The Democratic Party’s foreign-policy experts assembled what they dubbed a shadow cabinet during President Trump’s first term to counter the new leader’s disruptive approach to global affairs. As Trump harangued allies and threatened to abandon NATO, the group condemned his deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his support for the Saudi war in Yemen, proposed alternative policies, and called for a restoration of the rules-based order. The idea was to convene such governmental and academic firepower that “what we would put out would be unimpeachable and unquestionable,” Ned Price, who was involved in the effort and later became the State Department spokesperson, told me. Many of the shadow cabinet’s members, such as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, became principal policy makers when Joe Biden assumed the presidency in 2021 and made his triumphant declaration: America is back.
Today Democrats are not sure they want those people back. In a recent New York Times guest essay on how the party should view Israel, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Democratic-primary voters would not support any 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.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted on X that although he isn’t “into black listing,” he believes “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.”
When voters returned Trump to office, in 2024, no one revived the shadow cabinet, which had operated under the auspices of the advocacy group National Security Action, co-founded by Sullivan. Overall, the Democratic foreign-policy elite had lost its mojo. Not only was Trump’s reelection a validation of his norm-busting, transactional “America First” view, but Biden’s approach had come to a disappointing end. There was the ignominy of the American exit from Afghanistan; the rallying of allies in support of Ukraine, only to have the war become a source of partisan rancor; and the devastation in Gaza following the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel, which soured many Democrats on support for Israel and shattered their confidence and sense of moral purpose. Most important, party leaders now recognize that even when Democrats return to power, the world will not go back to the way it once was.
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Allies no longer believe Trumpism was an aberration and are unlikely just to pick up where Biden left off. Beijing and Moscow are asserting themselves in the belief that America is on the decline. Democrats broadly agree that Trump’s foreign policy—the disregard for allies, the solicitude toward autocracies, the muddiness of the Iran war—has been atrocious. But there are wide differences in opinion over what positions the party should adopt heading into the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential election—and the divisions don’t play out in the ways one might expect. Some of the new Democratic proposals carry more than a whiff of Trumpism. Others call for a complete reset, especially on aid to Israel. Underlying everything is the widespread recognition that the establishment order, personified by Biden and his predecessors, left many Americans behind.
To succeed, Democrats must now demonstrate that, despite the costs, America’s security at home depends on its influence abroad; shaping foreign policy around traditional values benefits Americans; and respecting alliances is a source of strength. The party has tried to sell Americans on the value of global engagement—famine relief, training foreign militaries, support for the United Nations—before. Biden and Sullivan championed a “foreign policy for the middle class.” But this moment is different, many Democrats say, if only because the world order they championed in the past is now so undeniably defunct—and because the smoldering aggrievement revealed by Trump’s reelection means they have no choice.
“We don’t want to go back to what once was, because there’s a whole generation of Americans that have never seen things work and deliver for them, and they’re angry about it, and they should be,” Democratic Representative Jason Crow, an Army veteran from Colorado, told me. “I’m not going to a community that has been gutted by deindustrialization and offshoring and fentanyl and so many other things and be like, You just don’t understand how this really did benefit you,” he said. “That’s just crazy and it’s just not true.”
Early last year, as Elon Musk boasted about feeding the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” Democrats fumed. In a matter of weeks, Musk’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency laid off more than 15,000 employees of the agency, founded by John F. Kennedy to promote global prosperity, and terminated the majority of assistance programs, halting shipments of lifesaving medicines and leaving food aid spoiling in warehouses. Out of power in Congress, Democrats could do little more than express outrage and argue for the reinstatement of employees and programs.
Almost 17 months into Trump’s second term, with the midterms approaching and the 2028 presidential election coming into view, I set out to discover what the Democrats are thinking now about foreign policy and international aid. Could a party with a tent big enough to include both progressives such as Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pramila Jayapal and national-security centrists such as Senators Chris Coons and Mark Kelly converge around a vision that can connect with Americans seized by anger and mistrust?
In cavernous Washington conference rooms, the party’s prominent foreign-policy thinkers have been presenting their ideas about how America should engage with a post-Trump world at events organized by a who’s who of centrist and left-leaning think tanks—Foreign Policy for America, the Center for American Progress, the Council on Foreign Relations. Let’s get this part out of the way: Some things haven’t changed. The Democrats at times risked becoming parodies of their earnest selves; during one event’s lunch break, attendees were invited to grab a bite and a drink—the up-market Spindrift, of course—then choose from an array of “affinity” tables, including one for gender equality and another for diversity in foreign policy.
At all of the events I sat in on, there was much talk about the corrosive effects of Trump’s policies. That was predictable. But I was surprised by how willing these Democrats were to acknowledge that they had failed to bring Americans along with the party’s previous approach. Not only had the party joined Republicans in perpetuating decades of fruitless and costly wars, they said, but it had also backed a liberal, free-trading world order that cost many Americans their jobs and consolidated wealth among the few at the top. In some ways, Democrats appeared to only now be adjusting to that reality. But if admitting one’s errors is half the battle, this at least constituted progress.
In addition to the soul-searching, I also found a willingness to address the problems created by the old consensus. Many Democrats want to explicitly link foreign policy to economic security, trade, and other concerns that policy makers have traditionally put in separate baskets. Some are now embracing tools championed by Trump, such as tariffs or other protectionist measures. (Biden himself endorsed some of this, keeping most of the tariffs Trump put in place in his first term.) Democrats would use such Trumpian tools, they hasten to say, in a smarter, more principled way than they believe the president has, to protect strategic industries rather than punish other nations or reward oligarch friends.
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Senator Chris Murphy, a progressive from Connecticut, is promoting a “responsible economic nationalism,” which would include a more muscular trade policy and increased regulation, for example by working with Europe to break up monopolistic companies and seeking opportunities to cooperate with China to manage the consequences of AI. “Traditionally when Democrats come in and want to do something different on foreign policy, they run it through the bureaucracy for months and months and months, and it comes out milquetoast,” Murphy told me. “We’re going to have to just make some big changes quickly.”
Many of the proposals Democrats are putting forward are light on specifics, and no one knows how AI will affect the plans. Their approaches may change by the time presidential primaries roll around in early 2028, but meanwhile there are distinct echoes of the past; Biden also talked about cultivating key industries and merging domestic and foreign policy. The challenge will be convincing voters that this time will be different, and that the policies Democrats want to pursue will truly benefit voters’ lives.
One word I heard a lot in my discussions with prominent Democrats—which wasn’t so much part of the lexicon before—was pragmatism: the idea that many tenets of U.S. foreign policy are out of step with the times, and that institutions such as USAID shouldn’t simply be reconstituted as before. The word also implies a certain curtailing of altruistic ambitions. Future foreign aid shouldn’t be done with the explicit transactionalism of Trump, perhaps. But future Democratic leaders will likely be okay with cutting aid. Or they may base assistance either on what the United States can get in return, such as access to markets, or on collaborations with the private sector.
Senator Andy Kim, a former State Department and USAID employee, suggests securing access to critical minerals could be a key component of foreign assistance, for example. He and others point to the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the U.S. government’s investment arm, as a model and vehicle for future efforts. “Foreign assistance is not charity,” Kim told me. “We need to move away from that notion, which is a real misconception, and really try to build something that the American people can see is about growing our influence and growing our access to markets.”
Some Democratic proposals veer toward MAGA in other ways: The progressive wing of the party seems more comfortable with nudging Ukraine to make territorial concessions to Russia, and they advocate a more cooperative approach with China. Some would be fine leaving China to build highways and other infrastructure in Africa. But that doesn’t sit well with centrists, who continue to see China as an existential rival. Coons, a centrist who is likely to lead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee should Democrats regain control, says America needs to win the arms race with Beijing and can’t concede the developing world to Beijing.
Representative Ro Khanna, whose district includes Silicon Valley, is one of the few Democrats calling for the restoration of a stand-alone aid agency as part of an ambitious foreign agenda. “The new American president and Democratic administration needs to come and say, We will be a multiracial democracy that will lead in the world to recognize the human rights and aspirations of people around the world,” he told me.
On defense, the party has deep substantive differences. Some back greater investment in modernization; others advocate for a dramatic reduction in defense spending, even before the Trump administration’s proposal to increase the Pentagon budget to $1.5 trillion in the next fiscal year. “Originally, when DOGE came out, I said it should go after the Defense Department,” Khanna told me, arguing that increased Pentagon spending has fueled militarism and eaten up too much of the federal budget.
Perhaps the strongest thread in Democrats’ attempt to articulate a viable vision is the belief that Trump, with his hapless war with Iran, has given them an opportunity to reclaim the mantle of the anti-war party. That worked for Barack Obama, who shot from first-term senator to the White House through his opposition to the Iraq War. Now Democrats hope to channel Americans’ dislike for the current conflict, with its high gas prices and unclear benefits, into electoral gain. “There’s an easy political message, which is we should stop spending money on wars and trillion-and-a-half-dollar defense budgets, and invest in Americans at home,” Ben Rhodes, who served as an aide to President Obama and is a co-founder of National Security Action, told me. “That’s our ‘America First’ message.”
Democrats think they can fly the anti-war flag without risk of being portrayed, as they have been in the past, as weak on national security, if only because the Iran war is so unpopular and because the frustration over past counterinsurgent wars runs so deep. I’m not sure. Having covered Pete Hegseth over the past 17 months, I’ve seen how his message that Republicans are restoring a testosterone-fueled version of national strength has resonance even beyond Trump’s MAGA base. And Democrats will need to be careful, as they criticize Trump’s militarism, to avoid being seen as defenders of Trump’s targets: Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Ayatollah Khamenei and his regime in Iran, and Caribbean drug traffickers. They may also find, as most parties do when they transition from the opposition to the executive, that it is easier to criticize what the current administration is doing than it is to govern.
When I entered a crowded ballroom in Washington’s Mayflower Hotel last month, I was startled to see former Secretary of State Antony Blinken walk onto the stage. Biden’s chief diplomat hadn’t appeared on the event program ahead of time. The surprise appearance led to speculation in the audience that Blinken’s name was left off the list of speakers in an attempt to avoid protests over the war in Gaza, who assailed Blinken during the Biden administration and have continued to after he left office. (The conference organizers declined to comment.) Blinken’s appearance drew immediate criticism from the party’s far-left flank. Matt Duss, who has served as a foreign-policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez, posted on X that members of the panel “helped perpetrate the Gaza genocide.” “This is how Trumpism thrives,” Duss added.
What Blinken and the others on the panel had to say was sober and sensible. But the backlash, both real and potential, against the man who embodies the most recent Democratic president’s global record was an ominous sign. Not many Democrats are calling for “accountability” for top Biden staffers over what occurred in Gaza, as Duss is. But a number are demanding that a new crop of policy makers take the reins, maybe to the exclusion of those who occupied leadership roles in the past. Many Democrats I spoke with told me they expect the party’s differing visions will get hashed out in the presidential primaries. It is hard to see that process going smoothly, however, if the party doesn’t first reckon with the shadow of the Gaza war. Biden’s decision to continue military aid to Israel, with only a handful of exceptions, as the death toll mounted in Gaza and Israel failed to facilitate adequate aid, caused widespread distress in the administration, on Capitol Hill, and in the party’s rank and file. A recent poll shows that 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents have an unfavorable view of Israel, up from 53 percent in 2022. The issue has become a proxy for generational divides over America’s role in the world, and for what many younger Democrats see as U.S. hypocrisy.
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“Gaza is still so real and so raw in part because the leadership was never fully honest about what the policy was, and what it wasn’t,” Christopher Le Mon, who served as a senior State Department official for human rights during the Biden administration, told me. “For a lot of people, Gaza not only remains a stark dividing line on the substance of the policy; it also stands as a proxy for how much someone actually cares about the human beings on the receiving end of U.S. policy choices.”
Since 2024, top Biden advisers such as Blinken and Sullivan have been challenged or heckled by people on the left over their roles in the war. Ilan Goldenberg, who served as an adviser to Kamala Harris and is now a senior official at J Street, a left-leaning advocacy group, thinks the feelings are misplaced. “That really should be directed at Joe Biden because it was driven by him,” he told me. But the fissure remains: Senior Democrats are discussing whether Biden aides should sit out the next Democratic administration. Other Democrats dismiss the brouhaha as an inside-the-Beltway distraction, noting that the Trump administration is a lesson about the risks of elevating people without expertise. Kim told me Democrats need to focus on setting the agenda first. “Right now we need the best ideas out there,” he said. “I want experts there; I want people that can engage.”
On the actual issues, though, there is a growing convergence among Democrats on a new Israel policy that will likely involve reducing or further conditioning military aid. In April, 40 Democratic senators, including virtually every Democrat who’s been floated as a 2028 candidate, voted to block the proposed sale of bulldozers to Israel, a major shift. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made things easier by calling for Israel to wean itself off U.S. funding.
Two Israel issues are likely to continue dividing the party: whether candidates favor cutting support for Israel’s air-defense systems, and whether candidates describe what occurred in Gaza as a genocide. Khanna is among a minority of lawmakers who use the term; he also wants to recognize a Palestinian state. More surprising, perhaps, was Wendy Sherman. She served as Biden’s first deputy secretary of state and was a member of the shadow cabinet during the first Trump administration. In a recent interview, she also referred to the war in Gaza as “genocide.”
The next Republican presidential candidate, be it J. D. Vance, Marco Rubio, or someone else, is sure to take up the “America First” slogan, which, despite the realities of Trump’s foreign policy, has been effective in connecting with voters’ anger and resetting how America engages with the world. A central challenge for the Democrats will be to find a similarly simple framing for what they want to do and why their approach will do more for Americans.
Trump, some say, is already helping. Coons told me that Americans have already concluded that, despite the president’s insistence to the contrary, Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz directly affects them; they see it in prices at the pump. “We are still part of an integrated global economy,” he said. “No matter what you say, our prosperity and our security depends on being engaged.” Democrats’ success with that message may depend on whether voters interpret it as a better way to put “America First”—or as something that puts America last.
The post Can the Democrats Find a Foreign Policy? appeared first on The Atlantic.
