Charting a New Path Forward

The Left had little influence on Joe Biden's foreign policy and will have none over the next four years. How can leftists build the capacity to carry a foreign policy message into 2026 and beyond?

This column is free to everyone. To receive more in depth analysis of US foreign policy and international affairs, sign up for Foreign Exchanges’ email list today! And please consider subscribing to support the newsletter and help it continue to grow:

---

The American Left—and here I mean anyone from social democrats to communists—was generally excluded from shaping Joe Biden’s foreign policy. And the Left achieved zero influence over the Kamala Harris campaign’s foreign policy positions, as Harris tacked to the right on immigration, abandoned an earlier pledge to ban fracking, promised to uphold Biden’s policies in the Middle East, pointedly excluded Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices, and embraced Dick and Liz Cheney. With all that said, the victory of Donald Trump—and his emerging cabinet of hawks—leaves the Left in an even bleaker place.

How can the Left build power and influence foreign policy between now and the 2028 presidential campaign? For the sake of simplicity, we could talk about an “insider track” (attempting to influence Democratic presidential and congressional candidates) and an “outsider track” (protest and criticism aimed at U.S. foreign policy as a whole).

Joe Biden delivering his final foreign policy address at the US State Department on Monday (ROBERTO SCHMIDT/AFP via Getty Images)

Neither of these options offers a panacea. To start with the insider track, it must be understood that the Democratic Party is hostile to the Left, both at an institutional level and among its leading politicians and professionals. Democratic presidents have borrowed selectively from Left thinking on economics and have incorporated a few Left-leaning voices into economic policymaking, albeit within serious limits—I will leave it others to break down how “Bidenomics” was far different in practice than how it was originally billed. On foreign policy, meanwhile, the dismissal of Left viewpoints is nearly complete. Indeed, much of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment in Washington (meaning both Democrats and neoconservatives, which are increasingly overlapping categories) refuses to even engage seriously with Left views on foreign policy, preferring to dismiss its criticisms and alternatives as “isolationism.”

Yet, with all that said, the Democratic Party remains the most plausible vehicle for bringing any kind of Left viewpoint into actual foreign policymaking. It remains virtually impossible for a third party to break through into electoral viability. And the across-the-board viciousness of the Republicans precludes the Left from taking that party seriously. So leftists hoping to influence policy are stuck with attempting to find a path into the heart of Democratic power circles. Perhaps some 2026 and 2028 candidates will be open enough—or desperate enough—that they might listen.

The Insider Track

Building an Infrastructure to Influence Campaigns

There already exists a range of Left-leaning organizations relevant to promoting foreign policy views, especially in terms of peace, immigration, and climate. This includes organizations such as Win Without War, Peace Action, Jewish Voices for Peace, the National Immigration Project, the Climate and Community Institute, 128 Collective, and numerous others. Left and left-leaning views are also increasingly represented within the DC think tank circuit, from the Quincy Institute (which includes both left and right anti-militarist voices), the Carnegie Endowment’s American Statecraft Project, and the Center for International Policy. However, the Left lacks a coordinating, cross-sector, overtly campaign-oriented infrastructure.

Between 2025 and 2028, I think the insider track requires a Left equivalent of National Security Action, the foreign policy vehicle created by Jake Sullivan and Ben Rhodes while Democrats were out of power. National Security Action was in some ways an empty husk, functioning primarily as a framework for assembling a foreign policy team-in-waiting, but it also had some think tank and rapid response capabilities. The Left needs to be able to offer 2026 congressional candidates and 2028 presidential candidates a similar kind of ready-to-go bench, but with several key differences: (1) more substantive messaging, designed not just to serve candidates but to mold and pressure them, (2) a mass outreach component designed to build ties to grassroots leftists and organized labor, and (3) a media strategy aimed not at promoting the Democratic Party but at promoting a Left foreign policy worldview.

Such a framework would allow for a coordinated, two-front attack on both the Sullivan crowd (Rhodes is somewhat to the left of Sullivan, it should be noted) and the Trump administration. The Left should not get drawn into a generic anti-Trump coalition in which establishment Democrats are the leaders—rather, leftists should vigorously debate the Sullivan crowd across the pages of influential publications and in the think tank and podcast world, while also mounting a full-throated condemnation of Trump policies.

Designing Compelling Messages

It is going to require careful thought to develop simple messages that resonate with voters but that don’t fall into any traps. “End foreign wars and invest at home” is one message that seems to resonate with some voters, for example, but that message can easily be coopted by the Right and is not sustainable, given that the climate crisis in fact calls upon the United States and the Global North broadly to invest ambitiously in climate change mitigation abroad. “Rebuild our alliances and restore American moral leadership” is a message that falls flat with ordinary people, as demonstrated by the struggles of the Biden administration and the Harris campaign in connecting with voters. “A foreign policy for the middle class”—Sullivan’s line—stumbled in its execution but also in its conceptualization, remaining vague and unconvincing. (And the Left, for its part, is not merely interested in the fortunes of the middle class.) Nor should the Left be tempted by the frame of “national security,” which flattens foreign policy concerns and limits foreign policy horizons while also embracing a right-coded, fear-based atmosphere. Progressive efforts to rebrand “natsec” thinking end up playing on right-wing turf.

The most promising messaging to me involves stressing the existential stakes of the climate crisis and the shared humanity of all people. “Let’s survive this together” is the sort of message I would use as a starting point. And I would leave American leadership and exceptionalism out of it—I’m not sure ordinary voters, especially Left-curious voters, care that much, and I think talk of American moral leadership inevitably shades into talk of “the national interest” in ways that undermine global solidarity and that conjure up the interests of Washington over the interests of Americans.

Every story needs an enemy, and I think for the Left, the enemy of our story about global politics should be climate change and corporate power, rather than singling out countries such as Russia or China. That doesn’t and shouldn’t mean any coziness with Russian or Chinese imperialism, but it does mean pragmatism when it comes to dealing with Moscow and Beijing and, at the level of messaging, less talk about the “liberal order” (a fantasy anyway) and more talk about a shared future for all people.

Fleshing Out the Policy Prescriptions

Much has been written about “progressive foreign policy,” and some of that writing has been compelling. Yet there are many critics of existing foreign policy and not as many voices when it comes to building a detailed alternative vision. It is significant that a lot of Left and progressive prescriptions boil down to “stop doing X, Y, Z” and “do more diplomacy.” To be clear, “stop doing X, Y, Z” is a crucial message and there is no path to a Left foreign policy (or to a survivable world) without the cessation of American militarism and aggression. The Century Foundation, for example, has laid out a long list of actions the U.S. should cease doing in the Middle East (and to be fair, TCF also includes some suggestions of what to do instead). But “do more diplomacy” is neither specific nor compelling.

There can be something of a disconnect between the search for a Left global strategy and the generation of specific Left policy prescriptions. A leftist presidential candidate shouldn’t take the stage in Democratic primary debates in 2027 and seem like they’re fudging their answers on Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, or Taiwan and calling in vague terms for “diplomacy.” That candidate should be well prepared by a team of advisors to deliver devastatingly precise recommendations for how to proceed, issue by issue, and then connect those answers back to the overall vision. The aura of foreign policy competence cannot be ceded to the likes of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or even Chris Murphy. Fortunately, I think a great deal of work is already unfolding at the issue level, and so the task may be more organizational than intellectual—how to better connect and coordinate, in other words, the work that is already being done, while continuing to push the intellectual frontiers of what can be imagined.

Seeking Institutional Leadership

Almost definitionally, the Left cannot and should not replicate the kind of infrastructure that the Sullivan crowd has—one could envision a Left-leaning foreign affairs consultancy, actually, but it would not look anything like the very troubling WestExec Advisors firm where Antony Blinken and others cashed in during the interval between the Obama and Biden years. The Left has some perches now within the think tank scene in Washington, although liberals and neocons continue to have far more institutional influence.

One challenge for the Left, then, is to think about what kinds of opportunities exist within other institutions—from professional organizations to city councils to community groups, there are platforms and roles available that could feed into a broader Left foreign policy strategy. Indeed, even the (now very remote-seeming) capture of the presidency itself would be a hollow victory for the Left without a massive popular and infrastructural base to lend support to a leftist president. So building power at the local level (not just in a geographical sense, but in terms of one’s own professional milieu too) is critical. Here it is worth giving thought to which kinds of sleepy organizations out there might be politicized and refashioned into tools of power for a rising Left. The local level—city councils, for example—can also be mobilized and attuned more to global issues, from passing resolutions to divesting to putting pressure on state and national officials and politicians.

The Outsider Track

Maintaining Distinct Channels of Resistance to Trump

In the tradeoff between building a broad coalition and maintaining clarity of message, I think clarity is the higher priority. As many have warned, we may now see some liberals shift away from supporting the Biden-Harris policies towards Israel and towards opposing the genocide in Gaza (and reverberating through the West Bank and Lebanon as well). The Left should look to draw in more ordinary people while not platforming fair-weather elite allies.

There are lessons to be learned here from the Bush era and Trump’s first term. In the mid-2000s, the spectrum of resistance to Bush and the Iraq War eventually blurred Left, progressive, and liberal voices in ways that the Democratic Party capitalized on to win the 2006 and 2008 elections, only to govern from the center if not the center right. Under Trump, the distinctions between Leftists and liberals were starker and firmer, in large part because of the 2016 Democratic primary and because of the groundswell of Left media in the second half of the 2010s. But the elected “democratic socialists” in Congress, most prominently Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, were folded into Biden’s coalition in ways that make the Left’s foothold in Congress—especially after the defeats of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush—even slimmer than that foothold was circa 2021.

It will be crucial to maintain distinctions between the Left and liberals heading into the 2027-2028 Democratic primaries, and the Left should not easily be persuaded to back an Obama-esque liberal in the primaries just because that person makes vague nods towards leftist rhetoric and ideas. The goal, however, far-fetched it may seem, is to see a genuinely Left candidate win that primary. Outside pressure will be vital not just in trying to deny the nomination to a centrist, but also to win it for someone with solid commitments.

In this spirit, Left outsiders should castigate Trump and his team and blast the Democratic leadership—particularly when Democrats enable Trump—and should also push the “progressives” and insiders to do better. Outside criticism will keep insiders on their toes and, hopefully, give them some cover to argue that their own ideas are not actually “extreme.” Insiders should not punch left, in my view, nor should Left candidates in 2026 and 2028 disavow the support of a rowdy online or offline Left. But a constructive insider-outsider dynamic on the Left could help shift the overall terms of debate.

Building Non-Establishment Power

The Left needs to get its perspectives, at least from time to time, into the pages of elite outlets like the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. But those publications also do a tremendous amount of harm. The New York Times’ role as a mouthpiece for American and Israeli power has been particularly evident during the ongoing war on Gaza. Although the “death of expertise” hurts ordinary people in many ways—for example as in the anti-vaccine movement—the de-centering of elite journalism and “foreign policy experts” could benefit the Left. (The difference, in case it needs to be clarified, is that scientifically backed medical interventions such as vaccines reflect a kind of expertise that is fundamentally more sound and reliable than the idea that someone is an expert on foreign policy simply because they have spent a lifetime talking about it—see Biden, Joe.) So directly attacking bastions of elite foreign policy influence while building up alternative publications, podcasts, and institutions is necessary. Ultimately, too, the nurturing of fundamentally outsider institutions will end up benefiting “Left Candidate 2028” by providing spaces where that candidate can reach and mobilize non-voters.

It is easiest (although not easy!) to build up alternative media institutions. But other kinds of alternative institutions are needed—particularly spaces where the Left can plan and strategize. So if you’re thinking of starting an organization, I say go for it (and I should take my own advice!). And then, too, connections between organizations are just as vital. Pace Ezra Klein and Adam Jentleson, the Left is not just “the groups”; being on the Left means having a worldview that is in fact much more cohesive and forward-looking than that of any other political strand. But to the extent that the Left does exist as “groups,” stronger connective tissue will help to build strength and to resist assaults from the center and the right.

Summing Up

The best-case scenario and most ambitious goal is to not merely survive the Trump era, but also emerge into the campaigns of 2026-2028 with a formidable set of insider and outsider spaces that position the Left to take power in 2029. Success would mean (a) pushing congressional candidates left, including on foreign policy, in 2026 and 2028, (b) having a meaningfully Left candidate emerge to contest the Democratic primaries in 2028, (c) winning the primaries while advancing Left ideas, and (d) winning the presidency. The foreign policy message, I’ve argued, should accent what the Left wants to do proactively just as much as it highlights what the Left wants to curtail and end. And the broad foreign policy platform should be backed and underpinned by well-developed ideas regarding specific foreign policy issues. Getting from this dark moment to that brighter future is partly an intellectual and analytical exercise, but it is much more an organizational challenge, necessitating levels of coordination that the Left currently lacks but seriously needs.

Having a Left president in 2029, or even a president willing to seriously listen to the Left and take on some Left advisors, might be unrealistic. But major swings have happened in America’s past, and in any case the urgency of a world on fire demands bold and imaginative efforts from the factions with the best ideas. The risk of inaction—of a Left that contents itself with analysis and criticism, rather than organization and competition with liberals and reactionaries—is greater than the risk of being overly ambitious.