Bluesky

Donald Trump returned to the White House promising to end wars and steer the United States away from costly foreign entanglements. One year into his second term, however, the United States has entered an illegal, costly, and risky war in Iran, with no clear justification or strategy. 

Over the past year, Trump has escalated tensions across the world, particularly Western Hemisphere—capturing Venezuela’s president and threatening governments from Greenland to Cuba—while delivering few diplomatic results, including little progress on his pledge to end the war in Ukraine.

In the aftermath of Trump’s decisive victory in November 2024, analysis and polling suggested that his willingness to emphasize a pro-peace message—and, the contrast he managed to draw with his opponent’s embrace of Washington’s foreign policy orthodoxy—played a meaningful role in the election’s outcome.  Now, as his governing record betrays that message, Democrats are confronting a familiar but unresolved question: whether they can articulate a coherent alternative of their own. As this year’s midterms and the 2028 presidential elections near, that question seems likely to fuel a growing debate within the party over how Democrats should counter this administration’s war and how far to go in redefining their own foreign policy.

“Trump very, very quickly broke his promise to be a pro-peace president; he showed once again he is anything but,” Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, told The Nation. “There is really an opening here for Democrats to lean into a more pro-peace message.”

Trump’s decision to launch a war with Iran has made the political stakes of that argument more immediate. Some progressive Democrats say the conflict illustrates the costs of Washington’s long-standing foreign policy approach. “As someone who survived war, I know bombs don’t build or create stability—they unleash chaos,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) told The Nation in a statement. “The Democratic Party must be the anti-war party. It’s time for us to set a clear vision of diplomacy over destruction, people over defense contracts. For decades, we’ve poured billions into endless wars with no clear mission. The US war on Iran has already cost taxpayers over $2 billion. While Washington funds another conflict, Republicans are cutting healthcare and food assistance. It’s time to stop investing in forever wars and start investing in our own people.”

In the broader party, however, signs of a serious rethinking are so far inconsistent, at best. Since his first term in office, the opposition party’s disapproval of Trump has waffled between pinpointing his militarism and blaming him for abdicating American leadership in the world because he won’t stand up to perceived adversaries.

All Democratic Senators but one voted in favor of an unsuccessful War Powers Resolution aimed at constraining Trump’s ability to wage war, and many members have spoken out against the president’s decision to go to war. On the House side, four Democrats voted with almost the entire GOP to defeat a similar effort.

But it took party leadership days after the administration had surged military assets into the Middle East to rally behind the resolution, at which point the war had already been launched. In the lead-up to the war, even when creating distance from the president over Iran, the party’s critique was uneven. Some Democrats have openly supported military action or opposed legislative constraints on executive authority, while others have focused primarily on what they see as Trump’s messy management of the crisis. The result has been a familiar pattern: a technocratic critique of execution rather than a moral, legal, or strategic objection to war itself—one that reflects the party’s broader uncertainty over how far its foreign policy rethinking should extend.

“It’s striking how many Democrats seem to be stuck making basically procedural objections to this war,” said Marcus Stanley, director of studies at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. “Instead of making the obvious point that we multiple times abandoned peaceful diplomatic routes to ending the Iranian nuclear program and instead took a course of violent destruction which is going to lead to tremendous suffering for the people of Iran.” Even after criticizing the war as illegal and dangerous, some Democrats expressed openness to providing the Pentagon with the money necessary to fight it.

In Germany earlier this month, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) addressed the Munich Security Conference to make the case for what she called a “working class centered politics” and foreign policy.

The remarks were framed in the press as an attempt to sketch a progressive approach to international engagement during Trump’s second term and amid speculation about her political future.

“Hypocrisies are vulnerabilities, and they threaten democracies globally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “So I think many of us are here to say: We are here, and we are ready for the next chapter—not to have the world turn toward isolation, but to deepen our partnerships with a greater commitment to integrity and to our values.”

Some observers say that even in an effort to articulate a distinct framework, elements of earlier Democratic foreign policy thinking remained visible. Ocasio-Cortez’ rhetoric resembled former President Joe Biden’s formulation of a world divided between democracies and autocracies, a worldview that, during the last Democratic administration, was used to ratchet up competition with China and contributed to the failure to deter or end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

“We have to avoid the temptation to go ‘back to the future,’ back to the pre-Trump, so-called ‘rules based international order,’ and simply try to score partisan points by saying that Trump has destroyed what was a positive situation before he came in,” said Stanley. “The truth is that the seeds for a lot of what Trump is doing were laid under the previous liberal internationalist system. You can see this very directly because all three of the areas where the US is engaged in aggression—Iran, Cuba, Venezuela—these were all countries that were targeted for sanctions and for economic destruction under the pre-Trump regime.”

A similar pattern played out following the 2016 election. Trump, according to some analysis, successfully outflanked Hillary Clinton on questions of war and peace, positioning his candidacy in opposition to the neoconservatives who had controlled the Republican Party’s foreign policy for a generation. But his first go-around in office did not follow the rhetoric, and by the time the 2020 primaries came around, most Democratic candidates were criticizing the incumbent for enabling and supporting Saudi Arabia’s devastating war on Yemen and withdrawing from international treaties such as the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris Climate Agreements. Even Biden, the party establishment’s preferred choice, made gestures toward a less militarist foreign policy. The resulting party platform was greeted with cautious optimism from the party’s left flank. That progress was short-lived, buried especially in the rubble of the genocide in Gaza. Many on the left have made the case that rebuilding any version of a human rights-centered foreign policy will need to begin with accountability for the administration that funded, facilitated, and provided cover for those atrocities, starting with a pledge to not bring the Biden foreign policy team responsible into future Democratic administrations.

“We need a president who is actually committed to following through on those promises, which Biden was not,” Duss said. “Biden ran on a platform of ending the forever wars. He followed through quite admirably in withdrawing from Afghanistan, but he seemed to think that was the one forever war. He either misunderstood what was meant by the commitment he made, or he wasn’t telling the truth.”

A series of polls suggests that anti-war messaging remains not just morally resonant but politically viable, particularly among Democrats. A late January Fox News survey found strong support for increased congressional checks on warmaking, while other polling from the Institute for Government Affairs, taken before the Iran war, shows Trump’s foreign policy was already broadly unpopular with voters. Within the Democratic base, the appetite for military escalation is even weaker, with one recent poll showing only 7 percent of Democrats supported the weekend’s attacks on Iran.

“I think this is absolutely a moment for Democrats to respond to the prevailing anti-war sentiment among Americans by reasserting congressional constitutional war powers responsibilities and proposing a foreign policy where the US isn’t so cavalier about taking military action without an exit plan, strategy, or timetable,” Rep. Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.), who sits on the House Foreign Affairs committee, told The Nation in a statement.

“I believe US foreign policy should center around understanding that we’re now in a multipolar world and instead of fighting that, we should work on creating the open, just, and prosperous multipolar world that we want.”

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who has been a leading voice in Congress to reassert legislative authority as part of a broader effort to redefine the party’s approach to foreign policy, has made the argument that voters are looking for a party presenting a new vision for America’s role in the world.

“We should be the party of peace. We should be the party against getting us into another colossal blunder in Iran,” he said during a post-election appearance on Politico’s “The Conversation” series. “We became the party of war. I think the Gaza situation really hurt us, with a lot of young people.”

Trump won the last election in part because of his ability to make inroads among traditionally Democratic voting blocs and build his own version of a multiracial coalition. While foreign policy was hardly the dominant issue shaping those shifts, some analysts argue that perceptions of war and peace nonetheless formed part of the broader political environment in which those realignments occurred.

Pointing to data from his pre-election survey about race and foreign policy that shows a meaningful racial gap among Harris voters over whether Washington should continue to provide military support to Kyiv until Ukraine regains all territory it has lost since, Chris Shell, a research fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, said that embracing a more prudent foreign policy could reinforce Democrats’ efforts to reconnect with those voters.

“There’s a lot of concern about how President Obama really galvanized voters, especially minority voters—I think he really seized the anti-war lane of ending these wars that Americans felt were rather nebulous and disconnected from their everyday interests. [In 2024] Trump seized that lane,” said Shell. “Articulating a foreign policy that tries to push for a more judicious approach and tries to push for more diplomacy with ‘adversaries’ is something that I have found would resonate with Black voters, regardless of where they are on the ideological spectrum.”

The evidence that voters are looking for fresh thinking on foreign policy is beginning to show up in elections ahead of the 2026 midterms and the 2028 presidential elections.

The most obvious example of the electoral tides shifting is over Gaza. Zohran Mamdani won the New York mayoral election last November by sticking to his principles on the war, despite consistent attacks from his opponents who incorrectly diagnosed these views as a weakness. More recently, progressive candidate Analilia Mejia won a special election primary in New Jersey despite strong opposition from AIPAC, underscoring that criticizing Israel is no longer the third rail many in the party once assumed.

Whether those results translate into a durable shift, however, depends on how much room there is to question the premises that have long defined Washington’s foreign policy debates, and how prepared politicians are to challenge them once in office.

“The US public has been and is being primed for war with China, war with Iran, war with Russia,” Stanley said in an interview before the war started. “I think a lot of people in the grassroots see through that and there isn’t really a constituency for war with Iran, there’s no constituency for World War III with China, but because of the propaganda environment, it is very difficult to speak common sense about how you get to peace.”