The Left’s Reckoning on Gaza, Elites and American Power

This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.

I think we may be in a moment of foreign-policy rupture in the Democratic Party.

Years ago, the Iraq war — a reason Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary — remade the Democratic Party and changed the course of American politics.

Archival clip of Barack Obama: Because I will offer a clear contrast. As somebody who never supported this war, thought it was a bad idea, I don’t want to just end the war, but I want to end the mind-set that got us in the war in the first place. That’s the kind of leadership I’m going to provide.

Right now, Israel and Gaza feel to me like they are becoming the center of a similar rupture.

Brian Schatz, the Democratic senator from Hawaii, is often considered the next Senate Democratic leader after Chuck Schumer — someone with an incredible sense of the pulse of the party.

A few weeks ago, Schatz wrote on X:

I’m not into blacklisting anyone from future work in their area of expertise, but I do think it’s fair to want a whole new crop of foreign-policy staffers in the next Democratic administration. It’s not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything.

Then Senator Chris Van Hollen — again, very well respected in the party and very much someone in its mainstream — wrote a Times Opinion piece laying out how different he thinks the Democratic Party’s policy on Israel needs to be, and how badly he thinks the Biden administration’s policy failed.

Senator Van Hollen then went on to say:

Primary voters won’t trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs, even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza. Nor will they support a candidate who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.

“Complicity” is a strong word in an internecine Democratic fight here.

Then we’ve seen a number of Democratic primaries beginning to split over Gaza. It has become an essential issue in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Abdul El-Sayed leads in many of the new polls.

Archival clip of Abdul El-Sayed: You’re watching Democrats bend over backward in the most pretzel-like way to justify the war. They’re like: This is an illegal war, but if they ask me, I’d fund it.

Archival clip of El-Sayed: If you don’t have the courage to call out the moral abomination of a genocide, then what do you have the courage to call out in the first place? This is a moral Rorschach test for our party.

It was very present in the New Jersey House primary that Adam Hamawy, a doctor who had treated the injured in Gaza, just won.

Archival clip of Adam Hamawy: I was running on something very simple — is that we should be spending on health care, not bombs. We should be spending on our communities here in New Jersey, in America, and not funding bombs overseas for atrocities and genocide. We should not be funding the endless wars that we’re seeing.

It has been at the center of the House primary in my district in New York, where Brad Lander is running against the incumbent, Dan Goldman. Much of Lander’s attack has centered on Goldman’s support for Israel.

Archival clip of Brad Lander: Representative Goldman does not view what’s happening there as a genocide. I’ve been fighting against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza since 1990. I’ve never heard him say the word “occupation” in that context.

Lander, too, is well ahead in recent polls.

Into all of this comes President Trump’s war in Iran — a war he has fought alongside Israel — as well as the general failure of his tariff and foreign policy. So it has made this moment one when something new really could emerge.

The Democratic Party is not going to go back to Bidenism. It is not going to try to replicate Trumpism. So what would something different actually look like? On Gaza and beyond, what would it do differently?

Matt Duss is the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy. He has worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Center for American Progress. He served as Senator Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, and he has advised Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. So Duss is really at the center of foreign-policy thinking among the elected left.

I wanted to have him on to explore a question that I think might come to define the 2028 primary: What would a left foreign policy look like? What would it actually try to do in the world?

Ezra Klein: Matt Duss, welcome to the show.

Matt Duss: Thank you.

You wrote a piece in The Nation recently saying that Democrats can’t avoid a reckoning on Gaza. What is that reckoning?

First, it involves understanding that we’re not going to sidestep Gaza as an issue as the party moves forward.

I do think the Gaza debate, the Gaza debacle, the Gaza genocide, stands for a lot that is wrong with our politics. If Democrats are going to be able to offer a compelling alternative vision of how they’re going to govern, they really need to have a discussion, have a debate, have a reckoning with what the Biden administration did — not just with the policy, but with the campaign of what I think was clearly disinformation that accompanied that policy. And that’s going to involve some very tough conversations.

That’s going to be putting a spotlight on some key officials who served in the Biden administration, some of whom probably hope to serve again and probably should not get to.

What do you mean by a campaign of disinformation?

I’m looking at the way that the Biden administration, the White House, the State Department talked.

You had this constant refrain of: Oh, we’re not seeing that. We’ve not made that assessment.

Archival clip of Matthew Miller: We have not made an assessment or drawn the conclusion that they are in violation of international humanitarian law when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.

Archival clip of Vedant Patel: Given the nature of Hamas’s track record of co-locating itself with civilians, using civilians as human shields, we’re unable to make a conclusive, uh, determination, uh, uh, as it relates to violations of international humanitarian law.

Archival clip of Patel: We at this time have not made an assessment that they’re, uh, that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.

And it was clear that they were choosing not to see things that were happening.

Everyone else in the world could see these things were happening. Palestinians themselves were reporting these things were happening. Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, international NGOs were reporting that these things were happening.

This is one of the things that really underlines this disconnect here: The Biden administration made an assessment within a month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Within a month, Secretary of State Blinken came out and made an assessment that Russia is committing war crimes.

Archival clip of Antony Blinken: Yesterday, President Biden said that, in his opinion, war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Personally, I agree.

The idea that they could not make a similar assessment of a military into whose operations the United States has vastly more visibility, I think, is just not credible.

You know many of the people in the Biden administration. You’ve talked to them.

Mm-hmm.

What do you think happened?

And when I ask that, I mean it in a very specific way. What do you think were the set of commitments or values — because these people see themselves as having deep commitments and deep values — that, in your view, went wrong and led to the policy that we had?

First, this really does come down to Joe Biden. Not only Joe Biden. But Joe Biden had a very particular conception both of how U.S. policy toward the Middle East, how U.S. policy toward Israel should work, and he had a very serious confidence — I would say misplaced, but he had great confidence — in his own judgment about how to use U.S. foreign policy.

He had a view of the U.S.-Israel relationship, about which he said many times, that there should be no daylight. If there were differences in opinion, differences in policy, those should be expressed privately, whereas in public, the United States should remain essentially in lockstep with whatever the Israeli government was doing.

I think he has had that view for a very long time. His view was: OK, we’re going to express some differences with what Israel is doing here and there, but we’re not going to put any real pressure on them to change policy.

As a former staffer myself, I know that once the boss has laid down the parameters of where he or she is willing to go and not go, staffers start to tend to shape — you stop arguing, and you say: OK, these are the guardrails. And you start to shape policy within those guardrails.

Actually, during the 2020 primary, when Senator Sanders kicked off a debate about conditioning military aid to Israel, Biden at the time called that a preposterous idea. There was that one time when he withheld one shipment of 2,000-pound bombs, but other than that, there were really no consequences for what the entire world could see was an ongoing set of atrocities.

I have a question about this that maybe you know the answer to, because it’s always confused me.

I think it’s fair to say at this point, for the left, Gaza exists as the central failure of the Biden administration. And I agree with you that much of that comes down to Joe Biden himself.

When Biden was being pushed to step down, some of the strongest people fighting that effort, trying to keep Biden in place, were Bernie Sanders and A.O.C.

I never quite understood why. You know them better than I do. Particularly given the centrality of Gaza now, and, obviously, that was true in 2024, what was going on there?

I can say what I know. From my perspective, I think their view was that they knew Biden. Obviously, they disagreed with the Gaza policy. They were two of the most vocal critics of the Gaza policy.

But they knew that when it came to other domestic policies — economic policy, trade policy — they at least had an ear in the White House. Joe Biden and his team had been willing to talk with and engage with them on a whole range of issues beyond foreign policy.

But I also have to say, I feel like in a pragmatic sense — and this is just my suspicion, I don’t have any inside information — I think it makes sense. If someone is going to push Joe Biden out, it’s not going to be the progressive left.

They’re very aware, and I think all progressives in the Democratic Party are aware, that we have a centrist establishment that is always looking for reasons to call us disunifying wreckers. So I think that played into their hesitance, as well.

Let me then ask you about the way the policy was changing.

As you say, in the 2020 campaign, Bernie Sanders kicked off a debate on conditioning aid, which is something that has been anathema in the Democratic Party for a long time. All of a sudden, it’s not. I thought the Op-Ed by Senator Chris Van Hollen was a pretty significant moment. He’s an establishment figure who’s been very outspoken on Israel for a long time, it’s worth saying.

Let me ask directly: What, in your view, should the Democrats’ position toward Israel be? What is the right policy here?

I think, first of all, it’s to end aid. Israel is a wealthy country. There’s really no need for American taxpayers to continue to subsidize their defense budget.

That’s a position that was put out there by A.O.C., and I think about five minutes later, Rahm Emanuel came up right behind.

So, very interesting. These are two people who represent different poles in the party, but I do think we’re getting close to that.

But then, moving from that, it’s not just aid — it is sales. And we do have laws on the books. This is why I found the whole conditioning aid, conditioning arm sales debate, so bizarre — the way it was treated as some kind of weird punishment.

We have laws on the books that condition aid to every country according to a set of principles. Whether it’s the Leahy Law, whether it’s the Arms Export Control Act, there are existing laws that prohibit or restrict the sale of arms to militaries or military units that have a proven record of human rights abuses.

We have simply not upheld those laws. Multiple administrations have simply ignored them. Again, this is what I was saying about the Biden administration ——

Would you say we follow those laws in general and make an exception for Israel, or do we not follow them in general?

I think there are certain countries, Israel being one, Egypt, others ——

Saudi Arabia.

Yes. Listen, the arms lobby is an extremely powerful one. There is a strong incentive to just push these sales through.

Do you think it comes from the arms lobby, or do you think it comes from the American foreign policy establishment’s or the president’s feeling that the alliances with these countries are important for other reasons?

I think it’s all those things. In some cases it might be one more than the other, but I do think this gets to a much bigger problem. The security state, the military industrial complex, whatever word we’re going to use now, is a real problem. This is part of how we ended up in this ridiculous war with Iran.

But getting back to what the Democrats’ position should be on Israel, I think, first of all, uphold our existing laws when it comes to arms sales. But also let’s really tee up a policy that empowers the best actors in Israel and Palestine, rather than the worst ones.

Because, unfortunately, as I see it, that is what our policy has been doing for the past 20-plus years.

Can you describe how it’s done that, and then what the alternative would look like?

We’ve had a policy where basically all the consequences and disincentives and punishments and sticks, so to speak, have been focused on one side. Not entirely, but mostly. That’s on one side, the less powerful side, the Palestinians.

There’s always some new condition that’s placed on them to receive aid — and again, some of this is legit. Obviously, we should impose consequences for terrorism. That is true.

But at the same time, there are zero real, meaningful consequences that are ever imposed on the more powerful side, the Israeli side. This dynamic has really given Israel a very reasonable belief that they can just press forward with de facto annexation, which is ongoing as we speak; with entrenching their control over all of the land of Israel and Palestine in perpetuity; and to weaken and diminish the Palestinian national movement to a completely controlled subject population within a greater Israel. That’s the situation we’re in right now.

The reason this keeps ticking in one direction is because there’s no reason for it not to. There are no consequences for more and more extremist leaders in Israel to raise and implement more extremist policies.

At the same time, Palestinians look at that, and they look at their own ineffective, corrupt leadership, and they’re like: What is this?

They see only more occupation, and it empowers extremist voices who are saying: No, the way to get our freedom is through the gun.

That’s what I mean: We have pursued policies that have empowered some of the worst actors, who don’t want peace, who want war.

Be specific for me. What are these policies, and what would their alternative or opposite look like?

Let’s look at Gaza. You need, first of all, governance.

Gaza, as I’m sure your listeners know, it’s a ruin now. It’s still a series of tent cities.

But the way to bring order, the way to bring services to people, the way to bring real control is to have it governed by Palestinians. That’s ultimately the only way that you’re going to be able to ——

Can that include Hamas?

I think it has to include some kind of tacit agreement with Hamas. As we all know, Hamas remains in Gaza. It has not been destroyed. So it continues to be a relevant force.

But I think what we have to come around to is just understanding that the disarmament of Hamas will never happen under a situation of occupation. It will only conceivably happen under a situation of legitimate Palestinian self-governance.

What does it look like on the other side? What have these policies been, and what would they be toward Israel?

First off, let’s start to create disincentives for these policies. Let’s state plainly that the settlements are illegal, that officials who support them and facilitate their growth should face consequences. They should face sanctions.

One of the very few good things that the Biden administration did on Israel was sanctions against violent settlers, but I think that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it will start to shift the dynamic once you show that there are real costs for these policies.

Let me ask you about attention here. Something Biden administration officials often told me, including on this show at times, was that there was only so far they could push or restrain Netanyahu, and they thought it was better to remain in conversation to retain some leverage over the Israeli government.

It’s funny, when you were talking about why A.O.C. and Bernie might have wanted Biden to stay on the ticket despite deeply disagreeing with him on Gaza — well, they had his ear.

And even right now, there are huge amounts of criticism from Israeli opposition that Netanyahu is listening too much to Donald Trump and not launching the scale of assault on Lebanon that Netanyahu has promised and that they want him to launch.

Even the incredibly modest level of concession Netanyahu appears to be making to Trump has become a political liability for him in Israel.

Yes.

There is some tension here between maintaining the line of communication and the possible influence over Israeli decisions — but then you’re complicit in them, arguably.

How do you think about that?

Yes. Well, I would say three things. First of all, even if you don’t change their behavior at all, you are at least no longer providing arms for a genocide. I count that as a win in and of itself.

Second of all, this idea that they could just move forward without us — we have enough Israeli security officials, not just recently, but going back many years, saying: Listen, without U.S. support, we simply could not continue. That is what the Israeli security echelon believes.

And third, this idea that they were just staying engaged to have influence, I don’t buy that.

The reason I don’t is — I’m going to go back to, I believe it was 2018. This is when I was working with Senator Sanders on a war powers resolution on Yemen. The United States was involved in support of the Emirati and Saudi war on Yemen. Massive humanitarian crisis at that time, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

Senator Sanders, along with Senator Chris Murphy and Senator Mike Lee, offered a war powers resolution, which basically said the president has taken the United States into a conflict without the appropriate authorization from Congress.

At the time, a number of former Obama administration officials published a letter, which we really appreciated, saying that they had made a mistake, because this war started under the Obama administration.

Initially, President Obama and his team supported it for exactly the reason you just said in Israel, which was to say: We don’t necessarily like this war on Yemen, but staying engaged and staying supportive of what the Saudis and the Emiratis are doing will give us some influence in how this war is conducted.

They said in that letter that was a mistake. We were not able to have meaningful influence, and in fact, what we did was just give affirmation to a terrible war.

And some of the people who signed that letter went on to serve in the Biden administration and are now out here offering the exact same argument for why it was better to continue supporting Netanyahu and Israel and Gaza — and I don’t buy it.

The other argument you’ll hear, sometimes from Democrats, very often from Republicans, is that Israel is an American ally. We stand with our allies.

Israel is an important strategic partner in the region, in intelligence, in cooperation and other things. So there is an American strategic interest — more of a realist take than a values-based take — in maintaining a tight alliance.

Do you buy that?

I mean, are we benefiting from our relationship to the Middle East right now with what’s happening? Are we benefiting from this relationship?

I hear this argument a lot. It’s almost like a Holy Writ in Washington. But I do question it.

Yes, it’s good to have allies. It’s good to have democratic allies. I think the United States should work with allies to defend their legitimate security interests.

I think what Israel has been doing is not remotely legitimate. When I hear people bring up they have this cooperation on technology, my answer is: Well, for what?

Obviously, this is very, very good for Israel. This alliance has been very, very good for Israel. But when I look at the costs and benefits strategically, ethically, morally, politically, diplomatically, to the U.S.-Israel relationship, I don’t think it works out in the U.S.’s favor.

I think this ladders up to a larger foreign policy debate that is happening right now about what should drive American foreign policy.

When I listen to some of the people, some of whom you have advised, who are articulating this on the left — A.O.C., Bernie Sanders, Chris Murphy and Jason Crow — something they center is that our foreign policy should be based on values. You hear a lot of talk of interests, but they will talk a lot about values.

What values? What does it mean to have a values-based foreign policy?

I would say democracy is one — self-government, a government that delivers for its people.

That sounds simple. It is. But I would take things back to some very first principles about what foreign policy is for.

Any country’s foreign policy is meant to advance the safety and the prosperity of that country’s people. That’s what American foreign policy is for.

As a progressive, I would add the word “solidarity” to that. I want to be in solidarity, not only with people in my country but communities outside our country.

Even though we don’t have the ability to fix the world, I think what we can do, at the start, is do less harm. There are places where the United States has done and is continuing to do enormous harm.

That’s not the entire story of our foreign policy, by any means. The United States has done enormous good over the past decades. I think there’s enormous good we can do in the future.

I would also say — and this is something you’ve heard from people like Congressman Crow, from A.O.C., from Bernie, from Senator Murphy, the people you mentioned — we need a foreign policy that really delivers for America’s working families.

We need to take things down to the wheel, so to speak. I’m not in the habit of really complimenting Trump all that much, but I do think he has provided an opportunity, or at least revealed an opportunity, by challenging some of the very basic preconceptions of postwar, unipolar American primacy and that is enabling us to have a debate. And we have to have it.

I want to explore what that foreign policy would look like, and I think a good place to start is a speech that Congressman Crow — who’s from Colorado, a former Army officer — gave at the Center for American Progress. I think it was last October.

I want to play a clip of it here:

Archival clip of Jason Crow: The biggest divide that I see right now in how we view this problem is those who believe that Donald Trump is the cause of it, versus those that believe that Donald Trump is a symptom of it.

And that requires looking back over the last 30 years and looking at it through the lens of the people that I grew up with in a working class town in the upper Midwest, those who I fought with and those who I now serve.

In those last 30 years, we’ve had over 20 years of failed military interventions, $3 trillion, three million combat tours, over 7,000 of our own dead, tens of thousands of others dead. And what’s not in those numbers is the unequal burden that was borne by the working class.

He goes on to say in that speech that we often mistake the core debate here for being a policy conversation, but what it is is a conversation about trust. And the foreign policy establishment has lost trust. It has broken faith.

You’re sort of half in and half out of that establishment. I think a good place to start is: How do you see this question of trust? How was it lost, if it was, and what builds it?

What Congressman Crow said right there, about the key divide being between those who see Trump as the problem and Trump as a symptom, is right-on.

I think that explains a lot of the debate right now. I’m very much on the symptom side.

The lack of trust really does come down to this one line from Trump that others have used. And that is: The system is rigged.

Trump gets traction with that because he’s right. The system is rigged. Americans can see it. They can feel it in the lack of control that they feel over their own lives — economic lives, political lives, social lives.

They feel confronted by technology that is designed to entrap them. They feel exploited by different costs to extract the maximum amount of wealth from every step they take, every symptom of every disease, every game that their kids play in sports.

And that attaches to foreign policy. Whether it’s the war in Iraq, which was sold to the Americans on what people understand now were misstatements, or outright lies, or the financial crisis in 2008. Which was not necessarily a foreign-policy crisis, but I think its global impact and, certainly, its domestic impact all add up to an elite establishment that either doesn’t know what it’s doing or is simply looking after its own interests.

One of the speeches that I’ve referenced a lot is the speech that JD Vance gave at the Republican National Convention in 2024, where he talked about his own personal story, as Congressman Crow did there.

But JD Vance spoke very, very effectively about someone who grew up in rural America, as he did, and what deindustrialized communities suffered. The lie that was told about neoliberal trade economics, NAFTA, the war in Iraq that he served in — he laid out a whole story of elite failure, of lies that were told to working people like the ones that he grew up with.

Archival clip of JD Vance: In small towns like mine in Ohio or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan, in states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war. And somehow, a real estate developer from New York City by the name of Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues while Biden was wrong.

I think what Democrats really have to do, and I think what Congressman Crow was starting to talk about in that speech — which I think was a really good speech — is to come up, first of all, with an acknowledgment of the real problem that connects with the one that Americans are feeling, but offer a compelling vision of: OK, this is how we’re actually going to govern in a way that can change your life and make it better.

You mentioned JD Vance in the 2024 campaign. Vance ran that campaign very much articulating a view that Donald Trump was the antiwar candidate. That Donald Trump meant an end to these kinds of foreign entanglements, these dumb wars.

Now, obviously, we are enmeshed in Iran.

What happened?

Well, it turns out that Donald Trump lies. That is one of the things that happened.

But you’re right. Both Vance and Trump, in the months and especially the weeks before Election Day 2024, leaned in hard on this antiwar message. Trump was a pro-peace president. We were going to get out of these dumb, endless wars. That’s actually something he ran on in 2016, as well.

I think it is very interesting: If you go back, every election since the end of the Cold War — starting with 1992, with the one exception of 2004 — the more antiwar candidate has won.

I’m not going to say that they won because they were antiwar, but I do think that is a very interesting set of data. At the very least, it says that there is an audience for a much less militaristic vision of America’s role in the world.

Even Joe Biden in 2020 ran on a pledge to end the forever wars. He ran on a much less militaristic platform that he ended up teeing up for Kamala Harris in 2024, and Trump took advantage of that. Democrats just abandoned the antiwar lane and left it wide open for Trump.

I said then, and I say now, obviously, no one should believe Trump. But I do think he had at least the political intelligence to recognize that was an attractive message. And I think Democrats really need to understand that.

Well, let me try to make the case for the other side of this. Putting aside the question of who performs electorally, and why they perform, because I think that’s tricky.

Take Biden as an example. I think Biden thought he had learned some important lessons. One thing that his people always bragged about was that he was the first president in some time to have not committed American troops to new wars.

They ended the Afghanistan war. People hated the way that looked, at the very least. That’s when Biden’s approval rating fell beneath 50 percent and never recovered.

But then it wasn’t Joe Biden who invaded Ukraine. It was Russia. Earlier, you named the very first value that a left foreign policy is based on: democracy.

You have Russia invading a democracy. Biden, I think, is trying through this period to calibrate a response that does not enmesh American troops but nevertheless does not abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.

Hamas attacks on Oct. 7. It’s another thing Biden responds to, as opposed to something he is creating.

How do you think about those from this perspective? Maybe not where the Gaza war eventually went, but these early moments. Because a lot of foreign policy is not what the president decides to do but rather: Something has happened, and now he has to make a decision.

Let’s take all of those. First, personally, I think all things considered, his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a good one.

He’s gotten criticism from his right — those who believe that he should have just given Ukraine all the weapons immediately — some on the left, who say: No, we were provoking Russia.

My own view is yes, Russia invaded Ukraine. It was reasonable to help Ukraine defend itself. I think there are legitimate criticisms that the Biden administration should have been more willing to get into talks with Putin along the way.

I am still unconvinced that Putin was ever interested in ending this war. I don’t think he’s interested in it right now. Obviously, he gets a key vote.

But I think comparing that to Gaza — and I think he made a huge mistake in twinning Ukraine with Israel in the speech he gave in October 2023.

Archival clip of Joe Biden: Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy. Completely annihilate it.

Yes, the precipitating factor for the Gaza war, what became the Gaza genocide, were the attacks of Oct. 7.

But that war did not begin on Oct. 7, as you know. It did not come out of nowhere. Israel was not just sitting quietly, minding its own business. There was an ongoing campaign of expulsion, of ethnic cleansing, of violence that existed in the Palestinian territories and had done so for many years.

He came into the Middle East having promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. He came in and more or less kept Trump’s policy in place: We’re going to keep pressure on them to try to get a longer and stronger deal.

This was based on a belief of the need to maintain the U.S.’s position as the regional security guarantor in the Middle East. And I think that was a huge mistake. So I don’t think it’s quite right to say just that he was responding to the events of Oct. 7. I think his administration had taken steps that led to Oct. 7.

Obviously, Hamas deserves the blame for ——

That’s a big claim. Say more about what you mean by that when you say they took steps that led to Oct. 7.

I do think by buying into the idea — let’s understand, the Abraham Accords were about a number of things, but one thing they were about was sidelining the Palestinian issue.

Do you just want to describe these quickly? Because they started under Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.

That’s right. So the Abraham Accords were announced in August 2020. They’re an agreement first between Israel and the U.A.E., brokered to some extent by the Trump administration, although they always like to take more credit than they really deserve. It was quickly joined by Bahrain.

But they were significant because these were the first agreements in a very long time that normalized relations between Israel and regional Arab governments. They were presented as major peace agreements, despite the fact that the U.A.E. had never really been at war with Israel.

Still, the fact that this relationship between Israel and the U.A.E., which had gone on for years under the surface, was now public was an achievement. There’s no doubt.

But from Netanyahu’s perspective, and I think from Netanyahu’s supporters’ perspective in the U.S., part of why this was a success is that it demonstrated their longstanding argument that we don’t need to solve the Palestinian issue first, as many have claimed. We can just push this to the side and move forward and have normal relations with the rest of the region.

I think it’s pretty clear that even though the Abraham Accords weren’t the precipitating factor for Oct. 7, it was one of the factors that led to Hamas’s thinking about why they needed to take action — horrific action, no doubt — to put the Palestinian issue back on the regional and global agenda.

To stay there for a minute, what do you think the Biden administration should have done immediately after Oct. 7? Because, I mean, that attack is more than a horrific attack.

Yes.

It is a genuine act of war. It is war crimes.

Absolutely. Yes.

And done to an American ally, certainly, at that moment. What should the response have been?

I think initially the response was the right one, which was to show strong support for Israel, for the people of Israel. Joe Biden going there himself. But he didn’t use that credibility to do what I think he should have done.

Within weeks — certainly, I would say, by the middle of November — it was abundantly clear that this just was not an act of self-defense anymore. This was a series of atrocities meant to just obliterate Gaza and to kill civilians.

I think this is the core understanding: The way that the Biden administration and many in Washington talk about this issue is that they treat civilian suffering, civilian casualties, as if it’s a regrettable consequence of an overall just objective.

It is not. Civilian suffering is part of the policy, and I think that became very, very clear, certainly by November.

I think by the end of Biden’s presidency, the feeling many Americans have about him is not so much that they dramatically disagree with any one of his decisions. The public opinion on Israel and Gaza is split at that point. It’s not a winning issue in one direction or another. Ukraine is a kind of complicated issue.

It’s that they don’t like the way America seems focused on these places that are not important to them.

Prices are high here, and yet we’re spending all this money arming Ukraine. We’re engaged in this war that Israel is waging in Gaza that seems like a mess, that seems horrible, that you’re seeing the atrocities of on your phone.

And in some way, I think what people hated about Bidenism by the end was that the world felt out of control.

There’s something Senator Murphy wrote on his Substack just recently:

We would be misreading a lot of the essential elements of Donald Trump’s foreign policy if we just said it was about jingoism or xenophobia, because a lot of what he talks about is really about power. His message is that these global forces that we are endlessly told are just out of our control can be inside of our control.

This is actually a pretty important insight, because I think one of the tensions of American foreign policy — and particularly American public opinion toward foreign policy — is, on the one hand, we do feel a sense of responsibility. We don’t want bad things to happen elsewhere in the world, and particularly with some set of them, we feel that we should engage in them.

On the other hand, we don’t want to engage too much, and then, when we do engage and it turns out we cannot control them at an acceptable cost — or maybe, as we found in Iraq or Afghanistan, at any cost — we get angry about that.

This tension of wanting control but not having it is a real knot at the center of the politics of foreign policy here. I’m curious how that lands for you.

Yes. Senator Murphy is obviously a strong voice on foreign policy, but as you noted there, I think he also has a very strong, compelling theory of the deeper case of the problems in our politics right now.

I would agree with that, although I think part of the tension between wanting to do good, wanting to have control and losing control — that’s going to keep happening as long as we have this foreign policy that is driven by sustaining American primacy, by trying to sustain America’s role as a global hegemon.

Well, what do you mean by that? Because I actually don’t buy that what we were doing in Ukraine is trying to sustain America’s role as a global hegemon.

I don’t buy that in Gaza, what we were trying to do is sustain America’s role as a global hegemon. I don’t think that’s how the Biden administration justified it to themselves. I don’t think that’s really how they thought about it.

So do you disagree that that’s what they were really trying to do?

I would agree with you a bit more on Ukraine. I do think there were habits of mind, especially from Biden — who’s not even a creature of the post-Cold War; he’s a creature of the Cold War.

So I do think that this idea of the U.S. helping to confront Russia was something that was kind of deep in his foreign policy DNA.

I think part of what we saw in Gaza and what led up to it was driven by an effort through the Abraham Accords, through this proposed U.S.-Saudi-Israel peace agreement, which would involve security guarantees with Saudi Arabia and was based, in my view, on sustaining America’s role as a regional security guarantor. And also to box out China from of the region.

That was the overriding focus of Joe Biden’s foreign policy. If we remember going back to — was it June 2021? — where he had a summit with Putin.

I think the goal of Biden’s Russia policy, initially, was to be like: All right, let’s just park Russia and Putin over here. We’re not going to have a great relationship with them, but we want to bring some predictability to the relationship so we can focus on the real problem, which is China.

And the China focus, the obsession with strategic competition with China, I do think what underlies that is an effort to sustain America’s global primacy.

I do agree with that. I agree with this on China, but I think all these are a little bit different. I think the reason this distinction might be important is: Obviously, people’s goals matter. And the way I read these different events, involvements, is the reaction of the Russian invasion was really a view about Ukraine and Europe and what America’s role was in that, and not wanting to allow Putin to begin taking territory. Because that would be destabilizing for the world. And we had to do it because nobody else could.

I think if it was the case that Europe was more capable of being the munitions factory for Ukraine, America would have been happy to have let them do it, at least to some degree.

I don’t know. I hope they are doing that now.

I hope they’re doing that, too.

On Israel, I think a lot was driven by Joe Biden’s actual commitment to Israel, which is something you said earlier, as well.

Yes.

And then China, I think there’s a different set of questions that are very real there about American primacy.

The reason I’m focusing on this for a minute is that I think that there is a difference that gets conflated often in foreign policy.

We move on different sides of it, between what it is we are trying to do — uphold responsibilities that maybe we don’t really want to be doing, the American people don’t really want to be doing, but in the long term it’s better for the global system that somebody is doing it. Versus: Are we actually trying to dominate the system, rig it in our favor, keep competitors from rising up?

Those are sort of two different problems. On the one level, if you say we should stop just trying to ensure American hegemony, which I think is also a little bit different than primacy, right? Hegemony is a control. Primacy is a leadership. I think a lot of people nod and agree, and I’d probably nod and agree.

And on the other hand, I just think Ukraine is a hard problem and that we don’t really want to be doing this, but a lot of things happen in the world that we don’t like, and we have to make tough decisions around them.

But I’m not sure that in some of these cases a President Bernie Sanders, a President A.O.C., a President Chris Murphy would be free from the pull of American responsibility, the sense that if we don’t stop something from happening, it will happen, and then we — we, here, being this imaginary administration — will be blamed by either the American people, who don’t like what just happened, or bad things will happen in the world that will eventually end up on our doorstep.

I agree with that. There are certain things that are beyond the U.S.’s control.

I’ve never said and I don’t believe that it’s all part of some grand plan. There are a lot of contingencies that popped up, a lot of unforeseen events, like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that the Biden administration certainly did not want to happen. And as I said, I think all things considered, they responded to that pretty reasonably.

But I do think that when you look at the sweep of Biden’s foreign policy, it was kind of captured in one of the things that Biden said upon taking office when he said to Europe: America’s back.

We’ve gotten past this brief little hiccup with this weirdo Donald Trump, and now America is back doing America things, and everybody can chill, and America is back in the business of helping the global system run.

I think we had already moved beyond that, both in terms of what America was capable of and what others in the world were interested in. So I would certainly agree there are times when only the United States, as of right now, certainly, has the capacity — whether it’s in arms, whether it’s in convening capacity, whether it’s in influence, whether it’s in economic power, whether it’s in diplomatic power — to help solve and address certain problems.

But I think the debate has to be: What are those situations, and what tools should we deploy in those situations?

Let me take the American global hegemony question from a broader perspective. You said that the American foreign policy establishment often asks the question: How do we better sell continuing American global military hegemony to the American people, rather than hearing that Americans just aren’t that into it?

Americans, you said, are just not that into global military hegemony because it’s destructive, it’s wasteful, it increases inequality, it steals money from the working class, and it funnels it upward to a tiny unaccountable elite.

I think there’s a broader view on the left — broader than Ukraine or Gaza or even China — that America’s view of its role in the world and what it puts into maintaining that role in the world is destructive.

Make that broader case to me, and what it would look like to turn away from that in our foreign policy.

Americans want their country to be strong, to be powerful, to play a major role in the world. I think any country’s people do. And more than that, I’ll say, I think Americans want their country to do good in the world. That’s how I feel. I think that is broadly shared.

But I do think we have to really take a very hard look at what global military hegemony, global — whatever term you want to use for it — is actually delivering.

This is where I would go back to JD Vance’s speech at the 2024 R.N.C. We’ve had just multiple wars. We have them ongoing right now. They’re not as big as Iraq and Afghanistan were, but we have many American troops deployed around the world on counterterrorism missions.

Do we actually need all of this to keep us safe? How much are we spending on this? And to whom are the benefits really accruing?

The question a lot of Americans ask when they see their communities having been deindustrialized, their children face a worse future than they do, is: OK, I want America to do good. I want America to be strong. But I don’t understand how these conflicts and our engagement in them is actually doing that.

You have this line that elite impunity is at the core of our political crisis. Tell me what you mean by that.

I mean the sense that the wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected, the influential, don’t pay a price. They operate according to a different set of rules than the rest of us.

It’s part of political corruption. It’s part of the loss of control. It’s a reflection of the system being rigged.

There’s that broad version of it, but you’ve also made this point, and I’ve seen others begin to make this point, around the foreign-policy establishment and around people in Democratic politics, people in Republican politics.

Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, recently put out this tweet where he said: Look, I’m not trying to blacklist anybody, but I think that the next Democratic administration should have a full turnover in its foreign-policy staff.

I’ve seen you sort of connect this to the need for a reckoning around Gaza. What does that actually imply?

There are two things about that. One is, from Senator Schatz’s comment, I think there’s a sense that there has been just this group of Democratic foreign-policy professionals that tend to cycle in and out of Democratic administrations, and they move up to the next job, and we need to reach out to a much broader pool of talent.

There are a lot of very smart, young foreign-policy folks in Washington and beyond who want to get engaged. We need to draw them into the process, so we don’t keep repeating and regurgitating the same policies and the same approach.

But I think there’s also a second piece of it that Senator Chris Van Hollen got to a bit more sharply in the Op-Ed that he wrote in The New York Times a few days after Senator Schatz’s tweet, and that had to do with specific actors inside the Biden administration who he said should not serve in future administrations. And I think this is part of accountability, as well.

We’re going to have policy disputes, policy disagreements, policy debates. I do think that the Biden administration’s Gaza policy was beyond just a policy dispute. It was a policy of supporting genocide. I think part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials who carried out that policy should not work in government again.

I’m watching this in the primaries, and I think it’s a pretty important thing happening right now. You see it in the Michigan Senate primary. You see it here in New York, where Brad Lander and Dan Goldman are running against each other. You saw it in a New Jersey congressional primary.

Does Gaza become like the Iraq war in the Democratic Party? Or are Democrats more divided on that than they were on the Iraq war?

There is this question of: Do Democrats split over this? In the same way that I wonder about this for Republicans after Donald Trump. Israel and support for Israel really seems to me to be a question that is splitting both parties internally.

I hope it doesn’t become like the Iraq war, because I don’t think anybody really paid a price for the Iraq war, at least the officials who carried it out. I want to see some consequences for the people who carried out the Gaza policy.

In terms of the debate, I do think your position on Gaza is becoming a litmus test. It really does go to credibility, the way someone chooses to talk about this.

For example, Kamala Harris, the language she used, of: Oh, too many civilians have died, and we’re pressing for a cease-fire — it just didn’t convince anyone. Even for people who perhaps didn’t care about the issue all that much, they could tell that this was not genuine.

I think the reverse is true for Zohran Mamdani. He didn’t raise Gaza, by the way. Gaza was raised by his critics because they thought it would be an effective way to weaken and criticize him, and they did that because they don’t know what time it is.

He stood firm on a set of principles under fire. Even for people who probably don’t know or maybe care about the issue as much, they saw that, and that added to his credibility.

So I do think, for a lot of Democratic voters, many of them care about the issue. They want their leaders to be on the right side of it, but it also gets to a much larger idea of: Can I trust this person? Are they for real? Or are they just going to regurgitate the usual set of establishment talking points?

I want to play something that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said at Munich:

Archival clip of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: I don’t know necessarily if it’s that we’re in a post-rules-based order. It’s possible that we were in a pre-rules-based order. We have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working-class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest.

Tell me about that idea that we were actually in a pre-rules-based order.

It’s a great line.

In conversations about the so-called rules-based order, I’ve often referred to Gandhi’s comment when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization. He said: I think it would be a great idea.

That’s what I think about a rules-based order. I think that’s what the congresswoman was getting at there.

Yes, there is a lot about the post-World War II order that is admirable, that’s very optimistic. There are elements of it that we definitely should try to revive and save. I think the United Nations and all the various organizations that work under its umbrella are very important. Having a global center where people can talk about their problems rather than fight over them is hugely important as a concept.

Yet I do think we’ve gotten to a point where the double standards and the hypocrisies have gotten so stark that the system has just lost legitimacy.

What about the international system can we really revive and strengthen, such that we can use the term “rules-based order” unironically?

You’ve been bringing up JD Vance, and I think there’s an interesting difference between the way even skepticism of the foreign policy of the past 20 or 30 years emerges on the right and the left.

On the right, it has taken shape as a critique of rules. Donald Trump, in particular, holds to the view that America should not be bound by rules, should not be bound by institutions, to the extent we should always just create our own, that we dominate in a more thoroughgoing way. JD Vance has certainly been supportive of Donald Trump and his project to do that.

On the left, there’s more of this idea that, actually, the rules might protect us more than we think they do. And allowing ourselves to be bound by them would be better than where we have ended up. It would have kept us out of Iraq, right? Because we could not, in fact, get the U.N. to go along.

I’d like you to go a little bit further with this. When you say, if we did try this rules-based order, if we were bound by rules in these slow, frustrating, multilateral institutions where Russia and China can veto things on the U.N. Security Council, there is a tension between positive restraint and then being subject to the agendas of bad actors.

How do you think about it?

What you just laid out there is right. It’s basically a zero-sum critique versus a positive-sum critique. For Trump, for Vance, as you said, it’s all about America being able to do whatever we want. If we’re getting a good deal, others have to lose, and vice versa.

But also this is the kind of positive-sum principle that undergirded the creation of the international system — the idea that countries, including the United States, will agree to be constrained by a set of rules, and that ultimately makes us safer. I think that’s it right there.

But the process and the project of reaccrediting the concept of international order, the concept of international rules, is one we have to undertake. It’s not going to be one administration. And in order to do that, I think we have to reaccredit it with the American people.

So I hope that we’ll have candidates, and hopefully a president, who’s ——

Is that possible to do? I’m mindful of what Murphy said.

Because this, to me, is one of the deep contradictions here. I don’t think Americans want what we’ve ended up doing.

I was around in Washington at a time when the rules-based international order was, let’s call it, stronger. And it was in many ways very unpopular. We got here on a pathway that comes from people feeling, in the ’90s, that the U.N. and others made it almost impossible to respond to genocides — Rwanda and Yugoslavia.

It goes to George W. Bush after Sept. 11 and the feeling that America just has to do whatever it needs to, and it can’t be held back, and that, I think, was obviously a terrible mistake.

There’s an amazing moment in the Obama administration when he says there’s a red line if, in Syria, al-Assad uses chemical weapons. And then at the last minute he said: I want congressional authorization if I’m going to do this. And he doesn’t do it.

I supported that. I thought he made the right call. But certainly in Washington, he got an enormous amount of ongoing criticism from it — including, by the way, from Donald Trump — for being weak.

This goes to this broader point of the fight over control. Because what you’re saying to people is you will get better outcomes by giving up control, by binding yourself and the power you have to these rules and these institutions that you do not have full authority over. You might end up not being able to do things that you think are a good idea, that you were elected to do.

In the teeth of this moment where we have a completely, I think, unaccountable president acting wildly, erratically and recklessly, all of a sudden, there’s a lot of interest in whether Congress should retake its war powers. Should we reinvest energy in the U.N. and the World Bank and all these organizations?

But it feels like we just end up on this pendulum. And this pendulum, I think, is very much about control.

So how do you sell people on the idea that binding American power in rules that will bind us even when we don’t want to be bound is a good idea?

First of all, people have to be able to feel that it’s true. Let’s be honest, I don’t think an election is necessarily going to be won or lost on this argument.

Since you mentioned the red line comment, I think that gets to a lot of what we’re seeing right now in terms of Congress taking control and taking responsibility. As we see, most, if not all, Republicans are fine with letting Donald Trump just carry forward.

They have had multiple opportunities to pass war powers resolutions, whether it’s on Venezuela, whether it’s on Iran, whether it’s now on Cuba. They’re choosing not to take ownership.

This goes to a much deeper problem. It’s not a problem of one president or one administration. It really goes to the deeper political problem of how the use of military violence has become such a regular occurrence. And I think people do have an innate understanding that it is not supposed to be this way, because it is not.

This is something that Congressman Crow really emphasizes in that speech he gave at CAP that I think is really correct.

Archival clip of Jason Crow: The first question you should ever ask a member of Congress before they ever start talking about foreign policy is: Are you willing to reclaim your foreign policy powers?

Our founders believed that Congress had a fundamental role in our foreign policy, from trade to treaties to war powers and to appropriations. For decades, Congress has ceded and given up many of those powers. Our founders knew that these things were too important to be entrusted simply to the executive, because it needed accountability to those closest to the people.

Let’s premise here: The Iraq war is an absolute, unmitigated catastrophe. And I think about the debate that led to it, and the absence of debate that led to Iran.

And I think that, given how little support there was for Iran, you could not have gotten that vote through Congress.

So I’m not saying that having Congress will always stop you from making dumb decisions. Ultimately, Congress did give Bush power to go to war in Iraq.

But nevertheless, it at least forces things to slow down and forces a debate and forces a process that I think is valuable.

I think foreign policy can often seem very hard to pin down because — well, it’s Ukraine, it’s Gaza, it’s China, it’s Venezuela. All of these are different situations. But I think something connecting many of them is that they’re operating without a process that restrains the president.

It’s very strange to me how little the president can do on most domestic policy right now, given the filibuster and a polarized Congress and much else. But then we give him all this power on foreign policy, which of course also creates an incentive for the president when he can’t get much done domestically to start trying to create a legacy through ambitious foreign policy adventurism.

That feels like an interesting place where something could really change, and I’ve seen it from Bernie Sanders, from Ro Khanna, from A.O.C., from others — a real focus on Congress reclaiming its role here. Because at least forcing that through the more representative body where the American public has more say in the moment, you can imagine that as a more procedurally based order that is, to the extent it binds us, it binds us domestically.

I think that’s right. It’s not the whole story. Let’s not put too much into the process. The process matters, but I do think that the criticism that some have made of arguments around war powers — and I tend to agree — is that, for example, the problem with the Iran war is not that Trump failed to file the appropriate paperwork.

It is a manifestly stupid idea from the beginning. I think keeping that second part in mind is really important.

Yes, I agree with that.

Yes, it’s important to reassert Congress’s constitutional authority over military violence, but we need leaders out there articulating why this is just a horrible idea.

But this is your whole argument. I agree that we need leaders articulating why it’s a horrible idea. But I think your whole argument, or at least some of the rules-based argument, is that sometimes you’re going to have stupid ideas.

Yes.

And sometimes you’re going to have stupid leaders.

Yes.

And the point of having rules and processes is because you don’t believe you will always be governed by the wisest of philosopher kings.

Absolutely. That’s right.

The other dimension of a lot of the foreign-policy arguments I’ve heard from people like A.O.C. and Sanders is the idea that you need a foreign policy that centers the working class, and that foreign policy is domestic policy on some level, that this kind of division we’ve created is not real.

Now, Joe Biden also said that. He said he was going to have a foreign policy for the middle class. That was a big way that he and Jake Sullivan and others expressed themselves as having a pivot from what had come before.

So what is different in the way that you and others more on the Democratic Party’s left flank are imagining this, compared with what Biden and his team were doing when they sort of announced this transformation?

I do think that the foreign policy for the middle class was good. I really think that deserves praise. Trump shocked everyone by winning in 2016, and I think that the foreign policy for the middle class represented a real, self-critical effort to say: What have we missed about what Americans believe and don’t believe about foreign policy?

In the language of recovery, the first step is admitting you have a problem, and I think that effort was a recognition of the real problem. Its conclusions were represented in a speech that Jake gave at Brookings in April 2023.

And this was interesting because it was the national security adviser offering essentially a speech on the global economy, America’s trade policy, and it represented a turning of the page, so to speak, from the old neoliberal era.

So recognizing, first of all, that a lot of the theories that underlie that era, the idea that if we just get rid of taxes and we let people trade and make money and constrain states from imposing restrictions and regulation, then the rising tide will lift all boats, so to speak.

That was an important recognition that turns out is not really true. It has produced a lot of very bad consequences that have led us to this moment.

But I think, having acknowledged that and having come back to the idea that, yes, it is right and appropriate for governments to play a major role in shaping and guiding the economy, the question is: To what end?

Obviously, one of the main ends is to benefit the safety and prosperity of the American people. And going back to what we’ve talked about with China being the guiding focus of the Biden administration’s foreign policy, I think there are a couple of ways you could have gone from that speech.

One is how do we really invest in a genuinely more equitable global trade order? How do we build an order that protects workers, not just in the United States, but empowers workers around the world, including in China, and does not pose American workers and Chinese workers in a zero-sum competition with each other?

Then there’s the other path, which I think they took, which is to say: OK, now we’re getting back involved in the economy because we are in this strategic competition with China, and we now see trade as yet another weapon in a toolbox to assert America in this competition.

I think that was the wrong choice. I think we need to go with Option A.

What would Option A have looked like in practical terms? What would they have not done that they did, or what would they have done that they didn’t do?

Certain ideas — the minimum corporate tax is one thing that they worked on. I think discussing a global minimum wage is another thing. Just for an example, that’s something that Senator Sanders has proposed.

I think part of the challenge that we face is that we have a developing world — or whatever term you want to use, the global south — that has very young populations. They are already engaged in shaping the global agenda.

The United States needs to have a relationship with these countries. Obviously, China has done a lot of work to build its own relationships in these countries. I don’t want to treat these countries as simply an arena for U.S. and China competition, but I think we need to approach this in a positive-sum way.

What would the global minimum wage look like? How would you apply that to a country? I was in Kenya not long ago. A huge amount of Kenya is in the informal economy.

Yes.

Much of the country is very, very poor, though it is certainly not the poorest country in Africa. When you’re imposing a global minimum wage on these countries, presumably with some of the stick being American trade opportunities, what does that actually look like?

I don’t know what it looks like.

Wait, whose job is this?

[Both laugh.]

I mean, getting the United States to propose this and putting the United States in the position ——

But I’m asking: Is it a good idea? You have to know what it would look like to know if it’s a good idea.

Yes, OK. Fair question. Still working on what exactly it looks like. But what I’m saying is proposing putting the United States in the position of: We are not just there to extract wealth, we’re not just here to empower the people who have been dominating and exploiting you.

It’s interesting to me where you went with that. I think the question I was getting at there is: Is the global minimum wage an effort to protect American wages — or to raise other countries’ wages? Because those are actually two quite different projects.

Right. I think it’s based on the idea that Americans’ security is bound up with the security and prosperity of others around the world. This is not just a high-flown bit of rhetoric.

As someone on the progressive left, that’s an understanding that I bring. If we can diminish deprivation, disease and suffering in other communities around the world, ultimately, that is going to accrue to our own safety.

I agree with that. The thing I’m pushing on here is: In what way would America imposing wage standards on other countries — whose economies it doesn’t really understand and certainly does not directly manage — help those countries?

When I do foreign economic reporting, and probably when I do it from places that are poorer, I am always struck by how maddeningly hard it is to make a poor country — forget rich — just middle-income.

So I could see a version of this that is actually that you have found another way to talk about a kind of protectionism. Because we’re not going to do trade with countries that can undercut our wages by a certain amount. That’s not going to help those countries. That will hurt them.

I think that’s right. But ultimately, ideally, this wouldn’t be just the United States saying: We’re doing this by ourselves. This would be something the United States could work on with other countries, including China, to propose.

But this is also a place where the foreign policy for the middle class ideas that Biden had, some of the ones I read from Sanders and A.O.C. and others — it seems to me that people don’t always define clearly what it is the middle class wants.

One thing I think we’ve seen in recent years is: Yes, the middle class, the working class, the country wants good jobs and good wages. But they also want things to be cheap.

People talk about the era of neoliberalism now as a huge failure, and I think one thing we’ve seen is that, whether it was a failure in some respects or not — and I think in many respects it was — people liked the cheap goods.

Being in this extended period post-pandemic and then during the Trump tariff regimes and the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the attack in Iran and their impact on energy prices, people are very angry about goods getting more expensive.

We could have much cheaper electric vehicles in this country if we let the Chinese electric vehicles in. The Biden administration put huge tariffs on those to make sure we couldn’t have those. But then also people are very mad about the cost of cars in that same period.

So there is this hard balancing of: You can do quite a lot actually to protect American jobs and industries by making trade harder or raising the various forms of standards, wage floors, etc., within our trading regimes by walling off parts of the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut.

But then you make things here more expensive. And then you get hit from the other side, and the middle class is like: I feel stretched.

How, as somebody who has been part of these discussions about a foreign policy for the middle class, do you balance the effort to protect jobs, the effort to raise wages and also the now demonstrated fury that people have when tradable goods increase in price?

Part of it is that people are outraged, not just at the rising costs, but they’re outraged at the idea they’re being nickeled and dimed for everything. Whether it’s for health care, whether it’s for education, as I talked about earlier, at every step it seems like someone is extracting some little bit of value from everything that you do.

I think, in order to address this question, we really have to take a bigger look at our entire social safety net, or lack of one.

That feels like a dodge. I agree with you that we need to improve our social safety net and get rid of junk fees and things, but on these questions like trade, you’ll have a direct question.

You can make things cheaper by taking down the tariffs on China. You could make them more expensive by increasing the tariffs on China. Those things might have meaningful effects on American manufacturing jobs and wages.

The question of what you’re prioritizing feels like a fair question to me.

I think it is a fair question, and I don’t think it’s a dodge, because I do think that part of what we lack right now is a sense of a common project.

People feel that they’re just being victimized and exploited. They don’t have a voice. They are susceptible to demagogues like Donald Trump who come in and say: Listen, I will be the instrument of your righteous grievance.

So again, I’m not going to say that we can tee up a good argument and restore the shared sense of the American project, and people suddenly won’t care about rising prices of goods. But I do think that part of the answer is just addressing the idea that people feel like they’re getting hit with costs all over the place.

These problems go back a long time, but I think the crisis that we’re in right now is a legitimation crisis. People just don’t feel that the systems under which they live are representing their interests and are really delivering for them.

And I know this is a much bigger problem than I have an answer for, but I think that recognizing the conversations that we’re having about foreign policy — we can propose all the good ideas we want for how America should act in the world, but if they’re not rooted in an actual, durable political consensus, they will fall apart.

Is what you’re trying to build here a left nationalism or a left internationalism?

The reason I ask it like that is that there have been some moments when what I’ve heard is very much a rising tide lifts all boats, that if America can be out there making other countries more stable, richer, more prosperous, that would rebound to our benefit, as well.

And then there’s also a question about our common project. There are a lot of policy tools — I mean, it’s not all zero-sum — but some of it is about privileging American workers over people in other countries. And I think that’s a very reasonable thing for a national community to do, privileging American industries over industries in other countries.

But there are choices on the margin of these two projects. How do you see that?

I see myself very much as a left internationalist, but I also recognize that to develop a durable and solidaristic internationalism, it has to be rooted in an American domestic political consensus.

A lot of Americans, probably most Americans, for very good reason, are mainly interested in themselves, their family, their community. And in order to offer a workable foreign policy that people will support, I have to show — and leaders have to show — that it is answering those concerns.

What does that imply for how America and Americans understand the relationship or the competition — whatever you want to call it — with China?

Earlier, you were critiquing the idea that our relationship with China should be built on maintaining American primacy.

But if not that, then what? How do you understand what we want vis-à-vis China?

First, we have to understand that we need to coexist with China. China has a huge economy. It is already a major player on the global stage.

And I think there’s a school of thought in Washington who believe that China’s ultimate goal is to supplant the United States and to reshape the global order in its image. I’m less convinced of that.

But, for me, the question always comes down to: OK, what does the United States want?

We’re going to need to find ways to cooperate with China. There are going to be areas where we have competition. There are going to be areas where we have conflict. But I think the problem with defining the relationship as competition is one that eventually will lead to conflict.

I do think it’s interesting. A lot of people were surprised, including me, given that in Donald Trump’s first administration, he was really the one who made China the focus. And Washington very quickly shifted focus to that, and Biden picked up the ball in his presidency.

And interestingly, when Trump came back, there was relatively little attention on China compared with what a lot of people assume would be the case, given how prominent it was in his first administration.

I think you saw some of that reflected in the recent summit. If anything, I think we should be conciliatory. He was very conciliatory, because I think Xi has shown him that China has cards to play. The United States simply cannot assert its will on China, and that’s a reality that Washington needs to grasp: We don’t get to just set the rules and have China follow them.

At the same time, I haven’t really seen evidence that China just wants to supplant the United States. I see China acting within an order that the United States essentially helped develop, and I think we can work with that.

Should American primacy be a goal?

I think the question is: Is American primacy necessary to keep Americans safe, prosperous and free?

And I don’t think it is. I want an America that is powerful. I want an America that is influential. I want an America that can advance the safety of the American people. And as I conceive of that safety, it involves promoting safety and prosperity in other communities around the world.

How does that make you think about immigration?

There was this interview I did many years ago with Bernie Sanders that always goes around, where I asked him about open borders. And he’s like: No, no, that’s the Koch brothers’ plot.

Archival clip:

Ezra Klein: I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the U.S. are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders, about sharply increasing foreign aid.

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. The idea ——

Klein: Really?

Sanders: Of course. I mean, that’s a right-wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States.

I think people thought that I was asking him that because I support open borders rather than I was interested in what he would say.

But the reason I asked him that is that I’ve always thought the question of immigration is very hard on the left. Because if you have solidarity with people in other countries, people who are trying to come here because their countries are unsafe, people trying to come here because the money is here, because the better jobs are here, because you can make a better life for your family here, and you actually do believe in the equal dignity of all people, it becomes hard to say: Well, why shouldn’t we let you in?

The limiting principle of immigration, at a moral level, is a very difficult one. And I think it’s more difficult on the left when there’s less of a bounding nationalism.

But I think immigration is a much more central question in our foreign policy than it was, and it is very tied up with a foreign policy for the middle class. It’s also tied up in this question of control. I think part of what people hated about the border under Biden was that it was out of control.

Yes.

So what should the left’s position on immigration be?

I think the left’s position should be that we need a legal and orderly system for people to immigrate here. But it’s also based on an understanding that we have long been a nation of immigrants.

I don’t think that’s just a slogan. Listen, I’m the son of an immigrant.

Me, too.

This country gave my family a lot. This country let my family in when they were fleeing war. That’s true of so many other families right now. That means a lot to me; that’s part of being American, as I define it.

In addition, I think there’s clear evidence that immigrants are a driver of economic growth. This country is stronger and more prosperous because of immigrants. So I think we need leaders who are willing to make that positive case while acknowledging that, yes, of course, we need to enforce the law.

We need people to apply for asylum and migration legally. Unfortunately, it’s one of these many issues that seems to have just become an issue in the culture war.

I think there are two questions here that are hard and for which Democrats of all stripes are going to have to come up with an answer.

One is: Ideally, how many people should immigrate here, including legally?

In the first term, Trump would often fuzz whether he was talking about illegal immigration or legal migration. It’s clear now he’s talking about all immigration. He basically doesn’t want anybody coming into this country. I mean, not no one, but what they meant by seal the border was ——

White South Africans are welcome.

Yes, white South Africans are welcome. So there’s that.

There’s also the problem that the Biden administration faced. Kamala Harris took heat when she went and said — I’m paraphrasing here: Our message to you is: Don’t come here right now.

No, I think that’s an actual quote.

Archival clip of Kamala Harris: I want to be clear: To folks in this region who are thinking about making that dangerous trek to the United States-Mexico border, do not come. Do not come.

One of the things that we saw in the Biden administration was, when the broad impression was that we were very, very friendly to immigrants coming here, a lot of people came.

So part of how Trump closed the border is a constant pulse of cruelty.

And for the Biden administration, they lost control in part because they were caught between the desire for an orderly border — which they did desire — and the belief in kindness.

That seems harder to balance.

No, it clearly is. I think part of it is also addressing the sources of anger and grievance that drive support for dramatic crackdowns on immigration: This idea that people believe that now these immigrants are coming and unfairly taking what’s mine. They’re coming and changing the way that I have to live.

I think there’s a way to address that. That has to be part of the debate we have on reordering our immigration system.

I want to end on this because this is already, I think, a very unifying idea for Democrats, but the question of how to make it tangible is harder.

You, like many others I’ve seen, have said that corruption, and particularly anti-corruption, should be at the center of foreign policy, that we should understand that as a domestic question, we should understand it as a foreign question, and that Democrats, particularly as the Trump era wears on, should find a way to make that core to their vision of the world.

So how do you make that core to your vision of the world? What does it look like to center that in the way you’ve been describing?

I think this goes back to the kind of key claim that we discussed earlier: Trump’s refrain that the system is rigged. And, again, the system is rigged. People can see it and feel it.

There are ideas that we have and that we’ve put out there, like international efforts against kleptocracy, closing down international money laundering, for which the United States is a main destination.

I mean, who knew that trusts in South Dakota would be one of the main ways that kleptocrats abroad hid their money? But South Dakota is apparently very popular.

But I think starting here, with campaign finance — and I know that’s a tall order. We’ve got Supreme Court rulings that have determined that money equals speech. But teeing up a conversation about what Congress can actually do to change the laws around campaign finance may take a constitutional amendment. And given our political polarization, that sounds completely unrealistic.

But I think Americans will respond to an argument that really addresses their sense of loss of control, that elites have taken control of the system for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the country at large.

One of the best messengers on this has been Georgia’s Jon Ossoff, who seems to drop an amazing video on this every couple of months. Something he said a few months ago about Trump that really struck me was: “Even before he came on the scene, America had the most corrupt political system in the Western world.”

And I think that’s true. Getting out there on that message is a way to start addressing this.

I agree with you that the way to start in the domestic scene is campaign finance reform. And I also agree that it’s hard to change the Constitution, hard to change the Supreme Court.

But you can build a politics, as the right did on overturning Roe, on an extended long-term effort to do that, and you can eventually succeed. And there’s a lot you can do on that particular issue in the meantime, too.

But in terms of foreign policy, are there people we don’t work with? One thing I remember seeing with the Biden administration was that they were holding Saudi Arabia a little bit more at arm’s length. And then oil prices started to go up. Then all of a sudden they felt they couldn’t anymore. And so all the questions of human rights abuses and other things began to dissolve.

That is often where I watch our foreign policy shift away from values. People have good intentions, but then there are other things that the American middle class wants, the American working class wants — like cheap oil — that means you’re working with autocratic strongmen in highly corrupt countries.

So what happens when the values you want to put forward and center in your foreign policy conflict with the things that you believe the American people want and can only be obtained at the price they want by working with these countries?

It’s going to sound like a punt, but I’ll acknowledge there are going to be trade-offs. There are going to be decisions you have to make. Sometimes you’re going to prioritize those values. Sometimes you’re going to have to backfoot them a little.

I guess I’d have to look at the particular situation to give an answer, but I would say, internationally, the United States is a major destination for global kleptocrats, as is the U.K.

I would say the U.S. and U.K. can do a lot. Even from where we’re sitting here in New York, a lot of these buildings are just parking spaces for ill-gotten gains. The same is true of London. I think the U.S. and U.K. just addressing their own houses could start to have an international impact.

I know that’s separate from the question you’re asking, but I do think that is a way to internationalize an anti-corruption policy.

Some of these issues we’re talking about raise this question of: Where is the line between domestic and foreign policy?

Particularly when we’re talking about a foreign policy for the middle class, how do you think about: What falls in one bucket, what falls in the other, and what’s in the wrong bucket? Is “buckets” even the right metaphor?

I don’t have a great answer to it. I think we talk about foreign policy in ways that we don’t often recognize as foreign policy, like when we talk about immigration. There are obviously huge international implications for immigration.

Climate, obviously, same thing. America’s foreign policies impact these things. Global trade, global economics, jobs here, these all have a foreign policy component.

This is something that I did appreciate about the Biden administration’s global economic approach. They ceded that as a part of foreign policy. Trade was not over here and foreign policy over here. These things are deeply connected.

I guess the way I would try to answer it is to say: Whenever we are talking about foreign policy — whether it’s about the Middle East, whether it’s about Russia, Ukraine — at least being mindful of how this actually serves American communities.

Even if every speech doesn’t necessarily have to have that paragraph, you need to be able to answer it.

What do you think about places where it doesn’t serve American communities, but it is important elsewhere? I’m thinking here about possibly interventions in humanitarian crises, certain forms of foreign aid.

Obviously, the Trump administration has really gutted foreign aid. How do you think about those moments when you can’t say our foreign policy is actually domestic policy?

We’re actually doing these things because, morally, we think it is good. We are a rich country, we are a powerful country, and we are going to use some of that power elsewhere.

I think there are going to be cases like that, and we need a president who’s able to articulate that strongly to the American people.

I think a lot of Americans are receptive to that, but they need to hear a convincing argument for why this is doing the right thing, even if that doesn’t end with: And here’s how it’s going to create new jobs in your community.

Like I said, I think Americans generally want the country to do good. That doesn’t mean we need to get up in everyone’s business all over the place, all the time.

For example, I think it’s very interesting how fairly steady support for Ukraine’s defense has stayed, despite Donald Trump taking a very different approach to it than Joe Biden, to say the least. I think there is something about the justice and the morality of helping a country defend itself from the aggression of a more powerful neighbor that Americans get, even if they might not connect it directly to how that’s good for them and their community and their family.

I think that’s a good place to end. Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

The first is Senator Chris Murphy’s new book, “Crisis of the Common Good.”

I’ve just been reading it, and I really recommend it because I think Senator Murphy has been someone who has articulated a strong theory of the case of what really ails our politics — the loss of a sense of community, the idea that these systems are out of control, and they are unaccountable, the idea that wealth is being extracted from us at every step — and what it takes to rebuild a shared sense of purpose.

I recommend that one.

The second one is by the journalist Suzy Hansen. It’s called “From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdogan.” It’s a book about Turkey through just exploring one neighborhood in Istanbul that she’s reported on for over 10 years — how this neighborhood changed, the influx of immigrants, refugees from Syria, looking at the country’s politics, obviously, the rise of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the A.K.P., how Turkey’s democracy has changed and diminished.

And the last one is a book by Leonard Cohen called “Book of Mercy.”

My mom recently passed away. She was, among other things, a woman of deep religious faith. I was raised in the church. I’ve just been thinking about the time we would spend talking about the Bible, and the Book of Psalms was a particular favorite of ours, the Psalms of King David.

“Book of Mercy” is by Leonard Cohen, who people know as a famous songwriter and singer. But this is a book of modern psalms. Like all of Cohen’s work, it struggles with pain and beauty and suffering and meaning.

It was something that I shared with her in her last months, but it has also meant a great deal to me as I’ve been dealing with this and as I struggle with what this all means.

Matt Duss, thank you very much.

Thank you.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

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