological commitments and its actions. It champions cooperative internationalism as a means of reducing inequality yet repeatedly returns to militarism in ways that can perpetuate it. Given Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria, Obama’s airstrikes against Libya, and Biden’s use of military force in Yemen, it doesn’t take a policy wonk to figure out how the next Democratic president would respond if a skirmish broke out in the South China Sea.
In stark contrast, progressives are dedicated to dismantling US military dominance and reconstructing American exceptionalism from within. Free from the establishment’s unbreakable ties to militarism, progressives avoid conflating “effective US foreign policy” with “military intervention”—as Democratic elites often do—thereby bringing domestic clarity to foreign policymaking.
Progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters.
This domestic clarity enables progressives to offer a clearer foreign policy vision than the establishment. By working toward social transformation at home, strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the American state, and reinforcing the moral legitimacy of its economy, the United States can increase its capability to marshal diplomatic pressure on behalf of allies around the world. By doing so, Democrats can reclaim the domestic-foreign nexus that Democratic grand strategists once wielded so effectively and present their voters with a foreign policy that speaks directly to their interests.
The most direct benefit of restoring that nexus is exactly what Democratic foreign policy needs: giving voters the ability to hold policymakers accountable for poor foreign policymaking. Due to the notoriously self-forgiving nature of the foreign-policy establishment, Democratic elites can often walk away scot-free despite the consequences of their policy advice. Biden’s behind-the-scenes hawkish advisers Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and Brett McGurk were responsible, for instance, for the administration’s near-unqualified support for Israel. Yet they were never meaningfully held accountable for their advice. A foreign-policy agenda grounded in progressive accountability would give voters a more effective means of judging the consequences of such decisions.
And the result of this shift toward accountability would be a clearer answer to what Democrats should pursue in an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry: not ex post facto militarism, but ex ante diplomacy. This progressive vision was on display in the remarks of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) on Taiwan at the Munich Security Conference this year. Despite her stumbles, Ocasio-Cortez captured an ethos fundamentally different from a militarism-based approach to US foreign policy: Rather than emphasizing how the United States would defend Taiwan and democracy through strength, as many centrist Democrats might, she emphasized the need to work toward ensuring that the United States and China “never get to that point.”
The Democratic establishment ridiculed that progressive vision and tried to keep it under control by stopping democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’ presidential bids in 2016 and 2020. Little did it know that the progressive spark Sanders ignited a decade ago would grow into a political cyclone in 2026, sweeping through one state after another in a string of electoral victories. From Melat Kiros and Abdul El-Sayed to Peggy Flanagan, progressive candidates have repeatedly defeated AIPAC-backed establishment figures and, in an ironic twist, have benefited politically from the warnings of Democratic elites. In a broader sense, this progressive wave is also reshaping the party’s stance on the litmus test of Israel. In July, over half of House Democrats voted to support cutting $3.3 billion in US aid to Israel, a shift that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.
Accountability Matters
Perhaps that is what a real progressive revolution is supposed to look like: not top-down reform, but a bottom-up revolt. The grassroots movement that has catapulted the left forward now gives progressives an opportunity to capitalize on their momentum and forcefully expose the uncomfortable elephant in the room that the Democratic foreign-policy establishment has long avoided: US primacy should not be the premise on which American foreign policy is built. Rather, it should be the American people.
Under pressure from the left, Democrats will have to rediscover that their foreign policy must ultimately remain answerable and vulnerable to the demands of mass politics. They will have to take seriously voters’ growing frustration with the longstanding shibboleths of American exceptionalism and US global leadership when those grand ambitions do little to make healthcare more accessible or everyday life more affordable. And they will also have to recognize that the rise of a progressive pro-Palestinian foreign policy is not simply a manifestation of youthful political naïveté but reflects a grassroots revolt against a US-led global order that many young Americans increasingly see as inseparable from the economic inequalities they experience at home.
The establishment might be strong, but its outdated militarist doctrine will not endure forever. And progressives, equipped with direction, determination, and time, will be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern Democratic foreign-policy identity that actually speaks to Democratic voters. Such a foreign policy would put people before US primacy, diplomacy before militarism, human rights before geopolitical calculations, and the needs of ordinary Americans before bloated Pentagon budgets and forever wars.
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Envisioning a Pro-Animal Foreign Policy
Various animal activists and thinkers answer the question: What would a pro-animal foreign policy, that we could plausibly get politicians to adopt, look like?
Aug 30, 2026
Some years back, I was toying with the idea of writing a book-length history of World War II from the perspective of wild and domesticated animals. I bought a number of relevant texts for research, like The Long Shadows: A Global Environmental History of the Second World War, edited by Simo Laakkonen, Richard P. Tucker, and Timo Vuorisalo. Ultimately, the project was more ambitious than what I was capable of, so I set it aside.
Still, I remained interested in the question which, at least partially, inspired my focus on the topic—namely, what would a pro-animal foreign policy, that we could plausibly get politicians to adopt, look like? Recently, I sought to ask various animal activists and thinkers that question. I had hoped to feature a broader range of figures. Nevertheless, I’m very grateful to all of the people who took the time to answer.
pattrice jones is a co-founder of VINE Sanctuary as well as an ecofeminist scholar and writer. VINE Sanctuary is an LGBTQ-led farmed animal refuge working for social and environmental justice as well as animal liberation. Prior to co-founding the sanctuary, jones worked as a tenant organizer and anti-racist educator. Her books include The Oxen at the Intersection and Bird’s-Eye Views: Queer Queries About Activism, Animals, and Identity.
“Countless animals are facing literally existential crises due to climate change, so the easiest animal-friendly foreign policy to promote would be to rejoin and rejuvenate international efforts to cooperatively do everything possible to address the climate emergency,” jones said. “I say ‘easiest’ because many—perhaps the majority—of people in the US already support efforts in that direction. Bonus points for bringing (a) diet and (b) the viewpoints of animals themselves into high-level international conversations about climate solutions.”
She pointed out wars kill animals and destroy their habitats, so a pro-animal foreign policy would necessarily be pro-peace. jones called for an end to giving or selling weapons to all countries and groups, aside from those engaged in legitimate self-defense. She wants to prohibit war unless the conflict was approved by domestic supermajorities and a majority of members of the United Nations.
“A vaccine for bird flu exists but has been blocked by international trade concerns of the poultry industry,” jones continued. “Not only farmed birds but also wild birds by the billions have died and will die. The risk for some wild bird species is, again, existential. The US should broker an international agreement so that this vaccine is available to all, including wild bird rehabbers who could begin to make a difference by vaccinating every bird who comes in for care for any reason. Foreign aid should include funds for the manufacture and distribution of this vaccine at scale.”
Martin Smedjeback is the chairperson of Animal Save Sweden. He campaigns for animal rights and the climate by giving presentations, facilitating workshops, participating in open rescues of animals, blockading oil transports, occasionally spending time in prison, taking photos, and shooting videos. Smedjeback argued the European Union should help accelerate the development of cultivated meat and levy higher taxes on traditional animal products.
“We need significantly more investment in alternative protein research,” he said. “Our environment, health, and animal welfare depend on a new food system where protein no longer originates from animals. We must develop plant-based foods and cultivated meat—produced from animal cells without harming the animal—that compete directly with conventional meat on taste and price. This transition is essential to tackling the climate crisis, reducing the risk of future pandemics, and curbing antibiotic overuse.”
Emilia A. Leese is an author, rewilder, and podcast host exploring the intersections of morality, food, and our relationship with the environment. She wrote Think Like a Vegan: Embracing Ethics in a Plant-Powered World. Leese believes a pro-animal foreign policy would be indistinguishable from a pro-animal domestic policy, and pushed back on the notion nonhuman activists should take into consideration existing political reality.
“We must abandon the mirage of ‘plausible’ reform within a system which is actively hostile against other animals,” she said, “Instead, we must demand radical change and reframe our current property-based utility to co-existence. This can be achieved by ascribing legal personhood to all other animals, such as is given to people and corporate or other legal entities. Or through a non-anthropocentric standard of beingness, like that developed by Professor Maneesha Deckha.”
Barry Kent MacKay is an artist, writer, and conservationist who has worked in different capacities for Born Free USA, the Animal Alliance of Canada, Zoocheck, the Animal Protection Party of Canada, Species Survival Network, the Toronto Humane Society, the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, and others groups.
“History shows that while great reforms may seem fairly spontaneous—the result of a tipping point having been reached—there are incremental steps to get there,” MacKay said, putting forward a number of potential foreign policy goals. “I think the connection between Covid-19 and mustelids opens an opportunity for bans on mink farming, locally, and the import of live mustelids from other countries.”
Merritt Clifton is editor of the Animals 24-7 blog. Previously, he was news editor of the Animals’ Agenda magazine, editor of the Animal People newspaper, and editor of the annual Watchdog Report on Animal Charities. Working as a journalist since 1968, Clifton has reported as a foreign correspondent from approximately 40 different countries.
“The simplest, easiest thing to do would be to enforce [the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora] and other relevant international treaties as written,” he said. “There are so many UN-brokered treaties relevant to animal welfare that I can’t even remember them all off the top of my head, also including the [International Whaling Commission] treaty, Treaty of Sea, several on various aspects of zoonotic disease, etc., but the US, though a signatory to practically all of them, has a terrible enforcement record.”
Moritz Stumpe is the executive director of Animal Advocacy Africa, which is trying to stop the spread of factory farming on the continent. He is based in Germany but travels regularly. Stumpe views his organization as a capacity builder and a bridge between the African and international animal protection movements.
He argued the same welfare standards should be applied to imported and domestic products. “This kind of policy should have broad support since it protects domestic farmers,” Stumpe said. “A similar principle applies to equipment that was used for practices that are prohibited in the Global North, like battery cages in Europe, not being exported to the Global South, where battery cages are still permitted.” He added Global North countries shouldn’t finance development projects in the Global South that promote factory farms.
S. Marek Muller is an associate professor of Communication Studies at Texas State University. They are the author of Impersonating Animals: Rhetoric, Ecofeminism, and Animal Rights Law and the forthcoming Soy Boy Beta Cuck: Primal Rhetoric and the Rise of Right-Wing Carnivorism. Their research centers discourses of animal rights and welfare as well as alt-protein biotechnologies.
“Sometimes imperialist tendencies get combined with genuine devotion to animal welfare and protection such that ‘our’ kind of animal relations are considered superior to ‘theirs’ in a way that ends up quite problematic in practice,” Muller said. “Take zoonotic disease in the cases of Ebola and Covid-19 and how, respectively, bushmeat and wet markets became the subjects of international scrutiny and denizens of non-Western countries were villainized as unsanitary, deviant, and cruel to animals.”
Muller noted there wasn’t much introspection in Western countries about industrial agriculture and its ties to zoonotic diseases and animal suffering. They added the far-right has used arguments about animal cruelty to demonize various human populations, for instance, by framing specific forms of religious slaughter as evidence of the inferiority of adherents to that faith.
“I'd say an important element of a pro-animal foreign policy involves the nation-state having humbleness about its own complicity in the animal-industrial complex, noting how being ‘pro’ animal will involve work from all parties in a foreign policy relationship, not a top-down relationship where the ‘civilized’ country ‘teaches’ the other country how to be,” Muller said. “I'm not talking about simplified cultural relativism, but rather an understanding of mutuality and dialogue where individual nations' individual contexts allow for distinct forms of animal protection that may not be a one-size-fits all situation.”
John Patrick is a co-founder of Scotland for Animals, a former member of the Scottish Parliament Cross-Party Animal Welfare Group, and a former Scottish Socialist Party animal-rights spokesman. He thinks foreign cooperation and assistance should be dependent on basic nonhuman welfare reforms with effective deterrents.
“Governments and alliances are able and willing to sanction other nations for a multitude of reasons,” he said. “They are also very keen to intervene at a diplomatic level on behalf of wealth and industry. They can and should apply this same pressure and zeal for failing or refusing to act on [the issue of animal protection].”
A longtime nonhuman activist, who previously founded Animal Outlook and worked at Humane World for Animals, Paul Shapiro is the author of Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World. He believes the three most consequential pro-animal foreign policy goals would be to end United States financing for the global expansion of intensive animal agriculture, make the development of alternative proteins a food-security priority, and put enforceable animal-welfare provisions into trade agreements.
“Those would likely help vastly more animals than the symbolically attractive approach of concentrating foreign policy on dog meat, trophy hunting, or a handful of notorious festivals,” Shapiro said. “A pro-animal foreign policy would use American money and market access to change systems.”
Matthew A. King is the president and co-founder of the Christian Animal Rights Association. He has written a growing number of books which address nonhuman ethics from a faith-based perspective. His latest text is Pride Goes Before Destruction: Human Vanity, Animal Agriculture, and the New Covenant Solution.
“A pro-animal foreign policy would mirror the legal framework established domestically by measures like California’s Prop 12 and Massachusetts' Question 3, ensuring that international trade and imports of animal products are permitted only when they meet rigorous, humane welfare standards,” King said. “Additionally, a practical step would be redirecting US Agency for International Development funds away from industrial factory farming models and instead investing in sustainable, plant-based agricultural infrastructure abroad.”
Katherine Perlo is the author of Kinship and Killing: The Animal in World Religions. She has worked as a typist, typesetter, accompanist, piano teacher, and academic proofreader. Later in life, Perlo earned a doctoral degree in philosophy, choosing the subject in order to promote animal rights. While born in the United States, she lives in Scotland.
“Veganism can be promoted, using standard foreign policy mechanisms, through the perspective of land,” Perlo said. “Agricultural support, through subsidies, import-export policies, and aid, could go to stock-free food production along with human-socially beneficial land projects, as an essential part of land reform and land management.”
Itai Roffman, PhD, an evolutionary anthropologist and conservationist, is a senior lecturer, researcher, and co-executive director of the Jane Goodall Institute Israel. He established the Mali Chimpanzee Cultural Preservation, Rehabilitation and Tribal Heritage League, dedicated to initiation of tribal protected reservations for chimpanzees and other critically endangered species, via community-led ecological restoration.
“Rainforest destruction is a global catastrophe, as they are Earth's lungs,” Roffman said. “Factory farming as cause of zoonotic pathogens and spread of lethal epidemics is also a global concern. It pollutes ground water and rivers. Governments should work together to find technological alternatives to meat from slaughter, such as promoting commercially sound cultured meat from cells."
Marco Maurizi wrote Beyond Nature: Animal Liberation, Marxism, and Critical Theory. He is particularly interested in attempts to understand nonhuman protection as part of a wider left-wing project, rather than an isolated ethical issue. Maurizi teaches philosophy and history in Italian high schools, while collaborating with the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
“A plausible pro-animal foreign policy,” he said, “could include ending subsidies and other forms of state support for industrial animal agriculture; incorporating strong restrictions on animal exploitation into international trade agreements; opposing the expansion of factory farming through international development and investment programs; strengthening international action against wildlife trafficking and industrial fishing; and redirecting development aid toward plant-based and ecologically sustainable forms of agriculture.”
Spencer Roberts is a science writer, ecologist, musician, and engineer. In his journalistic work, he focuses on the climate crisis, marine life, and animal agriculture. Roberts’ work has been published in Wired, The Intercept, Jacobin, and elsewhere. He pointed out fishing is the largest source of human-caused animal suffering and premature death.
“Ending the subsidization of high seas and distant water fishing would not only save countless billions of animals, but would extend an olive branch in foreign policy, deescalating the ‘arms race‘ of competition for catch and hegemony of the high seas,” Roberts said. “These subsidies could be redirected to countries who endured United States military occupations, many to this day, particularly in the Pacific. Many small island nations derive a majority of their national revenue from licenses to foreign fleets to plunder their waters.”
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Trump: Grifter in Chief
The administration has endeavored to negotiate every peace deal, trade agreement, investment arrangement, and mineral pact in such a way as to deliver Trump, his family, and their circle of close supporters a good chunk of change.
Jul 02, 2026
The Trump administration concluded a recent mineral deal with Kazakhstan that, not surprisingly, enriches not only President Donald Trump’s own family but that of his secretary of commerce, Howard Lutnick. Trump’s two eldest sons, part owners of Dominari Securities, are set to profit from the Kazakh tungsten deal. So is Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment firm run by Lutnick’s two sons.
As The New York Times pointed out in its investigation of the scheme, “Their sons were soon doing business with partners in a deal that their fathers were negotiating, continuing a pattern of self-enrichment in the second Trump administration that has few precedents in American history.”
The phrases “self-enrichment” and “few precedents” are interesting ways of characterizing this latest instance of the administration’s corruption. Isn’t self-enrichment a good thing, in the sense of profiting from your own hard work? By contrast, the article doesn’t mention the word “corruption” at all. Perhaps the Times is worried about getting hit by yet another Trump legal challenge (in October last year, Trump refiled a $15 billion defamation suit against the paper for its coverage of his 2024 presidential campaign).
There are indeed several precedents in American history for what Trump is doing. These previous corruption scandals—Credit Mobilier, Whiskey Ring, Teapot Dome—wrecked the reputations of presidents and cast long shadows over American politics. They also helped to produce the kind of safeguards that Trump is now destroying.
Foreign policy is a tool by which the administration levies a toll on any entity that has the temerity to be a country other than the United States.
As with much of Trump’s disrespect for norms, his corruption has been massive and largely in full view. The two outstanding questions are: Will Trump and company ever be held accountable for their graft and will this corruption have an enduring impact on political institutions in the United States?
Tracking the Damage
If scandalous behavior unfolds in full view of everyone, is it still a scandal? “Scandal” suggests something hidden, something whispered about, something revealed. Trump’s actions are full frontal. They are both brazen and matter-of-fact.
According to the Trump administration and its extended family, the money skimmed off the top of economic transactions is just smart politics. The administration has endeavored to negotiate every peace deal, trade agreement, investment arrangement, and mineral pact in such a way as to deliver Trump, his family, and their circle of close supporters a good chunk of change.
This is Trump’s interpretation of the American dream: Folks would be downright foolish not to profit from their position. All the great tycoons made their money, from railroads to AI, by being in the right place at the right time with the right amount of ruthlessness. In Trump’s case, however, he is using taxpayer money to cover the risk. And most the time, given the terms of the arrangement, there is hardly any risk because Trump is using his presidential power to game the system. That’s what he really means by the “art of the deal.” Trump only deals from a marked deck of cards.
The Center for American Progress runs Trump’s Take, which estimates that the president has received a little over $2.6 billion in cash and gifts since he took office in January 2025.
The graft is not secret, though sometimes the actual amounts involved are obscured by layers of complex finance. Trump’s recent mandatory financial disclosure offers some details. But thanks to a number of websites, it’s become quite easy to track in real time the growing amount of Trump’s slice of the pie.
The Center for American Progress runs Trump’s Take, which estimates that the president has received a little over $2.6 billion in cash and gifts since he took office in January 2025. Much of this money has come from various crypto schemes, including the Trump meme coin, but also such dubious ventures as the documentary about Melania Trump and a number of legal settlements (more colloquially known as shakedowns). Corruption Counter puts the value at $2.2 billion and includes such recent items as the $100 million savings for Trump from the recent effort to bar the Internal Revenue Service from auditing the president. (Courts blocked the overall $1.8 billion “settlement fund,” but the Justice Department is upholding the IRS amnesty.)
If you want to keep track just of the crypto deals, the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee maintain the Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker. Senator Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) keeps his own list, which highlights the insider trading around the Iran War and a defense contract with Dell after the president invested in the company. David Kirkpatrick, at The New Yorker, has been keeping a running total of Trump’s ballooning assets. In January, he updated his total to $4 billion, which details, among other things, the Gulf money flowing into Trump pockets. Meanwhile, at RepresentUS, you can find a timeline of shady deals, from the no-bid contract to a presidential supporter for the Reflecting Pool “upgrade” to an Air Force contract for drones awarded to a company backed by Trump’s eldest sons.
In May, Campaign Legal Center published a rundown of influence peddling—what Trump supporters get in return for their contributions—that includes Elon Musk’s DOGE appointment, Immigration and Customs Enforcement contracts for the Trump-supporting GEO Group, and the cessation of various lawsuits for Trump-friendly entities (Gemini, Robinhood, Coinbase). Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has its own tracker that keeps up with the number of major events held at Trump’s properties and the number of Trump-branded foreign projects developed during his second term (with a new Trump Tower planned for Tbilisi, Georgia, it’s now up to 25).
Sometimes it seems as though Trump administration policy is just a front for making money, much as a shell company provides a legitimate façade for organized crime.
Getting His Percentage
One of the sticking points in the current war with Iran is the latter’s attempt to control shipping in and out of the Strait of Hormuz. Tehran wants to charge a toll on ships passing through the Strait. Given that the strait is an international waterway—and not a canal—Iran’s bid violates international law.
Trump has opposed Iran’s gambit not so much because it violates the Law of the Seas but because Iran has borrowed a page from the Trump playbook. How dare they try to trump Trump! Indeed, the president has threatened a toll of his own if the ceasefire doesn’t hold: a take of 20% of regional revenues if the United States becomes “the guardian of the Middle East” by using military force to protect shipping in the region.
Foreign policy is a tool by which the administration levies a toll on any entity that has the temerity to be a country other than the United States. The Kazakh deal on tungsten is but one of several ways that the administration has cashed in on critical minerals. The Trump sons have a financial interest in 14 companies working with the US government on mineral deals that involve nearly $9 billion in federal funding. This includes $620 million Pentagon loan, fast-tracked by the White House, to a North Carolina rare-earth magnet company in which Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm has invested. Several Trump associates stand to gain from any future deal involving Greenland minerals.
Trump has used tariffs to extract various concessions. In some cases, countries have responded by appealing to Trump’s self-interest. Vietnam, for instance, approved a Trump golf course and received a tariff reduction. Switzerland also enjoyed such treatment when it gifted Trump “a special Rolex desktop clock, a 1-kilogram personalized gold bar, and loads of flattery.” The message is clear: US trade policy is for sale.
Even peace agreements are not immune from the Trump treatment. The Gaza peace deal offers potentially lucrative opportunities for outside businesses to profit from the reconstruction of the rubble-strewn area. “Everybody and their brother is trying to get a piece of this,” one long-time contractor told The Guardian. “People are treating this like another Iraq or Afghanistan. And they’re trying to get, you know, rich off of it.” The executive board of Trump’s Board of Peace is dominated by titans of industry—Marc Rowan, Steve Witkoff, Jared Kushner—all salivating at the prospect of using their insider position to profit (though, with progress stalled on the ground, the Board of Peace may end up doing corruption the old-fashioned way by just siphoning off the money up front and granting itself legal immunity to escape the consequences).
The deal that created a “Trump corridor” between Armenia and Azerbaijan was similarly projected to provide commercial opportunities to Trump cronies. But it has yet to get off the ground, another victim of Trump’s propensity to make a big splash with his agreements and neglect to secure the follow-through. Trump’s peace deal with Russia, negotiated on the backs of the Ukrainians, would have also meant a huge windfall for Trump cronies—in opportunities for reconstruction contracts in Ukraine and even larger profits for the commercial reengagement with Russia.
In The Atlantic, several months after Trump took office, David Frum summed up the corrupt activities of the administration this way:
Nothing like this has been attempted or even imagined in the history of the American presidency. Throw away the history books; discard feeble comparisons to scandals of the past. There is no analogy with any previous action by any past president. The brazenness of the self-enrichment resembles nothing seen in any earlier White House. This is American corruption on the scale of a post-Soviet republic or a postcolonial African dictatorship.
Frum served in the George W. Bush White House. A NeverTrumper, he nevertheless knows a little something about corrupt conservatives. Upwards of $20 billion of post-war reconstruction aid for Iraq disappeared into the ether of corruption (and the pockets of US firms, including Halliburton). Trump stands on the shoulders of giants.
Immunity and Impact
Donald Trump knows that he is a living, breathing violation of the law. That’s why he has gone to such lengths to ensure immunity—the Supreme Court decision providing presidents with immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts, the attempt to secure exemption from IRS audits. Trump has also promised to pardon preemptively “everyone who has come within 200 feet of the Oval Office.”
Let’s tackle Trump first. His immunity is not absolute. First, it does not cover “unofficial acts.” Depending on how courts define this category, Trump (and certainly his family) could be prosecuted for corrupt business dealings that are deemed “private.” Second, immunity doesn’t apply if it can be demonstrated that criminal prosecution poses no “dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.” That’s another tough one to parse, and it will probably fall to future courts to define. But if something is demonstrably corrupt, then it should by definition fall outside the legitimate authority and functions of the Executive Branch.
Trump has already used his broad powers to pardon the January 6 rioters and other malefactors, including 22 corrupt politicians. Trump cronies must look at this record and feel pretty safe from future prosecution.
Donald Trump knows that he is a living, breathing violation of the law.
But presidential pardons also have their limits. Such pardons can’t violate the Constitution or criminal law—though Trump has challenged these strictures—and they don’t cover future crimes. More to the point, Trump’s pardons only apply to federal prosecution. Individuals can still be tried in various states (and overseas if their misconduct took place in other countries).
The impact of Trump’s misconduct is directly related to this question of immunity. If the president and his coterie “get away with it,” then the corruption they initiated will be much harder to root out of political institutions. Unprosecuted acts can harden into precedents. Throwing Trump and company into prison would be satisfying. Ditto clawing back their ill-gotten gains. From the point of view of democracy, however, even a plea bargain in which the malefactors stay out of jail and pay a nominal penalty in exchange for pleading guilty would be a victory.
It’s best to think of Trump as an aberration, however much his behavior can be traced to past scandals, the authoritarian tendencies of previous presidents, and the oft-corrupt workings of American capitalism. Democracy, like any fiction, requires the willing suspension of disbelief. Trump’s truly an unbelievable character. Once he’s gone, it will be time to pretend that the monster has been vanquished and the rule of law restored. Only in this way will America escape its semiquincentennial with its clothing muddied but its presumably good intentions intact.
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As the US and Israel Escalate in Iran, Europe Trades Alignment for Strategic Autonomy
Europe is no longer prepared to be drawn, by default, into an open-ended military operation in the Middle East.
Mar 23, 2026
What is unfolding across European capitals is not merely dissent over a particular conflict; it is the quiet reconfiguration of alliance behavior under conditions of escalating risk. The refusal voiced in Madrid—most starkly articulated by Spain’s Transport Minister, Óscar Puente, who declared that his country would not go “even around the corner” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—signals something more consequential than diplomatic disagreement.
Delivered in unusually blunt terms, his remark crystallized a broader political reality: Europe is no longer prepared to be drawn, by default, into an open-ended military escalation against Iran. It marks, in effect, the visible boundary of a strategic threshold the continent is no longer willing to cross.
For decades, transatlantic alignment functioned on the presumption of convergence: that when Washington moved, Europe would calibrate—but ultimately align. That presumption is now under strain. The prospect of a US-Israeli military aggression against Iran has exposed a widening gap between American strategic impulses and European risk tolerance.
The divergence is not ideological. It is structural. European governments are confronting a scenario in which escalation offers limited strategic clarity but immediate systemic exposure. They are being asked, in effect, to underwrite a conflict defined by uncertain objectives, fluid escalation dynamics, and a disproportionate economic burden—without corresponding influence over its conduct or conclusion.
The era of automatic convergence is giving way to one of selective alignment, where interests are weighed more carefully, risks are more openly acknowledged, and participation in conflict is no longer the default expression of alliance.
Spain’s position, far from anomalous, crystallizes this dynamic. The refusal to facilitate or politically endorse escalation reflects a broader European instinct toward insulation. Berlin’s caution, Paris’s distance, and the European Union’s emphasis on deescalation all point in the same direction: a deliberate effort to decouple European stability from the volatility of a conflict it neither initiated nor controls.
At the center of this recalibration lies energy vulnerability. The Strait of Hormuz—through which between 17 and 20 million barrels of oil pass daily—remains the most immediate point of systemic exposure. Any disruption, even partial, would transmit shockwaves through European economies already navigating inflationary pressures and fragile growth trajectories. Oil prices hovering around $115 per barrel, with credible projections reaching $150-$175 under sustained disruption, are not abstract indicators; they are policy constraints.
This economic dimension has begun to reshape strategic language. Where earlier discourse emphasized deterrence and enforcement, current formulations increasingly prioritize stability, containment, and the avoidance of escalation spirals. The postponement of strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, following what Washington described as “productive” engagement, underscores the extent to which strategic decisions are now bounded by economic risk.
Equally significant is the absence of decisive outcomes on the ground. The escalation has yet to produce the structural breakthroughs that would justify its expansion. Assertions of operational success coexist with the persistence of institutional continuity within Iran, where governing structures remain intact and operationally coherent. In strategic terms, the conflict has generated pressure without resolution—a condition that complicates both escalation and exit.
Under these circumstances, Europe’s posture begins to take on a different meaning. It is not hesitation, nor is it disengagement. It is a recalibration of agency. By declining automatic alignment, European states are asserting a form of strategic autonomy that had long been subordinated to alliance cohesion. The message is not framed in declarative terms, but its implications are unmistakable: Participation is no longer assumed; it is contingent.
This shift does not dissolve the transatlantic relationship, but it does redefine its operational boundaries. It introduces friction where there was once fluidity, and conditionality where there was once reflex. Most importantly, it signals that the costs of alignment—economic, political, and strategic—are now subject to explicit calculation rather than implicit acceptance.
The significance of Spain’s stance, therefore, lies not in its rhetoric, but in what it reveals about the evolving architecture of Western power. The era of automatic convergence is giving way to one of selective alignment, where interests are weighed more carefully, risks are more openly acknowledged, and participation in conflict is no longer the default expression of alliance.
In that sense, Europe’s refusal to go “even around the corner” is not a momentary divergence. It is an early indicator of a deeper transformation—one in which the boundaries of Western cohesion are being redrawn in real time.
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The Military Madman of Mar-a-Lago
For Donald Trump, foreign policy is dedicated not to peace, but first of all to secure access to mineral and petroleum resources, and second to make the world understand his dealmaking prowess.
Mar 06, 2026
The murderous madman from Mar-a-Lago, who claims himself worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize, has unleashed yet another war, this one across the Mideast. President Donald Trump has demonstrated again and again the absence of any consistent foreign policy, except a perfunctory willingness to unleash military might. Since returning to office last year Trump has attacked Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Venezuela, and Iran twice, and he has threatened “friendly” takeovers of Denmark (Greenland) and Cuba.
For Trump, foreign policy is dedicated not to peace, but first of all to secure access to mineral and petroleum resources, and second to make the world understand his dealmaking prowess. But even by mercenary standards, he falls short. His efforts to secure “peace” in Africa, the Caucasus, the Mideast, and Ukraine reveal a doddering dictator dedicated only to securing access to strategic resources, not at all a statesman interested in peace. In fact, Trump’s diplomatic efforts reflect a transactional approach to accumulate wealth through minerals, oil, and natural gas for himself and his extended family, and secondarily to US companies.
Trump claims to have ended eight wars. None of his touted agreements have actually ended a war. The so-called “Washington Accords” between Congo and Rwanda in December 2025—in the name of peace—actually aims at a strategic partnership between the US and Congo that gives American companies priority access to the country’s significant reserves of strategic cobalt, copper and lithium. The accords failed to end the fighting.
Trump insists his efforts alone ended the decades-long war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. But an August 2025 agreement has not been ratified or implemented, nor was the agreement new, nor American-brokered, but the product of bilateral negotiations between Baku and Yerevan. The agreement instead mentions a Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) connectivity project to be built solely by American companies with railways, communication networks, and pipelines for oil and gas. (It does not help to win peace in the Caucasus that the intellectually impaired Trump insists that Azerbaijan is Albania.)
Trump promised an end to the war in Ukraine on day one of his second term. He obviously has not delivered, and he has no interest in ending the war. Nor does Russian President Vladimir Putin. Trump insists that Ukraine give in to Russian territorial demands. In exchange for US access to Ukrainian mineral resources and its nuclear power stations, Trump says he will guarantee the peace that follows. But the Trump “peace” deal requires nothing from Russia in return. To dazzle Trump, Russia cleverly promised the US $12 trillion in economic deals involving fuels and minerals should a treaty be signed. But this is a Kremlin ploy given that the promised amount is six times Russia’s GDP. Putin’s representatives deftly deployed dollar signs to excite Trump’s mineral fantasies.
Granted, Trump supported an Israeli-Palestine ceasefire in September 2025, but it, too reflects his base acquisitive interests. Trump said of the deal, in a fit of self-adulation, “All I've done all my life is deals. The greatest deals just sort of happen… And maybe this is going to be the greatest deal of them all.” In fact, the “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict” has not led to peace or demilitarization. It ultimately endorses a US takeover of the Gaza Strip, the expulsion of all Palestinians, and the construction of a Gaza Mideast Riviera, replete with Trump skyscrapers and glass-front condominiums for the wealthy.
Not content with the halting pursuit of mineral rights and property deals in Africa, Russia, Ukraine, and the Middle East, Trump determined to secure petroleum in South America. In January 2026 Trump ordered the bombing of Venezuela to remove its leadership and bring its President Nicolás Maduro and his wife to the US for prosecution. Trump celebrated the invasion as an end to the flooding of the US with fentanyl by violent Venezuelan “narco-terrorists.” But this was a typical Trump lie: The drug comes from Mexico and China, and Trump’s real interest was in ownership of Venezuelan oil reserves which at one time were controlled by US companies. Those companies remain skeptical today of any investment to rebuild the industry. And so, president promised that the US is going to "run" Venezuela "until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition.”
The same pattern of lies, ignorance, and violence came to a head in Iran. If Trump was truly interested in peace, he would not have unilaterally abandoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (2016) with Iran that had secured its agreement not to build nuclear weapons and permitted onsite inspections of its facilities. Trump withdrew from the accord in 2018 simply because it was an accomplishment of Barrack Obama.
Trump wanted war with Iran, no matter the consequences. As a first step, in June 2025, the US and Israel bombed Iranian nuclear facilities, with Trump pompously—and falsely—proclaiming their obliteration. And even as US and Iranian negotiators were close to a new deal in Oman in this weekend, in which Iran had agreed again to full verification of sites and never to build nuclear weapons, Trump started a second war with Israel’s help. Pursuing regime change against common sense and his advisers’ informed assessments, he ordered missiles to kill Iranian leadership in the gratuitously named mission “Operation Epic Fury.” And now the US is stuck in a Trumpian world of unending violence that is spreading from Iran to Israel to Bahrain to US bases in what many observers are now calling “Operation Epstein Fury”—a war to divert attention from Trump’s pedophile scandal at home.
So confident about this war are the president and his advisers that they sat about, smirking, in his Mar-o-Lago “situation room” to gloat over this most recent war, with maps and photos, likely of military secrets, visible on the wall, not far from the bathroom in which Trump kept stolen classified documents. What’s up next for the decrepit, violent, and ineffective leader? Sending federal troops wearing body armor and armed with chemical weapons and M-4 carbines into US cities to subjugate dangerous blue states?
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Prince Andrew Arrested—Why Not King Trump?
If no one is above the law in the UK, not even royalty, presumably no one is above the law in the US, not even a president.
Feb 19, 2026
Police in the United Kingdom have arrested Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew and Duke of York, on suspicion of misconduct in public office—after the disclosure of emails between Mountbatten-Windsor and the late disgraced banker Jeffrey Epstein. As I write this, Mountbatten-Windsor remains in custody.
We don’t know yet the specific charges. But we do know that the late Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, accused Mountbatten-Windsor of raping her.
We also know that Mountbatten-Windsor was the UK’s trade envoy between 2001 and 2011, and appears to have forwarded to Epstein confidential government reports from visits to Vietnam, Singapore, and China, including investment opportunities in gold and uranium in Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer says, “No one is above the law.” The family of Virginia Giuffre says, “No one is above the law, not even royalty.” Britain’s chief prosecutor says, “No one is above the law.”
Instead of bureaucracies, America now has a royal entourage. Instead of institutions, we now have royal prerogative.
All of which raises awkward questions about the people implicated on this side of the pond, including the person in the Oval Office who loves to be treated like a king, and who appears in the Epstein files 1,433 times (that is, the files that have been released so far). Prince Andrew appears in them 1,821 times.
America likes to believe we gave up kings almost 250 years ago and adopted a system in which “no one is above the law.”
But President Donald Trump’s foreign policy has become a personal tool for him to channel money and status to himself and his closest associates. Since the 2024 election, the Trump family’s personal wealth has increased by at least $4 billion.
As with the British royalty of the 16th century, it’s all personal with Trump—all about expanding his power and enlarging his and his family’s wealth. Proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil? “That money will be controlled by me,” he says. The gift of a plane from Qatar? “Mine.” Investments by Middle-East kingdoms in his family’s crypto racket? “Perfectly fine.”
Like the British royalty of yore, King Trump has arbitrary power. He raises Switzerland’s tariff from 30-39% because its former president Karin Keller-Sutter “just rubbed me the wrong way.” He imposes a 50% tariff on Brazil because Brazil refused to halt its prosecution of Trump’s political ally, the former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who was found guilty of plotting a coup. Vietnam fast-tracks approval of a $1.5 billion Trump family golf course at the same time it seeks to reduce its tariff rate.
Trump claims that Greenland is “psychologically needed,” although the United States already has a military presence there and an open invitation to expand its bases. He muses about making Canada the “51st state.” These are throwbacks to the 16th-century age of empire.
***
Meanwhile, Trump has created a system of tribute and allegiance that would make Henry VIII jealous.
Apple’s Tim Cook delivers a gold-based plaque and a donation to Trump’s planned ballroom. Swiss billionaires bring a gold bar and a Rolex desk clock to the Oval Office. Jeff Bezos backs a vapid movie of Melania and hands her a check for $28 million.
Trump pardons Changpeng Zhao, the billionaire mogul who pled guilty to money-laundering violations in 2023, after which time Zhao’s Binance digital-coin trading platform becomes the engine of the Trump family’s crypto business, World Liberty Financial.
King Trump was evidently involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious doings. We don’t know exactly how because there’s been no criminal investigation. But shouldn’t there be?
Elon Musk’s humongous quarter-billion-dollar contribution to Trump’s 2024 campaign earns Musk a dukedom—a “department of government efficiency”—and the keys to the kingdom in the form of sensitive US Treasury Department software systems used to manage federal payments.
But when the Duke of DOGE starts becoming more visible than King Trump, the king banishes him and revokes his dukedom. When the banished Musk begins openly criticizing Trump, the king threatens to cut off Musk’s head in the form of cutting him and his SpaceX off from valuable government contracts. This puts an end to Musk’s impertinence.
The new TikTok (on which Trump has more than 16 million followers) will continue operating in the United States—but now with the financial backing of Trump ally Larry Ellison’s Oracle;Trump’s allied Emirati investment firm MGX (which has already invested in the Trump family’s cryptocurrency company); and Silver Lake, teamed up with the private equity firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner.
Trump allows Nvidia to sell chips to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia and extends military guarantees to Qatar—all of which have invested in the Trump family empire. (Emirati-backed investors plowed $2 billion into World Liberty Financial.)
Instead of national glory, Trump demands personal glory—to get the Nobel Peace Prize, to put his name on the Kennedy Center and Penn Station, and other major monuments and buildings.
If his commands are not met, he punishes. Because Norway didn’t give him a Nobel (it wasn’t Norway’s to give anyway), he “no longer feels obliged to think only of peace.” Because performers refuse to appear at the “Trump-Kennedy” Center, he shutters it.
Instead of bureaucracies, America now has a royal entourage. Instead of institutions, we now have royal prerogative. Instead of legitimacy based on the will of the people, there’s divine right (“I had God on my side,” “God was protecting me,” “God is on our side”).
***
We will march against King Trump on the next “No Kings Day” on March 28—hopefully making it the biggest protest in American history.
But the arrest of the former Prince Andrew raises an issue that goes way beyond protesting and marching. King Trump was evidently involved in Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious doings. We don’t know exactly how because there’s been no criminal investigation. But shouldn’t there be?
Pam Bondi obviously won’t investigate Trump because she’s part of King Trump’s court. But what about a group of state attorneys general?
Trump has also been enriching himself and his family through his public office, violating multiple laws about conflicts of interest.
If the UK can arrest the former Prince Andrew on evidence of such wrongdoing, why shouldn’t America arrest King Trump? If no one is above the law in the UK, not even royalty, presumably no one is above the law in the US, not even a president.
Pam Bondi obviously won’t investigate Trump because she’s part of King Trump’s court. But what about a group of state attorneys general?
Almost 250 years after we broke with George III, the question must now be faced: Are we a monarchy or a nation of laws?
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Is Rural America Finally Realizing Trump Is an Elite in Populist Clothing?
The administration’s domestic policies, coupled with aggressive foreign postures, are accelerating disillusionment among Trump’s core supporters.
Jan 29, 2026
As President Donald Trump’s second term unfolds, the contradictions at the heart of his “America First” agenda are increasingly apparent. What began as a populist revolt against elite globalism appears to have morphed into policies that alienate the very rural and small-town constituencies that backed him in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
These rust-belt and rural counties were drawn to his promises of economic revival, border security, and non-interventionism. Yet, emerging signs of fracture in this MAGA base suggest a potential backlash in the upcoming midterms.
The administration’s domestic policies, coupled with aggressive foreign postures, are accelerating disillusionment among Trump’s core supporters.
Domestically, Trump’s intensified immigration enforcement has backfired. Ramped-up Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids were sold as fulfilling pledges of mass deportations targeting “criminals”. But these operations have swept up undocumented workers essential to rural economies. Small family farms and businesses in states including California, Idaho, and Pennsylvania are reliant on immigrant labor for harvesting crops, dairy operations, and meatpacking. They now face acute shortages.
Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy.
Agricultural employment dropped by 155,000 workers between March and July 2025, reversing prior growth trends. Farmers in Ventura County, California, for example, denounced raids that targeted routes frequented by agricultural workers. Fields lie unharvested signalling financial ruin for some operations. Family-run farms struggle to find replacements. Low wages and grueling conditions simply fail to attract American-born laborers.
This labor crisis exacerbates a broader sense of betrayal. Rural voters supported Trump for his anti-elite rhetoric, expecting protection for their livelihoods. Instead, the administration’s actions have hollowed out local workforces without viable alternatives.
The H-2A visa program, meant to provide temporary foreign workers, has been streamlined—but remains insufficient amid ongoing raids, which deter even legal migrants. These disruptions ripple through small-town economies, where agriculture underpins community stability. Democrats, sensing opportunity, are investing in rural outreach, emphasizing economic populism to woo disillusioned voters who feel abandoned by Trump’s enforcement zeal.
Compounding these woes are the ongoing tariff disruptions. Trump touts his tariffs as tools to “make America great,” but in fact they have driven up costs for the same rural groups. Between January and September 2025, tariffs on imports from China, Canada, Mexico, and others have surged, collecting US$125 billion. However, the figure may be even higher according to experts.
But while the administration claims these taxes punish foreign adversaries, the burden falls squarely on American importers and consumers. Small businesses, which account for around 30% of imports, faced an average of US$151,000 in extra costs from April to September 2025, translating to $25,000 monthly hikes. Farmers, already squeezed by low grain prices, pay more for necessities, such as fertilizers (hit by 44% effective tariffs on Indian imports) and machinery parts.
Midwest producers of soybeans, corn, and pork—key US exports—suffer doubly from retaliatory tariffs abroad, which reduce demand and depress revenues. In Tennessee and Pennsylvania, builders report 2.5% rises in material costs, while food prices climb due to duties on beef, tomatoes, and coffee.
Trump, meanwhile, is perceived as profiting personally. His properties and branding deals benefit from economic nationalism, even as family farms teeter on the verge of bankruptcy. This disparity fuels resentment. Polls show Trump’s approval slipping in swing counties, with economic anxiety eroding the loyalty that once overlooked his character flaws.
Foreign Policy Compounds Domestic Fractures
These domestic fractures are mirrored in foreign policy, where Trump’s interventionism starkly contradicts his campaign pledge of “America First” restraint. Having promised no new wars, he has instead pursued aggressive postures that many Republicans view as unnecessary. The most emblematic is his renewed bid to acquire Greenland, apparently by negotiation or force, which has swiftly followed the US raid on Venezuela in the first week of January, accompanied by threats against other Latin American countries including Cuba and Colombia.
The US president has justified demands for control over the Arctic island—citing threats from Russia and China—as a strategic necessity. But NATO allies such as Denmark—of which Greenland is a constituent part—have rebuked it as an potentially alliance-shattering move. Congressional Republicans, including Sens. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Thom Tillis (R-NC), have broken ranks, warning that force would obliterate NATO and tarnish US influence.
Such dissent highlights broader paradoxes. Trump’s populist realism prioritizes tough rhetoric for domestic consumption but yields aggressive, even reckless actions abroad. His administration is effectively dismantling post-1945 institutions while embracing 19th-century spheres-of-influence and outright colonialist thinking, including invoking an updated version of the 1823 Monroe doctrine.
The fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind.
Rural voters, weary of endless wars, supported his non-interventionist promises. Now they see echoes of past entanglements in Trump’s suggestion that the US could intervene in Iran. This cognitive dissonance is accelerating disillusionment with his presidency.
These self-inflicted but inherent contradictions are hastening a pivotal reckoning for Trumpism. In many counties that have thrice backed him—and especially in swing counties—economic hardship and policy betrayals erode the cultural ties binding rural America to the Republican party. Democrats, through programs such as the Rural Urban Bridge Initiative, are betting on this “betrayal” narrative, spotlighting farmers’ plights to flip seats in November 2026.
Polls show Latinos and independents souring on Trump, with the US president’s base turnout potentially waning as the midterm elections approach in November. If Republicans suffer larger-than-expected losses in those elections, it could mark the decline of Trumpism’s grip by exposing its elite-serving underbelly beneath populist veneer.
Yet, without a compelling alternative vision, Democrats risk squandering this opening. For now, the fractures signal that Trump’s “America First” policies may ultimately leave its rural and rust belt champions behind. Whether Trumpism proves resilient or begins a long decline may well be decided not in Washington and Mar-a-Lago, but in the county seats and small towns that once formed its unbreakable base.
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Trump's Administration of Comic Book Villains Is Making War on the World Order
The 47th US president wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.
Jan 26, 2026
When Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services, wanted to change his agency’s dietary recommendations, he did something very simple. He took the food pyramid and turned it upside down. After years of promoting healthy grains, pulses, and vegetables, the agency was now favoring meat and dairy.
It seemed like a joke. It wasn’t.
Kennedy called his upside-down pyramid, with meat at the top and whole grains at the bottom, “Eat Real Food.” A better name would be “Support Cattle Farmers and Have a Heart Attack.”
The Trump administration’s topsy-turvy approach applies to every aspect of American policy.
The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it.
The United States needs undocumented immigrants to maintain the economy by filling jobs in agriculture, the construction industry, and the service sector. So, the Trump administration is deporting them.
The United States is the only major industrialized country without universal healthcare. So, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for people to access medical insurance.
The United States, before 2024, was the largest oil and gas producing nation on the planet, but needed government support to make the transition to clean energy. So, the Trump administration eliminated those clean energy subsidies and invested even more into expanding the fossil fuel sector.
In other words, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to harm people and the planet. They are like comic book villains, and they don’t even realize it
The upside-down nature of Trump’s approach to policy can perhaps best be seen in the foreign policy realm.
Donald Trump has talked over and over again about the importance of peace. He has lobbied for the Nobel Peace Prize. When asked about his New Year’s wish this year, he said, “Peace on Earth.”
But all he has done recently is promote war. His administration bombed Nigeria on Christmas Day. The United States invaded Venezuela right after the New Year in order to kidnap the president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
The administration is now preparing to attack Iran. Trump has insisted that the United States must seize Greenland, by force if necessary. And the US president expects that the government in Cuba will fall as well, and that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will one day be that country’s leader.
The Trump administration has emphasized the critical importance of US sovereignty. It doesn’t want any other country or any international institutions interfering with US policies.
However, the Trump administration doesn’t care about the sovereignty of any other country. Trump believes he can intervene anywhere. Even close allies are not off limits. He has suggested absorbing Canada. And he seems willing to fight a fellow NATO member, Denmark, in order to control Greenland.
Respect for sovereignty is a bedrock principle of the United Nations. All states rely on this principle to safeguard their borders and protect against the interventions of other countries. Trump’s challenges to sovereignty in Venezuela and elsewhere threaten to unravel the world order.
This contempt for international treaties and institutions led the administration early on to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate as well as the UN Human Rights Council. This year, he has ordered the withdrawal from 66 international organizations, half of them connected to the United Nations. These include the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for the yearly Conference of Parties (COP), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
From 2005 to 2024, carbon emissions in the United States dropped 20%, a rare bit of good news from a country with the second-highest rate of emissions in the world. Last year, under Trump, US emissions made a dramatic U-turn, rising by 2.4%.
Trump has nothing but contempt for international law. He has done more than just denounce legal bodies like the International Criminal Court. He has actively sought to destroy the ICC with sanctions. And he has threatened even more sanctions if the ICC doesn’t rewrite its founding document to ensure that Trump and his cronies are never prosecuted for the war crimes that they have most definitely committed.
The violations of sovereignty, the withdrawal from international institutions, and the contempt for international law: These all form a different kind of war. The Trump administration has launched an offensive against the very edifice of the world order. He wants to get rid of the United Nations, reverse the decolonization process, and return the world to a time when only power determines the course of events.
This is the world of Stephen Miller, Trump’s hard-right adviser. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller recently told CNN. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
This is, of course, nonsense. Power, as even authoritarian leaders learn, has its limits. Autocrats can’t change their societies by force alone. They are overthrown by peaceful protests. They are tried in court and sent to jail.
History is littered with the wreckage of empires that attempted to rule by force alone. That is the iron law since the beginning of time.
And it is just a matter of time before the Trump administration discovers that it too faces limits. The European Union is banding together to fend off any attempt on Greenland. The US courts are laying down limits on what the Trump administration can and cannot do, with even the conservative Supreme Court ruling recently that the administration cannot send the National Guard to Chicago against the wishes of the mayor and the governor.
And popular protests continue throughout the United States, most recently to protest the killing by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a young mother in Minneapolis.
The Trump administration shouldn’t be surprised when the world that it is trying to turn upside down unites against it. An upside-down pyramid is not stable. Eventually, it will collapse.
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Donald Trump Is a Real Life Scrooge McDuck—But Not Even a Little Funny
Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin, and the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune.
Jan 22, 2026
Writers often try to gild their tawdry times or dignify their flawed leaders with lofty literary analogies—notably, America as the New Jerusalem; Lincoln as Moses leading his people through the wilderness of the Civil War; the Kennedy White House as an incarnation of King Arthur’s “Camelot“; or Lyndon Johnson living his last years as a latter-day King Lear, cast off by his ungrateful children into the moors of south Texas.
But what are we going to do with Donald Trump? Wouldn’t his vanity, his vulgarity, and his relentless pursuit of money and minerals in every corner of the globe turn any literary analogies into soggy clichés? Like the showman P.T. Barnum, Trump is an American original, whose true metaphors can be found only in comic books (America’s one true art form), not literature. As Ariel Dorfman reminded us once upon a time in How to Read Donald Duck, that classic guide to US cultural imperialism in Latin America, there was always more to a Disney comic book than gags.
To understand Trump’s America, we need our own comic guidebook to his global misadventures, which might be titled something like “How to Read Scrooge McDuck.” After all, in case you never had the pleasure of his acquaintance, Scrooge McDuck was the predatory billionaire in Disney comics, who was amazingly popular among teenagers in Cold War America. In that era when American corporations scampered around the global economy extracting profits wherever they saw fit, Scrooge McDuck put a friendly face on US imperialism, making covert intervention and commercial exploitation look benign, even comic.
From 1952 to 1988, a period coinciding almost precisely with the Cold War, the comic’s creator, illustrator Carl Barks, filled the country’s magazine racks with more than 220 comic books celebrating Scrooge’s schemes to accumulate ever more billions by dispatching Donald Duck and his triplet nephews (Huey, Dewey, and Louie) to scour the world for riches—gems, minerals, oil, and lost treasure. No place on the planet was too remote, not even the Arctic or the Amazon, and no people too poor or obscure, not even Hondurans and Tibetans, to escape his tight-fisted grasp. And yet in that innocent world of the comic book, every adventure, no matter how twisted the plot, always ended with a light laugh for those duckling heroes and the diverse peoples they encountered on their global travels.
Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority.
Let’s visit a few of my favorite comic books from my Cold War childhood, starting with the 1954 story “The Seven Cities of Cibola.” Its initial panels show a butler showering the billionaire duck with coins while he swims around in his Money Bin’s “three cubic acres” of cash. At first, Scrooge McDuck seems content as he gloats about making money from “about every business there is on Earth” (from “oil wells, railroads, gold mines, farms, factories”).
Suddenly, however, saddened by the realization that he’s exhausted every possible domestic path to profit, Scrooge decides to lead his nephew Donald and the triplets into the desert borderlands between Mexico and the US. There, they come upon a lost Eldorado, a towering, multitiered city with gold-paved streets and a cistern filled with opals and sapphires. But caution intrudes when Huey, Dewey, and Louie discover that the whole edifice is poised dangerously atop a spindly stone pillar. Then, at their moment of near triumph, the ducks are denied any treasure by Scrooge’s recurring nemesis, the comically criminal Beagle Boys, who break in and grab the city’s bejeweled idol, triggering a hidden mechanism that fractures the pillar. As those fabled cities collapse into a heap of rubble, our duckling heroes escape unharmed, ready for their next adventure.
The first panel in a 1956 comic book, the “Secret of Hondorica,” shows Scrooge McDuck pointing to a map of the Caribbean as he dispatches Donald Duck and his three nephews deep into tropical jungles near—yes, how sadly appropriate almost seven decades later—Venezuela to recover his lost deeds to the region’s rich oil wells. After crossing steep mountains and crocodile-infested creeks, the Ducks happen upon a Mayan temple filled with spear-carrying “savages” arrayed around their idol. By translating the “picture writing” on the temple walls with the help of their handy encyclopedic “Junior Woodchuck Guidebook,” the nephews deceive the natives with incantations in their own language and escape with the idol’s crown of gold.
President Donald Trump is, of course, our real-life Scrooge McDuck. Mar-a-Lago is his Money Bin. And the world is his playground for schemes to add another billion or two to his and his family’s growing fortune. Just as Scrooge McDuck scoured the world in a relentless, even ruthless search for wealth, so our real-life Donald has made mineral deals everywhere on the planet his top presidential priority—rare earths from Ukraine, oil from the Middle East, and (someday perhaps) a frozen treasure trove of minerals in Greenland. And just as Scrooge dispatched Donald Duck on a mission to recover his lost oil wells from the jungles of “Hondorica,” so our real Donald did indeed send US special forces to capture President Nicolás Maduro and win yet more of Venezuela’s oil fields for American companies.
Back to the Reality of the Old Cold War
Alas, my innocent childhood is long gone. The world is no backdrop for comic book adventures, and imaginary heroes don’t flit from frame to frame to amusing endings. In the real world of 2026, we are already deep into a “new Cold War” against nuclear-armed powers, and President Donald J. Trump’s comedic foreign policy is dragging us toward a dismal defeat.
First, let’s snap back to reality by taking stock of the world we’ve actually been living through all these years and review how we got here. During the real Cold War, the global conflict that lasted from 1947 to 1991 (when the Soviet Union collapsed), the one I describe in my new book, Cold War on Five Continents, Washington’s geopolitical strategy was brilliantly ruthless in its basic design. After fighting quite a different global conflict, World War II, for four years with the aim of defeating the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and Japan) entrenched at both ends of Eurasia, America’s leaders of General (and future president) Dwight D. Eisenhower’s generation knew instinctively that geopolitical control over that vast continent was indeed the key to global power.
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was... much less so.
Guided by that fundamental strategic principle (which had, in fact, held true for the last thousand years or so), Washington’s early Cold War leaders worked hard to “contain” the Sino-Soviet communist bloc behind an “Iron Curtain” that stretched for 5,000 miles around the rim of Eurasia. With the armed forces of its NATO alliance securing that continent’s Western frontier and five bilateral military pacts ranging along the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia for its eastern border, Washington bottled up the communist superpowers. That strategy freed the US to make the rest of the planet into its very own “free world.” In exchange for open access to the markets and minerals of the countries in much of that free world, the US distributed a few development dollars of aid to the emerging nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, which often served to fatten up the bank accounts of their nominally “democratic” dictators.
After two decades of being locked up inside Eurasia, however, Beijing and Moscow tried to break out of their geopolitical isolation by arming allies for revolutionary warfare on Cold War battlegrounds stretching from South Vietnam across the Middle East and through southern Africa, all the way to Central America.
To counter that gambit and push those communist powers back behind the Iron Curtain, the US sometimes sent in its own troops, whether successfully to the Dominican Republic in 1965, or disastrously to South Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. But most of the time, Washington dispatched individual CIA operatives armed with impunity to do whatever—and I do mean whatever—they wanted to deflect Moscow and Beijing’s gambits and secure contested terrain. Usually misfits, even oddballs at home, those surprisingly significant historical actors, whom I’ve come to call “men on the spot,” often proved quite successful abroad. Using the cruelest instruments in the toolkit of modern statecraft—assassinations, coups, surrogate troops, torture, and psychological warfare—those covert operatives fought for control of foreign capitals as diverse as Kinshasha, Luanda, Saigon, Santiago, San Salvador, Tegucigalpa, and Vientiane. And then, with the Soviet Union significantly “contained” geopolitically within its borderlands, Washington could just sit back and wait for Moscow to make a strategic blunder.
That blunder came in 1979 in one of those classic military misadventures that often hasten the deaths of empires in decline. When Moscow sent 100,000 troops to occupy Afghanistan, Washington sent just one CIA operative, Howard Hart, to defeat that occupation. Acting as Washington’s “man on the spot,” he used the agency’s millions of dollars to form a guerrilla army of 250,000 Afghan fighters. By the time the Red Army was bled dry and left Afghanistan a decade later, defeated and demoralized, Moscow’s satellite states in Eastern Europe were erupting in mass anti-communist protests. With the Red Army generally unable or unwilling to intervene, the Soviet bloc broke apart as the Soviet Union broke up, ending the Cold War with an unqualified US victory.
Toward a New Cold War
If Washington’s strategy for waging the Cold War was a successful exercise in geopolitics, its use of “unipolar” power in the decades to come was, as I also argue in Cold War on Five Continents, much less so. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Washington stood astride the globe like a Titan of Greek legend—the sole superpower on Earth, at least theoretically capable of remaking the world as it wished. Convinced that “the end of history” would make its free-market democracy the future of all mankind, America’s leaders, “drunk with power,” advanced sweeping plans for a new world order, grounded in a globalized economy that served their short-term interests but would have deleterious long-term consequences for their global hegemony.
Only a decade after the Cold War ended, Washington started facing serious strategic challenges across the Eurasian continent, which, then and now, has been the epicenter of geopolitical power. In the heady aftermath of its Cold War victory, the US attempted some bold strategic gambits that would soon prove to be distinctly ill-advised. Above all, Washington’s leaders believed that they could co-opt Beijing’s rising power by recognizing China as an equal trading partner. In a parallel attempt to curb any of Moscow’s future imperial ambitions, the US also presided over NATO’s expansion until that alliance surrounded Russia’s western borders, sparking security concerns in Moscow. Such ill-fated initiatives, combined with ill-considered military interventions in Afghanistan and also Iraq, created conditions for the revival of a great-power rivalry that, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, many observers have called “the new Cold War.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union and its socialist economy in 1991, Washington seemed to feel its post-Cold-War globalization would both promote democracy there and integrate that country into an emerging American world order, perhaps as a secondary power supplying cheap commodities, including oil, to the global economy. For the Russians, however, such globalization produced the dismal decade of the 1990s that would be marked by what economist Jeffrey Sachs has called a “serious economic and financial crisis” and a privatization of state enterprises “rife with unfairness and corruption,” creating a coterie of predatory Russian oligarchs.
When Vladimir Putin became prime minister amid the post-Soviet malaise of the late 1990s, he reverted to Russia’s centuries-old imperial mode. He found his vision for the country’s revival as a “great power” in the sort of geostrategic thinking that Washington’s leaders seemed to have forgotten in the afterglow of their great Cold War victory. Following a 2005 address calling the collapse of the Soviet Union the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin set about systematically reclaiming much of the old Soviet sphere—invading Georgia in 2008 when it began flirting with NATO membership; deploying troops in 2020-2021 to resolve an Armenia-Azerbaijan conflict in favor of a pro-Moscow regime in Baku; and dispatching thousands of Russian special forces to Kazakhstan in 2022 to gun down pro-democracy protesters challenging a loyal Russian ally.
Concerned above all with securing his western frontier with Europe, Putin pressed relentlessly against Ukraine after his loyal surrogate leader there was ousted in the 2014 Maidan “color revolution.” First seizing Crimea, next arming separatist rebels in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region adjacent to Russia, and finally invading Ukraine in 2022 with nearly 200,000 troops, he would spark a protracted war that has yet to end.
At first, as Kyiv fought the Russians off, Washington and the West reacted with a striking unanimity by imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, dispatching armaments to Ukraine, and expanding NATO to include all of Scandinavia. Moreover, Ukraine showed a formidable flair for unconventional operations—clearing Russian ships from the Black Sea with naval drones and sabotaging that country’s massive gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea.
As Russia’s war on Ukraine reverberated across Eurasia and beyond, geopolitical tensions also rose in the Western Pacific, sparking a renewed great power rivalry that became worthy of the phrase “the new Cold War.” In a striking parallel with the 1950s, in February 2022, just before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow forged a multi-faceted economic and strategic alliance that they claimed had “no limits.” In an eerie reprisal of the early Cold War years, Russia and China were in that way united against a Western alliance, once again led by Washington with its military forces still deployed in Western Europe and East Asia.
After two years of continuous combat in Ukraine, however, cracks began to appear in the West’s anti-Russian coalition. Most critically, American domestic support for Ukraine started to falter under partisan political pressures, amplified by a rising populist opposition in both the US and Europe to the globalized economy and its military alliances. After successfully rallying NATO to stand with Ukraine, President Joseph Biden opened America’s arsenal to Kyiv until Republican legislators, at Donald Trump’s behest, delayed military aid throughout much of 2024.
President Trump’s Second Term
Following his second inauguration in January 2025, President Trump’s initial foreign policy initiative was a unilateral attempt to negotiate an end to the Russia-Ukraine war—an effort that would be complicated by his underlying hostility toward NATO and his sympathy for Russian President Putin. On February 12, Trump launched peace talks through a “lengthy and highly productive” phone call with the Russian president, agreeing that “our respective teams start negotiations immediately.” Within days, Defense Secretary (or do I mean Secretary of War?) Pete Hegseth announced that “returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” and Trump added that NATO membership for Kyiv was no less unrealistic—in effect, making what a senior Swedish diplomat called “very major concessions” to Moscow before any talks even began.
At month’s end, those tensions culminated in a televised Oval Office meeting in which Trump berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, saying: “You’re either going to make a deal or we’re out, and if we’re out, you’ll fight it out. I don’t think it’s going to be pretty.” That unilateral approach not only weakened Ukraine’s ability to defend itself, but also degraded NATO, which had, for the previous three years, supported Ukraine’s resistance to Russia. Recoiling from the “initial shock” of that utterly unprecedented breach, Europeans quickly appropriated $160 billion to build up their own arms industry in collaboration with both Canada and Ukraine, thereby reducing their dependence on US weaponry.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power.
For the rest of the year, Putin continued to work on Trump. He even scored a state visit and meeting with the American president in Alaska, without making any concessions whatsoever. In the process, he reduced US envoys to messenger boys for his unyielding demands, while using disinformation to drive a wedge between Washington and Kyiv. Even if the Trump administration does not formally withdraw from NATO in the years to come, the president’s repeated hostility toward it, particularly its crucial mutual-defense clause, may yet serve to weaken, if not eviscerate the alliance.
Amid a torrent of confusing, often contradictory foreign policy pronouncements from the White House, the design of Trump’s de facto geopolitical strategy soon took shape. Instead of focusing on mutual-security alliances like NATO in Europe or NORAD with Canada, Trump seems to prefer a globe divided into three major regional blocs, each headed by an empowered leader like himself—with Russia dominating its European periphery, China paramount in Asia, and the United States controlling the Americas. That aspiration to hemispheric hegemony lent a certain geopolitical logic to Trump’s otherwise quixotic strikes on Venezuela (and his capture of its president and his wife), as well as his overtures to claim Greenland, reclaim the Panama Canal, and even to make Canada the 51st state.
Last November, formalizing that approach, the White House released its new National Security Strategy, which proclaimed a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at achieving an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Think, of course, the Donroe Doctrine. To that end, the US will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere,” deploy the US Navy to “control sea lanes,” and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce.” In essence, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity.”
For over a century, the Caribbean region had consistently experienced the most brutal, least benign aspects of US foreign policy and now that reality has only worsened. Not only has Trump reverted to the gunboat diplomacy of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, but he’s done so with a caricatured cruelty—sinking boats in the Caribbean in the name of drug interdiction and sending troops to invade Venezuela, a sovereign state.
Just as Theodore Roosevelt used the Navy to seize land from Colombia for the Panama Canal, so Trump sent Special Forces into Venezuela to gain control over its oil. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies… go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country,” Trump said at a January 3 press conference just hours after President Maduro’s capture. “We’re gonna rebuild the oil infrastructure, which will cost billions of dollars. It will cost us nothing. It’ll be paid for by the oil companies directly.” Such a caricatured assertion of economic interest is likely to inflame resentment in a region where anti-imperialist sensibilities remain strong.
Although it has little chance of success, Trump’s attempt at a tricontinental grand strategy will likely leave a residue of ruin—alienating allies in Latin America, weakening NATO’s position in Western Europe, and ultimately corroding Washington’s global power. From a strategic perspective, a staged US retreat from its military bastion in Western Europe would end its long-standing influence over Eurasia, which remains the epicenter of geopolitical power in this new Cold War era, just as it was in the old one. Such a retreat, at the very moment when Russia and China are expanding their influence over that strategic continent, would be tantamount to a self-inflicted defeat in this era of a new and intensifying Cold War.
To return to those Donald Duck comic books for an appropriate analogy: Just as that bungled grab for a bejeweled idol collapsed the spindly stone pillar holding up the “Seven Cities of Cibola,” so the Trump administration’s inept foreign policy is potentially destabilizing a fragile world order with dangerously unpredictable consequences for us all. And count on one thing, unlike in the comic books, it won’t be even a little bit funny.
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