Come January 20, 2029, any Democrat who succeeds Donald Trump as president must be prepared to confront the very different and much more dangerous world Trump will almost certainly create. The Democratic Party must begin thinking seriously about a new foreign policy approach now — one based on the party’s best internationalist traditions and the defense of freedom worldwide, not fantasies of “restraint” conjured up by progressive isolationists or the timid, managerial approaches of the Obama and Biden years.
Democratic foreign policy would have required a serious refresh even had Kamala Harris prevailed in November 2024. But Trump’s return to the presidency makes matters even more urgent: Unconstrained by more experienced and sober national security voices that understand the value of America’s alliances, Trump appears ready and willing to let his deepest and most destructive foreign policy impulses run wild — as became clear during his first weeks back in office. Long-standing American allies and friends have already found themselves treated as enemies, threatened with and subjected to economic and military pressure, while adversaries and autocrats find themselves welcomed as comrades and given leave to act as they please.
Like prudent military strategists who plan for every possible contingency, Democrats need to prepare for world more hostile to American interests and liberal values than at any point in living memory — and an America much weaker and far less able to defend them. Dictators in Moscow and Beijing will see their power and influence grow, possibly with Ukraine as a de facto Russian vassal state and Taiwan under China’s thumb. Other democracies could well follow America’s example and elect illiberal, far-right governments of their own, a task made all the easier by Trump’s gutting of USAID and the vital support it provides to those fighting for freedom and democracy abroad. NATO and other American alliances may either cease to exist altogether or stumble ahead shadows of their former selves, effectively unable to deter conflicts or defend their members. Future American promises and commitments will lack credibility, particularly when it comes to issues of trade and security.
Indeed, in his first month in office alone, Trump bullied two NATO allies — Canada and Denmark— with threats of tariffs and territorial annexation while sitting down one-on-one with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to discuss the fate of Ukraine. He similarly promised to levy tariffs on Mexico, another neighbor and trading partner, while Secretary of State Marco Rubio falsely claimed Trump’s threats wrested concessions from the Panamanian government over access to the Panama Canal. Trump also publicly backed crimes against humanity when he floated a preposterous scheme to depopulate the Gaza Strip, seize the Palestinian territory for the United States, and transform it into “the Riviera of the Middle East.”5 The loud and repeated endorsement of gangster-style extortion, territorial conquest, and rank imperialism by the president of the United States will have lasting and calamitous global consequences.
It will, therefore, not be possible for a future Democratic president to proclaim, as President Joe Biden did, that “America is back” and restore the world as it was before. Institutions and relationships demolished, degraded, and debased by a second Trump presidency, both at home and abroad, cannot simply be resurrected as if nothing had happened over the previous four years. Reconstruction and rebuilding, not restoration and refurbishment, will be the order of the day for any future Democratic foreign policy worthy of the name — and it will need to be done at a moment when America finds itself in its most precarious strategic position since before the Second World War.
So what should a future Democratic foreign policy look like?
First, it’s important to note that it’s hard to predict just how much damage Trump will do to America’s national security and foreign relations over the next four years — making specific policy proposals and positions less relevant than a broader intellectual and moral framework for thinking about foreign policy. Indeed, less than two weeks into his second term in office, Trump and his minions have already attempted to liquidate the U.S. Agency for International Development, purge the CIA and FBI of professional intelligence and law enforcement officers, and gut public scientific research institutions like the National Science Foundation, NASA, and NOAA.
What Democrats need is not a suite of detailed policy blueprints on this or that specific issue, but a general orientation and set of attitudes toward foreign policy — an animating spirit to guide them as they navigate the world moving forward.
That starts with a clear understanding of enduring global strategic realities and abiding American national interests — realities and interests that won’t change no matter who happens to occupy the Oval Office.
As Democratic Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt recognized, the dramatic scientific, technological, and industrial breakthroughs of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth century transformed the world in fundamental and irreversible ways.10 From steamships, the telegraph, and internal combustion engines to aviation, the radio, and rocketry, these advances made it impossible for geography to insulate the United States from threats across the Atlantic and Pacific. The political, economic, and diplomatic fate of this vast geographic expanse would now determine and define the sort of world in which America and other nations would live.
These profound changes required Americans to think about their national security in global terms, not just continental or hemispheric ones. As Roosevelt reminded his fellow citizens in his December 1940 fireside chat, “The width of those oceans is not what it was in the days of clipper ships.” Rapid technological progress since the Second World War — jet airliners, nuclear weapons, satellite telecommunications, and the internet, among other innovations — have only made Roosevelt’s central argument more compelling. Today, America’s own safety, prosperity, and freedom remains, as it has for more than a century, intimately and inextricably bound up with that of Europe and East Asia.
This essential national interest in the stability, security, and freedom of Europe and East Asia remains constant and objective; it can be denied and downplayed by isolationists on both left and right, but it cannot be altered, eliminated, or wished away. Now and for the foreseeable future, this interest is threatened by a pair of global gangster powers — Vladimir Putin’s Russia and Xi Jinping’s China — that aim to dominate these two vital regions and dictate their own terms to the rest of the world. In this endeavor, moreover, Moscow and Beijing receive both material and moral support from lesser gangster states like Iran and North Korea. The frontiers of America’s own national security, in other words, now stand at Ukraine’s Dnipro River and in the Taiwan Strait.
For a future Democratic foreign policy to fully succeed, however, the pursuit of America’s national interest must proceed hand in hand with the pursuit of higher ideals and moral values that represent America at its best — namely, a stalwart defense of freedom and democratic self-government against the depredations of despots, dictators, and international gangsters.
A strong and forthright defense of freedom at home and abroad ought to sit at the heart of a future Democratic foreign policy, serving as its crucial central pillar and main organizing principle. As America learned during the first half of the twentieth century, a world dominated by unfree powers is one that’s manifestly unsafe for the United States. It ultimately remains up to America to defend freedom around the world — there is no other nation or group of nations that can assume the same mantle of moral leadership as the United States or possesses the necessary geopolitical heft. Without a power as strong and influential as America to stand for them, freedom and liberal values will find themselves with no real or effective champion on the global stage. In short, the fate of freedom around the world depends in no small part on America’s own active involvement in the world.
Democrats should also make clear that they want the United States to defend freedom where it already prevails — however incomplete and fragile it may well be in certain places — against bullying, intimidation, and outright invasion by gangster powers like Russia and China. America remains the only nation with the capacity and ability to organize an effective, durable defense of democratic self-government where it now exists against such powers. It’s not some abstract rules-based international order that Democrats want America to defend, then, but actual living-and-breathing societies like Ukraine and Taiwan who wish to live free from the very real threat of military bullying and political domination by their more powerful and predatory neighbors.
Four additional pillars support and flesh out in more practical terms this main animating principle of a future Democratic foreign policy:
