12 The New York Review
Do the Democrats Have a Foreign Policy?
Jessica T. Mathews
A paradox of American presidential
elections—especially during the pri-
maries—is that unless a war is looming
or underway, voters pay little attention
to the arena in which a president has
the greatest power to affect their lives.
On taxes, education, health care, and
all the other domestic issues for which
candidates put forward detailed plans,
what a president wants will have to be
exhaustively negotiated with Congress.
On foreign policy, his or her freedom of
action is vastly greater. Foreign policy,
too, unlike domestic issues, frequently
entails surprises—the collapse
of the Soviet Union, say—that
demand a swift response in un-
expected conditions. In their own
interest, then, voters ought to
want to know what a candidate’s
instincts about foreign policy
are—what she or he makes of
recent history, of global trends,
of the threats the US faces, and
of what its responsibilities in the
world should be.
Candidates should care as
well, since history suggests that
foreign policy is likely to have a
significant effect on their legacy if
elected. Of Trump’s nine prede-
cessors over the past half-century,
the Vietnam War shaped the ad-
ministrations of Lyndon Johnson
and Richard Nixon. The Iran hos-
tage crisis ended Jimmy Carter’s
presidency after one term. The
Iran-contra scandal dominated
Ronald Reagan’s second term,
eventually producing convictions
of eleven administration officials.
The terrorist attacks of Septem-
ber 11, 2001, George W. Bush’s
declaration of a “global war on
terror,” the war in Afghanistan,
and the tragically misconceived
invasion of Iraq determined the
course of Bush’s presidency and created
many of the issues facing his successors.
Donald Trump’s international deci-
sions—they do not amount to a coher-
ent policy—are a further reminder of
what is at stake. In just three years he
has scrambled allies and adversaries,
thrown away international agreements,
crippled institutions demonstrably serv-
ing US interests, and created opportu-
nity after opportunity for China and
Russia to exploit. Nonetheless, until the
US killed Qassim Suleimani on Janu-
ary 3, foreign policy was once again
nearly invisible in the 2020 campaign.
In the Democratic candidates’ first six
televised debates, 10–15 percent of the
time was spent on foreign policy.
But that proportion reflects what
national reporters think is important.
Voters hold different views. The Des
Moines Register tracked every ques-
tion asked of all the Democratic can-
didates at public events in Iowa during
three weeks in October and November.
Of the 321 questions, fourteen—4.
percent—were about foreign policy.
(Questions about climate change were
counted separately.) Elizabeth War-
ren’s campaign kept a tally of ques-
tions asked at her events across the
country that counted twenty-seven
about foreign policy out of more than
six hundred—4.5 percent. Those ques-
tions have ranged widely, not clustering
around a few issues. Polls are remark-
ably similar: only 5 percent of respon-
dents name foreign policy as the most
important issue. Given these numbers,
candidates can hardly be faulted for
not talking about it more.
What they have said reveals broad
areas of like-mindedness. All the
candidates agree that climate change
is an existential threat and pledge to
immediately rejoin the Paris climate
accord. They agree that relationships
with traditional allies are crucial to
US interests and are committed to re-building them—Joe Biden plans to also
“reimagine” them, without explaining
what that means. They agree that mili-
tary force should be a last rather than
a first resort and promise to reinvigo-
rate and reemphasize diplomacy. And
they support a renewed embrace of
multilateralism.
They have all pledged to rejoin or in
some way rescue what is left of the Iran
nuclear deal. (The killing of Suleimani
could make this moot: there may well
be nothing left of the deal by January
2021.) They agree on ending the war in
Afghanistan, though with differences
in emphasis and timing. Warren, Ber-
nie Sanders, and Andrew Yang urge a
quick departure. Pete Buttigieg notes
the need for special forces and intelli-
gence personnel to remain behind after
combat forces depart and pledges that
the authorization of any US interven-
tion under his leadership will expire
after three years. Congress will be
forced, he says—though it’s not clear
how—to match soldiers’ courage with
its own willingness to go on record au-
thorizing a mission. Biden pledges to
bring the troops home from Afghani-
stan during his first term and to focus
US efforts there tightly on counterter-
rorism, but he undercuts that welcome
rigor by specifying that any peace deal
must protect the rights of women and
girls—an outcome greatly to be desiredbut not a function of a counterterror-
ism operation.
The candidates also agree that the
top priority for a sound foreign policy
is the need to rebuild a healthier, less
divided, and less unequal democracy
at home. Here trouble arises, because
the domestic agendas they advocate
to achieve that happier state are fre-
quently so long that foreign policy gets
lost entirely. This is especially true for
Biden, who puts the greatest emphasis
on democracy as the foundation of US
policy abroad. The first bullet pointin the fact sheet that accompanied his
major foreign policy address delivered
in October is “Remake our education
system.” The second is “Reform our
criminal justice system.” To be sure,
we badly need to repair the fractures in
our democracy, but in the years—de-
cades—that that will require, we will
need an actual foreign policy as well.
History won’t take a time-out while we
work to restore what is broken at home.Trump’s successor, whether in 2021 or
2025, will inherit a uniquely demand-
ing international agenda both with re-
spect to specific policies that need to
be reversed and, for the first time in
many decades, real uncertainty about
what priorities—what strategic vision—
Washington should adopt in their place.
Most of the Democratic candidates
understand that part of Trump’s ap-
peal in 2016 was to Americans who
did not believe that US policies abroad
served their interests. For fifty years,
memories of World War II and the
extraordinarily successful internation-
alist strategy born out of it (the Mar-
shall Plan, the United Nations, and so
on), and then the need to win the cold
war, were enough to command steady
popular support for those policies. But
thirty years after the collapse of the
Soviet Union and with seemingly un-ending wars continuing in the Middle
East, the support for them is gone. But-
tigieg has captured this dilemma most
clearly: “Democrats can no more turn
the clock back to the 1990s than Re-
publicans can return us to the 1950s,
and we should not try.” What should
be done instead, however, none of the
Democratic candidates has made clear.
The biggest problems Trump will
leave behind are well understood, but
here, too, answers are not evident. Days
after the 2016 election, Barack Obama
warned the new president-elect that
North Korea’s nuclear program
posed his most urgent challenge.
Three years later, US policy has
lurched from “fire and fury” to
“love,” from threats to fawning
requests, and from unprepared
presidential summits to ill-judged
cancellations of US–South Ko-
re a n m i l it a r y exerc i s e s. No a g re e -
ments have been reached, while
North Korea has had a thousand
days to make progress on its
nuclear and missile programs—
time it has not wasted. Wiser
men and more professional US
administrations than Trump’s
have failed to stop Pyongyang’s
nuclear advance, but none has
produced a comparable record of
confusion, futility, and weakness.
The Trump administration’s
record on Iran is in some ways
even worse because it threw away
an agreement to shut down Teh-
ran’s nuclear weapons program
that was working and had noth-
ing but threats and sanctions
to replace it. The results have
been exactly what critics pre-
dicted. After a year’s wait to see
whether Europe could change
Washington’s mind or deliver
promised economic benefits on
its own, Iran began to meet Trump’s
“maximum pressure” with “maximum
resistance”: escalating violations of
the agreement and more provocative
policies across the region. After Wash-
ington completely shut down sales of
Iranian oil last spring, the Iranians at-
tacked an American drone, oil tankers
in the Persian Gulf, and major Saudi
oil facilities. Hard-liners in Iran who
opposed the nuclear deal have been
politically strengthened and confirmed
in their belief that the US can never
be trusted. The economic impacts of
the tightened US sanctions have been
severe, prompting large public pro-
tests that the government has brutally
suppressed. US officials now speak
openly about regime change, but even
the harshest sanctions have proven
ineffective in unseating autocratic re-
gimes. Elites protect themselves, every-
one else suffers, while the regimes—in
North Korea and Cuba as in Iran—stay
in place. Trump’s policy, in short, has
been lose–lose: nuclear constraints
have been lost and the risk of a shoot-
ing war—intentional or accidental—
has increased dramatically.
The killing of Suleimani ratchets
tensions many degrees higher. Mem-
bers of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard (of
which Suleimani was a leader), if not all
Iranians, are unlikely to feel that Teh-
ran’s first response of missile strikes onElizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Pete Buttigieg
at the Democratic presidential debate in Des Moines, January 2020Scott^ Olson/GettyImages