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foreign policy
Can America Recover From Trump-World?
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled.
Oct 04, 2026
Humpty dumpty sat on a wall
Humpty dumpty had a great fall
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again—Nursery Rhyme
Much can be said about President Donald Trump, but it is impossible to say that he has “done nothing.” This boorish, megalomaniacal, unpredictable, and frighteningly ignorant real-estate salesman has transformed his country by unleashing an avalanche of executive orders, edicts, institutional transformations, legislative shifts, and policy changes. Whether the nation can recover its democratic roots should not be taken for granted despite its institutional resilience and civic culture.
Trump-World is about more than Trump the president and demagogic ruler of the Republican Party. MAGA stands on tradition. Its base is rooted in the same backward classes, with a similar authoritarian and fascist ideological outlook as its right-wing extremist forerunners such as the “know-nothings,” the KKK, “America First!,” McCarthyism, and the White Segregationist Councils. Whatever the president’s decline in poll numbers, his mass base isn’t going anywhere and its racist, xenophobic, chauvinistic, and anti-working class beliefs are firmly entrenched. A reactionary sword of Damocles still hangs over a Democratic Party torn between a sclerotic mainstream and an exuberant faction of democratic socialists. Republicans collapse the former into the latter and then attack this essentially “center-left” political organization as “liberal,” “socialist,” communist, “Marxist,” and “anarchist,” even as Trump followers haven’t a clue what these words actually mean.
For a forest to recover from a fire takes more than planting a few new trees. Rolling back what amounts to a domestic counterrevolution is a daunting task, and it is easy to be misled. It is not a matter of the next election or putting together a grab bag of issues that will leave the public as confused as it was before, but a readiness to change institutions, reorient economic policy, and refashion foreign policy by highlighting three or four crucial points in each domain.
This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy.
Trump has issued over 500 executive orders in 2025-2026 alone. These now touch upon virtually every aspect of everyday life. Every progressive social movement with a marginalized constituency has come under attack through legislative and often coercive means. Public lands have been privatized, coal has been promoted while wind and solar energy projects have been shut down. Agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security have been “weaponized;” indeed, between the beginning of June and the end of August 2026, more than 150,000 arrests were made by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Meanwhile the “leftist” departments of education, environmental protection, and health and human serves have been gutted. Other regulatory agencies have been purged, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Legal gambits have insulated the presidency from criminal indictment, legal harassment of critics and “enemies” has become an everyday occurrence. The press has been intimidated, television shows have been canceled, and academic freedom is on the ropes. The threat to democracy is real and and the nation’s fabric is fraying. Drastic changes to the tax codes favoring elites and the top 0.1% have contributed to the greatest upward shift in wealth in American history. Unions have been banned from 40 federal agencies, collective bargaining agreements are imperiled, and worker health programs have been eviscerated. The new imbalance of class power is fixed, if not set in stone. Everything associaated with the “New Deal” of the 1930s, and the “Great Society” programs of the 1960s is hanging by a thread. With the Trumpist counterrevolution, the whole has become more than the sum of its parts, and everyday people find it difficult to process this avalanche of reactionary measures or the dangers that they pose. A mixture of political frustration and disorientation that provides fertile ground for nostalgia associated with the 1950s, when America was seemingly admired by the whole world.
US foreign policy has changed for the worse as multilateralism has surrendered to “America First!” Indeed, reference to the isolationist and quasi-fascist movement of the 1930s with the same name is not coincidental. Trump has identified the American national interest with his own. His personal enrichment by $2.6 billion in 2025-2026 occurred in concert with constantly fluctuating positions on the Russia-Ukraine War, the Iran War, NATO, the European Union, and Canada. The rule of thumb: Where cash is not to be made, support is not to be given. The United States has reneged on all major climate treaties. Aid to the United Nations, UNICEF, the World Health Organization, and the world’s most vulnerable nations has been cut to the bone. Trump has signed a sweeping bill imposing sanctions on Russia while simultaneously negotiating new “business deals” before the conflict ends, thus contradicting his previous warnings. His on-again, off-again imperialist threats to turn Canada into America’s 51st state, “protect” Greenland and Denmark, “run” Venezuela’s oil industry, create a “Gazan Riviera” (presumably based on Trump company investments), exploit Ukrainian minerals, sign a bill with sweeping sanctions and set up hotel deals in Russia, constitute the mix of personal and institutional goals that provide the president’s zigzag approach with a certain logic.
Trump’s foreign policy has no need for a state department, which has essentially been hollowed out along with the experts necessary to create prudent policies. Our president values the personal touch, and he is not above blackmail, threats, intimidation, bluster, and childish tantrums to get his way. None of this has worked. Trump has alienated NATO and the EU to Russia’s delight. Relations with Canada are at their lowest point amid a bitter tariff war. America’s squandering of military rources and diplomatic setbacks have left Taiwan and South Korea feeling increasingly uneasy as Chinese military actions linger in the background.
Trump’s record of failure is astonishing. After all the grandiose claims, mediation efforts to end the Russian-Ukraine War are stalled, policy toward Israel is an embarrassment, Venezuela has the same authoritarian regime, Iran’s geopolitical importance has actually increased, and there are rumblings about charging the United States with war crimes. Trump’s attempts to intimidate China have failed, the tariff offensive is tottering, and the president’s charismatic charm apparently hasn’t prevented North Korea’s “supreme leader” Kim Jong Un from further nuclear testing. Never has the moral and symbolic standing of the United States been lower, and never has it shown itself so incapable of distinguishing between democratic friends and authoritarian enemies.
“America First!” has turned into America last. Reversal of discrete policies is possible, restoring checks and balances is more difficult, and reigning in the charismatic presidency is likely. But this ignores the forest for the trees. Trump-World is more than the sum of its parts, and the avalanche of policies and edicts makes the counterrevolution difficult to process and threatens to overwhelm the ability of critics to prioritize their responses. MAGA will offer ongoing opposition to progressive forces and, in response, they must forward a rational and radical agenda of their own. This calls for shifting away from Trump, the insufferable person, and focusing on Trump-World’s devastating attack on the welfare state, neofascist battle against civil liberties, cultural parochialism, and xenophobic-imperialist foreign policy. That is what it will take for the United States to recover from its decade-long trauma—and even then...
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Needed: New Progressive Leaders to Address US Foreign Policy Crisis
What’s different now compared to past crises is that many bold progressive leaders have won competitive primaries in this year’s midterms—often putting opposition to war and genocide at the center of their messaging.
Oct 01, 2026
In this run-up to the 2026 mid-term elections, progressive movements and candidates remain caught up in the challenges of rising authoritarianism and militarism both at home and around the world.
We are mobilizing against new US-Israeli wars against Iran and across the Middle East/West Asia region, including Israel’s US-enabled genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. We face explosive US bombing raids and illegal military interventions in Latin America, Africa, and beyond, as well as threats to Canada, Greenland, Mexico, and elsewhere — with President Donald Trump at the center of all of it.
What’s different now compared to past crises is that many bold progressive leaders have won competitive primaries in this year’s midterms — often putting opposition to war and genocide at the center of their messaging.
While all of the self-defined democratic socialist and progressive candidates around the country have their own sets of priorities, the most common areas in their electoral platforms include opposition to ICE and military support for Israel, support for expanding health care, affordability, and housing, and anti-authoritarianism writ large.
What’s still needed, beyond the broad principles of progressive foreign policy (see also my 2018 article on the same question as the Squad was winning primaries) is a set of ideas for specific policy proposals to address at least some of the key priority foreign policy issues that will face a new Congress during two more years of the Trump administration and going forward into the elections of 2028.
What Should Progressive Foreign Policy Look Like?
Part 1 of this series identified key principles of a progressive foreign policy. Briefly, foreign policy should reject the goals of US military and economic domination and instead be grounded in global cooperation, international law, human rights, and real diplomacy. It must also take responsibility to repair damage that US military, economic, climate, and other policies have wrought.
This section looks at some of the key global issues that progressive members of Congress will face — and what initiatives may best respond to them.
Official “US foreign policy” will never completely match the much broader internationalist goals of progressive and left movements. But there are examples of good (however limited) and bad foreign policies chosen by past governments.
The Obama administration chose some of each. Its foreign policy victories were all diplomatic: the Paris climate accord, moves towards normalization with Cuba, and especially relevant now as the US-Israeli war against Iran continues to rage, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Its greatest foreign policy failures occurred because Obama chose military action instead of diplomacy, including its escalations and new illegal interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Somalia.
The Biden administration’s important (though still completely insufficient) domestic successes have already been largely relegated to the sidelines and will likely be forgotten by history when weighed against his massive international catastrophes — including the failure in execution (though not in principle) of the Afghanistan withdrawal and, especially, Biden’s enthusiastic arming, financing, and defense of Israel’s genocide against Gaza.
During both of those administrations, including during the periods when Democrats also controlled both House and Senate, only a few progressives in Congress directly challenged the White House — never enough to force an end to the dangerous policies. With more candidates winning elections backed by explicitly left and socialist organizations, as well as the broader progressive movement, their political base will likely expect much more. And the work of movements in highlighting the human and economic costs of wars means that the public will accept — and increasingly will demand — much more as well.
Here are some brief ideas on a few global priorities — and potential crisis points — with some ideas of what policy responses should look like.
Nuclear Weapons
- Recognize that as the only country to have actually fired nuclear weapons in wartime, with horrific human consequences in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and as holder of one of the two most powerful nuclear weapons arsenals in the world, the US bears particular responsibility towards ending the threat of nuclear war. That means developing a congressional response to the weakening of international anti-nuclear norms (including by the US abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal and the 2026 ending of the New START treaty with Russia) towards the goal of real disarmament and ultimately nuclear abolition.
- Reaffirm US obligations as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which requires (in Article VI) moving towards “nuclear disarmament and a treaty on general and complete disarmament.” Move the US towards taking the lead among nuclear weapons states in joining the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
- Push Congress to recognize that the goal of nuclear non-proliferation (preventing any other country from getting nuclear weapons) can never work in the long run without nuclear disarmament by the official nuclear weapons states (China, France, Russia, the U.K., the US) and unofficial nuclear weapons states (India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan).
- Accept the South Korean president’s recognition that nuclear disarmament of the Korean peninsula will not start with unilateral North Korean disarmament as a precondition. Instead, it will require recognizing North Korea’s nuclear status and then moving towards freezing its nuclear capacity as the starting point for a disarmament process.
Sanctions, Drones, AI, and the Changing Nature of Warfare
- Mobilize in Congress to reject strategies based on broad economic sanctions. Sanctions, especially secondary sanctions, are not “alternatives to war.” Instead, they damage entire populations and are themselves acts of war.
- End the glorification of military “lethality” and prevent the Pentagon from carrying out recruitment campaigns in language coded to appeal to white supremacists.
- Cut overall numbers of US troops, and stop allowing the Pentagon to escalate recruitment by targeting high-poverty areas or reducing standards for joining the military. As air wars replace most large-scale deployments, far fewer troops are required, but it is important to reject the “doing more killing with fewer soldiers” framework.
- Ban all AI-controlled weapons or military systems.
- Stop allowing the ostensible “dangers” of munition shortages to justify increasing military budgets and escalating weapons production. The danger is not munitions’ absence but their use against civilians and civilian infrastructure around the world. Even as cheap drones replace multi-million-dollar rockets and missiles, expensive anti-missile weapons systems do not make us safer — they make US wars easier to wage by reducing US military casualties, while at the same time causing far more civilian deaths and injuries around the world.
Climate Change
- Rejoin the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and implement its requirements to publish comprehensive greenhouse gas (GHG) reports on Pentagon emissions, and include military emissions in all emission-reduction plans.
- Redirect funds from the Pentagon budget to support the Global Just Transition Fund.
- Support the creation of an international Fossil Fuel Treaty to coordinate the phasing out of military fossil fuel consumption, including phasing out weapons production and closing military bases.
- As AI and other advanced technology expands, support serious local, state, federal, and global governance regulation to address the dangerous climate impact of these technologies.
- During trade negotiations, stop pressuring other countries and multilateral groups to purchase more US fossil fuels, a tactic that undermines global efforts to reduce fossil fuel use and replace it with renewables.
- During treaty negotiations, stop using pressure tactics designed to prevent the passage of global climate justice regulations, such as the recent US-forced postponement of the IMO’s Net-Zero Framework to limit and tax large ships’ CO2 emissions.
Global Poverty and Inequality
- Recognize the interconnections of nations, economies, and especially peoples around the world, and how economic and human crises caused by war, climate change, and legacies of colonialism and resource theft across the Global South always come back to impact the lives of people — especially poor people — in the United States.
- Acknowledge the role the US has played in creating the current economic crisis facing the Global South — including crises of debt, privatization, “free trade,” austerity, and more. Take responsibility for reversing those crises, including by expanding the Third Reconstruction Bill now pending in Congress (which calls for challenging domestic poverty, systemic racism, militarism and inequality from the bottom up) to include the Global South.
- Through institutions including the UN and the G20, call on the US, its allies, and others to challenge international inequality through such means as a global wealth tax and the creation of new systems of enforcement of global rules and accountability.
- Expand the common foreign policy goal of stability to include human and environmental security, and work for implementation of that goal through new collaborations between governments, multilateral organizations, and civil society and social movements.
The US Role in Global Institutions and Its Obligations to the World
- Pay all back dues owed to the United Nations, and rejoin and repay assessments owed to UN and related global agencies that the US has left or has stopped or reduced paying, including the World Health Organization, Paris Climate Agreement, UNRWA, World Food Program, UNESCO regional commissions, UN Women, Office for Children in Armed Conflict, and more.
- Stop using the veto to prevent the UN Security Council from acting when it tries to hold the US or its allies accountable for violations of human rights, international law, and UN resolutions.
- Support campaigns for the US to join the International Criminal Court, and in the meantime recognize and commit to enforce its indictments and arrest warrants.
- Recognize the international legitimacy of the International Court of Justice, and commit to supporting and implementing ICJ decisions that impose obligations on Member States of the Court. Particularly urgent is recognition and implementation of the ICJ’s 2024 advisory opinion finding the Israeli occupation illegal, and its provisional ruling determining that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly constitute genocide.
- Stop preventing other countries’ implementation of the 2024 UN General Assembly resolution ES-10/24 based on those two decisions, by ending the threats and punishments designed to prevent realization of the arms restrictions, trade and banking sanctions, and other non-violent pressures aimed at achieving Israeli compliance with international law, human rights, and UN resolutions.
This is the second article in a two-part series. The first part, Progressive Principles for a New US Foreign Policy, can be found here.
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Will Democrats Ever Formulate a Better Foreign Policy?
If the party is to meet the moment, restructuring US ties with Israel is only a starting point.
Sep 30, 2026
By any measure, 2026 has been a disastrous year for President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
An Iran war in which Trump promised quick victory has turned into a protracted farce dragging down the world economy. The president’s “reciprocal tariffs” were gutted by the Supreme Court, and his administration’s trade agenda remains deeply unpopular. Even his regime change operation in Venezuela, an apparent success, was broadly rejected by the American public and has put the United States into an imperial caretaker role in that country that could prove complicated and costly.
It is no surprise, then, that the president’s approval rating on foreign policy has sunk by almost 30% since his inauguration for his second term. With Trump’s overall polling numbers cratering, Democrats appear to have a decisive advantage in November’s midterms. Yet this has not translated into a lead in foreign affairs, where polling suggests the two parties are essentially tied.
This reality may stem from the fact that, while Democrats have correctly lambasted the president’s actions abroad, the party — and especially its top leadership — has yet to articulate a vision for US foreign policy that reckons with how Trump’s two terms have changed the world and America’s role in it.
While Trump’s first presidency could be viewed as an aberration from the normal course of American politics, his second has been more consequential: a “rupture,” as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney memorably put it in his Davos speech early this year.
American partners who have relied on US markets or security backing can no longer hope for a return to normalcy after Trump. They are acting accordingly: in the past year, US allies in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have engaged in a flurry of activity, inking new trade and defense agreements in a long-term effort to reduce dependence on the United States.
If Democrats are to regain some credibility on foreign policy with audiences both at home and abroad, they must show a similar willingness to break with the past. Yet this willingness has so far been in short supply. While some leading party figures acknowledge that a return to business as usual is impossible, their prescriptions have continued to echo the agenda of the Biden administration: restoring US leadership, renewing alliances, and crafting an international coalition to compete with China.
As much as former President Joe Biden’s foreign policy struggled under the weight of its contradictions, a retread of his agenda would face even more daunting challenges. Can the United States credibly claim to lead its allies — much less the world — when it has repeatedly shown that its commitments don’t outlast a single presidency? Will any partners want to double down on ties with a hegemon that has proven so eager to exploit dependencies for short-term gain? And what kind of international program can the American public be expected to support after years of anger at the status quo and Trumpian disruption alike?
The Democrats have yet to address these questions in a serious way. Fortunately, the intra-party struggle taking place around the US relationship with Israel has created an opening for a broader reevaluation of Democratic foreign policy.
What kind of international program can the American public be expected to support after years of anger at the status quo and Trumpian disruption alike?
Across the country, progressive primary challengers have trounced establishment candidates by appealing to voters’ desire to end blank-check support for Israel. The relationship has become a litmus test for candidates’ willingness to break with destructive orthodoxies. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) put it, “primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues.”
If the party is to meet the moment, restructuring US ties with Israel is only a starting point. Candidates and elected officials alike need to put forward bold ideas covering a range of issues, from reasserting congressional war powers to crafting a reformed approach to global aid.
Crucially, their proposals need to go beyond opposition to Trump. Rather than just calling out the stupidity of the Iran war, Democrats should pointedly reject the policy of US military primacy in the Middle East that led to it and make the vigorous case for diplomacy that the conflict has so clearly validated. In addition to overturning Trump’s tariffs, the party should develop an agenda for positive-sum economic engagement with the world that does not treat economic prosperity as a scarce resource to be hoarded by some countries at the expense of others. Instead of attacking Trump for weakness in his apparent dovish turn on China, Democrats can advance a strategy that centers cooperation and conflict prevention alongside targeted pushback on Chinese policies where necessary.
In the broadest terms, a new Democratic foreign policy should entail uniting behind a vision for US global engagement that recognizes America cannot lead on every issue and in every instance. This does not mean abandoning the commitment to a world governed by rules and institutions; in fact, renewed investment in international cooperation stands the best chance of sustaining a genuine “rules-based order” at a time when the United States clearly lacks the will and ability to stand up such a system on its own. This approach would mesh well with proposals by allied leaders like Carney and Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who have each sketched out ideas for a more just, resilient global order upheld by multilateralism and flexible coalition-building.
Democrats must build on these efforts and offer a compelling alternative both to Trumpism and to the exhausted status quo that helped produce it. Failure to do so would invite disappointment on the world stage — and provide a blessing to Trump’s would-be successors.
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The Ballot Box as a Check on War
A vote need not endorse a party’s entire agenda. It can demand answers from those responsible for war.
Sep 30, 2026
On September 24, the Senate rejected a resolution directing the president to remove US forces from hostilities with Iran. In American politics, the end of military operations does not necessarily end a war’s political consequences. Some wars enter a decisive phase when the public judges their costs. Missiles may fall silent, troops return to their bases, and governments announce agreements or claim victory, but questions remain: Who decided? Why was war necessary? How transparent was the decision? What did it cost taxpayers, soldiers, allies, and America’s credibility? Who should answer for it?
Elections do more than transfer power between parties. They are among the few institutional channels through which Americans can translate dissatisfaction with foreign policy into political action. A vote need not express partisan loyalty or simple opposition to a president. It can demand answers for decisions whose consequences outlast any administration.
One of American democracy’s fundamental contradictions is that the government makes decisions with far-reaching international consequences while citizens often have little direct power to shape them. Launching or expanding military operations, deploying troops to crisis zones, and allocating billions to foreign wars involve executive and congressional powers, security considerations, and classified intelligence. This setting can distance decision-makers from those who bear the economic, human, and geopolitical consequences. War becomes a question about the quality of political representation: Can democratic institutions balance government power with the public’s right to know, question, and judge?
Voting cannot solve every problem. Its value lies in its capacity to turn passive observers of foreign policy into participants who take positions on government direction and the limits of its authority.
A government that goes to war in the name of national security must explain its objectives, costs, and prospects for an end. A war that begins with a specific justification but continues without a clear endpoint, public evaluation of its outcomes, or political accountability can turn an emergency policy into a permanent condition. It may persist because of the political difficulty of admitting failure, the cost of withdrawal, or institutional and security interests, rather than a new necessity.
This is where elections matter. If citizens cannot intervene when a war begins, can they judge how it is managed, prolonged, or ended? Choosing a candidate can also convey a demand about war, military spending, or presidential powers without endorsing every part of that candidate’s platform.
A vote can register dissatisfaction, demand a change of direction, and warn officials who believe they can manage the political costs of war without public accountability. Someone may approve of a government’s economic policies while opposing its war, or disagree with parts of a party’s social agenda while seeking limits on the incumbent administration’s military powers. Elections allow these conflicting preferences to find expression through political choices, primary contests, civic participation, and pressure on representatives.
America’s two-party system, money in politics, the influence of interest groups, and the many issues bundled into electoral contests can prevent a single concern from translating clearly into a political outcome. Those limits do not necessarily leave citizens with a powerless ballot. They make deliberate use of the vote more important.
Foreign wars are often shaped within security, military, and executive circles whose language centers on threats, deterrence, national interests, and urgent action. During crises, that language can narrow public debate: Opposition may be accused of undermining national security, while demands to end a war may be portrayed as retreat. Democracy requires that national security remain open to scrutiny. Citizens are entitled to know the objectives, measures of success, how costs are financed, and when responsibility for decisions will be assessed.
Supporting the armed forces does not require unconditional acceptance of decisions about their use. Respecting soldiers is compatible with criticizing the politicians who send them to war. Those who hold political power remain responsible for defining missions, setting objectives, and explaining why they must continue.
The long-term costs of Middle Eastern wars, the social consequences of deployments abroad, and doubts about whether interventions were worth their costs can fuel public dissatisfaction. But war fatigue alone does not necessarily change policy. Discontent must move beyond scattered emotions and become a political demand that can be pursued and sustained. Elections offer one route.
When war becomes an electoral issue, candidates and parties face pressure to explain military costs, objectives, and the limits of foreign commitments. Congressional decisions on defense budgets, authorizations for military force, and oversight of foreign operations can affect voters’ trust and lawmakers’ futures. These are not merely technical matters detached from public opinion. A protest vote may not end a war, but it can form part of a chain of pressure through civil society, the media, Congress, and oversight institutions, raising the political cost of leaving questions unanswered.
Accountability must extend beyond ending a particular conflict. Even after fighting ends, the question of how the United States enters future wars remains. If politicians can invoke ambiguous threats, shifting objectives, and vague promises to enter wars, then move past their consequences without clear explanations, changing administrations will not necessarily change how decisions are made.
Are presidential war powers subject to sufficient congressional oversight? Do voters have the information needed to evaluate foreign policy? Are war costs transparent in the budget? Do officials remain accountable after fighting ends? These questions concern the architecture of power, the limits of executive authority, public oversight, and the meaning of representation.
When war decisions can cost billions, endanger lives, reshape regional orders, and have consequences lasting generations, political indifference carries a cost beyond withdrawing from an electoral contest. Beyond deciding who occupies the White House or controls Congress, citizens can remind officials acting in their name that power without accountability eventually becomes detached from representation.
For Americans who see endless wars as a rupture between the public’s will and foreign-policy decisions, voting can express a clear demand: National security must not become a blank check for unlimited wars. Politicians must not be allowed to hide responsibility behind geopolitical complexity, classified information, or partisan competition.
Voting cannot solve every problem. Its value lies in its capacity to turn passive observers of foreign policy into participants who take positions on government direction and the limits of its authority. It is not a final answer to endless wars. It can begin to reclaim a right that opaque decisions and unaccountable foreign policy have pushed beyond the public’s reach: the right to ask why a war began, why it continued, and who should be held responsible for its consequences.
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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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