Connexion
A new book lays out how progressives would reshape U.S. strategy.
A World for All, edited by Matt Duss, OR Books, 2026, 250 pages.
Opposition to U.S. foreign policy has always tended to bring together strange ideological bedfellows. During the 1890s, when our republic shed its innocence to don the gaudy trappings of empire, populist Democrats joined aristocratic Mugwumps to take a stand against what one far-sighted pamphlet called “the conquest of the United States by Spain.” Before both world wars, a ragtag collection of socialists and pacifists found themselves on the same side as fanatical capitalists in futilely opposing America’s entry into the conflicts of the Old World. And from the Cold War through the Global War on Terror, libertarians and paleocons made common cause with hippies, Marxists, and other assorted denizens of the left to attack America’s globe-spanning military commitments.
These sorts of coalitions are easiest to maintain when the establishment is at its most imperial. It is no coincidence that the wild excesses of the Bush years produced the most durable and influential critique of interventionism since the Vietnam War, one that would eventually break containment to shape how the electorate as a whole thought about the country’s “forever wars.” Indeed, so thoroughgoing was this backlash that by 2016, the most exciting and compelling candidates vying for the Republican and Democratic nominations—Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders—would both be unrelenting critics of America’s foreign policy orthodoxy. And each held out strikingly similar prescriptions: end the wars, stop policing the world, and turn our gaze inwards.
Today, the promise of such a transpartisan alliance remains a major element of the movement known in DC circles as “restraint”—a loose but very real project to bring the national security state to heel, retrench from our garrisoning of the globe, and unwind an empire that has proven far more of a liability than an asset. But big struggles have a way of papering over differences. And although both left-wingers and right-wingers do meaningfully come together to advance restraint, their premises, priorities, and ultimate aims often diverge significantly.
One of the most influential and, I think, accurate taxonomies of this movement posits three distinct species of “restrainers” (to use the inelegant but unavoidable term): realists, conservatives, and progressives.
Realists come to restraint through their understanding of the international system, which they believe tends to punish overextension and make the employment of military force particularly risky. Of the three schools, they tend to be the most focused on the material costs of primacy. (Although realism and restraint are often used synonymously, they are conceptually distinct: The former is a descriptive theory, while the latter is a set of prescriptions.)
Conservative restrainers are more concerned about what interventionism does to America’s own values, domestic institutions, and republican traditions. Although they, too, decry the waste and risk associated with our global entanglements, they also see empire as inherently corrosive, even if the bill in blood and treasure could be kept manageable.
And progressive restrainers are most exercised about war and militarism. They are comfortable with engagement, broadly speaking, and in fact often harbor their own plans to remake global order, but reject an American hegemony that is enforced with or underwritten by military power.
A World for All, a new volume of essays edited by the leftist foreign policy guru Matt Duss, represents an attempt to articulate the worldview of this last group. The foreword—which is written by Sanders, Duss’s old boss—frames things in starkly moral terms, as an epic struggle between oligarchy and democracy. “A progressive foreign policy,” Sanders writes,
must begin with moral clarity. We cannot champion human rights abroad while violating them at home. We cannot condemn Russia’s bombing of civilians while funding Israel’s atrocities. We cannot lecture others about democracy while billionaires buy our elections and policymakers serve their donors rather than their constituents. Authoritarian rivals are exploiting our hypocrisy, making consistency not only a moral obligation but a strategic necessity.
But clarity is not enough. We must also articulate an affirmative vision: a foreign policy that confronts global oligarchy, strengthens democratic institutions, and builds genuine partnerships. This means focusing on collective action rather than dominance. It means making anti-corruption a central pillar of our foreign policy. It means supporting democracy not through military intervention but by helping societies meet the needs of their people. It means recognizing that true security comes not from trillion-dollar arsenals but from addressing the root causes of instability: inequality, injustice, and environmental catastrophe. And it requires humility—an understanding that US leadership must be earned, not assumed.
The book is divided into three thematic sections: one offering regional sketches; one focused on economics and migration; and one mainly concerned with government and technology. It draws from a range of contributors, including former officials in Democratic administrations, academics, and think-tankers, all of whom share a firmly left-wing and broadly idealistic orientation.
But despite the aspirations of the foreword (and the introduction, and the prologue—the volume does a hat trick of prefatory materials), what we get falls a little short of an “affirmative vision.”
Partly this is because the essays are uneven. Some are sharp and thought-provoking. The piece on Congress, for example, deftly analyzes the causes of our current dysfunction and lays out the foreign policy stakes of continuing to tolerate an utterly supine legislature. The chapter on corruption puts forward specific, actionable policy fixes, ones that seem to me to have a decent chance of cutting down the sale of political outcomes both here and abroad.
Others read as throwbacks to the nadir of what we’re now calling “Woke 1.” One chapter ponders earnestly the question of how America can build a “feminist, anti-racist foreign policy;” another recommends open borders and a return to the “see no evil” approach to immigration policy that Americans so roundly rejected in 2024.
And then there are some contributions that leave the reader scratching his head. The essay on Europe, for instance, talks airily of the need for both “deeper engagement and genuine give-and-take,” while entirely ignoring the most pressing issue in transatlantic relations: namely, what should be done with the 80,000 or so American troops currently stationed on the continent. In the volume’s piece on Russia, the role of the United States in the Ukraine War—obviously the gravitational center of bilateral relations right now—is disposed of in a few hand-wavey sentences:
If negotiations on ending the war become possible with Russia, the key diplomatic instrument will not be rhetoric or the art of persuasion but the cumulative leverage over Russia that Ukraine and its partners are able to amass. Military aid to Ukraine should be organized accordingly, not around the unobtainable goal of defeating Russia outright but of blocking Russia from moving forward in Ukraine and of demonstrating to Russia that the war is futile—a costly dead end. The unpredictable details of such military aid will vary month by month and year by year.
Perhaps it’s just me, but those “unpredictable details” seem rather important!
But the other reason the effort to build a coherent blueprint falls short is because there are major, unresolved tensions at the heart of progressive thinking about foreign policy. The most important of these concerns the relationship of values to statecraft. On the one hand, there is a strong impulse among leftists to orient themselves around bright, moral lines—to lay down sweeping, universal principles and build upwards from those. At the Munich security conference this year, AOC mused that rather than the post-rules-based international order many IR theorists profess to see in the aftermath of Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, we may in fact be living in a pre-rules-based international order. Progressives, she said, therefore “have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working-class people.”
At the same time, there is also a nagging sense that the United States is itself a morally compromised actor, which leads naturally to a discomfort with Washington unilaterally setting and enforcing the rules by which the rest of the world must play. In addition, many progressives’ aversion to militarism and securitized rivalries gives them a pragmatic streak when it comes to great power diplomacy, even when that involves (as it must) legitimating forces that are antithetical to many of the values upon which a left-wing vision for world order supposedly rests.
We can see this tension at work in the different approaches to issues like regime character. Authoritarianism is often seen by the progressive set as a foreign policy problem with both ethical and strategic costs. Coziness with autocratic states is often decried in the strongest moral terms, and U.S. policy mistakes tend to be framed as natural outgrowths of our relationships with evil governments. This perspective is most influential in the approach to places like Latin America and the Middle East, whose strongmen—Bukele, Netanyahu, MbS—are particularly distasteful to the progressive left. (This book’s chapter on the Middle East, for example, makes reference to “the mistaken belief that authoritarian regimes could ensure American interests,” and goes on to blame “short-term authoritarian bargains” for most of our troubles in the region.)
Yet when it comes to China, there is a markedly different—and, I should add, vastly more reasonable—approach. This is to accept the existence and legitimacy of a repressive, non-democratic regime ruling over 1.4 billion people; explicitly to reject the logic of great power competition and the “authoritarianism versus democracy” framing of the Biden years; and instead to reach for a grand bargain to minimize the risk of war and work to manage irreducibly international problems like AI risk and climate change.
There is a similar ambiguity about another major component of American statecraft: trade policy. On the one hand, the left is perfectly willing to employ public power to shape the economy for social and political ends; the use of tariffs as part of a broader effort to reverse neoliberalism, globalization, and the immiseration of American workers seems a perfectly natural aim for a progressive foreign policy. And obviously until Trump came along, Democrats were far the more protectionist of the two parties. But the Donald has scrambled that, particularly in his second term, and now opposition to a tariff regime directly and seemingly irreducibly associated with Political Enemy No. 1 is orthodoxy for most Democrats. Moreover, some progressives are uncomfortable with the adversarial character of tariffs, which they fear drive interstate conflict and competition. (Indeed, the book’s prologue argues the United States should “unwind its tariff regime toward China and marry Western capital with Chinese green tech overcapacity.”)
But if these uncertainties make it difficult to predict exactly what a progressive administration would do, they shouldn’t obscure the fact that there is an underlying coherence to much of this worldview. Two elements of this are particularly important.
The first is internationalism, the embrace of universalizing aims that imply deep and sustained engagement with the rest of the world. This is not McGovern’s “Come Home, America;” it is resolutely interventionist, in the broadest sense of that word, and sees the United States as an (if not, as Albright had it, the) indispensable nation. Its adherents would harness U.S. influence to advance ambitious—some might say utopian—projects like halting climate change, combating “oligarchy,” and redistributing wealth from the global North to the global South.
The second is a related tendency to look at geopolitics as an extension of domestic politics. Developments inside and outside our borders are connected; it is all “one struggle,” as some of the more radical proponents of this view used to say. Thus fighting inequality and corruption in the United States requires tackling it in Central America as well, and advancing gay rights in Africa is part and parcel of defending them here.
It must be said that there are some things for which this is obviously true: If one believes that multinational corporations pay too little tax, for example, trying to coordinate an international corporate tax regime makes eminent sense. Likewise for restricting carbon emissions, if fighting climate change is your bag.
Still, there is something quite unsettling about such a Weltanschauung. Even accounting for the progressive aversion to militarism, this is the stuff of which crusades are made.
So what are other restrainers to take away from all this?
Progressives remain important allies for those of us who care about right-sizing America’s global posture, and who aspire to an international system shaped by something more than brute force. This is especially true as an administration which came into office with such promise degenerates into the crudest, most overtly imperialistic version of primacy imaginable. I’ll take a flawed idealism that seeks to unwind American empire over a bloody-minded interventionism built around the precept that (as the president put it while cataloguing his various acts of aggression in front of the UN) “to the victor belong the spoils.”
Yet as 2028 heaves into view, the differences between the respective camps will start to matter more and more. It is conceivable that both the Republican and Democratic nominees could plausibly claim the mantle of restraint: a Vance–AOC showdown, for instance, could well be seen as pitting the project’s realists and conservatives against its progressives. This is especially important given the way the second Trump administration has bulldozed the U.S. foreign policy establishment, clearing out decades of accumulated policy choices, personnel, and bureaucratic inertia. Whoever steps into the Oval Office in January 2029 will have more latitude to reshape U.S. strategy than any president since the end of the Cold War. Restrainers would therefore do well to ponder their allegiances carefully before then.
The post Building a Better World? appeared first on The American Conservative.
Evan Barker’s debut book exposes the rot hollowing out the Democratic Party.
One of the more striking developments in American politics over the past three decades has been the transformation of the Democratic Party from a big-tent movement built around working-class Americans into an elite-driven institution obsessed with diversity, equity, and inclusion.
In Nothing Left: Confessions of a Democratic Operative, Evan Barker, a former fundraiser for the party, offers readers a behind-the-scenes look at that evolution.
Barker has always been someone at home on the left side of the political spectrum. She suffers from primary ciliary dyskinesia, a rare and life-threatening genetic disorder that made healthcare an issue of paramount personal importance to her. Barker credits Obamacare—specifically, its extension of insurance coverage to Americans with pre-existing conditions—with saving her life, and believed this “would bind [her] to the Democratic Party forever.” She was further heartened by the rise of hard left populists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-VT), whose commitment to social democracy inspired her to work for the Democratic party as a fundraiser.
But as her career progressed, Barker was dismayed to see Democrats toss aside the old goal—improving its voters’ material circumstances—in favor of a new focus: identity politics.
One of the big villains of the book is Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Barker cites an episode in early 2019, soon after her widely-covered election to Congress, as showing AOC’s true colors. Despite campaigning on not supporting Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) campaign to reclaim the House Speakership, that is precisely what AOC did, with Barker noting that “just five days after AOC met one-on-one with Pelosi,” her firebrand chief of staff and co-founder of the famed “Justice Democrats” movement Saikat Chakrabarti “resigned” while her equally anti-establishment communications director Corbin Trent “would be demoted.”
AOC, in Barker’s telling:
sold her soul to Nancy Pelosi in exchange for power, prestige, and good committee assignments…together AOC and Pelosi formed a partnership. AOC would follow Pelosi’s lead while Pelosi gently steered the Democratic Party toward progressives. AOC was co-opted, yes, but the Democratic Party was co-opted, too. Both wings captured each other’s worst impulses. AOC became a loyal lapdog for the establishment, while the establishment embraced the most divisive aspects of progressive rhetoric. This merger came at the expense of the populist vision expressed in Bernie’s 2016 campaign. All that economic populism had to be dropped. The party would have to focus on the culture war.
AOC had, in other words, signaled her allegiance to what she recently laughed off as “Woke 1.” And it was an allegiance she would act on.
Barker recounts how AOC had refused to endorse a progressive challenger to a corporate, establishment incumbent in a Democratic primary in Kansas. Her reasoning: the challenger, Brent Welder, was a white man, while his opponent, Sharice Davids, was a Native American woman. As AOC herself allegedly told Welder, it simply wouldn’t do for her to be seen “as someone who isn’t supporting another woman of color.”
And later, in the summer of 2020, Barker watched as “healthcare went from the primary issue to a secondary one” within the party.
While organizing for the 2021 U.S. Senate special election runoff race in Georgia, Barker got involved with the Be A Hero Fund, an organization founded by healthcare activist Ady Barkan who tragically passed away from ALS shortly after his first child was born yet was “consistent and true to his values, a rarity in politics.” But to campaign on Ady Barkan’s Medicare-for-All politics alone “wouldn’t get donors excited.” To advocate for the issue which first motivated her to embrace the Democratic Party, Barker would have to “frame the pitch as a push to reach ‘neglected’ minority communities” and use the language of “intersectionality,” which “had become ubiquitous in the wake of George Floyd,” writing that “even when we spoke about healthcare, we had to use the language of identity politics.”
Though her book takes aim at Democrats, there are lessons in it for Republicans as well. Reflecting on the failures of the Kamala Harris campaign to inspire Democratic voters, Barker observes that their “single most egregious mistake,” was “ignoring the pain of the American people by telling them what they felt about the economy wasn’t real.” Indeed, after three years of inflation, MSNBC decided its strategy to woo voters disaffected by the economy under President Joe Biden was to simply tell those voters that they were hallucinating, trotting out Chris Hayes to convince his viewers not to believe their lying eyes. As the Iran War deepens that affordability crisis, the response of the GOP has likewise been to tell voters that the economy is normal, labeling the economy’s critics as ungrateful and spoiled “communists.”
Another factor in Kamala Harris’ 2024 defeat—one that was perhaps understated in the book—was the vice president’s association with the Gaza War. Barker is basically silent on Israel, but it appears clear in hindsight that this was an albatross for the party. A poll conducted by YouGov and published by IMEU asked voters who had voted Democrat in 2020 but not in 2024 why they had changed their minds. A plurality, nearly 29 percent, said the most important factor in their decision was ending Israel’s war in Gaza.
The path Barker charts for the Democratic Party—ditch woke and return to improving people’s lives—should be uncontroversial. Even conservatives should welcome this, as it’s far better for the country for the opposition party to be more sane and responsible. And in fact, there may be opportunities for some fruitful cross-pollination: to appeal to the working class once again, Barker writes that Democrats should “take the best parts of MAGA and the best parts of Bernie and marry them.” Sounds to this reviewer like the right prescription for America.
The post Nothing Left (Except Corporate-Friendly Identity Politics) appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Democrat Graham Platner dropped out of the Maine Senate race Wednesday evening following new allegations of sexual assault, the latest in a string of scandals dogging his campaign.
After days of speculation and high-profile endorsement revocations, from including Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Platner announced his withdrawal from the race.
“We are not doing it because of the allegations, we are doing it because of the structures being taken away from us by those in power,” he said in a video statement.
POLITICO on Monday reported new allegations of sexual assault from a woman who had dated Platner. Jenny Racicot, the accuser, had in an interview with the New York Times previously described “positive memories” of her time with the candidate despite Platner showing up drunk to her home, an incident during which she now says that Platner sexually assaulted her. Platner denied the allegations in a Monday video statement.
Platner won the Democratic primary for Senate in Maine last month amid controversies including a Nazi-related tattoo, offensive comments online, and the Times’ report on past relationships.
His withdrawal comes just days before a deadline that would allow the Maine Democratic Party to replace him on the ballot by July 27.
The post Platner Exits Maine Senate Race appeared first on The American Conservative.
Plus: staring Zoomers and a fresh war.
Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) want to impose a 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires, which seems predictable enough. This tax would bring in $4.4 trillion over the next decade, apparently, which would then be passed along—minus administrative overhead, of course—to people in households making less than $150,000 a year.
Sanders and Khanna, of course, won’t pocket any of the money themselves, but that’s okay. They already make $174,000 a year, hardly a princely sum these days, but more than most Americans take home. Their pay also comes, of course, from taxes—these paid by everyone, not just billionaires.
Bernie, even on his meagre salary as a United States Senator, is feeling no pain. By now, it’s well known that he owns three homes and knows better than to try to hide the fact.
“Do I own three residences? Yeah, I do,” he admits. “I live here in Burlington, Vermont. We live in a middle-class neighborhood. Nice house. Guess what? I’m a United States senator and I own a home in Washington, DC, as do most senators—you live there year after year…. And guess what? Like many thousands of people in the state of Vermont, I have a summer camp. It’s a nice one on Lake Champlain. That’s it.”
Ah, the irony of it all! Sanders did not buy three homes on his salary as a senator. He “wrote two best-selling books,” he reminds us, including It’s Okay to Be Angry About Capitalism. (Thanks, Bernie, for your permission.)
Now comes an entire book, Bernie for Burlington: The Rise of the People’s Politician and the Transformation of One American Place, in which the author Dan Chiasson devotes nearly 600 pages just to the eight years Sanders spent as that city’s mayor. In the New York Times Book Review in early March, Alexander Nazaryan writes that it is “impressive but frustrating.”
Chiasson seems to worship Bernie, which is not always the case with those who know the man. Sanders clearly inspires loyalty in his fans—not least in this book’s author—but he can also be abrasive, irascible, and tactless. As one advisor wrote in a 1982 memo to him, “You are not nice to people.”
Maybe not, but St. Bernard means well, and that’s what socialism is all about, right? Intentions are everything. Results, in the long run, matter less than the stated objectives of the visionaries earnestly paving our highways to Hell.
Bernie for Burlington, at least for those of us not under the Sanders spell, sounds like hard going. It takes Chiasson 257 pages just to get to our hero’s first campaign for mayor, and while he makes Burlington “the place to see socialism in action,” Bernie could also, when the need arose, morph into “a classic ribbon-cutting mayor” and (are you ready?) “an innovative capitalist.”
He’s no Marxist, the publication Democratic Left reassures us. He’s not for the “withering away of the state,” Mark S. Malaszczyk of the Long Island Democratic Socialists of America writes, but for “preserving [it] as a tool for public welfare.” What idealistic people Bernie’s age not so long ago denounced as the national security state, the military-industrial complex, and the Establishment now provide a “social safety net within a mixed-market economy.”
Bernie’s a “socialist,” of course, but his socialism “is a form of social democracy—a philosophy that respects private property while prioritizing human dignity, much like the progressive reforms of the early 20th century.”
This is comforting, especially since Bernie’s impact beyond the Green Mountain State remains considerable. While his fans can point to “few robust legislative accomplishments,” in Nazaryan’s words, he “has cleared the way for younger, more charismatic democratic socialists, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani.”
This is by no means an authorized biography—Bernie and wife Jane did not cooperate—but “it is not clear how much they would have had to add.” They could hardly have made the book more fawning than it already seems to be.
“By collapsing the distance between himself and his subject,” the Times’ reviewer says, Chiasson “turns history into a sales pitch.” That hallmark of capitalism, it turns out, also serves a useful purpose.
We finally saw Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which was almost two-and-a-half years in the making and is two-and-a-half hours long. The cinematography, critics say, is “stunning.” Variety’s review comes closer to my own reaction. With all its operatic overkill, Frankenstein “buckles under its own weight.” I almost always enjoy Charles Dance and Christoph Waltz, but their roles here end all too soon. I also found Mia Goth’s Lady Elizabeth Harlander quite fetching, but the more I have learned about this actress (can we still say actress?), the less I like.
Mia Goth cannot be her real name, I thought, but evidently it is. Mia Gypsy Mello de Silva Goth, it turns out, really is the name she was assigned at birth, as we are now instructed to say. In 2016, she and Shia LaBeouf, who met on the set of Nymphomaniac, got hitched in Las Vegas at a ceremony officiated by an Elvis impersonator. If a Las Vegas ceremony with an Elvis impersonator officiating doesn’t tell the world they are serious about marriage, I don’t know what would.
What puts me off mainly about this woman is that in almost every picture I see of her—and I’ve looked for them—she is gazing out at the rest of us with what I understand is called the Gen Z Stare. This disdainfully uncomprehending look, which Aubrey Plaza and Billie Eilish also affect, is associated with service workers being asked apparently idiotic questions.
We’ve gone, it seems, from “the customer is always right” to “the customer is always stupid.”
So, we are at war again, and people are rightly disturbed. But a proper response to such occurrences, Albert Jay Nock wrote, is to ask, “What did you expect?” That’s the question that
ought to be put every time a story of State villainy appears in the news. It ought to be thrown at our public day after day, from every newspaper, periodical, lecture platform, and radio station in the land; and it ought to be backed up by a simple appeal to history, a simple invitation to look at the record.
The post Capitalism Has Its Uses—Bernie Says So appeared first on The American Conservative.
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