For the past two decades, the Democratic Party has struggled to articulate a coherent US foreign policy doctrine. From the Iraq War to the rise of China to the Russia-Ukraine war, the Democrats have had little exciting to offer. Too often, they have converged with the Republicans on militarism, occasionally tinging it with a dose of liberal internationalism in an effort – often fruitlessly – to demonstrate that they are different. That uninspiring foreign policy may finally be facing a serious reform movement in the wake of the 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 Party – are gaining momentum to reverse that tradition. This could evolve into a broader challenge to the party’s establishment, and ultimately rescue the Democrats from their disappointing record.
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Democrats once knew how to do foreign policy. Those who succeeded connected their foreign-policy principles to their domestic agenda. In doing so, they created a coherent foreign-policy philosophy that could resonate with mainstream voters, who generally care more about domestic affairs than foreign policy. 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 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. Bill Clinton presented China’s accession to the WTO as an opportunity to expand American exports, create jobs, and strengthen the U.S. economy. That foreign-domestic policy nexus, nevertheless, largely disappeared.
When Democrats rallied behind John Kerry in 2004, 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 Kerry’s internally contradictory foreign-policy record. He supported several U.S. military interventions while remaining committed to multilateralism. The result was that Kerry, the liberal hawk, alienated anti-war voters without giving hawkish voters a compelling reason to prefer him over Bush. More importantly, in their effort to portray Kerry as a strong 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 make Americans better off?
The Kerry puzzle seems to have haunted the Democratic foreign-policy agenda ever since, with occasional exceptions. Barack Obama had some notable foreign policy achievements, such as the Iran nuclear deal and the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations. And those achievements 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 in 2016, shifting Democrats’ focus from opposing Republican foreign policy in general to opposing Trump, the person. Democrats’ obsession with Trump left his Democratic challengers – from Hillary Clinton to Joe Biden to Kamala Harris – stuck in the limbo of status-quo foreign policy. They became so eager to deliver a defining foreign-policy victory 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.
The most recent example is the Biden administration where many of the top officials had been involved in negotiating the Iran nuclear deal under Obama, who sought to advance cooperative internationalism – yet Biden’s 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 U.S. involvement in conflicts across multiple regions.
Biden epitomizes the conundrum confronting the Democratic establishment: whereas it has one foot in the present to search for reform, the other remains 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 the 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 in 2024. 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 the Democrats to escape their quagmire is to stop tinkering with – and, more importantly, 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 the Democrats need is an outside-in reform – something only genuine progressives can deliver. Progressives, by nature, embody an egalitarian imagination seeking to take root in the most capitalist country in the world. Their dissatisfaction with the status quo of the socio-economic structure can easily translate into opposition to the Democratic foreign-policy establishment’s hunger for so-called “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 elsewhere within the Democratic establishment: the introspection to reconsider America’s changing place in the world increasingly defined by inequality.
The most critical aspect of that introspection is, despite its relentless denial, the Democratic Party’s fixation on U.S. military dominance, which progressives increasingly view as an important contributor to global inequality. In defending that dominance, the establishment is emblematic of the inconsistency 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. From Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of a no-fly zone in Syria to Obama’s airstrikes against Libya to 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 U.S. military dominance and reconstructing American exceptionalism from within. Free from the establishment’s unbreakable ties to militarism, progressives’ ideological and professional conformity enables them to avoid conflating “effective U.S. foreign policy” with “military intervention” – as Democratic elites often do – thereby bringing domestic clarity to foreign policymaking. And it is precisely this domestic clarity that enables progressives to offer a clearer foreign policy vision than the establishment: by working toward social transformation at home, strengthening the 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 notorious self-forgiving nature of the foreign-policy establishment, Democratic elites can often escape the consequences of their policy advice. Biden’s hawkish advisers Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken, and Brett McGurk were involved in policies that undermined crucial negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in the spring of 2022, not to mention 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.
The result of this shift toward accountability would be an answer as to what Democrats should pursue in an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalry: not ex post militarism, but ex ante diplomacy. This progressive vision was on display in the remarks of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Taiwan at the Munich Security Conference. Ocasio-Cortez captured an ethos fundamentally different from a militarism-based approach to U.S. 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 would grow and begin sweeping through one state after another in a string of electoral victories. From Melat Kiros to Abdul El-Sayed to Peggy Flanagan, progressive candidates have repeatedly defeated establishment figures and, in an ironic twist, have been propelled in part by warnings from Democratic elites themselves. 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 aid to Israel – a shift that would have been difficult to imagine in prior times. 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 upon which American foreign policy is built – the American people should be.
Under pressure from the left, Democrats will have to rediscover that their foreign policy must 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 health care more accessible, or everyday life more affordable. And, they will also have to recognize that the rise of a progressive pro-Palestinian foreign policy 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’s outdated militarist doctrine will not endure forever. Progressives may prove to be the only viable counterforce capable of ultimately revitalizing a modern foreign-policy identity that puts people before US primacy, diplomacy before militarism, human rights before geopolitical calculations, and the needs of ordinary Americans before bloated defense budgets and forever wars.
Jiachen Shi is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Tulane University. His research examines how US presidents use backchannel diplomacy and rhetorical strategies to achieve policy legitimation, drawing on cases from the Woodrow Wilson administration onward and spanning diplomatic engagements across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and South America. His opinion articles have been published in The Diplomat, The National Interest, and E-International Relations. His journal articles on population aging, national security, and military spending have appeared in SN Social Sciences and China Information.