Last October, Joe Biden made the most significant address of a presidency defined by war. Sitting in the Oval Office, he asked Congress to approve $106bn in emergency aid mainly to arm Ukraine and Israel in their ongoing wars. He barely attempted to explain what the US was seeking to achieve in either place, or how the fighting would come to an end. Instead, he claimed that American allies, and freedom itself, were under attack, and the US had to help because of its very identity as a nation. “We are, as my friend Madeleine Albright said, ‘the indispensable nation’,” Biden intoned. Albright had served as secretary of state in the late 1990s, at the apex of America’s global dominance.
The next day I attended a meeting of “outside experts” convened by the national security council. The group, in fact mostly composed of seasoned national security hands, showered praise on the administration for Biden’s soaring speech. If the attenders had made up the US Congress, they would have rubber-stamped the aid that afternoon and probably added billions more. (The actual Congress balked at the request, approving it only after five months of uncertainty.)
I thought to myself, I must be living in another country than these people. The president just asked the American public to pay $106bn – almost double the budget of the state department, and on top of about $1tn in annual national security spending – to supply multiple overseas wars whose consequences for ordinary Americans were abstract at best. Not only that: the president seemed to imply that Americans had no choice in the matter because, as all right-thinking people knew, we are the indispensable nation.
I was so close to the priests yet so far from the priesthood.
I felt less alone, but more uneasy, when I recalled what Jake Sullivan had written in 2019, a year before Biden appointed him to be national security adviser. Back then, Sullivan had urged Democrats to retire the notion that the United States was the world’s indispensable nation. “By itself, indispensability is more wearying than energizing,” he wrote. “It speaks to fulfilling others’ needs, not one’s own. And it comes with no limits.”
Leaving the meeting, I realized that the process of political learning and policy adaptation that Democrats had attempted after their loss to Trump in 2016 – an effort that informed Biden’s campaign and first year in office, when he denounced “forever wars” and withdrew US troops from Afghanistan — was over. White House officials evidently believed that they had made the necessary changes and were back in command of American politics and now could proudly defend the system and tout its most orthodox of orthodoxies.
So when Biden and then Harris ran for president in 2024, they did so as the candidates of the system, right down to campaigning with Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz. They touted her moral rectitude even as most of the country knew the Cheneys for sponsoring foreign policy disaster.
Little wonder Trump relished the opportunity to talk about foreign policy in this election, just as in 2016. Foreign policy helped Trump to make his central pitch: that he was the outsider who would upend a failing system, dispense with self-referential elite pabulum, and resort to all manner of methods to bring change. The Biden-turned-Harris campaign, remarkably, accepted the role Trump cast for it: high-minded defender of the status quo. In her lone presidential debate, Harris did not even state an intention to try to bring the war in Ukraine to a close. She chose instead to express offense at Trump’s willingness to deal with dictators. America must stand, she said, as a “leader upholding international rules and norms”.
As in 2016, the Democrats permitted Trump to be the candidate who at least recognized that the wars should end sooner rather than later, who at least recognized that Cheney-era military interventionism was a major failure (and a bipartisan one), who at least recognized that the specter of what Trump constantly called “World War III” was a real danger and must be avoided through realistic thinking, not wishful platitudes, and not only by deterring adversaries through military strength but also by being unafraid to seek diplomatic accommodations that serve America’s best interests.
Of course, it wasn’t foreign policy that caused American voters to give Trump the largest victory for Republicans in decades. As singular issues go, inflation and immigration mattered more. But elections have multiple causes, and foreign policy was one of them. For starters, the Biden-Harris administration’s sponsorship of Israel’s devastating war cratered Arab-American support in Michigan and elsewhere. More broadly, foreign policy distills something that does determine elections. It is the essential terrain for expressing what America’s identity as a nation should be, where the country has been and where it should go, who is to blame for its ills and who deserves power now. In depicting the US in the world, political candidates tell the story of the nation.
You don’t have to attend national security council meetings to tell that putting “America first” was the stronger message than upholding “international rules and norms. In fact, being among Washington’s foreign policy elite is more likely to blind you to that fact.
As Democrats reckon with the future of their party, foreign policy must be part of the reckoning.
Stephen Wertheim is a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a visiting lecturer at Yale Law School and Catholic University
