No one ever voted for Stephen Miller. Only a bare plurality of American voters pulled the lever for his boss, Donald Trump, in 2024—and even then, voters were concerned above all with the rising cost of living, not with immigration, Miller’s obsessive focus. But over the past year, Miller has become arguably the most consequential figure in the second Trump administration—the maximalist force behind a maximalist presidency. Guided by white-supremacist teachings like the dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, Miller has made the ethnic purification of the American body and the expulsion of potentially millions of immigrants the administration’s central priority.

What makes Miller truly scary is that he is uncommonly effective at getting his way. Steve Bannon has described him as Trump’s “prime minister,” while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt recently told The Atlantic that Miller “oversees every policy the administration touches.” His fingerprints can be found all over the deployments of ICE to US cities, including the one that culminated in the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in the streets of Minneapolis; the rendition of scores of immigrants to a gulag in El Salvador without a shred of due process; the attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship and thus strip millions of native-born Americans of their most basic constitutional rights; and, increasingly, Trump’s most provocative and unilateral foreign-policy moves, from abducting Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela to his ongoing threats to annex Greenland.

Like Miller himself, none of this is popular. In Trump’s first year back in the White House, his net approval rating steadily declined from a high of plus 4 percent to a low of minus 19 percent—about as bad as has ever been recorded at this stage of a presidency—and the Democrats are favored to take back the House in this fall’s midterms. Voters are overwhelmingly concerned about the state of the economy, which continues to suffer from high inflation thanks to Trump’s much-publicized tariffs, and have expressed strong disapproval of his immigration-enforcement policies in particular, especially in the wake of the slayings in Minneapolis, which even many conservatives have struggled to defend. In a more rational administration, the way forward politically would be clear: Trump would marginalize (or ideally fire) Miller and pivot to a less abhorrent policy approach. Instead, Miller has seemed only to grow in stature and influence within the administration.

How did the most powerful government on earth come to be dominated by this unelected, viscerally unappealing 40-year-old right-wing extremist from Santa Monica? Last year, I reviewed the most authoritative biography of Miller, Jean Guerrero’s Hatemonger, for this magazine, and I came away with the impression that Miller has a handful of talents: a willingness to attract and capitalize on negative attention (colloquially, he’s good at “trolling”); an unusual skill at navigating office power politics and flattering the right people (in Trump’s first term, Miller won over Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump even though neither shares his extreme anti-immigration views); and an uncommon sense of how to turn his ruthless dogmatism into policy.

The trolling is table stakes in the MAGA extended universe, where countless individuals, including Miller’s wife, have pursued careers as influencers channeling the myriad frustrations of the American right. Miller, a frequent guest on shock-jock radio since high school, certainly could have gone that route. But it was Miller’s cutthroat instincts on Capitol Hill and his unfailing loyalty to Trump that ensured that his legacy would be more than just talk, and that he would exert the kind of influence over a sitting president that malign figures like Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney once did. The Venn diagram of competent Beltway operatives and ideologically committed neofascists has a very small intersection, but Miller sits comfortably at the center of it. He is hardly the most colorful character in the second Trump administration, where the competition includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Kristi Noem. But his impact on policy is outsize, even when the administration itself might be better served politically by doing anything else.

“We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world—in the real world, Jake—that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper recently in a defense of Trump’s Western Hemisphere expansionism. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

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The Darwinian flourishes are pure Miller, but the underlying imperial hubris recalls the 2004 quote that Ron Suskind got from a top George W. Bush official, widely assumed to be Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Given how the Bush administration’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq worked out, there’s a lesson here for Miller—and for us. It’s true that with the power he currently wields, he can mold reality to a far greater extent than anyone should be comfortable with. But there is far less domestic support for Trump and Miller’s agenda than Bush and Rove once enjoyed for theirs, and neither financial markets nor foreign governments nor the ordinary citizens confronting ICE in the streets have passively bent to their will. Reality is never solely the product of any one small political clique, and it has a tendency to frustrate and foil those who would claim the right to shape it. It’s far simpler to outmaneuver one’s colleagues for control of the boss’s ear than it is to impose one’s will on the rest of the world. This, too, has been an iron law of the world since the beginning of time.

Postwar Manhattan hosted a tight-knit, disputatious intellectual culture shaped heavily by the sons (and occasionally the daughters) of shtetl-born immigrants. Applying talmudic rigor to secular debates about literature and foreign affairs, they published little magazines whose ideas spread directly from their pages to the highest political offices. While traces of that culture remain—The New York Review of Books, Dissent, and yes, Commentary are all still publishing, as are dozens of other small-circulation journals in the same tradition—its claim on the political zeitgeist has been displaced by a culture that is comparatively dumbed-down, post-literate, and rooted in petty grievances and cheap provocation.

The singular figure who bridged these two sensibilities, Norman Podhoretz, is dead at 95. He was the last canonical New York intellectual, and the first of a now-familiar breed of discourse demagogue.

A star student born and raised in the slums of Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a Yiddish-speaking milkman from Galicia, at the age of 16 Podhoretz took what he called “the longest journey in the world” to the rarefied salons of the Upper West Side, where he studied under Lionel Trilling at Columbia and socialized with the likes of Hannah Arendt, Alfred Kazin, and Susan Sontag. His book reviews, including gutsy attacks on Saul Bellow and Jack Kerouac, earned him early notoriety, and by age 30, he was the editor of Commentary, published since 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, following the suicide of founding editor Elliot Cohen. He held that job for 35 years before handing it off to his like-minded deputy, Neal Kozodoy, who in turn handed it off to Podhoretz’s only son, John.

On Norman Podhoretz’s watch, Commentary was remade twice: at the start of the 1960s, from a somewhat parochially Jewish communal journal to a trendy signifier of countercultural sophistication, and then by the end of the decade into the neoconservative flagship that it remains today. As the runt of the New York intellectual “family” centered on contributors to Partisan Review—the idiosyncratic, anti-Stalinist left-wing literary journal founded in the 1930s—the young Podhoretz was eager to throw off his elders’ tedious, decades-old ideological debates, which had peaked in relevance during his Depression-era childhood. He wanted Commentary to engage with the present, to publish Norman Mailer in opposition to the Vietnam War and James Baldwin on the crisis of the inner city. When the latter defected to The New Yorker for a higher fee for the essay that became The Fire Next Time, Podhoretz responded by penning “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” an unfiltered reflection on his youthful terror of Black bullies that concluded with a reluctant endorsement of mass miscegenation. It was offensive in multiple ways, but it was also buzzy, and so was Podhoretz, who at the height of this era was throwing dinner parties with the newly widowed Jackie Kennedy and making sure everyone knew about it.

Podhoretz was never exactly a man of the left, despite what he would retroactively claim; a decade younger than his City College–educated peer Irving Kristol, he never had a Trotskyist phase in his youth, and while he dallied with the New Left early in his Commentary tenure, that was more about generating attention than any deeper conviction. By default, he was what would now be termed a “Cold War liberal,” but politics was not his guiding motivation. What he sought, quite openly, was literary prestige and the attendant social clout.

In 1967, he published his first original book (he had previously published a collection of essays), the memoir Making It, a shameless bid for greatness that backfired spectacularly. Podhoretz intended to tell his own story as a juicy exposé of what he cast as the dirty little secret of the New York intellectuals—that America’s leading literary critics, despite their high-minded pretense of alienation from grubby capitalism, were actually obsessed with the status hierarchy. To whatever extent that may have been true, insightful, and even prescient, it was also pure projection, and the release of Making It got Podhoretz laughed out of the exact scene he thought he had conquered. It was a critical and commercial flop, and many of the pans came from people he thought were his friends. (In hindsight, it’s a great read, if not precisely for the reasons he intended.) His considerable ego never recovered.

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As he drank away this humiliation—his first big failure made a long-standing problem worse—he also began to process the tumult of the late 1960s. Once a skeptic regarding Israel (in a letter to Trilling following a 1951 visit, he wrote, “They are, despite their really extraordinary accomplishments, a very unattractive people, the Israelis. They’re gratuitously surly and boorish.… They are too arrogant and too anxious to become a real honest-to-goodness New York of the East”), in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War Podhoretz became one of the Jewish state’s staunchest partisans, seeing it as a manly alternative to the allegedly feminized and neurotic culture of his fellow diaspora Jews. This put him at odds with the emerging Black Power movement, which forcefully criticized Zionism. Black Power activists were also highly visible during the monthslong 1968 public school strike in Podhoretz’s native Brownsville, a low point in Black-Jewish relations. Commentary increasingly became fixated on these alleged betrayals, with Podhoretz fulminating against what he deemed the ingratitude of Black America.

In the dead of winter in 1970, alone and miserable in a dilapidated farmhouse he’d purchased in upstate New York with half of a book advance, Podhoretz had a divine revelation—he realized, as he later told his biographer, “that Judaism was true,” and that he was bound to an ancient covenant that transcended the secular world where he had sought material success. He determined that he would henceforth live his life in accordance with a culturally conservative read on Jewish law as he understood it. Returning from a long paid leave, newly sober and with a reinvigorated sense of mission, he rededicated Commentary to war against the left and everything it stood for. His signature editorial tone increasingly prioritized invective and overstatement over rigor and precision and ruthlessly targeted not only African Americans and Palestinians but also feminists, LGBT people, student radicals, and liberals of all stripes.

Within a few years, he was being disparaged by Michael Harrington and others on the left as a “neoconservative” along with peers like Irving Kristol and Daniel Bell who had recoiled from New Left demonstrations on college campuses. Unlike Bell, Podhoretz and Kristol embraced the epithet and made it their own, with Kristol articulating a fuller version of the concept as skeptical of Great Society welfare programs, hostile to the counterculture, and muscular in foreign policy. In 1972, they both endorsed Richard Nixon for president over George McGovern. In 1975, Podhoretz helped draft the speech that his friend US Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan delivered before the General Assembly in which he denounced a resolution equating Zionism and racism; the speech made Moynihan a hero to many New York Jews and helped propel him to the Senate a year later, when he defeated feminist firebrand Bella Abzug in the Democratic primary.

Though Podhoretz spent the 1970s attempting to roll the Democrats back to the Kennedy era via the failed presidential campaigns of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, his 1979 memoir Breaking Ranks formally declared him a man of the right. By the 1980 election, Podhoretz and his wife, fellow neoconservative Midge Decter—at least as gleeful a left-baiter as her husband, and with a particular disdain for the New Left’s sexual proclivities—were ensconced in the Republican camp. Along with Kristol, they had mentored a large brain trust that would occupy many offices in the Reagan administration—notably including their son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, who narrowly dodged prison for his role in the Iran-contra scandal and implicated himself in what is now understood as a genocide in Guatemala.

Podhoretz’s cantankerous personality and zeal for war eventually put him at odds with the Reagan White House; when the once-hawkish president turned to diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev that ultimately led to the peaceful end of the Cold War, Commentary cried appeasement and warned that America risked being turned into a passive, neutral Finland as a resurgent Soviet Union conquered the world. Podhoretz was wrong, of course, but that didn’t stop him from declaring victory for neoconservatism as he stepped down from his editorship in 1995. He also declared neoconservatism over, having fully transitioned from an essentially liberal intellectual critique of the New Left into an integral part of the mainstream conservative movement.

He was at least partly wrong about that, too; neoconservatism would prove to be very much a living ideology just a few years later. After the 9/11 attacks, the foreign policy-centric neoconservatism represented by The Weekly Standard, cofounded by Kristol’s and Podhoretz’s sons, played a central role in shaping George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s response, with catastrophic results for Iraq and for the US’s global stature. It could have been even worse, though—Podhoretz, who cast the War on Terror as a sweeping crusade he called World War IV (the Cold War was World War III), personally advised Bush and Karl Rove to attack Iran as well, but they demurred.

Unlike essentially every other major contributor to Partisan Review, Podhoretz lived long enough to see Donald Trump take over the GOP, and unlike second-generation neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, Robert Kagan, and David Frum, he came to welcome it—at first with reservations, but later with real enthusiasm. “His virtues are the virtues of the street kids of Brooklyn,” he told the right-wing Claremont Review of Books in 2019. “You don’t back away from a fight and you fight to win. That’s one of the things that the Americans who love him, love him for—that he’s willing to fight, not willing but eager to fight.” Where the younger Kristol saw Trump’s boorish behavior as an affront to republican virtue, the elder Podhoretz saw a kindred spirit.

It’s fitting, then, that Podhoretz’s final piece of writing, published this April, landed at The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s latter-day neocon website. It was a valedictory, one last retelling of the heroic Brooklyn-to-Manhattan journey that had already formed the basis of four memoirs and an authorized, hagiographic biography. There was little new in the text itself, but its venue signaled that Podhoretz’s strain of neoconservatism remains alive in spite of being pronounced dead many times over. Just months before Podhoretz’s death, one of the wealthiest families in history purchased The Free Press for $150 million and then installed Weiss at the helm of CBS News, with the apparent aim of winning favor from Trump. Meanwhile, Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is now the chairman of the right-wing Zionist Tikvah Fund, which just received a record-setting $10 million grant from the Trump-controlled National Endowment for the Humanities.

One must imagine Norman Podhoretz happy.

As the seat of national government, Washington, DC, tends to experience whatever the United States as a whole is experiencing, but in sharper relief. Its health tells us a lot about the nation’s health—and right now, both are in crisis. For months, Washington has been forced to host unprecedented deployments of National Guard troops and ICE agents, with the former largely functioning to simulate the experience of military occupation while the latter raids homes and worksites and tramples on the basic civil liberties of immigrants and citizens alike.

Washington isn’t the only city that’s under siege. The first major National Guard deployments, in June, were in Los Angeles, the hometown of Donald Trump’s homeland-security adviser Stephen Miller, for the specific purpose of confronting those who were protesting against ICE’s immigration raids. But the most common strategy, in which a phantasm of crime is used to justify a full-scale urban occupation, was first employed in the nation’s capital in August before spreading to Memphis and Portland, Oregon, in September and to Chicago in October. It is Washington—among the bluest cities in America, with more than 90 percent support for Kamala Harris in the election last year—that has served as a template for what Trump intends to inflict upon so many other cities. “We want to save these places,” Trump said, from what he erroneously claims has been a surge of violent crime under Democratic mayors.

Washington was a logical place to start, not only because the federal government is based there—and not only because it’s perceived (if no longer accurately) as a majority-Black city and thus a ripe target for an administration whose central premise is white grievance—but also because Washington has no real right to self-governance and thus exceptionally few legitimate options to resist federal incursions. The founders, in their wisdom, wanted to establish a national capital that would not be part of any state and instead would be under the direct control of Congress; they never anticipated that this designated federal district would eventually grow into a city of 700,000 residents.

In 1973, Congress passed the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which handed most of the responsibilities of city governance to a locally elected mayor and city council. In the half-century since, there has been a perennial tension between the DC government, which like many other urban governments has seen its share of corruption scandals and financial mismanagement, and Congress—especially when the latter is controlled by Republicans, who have tended to treat DC’s mayors, all of whom have been Black, with outright contempt and have repeatedly threatened the city’s autonomy. Congress retains the power to block laws passed by the City Council and has done so on numerous occasions, almost invariably at the expense of a local progressive consensus on issues like abortion access, gun control, and marijuana legalization.

For many Washingtonians, the city’s disenfranchisement is a source of deep resentment and a spur to grassroots activism. In a 2016 referendum, 86 percent of DC residents supported statehood for the district, which is more populous than Wyoming and Vermont, and in 2021 the House of Representatives narrowly passed a DC statehood bill, which stalled in the Senate thanks to the opposition of Joe Manchin. But congressional Republicans are not merely opposed to statehood; they are determined to roll back the limited home rule DC has enjoyed since the 1970s. In February, Senator Mike Lee and Representative Andy Ogles introduced the Bringing Oversight to Washington and Safety to Every Resident, or BOWSER, Act—an acronym that just happens to spell the last name of the sitting DC mayor, Muriel Bowser, whose “radically progressive regime…has left our nation’s Capital in crime-ridden shambles,” according to Ogles.

Even if DC were a state, it probably wouldn’t be able to prevent Trump from unleashing federal forces on its streets. But Democratic governors like California’s Gavin Newsom and Illinois’s JB Pritzker have been far more forceful and outspoken in their opposition to Trump’s deployments than Bowser has been. The difference isn’t merely one of temperament: Bowser knows she has far less leverage than any governor or any other mayor of a major city, and that the very existence of her office is something Congress could withdraw at any time.

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For decades, Democrats have failed to treat the cause of DC statehood with the urgency it deserves. Now they appear helpless as Trump and the GOP not only send troops to occupy the city but also inflict likely irreparable damage on its economy, via sweeping cuts to federal agencies like USAID and the IRS, and on its cultural institutions, from the Kennedy Center to the Smithsonian. Ominous signs of a regional recession are already present, including an estimated 20 percent drop in federal jobs.

As a born and raised Washingtonian, I remember when the district was poorer, more dangerous, and more politically dysfunctional than it is today, but I can’t remember a time when my friends and family were so pessimistic about the city’s future. The guardsmen on the streets are constant visual reminders of DC’s disempowerment. The city Trump has called “the swamp” feels defeated, and everyone knows someone who has been directly harmed by MAGA misrule.

America’s major cities—dense communities defined by racial and ethnic diversity, immigrants, white-collar industries requiring high levels of education, and liberal norms on gender and sexuality—overwhelmingly did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, or 2024. Though Trump himself is a son of New York City, the party he leads is fundamentally hostile to urban values, and since returning to power, he has repeatedly threatened to use military force to punish cities for rejecting him. The president has named ​​New Orleans, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, and St. Louis as potential targets for such interventions—all of which voted heavily for his opponent, and none of which have asked for the help. Trump’s occupation of blue cities is lawless, heavy-handed, illiberal, and dangerous—and it could be coming to your town next.

Less than a week after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the Israeli-born Holocaust scholar Raz Segal described Israel’s retaliation against Gaza as “genocidal”—a term he meant not rhetorically but literally, based on well-founded legal definitions. “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed,” he wrote. “Perpetrators of genocide usually do not express their intentions so clearly.”

While Segal’s deep academic expertise provided intellectual heft to his warning, it did not require years of study to see where Israel’s assault was headed; anyone who had been paying attention understood the designs of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right, settler-­dominated governing coalition, which had been spewing eliminationist rhetoric about Palestinians and facilitating pogroms in the occupied West Bank for nearly a year before the attacks.

“It’s a choice to forget everything you knew yesterday about Israel,” I tweeted on the morning of October 7. Nonetheless, it was a choice many of my peers made—some for days, some for weeks, and some for nearly two years of slaughter in Gaza. But in late July, a memo seemed to go out that it was finally permissible, imperative even, for mainstream liberals and elected Democrats to call what Israel was doing to the Palestinians a genocide, or a man-made famine, or simply evil.

Better late than never, some might say. “Tweeting ‘I told you so’ at people who change their mind about what’s happening in Gaza does nothing to help the kids who are being starved to death,” former Obama administration staffer and Pod Save the World host Tommy Vietor tweeted on July 26. “Welcome people into the tent. Build a bigger coalition and use it to force political change.” I ended up discussing this at length with Vietor, who has been an honorable critic of Israel’s policies in Gaza from early on but who, as a political professional, operates in a different lane and with more generous instincts than I have.

I agree that the tent needs to be expanded, the coalition needs to grow, and minds need to change, and I agree that bragging about having been right early on is not useful to anyone. But there are also real dangers to sidestepping a reckoning—an enduring lesson from America’s reckless, criminal invasion of Iraq, which was supported by many prominent liberals who remain influential today. There were courageous critics urging Americans to take a breath after 9/11, but their words were ignored and their reputations often damaged. In general, it was a better career move to be wrong at the time and apologize later, if ever.

This crisis of accountability has haunted US foreign policy ever since. Joe Biden, who presided over and directly enabled more than a year of Israeli atrocities in Gaza before yielding the White House to Donald Trump, was one of the many Democrats who voted in favor of the Iraq War in October 2003—which did not prevent him from becoming Barack Obama’s vice president and eventually president himself. At the time of the vote to authorize the invasion, Biden was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his Democratic staff director in that role was Antony Blinken, who helped build bipartisan support for the Iraq War—which did not prevent him from becoming Biden’s secretary of state and running cover for the Gaza genocide 20 years later. Brett McGurk, arguably the single figure in the Biden administration most responsible for the circumstances that led to October 7, essentially launched his career in public life as part of the occupation regime in Iraq. The Democratic establishment in Washington abounds with people who faced no meaningful consequences for their disastrous judgment in the early 2000s, and who have gone on to exercise even more disastrous judgment in the 2020s.

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The point is not that people can never change; in fact, there are some scattered public figures who initially supported the Iraq War and have spent the years since listening to more dovish voices, reexamining their priors, and working to prevent additional foreign policy catastrophes. But a far more common approach has been to glibly shrug off Iraq as an isolated error while continuing to back the same aggressive, militaristic US role in the world and to arrogantly dismiss and marginalize the very critics who got Iraq right.

This is why a certain degree of skepticism is warranted toward the many liberals—I’m referring especially to elected officials, policymakers, journalists, pundits, celebrities, and, not least, ostensibly progressive rabbis—who were able to disregard months of images of Palestinian children maimed or dismembered in Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign but who now claim that images of children emaciated by famine have stirred their consciences. No doubt some of them are sincere; no doubt some of them regret their earlier silence or active complicity. But others have simply decided that now, with Trump in the White House and public opinion rapidly shifting, it is finally time for them to whitewash their own records and obscure their roles in enabling crimes against humanity.

“One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This,” the writer Omar El Akkad famously declared in the weeks after October 7, as bombs rained down on Gaza’s dense urban neighborhoods. Like so much that has happened since, the liberal repositioning on Gaza has been predictable—and predicted. To applaud those making the long-foretold pivot for their moral courage is not only unnecessary but perverse; they are, at best, joining a coalition built by the people they insulted, scorned, and in some cases called for arresting when their words counted most. There may be room for them in the tent, but to meaningfully participate will require teshuva, the Hebrew word for “repentance”—honest self-examination and a dedicated, continuous, lifelong effort to atone for even passively supporting this genocide. That effort could begin with some displays of real courage—including the courage to take actual risks, like so many activists have already done, often losing jobs, friends, and even freedom in the process. It’s the very least we owe to the Palestinians of Gaza.

Ten years ago this month, Donald Trump launched his first presidential campaign, which means that, after a few false starts, Bill Kristol has been vocally Never Trump for almost a full decade. The Weekly Standard, the flagship neoconservative magazine Kristol founded in 1995, folded in 2018 when its publisher, Philip Anschutz, withdrew funding over its opposition to the first Trump administration. The Bulwark, which Kristol cofounded as an online successor to the Standard, has maintained that posture into Trump’s second term. In recent months, Kristol has gestured toward positions that would place him to the left of much of the Democratic Party—on Twitter, he has applauded Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Fighting Oligarchy” rallies, all but endorsed abolishing ICE, and repeatedly referred to his “inner social democrat”—the last of these perhaps a reference to the youthful Marxism of his late father, Irving Kristol, who is widely considered a foundational neoconservative.

But as Trump contemplates direct US participation in Israel’s war with Iran, including the possible use of “bunker buster” bombs on the heavily fortified Fordo uranium enrichment site, Kristol has made it known that he still has that hawk in him. “You’ve got to go to war with the president you have,” he told The New York Times on Wednesday. “If you really think that Iran can’t have nuclear weapons, we have a chance to try to finish the job.” In a series of blog posts for The Bulwark, Kristol has elaborated on his position: “I’ve not been in recent years a supporter of Bibi Netanyahu. But I support Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear program,” he wrote last week. “I’ve never been, and don’t intend ever to be, a supporter of Donald Trump. But I wish the president and his administration well in this crisis.” John Bolton, the neocon policymaker who had a dramatic falling-out with Trump during his first term, struck a similar note. “Bomb Fordo and be done with it,” he told the Times. “I think this is long overdue.’’

To longtime critics of Kristol and the wider cohort of Never Trump neocons he represents, Kristol’s endorsement of yet another US war in the Middle East is a vindication of a decade of warnings. “I’ll be accepting apologies from everyone who insisted we needed to welcome Bill Kristol in our coalition,” tweeted Matt Duss, Sanders’s former foreign policy adviser, yesterday. “He delivered no votes, but thanks to you treating him as a democratic ally he can provide the illusion of consensus for another catastrophic war.” Glenn Greenwald, whose opposition to US imperial wars has in recent years aligned him with the “America First” right that backed Trump’s presidential campaigns, piled on: “The #NeverTrump neocons have been biting their tongues so hard over the last week, wanting to praise Trump for supporting another Israeli war but also knowing they trained a loyal liberal audience to believe he’s Hitler.” Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA inner circle, including Vice President JD Vance and Steve Bannon, is scrambling to reconcile its loyalty to the president with its oft-stated opposition to new US wars. “Of course, people are right to be worried about foreign entanglement after the last 25 years of idiotic foreign policy,” Vance tweeted on Tuesday. “But I believe the president has earned some trust on this issue.” Bannon, too, seems ready to put loyalty first. “We may hate it,” he said at an event for The Christian Science Monitor, “but you know, we’ll get on board.”

When Trump won last November, the conventional wisdom immediately congealed that “America First” isolationism had won out against neocon interventionism. The defeated Democrats were the party of Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney, and above all of Joe Biden’s disastrous support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As The New York Times reported days after the election, Trump’s national security team “reflects the broader marginalization of neocons throughout the Republican Party after the disaster in Iraq and the rise of America First.” In my own inaugural Nation column in February, I sounded a note of skepticism; Trump, I wrote, “has taken advice in the past from figures whom the Times would call ‘America First’ as well as figures it would call ‘neocons’—and most likely he will again.” With Trump, inconsistency is usually the safest bet; the president is no ideologue, and is easily swayed by flatterers and the vagaries of the TV news cycle. On any given day, he may be pushing for a Gaza ceasefire and a restoration of the Iran nuclear deal his first administration unilaterally scrapped—or he may be preparing to bomb Iran and mulling the ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

Trump’s flakiness is crazy-making for anyone with a coherent worldview, including neoconservatism as practiced by Kristol, which might be summarized as support for robust American military power in the service of crusading idealism abroad. This worldview is rooted in the Cold War liberalism of the JFK era, was kept afloat by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson through the 1970s, and found a comfortable home in the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush before returning to the Democratic establishment’s welcoming embrace in the Trump era. Kristol’s wing of neoconservatism, which also includes figures like David Frum, Max Boot, and Robert Kagan, has generally cast the president as a vulgar authoritarian whose assault on American institutions is at least as terrifying as the threat they once perceived from the New Left. This stands in contrast to the geriatric Norman Podhoretz, who alongside Irving Kristol is neoconservatism’s acknowledged patriarch, and who sees Trump as a kindred spirit. His son, John Podhoretz—the nepo-editor of Commentary, which his father turned into a neocon stalwart and ran for 35 years—likewise sees continuity between the Bush era and today. “Eighteen years ago this month, my father, Norman Podhoretz, published ‘The Case for Bombing Iran,’” the younger Podhoretz tweeted last week. “He’s 95 and a half. I’m thrilled he’s with us still to see this unfold.”

One would think by now that the neocons might know better than to get carried away with excitement over a new war in the Middle East. Their last successful effort to launch one, Bush’s campaign of regime change in Iraq in 2003, is almost universally regarded as a fiasco today, even though it, too, seemed to be going well at the outset. Besides the humiliating failure to ever find the weapons of mass destruction it had cited as a pretext for war, the Bush administration had no real plan for a post–Saddam Hussein Iraq, and its mismanagement of the invasion’s aftermath set off a years-long, brutal sectarian war—hardly the flourishing liberal democracy that Kristol and his cohort had assured the public would emerge.

Back then, the neocons wielded considerable influence within the executive branch, where many friends, fellow travelers, and even family members worked on national security policy. Today, they watch from the sidelines, with Kristol at least acknowledging that the leaders prosecuting their long-sought war against Iran are temperamentally unsuited to the task. Even if Israel and the United States do manage to dismantle the Iranian nuclear program by force, no one knows whether Iran’s theocratic regime will remain in power, or what would replace it if it fell, or what kinds of long-term ripple effects will spread throughout the region, where Israel is currently at war with five distinct belligerents. It’s unlikely this will end well, and extremely premature to be declaring Mission Accomplished.

It’s been five years since Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” a cri de coeur signed by 153 public intellectuals that warned against threats to freedom of expression from both the right and the left. “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” the letter proclaimed. While it acknowledged that such threats have often emanated from “the radical right,” it focused the bulk of its concern on censorious campaigns from within liberal cultural institutions: “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes.”

Reginald Dwayne Betts, one of the letter’s signatories, told The New York Times that he had been particularly troubled by the forced resignation of the paper’s opinion editor, James Bennet, a month earlier, a decision many other signatories had also criticized. The summer of 2020 was defined by the George Floyd uprisings—the high-water mark of social justice activism during Donald Trump’s first term—and Bennet’s sacking was arguably the highest-profile example of what the signatories of the letter, and many to their right, might call “cancel culture.” In hindsight, the letter signaled a major shift in intellectual discourse: Less than a decade into the “Great Awokening” that signatory Matthew Yglesias identified as having begun around 2014, a swath of mostly liberal writers were declaring en masse that wokeness had already gone too far.

A few months later, Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump. The elite culture of the Biden years would be notably more unfriendly to “woke” speech-policing than that of the previous decade. This “vibe shift” could be seen in the fascism-­curious downtown Manhattan arts scene known as Dimes Square; in the lucrative anti-woke Substack empires built by formerly mainstream journalists (including Harper’s letter signatory Bari Weiss, who left the Times in protest of the Bennet firing); and in the rise of a “popularist” wing of the Democratic Party that cautioned against identity politics and radical positions like “defund the police.” Cultural elites to varying extents embraced the backlash against Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, and trans activism—a backlash pioneered by right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo and generously subsidized by the Silicon Valley oligarchs who would go on to fund Trump’s 2024 campaign. The Harper’s letter wasn’t the first example of this backlash, but the sheer range of its signatories—including some respected voices on the left, like Noam Chomsky—and the seeming reasonableness of the text itself marked what would turn out to be a durable shift.

Flash-forward to 2025. The backlash against wokeness is the core of Trump’s second administration, and it’s being used to justify an assault on free speech unequaled since the McCarthy era. Trump has banned diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives throughout the federal government; has used the levers of the state to compel universities and other elite institutions to do the same; and has repeatedly jailed legal residents for engaging in what was once protected speech—usually speech in defense of the human rights of Palestinians. But as In These Times noted in April, just under a quarter of the Harper’s letter signatories have spoken up for the detained Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil and other victims of Trump’s unconstitutional crackdown. (Those who have include progressives like my fellow Nation columnists Jeet Heer, Katha Pollitt, and Zephyr Teachout.) For the large majority—notably including Weiss, a leading champion of Israel’s war on Gaza—Trump’s reign of terror has apparently been less objectionable than the irritating undergraduate and entry-level scolds of the 2010s.

If these erstwhile free speech champions were only guilty of hypocrisy—or bad faith—they would hardly be worth writing about now, but in many ways they helped lay the groundwork for Trump’s second term. Consider the column for which Bennet was ousted, which was among the inspirations for the Harper’s letter: a Republican senator, Tom Cotton, calling for the use of military force to violently suppress free assembly (in protest of lethal police violence, no less). Cotton recently described Khalil as “a pro-Hamas foreigner” and scoffed at the idea that he has any rights worth defending. From the start, the speech being defended was advocating the violent, top-down defense of existing social hierarchies—which in 2025 is not the least bit abstract.

Some of the Harper’s letter signatories who spent much of the Biden era bemoaning the excesses of the woke left, among them Anne Applebaum, Jesse Singal, and Thomas Chatterton Williams, have also condemned Trump’s attacks on free speech. While this is honorable and certainly preferable to the alternative, all of them should examine their role in helping to build a broad elite consensus that has functioned mainly to legitimize Trump’s actions. Around the same time as the Harper’s letter, a popular meme started circulating online in which the comedian Tim Robinson, dressed in a preposterous hot dog costume, insists he is “trying to find the guy” who crashed a hot-dog-shaped car. Today, amid the wreckage of America’s academic and cultural institutions, far too many intellectuals are still trying to find that guy.

The first time I thought about David Horowitz was in 2006, when I was a 22-year-old senior at Horowitz’s alma mater, Columbia University. A friend—like me and Horowitz, a Jewish David—had commissioned me to review Horowitz’s latest book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, for the Columbia Political Review. As a snotty undergraduate, I agreed to do so on the condition that I wouldn’t have to read the book and that I would admit that I hadn’t upfront. Rather than an actual review, I wrote a generalized attack on Horowitz as a “once-radical hack,” accusing him of producing a McCarthyist screed and of libeling nine Columbia professors among his chosen 101—but I also reduced his life, or what I assumed without any research to be the broad outlines of his life, to a cliché:

I think I’ll use this review as a chance to publicly denounce Horowitz with the same shoddy scholarship and borderline-racist vitriol to which he routinely subjects his far more impressive targets. Horowitz was born, I would estimate, sometime during World War II. He probably grew up somewhere within ten miles of Morningside Heights. He is probably a second- or third-generation American, which, to my mind, has awfully suspicious implications. His parents, I would imagine, were Stalinists, but eventually recanted sometime around the revelation of the Doctors’ Plot and became Trotskyists instead, probably while Horowitz was in his Portnoy phase.

Horowitz may have socialized with Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz at some point in his career. There is a good chance he protested the Vietnam War and ROTC. Then, sometime between 1968 and 1979, he realized that he hated Arabs and Black people. Coincidentally, he also realized that the free market works after all. Then he probably voted for Reagan.

It’s embarrassing to revisit some of my earliest writing, but still, I was pretty close. Horowitz was born in January 1939, eight months before World War II broke out in Europe (arguably, it had already begun in Asia). He grew up in Sunnyside, Queens, about five miles from Morningside Heights as the crow flies. He was indeed a second-generation American on both sides, and his parents really were Stalinists, though it was Nikita Khrushchev’s “secret speech” in 1956 rather than the earlier Doctors’ Plot that broke them. He did at some point socialize with Kristol and Podhoretz, he did protest the Vietnam War (not sure about ROTC), and the rest of that second paragraph is essentially accurate too.

In the nearly two decades since I wrote that, I’ve learned a great deal more about the history of conservatism, and these days I always do the reading. When Horowitz died at 86 last month, I assigned myself Radical Son, his 1997 autobiography, widely regarded as the most essential text among the roughly 60 books he wrote or cowrote. I now see that in some ways I was underestimating Horowitz—to my shock and chagrin, the eventual author of books like Blitz: Trump Will Smash the Left and Win (2020) and I Can’t Breathe: How a Racial Hoax Is Killing America (2021) had actual prose chops and a deep knowledge of 20th-century political thought. At one point, he was capable of writing a moving memoir about radicalism and disillusionment, suffused with generational pain, candid self-examination, and indelible portraits of former comrades. I was also unfair in classifying Horowitz as a “neoconservative,” a term bandied about often in 2006; though in some ways his life followed similar beats, he also differed from the foundational neocons in significant and telling ways. But perhaps most of all, I was unfair in dismissing him as an inconsequential figure. Unfortunately, he turns out to have been ahead of his time.

If Irving Kristol is the paradigmatic neoconservative, the consistent through line that defines every stage of his ideological journey is anti-Stalinism. As a teenager, he was a Trotskyist; by his 20s, he was a Cold War liberal, and at middle age, he shifted toward the party of Nixon and Reagan, but his opposition to Stalinism was consistent, and it was the basis for his antagonism toward the New Left that arose on college campuses amid the counterculture of the 1960s. To Kristol and his cohort of ex-Trotskyists, the radical moral fervor of the New Left was a frightening echo of the dogmatic communists they had clashed with back in the 1930s.

David Horowitz, who was 19 years younger than Kristol, had a strikingly different journey. He was raised by Stalinists of roughly Kristol’s generation (like Kristol, Horowitz’s parents were the New York–born children of Russian Jewish immigrants) who experienced McCarthyist repression firsthand, which meant that Horowitz himself, a self-described red-diaper baby, grew up under a cloud of political suspicion. Horowitz went on to become centrally involved in the New Left, and he knew all its most prominent figures, from Tom Hayden to the Black Panthers. Based in Berkeley at the height of the counterculture, Horowitz was the co-editor of Ramparts, a radical magazine that represented everything Kristol and his fellow neocons hated. And while much of the neoconservative movement is now defiantly anti-Trump (Irving Kristol died in 2009, before Donald Trump ever ran for office, but his son Bill is the quintessential Never Trumper), Horowitz embraced MAGA populism.

In short, Horowitz started out much further left and ended up much further right than most neoconservatives ever did. The story of how that transition happened was also far more dramatic. The neocons, broadly speaking, moved right beginning in the late 1960s because they were troubled by the unrest that they saw on college campuses and in urban slums; at the time, Horowitz was very much part of that unrest. His transition came in the mid 1970s and was triggered, at least in his telling, by a traumatic incident: the unsolved murder of his friend Betty Van Patter. Van Patter had been the bookkeeper at Ramparts when Horowitz recommended her for a similar role for the Black Panther Party in Oakland, where Horowitz was helping Huey Newton establish a school. She mysteriously disappeared at the end of 1974, and her battered corpse turned up in the San Francisco Bay over a month later.

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Horowitz believed the Panthers had his friend murdered and that the New Left writ large ignored her fate out of deference to the Panthers, and he became overcome with guilt over his personal complicity. Though it took another decade for Horowitz and his frequent co-author Peter Collier to “come out” as Reaganite conservatives and another decade after that for Horowitz to fully reflect on his story in Radical Son, Van Patter’s death marked the beginning of the end of Horowitz’s relationship with the left. To the extent that we can trust his own account, nothing less than a woman’s life had been sacrificed to his misguided ideals. He sank into a depression, and by the time he emerged, he had concluded that Marxism, along with all of the revolutionary causes that had defined his life to that point, was false.

That revelation hits around the halfway point of Radical Son, which up until around there is a gripping account of a life on the American left. After that, Horowitz’s life starts to deteriorate, as does the quality and coherence of the book itself. Having destroyed his first marriage, which produced four children, in a reckless affair, Horowitz proceeds to cycle through two more chaotic and ill-considered marriages (the fourth one stuck). As he alienates old friends, he passes through the stages of a classic midlife crisis: new vanity car (which he crashes), new vanity home, new and increasingly half-baked political positions, and a growing closeness with right-wing donor networks. As he sets down to record all this in the mid 1990s, his transformation into a Republican demagogue is complete. Thus, by the time I became aware of him a few years after the publication of Radical Son, he was hounding college professors in a farcical reenactment of the McCarthyist persecution of his parents, and he was recruiting young conservative demagogues on those same elite campuses and funneling them into careers on the professional right.

In hindsight, the most influential figure Horowitz nurtured in that period was a student at Santa Monica High named Stephen Miller, who even as a teenager had begun making regular appearances on right-wing talk radio in Southern California. Horowitz helped steer Miller to Duke University, where Miller established a branch of Horowitz’s nonprofit empire, now called the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which the Southern Poverty Law Center recognizes as an anti-Muslim hate group. With the benefit of Horowitz’s patronage and tutelage, Miller became an outspoken reactionary at Duke during the George W. Bush years, and Horowitz further helped him land his first Capitol Hill job, which set him on the path to become one of Donald Trump’s top advisers. Today, Miller is the single figure most associated with Trump’s brutally repressive deportation policies, including how those policies have been used to terrorize and imprison campus activists without due process.

Horowitz’s impact also extends to another part of the Trump coalition: the clique of Silicon Valley oligarchs who funded Trump’s victory last year and now expect fealty to their business interests, which encompass AI, cryptocurrencies, and monopolistic disruptions of traditional sectors. A key figure in that world is Horowitz’s son Ben Horowitz, who along with Marc Andreessen founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) in 2009. Andreessen and Horowitz each donated $2.5 million to pro-Trump Super PACs last year (though Horowitz also gave to Bay Area native Kamala Harris, whom he’s known for years, presumably to hedge his bets), and after Trump won, Ben Horowitz proclaimed, “Hallelujah!” on the a16z YouTube show. He and Andreessen agreed that Joe Biden’s attempts to regulate the tech industry represented a low point in their industry’s fortunes, and they were overjoyed at the prospect of a president who would, as Andreessen put it, remove the boot from their neck.

To the extent that Stephen Miller and Ben Horowitz represent his legacies, David Horowitz is a forerunner of the Trump coalition, with its grotesque alliance of fever-swamp nativists and Bay Area plutocrats. Twenty years ago, he was regarded as something of a clown and a provocateur, rather than a serious conservative intellectual, even if his earlier career had shown intellectual promise. But today’s Republican Party is far more in line with the vindictive style of Horowitz than with what The Weekly Standard was publishing back when George W. Bush was trying to make “compassionate conservatism” a thing. As an undergraduate at Columbia, I considered Horowitz a joke, but 500 miles to the southwest, another undergraduate saw him as a career guru. Today, that guy has the power to rip apart immigrant families anywhere in the United States out of sheer malice, and all I have is a magazine column.

The Trump administration’s abduction, detainment, and threatened deportation of the Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month is first and foremost a threat to every American’s civil liberties. Khalil—a green card–carrying legal resident of the United States, whose wife is a US citizen and eight months pregnant—has not been charged with or even accused of any crime. By the implicit admission of President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Khalil was arrested by Department of Homeland Security officials in New York and transported to an ICE detention center in Louisiana entirely on the basis of his constitutionally protected speech criticizing US support for Israel’s war on Gaza. To Trump and his enablers in, for instance, the Anti-Defamation League, Khalil’s nonviolent activism constitutes material support for terrorism and therefore justifies the suspension of his rights. Trump has promised many more arrests of pro-Palestine activists—indeed, more have already begun—and the precedent he is establishing with Khalil is one that could easily be used to penalize any kind of speech the administration disapproves of. As not nearly enough elected Democrats have said, one need not agree with any of Khalil’s positions to defend his rights both to express them and to remain in the country.

What is happening to Khalil has been enabled at every turn by one of the most venerated elite liberal institutions in the country, Columbia University, which has consistently failed to defend basic academic freedom since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. For decades, Columbia has been a symbolic battleground between critics and defenders of the State of Israel. As the one Ivy League school located in the global media capital, home to both a large Jewish population and a tradition of radical activism dating back to the near-legendary 1968 student revolt—and as the school where Edward Said taught for years and where Bari Weiss staged her first provocations—Columbia commands outsize attention. It hosted arguably the most infamous pro-Palestinian encampments of any major university last spring, which were met by the most infamous police crackdown. Now, with Khalil’s arrest, Columbia has become the Trump administration’s test case for the largest assault on American higher education since the McCarthy era.

When Donald Trump first assumed the presidency eight years ago, Columbia, like many universities, positioned itself as part of the broad resistance movement defending core liberal principles. Barely a week into Trump’s first term, Columbia’s then-president Lee Bollinger put out a strong statement condemning the new president’s executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. “[T]he University, as an institution in the society, must step forward to object when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values,” Bollinger wrote at the time, in a letter pledging solidarity and support to the Muslim and international students and faculty potentially affected by the ban.

Bollinger, a leading First Amendment scholar—who in 2007 had invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak on campus and stood his ground after significant blowback—understood that Columbia had a role to play in protecting the rights of free speech, religious expression, and assembly. While his long tenure was not without controversies, he offered his campus some basic reassurance when those rights came under threat from the Trump administration.

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That commitment was sorely lacking last spring when Bollinger’s freshly installed successor, Nemat Shafik, was thrust into the university’s biggest crisis since 1968. In April, as student activists set up encampments on Columbia’s main campus to demand that the university divest from Israel amid its genocidal war on Gaza, Shafik was called before Congress to testify about what Republicans alleged was the campus’s pervasive climate of antisemitism. Having just seen the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania ousted over the same set of issues, Shafik—accompanied by still-active members of the Columbia Board of Trustees—turned in a shambolic, evasive performance that failed either to defend academic freedom or to deter Representative Elise Stefanik from calling for Shafik’s resignation shortly thereafter.

The night after her testimony, Shafik ordered an initial police sweep to shut down the encampments, resulting in over 100 arrests but failing to prevent activists from setting up another encampment the next day. After two weeks of refusing to negotiate in good faith, Shafik called the cops again to expel students occupying an administration building. Starting even before any encampments were set up and continuing to this day, Columbia has been sealed off with 24/7 security checkpoints from the surrounding neighborhood, to the consternation of local residents. Having comprehensively mismanaged every part of this fiasco, Shafik was forced to resign after just a year on the job.

All of this happened under a Democratic president, governor, and mayor, none of whom stood up for the rights of student activists and all of whom were eager to be seen as protecting Jewish students against alleged antisemitism—which has been expansively interpreted by groups like the ADL to mean practically any pro-Palestinian speech. All of it happened before Trump’s election victory and his return to power pledging to criminalize and root out antisemitism on campuses under the same expansive definition.

The week before Trump’s second inauguration, Columbia pushed out law professor (and Nation contributor) Katherine Franke over her involvement in last year’s protests—a portent of how the new interim university administration would handle the coming maelstrom. Since then, and just ahead of Khalil’s arrest, the Trump administration suspended $400 million in federal grants to Columbia to punish the university for the antisemitism and “illegal protests” it supposedly failed to prevent last year, an unconstitutional end run around Congress’s power of the purse that will soon be deployed against other schools and that threatens to undermine vital scientific research. The administration is holding those funds hostage pending a number of outrageously invasive demands, including that Columbia’s Middle East, South Asian, and African studies departments be placed under academic receivership for at least five years (this demand was first made public via an exclusive in The Free Press, the publication founded by Bari Weiss, who has been campaigning against Middle East studies professors at Columbia since she was an undergraduate 20 years ago, and who now counts the Trump administration as an ally in her efforts).

“Appeasement hasn’t worked,” Joseph Howley, an associate professor of classics at Columbia and one of the most vocal faculty advocates for Palestine, told me last week. “We have been saying for a year now that these charges of systemic antisemitism at Columbia are obscuring real incidents of bias against both Jews and others, that they are part of a bad- faith right-wing attack on higher ed, and that we are going to be powerless to defend ourselves against the MAGA Trump agenda. It turns out we were right.”

Howley is of course correct that appeasement hasn’t worked for Columbia, won’t work for higher ed in general, and won’t work for any other institution that attempts to accommodate Trump’s comprehensive war on liberalism. But “appeasement” may also understate the problem: For Columbia’s administration, the pro-Israel donors it answers to, and many likeminded Democrats, the suppression of Palestinian activism and even the obscene violation of Mahmoud Khalil’s civil rights are more feature than bug.

“I support this administration” with regard to Khalil, Democratic Representative Jared Moskowitz told CNN last week. “If you’re here on a tourist visa and you’re going to a Hamas rally, then yeah, you probably shouldn’t be here anymore,” he added, managing to misrepresent both Khalil’s immigration status and his activism. Moskowitz is only somewhat to the right of New York’s own Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, who could not bring himself to defend Khalil’s constitutional rights as a legal US resident without first stating that he “abhors” many of Khalil’s opinions and reiterating his condemnation of “antisemitic actions” at Columbia.

As Zeteo’s Prem Thakkar reported last week, Columbia administrators knew Khalil was under threat from ICE and did nothing to protect a graduate student on their campus. “I haven’t been able to sleep, fearing that ICE or a dangerous individual might come to my home. I urgently need legal support, and I urge you to intervene and provide the necessary protections to prevent further harm,” Khalil wrote in an e-mail to interim university president Katrina Armstrong the day before ICE arrested him. He never received a response.

Rather than robustly defend Khalil by name following the arrest, Armstrong put out a tersely worded statement that acknowledged “a challenging moment for our community” and vaguely pledged to navigate it while making no substantive commitments. Since then, Columbia has expelled Grant Miner, the head of the graduate student union and a participant in the encampments last year, a week ahead of scheduled contract negotiations—one of a raft of student protesters to be hit with expulsions, suspensions, or degree revocations. With university leadership like this, it can be difficult to parse where cowardice ends and eager complicity begins.

“We’re in the middle of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government,” Bollinger, Columbia’s former president, told The Chronicle of Higher Education last week. “We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.” If Columbia is any indication, it is clear that the current crop of university administrators has little inclination to defend the values of free inquiry and expression from Trump. That task will have to fall to those parts of the academic community, students and faculty alike, who still believe there’s anything left worth defending.

If the only thing one knew about Stephen Miller was that he was a white man, it might be sufficient to explain his alignment with Donald Trump—after all, 60 percent of that demographic supported Trump against Kamala Harris last fall. But identity is complicated, and every other aspect of Miller’s points to the opposite conclusion. At 39, Miller is a millennial (51 percent of voters age 30 to 44 voted for Harris); he was raised Jewish in a Reform congregation (84 percent of Reform Jews voted for Harris) and grew up in Santa Monica, California (Santa Monica’s precincts ranged from 71 to 86 percent for Harris); he has parents with advanced degrees and himself graduated from top-ranked Duke University (56 percent of college graduates and a likely 75 percent of students at Duke voted for Harris); and he has lived his entire postcollegiate life in the District of Columbia (92 percent of DC voters went for Harris).

Miller has the profile not of a typical Trump supporter but of a garden-variety liberal Democrat. Nevertheless, he is arguably one of the president’s most influential and ideologically fervent loyalists. Having previously served as chief speechwriter and a senior adviser for policy in Trump’s first term, this year he returned to the West Wing as deputy chief of staff for policy and Homeland Security adviser in Trump’s second—roles that mark him as one of the most powerful people in the Trump White House and, by extension, the world. As a January New York Times profile put it, “Mr. Miller was influential in Mr. Trump’s first term but stands to be exponentially more so this time.”

One of the architects of the attempted “Muslim ban” as well as the infamous child-separation policy during Trump’s first term, Miller has now pledged to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history,” indiscriminately targeting the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants believed to be living in the United States, with the full coercive power of the executive branch. To whatever extent he is successful, he will transform America demographically, culturally, and economically in ways he has fantasized about since his early teens; in many respects, he already has.

How to make sense of Miller and his trajectory? While he has made his share of public appearances to push his ultra-nativist views, he rarely speaks about his own political evolution. To date, the only authoritative biography of Miller is Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, by the reporter Jean Guerrero. Published in 2020, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and during a presidential election that saw voters reject Trump, the book was well received by reviewers but arrived at a moment when Miller seemed, mercifully, to be fading in relevance. But the story Guerrero recounts is an urgent one, packed with insights into the kind of personality that self-radicalizes toward the far right in the unlikeliest of circumstances. As we now know, Miller was only just getting started during Trump’s first term. The particular brand of virulent xenophobia he represents is now politically ascendant, and his biography is inescapably central to the history of the present.

Stephen Miller was born in 1985 and raised in the coastal paradise of Santa Monica—a semi-urban enclave of wealthy and mostly white liberals, undergirded by the omnipresent labor of immigrants who are neither white nor wealthy. “Laborers maintain this world,” Guerrero notes, most often laborers from Mexico and Central America. The rest of California in the 1980s and ’90s, however, was neither placid nor uniformly liberal. During Miller’s childhood and adolescence, the state was a hotbed of anti-immigrant sentiment and racial backlash.

Miller was 6 years old when the Los Angeles Police Department’s savage beating of Rodney King set off a wave of protests and riots across the city. California’s Republican governor, Pete Wilson, won reelection on an anti-immigrant platform when Miller was 9, campaigning on Proposition 187 to deny nonemergency services to undocumented immigrants. Right-wing talk radio, spearheaded by but not limited to Rush Limbaugh, took off nationwide during the 1990s and stoked racist and xenophobic sentiment for anyone inclined to listen to it. Santa Monica may have been a haven for well-to-do veterans of the New Left (Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda lived there for decades), but they were thriving amid the cognitive dissonance produced by a functional racial caste system upon which many of them relied and a state that was a harbinger of our ugly political moment.

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Miller is a product of some of the same cognitive dissonance. The story of how he came to be born in Santa Monica, as Guerrero reminds us, begins with his ancestors’ immigration to escape antisemitism. Both sides of his family, the Millers and the Glossers, arrived in the United States from Russia’s impoverished Pale of Settlement in the early 20th century. From then on, they both had typically American Jewish social ascents. On the Miller side, one generation’s success selling groceries and rolling cigars in Pittsburgh led to the next generation’s success in law and real estate in Los Angeles; on the Glosser side, a family-owned department store served as a community pillar in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, until it was acquired and liquidated in a leveraged buyout in the 1980s.

Stephen’s father, Michael Miller, a Stanford-educated lawyer, cofounded a firm focused on corporate and real estate law; he also became deeply involved in his father’s real estate business and helped to reconstruct the world-famous Santa Monica Pier. Stephen’s mother, Miriam Glosser, graduated from the Columbia University School of Social Work and worked with troubled teens before eventually pivoting to the family real estate business as well. As a child, Stephen grew up in a $1 million, five-bedroom home in the North of Montana section of Santa Monica, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Greater Los Angeles. He had Latin American–born housekeepers who cooked family meals and cleaned up after him and his siblings.

This comfortable lifestyle was disrupted in 1994, when the Millers had a run of terrible luck: A major earthquake inflicted $20 billion in property damage in Southern California, including on a number of properties managed by the family firm. This came at a particularly inopportune moment, as Michael Miller was in the midst of an acrimonious legal battle with his former partners in the law firm he’d started, the upshot of which was that he found himself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

In 1998, when Stephen was 13, the family sold its imposing home and moved to a smaller house by a freeway underpass near the working-class Hispanic neighborhood of Pico, though still in a majority-white middle school district. The area was beginning to gentrify, and the Millers would refinance the house three times over the next four years as their fortunes gradually recovered.

If there is a sociological explanation for Miller’s politics, Guerrero implies, perhaps it lies in this period. In the aftermath of the 2008 housing crisis, many of Miller’s peers found themselves downwardly mobile, locked out of the housing market and denied opportunities that prior generations had taken for granted—experiences that have inclined many millennials toward a more socialistic politics than previous cohorts. But Miller’s brush with downward mobility came much earlier, with his affluent boomer parents experiencing the shock of material insecurity during the 1990s, a decade that is more typically remembered as a period of unprecedented economic prosperity. Though Miller was never anywhere close to working-class, and his family’s finances rebounded in time for him to enjoy the benefits of an elite university education and a parentally subsidized down payment on a DC condo (though recently his parents had another bit of bad luck, as their home was destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January), he did pass through a period of acute economic and status anxiety during a very impressionable age.

But sociology can only explain so much; it is hard to escape the sense that there was something fundamentally malevolent about Miller from the start. Another person in his shoes might have grasped that this anxiety was the product of his parents’ business difficulties and sheer geological misfortune, but the adolescent Miller sought out other culprits. With his economic privilege in seeming jeopardy, he leaned much harder into his privilege as a white, native-born American.

Guerrero spoke with Jason Islas, a working-class Mexican American who was Miller’s friend in middle school and attended his lavish bar mitzvah. Though the two initially bonded over Star Trek, Miller abruptly ditched Islas as a friend the summer after middle school, citing his Latino heritage as a justification. “The conversation was remarkably calm,” Islas told Guerrero. “He expressed hatred for me in a calm, cool, matter-of-fact way.”

In middle school, Miller was already drawn to right-wing subcultures that distinguished him from his peers, purchasing a subscription to Guns & Ammo magazine and finding himself inspired by the writings of Charlton Heston and Wayne LaPierre on the Second Amendment. His father was also moving right, alienated by bad relationships and burned bridges with his liberal Santa Monica cohort, and Stephen seems to have inherited his father’s contrarian streak. By the time he enrolled in the public Santa Monica High School, which Guerrero portrays as neatly internally segregated between professional-class, college-bound whites and working-class Hispanics, he was a full-fledged conservative provocateur.

For Miller, a key entry point to the right was The Larry Elder Show, whose Black host had built a following among right-wing Angelenos for his verbal assaults on political correctness and liberal shibboleths. Miller called in to the show and invited Elder to speak at his high school, and he subsequently became a frequent guest, a precocious teen reactionary holding forth on his high school’s alleged anti-Americanness in the wake of the 9/11 attacks before an audience that spanned Southern California.

Miller’s provocations became more outlandish as he advanced through his teens. He cultivated a mid-century gangster affect: He listened to Frank Sinatra, enjoyed gambling, and styled himself after Ace Rothstein, the Robert De Niro character in Casino. He was known for arguing with teachers, hijacking school events, and winning attention with his outrageous antics. In both high school and college, he would be repeatedly observed throwing trash on the floor and then insisting that the custodial staff pick it up. (“Am I the only one here who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he is quoted as saying at one point.) A number of students and faculty found this behavior appalling, but Miller’s shameless transgressiveness at least got him a lot of attention.

His willingness to upset liberals and thrive on their outrage put Miller on the radar of David Horowitz, the nationally notorious firebrand whose red diaper upbringing and early career involvement with the Black Panthers were followed by an abrupt rightward turn beginning in the 1970s. By the early 2000s, Horowitz had become a leading conservative ideologue who specialized in identifying and recruiting young talent. After discovering Miller on The Larry Elder Show, Horowitz went on to serve as something of a career guru to him. He helped Miller craft an image as an outspoken champion of free speech at a hostile liberal high school, which Miller exploited to secure a photo spread in the Los Angeles Times. This publicity, Guerrero speculates, might also have helped Miller gain admission to Duke University despite an antagonistic relationship with his high school administration.

In 2003, Miller entered Duke, where he continued the shtick he’d developed at Santa Monica High: the performative littering, the trolling classroom monologues, the Larry Elder Show appearances lambasting the university administration for its supposed leftism, and the fruitful relationship with Horowitz. He quickly established a Duke chapter of Horowitz’s Students for Academic Freedom, which he used to assail the Palestine Solidarity Movement, to attack feminism and multiculturalism, and to champion the white members of the Duke lacrosse team who were accused (falsely, it turned out) of raping a Black stripper in 2006. This last incident, which drew sustained national attention, gave Miller the opportunity to appear on The O’Reilly Factor and Nancy Grace while he was still an undergrad.

Miller’s TV appearances proved to be the perfect launchpad for a career in Republican politics after graduation. Horowitz helped, too, introducing Miller to Representative Michelle Bachmann, from whose office Miller quickly rose to serve as press secretary for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. It was in this job that Miller met Steve Bannon, then affiliated with the emerging right-wing tabloid site Breitbart; Bannon, a longtime Los Angeles resident, recognized Miller from his Larry Elder spots. Breitbart and an increasingly extensive network of alternative right-wing media outlets enabled Miller, working with Sessions, to play a central role in the successful effort to kill the Obama administration’s effort at bipartisan immigration reform in 2014.

By this point, Miller had become much more deeply immersed in the literature and online forums of the extreme right and was taking direct inspiration from Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, with its dystopian vision of a horde of nonwhite migrants invading the West. Soon he also began to develop ties with leading right-wing media figures like Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Tucker Carlson, and the anti-immigration think tanker Mark Krikorian.

Perhaps the most vocal advocate against immigration in that media space was one Donald Trump, who had leveraged his celebrity to become the leading exponent of the “birther” conspiracy theory during the Obama years, impressing Miller greatly in the process. “Our whole country is rotting, like a third world country,” Trump told Breitbart in the wake of the Obama immigration bill’s defeat, prompting Miller to e-mail his friends that “Trump gets it…. I wish he’d run for president.” When Trump began his long-shot campaign the following year, Miller, barely 30, joined up, and the two quickly hit it off. Where more traditional young Republicans might have spent their early careers preparing to work for a more conventional Republican candidate like Jeb Bush or Chris Christie, Miller had presciently spent his preparing for a candidate like Trump. And with Trump’s victory came opportunities to do the kinds of things that his more seasoned peers might never have proposed.

Literally from Day 1, Miller set the tone for Trump’s first presidency: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now,” the most memorable line in Trump’s 2017 inaugural address, came from Miller’s pen. A wave of executive orders empowering Immigration and Customs Enforcement, targeting sanctuary cities, ordering the construction of a border wall, and suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries soon followed, all of them pushed and heavily shaped by Miller. It was Miller who made the once-obscure Salvadoran gang MS-13 
an obsession of the Trump administration, and Miller who emerged as one of the top internal advocates for the family separation policy that became a national scandal in 2018.

In addition to the president himself, Miller built a close relationship with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, ensuring a level of family trust that protected him from the turnover for which the Trump administration became infamous. If xenophobia was the policy through line for most of Miller’s efforts, competent bureaucratic maneuvering and absolute loyalty to Trump were what empowered him to execute his agenda. Miller’s fingerprints are likewise all over the early initiatives of Trump’s second term, including turning legal refugees away from the United States, suspending foreign aid, launching ICE raids on major cities, and leaning on the major tech companies to ban diversity initiatives.

The world according to Stephen Miller is a cruel and callous one, in which America is strictly for unhyphenated Americans and those here “illegally” must be forcibly returned to the “failed states” where they were born. To Miller, the crumbling American heartland is being preyed on not by rapacious capital but by an invading army of gangsters, thugs, and terrorists waved in by coastal liberal elites—in other words, by exactly the kind of people he has always lived among.

Part of why Guerrero was able to speak with so many of Miller’s acquaintances—including his estranged uncle David Glosser, who has compared his nephew to the Nazis—is that Miller is so unrepresentative of the world he grew up in. Interviewees throughout Hatemonger regularly express shame and horror rather than pride at Miller’s steady climb to the heights of political power; one gets the sense that speaking to the media is a form of penance for some of them.

At the same time, Miller’s rise wasn’t exactly a fluke. It was facilitated not only by his family’s baseline wealth and privilege and the social capital they afforded, but by Miller’s demonstrated talent for hacking the weaknesses of liberal elite culture itself. Miller is an extreme case, yet anyone who grew up in similar communities or attended similar schools can recognize him as a very particular type of guy. His hateful tirades weren’t popular at Santa Monica High or at Duke, but they consistently drew attention; students and faculty often pushed back hard against his constant trolling, but in doing so they played right into his hands. Teachers who wanted to encourage open debate and free speech gave him a platform regardless of whether he was arguing in good faith; mainstream and liberal media outlets continued to promote him in the name of provocation and ideological diversity. Like Trump himself, Miller intuitively grasped that being hated in elite liberal environments was better than being ignored, and that embracing the language and tactics of conservative media offered a means for a strange and argumentative kid to stand out from a crowd of generic achievers and to fast-track his way to influence.

This isn’t to say that Miller’s act is entirely cynical. It’s clear that beneath all the performative cruelty and amoral careerism, there’s an authentic core of seething, visceral, unquenchable hatred that defies any easy explanation. It’s true, as Guerrero documents, that such bigotry circulated widely in Southern California and elsewhere in the 1990s, and it’s true that far-right voices on talk radio and later on the Internet continually grew in influence as Miller came of age, but none of that by itself explains why Miller is the way he is.

Despite his obvious intelligence and his elite pedigree, Miller didn’t arrive at his views via serious reading—his is not the classical conservatism of Edmund Burke, the libertarianism of Friedrich Hayek, the neoconservatism of Irving Kristol, or the paleoconservatism of Samuel Francis—and he’s never presented himself as an intellectual in his own right in the manner of, say, his White House colleague Michael Anton. His ideas are not just monstrous and reactionary but banal and simplistic; he lacks the imagination that is a prerequisite for empathy. But in a way, this makes him the ideal conservative for the Trump era: His ideology is not refined, abstracted, or euphemized away from its real object. He’s told us exactly what he intends to do.

I’ve always struggled to pay attention. For the first half of my life, well before I had 24/7 portable high-speed Internet, it was a challenge to stay focused on what a teacher was saying in class, or on the homework I was supposed to be completing, as my mind involuntarily drifted to topics I found more stimulating. Then, once smartphones entered the picture, it became possible for me to divert myself with whatever I found most interesting at any given moment, which quickly became more addictive than any substance I might consume. While not everyone is as distractible as me, most of us contend with the social Internet’s incessant demands on our attention, the difficulty of finding time for activities unmediated by screens, and the mendacious narratives spread by the most toxic attention seekers—above all the ones in the White House.

Chris Hayes’s latest book, The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, argues that the problem of attention is central to our current political and media environment as well as how we live our quotidian lives, with ubiquitous and predatory high-tech platforms competing over every scrap of our waking hours. Hayes is an anchor for MSNBC and before that was a longtime contributor to The Nation, and he draws on both of these experiences—of trying to maintain the attention of an audience that could be watching or reading anything else instead—to untangle the problem of attention itself. Though he does urge spending less time staring at screens, he goes well beyond that frequently disregarded advice to offer an almost philosophical exploration of what attention really is and how it works. I recently spoke with Hayes about his book and how it can help make sense of this historical moment. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

—David Klion

David Klion: Why did you decide that attention was the thing you would devote a book project to?

Chris Hayes: Back when I was writing for The Nation, we would have some sense of what the traffic on an article was, but there was also a sense of whether something was a good piece or not. We had an independent judgment about whether we thought it was good reporting, whether it was well-written, whether people were talking about it. We didn’t conceive of the work in terms of whether it was charting.

Then as I moved into cable news, it’s just the case that holding people’s attention is really foundational to the whole project. It’s necessary, but not sufficient. Wrestling with that, at a craft level, day in, day out, over the course of more than a decade and over thousands of cable news segments that I’ve done, had me thinking a lot about the internal tensions within trying to hold attention—what attention is, why it moves, the directions it moves, and how valuable it is. That’s what led me to the book.

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DK: You operate at the intersection of three very different attentional regimes: long-form journalism, cable TV, and, well, being extremely online and posting a lot. Some of the most interesting parts of the book were when you got personal about early ratings failures—you thought that you could bring what was interesting to you as a reader and a writer on cable, and it often didn’t work.

CH: That took a real psychological toll. I write about how we would all get ratings, and every day everyone sees everyone else’s ratings, and it creates a feeling that can suffuse the building—it’s like getting a report card every day. At least early in my career, it felt that way; now I detach from it more. But it creates its own intense internal pressure.

DK: I got the sense you have, not exactly regrets, but are self-conscious about some of the coverage decisions incentivized by that. You write about the missing Malaysian plane story and the outsize attention your show gave it. One thing you don’t write about is Russiagate, but I’m curious how these pressures affected MSNBC’s coverage of that?

CH: There was definitely a tension behind that. I really thought—and still think—what happened with Russiagate was totally outrageous.

DK: I do, too, for what it’s worth.

CH: The thing about Russiagate that propelled it attentionally was that there was a genuine set of unanswered questions, and a structure of a mystery and revelation, reminiscent of Watergate. The way the Watergate story was structured in terms of the unraveling of a cover-up gave a kind of attentional force to it over a sustained period of time. With Russiagate, we had a set of facts that were themselves incredibly damning. There was a question about what was hidden, and I think that was why there was such enormous energy around that. But there are a million things that have happened since and are happening now that, in many ways, have been worse.

DK: With Russiagate, we can disaggregate the Steele dossier and the many salacious claims in it, which turned out to be bunk, from the overall conclusion of the Mueller Report that there was a concerted effort by Russia to influence the election, which Donald Trump at the very least openly welcomed. Whether you call that “collusion” or not is almost semantic. But in hindsight, a lot of the outrage and attention directed at it was premised on the idea that Americans had a set of shared assumptions about how the world was supposed to work. That seems almost quaint now.

CH: Yes! Beyond the mystery aspect, there was this faith and belief that, as with Watergate, when they get the smoking-gun tapes that prove the president organized a cover-up, there will be a moment when people agree that a line has been crossed, and there would have been a Nixonian denouement. What we learned in the end was that, first of all, the facts were nowhere near that clear, even though I agree with you that whether the collusion was explicit or just openly implicit doesn’t really matter. But what drove all the attention was the belief that there existed some set of facts, some scandal, some revelation about Trump that would get people to say, “We’re done here.” What we learned is that no such set of facts exists. Subsequently, on January 6, Trump attempted the first-ever violent opposition to the transfer of power since the cannons fired on Fort Sumter, and that was not enough either.

DK: You’ve clearly heard the critique that cable news and other mainstream media suppress important stories. The argument you make in the book, and that I find fairly persuasive, is that all anyone is doing is responding to audience incentives, and audiences just don’t want to hear about the things that matter most. What kinds of stories do you think audiences are missing, and why?

CH: Walter Lippmann has a great line in The Phantom Public (1925) where he says that the American public has a great interest in what happens with the Treaty of Versailles, but they’re not interested in it—the same way a son has a great interest in his father’s business but is not interested in it.

One of the hardest topics to get audiences to care about is international news. Partly that’s because America is a huge and hegemonic country, which gives us the luxury of not having to worry that much about other places in the world, because it doesn’t directly affect us the way it would if we were El Salvador or Belgium. There are lots of small European countries where people genuinely read a ton of international news. I meet foreigners all the time who watch MSNBC and are incredibly invested in American politics. It’s almost impossible to imagine an American who has that investment, and pays that much attention to another country’s politics unless it concerns them directly, in the absence of major violence or conflagration like October 7 or the invasion of Ukraine.

The other big one is climate—that’s the biggest disparity between objective importance and the scale of coverage. It’s really hard. Even if you look at left-leaning publications that cover climate more, they generally don’t focus on it in proportion to its overwhelming importance.

DK: Another one that comes to mind is Covid, which for a while was the dominant story because it was affecting everyone’s life so directly, but it was impossible to sustain that. There’s been a kind of mass forgetting—I personally got sick of talking about it every day. It’s a tedious topic.

CH: I do think there’s something about Covid that relates to some of the deep attentional imperatives I am concerned about. Part of what we do attentionally is acclimate to things. Novel stimuli grab our attention—if a car honks at you in the street while you’re crossing and looking at your phone, it wrenches your attention preconsciously, independent of your will. It’s compulsory, and thank God, because that saves you from getting hit by the car.

But let’s say you’re in a hotel room and a loud HVAC turns on; it will grab your attention at first, and then as you adjust and the stimulus recedes from novelty, you don’t notice it anymore. And this is true about many things, and it’s hard to sustain focus. Grabbing attention is easier than holding it. If you task anyone you know with walking into a room of 500 people and grabbing their attention, they can do it—but if you task them with walking into a room of 500 people and holding it for an hour, they probably can’t.

Covid is a great example of something that has receded from the novelty of the initial stimulus to a kind of background noise. But Ukraine is also a great example—that war is still grinding on, incredibly brutally, with enormously high geopolitical consequences and lots of things happening on the ground day after day, but audiences have stopped paying attention.

It’s always been part of the human condition that we have these competing kinds of attention: the compelled attention—this circuitry that can function independent of our will—competing with our willful desire for a place to put our attention, as a refuge from the terrifying, feral reality of our own minds, from anxiety and boredom. But now we live in a technological landscape that allows us a level of diversion that would have been unthinkable in earlier eras.

DK: Since we are both in our 40s, we have clear adolescent memories of a time when our attention was not as aggressively contested as it is now. A lot of people our age are nostalgic for that era. But I also remember being so miserably bored all the time, and how wonderful it was when the Internet made it possible to access endlessly interesting things.

CH: As a child, there would be summer days where I just was doing nothing. I would go to the park to shoot hoops, but it would be 98 degrees on an outdoor court. I’d last two hours maximum, I’d go home, I’d sit on the couch with nothing to do and stare up into a light shaft coming through the living room window, lighting up the little dust motes as they floated up off the couch, trying to entertain my brain.

The experience of the early Internet was a reprieve from that, particularly if you were a nerdy or curious kid. Before the Internet, I consulted baseball statistics books (like the ones published by the Elias Sports Bureau), I read books like The Way Things Work by David Macaulay, and I had this compendium of Greek mythology—reference tomes that I would comb through that were enjoyable reprieves from boredom. But then we got the Internet, and suddenly any fact you wanted was there. It was the feeling of landing in a new city on the first day, checking into your hotel, and being like, “What should we go see?” I miss that feeling… I truly do.

DK: When I think back, when did my screen addiction really begin? I was in high school from 1998 to 2002, and we had these computer labs full of turquoise-colored iMacs connected to the Internet. I was a nerdy kid, as you might imagine. We had free periods, so I remember having enormous amounts of time during the school day when I could read about Star Wars or whatever. Later, thanks to phones and social media, that behavior took over more and more of my life. But I’m realizing a lot of us were primed for this kind of lifestyle even before it became totally hegemonic.

CH: I do think that kind of thing was qualitatively superior to what’s happening now.

DK: Well, yeah—I wasn’t getting into fights with people, for one thing.

CH: There’s that! Also, if you were to tally up your regretfully wasted minutes then, it would be much lower than those minutes now. It’s true that the screen itself and its attentional draw has a compulsive, addictive quality. But I also think the specific model of the open Internet, which was not designed by enormously sophisticated and wealthy corporations to monetize every last ounce of our attention, led to a qualitatively different experience. I remember my friends and I would go to the computer lab and message each other sitting five feet apart, and we got such a kick out of it. To me, that feels like a pretty pure adolescent activity, like a digital version of note-passing.

So one of the things I’m trying to do in the book is untangle the experience of the Internet or screens from the particular forms of attention capitalism that have become intertwined with the technology, and to make a case that you can actually disaggregate them. There is a version of an open Internet that maybe people are addicted to or use compulsively, but that is not extractive or exploitative in the way that the current Internet is.

DK: You can’t be accused of Luddism—you’re not saying we should destroy the Internet; you appreciate why the Internet is cool, even as you’ve watched it systematically become something worse. Let’s talk about our political situation in this context, which you wait until pretty late in the book to dive into. Why is it so difficult for liberal culture to hold attention right now? The right has Trump and Elon Musk and a million different hateful, conspiratorial grifters. But we have celebrities: We have Taylor Swift, we have Kendrick Lamar, we have athletes like LeBron James, we have charismatic politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Barack Obama. We have some of the most talented attention seekers on Earth, people with incredibly powerful global brands. So what is the right’s edge, and why do all the celebrity endorsements in the world not ultimately move the needle for us?

CH: For one thing, the form of attention capitalism we have, with its relentlessly competitive bidding for eyeballs across monetized platforms, stacks the deck in favor of reactionary gestures—the obnoxious, the insulting, the offensive, the outrageous, the troll, the threat.

There’s been a recognizable version of this in another attention market for years: local evening news, which is quite competitive and high-stakes. There’s a huge audience, divided between three or four networks, so it really matters to those networks how much share they get. These are widely watched programs, and they’re very profitable. And we all know the cliche: If it bleeds, it leads. There’s something about the structure of the evening news attention market that pushes it toward a form of crime coverage that clearly leads in reactionary directions. It’s trying to grab you with a feeling of threat every night. New York is a city of 8 million people, so something bad happens to someone here every day, and that’s what gets covered on the evening news. If you watch it every night, you come away thinking the city’s a terrifying hellhole. There’s something similar in the current attentional landscape that favors the threat-focused, right-wing ethos in a similar manner.

The second part of it is a cultural aspect of liberalism, and particularly in the world of Democratic politics, which is risk-averse, status-quo-oriented, and small-c conservative. Depending on the situation, being risk-seeking or risk-averse can be important or maladaptive. If you work in the nuclear safety bureaucracy in the Department of Energy, you want to be pretty darn risk-averse, whereas if you work at a start-up, you should be more risk-seeking. There’s an almost dispositional cultural phenomenon among Democratic lawmakers and their staff that makes them risk-averse, and means that they don’t want to seek attention if there’s some chance it blows up.

DK: I’ll take a minor risk and bring up the war on wokeness, which relates directly to what you’re saying. There’s an argument that some of these popular anti-woke cultural figures have become transgressive in a way that left-leaning culture used to be, because they relish offending people. Our generation remembers a time when progressive cultural values were distinctly in the minority and espousing them could seem subversive, whereas I think a lot of zoomers take for granted, for instance, that gay people have equal civil rights, or that there’s a certain level of diversity in the cultural establishment. Offending that establishment and its pieties, for some people younger than us, is what’s edgy now.

CH: Yeah, there’s a cyclical rhythm to culture. If you grew up in the wake of 9/11, it’s normal to think of the culture as hegemonically aligned behind a conservative president. Right now it’s actually quite divided by comparison. But who counts as the establishment and who counts as the insurgents, and how they’re coded politically, has gone through shifts. I don’t think it was the worst thing for the left to have this inauguration where Trump is onstage next to the five biggest tech CEOs—it presented an image of an establishment colossus to rebel against, which is useful and clarifying.

DK: I don’t think it’s quite sunk in yet for the bulk of the country. Elon Musk may be the richest person who ever lived, but he still presents himself as a kind of bratty insurgent against the true establishment, which apparently consists of USAID bureaucrats who no one has ever heard of. I’m wondering how much damage the Trump administration will have to do before it clicks in people’s heads where power actually lies.

CH: A lot of the work of good governance is boring—it’s saying no and being stodgy about risk, and those things are not that attentionally salient. That’s another way in which the deck is stacked against liberalism: A 19-year-old swashbuckling into a government agency is a better story than the everyday work of governance. That’s not to say there isn’t genuine sclerosis in the federal bureaucracy—anyone who has ever worked in it can give you a three-hour lecture on all the things they find maddening about it. But fundamentally, this comes from a place of knowledge and love. That is not the case with DOGE, but the story of the disruption is a better story and attentionally outcompetes the boring daily work of the civil service.

DK: It’s sad and ironic that this is probably the most sustained attention the work of USAID has ever gotten.

CH: Right, they made USAID a story, which in any other universe is impossible.

DK: In your final section, you speculate that the current attentional regime is unsustainable. But in outlining what it would look like to move past it, you emphasize cultural trends within what we could call “professional-managerial class liberalism.” You draw parallels with the rise of organic food, which I found plausible, and I can see how it might apply to you, me, and our peers in gentrified Brooklyn. But looking at the political landscape right now, I feel like we are already profoundly alienated from the country writ large. The only demographic that got more blue last year was college-educated whites. I can see a cultural shift among educated liberals where we regulate kids’ screen time more aggressively, or where it becomes a point of pride to read a lot of physical books or shop in physical stores. But does that trickle down to the rest of the population, or does it become one more thing marking us off as snobby elites?

CH: A number of people have responded to the organic food metaphor in the book with a reaction along those lines. My response is that you have to start somewhere, right? The base that has been built for a rebellion against industrialized food started among a vanguardist elite, if you want, and then it moved beyond them—there are people doing food justice work in every part of this country, in poor neighborhoods, in urban centers, in rural areas—and it has changed American food culture writ large.

The other thing I would say is that this experience of carsickness produced by the contemporary online attention regime isn’t just limited to educated liberals. It’s a broadly shared feeling of alienation. I think there are ways to reach out to people who feel it and who don’t necessarily have the same politics or worldview.

DK: I buy that, but I also expect there will be a right-orchestrated backlash that says, “They’re trying to take away your AI slop and your crypto.”

CH: We saw it with TikTok—the Republicans did a 180 on this one specific issue within the course of a few months.

DK: TikTok is such an interesting example because it arguably is a Chinese foreign-interference op, but it also hosted a more pro-Palestinian news environment than basically the entire US media.

CH: Yeah, and it didn’t help to hear a bunch of prominent politicians explicitly say that one of the contributing factors for the TikTok ban was the balance of Israel-Palestine coverage on the platform.

DK: Right, which is how you end up with AOC defending TikTok. It’s a partisan-scrambling issue. I have an aversion to TikTok, and a lot of my friends and peers do; for people who work with words, pre-Musk Twitter was the ideal social media platform. There’s a lot of anxiety right now that reading and writing are going to be obsolete. It’s notable that you’ve packaged your argument as a traditional nonfiction book, because it feels like an endangered form.

CH: Yeah, do we end up with an increasingly post-literate mass culture? We had the Internet of words from the mid-1990s to around 2016 or 2017. The lifeblood of the Internet was writing, from the early AOL forums to Instant Messenger to e-mail, and we’ve transitioned to mostly oral forms of communication.

Also, while I think IQ is a dubious measurement and isn’t measuring anything innate, there is such a thing as the Flynn effect: As societies get richer, they score higher on IQ tests. It’s not that people get innately smarter, but social forces affect their scores. We’ve seen a reversal of the Flynn effect over the last few years, and it’s possible national IQ is just going to decline because of these non-text-based platforms.

DK: It’s ironic that the oligarchs who are driving so much of this change tend to be obsessed with IQ, even as they are systematically rotting away the average American’s IQ as well as their own. Elon Musk must be stupider now than he was five or 10 years ago.

I’ve been reading a lot about the development of a mass intellectual culture after World War II, in large part because of the expansion of higher education. It’s not that everyone became an intellectual, but huge numbers of people who grew up blue-collar earned liberal arts degrees and went on to read smart novels and attend local theater or symphonies in their midsize towns, and it feels like we’ve come in at the very end of that era.

CH: Part of that is a story about that growth plateauing. There was an idea that an ever-higher percentage of people were going to be four-year college grads, but it stopped at a certain level. That’s the structural, sociological part of the story, but it’s also technological—we’re seeing a generational shift from typing out your texts to dictating them, which seems deranged to me. The move away from writing and reading is clearly happening, and it is more than a little unnerving.

“Once They Were Neocons. Now Trump’s Foreign Policy Picks Are All ‘America First,’” read a New York Times headline published one week after Donald Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris last November. The report focused on three proposed Trump national security team nominees: Representative Michael Waltz for national security adviser, Senator Marco Rubio for secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth for defense secretary. All of them, the article claimed, have apparently moved away from neoconservatism, which the Times characterized as an “ideology” that promotes “foreign interventions or the prospects of regime change.” This was the ideology that led George W. Bush’s administration to invade Iraq in 2003 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, but per the Times, in the Trump era it has given way to a focus on “dealmaking.” On issues ranging from Ukraine to Afghanistan to China, Republican foreign policy elites have become less inclined toward grandiose military crusades to remake the world according to American ideals and more toward cold, pragmatic, transactional policies in line with narrow American interests—at least, that’s the story they want told about them.

What kind of foreign policy Trump will actually follow in his second administration remains an open question, and the record from his first administration offers contradictory evidence. As president, Trump often spoke sympathetically of Russian President Vladimir Putin and criticized NATO, but he also expanded arms sales to Ukraine. Trump tripled the pace of bombing in Afghanistan but also negotiated a rapid troop withdrawal; despite his saber-rattling against China, he praised President Xi Jinping’s authoritarian tendencies. His recent gestures toward expansionism within the Western Hemisphere—asserting territorial claims from Canada to Greenland to Panama—hardly suggest dovish instincts, but it’s hard to know how literally to take anything Trump says. He has taken advice in the past from figures whom the Times would call “America First” as well as figures it would call “neocons”—and most likely he will again.

The story of neoconservatism does have a lot to teach us about the current political moment, but “neoconservatism” as a shorthand for hawkish foreign policy—while widespread since the Iraq War—is far removed from what “neoconservatism” meant when it first came into common use during the 1970s. Back then, it served as a term of opprobrium among left-wing intellectuals like Michael Harrington, aimed at a cohort of their peers who, in response to the perceived excesses of the New Left over the previous decade, had mobilized for a reactionary defense of Cold War liberalism.

Some of the figures so described, like Daniel Bell or Daniel Patrick Moynihan, rejected the label even as they vocally expressed their distaste for the New Left, while others, most notably Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, came to embrace it. In a 1976 article in Newsweek, Kristol attempted to define “neoconservatism” and came up with a list of five broad tendencies, the first four of which (a rejection of the Great Society welfare state, but not the New Deal; support for market-oriented policy reforms; reverence for Western high culture; and a preference for equality of opportunity over equality of outcome) had little to do with foreign policy. On foreign policy specifically, Kristol wrote:

Neoconservatism believes that American democracy is not likely to survive for long in a world that is overwhelmingly hostile to American values, if only because our transactions (economic and diplomatic) with other nations are bound eventually to have a profound impact on our own domestic and political system. So neoconservatives are critical of the post-Vietnam isolationism now so popular in Congress, and many are suspicious of “détente” as well. On specific issues of foreign policy, however, the neoconservative consensus is a weak one.

Relying solely on the above, it would be a stretch to extrapolate whatever logic—or wish-fulfillment—toppled Saddam Hussein’s regime and sent hundreds of thousands of US troops to occupy Iraq in an attempt to install Western-style democracy. Still, Kristol’s neoconservatism is capacious enough to include practically everyone working in Republican foreign policy today, regardless of disagreements—except insofar as it suggests more respect for American democracy and vaguely defined “American values” than Trump or some in his orbit have shown. I won’t recount here the long and complicated story of how a second generation of neoconservatives, including Kristol’s own son, came to advocate for a specific set of foreign policies that culminated in the Iraq War. Suffice it to say that since then, neoconservatism has usually meant something closer to the Times’ definition than what Kristol proposed half a century ago.

But there’s some value in considering that older definition—the one that had less to do with foreign policy than with what a group of mid-20th-century intellectuals perceived as a crisis in liberalism itself. The founding generation of neocons cared about foreign policy—mostly in the context of aggressively confronting the Soviet Union during a period when that seemed unfashionable—but they paid far more attention to what they saw as a breakdown in the domestic social order. Most of them had grown up before World War II in working-class, heavily Jewish immigrant milieus, often steeped in Marxist doctrinal debates. But as they came of age after the war they found themselves benefiting from the very liberal institutions they had once attacked from the left. By the mid-1960s, they had become leading national figures in intellectual fields ranging from sociology to literary criticism—just in time to see all those fields come under direct assault from a younger generation of relatively privileged left-wing activists and writers who, as the neocons saw it, outrageously and ungratefully rejected the blessings of American civilization at its height.

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This rowdy New Left, the early neoconservatives asserted, heralded the emergence of a New Class of white-collar professionals whose irreverent vulgarity threatened to upend American life, and who would rapidly displace the blue-collar workers who had formed the social base of the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition. Whether such a development was to be feared or welcomed at the time of this assessment, it’s hard to deny its prescience.

American foreign policy has passed through many phases since then: Vietnam-era domino theory giving way to Kissingerian détente; Ronald Reagan reigniting and then unexpectedly winding down the Cold War; American neoliberal hegemony interrupted by 9/11; and most recently, disillusionment over the War on Terror yielding either to neo-isolationism or a return to great-power confrontation. Among the elite foreign policy community, specific doctrines and personnel have continually shifted in response to particular events and challenges—not always aligning neatly with domestic political views. Meanwhile, the crisis of liberal institutions that set off the original neoconservative reaction has remained virtually constant over the same period, or at least has shown a tendency to recur and rhyme.

The 1968 campus uprising at Columbia University, spurred by generational divisions over civil rights and Vietnam, was a formative moment for the neoconservatives, and last year’s student uprising on the same campus over US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza carried unignorable echoes. The issues at stake may have changed over 56 years, but the overall spectacle was rich with resonance: an Ivy League campus, an administration aligned with an unjust policy status quo, radicalized students seizing control of academic buildings, a brutal police crackdown, and an older cohort of faculty and alumni more appalled by the students’ conduct than by the overseas injustices that provoked it. Both times, campus upheaval was a harbinger of national politics: In 1968—as in 2024—a discredited incumbent Democratic president chose not to run for reelection, his vice president ran instead and lost, and a right-wing demagogue despised by liberals and leftists alike won over a silent majority of the electorate. Then as now, intellectuals split over whom to blame and what liberalism would mean going forward, with some eventually rejecting liberalism altogether.

This is the first edition of a new monthly column for The Nation in which I plan to trace our culture’s response to the pressures of today’s triumphant and proudly illiberal right, as well as to an increasingly disaffected and alienated left. Every institution that once served as a bulwark of elite liberalism—universities, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, the arts, the legal profession, the entertainment industry, and government bureaucracies at all levels—is presently in a bad way, for reasons long preceding Trump’s victory. Each is divided between an aging old guard trying to protect its accrued status and a young, often radicalized cohort trying to secure a foothold—even as each institution declines in overall influence. Immense new fortunes minted in Silicon Valley have ultimately benefited a small clique of ultra-reactionaries who are openly hostile to the cultural and political power of the once-New Class. With Trump’s return to the White House, these tech oligarchs now have practically direct control over the administrative state, and there is every indication they will wield it against the actual constituencies that make up both the cultural establishment and the Democratic coalition.

This will have wide-ranging implications, including, no doubt, for US foreign policy. But the purview of this column will be the full range of cultural contradictions that so animated the first generation of neoconservatives and that remain unresolved. Right now, it can feel like a whole era is coming to a close, and like Trump represents a final, apocalyptic resolution of the dialectical forces that have divided Americans since the 1960s. It remains to be seen what—if anything—will be left standing.

There’s an old segment of The Today Show that circulates periodically online—maybe you’ve seen it. It’s 1980, and Donald Trump, then 33, is being interviewed by a 40-year-old Tom Brokaw. They’re discussing Trump’s burgeoning skyscraper portfolio in Midtown Manhattan, but the reason the clip retains such fascination has less to do with the subject matter than with Trump’s delivery. Anyone who watches it comes away struck by how much more articulate and focused the 45th president once was. The Queens accent is recognizable, and there’s a certain familiar bluster, but instead of the rambling, free-associative conspiratorial diatribes we’ve come to expect, what we see is a young man on the make who is confident, lucid, and seemingly well-informed about the workings of the real estate market.

Though already a nationally known figure by that point, in the popular imagination the Trump of 1980 has been largely lost to the Trump who has dominated global attention for the better part of a decade. It’s the latter Trump we often see impersonated, whether by Alec Baldwin or James Austin Johnson on Saturday Night Live, by Brendan Gleeson in The Comey Rule, or, more loosely, by Nick Offerman in Civil War. Regardless of the specific merits of each of those performances, they all come off as a little redundant. The real Trump is himself a performer, having portrayed a larger-than-life character named Donald Trump on NBC’s reality series The Apprentice, in political debates and rallies, and eventually in the Oval Office—and no one plays Trump like Trump.

Ali Abbasi’s new film, also titled The Apprentice, is the first attempt to turn back the clock and portray that earlier Trump—the Trump that Trump no longer plays. In the title role, Sebastian Stan tries to present him as almost a normal human being, albeit one who is clearly on a journey somewhere weirder. Following the future president between 1973 and 1986, The Apprentice charts a formative period in Trump’s life that begins with his fateful encounter with Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and ends with Cohn’s death from what he always insisted was liver cancer, but which is widely understood to have been AIDS. During much of this period, the film suggests, Trump himself was the apprentice of Cohn, who trained him in the dark arts of seeking and wielding power and, in doing so, created a monster.

A film about a current presidential candidate with even odds of winning was always going to be controversial—especially one that depicts said candidate raping his then-wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) on-screen, an act the real Ivana alleged in divorce papers occurred before recanting years later. (Ivana died in 2022 and thus can’t comment on the film.) The Apprentice has weathered legal threats and distributional obstacles from Trump’s allies, and the former president himself has called it “a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job.” But even liberal critics and audiences seem polarized. While The Apprentice has received generally positive reviews and a standing ovation at Cannes, its opening-weekend box office returns were disappointing, and some viewers seemed uneasy with the whole premise. On Letterboxd, the legendary screenwriter and director Paul Schrader called it an excellent film that “requires you to spend 2hr15min in the company of a shallow reprehensible person,” adding that he left in disgust after an hour and a half.

Schrader is not alone. I have friends who can imagine watching the film only if and after Trump loses. For many Americans, the constant media coverage of the real Trump is exhausting enough that the entertainment value of a simulacrum seems dubious, regardless of how well it’s executed. It’s too depressing a topic to think about in the meantime.

That’s a pity, because while much of what The Apprentice depicts is disturbing, none of us are free to opt out of the embarrassing reality that Donald Trump is a major historical figure who was elected president once and might be again in a few weeks. The film is indeed well-executed, and Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, a veteran journalist, deserve credit for effectively capturing a younger and less seasoned Trump absorbing Cohn’s methods in all their unseemliness. Stan and Strong are utterly persuasive at humanizing two figures who themselves have worked so hard to come across as caricatures. In doing so, they give us a fresh perspective on our political moment that we can’t afford to ignore.

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When we first meet Trump in The Apprentice, he’s simply the son of Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), a tyrannical father and outer-borough real estate developer with no particular clout in Manhattan. Fred openly berates his older son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), a commercial airline pilot and heavy drinker; Donald, at least, is a teetotaler and has entered the family business, where he has big plans, even though he still has to do the unglamorous work of door-to-door rent collection.

The father-son relationship is one of the more compelling aspects of the film; even knowing the basic facts, I came away newly struck by Fred’s abusive mastery of his petty Queens empire and by Donald’s almost admirable determination to compete in a bigger pond. Though very little about The Apprentice flatters the future president, he is depicted as having gotten one big thing right: He understood in the 1970s, at perhaps the lowest point in Manhattan’s history, that there was a fortune to be made in redeveloping the seedy area around Grand Central Terminal as a luxury destination. This took some legitimate vision and guts to propose, along with an almost romantic belief in the resilience of New York; to actually realize it required something else.

Trump’s meal ticket turns out to be the tabloid-friendly lawyer Roy Cohn, by this point already notorious for his role in delivering Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, among other infamies. Cohn, whose portrayal by Strong has been deemed “uncanny” by none other than former Cohn associate Roger Stone (who is portrayed in the film by Mark Rendall), introduces himself at an elite private club to which Trump has been newly inducted. He is tough, impervious, a fount of one-liners and putdowns, and surrounded by mafiosi and younger male lovers who treat him as the ultimate VIP.

Stan’s Trump is a different kind of creature. He is awkward, unassuming, a bit shy, and at the same time hungry for the older man’s approval. “I don’t drink,” Trump tells Cohn when offered a glass of Smirnoff neat, to which Cohn replies that he does if he wants to do business. Trump ends up vomiting twice, but he gets what he was after: Cohn agrees to represent the Trump Organization in its struggle against the Department of Justice, which is suing over the elder Trump’s unsubtle discrimination against Black tenants.

Besides beating the case by both legal and extralegal means—he files a countersuit and then blackmails the judge—Cohn takes Trump under his wing. He buys Trump a suit that’s “more Park Avenue than Flushing,” introduces him to people like Andy Warhol and Rupert Murdoch, and initiates him into the hedonistic nightlife of New York’s decadent elite. Cohn is eager to mold his young protégé into a VIP in his own right; he sees Trump as both an unrequited romantic conquest and as yet another power player in his debt. (Trump, meanwhile, sees Cohn as a better father than his actual father.) To that end, Cohn gives Trump his most valuable asset, his crisis playbook: always go on the attack, never admit defeat, and win no matter what.

Cohn’s tutelage quickly pays off: Trump is able to capitalize on the desperation of a city whose finances are in free fall. Sherman’s script reflects the fiscal crisis detailed in Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City, in which financiers hijacked the city government and imposed brutal austerity measures after President Gerald Ford told the nearly bankrupt city to (in the words of a famous Daily News headline) “drop dead.” Cohn’s corrupt methods and extensive Rolodex play a large part in Trump’s success: He helps Trump secure the tax breaks he needs to redevelop whole blocks of Midtown on the backs of the city’s working poor, as well as the puffy interviews that turn Trump into a national celebrity.

The newly emboldened Trump begins pursuing Ivana Zelníčková, the Czech American fashion model he first encounters while she’s trying to get into the same club where he first met Cohn. It’s an aggressive courtship in which he pursues her all the way to Aspen; Ivana, as we learn, has her own grand business ambitions and won’t be satisfied as a mere trophy wife. At first that appeals to Trump, but we know this is not a man who is ultimately going to be comfortable in an equal partnership with a woman.

So far, we have been tracking Trump’s rise from the outer boroughs to the heights of power, filmed in a grainy style that re-creates the bleak cinematic landscape of 1970s New York familiar from movies like Taxi Driver and The French Connection. But as the story advances into the Reagan era, the colors get bolder, and our protagonist begins to resemble the paradigmatic drug-addled capitalists of the age.

Powered by a growing amphetamine habit, Stan’s Trump becomes more reckless and more determined to squander his good fortune on ill-conceived investments in Atlantic City. He also begins to resemble the father he once rebelled against: He is cruel and abusive to Ivana and seeks gratification elsewhere. He turns his back on his brother, who is spiraling into addiction. As Trump’s ego and fame grow, we watch Cohn physically wither from his illness, which Trump himself finds repulsive. If the first half of the film feels like a wild night out, the second half is the next morning’s dismal hangover.

It’s no wonder that The Apprentice has been greeted with such indifference: We know how this story ends, and by and large we wish we didn’t. The New York of the 1970s, with its open-air drug and sex markets and fast-disintegrating public sector, feels distant enough for nostalgia; the New York of the ’80s, practically personified by Trump’s excesses, feels entirely too familiar. There is guilty pleasure to be found in a comfortably malevolent Cohn tutoring an unformed Trump, but there’s limited pathos in watching the pupil reject the master—dying of AIDS and being treated with open disgust doesn’t make Cohn retroactively sympathetic. By the final act, this is not an easy film to watch.

All the same, The Apprentice deserves a warmer reception than it’s gotten, and perhaps when enough time has passed from this ugly historical moment, it will warrant a second look. The filmmakers, and especially the cast, have managed to take seriously a fundamentally unserious man and to draw a portrait that is all the more unsettling for being fair-minded. However this election turns out, we are stuck with Donald Trump and with the society that created him, shaped him, and repeatedly embraced him. We are not better than this.

When discussing 1989 and the years that followed, it can seem obligatory to the point of cliché to mention Francis Fukuyama’s essay “The End of History?,” published just months ahead of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Though no one, including the author, would argue that history actually ended in 1989, most everyone since then has felt compelled to reckon with Fukuyama’s central thesis: that Western liberalism and capitalism had, by the end of the 20th century, won decisively and globally over their major ideological rivals. Even 35 years later—in the wake of 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of Donald Trump and other right-wing populists, the Covid-19 pandemic, a resurgent socialist movement in the United States, and a renewed era of great-power confrontation—it is hard to dismiss altogether Fukuyama’s claim that certain political and economic ideas have become hegemonic and are honored today even in the breach. One might debate whether these ideas are truly liberal in spirit or practice, and one can warn of emergent challenges today, but almost everyone can agree that they stood triumphant in 1989 and have dominated ever since.

But even at the time, Fukuyama was far more anxious than triumphalist in his avowals of a new liberal and capitalist age. He was sure that communism had been defeated, but he foresaw a looming crisis for the political and economic systems he himself championed: “In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy,” he predicted, “just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history.” He also feared that rising nationalism and intra-ethnic conflict—already visible at the time with the disintegration of Yugoslavia—might foil the illusory tranquility of this new world order.

These uncertainties about a liberal future sit at the center of John Ganz’s accomplished debut, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. While many Americans in 1989 “believed they were witnessing the ultimate victory of liberal democracy,” Ganz notes, “others thought they were observing its death throes.” A whirlwind tour of the myriad right-wing insurgencies that punctuated the George H.W. Bush years, When the Clock Broke presents the post–Cold War United States not as a victorious empire but an ailing nation plagued by deindustrialization, racist militias, millenarian sects, extremist demagoguery, urban unrest, conspiracy theories, and generalized despair. If that sounds a lot like the Trump era, well, that’s precisely Ganz’s point. Trump’s election in 2016, he writes in his introduction, “represented the crystallization of elements that were still inchoate in the period of this book.” The supposedly ascendant United States at the end of history, in other words, already demonstrated all the symptoms of its present maladies.

Over the past several years, Ganz has become known as an acerbic combatant in the often internecine political debates on social media, but his considerable talents are better appreciated in his Unpopular Front newsletter, which has offered everything from nuanced commentaries on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza to deeply researched investigations into the history of France’s Third Republic. When the Clock Broke, which is an expansion of a 2018 essay Ganz wrote for The Baffler, replicates this approach. Like Unpopular Front, it showcases sophisticated political argumentation, erudite prose, enviable rigor, and a depth of knowledge.

A historian outside the academy and a political journalist without a staff job, Ganz invites comparisons to Rick Perlstein, who is thanked in the acknowledgments and whose cover blurb proclaims Ganz as “the most important young political writer of his generation.” Like Perlstein, Ganz tends to use an immersive approach to writing about the past: When the Clock Broke not only recounts but seeks to approximate the experience of living through 1989 to 1993.

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Functioning almost as a sequel to Perlstein’s acclaimed multivolume history of the conservative movement from Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan, When the Clock Broke is similarly concerned with the nation’s rightward drift and wants to understand where it came from. “American democracy is often spoken of as being in peril. This book by and large agrees with this thesis,” Ganz writes. “Others point out that democracy in America never fully existed in the first place: for them, it has always been a nation enchained by great inequalities and ruled by an unrepresentative system designed largely to keep those chains in place. This book also agrees with that thesis.” In When the Clock Broke,Ganz pursues both of these arguments, emphasizing throughout not only the emerging villains but also the circumstances out of which they emerged. The origins of our times, he reminds us, have their own origins in the longue durée of American history.

In accounting for the rise of the Klansman turned congressman David Duke, for instance, Ganz feels compelled to acquaint readers with the deep roots of Louisiana history: “The alluvial plains and dense swampland of the Mississippi Delta were less like a [laboratory of democracy] than a hothouse or a petri dish of inchoate American fascism,” he writes in a characteristic passage, before briskly recounting the region’s French and Spanish colonial history, its brutal 19th-century planter class, its corrupt urban politicians, its vigilante-enforced white supremacist social order, and the boom-and-bust cycles engendered by its oil resources. Similarly, in introducing us to the Weaver family, made infamous in the 1992 Ruby Ridge shootout in Idaho, Ganz walks us through the family’s background in Iowa, in the process illustrating how shifts in technology and global commodity price fluctuations in the 1970s and ’80s drove farming communities in the Great Plains to despair—which in turn left men like Randy Weaver “even more sullen and angry, open to more radical views.”

To Ganz, we can’t know John Gotti without knowing a little about the lumpenproletariat of Naples or the social clubs of East New York; we can’t know Rush Limbaugh without a sense of what it was like to go to high school in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the 1960s; we can’t know Ross Perot without a grasp of how Sun Belt entrepreneurs raided Great Society spending programs to build their fortunes. Ganz’s subjects, to paraphrase Kamala Harris, didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree—they exist in the context of all that came before them (an essentially Marxist insight). If, like Ganz, you are an older millennial, you might experience When the Clock Broke as I did—as an informed adult’s reconsideration of what our parents were muttering about at the dinner table back when we were learning how to add and subtract. It’s to Ganz’s great credit that he is able to write about both wider historical trends and idiosyncratic biographical details while also keeping his story lively and amusing.

Though frequently leavened with a dry sense of humor, Ganz’s overall portrait of the United States at the end of history is a grim one. “The entire ’80s economy ran on debt: borrowed money and borrowed time,” he notes. It was the first President Bush’s misfortune, even as he claimed victory over Saddam Hussein and his approval rating soared, that the bills came due on his watch: The savings-and-loan sector collapsed in scandal, banks failed, oil prices surged, crack and homelessness flooded dilapidated inner cities, military bases closed, factory jobs moved abroad, and Brooklyn and Los Angeles exploded in race riots. The tech boom that would buoy Wall Street through the next few decades hadn’t fully begun, and the national mood was one of omnidirectional rage. It was an ideal environment for demagogues.

As concerned as he is with describing the conditions that produced these demagogues, Ganz is equally deft in characterizing their individual personalities. Duke is “caught between his desire for publicity and mainstream acceptance and his infatuation with the secretive underworld of extremism,” a doomed position neatly reflected in his pseudonymous side gig publishing pornographic literature that an aide calls “too hard-core for the right wing and too soft-core for the perverts.” Limbaugh—“a square with a flattop, he liked being the guy playing the records more than he liked the records”—is a shy introvert in person whose inner confidence emerges only in a broadcasting studio. Perot, the corporate welfare profiteer turned populist,

had one foot in the future and one in the past. On the one hand, he was a double throwback: there was all the mythological Americana, the cowboy and Western imagery, the Texas accent, the folksy idioms, the Norman Rockwells. He was also a throwback to another, more recent past, a past in contradiction with the America of self-reliance and rugged individualism but increasingly the source of its own nostalgia: the postwar regime of industrial prosperity, economic security, and corporate paternalism.

Each of these men, in his own way, is a grasping outsider thirsty for adulation and status commensurate with new money. The patrician George H.W. Bush, introduced early as a politician profoundly out of step with the times, makes for a perfect foil:

Bush did not aspire to the presidency out of a sense of political passion; his ambition was for a successful career befitting a person who was quite literally of the senatorial class: it was simply the last step in the cursus honorum of ascending offices. He had no interest in the permanent campaign of his predecessor, the “Great Communicator”: he was the representative of a class bred to govern, not to lead. Its predominance was taken for granted. He had been happiest as leader of the nation’s Super Secret Club for Privileged Boys, the Central Intelligence Agency, and he took with him the clichés and behavior of a bureaucrat: everything was a contingency, a particular case to be reacted to and then managed competently—“prudent” was one of his favorite words, as Dana Carvey’s famous Saturday Night Live send-up of the president highlighted with glee. He possessed the ditziness of the high WASPs: a love for games, toys, and practical jokes; he spoke in non sequiturs and inside or private gags. It was difficult, even for him, to know what he really meant sometimes.

No wonder, then, that Bush’s 1992 reelection campaign was “totally bereft of ideas, direction, or meaning,” thereby creating an opening for candidates who had all of the above. Though Bill Clinton is not a central focus of the book, Ganz does explore the ideas that shaped Bush’s successful Democratic challenger. Clinton, we learn, studied at Georgetown under a professor named Carroll Quigley, the author of Tragedy and Hope, a 1,300-page argument for a secular Puritanism that defended social responsibility against 1960s counterculture excesses. Quigley’s ideas peppered Clinton’s “New Covenant” campaign rhetoric and were also popular with the latter-day John Birchers who supported Perot, and who passed around bootleg copies of Tragedy and Hope at gun shows.

Pat Buchanan, who challenged Bush in the Republican primary, certainly wasn’t lacking in ideas either. In the writings of Samuel Francis and the speeches of Buchanan closely informed by them, Ganz sees the intellectual roots of what Paul Gottfried first termed “paleoconservatism,” which developed in reaction to the more cosmopolitan (read: Jewish) neoconservatism embraced by the Reagan administration. “If the neocons held up mid-century New York as the height of U.S. civilization, the paleos wanted to go much further back: to the 1920s at least, and preferably back to the nineteenth century, to the world before Lincoln and the Civil War,” Ganz writes. “The paleo aesthetic was American Gothic: white-sided Presbyterian and Congregational churches in small towns; stern, industrious folk; farmers, homesteaders, and frontiersmen.” During the Reagan years, the paleocons Russell Kirk and Joseph Sobran charged the leading neocons, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, with “dual loyalty” over their fervent support for Israel; the neocons returned fire with charges of antisemitism, while William F. Buckley made an awkward attempt to broker peace between the conservative factions. In the 1980s, these battles unfolded in the pages of small-circulation magazines like Buckley’s National Review, but in 1992 they would also play out electorally with Buchanan’s failed but damaging primary challenge to Bush, during which he articulated the case for a “new nationalism” that would “put America first”—language that would be echoed by Francis in the campaign’s wake

Francis, as Ganz discusses, also took a particular interest in the Mafia as an American cultural archetype—as did Murray Rothbard, another right-wing thinker that Ganz spotlights (Rothbard’s 1992 pledge, “We shall break the clock of social democracy,” inspired Ganz’s title). Both Francis and Rothbard reacted to Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, released in 1990, by contrasting its sordid rendering of the mob with the quasi-feudal, honor-and-loyalty-bound society portrayed in Francis Ford Coppola’s earlier Godfather films. “While The Godfather was essentially a right-wing utopia, Rothbard believed the assault on property and persons in Goodfellas reflected the actually existing liberal dystopia of street violence,” Ganz writes. Similarly, “Francis thought the famiglia in The Godfather stood for an earlier, more wholesome and integrated social form fighting to keep itself intact in an American culture that threatened to dissolve it.”

The widespread fascination with mob culture in both its idealized and debased imaginings, Ganz argues, is also the cultural context in which a real-life mob boss like Gotti could become a folk hero to many New Yorkers—to the point where Rudy Giuliani, who built his early career on prosecuting mobsters, would ultimately co-opt the style (and, years later, the criminality) of Italian American wiseguys in his bid for political office. It’s also the context in which another tough-talking vulgarian from the outer boroughs—one who did more than his share of business with mafiosi—would find a receptive national constituency on the right.

When the Clock Broke ends rather abruptly in 1993, just past Clinton’s inauguration as president after having won a mere 43 percent plurality of the popular vote (Perot won an astonishing 19 percent, the highest total any third-party candidate has received since 1912). Surveying the national landscape, Ganz gives us a sort of montage of what his antiheroes were up to at the dawn of the Clinton era. We see Perot plugging a new book inveighing against NAFTA, which Clinton would sign into law the following year with Republican support and considerable Democratic defection; we see Francis speaking at a Buchanan-affiliated event and drawing explicit inspiration from the way Adolf Hitler and the Nazis regrouped after the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch. Finally, Ganz checks in on Donald Trump, a recurring minor character throughout the book, who by 1993 was reeling from bankruptcies. We listen in on Trump as he meets with the aging, fascism-influenced architect Philip Johnson to discuss a potential redesign of the Trump Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City. After listening to the future president’s inimitable bluster for a while, Johnson tells him, “You’d make a good mafioso.” To which Trump replies, “One of the greatest.”

It’s a hell of a kicker, and Ganz is confident enough as a writer not to feel the need to explain it any further: He trusts us to get the punch line. We already have been, and perhaps once again will be, governed by a mobster of historic proportions, albeit one more in the Goodfellas than the Godfather mode. Everything Ganz has shown us about the United States of the early 1990s—the fraying social fabric, the deregulation of talk radio, the far-right insurgency against the Republican old guard, the radicalized angry white men—would eventually culminate in the presidency of Donald Trump.

Ganz’s story is compellingly told, with a sharp eye for detail and for unexpected connections, and his implicit argument is largely persuasive, yet one might still quibble with his decision to stop where he does. Without a brief discussion at the end of what happened during the eventful 23-year gap between the end of his book and Trump’s election in 2016, the reader is left wondering why it would take another generation for the toxic political trends of the early 1990s to coalesce in their now-familiar form.

The future War on Terror, for instance, is briefly hinted at in the concluding overview of 1993, when Ganz notes that “a group known as Al-Qaeda” detonated a bomb at the World Trade Center in a vain attempt “to send one tower crashing into the other, bringing down both skyscrapers in the process. It seemed an outlandish and impossible goal: the bomb had barely damaged the building.” It’s a clever way to indicate that a lot more history is going to unfurl between then and now, but it also allows the book to avoid arguing anything more specific about that history.

To be sure, anyone reading this book is likely to recall the major developments of recent decades and would also be able to draw their own connections to the world we currently live in. Indeed, a number of well-regarded recent works of popular history have already traced the rise of Trump to the aftermath of 9/11 (Spencer Ackerman’s Reign of Terror), to the 2008 financial crisis (Adam Tooze’s Crashed), and to the racist backlash against Barack Obama’s presidency (Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power), to say nothing of the widely discussed failures of the Hillary Clinton campaign or the much-debated role of Russian election interference. And so it is understandable why Ganz would instead seek explanations in an era further removed from recent news cycles. Still, without a little more about how his subjects and their political projects fared during the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama presidencies, we are left to speculate on whether the seeds planted during the George H.W. Bush years were inevitably going to blossom into the Trump presidency, and whether there was anything that Americans might have done in the interregnum to avoid that outcome.

As we confront a potential Trump restoration, this question isn’t merely academic. As Ganz convincingly demonstrates, Trump represents a constellation of reactionary forces that emerged at the supposed end of history—but history never ends, and what comes next is up to us.

“You don’t have to be a Jew to be a Zionist,” President Joe Biden declared last December at the White House Hanukkah reception, to applause. Biden, who is not a Jew, rattled off his Zionist bona fides: When each of his children and grandchildren turned 14, he flew them to Dachau to impress upon them the horrors of the Holocaust; he called his commitment to the Jewish state “unshakable” and boasted that he had known Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for 51 years. “Folks, were there no Israel, there wouldn’t be a Jew in the world who was safe,” proclaimed the man responsible for the security of roughly 7 million American Jews—to more applause.

Since Hamas’s October 7 attack, Biden has offered what he has accurately described as “unprecedented” levels of American support for Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza—an approach that may appease some Democratic donors but has alienated key constituencies. A CNN national poll in April showed that Biden’s handling of the war is his worst major issue, with 71 percent overall disapproval, rising to 81 percent among respondents under age 35; voters in this youngest cohort, who had favored Biden over Donald Trump by a 31-point margin in 2020, now favored Trump by 11 points. A New York Times poll in May showed Biden trailing Trump in five key states (including Michigan, with its large Arab and Muslim population), and noted that 13 percent of voters who preferred Biden in 2020 but won’t vote for him in 2024 cite Gaza as their reason, with the vast majority of those sympathizing with Palestinians over Israel. Other polls present a more ambiguous picture—many younger voters do support Israel, and many issues are seen as higher priorities—but it’s clear that the strategy Biden has chosen to navigate Israel’s war over the past eight months has not helped him politically as he heads into an election likely to be decided by close margins in a few swing states.

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By this point it’s become conventional wisdom that Biden is risking his presidency over his strident support for Israel since October 7. “Gaza has become the albatross around Biden’s neck,” wrote Nicholas Kristof in an April New York Times column. “It is his war, not just Benjamin Netanyahu’s. It will be part of his legacy, an element of his obituary, a blot on his campaign.” “If nothing changes, the destruction of Palestine will be a major piece of Biden’s legacy,” wrote Jonathan Guyer in an American Prospect cover story in March. Many observers furthermore agree, as Guyer puts it, that “the reason for Joe Biden’s particular brand of Israel policy is Joe Biden”—that the president’s fervent Zionism has constrained US policy options relative to what a standard-issue Democrat, including Biden’s own advisers, might consider.

But while the narrative that Biden’s support for Israel has been stalwart over decades is broadly accurate, a closer examination of the president’s long career in public life reveals scattered moments of ambivalence. That Biden has sometimes pushed back against more hard-line Israel supporters isn’t meant as a defense; if anything, Biden’s muddled record on this issue accounts for a policy course that voters across the political spectrum find unsatisfactory. Biden’s bedrock support for the Jewish state has coexisted with an occasional willingness to criticize its leadership that comes and goes according to shifting circumstances—a pattern that has been evident with Biden’s belated, halting attempts to limit military aid even as Netanyahu invades Rafah, and with his recent efforts to promote a supposedly Israeli-backed cease-fire deal that Israel itself continues to undermine. The problem with Biden on Israel, in short, isn’t just that he’s been too supportive—it’s that he’s been incoherent. That incoherence, as much as the underlying immorality of his policy, is why the war in Gaza threatens to usher Trump back into the White House.

In 1948, when the future president was 6, his father supposedly explained to him that the newly founded state of Israel was necessary to protect the Jewish people in the wake of the Holocaust. His father, “a righteous Christian,” Biden said in 2015, in one of many retellings of this anecdote, “talked about how he could not understand why there was a debate among Americans or why there was a debate among American Jews about whether or not we should have recognized Israel.” Such debates in fact raged at the time—among American Jews, Zionism was far from a consensus position in the late 1940s, and among American foreign policy elites, there were serious concerns about antagonizing the Arab world, given its rich oil resources—but as far as Biden is concerned the issue has always been a settled one.

Biden was first sworn in as a US senator in 1973, at age 30. Always a bit of a square, he never identified with the counterculture (“I wore sports coats. You’re looking at a middle-class guy,” Biden said in 1987, explaining his disinterest in Vietnam-era protests. “I’m not big on flak jackets and tie-dyed shirts.”) His affection for Israel wasn’t forged on a kibbutz and had little to do with the left-leaning idealism that so many other members of his generation were swept up in after Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War. As Jeet Heer noted in The Nation, Biden’s views on Israel were instead shaped by one of his Senate mentors, Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, a legendary Democratic hawk whose young staffers included Elliott Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith—all of whom would go on to be neoconservative architects of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, which Biden himself would also support.

Biden eulogized Jackson in 1983, crediting him with having “changed my whole perspective on an issue that I had up to that point felt not nearly as strongly about, and that was Israel.” (That the future president credited this awakening to Jackson calls into question his oft-repeated story about learning about Israel from his father in 1948, but no one ever called Biden a reliable narrator.) Jackson, Biden said, had described visiting Buchenwald during World War II and encouraged Biden to make a series of trips to concentration camps, “which was the first time I was able to understand with any of the sense of the depth of emotion that he, like me, a non-Jew, felt about what had happened.” Jackson (often called “the senator from Boeing”) was a Cold War hawk and a champion of his state’s robust defense industry, and he saw Israel as an outpost of American power and values in a hostile region.

It was Jackson who led the charge for greater US military aid for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War when, nine months into Biden’s first Senate term, Israel was caught off-guard by a joint Egyptian-Syrian sneak attack. Campaigning for US support in the wake of the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir made the savvy choice to host a congressional delegation that included the freshman Senator Biden. As Alexander Ward explains in The Internationalists, a recent reported account of the current administration’s foreign policy, Meir described the many security threats the country faced, in what Biden has called “one of the most consequential meetings I’ve ever had in my life”—and despite Biden’s well-known propensity for exaggeration (in fact, he seems to have greatly overstated his role in the meeting and his relevance to Meir), it probably was.

Over the course of six terms spanning more than three decades, Biden was frequently one of the Senate’s most reliable supporters of Israel. In 1975, Biden signed a joint letter organized in part by Jackson urging President Gerald Ford to provide Israel with the military aid it was requesting. In 1981, he took to the New York Times op-ed page to oppose Ronald Reagan’s sale of high-tech enhancements to Saudi Arabia’s military on the grounds that “Israel’s military superiority and military-technology edge would be dangerously eroded.” Biden and his ally Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York (who maintained close ties with neoconservative intellectuals and was another of the Senate’s leading champions of the Jewish state) both told the Times that they were being subjected to antisemitic vitriol for their opposition to the Saudi arms deal. “I have a feeling that American Jews are being made a scapegoat,” Biden said. The following year, Biden was the only senator who defended Israel’s conduct in its invasion of Lebanon in a closed meeting of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with the right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in terms that apparently shocked Begin himself; three months later, Christian militias backed by Israel carried out the massacre of hundreds if not thousands of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

On the other hand, in 1980, Biden defended the Carter administration’s decision not to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements, situating himself to the left of many of his Senate colleagues. At the time he said the Carter administration should declare publicly, “We’re mad as hell with Begin over settlements,” and added that Begin “seriously underestimates the anger of the American people over settlements.” Two years later, under the Reagan administration and amid the Lebanese invasion, Biden reportedly threatened Begin with aid cuts in response to settlement expansion, to the point where Begin responded, “Sir, do not threaten us with cutting aid. First of all, you should know that this is not a one-way street. You help us, and we are very grateful for your help, but this is a two-way street. We do a lot for you.”

Biden certainly agreed that Israel was a strategic asset to the United States. In 1984, he took the lead on getting Congress to establish that Israel would always receive enough economic assistance from the US to cover the cost of its weapons purchases, a privilege that was not extended to neighboring Egypt. In 1986, Biden told the Israeli ambassador to the US that aid for Israel was “the biggest bang for our buck” and that he felt the US should refrain from criticizing Israel publicly. At the time, the Israeli embassy regarded Biden as a minor player in Middle East policy and classified him as neither especially for nor especially against Israel. That ambivalent impression is understandable; even today, it is hard to reconcile Biden’s privately championing Israel’s brutality in Lebanon with his publicly criticizing Israel for settlement expansion, only to turn around a few years later and say Israel should only ever be criticized in private.

The Reagan era coincided with the emergence of a well-funded Israel lobby, led by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), that would come to dominate American Jewish political life and to pressure politicians in both parties to stand with Israel. One politician in particular was an eager recipient: Over the course of his Senate career, Biden took $4.2 million from pro-Israel groups, more than any other senator in history. The youth director for his failed 1988 presidential campaign, Jonathan Kessler, was hired directly from AIPAC, and AIPAC lobbyists favored Biden’s campaign “because he has long been vocal in support of Israel,” as the Times reported that cycle. In 1991, when George H.W. Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, insisted on conditioning aid to Israel on the restriction of settlement expansion, AIPAC lobbied Congress to override the Bush policy, and Biden cosponsored a bill to that effect, which failed to pass. AIPAC had not quite achieved bipartisan hegemony: “Fuck ’em, they didn’t vote for us,” Baker allegedly said in 1992 of Jewish supporters of Israel.

AIPAC money might seem to account for how Biden went from a critic of Israeli settlements to a defender over the course of about a decade. But a few years after his attempt to override Bush and Baker, in 1998, Biden took the more dovish side of an intra-Democratic debate over Bill Clinton’s attempt at a peace initiative. The hawks were represented by Senator Joe Lieberman, who coauthored an AIPAC-backed, Netanyahu-aligned letter urging Clinton not to publicly confront Israel, while Biden signed a response letter authored by Senator Carl Levin praising the administration’s efforts at diplomacy. Biden supported Clinton’s ultimately unsuccessful effort to secure a two-state solution at Camp David, and into the George W. Bush administration, he continued to call for a regional peace plan, including in a New York Times op-ed in which he wrote, “Israelis will have to understand, as most already do, that a Palestinian state will require dismantling most settlements.” He even blocked a 2002 effort by Netanyahu, then between prime ministerships, to address the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, calling it “totally inappropriate” for the opposition leader to use that forum to undermine then–Secretary of State Colin Powell’s efforts to negotiate a ceasefire.

Biden’s relative dovishness during the Clinton and George W. Bush years makes for an odd and inexplicable contrast with his relative hawkishness during Barack Obama’s administration. When Biden became vice president in 2009, he developed a reputation as the “good cop” who could personally get along with Netanyahu, unlike Obama, whose relationship with his Israeli counterpart was rocky from the start. Months into Obama’s first term, which coincided with Netanyahu’s return to power, the new president gave an address to the Arab world in Cairo in which he affirmed US support for a two-state solution, which Netanyahu reluctantly endorsed under Obama’s pressure (in January of this year, Netanyahu declared his blanket opposition to a Palestinian state). In 2010, Netanyahu insultingly timed the announcement of new settlement construction to line up with a Biden visit to Israel, prompting a furious reaction from Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who contemplated punishing Netanyahu for his intransigence. But then Biden called Netanyahu to reassure him it would all blow over, thereby undercutting the credibility of his own administration’s threat, to Obama and Clinton’s further consternation. As reported by The New York Times, that same year Biden told Uzi Arad, one of Netanyahu’s top advisers, “Just remember that I am your best fucking friend here.”

In short, it isn’t quite right to say that Biden has always taken the most hawkish possible stance on Israel. As a senator and as vice president, he was consistently a staunch Zionist, a leading beneficiary of AIPAC funds, and a champion of Israel’s right to defend itself. But there have been times when he voiced opposition to settlements and tried to support peace negotiations while other Senate Democrats took a harder line, and there have also been times when he undermined efforts by presidents in both parties to put meaningful pressure on Israel. It’s a maddening record, and it foreshadowed a maddening presidency.

From the start of his term, Biden has been deferential to Israel. The Trump administration’s significant rightward Middle East policy shifts have all been maintained by Biden, despite some half-hearted efforts to resuscitate the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. For Biden’s first few years in office, there were no significant efforts to revive the long-moribund peace process between Israel and the Palestinian Authority; a short Israel-Hamas war in May 2021 caught the administration off-guard and was resolved inconclusively with little impact on US policy. In an article drafted for Foreign Affairs just before the October 7 attacks, Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, wrote that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades,” adding that “we have de-escalated crises in Gaza.” That unfortunately timed passage made it to print, though it was wiped from online publication, but it reflected the administration’s basic attitude before the attacks. The Palestinian issue was seen as contained, manageable, and unlikely to derail Biden’s agenda. A year out from reelection, Biden was blindsided by Hamas and unprepared for the political consequences of embracing Israel’s war on Gaza.

Just over a week after the attacks, Biden traveled to Israel to meet with Netanyahu and to express solidarity with a traumatized ally. “The fact that the most powerful person on Earth—the president of the United States—is standing behind us is a big deal,” a Netanyahu adviser told NBC News at the time. The Biden administration chose to unequivocally back Israel, including with a $15 billion military assistance package that Congress passed in April and that includes no conditions on how Israel uses US-made armaments, despite knowing that Netanyahu’s reigning far-right coalition was likely to employ indiscriminate tactics against the Palestinians in Gaza. Netanyahu—who has weathered protests against his personal corruption and his attempted dismantling of Israel’s independent judiciary since well before October 7—has been strongly incentivized to extend the war as a means of staying in power and avoiding accountability for his failures in allowing the attacks to happen. The White House had every reason to understand that neither Israel’s interests nor Netanyahu’s are aligned with Biden’s—and yet it decided to stake Biden’s legacy on Netanyahu’s prosecution of this war.

Maintaining this posture has compelled Biden to do things like repeat unsubstantiated claims that Hamas beheaded Israeli civilians and publicly question the accuracy of Palestinian casualty counts, as he did in late October. A day later, he apologized in private and pledged to work harder at humanizing Palestinians in his rhetoric to a small group that included several Muslim advocates, in a meeting which wasn’t reported on for another month. Biden’s quiet, perfunctory gestures of empathy have been drowned out by administration decisions like bypassing Congress to expedite a weapons sale to Israel, or vetoing a near-unanimous UN resolution condemning Israel’s war conduct in December and another supporting full UN membership for Palestine in April.

Biden’s Israel strategy since the attacks has been described by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot as a “bear hug.” In other words, by publicly demonstrating unequivocal support and affection for Israel, the US could privately curb Israel’s worst excesses—or so the theory went. For a few months, defenders of the administration could argue that the bear hug was working insofar as it prevented a wider regional war; by January, however, that seemed harder to maintain, as the war expanded to encompass US air strikes on the Houthis in Yemen, as well as ongoing exchanges between the US and Israel on the one hand and Iranian proxies on the other in multiple countries.

In late January, following the deaths of three US troops in a drone strike on Jordan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters that “we have not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973, and arguably even before that.” And in April, tensions between Israel and Iran reached a boiling point after Israel assassinated an Iranian general in Syria and Iran responded with drone strikes on Israeli territory; Biden ultimately held the line against further escalation. But even if the war were contained entirely within Gaza, it’s hard to describe a policy that directly implicates the White House in tens of thousands of civilian deaths as a success.

The White House has sidelined considerable dissent within the State Department, relying instead on a tight circle of hawks led by Brett McGurk, a holdover from previous administrations, including Trump’s. Since the start of the Biden presidency, McGurk’s singular priority has been normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia; he regarded Palestinians as irrelevant before October 7 and since then has seen them as expendable. In January, Akbar Shahid Ahmed, a diplomatic correspondent for HuffPost, exposed McGurk’s secret plan to expedite Saudi-Israeli normalization and to offer a Saudi-funded reconstruction of Gaza as leverage to impose a new Israel-friendly government over the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. The White House was so embarrassed that it accused Ahmed of making up quotes by senior US officials—a serious and unsubstantiated charge.

Still, as the casualties in Gaza mounted, the administration seemingly attempted to distance itself from Netanyahu through a steady series of anonymous leaks and occasional half-hearted public statements indicating that Biden and various senior officials had repeatedly attempted to rein in Israel. A December 28 Axios scoop, for instance, describes a “frustrating” phone call between Biden and Netanyahu; per one unnamed US official, “The feeling was that the president is going out on a limb for Bibi every day and when Bibi needs to give something back and take some political risk he is unwilling to do it.” The same basic narrative was playing out almost six months later; a New York Times report in May documents a seemingly never-ending series of White House “frustrations.” The administration clearly wants the public to be aware of Biden’s annoyance with Netanyahu, but for months it failed to hold Netanyahu meaningfully accountable, even as it made some criminally insufficient gestures toward alleviating what the US Agency for International Development warned could be a famine “unprecedented in modern history” and what Cindy McCain, whom Biden appointed as head of the World Food Program, called “a full-blown famine” in northern Gaza in early May.

After seven months of this dance, Biden finally took what seemed to be a significant public step toward holding Netanyahu accountable. He paused a shipment of bombs to Israel in protest of Netanyahu’s decision to proceed with an invasion of Rafah, the enclave in southern Gaza on the Egyptian border where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have fled from the devastated north. Neither the United States nor its allies in Cairo want to see a Palestinian refugee crisis spill over the heavily fortified border with Egypt, and Netanyahu’s repeated intransigence seemingly pushed Biden over the edge. “Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs,” Biden told CNN on May 8, marking his first public acknowledgment of US culpability in Palestinian civilian deaths. “I made it clear that if they go into Rafah—they haven’t gone in Rafah yet—if they go into Rafah, I’m not supplying the weapons that have been used historically to deal with Rafah, to deal with the cities—that deal with that problem,” the president added.

But in fact Israel had begun firing on Rafah, and a week later the assault showed no signs of slowing down, as Biden announced another $1 billion arms sale to the Jewish state, confounding many of his supporters. Israel already has sufficient arms to carry out its invasion; Biden’s weapons pause was a warning shot, but he undercut it almost immediately. As long as Palestinians are still being killed, it’s unlikely that he’ll bank any goodwill with the left, but he has managed to alienate centrist and center-right voices that support Israel, as columns by Mark Penn, Bret Stephens, and others show. “We are deeply alarmed by indications of US delays and possible curtailment of weapons for Israel,” tweeted the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of the pause. “This move undermines our ally Israel, fails to put pressure on Hamas and emboldens terror while energizing Hezbollah and Iran, who specialize in toxic antisemitism and rabid anti-Zionism.”

On May 31, Biden declared in his strongest language to date that it was “time for this war to end,” claiming that Israel had fully degraded Hamas’s capacity to carry out future attacks and that Israel itself had advanced an actionable cease-fire plan. The president urged Israel to follow through on that plan and suggested that he would not back an indefinite Israeli occupation of Gaza. Three weeks later, however, the war was still ongoing amid denials from Israeli officials that Israel had in fact proposed the cease-fire deal Biden described; in a daytime raid that successfully rescued four Israeli hostages, Israel killed a reported 274 Palestinians in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Meanwhile, as Israeli politicians maneuver ahead of possible new elections, the leaders of both parties in Washington are preparing to reward Netanyahu next month with an appearance before a joint session of Congress, where the Israeli prime minister will have the opportunity to pose as a triumphant statesman who defeated Hamas while preserving American military and diplomatic support. In early June, Blinken met with Netanyahu and reportedly pledged to roll back the previous month’s limitations on arms shipments, which Netanyahu argued had strengthened Iran’s strategic position. Just yesterday, on the same day The Washington Post reported that the Biden administration strong-armed Democratic lawmakers into voting for a major arms sale to Israel, despite reservations from some that the weapons would be used against civilians, Netanyahu brazenly attacked Biden and Blinken for supposedly withholding weapons and ammunition.

Clearly, Netanyahu feels free to ignore the White House’s warnings and keep doing what he’s doing, confident that the only consequence he’ll face is negative press. To Democratic voters opposed to the war, Biden not only looks complicit; he looks weak—and no doubt that suits Netanyahu just fine. In backing Israel for months before belatedly and inadequately pressuring it, Biden has managed to please no one. It’s a policy in keeping with his long history of supporting the Jewish state while occasionally criticizing it—and during the more than 50 years Biden has maintained that posture, Israel’s political center has drifted steadily further to the right, settlements have expanded, and the prospect of peace has become ever more elusive.

If Biden were merely a committed hawk, he might have managed this crisis with a discernible strategy—though not necessarily one that would have pleased left-wing critics of Israel. He might, for instance, have provided even more full-throated support to Netanyahu’s government, without the constant professions of “frustration”; alternatively, he might have thrown US support fully behind Israel’s centrist opposition, which is no less committed than Netanyahu to total war with Hamas, and attempted to box Netanyahu out. Or he might have even modeled himself after a traditional realist like James Baker—who was no peacenik but rather a champion of cold-blooded realpolitik on behalf of what he saw as the American national interest—and taken a much tougher line on military aid to Israel, asserting US prerogatives as a global superpower.

But Biden has done none of these things. Since October 7, he has drawn red lines he has no intention of enforcing and allowed Netanyahu to repeatedly humiliate him and get away with it, strengthening the Israeli prime minister both with his domestic constituency and with the American right, which may very well regain control of US foreign policy as a result. Morally, strategically, politically—from any perspective, Biden’s Middle East policy has been a dismal mess. It’s as if he has taken half a century of incoherence on Israel and compressed it into what may turn out to be a single presidential term.

Anyone who writes about current events knows how cruel the gap between final edits and publication can be. Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, certainly does. On October 2, 2023, Foreign Affairs closed a print issue that included a 7,000-word article by Sullivan intended to offer a comprehensive overview of the global situation on Biden’s watch. In it, Sullivan boasted that the Middle East “is quieter than it has been for decades” and that “we’ve de-escalated crises in Gaza.” Five days after those lines went to press, and 17 days before their publication, Hamas launched a sneak attack on southern Israel that resulted in some 1,200 Israeli casualties and the capture of more than 200 hostages. Over the ensuing months, Israel has retaliated with a merciless war on Gaza that has killed or injured tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians and that has expanded into a wider regional struggle between the United States and Iran, incorporating military exchanges from Yemen to Syria to Iraq. Notwithstanding Sullivan’s unfortunately timed assessment, the Middle East under Biden is anything but quiet. As Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently put it, “We’ve not seen a situation as dangerous as the one we’re facing now across the region since at least 1973.”

The Internationalists, the new book by the Politico national security reporter Alexander Ward, suffers from similarly awkward timing. An account of the first two years of Biden’s foreign-policy team, The Internationalists closes with a speech that Sullivan gave in April 2023, some 10 months before the book’s publication, meaning that it does not cover the October 7 Hamas attack or its ongoing, cataclysmic aftermath. Ward, as he explains in the book’s acknowledgments, set out “to write a story of a team that came in with immense confidence, lost it during the withdrawal of Afghanistan, and found their mojo again with the defense of Ukraine.” He delivers that exact arc, and also delivers on his expressed intention to produce “a helpful second draft of history for those seeking to go deeper,” but the book’s resilient-comeback narrative has already been undermined by global events.

This is in no sense Ward’s fault—unlike Sullivan, he bears no responsibility for the state of US policy in the Middle East or anywhere else—but it does cast the principal subjects of his book in a different light than he presumably wanted or expected. Written with what was clearly extensive access, The Internationalists reflects the weaknesses as well as the strengths of Biden’s foreign policy advisers. Team Biden members see themselves as a group of sober-minded yet idealistic professionals who took office intending to end wars and to repair America’s ailing body politic at home and its damaged reputation abroad in the wake of Donald Trump. Nevertheless, on their watch the United States has been drawn into a set of major new wars whose unintended consequences threaten to prematurely end the Biden presidency and transfer the reins of global power back to Trump. Like Ward, they had set out to tell an uplifting story about American global leadership, but at some point they lost the plot.

Along with Jake Sullivan and Antony Blinken, the key figures on Biden’s foreign-policy team include Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, and, of course, Biden himself. Of these, Sullivan features most prominently in Ward’s book—both the first chapter and the epilogue are structured around him, and we learn more about his personal background than anyone else’s. One gets the sense that Sullivan and Ward spoke often and that Ward identifies with him. Though the main role of any national security adviser is to advise the president, each individual to hold the job brings their own unique approach, and Sullivan’s particular talent seems to be as a crafter of narratives designed to appeal to journalists.

Sullivan, who’s 47, is an earnest meritocrat out of central casting. He’s the son of a professor and a guidance counselor and the product of Minneapolis public schools, where, Ward informs us, he was named “Most Likely to Succeed,” where “teachers fawned over his ability to hand in flawlessly written assignments,” and where “he led the student council while winning debate tournaments and quiz bowls.” After this almost idyllic Midwestern upbringing, Sullivan headed east and charted a swift path through the most prestigious institutions, earning BA and law degrees at Yale. He also became a Rhodes scholar and a Supreme Court clerk before his stints campaigning and then working for Senator Amy Klobuchar. Soon enough, Sullivan was advising Hillary Clinton on her first unsuccessful run for president in 2008 and then as she took the helm at the State Department under Barack Obama. Had Clinton won the presidency in 2016, Sullivan very likely would have been tapped as national security adviser before his 40th birthday.

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Instead, Sullivan spent the Trump years in the wilderness, trying to understand what went wrong and how Democratic foreign policy might be reimagined in response. Along with fellow wunderkind and Obama foreign-policy adviser Ben Rhodes, Sullivan established a shadow policy team, dubbed National Security Action, with the goal of crafting a new doctrine for whichever Democrat ended up facing Trump in 2020. Some of the group’s big ideas were intended as responses to Trump’s populist rhetoric and its rough counterpart on the left flank of the Democratic Party, both of which argued in different ways that the domestic economic needs of ordinary Americans had been neglected during the endless post-9/11 wars.

Trump’s victory had made Sullivan mindful of the economic challenges facing “everyday Americans,” who “reminded him of the folks he grew up with in Minnesota”; now he wanted “to look at strategic decisions”—that is, national- security policies—“through the lens of how they would affect the well-being of Americans at home.” That could mean a tariff-driven industrial policy that prioritized domestic manufacturing, in a departure from the reigning neoliberal trade consensus; it could mean reinvigorating America’s democratic institutions in the wake of Trump’s authoritarian moves at home and embrace of autocrats abroad; it could mean ending the post-9/11 “Forever War” and finally winding down the US presence in Afghanistan. Sullivan called his proposals a “foreign policy for the middle class,” and they soon found their way into the Biden transition team’s position papers (“basically carbon copies,” as one official described them).

Meanwhile, a larger team began to take shape. Blinken, the stepson of a Holocaust survivor who advised presidents, grew up “discussing everything from geopolitics to music and art in [his family’s] spacious home in Paris’s 16th arrondissement” and carefully evolved from a left-leaning Harvard Crimson opinion writer to a more moderate champion of democracy promotion and the “rules-based international order.” He also, Ward notes archly, “knew how to make a buck” in the private sector, having founded a lucrative political consulting firm during the Trump years. Biden liked him because he “was loyal and shared a similar love for corny jokes.”

Lloyd Austin, the first African American to run the Pentagon, was likely chosen in part because he had served in Iraq with Biden’s beloved son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015. Biden valued Austin for being empathetic and spotlight-
shy and for prioritizing loyalty over bureaucratic infighting. And then there was Avril Haines, the first woman to serve as director of national intelligence (who, Ward notes not once but twice, had once run a bookstore that hosted regular erotica readings). Haines is credited for her dispassionate briefings and analytical mind; her management of the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine, during which US intelligence repeatedly outfoxed its Russian counterpart, might be the most impressive thing anyone does in The Internationalists. Together, this motley crew became known as the “A-Team,” after the action series that at least some of them probably grew up watching in the 1980s.

Biden’s own biography has been recounted in many other places, but suffice it to say that he makes for a striking contrast with this A-Team—from Sullivan, the academic whiz kid, to the worldly, almost aristocratic Blinken. Biden’s administration may be staffed with the best and the brightest, but the president himself was a mediocre student who attended his local state university and a lower-tier law school. He comes from an era before the political class was fully professionalized, when prestige and polish counted for less and folksiness counted for more. Biden’s gut instincts sometimes align naturally with the policy prescriptions of Sullivan and Blinken, but other times, it’s as if they are trying to shape policy around what they know the boss wants.

This temperamental gulf between Biden and his advisers is illustrated most dramatically in the debates about the US military withdrawal from Afghanistan, which Biden insisted had to be completed within his first year in office and ahead of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. To the anti-war left, Biden’s stubbornness on this point could be read as one of his greatest strengths. As Obama’s vice president, he had famously dissented on the decision to surge troops into Afghanistan in 2009, which prolonged the war by more than a decade. But for Biden, the matter was as much personal as political: Because of Beau’s service, he had a particular sensitivity to military families and an overriding desire to bring the troops home from what he had judged long ago to be a futile war.

With regard to Afghanistan, there was little daylight between Biden and progressives like the Marine veteran Alexander McCoy, the leader of the anti-war group Common Defense, who features prominently in The Internationalists as one of the activists the West Wing coordinated with on the withdrawal. Much of the Beltway foreign-policy establishment and the military elite—in particular Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—disagreed. They were invested deeply in salvaging some sort of military victory in Afghanistan; the sunk-cost fallacy weighed powerfully over Washington. The A-Team ended up having to implement the president’s will in the face of institutional resistance, and the outcome was a fiasco—what Ward calls “the Great Humbling.”

Anyone who followed the news in the summer of 2021 will recall what made this moment such a humbling one: As US troops started pulling out, Taliban forces seized control of the whole country far more rapidly than the Biden team had anticipated. The US-trained Afghan Army melted away, Kabul surrendered to the Taliban, and the hapless President Ashraf Ghani fled abroad. The evacuation of US personnel and the Afghan citizens who had cooperated with them was hastily improvised, in part through a mass volunteer effort by heartbroken US national-security professionals. Defenders of Biden’s decision argued that the speed of Afghanistan’s collapse proved he was right all along; critics countered that the small remaining force Biden inherited when he took office could have been maintained in the country indefinitely as a low-cost investment in regional stability. Either way, the withdrawal itself went disastrously, and the president’s approval numbers plummeted.

Ward recounts how Biden faced demands to make some heads roll in the aftermath of the pullout, and perhaps that might have been the politically savvy move. But Biden stood by his A-Team: “Leaving Afghanistan was always going to be messy,” Ward writes, summarizing the White House’s internal consensus. Still, everyone felt chastened by what had happened, and Sullivan perhaps most of all. “More than anyone,” Ward notes, Sullivan “was looking to get the administration a much-needed win.”

The idea of “getting a win” for the Biden administration is representative of a larger problem with how the A-Team views US foreign policy. Their decisions have real and often bloody consequences on the ground, but wins and losses are tallied in terms of the political consequences for Biden and the professional standing of his advisers. What these wins and losses might mean for the rest of the world is rarely remarked upon. Sullivan and his colleagues are instead concerned with how a failure (stipulating that’s what it was) in Afghanistan can be redeemed by a success (if that’s what it is) in Ukraine. But does a triumphant outcome in one country offset a dismal outcome in another? Sullivan and his colleagues seem to think so, and Ward seems to agree, but what about the Afghans and Ukrainians—which policies are wins and which are losses for them?

The narrowness of The Internationalists’ framing is noticeable in Ward’s section about the run-up to the war in Ukraine. Ward casts US support for Ukraine as redemptive for Team Biden: He describes, as they would, how America successfully stood up for a beleaguered democracy invaded by its far larger authoritarian neighbor. Even so, much of this section reads like a series of cascading disasters—from the failed diplomatic campaign to prevent Vladimir Putin from doing the unthinkable to the frustrating efforts to persuade Volodymyr Zelensky that an invasion was imminent. In Ward’s telling, Biden and his team never sought war and tried at every opportunity to avert it, and this is probably correct as far as it goes, but of course the backstory of the Ukraine war didn’t begin under the Biden administration; it was the result of years of escalating tensions between the US and Russia, tensions that were sometimes stoked by hawks in Washington. The war that resulted hasn’t been an unmitigated success either, especially after last summer’s failed Ukrainian counteroffensive; proclaiming it a redemption story for American foreign policy is premature at best.

Ward might have framed the Ukraine war a little more skeptically had he focused more on one of the key figures shaping US policy toward Russia and Ukraine both before and during the Biden administration: Victoria Nuland, the outgoing under secretary of state for political affairs, whom Ward himself describes, in one of the few times he refers to her, as “notorious for her years as a staunch Russia hawk.” Nuland’s consistently aggressive posture toward Russia in the lead-up to the war, which Ward notes initially put her in a minority within the Biden administration, has drawn intense scrutiny from Moscow; her many years as a Russian policy hand, in a career spanning the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations, point to a deeper backstory to the current crisis. However one feels about Nuland or her policy preferences, she is an example of how US foreign policy operates on a longer timeline than any one presidency; had Ward emphasized her a bit more, he might have also been able to shed some light on how Team Biden came to be so deeply enmeshed in Ukraine.

An analogous figure who appears only briefly in The Internationalists is Brett McGurk, who in recent months has become widely recognized as a key player shaping Biden’s increasingly controversial Middle East policy. Like Nuland, McGurk is a hawk and a veteran of multiple administrations under both parties (though unlike Nuland, he even served during the Trump years). McGurk has been primarily responsible for the Biden administration’s overriding priority of brokering a normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel—an extension of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner’s “Abraham Accords”—and it has also been under his watch that the status of the Palestinians has remained a marginal issue in US Middle East policy, at least until Hamas forced it into international headlines last fall. McGurk comes up only briefly in The Internationalists, when an anonymous source in touch with administration officials blames him for how the administration was caught flat-footed by the war between Hamas and Israel that broke out in May 2021. Had Ward followed McGurk’s story more closely, and had the Middle East taken up more than one chapter, his book might have cast the overarching priorities of US foreign policy in a more cynical light. By centering the A-Team and replicating its de-emphasis on the Middle East, Ward is instead able to tell a more sympathetic story—albeit one that already feels dated.

Sullivan’s speech at the Brookings Institution at the end of The Internationalists makes for an odd coda. It returns to the themes of a “middle class”–oriented, post-globalization foreign policy that Ward emphasizes in his introduction, even as most of the book has been focused on the management of long-standing national-security issues and geopolitical crises that are only secondarily connected to such a policy. (According to its index, the term “middle class” comes up multiple times in the book’s first chapter and epilogue, but is barely mentioned anywhere in between.) Yet in Ward’s view, Sullivan’s speech, and his tenure in office, marked an important break: In criticizing the Washington consensus on globalization, Sullivan “was dismantling, point by point, the dominant world view that Biden held for decades and that the national security adviser grew up believing until Donald Trump won the election in November 2016.”

It’s certainly true, as Ward notes, that Sullivan and the Biden team broke with the Beltway consensus on their divisive decision to leave Afghanistan and that they paid real political costs for doing so. It’s also true that on domestic economic policy, Biden took significant cues from the Bernie Sanders–Elizabeth Warren wing of the party, in a departure from the Clinton and Obama administrations. On the other hand, in Eastern Europe, the administration has been pulled into a hellish quagmire that has put significant strain on the global economy, and by extension the American middle class, threatening Sullivan’s own political vision along with Biden’s reelection.

In the Middle East, too, the policies of the administration have damaged Biden’s popularity and thus put his domestic accomplishments at risk. The A-Team inherited and maintained a dysfunctional status quo policy that, mere months after Sullivan’s speech, would deteriorate into a calamitous war in Gaza and implicate Washington in the collective punishment of Palestinian civilians—a policy that horrifies large numbers of key Democratic constituencies while doing nothing to materially benefit most Americans. And this is to say nothing of a potential confrontation with China over the Taiwan Strait, which looms in the background of The Internationalists as it does over US foreign policy in general. Given all this, Ward’s anodyne, Sullivan-channeling conclusion—“America was ready for renewal. The world was there to remake. There were at least two more years to get it done”—reads as more than a little off.

Sullivan comes across in the book as bright, competent, and well-intentioned, even if his thinking remains far more conventional than he wants it to seem. But good intentions will get you only so far when your job is to steer an imperial superpower through the multiple crises that it spent years getting itself into. Ward likewise does a capable job of recounting how Sullivan and the Biden team have tried to navigate those crises, but The Internationalists would be more compelling if it looked deeper into the underlying contradictions that make US foreign policy so crisis-prone in the first place. One has to squint pretty hard to see what most of these overseas entanglements have to do with the well-being of the American middle class, however one defines it, and one has to squint even harder to see how any of them might be considered wins.

When director Jonathan Glazer won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film for The Zone of Interest earlier this month, he used his acceptance speech to deliver the night’s sole statement on the war in Gaza in front of a global audience. After noting that his film—which depicts the quotidian life of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife and children in their home outside the gates of the concentration camp—is intended to be as much about the present as the past, Glazer, trembling, said this: “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.”

Though many viewers misunderstood the awkwardly worded statement—some innocently, others deliberately—its plain meaning was that Glazer and the other predominantly Jewish men involved in producing The Zone of Interest were speaking out against Israel’s assault on Gaza, and were doing so as Jews. Far from refuting their Jewishness—as some of their critics would claim—Glazer was rather speaking againt the abuse of Jewish identity in the service of a brutal war against Palestinian civilians.

At least some in the ceremony’s audience of Hollywood A-listers applauded Glazer, but the subsequent backlash has been louder. On social media, the reaction from right-wing supporters of Israel was perhaps best summed up by Commentary editor in chief John Podhoretz, who tweeted, “Jonathan Glazer, you can go fuck yourself and stuff your Oscar up your ass.” To Podhoretz and his neoconservative ilk, Glazer instantly became the most prominent example of what Commentary contributor Eli Lake recently termed an “AsAJew”—that is, a Jew who weaponizes their Jewish identity to criticize Israel and Zionism. The slur, which Lake has also directed against Peter Beinart, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Norman Finkelstein, is essentially an updated version of the older terms “self-hating Jew” and “kapo.” Writing in The New York Times this week, Bret Stephens called Lake’s “AsAJew” essay “brilliant” and added, in reference to Glazer, “Having once had a bar or bat mitzvah does not make one a spokesperson for Jews, much less an authority on the Middle East.”

Yet it’s clear Glazer’s remarks struck a nerve. Earlier this week, over 1,000 Jewish creatives in the film industry signed an open letter denouncing his remarks and denying the very existence of an “occupation.” While the list of signers included a handful of notable names like Debra Messing, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Tovah Feldshuh, it’s remarkable how many prominent Jews in Hollywood didn’t sign; several, including Tony Kushner and Jesse Peretz, have defended Glazer. The speech has also prompted some incoherent reconsideration of The Zone of Interest itself, which was made entirely before the war in Gaza and has only retroactively come to be associated with it. On Tuesday, CNN published a piece by Peter Rutland, a professor of government at Wesleyan, arguing that “in some important respects, the film is even more troubling than Glazer’s speech.” Rutland went on to demonstrate a basic lack of understanding of both The Zone of Interest and of Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil,” which the film clearly draws upon. “Arendt was wrong,” Rutland wrote, adding, “Höss was not just a bored bureaucrat and family man. He was a fanatical Nazi.”

It’s telling that Rutland sees any contradiction there. Höss, as portrayed in the film, is indeed a bored bureaucrat, a family man—and a fanatical Nazi all at once. His wife, Hedwig, is likewise a typical hausfrau and a fanatical Nazi. The Zone of Interest makes a lot of critics uncomfortable because it dares to suggest that ordinary people can be actively, willfully complicit in genocide. Arendt’s own famous reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s trial is often misunderstood in this exact way; it was Eichmann himself who disingenuously maintained that he was just following orders by way of defense. “The banality of evil” doesn’t mean that bored bureaucrats follow genocidal orders unthinkingly, and doesn’t preclude their agreeing with the substance of those orders.

Glazer’s artistic intent with The Zone of Interest clearly flew right over the head of, for instance, New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who began her review by asking, “What is the point of ‘The Zone of Interest’?” and later calls it “a blunt, obvious movie.” Others, like former Anti-Defamation League director Abraham Foxman, seemed initially to appreciate the film as a commemoration of the Holocaust—then balked at Glazer’s connecting the Holocaust to the war in Gaza. But, as I wrote in an essay for the Times ahead of the Oscars, The Zone of Interest “demands that we reflect not only on the Holocaust but also on our own degrees of complicity in the horrors that we know are being carried out on the other sides of figurative and literal walls today.”

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The most urgent such horrors at the moment are in Gaza, and it’s not a coincidence that so many of Glazer’s critics are also fervent defenders of Israel’s indiscriminate bombing campaign against the crowded Palestinian enclave over the past five months. Before Glazer’s Oscar speech, they might have interpreted The Zone of Interest to be saying merely that the Nazis were bad people, a point that a critic like Dargis might find dull and unnecessary in 2024. But since the Oscars, everyone understands that the film is making a broader argument, and that its portrayal of the Hösses is in some sense an indictment of ordinary people who would champion the slaughter of Palestinian civilians. Those who feel most directly indicted are lashing out; hit dogs holler.

For those of us who appreciate The Zone of Interest in the spirit in which Glazer intended it, and who share his basic perspective on Gaza, what’s additionally striking is how measured his remarks were. Glazer did not demand a free Palestine from the river to the sea, did not comment on whether Zionism is inherently racist, and did not deny the suffering of Israelis on October 7 (in fact, he cast them as victims of the occupation, just as Palestinians are). All he did was attempt to reclaim Jewish identity and Holocaust memory from their propagandistic use in the service of Israel’s military campaign, and to suggest that the lessons of the Holocaust might apply to atrocities committed by Jews and not only those committed against Jews. The ferocious response suggests that Glazer’s critics now recognize themselves in Rudolf and Hedwig Höss, and they’ll never forgive Glazer for that.

As Israeli missiles continue to pound Gaza—killing, at most recent estimate, more than six times as many people as were killed by Hamas in its bloody October 7 incursion, including thousands of children—a cease-fire has become the consensus demand of progressive activist groups like IfNotNow and Jewish Voice for Peace. It has also become the demand of many of the most high-profile progressive members of Congress.

Just two days after Hamas’s attack, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was calling for an end to the violence. “An immediate ceasefire and de-escalation is urgently needed to save lives,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement. A week later, AOC signed the Ceasefire Now Resolution along with 11 of her progressive House colleagues, including fellow “Squad” members Jamaal Bowman, Rashida Tlaib, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar.

But the call for a cease-fire has yet to receive the backing of the single most influential progressive on Capitol Hill: Senator Bernie Sanders. The Vermont socialist, whose trailblazing presidential runs helped inspire a generation of left-wing activists, including everyone in the Squad, has stubbornly avoided using the term “cease-fire,” even as he calls for a “humanitarian pause” in Israel’s assault to get aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. 

Sanders has stuck to this position even as calls for a cease-fire have started to move from the edges of the Democratic Party to its center. On Thursday, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate, became the first senator to endorse a cease-fire when a TV interviewer pressed the issue; though Durbin is relatively progressive, commentators like MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan took note that he got out ahead of Sanders, the left’s standard-bearer in the Senate.

Many in Sanders’s orbit have also backed a cease-fire. Matt Duss, the executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, who served as Sanders’s foreign policy adviser from 2017 to 2022, endorsed the goal of a cease-fire in The Guardian this week, urging progressive activists to “continue to apply pressure to those not yet courageous enough to support a cessation of this horror.” At the same time, Duss cautioned against “a false binary between whether Israel should be taking any military action or not,” arguing that the distinction between “humanitarian pause” and “cease-fire” is largely semantic, that the former can be extended to the latter and the latter is not a peace treaty, and that the important thing is to protect civilian lives and oppose Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas without necessarily opposing targeted military action against Hamas leaders. Though Duss no longer works for Sanders, he remains in contact with the senator and with his successor as foreign policy adviser, Max Hoffman; from his position, it makes sense to call for a big-tent approach to rein in Israel’s assault.

But for many on the left who passionately supported Sanders in 2016 and 2020, the refusal to call for an actual cease-fire is baffling. “How many dead Palestinians is enough for Bernie Sanders to call for a ceasefire? We learned today that it is higher than 8,000, how high it actually is is still not known,” tweeted Palestinian-American writer Yousef Munayyer on Wednesday. Daniel Denvir, host of Jacobin’s popular podcast The Dig, contrasted “the Squad’s leadership demanding a ceasefire while Bernie breaks our hearts, refusing to speak out against genocide.” Felix Biederman, cohost of the left-wing podcast Chapo Trap House, which ferociously championed Sanders’s presidential runs, had the harshest words of all for Sanders: Israel, he wrote, “is doing their best to end all life in Gaza and the most you can offer is suggesting a brief timeout while assuring them that they’re allowed to do whatever they want. hope you live just long enough to see Biden lose and the last years of your life wasted.”

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Sanders is the most powerful leftist Jewish politician in America. He has been a consistent critic of Israel. He is well aware of the horrors being inflicted on Gaza. He would seem to be an obvious spokesman for a cease-fire. And yet he has clearly taken a firm decision not to call for one.

To understand where Sanders is coming from, it helps to know a little about his personal history. Though he is well to the left of his Senate colleagues and has consistently voiced support for the basic human rights of Palestinians and criticized the Israel lobby, Sanders is in many ways a product of the liberal Zionist tradition. During his 2020 campaign, Sanders advisers urged the instinctively private candidate to talk more about his Jewish background, including the fact that his father, an immigrant from Poland, lost most of his family in the Holocaust. The slaughter of Europe’s Jews is deeply personal for Sanders, and it likely factors into his response to the October 7 attacks, which were the single deadliest day for Jews anywhere in the world since 1945. The members of the Squad, who come from a wide diversity of backgrounds and are on average many decades younger than Sanders, lack this direct connection to the personal trauma that many American Jews of Sanders’s generation feel.

They also lack his direct connection to Israel itself, including his time living on a socialist kibbutz near Haifa in 1963. As Sanders wrote in Jewish Currents in 2019, “It was there that I saw and experienced for myself many of the progressive values upon which Israel was founded. I think it is very important for everyone, but particularly for progressives, to acknowledge the enormous achievement of establishing a democratic homeland for the Jewish people after centuries of displacement and persecution.” Sanders went on to acknowledge that Palestinians experienced the founding of Israel very differently, “as the cause of their painful displacement,” and to call for a two-state solution. His understanding of the conflict is basically indistinguishable from that of J Street, the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” organization that many progressive Democrats prefer to the increasingly right-wing AIPAC—and J Street has refused to back a cease-fire, though it has called for humanitarian pauses.

Sanders, it should be acknowledged, has called for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza and the killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians, warned against a ground invasion, and insisted on more humanitarian aid—and the practical effects of his demands would more or less amount to a cease-fire. A defender of Sanders might reasonably ask why the word “cease-fire” is essential, while a critic might respond that if that’s what he supports then he shouldn’t have so much difficulty saying it. But the truth is that there is a meaningful ideological distinction to be drawn between calling for a cease-fire and calling for a humanitarian pause: The latter acknowledges that some military operations by Israel might theoretically be legitimate, even if much of what they’re doing in practice is not.

Those on the left who demand a cease-fire are saying, in effect, that we don’t identify with Israel’s desire to wipe out Hamas militarily, because we see everything that’s happening in the context of a decades-old colonial project in which Israel is fundamentally the aggressor. By contrast, those who call for a humanitarian pause may acknowledge the need to protect Palestinian civilians, or that Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza is brutal and unjustified, or even that Israel owns its share of responsibility for the underlying conflict—but still, they insist, Israel was attacked by Hamas on October 7 and has some right to respond in kind. Sanders has been clear that this is where he stands. “Israel suffered a major attack and has, as do all other countries under similar circumstances, the absolute right to defend itself,” he said last week.

To put my own cards on the table, I wish Sanders would call for a cease-fire, and as a longtime supporter and admirer, I’m disappointed that he hasn’t. I understand the reasons why, but I don’t think they excuse the call he’s made. At the same time, I’d like to think Sanders appreciates that so many young activists aren’t relying on him for cues on how to talk about this unfolding atrocity. Instead, they are organizing and demonstrating on their own terms, based on their own collective sense of what is morally demanded of them right now. As Sanders has said many times, the movement is much bigger than him.

In his speech from the Oval Office on October 20, President Biden drew a direct parallel between two ongoing wars in which the United States is intimately involved: the Russia-Ukraine war that has raged since February 2022, and Israel’s rapidly expanding war in the Palestinian territories following the October 7 Hamas attacks. “The assault on Israel echoes nearly 20 months of war, tragedy, and brutality inflicted on the people of Ukraine,” said Biden. “Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy.” It’s an awkward, even offensive, comparison.

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Russia is Ukraine’s former imperial master and a much larger and more powerful country. Most Americans rightly understand Russia to be waging a straightforward war of aggression—and that by refusing to surrender to Russia, Ukrainians have been engaged in a war of resistance, defending their basic right to sovereignty. By contrast, it is Israel that militarily dominates the Palestinians, not the other way around. It’s Israel that occupies the West Bank and colonizes it with settlers in violation of international law; Israel that maintains the suffocating blockade that keeps more than 2 million Palestinians trapped in Gaza and dependent on Israel for food, water, and electricity; Israel that has international legal recognition, a high-tech army, and, like Russia, nuclear weapons.

And yet in Biden’s framing, Israel is the underdog, which is how he morally justifies his proposal to grant Israel billions of dollars in new military aid (part of a $105 billion package that also includes additional aid to Ukraine and money for US border security). Biden’s comparison of Putin, the dictator of a major world power with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, to Hamas, a militant faction officially recognized by no government on earth, is laughable; it is also a succinct encapsulation of US policy.

But as strange as Biden’s formulation may seem, he’s not alone; Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky drew a similar analogy just days after Hamas’s incursion into Israel, telling the NATO Parliamentary Assembly that Russia and Hamas are “the same evil, and the only difference is that there is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel, and here is a terrorist state that attacked Ukraine.” In fact, Zelensky has been associating Ukraine with Israel since well before the Hamas attacks; in April 2022, he told Haaretz that he expected Ukraine to develop less as a “liberal, European” state than as a “Big Israel.” “We will not be surprised if we have representatives of the armed forces or the national guard in cinemas, supermarkets, and people with weapons,” said Zelensky. “I am confident that the question of security will be issue number one for the next ten years.”

From the perspective of international law, it should be clear that Russia and Israel are the occupying powers in their respective wars, and that Ukrainians and Palestinians are occupied peoples resisting domination. But from a different perspective, Ukraine as a “Big Israel” almost makes sense. Both countries present themselves as being on the front lines of a global struggle between the developed West and the proverbial barbarians at the gates. The globe-trotting French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy recently drew a set of parallels between Ukraine and Israel on Twitter: “Same values at stake (democracy & liberalism),” Lévy wrote. “Therefore, same fight. #StandwithIsrael #StandwithUkraine” To Lévy, Israel and Ukraine belong to the liberal West, while Russia, Iran, and Hamas are the West’s civilizational enemies.

Ukraine’s long-term geopolitical goal is membership in the European Union and NATO, confirming its status as an integral part of Europe. Its support has come primarily from the major Western countries, led by the United States; in the rest of the world, there has been an almost uniform refusal to accept Washington’s framing of the conflict, while Putin, who has attempted to position himself as a leader of the resistance to Western global hegemony, was one of the first world leaders to call for a diplomatic resolution to the current crisis, as opposed to backing Israel’s military response. Israel likewise relies heavily on Western—above all US—support and has often struggled diplomatically in the Global South, where public opinion typically regards the Palestinians as fighting an anti-colonial struggle. (Israel has stayed essentially neutral between Russia and Ukraine, given its extensive ties to both countries.)

At least in the United States, Ukraine has had little difficulty presenting itself to a receptive public as the clear underdog. Israel has traditionally played a similar role in the US imagination since its 1948 founding; as its position in the Middle East has grown steadily more secure (and its position over the Palestinians steadily more dominant) over subsequent decades, Israeli has put considerable resources into propaganda casting itself as besieged and vulnerable. The US media has overwhelmingly accepted this framing, which helps explain why Americans tend to sympathize with Israel over the Palestinians—especially in the wake of the October 7 attacks, a rare and viscerally upsetting example of mass violence against Israeli civilians.

In general, US progressives have tended to support Ukraine while being far more critical of Israel and increasingly vocal about the basic justice of the Palestinian cause. By drawing close parallels between the two conflicts, Biden risks weakening progressive support for Ukraine—already fragile in some quarters given a stalled counteroffensive, global anxiety about food and energy price spikes, and the skepticism many on the left feel about long-term US military commitments. Biden’s conflation of these two very different wars undermines any argument that the US supports Ukraine out of a principled defense of the right to self-determination. Instead, he’s sent a message to the world that these principles only apply to Western-coded client states fighting America’s geopolitical and civilizational rivals. Given Biden’s sagging approval rating, it could even create an opening for the Trump-led Republicans to push to withdraw aid to Ukraine and to find more cross-partisan support for that position than they might have.

That would be a tragedy for the Ukrainians, whose right to freedom from foreign military occupation is inherent and shouldn’t depend on anyone’s particular political alignment any more than Palestinians’ should. Writing in this magazine the week of Russia’s invasion, Yousef Munayyer criticized the double standards of those in Western media who (rightly, in his view) champion the right of Ukrainians to resist occupation by force while hypocritically denying Palestinians the same right. “If we want there to be an international norm against aggression, colonization, and the acquisition of land by force, we can’t keep making exceptions for our friends when they violate it,” Munayyer wrote. But not only has Biden made an exception for Israel; he’s made a tortured case that Israel is in fact the victim of the very aggression it carries out.

Those of us on the left who support both the Ukrainians and the Palestinians in their respective struggles should continue to do so, even if the Biden administration has made that harder with its clumsy and misleading analogy. The US government may not have consistent principles, but we still can.

Leon Wieseltier has been burned by the tech world twice. In 2012, three decades into his tenure as The New Republic’s literary editor, Wieseltier was reportedly “giddy” after the century-old, perpetually unprofitable magazine was acquired by Chris Hughes, a 28-year-old cofounder of Facebook. Two years later, Hughes installed a Silicon Valley veteran who promised to “break stuff” as the magazine’s chief executive and then ousted TNR’s editor, Franklin Foer, prompting the abrupt resignation of most of the editorial staff, Wieseltier included. In 2015, Wieseltier got to work on a new venture, a quarterly magazine called Idea, to be financed by Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple CEO Steve Jobs. But in 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, Wieseltier was accused of having sexually harassed female employees at The New Republic over the course of many years, and Powell Jobs quickly shut the project down. Idea, it turned out, would remain just an idea.

Both times, tech money had promised to fund Wieseltier’s editorial vision, and both times it had betrayed him—or at least that’s how he saw it. It’s no wonder, then, that three years ago, Wieseltier chose a more traditional route to make a comeback: He turned to his 91-year-old “synagogue pal” Alfred Moses, a retired white-shoe lawyer who once served as US ambassador to Romania, to finance yet another magazine. “One of the great things about this man is that he’s not from Silicon Valley,” Wieseltier said of Moses in a 2020 interview announcing the launch of Liberties, essentially the journal that Idea was supposed to be.

Everything about Liberties seems designed to thwart the Internet. The magazine has a bare-bones website; to read an issue of Liberties in its entirety, you have to purchase a $50 subscription or pay $18.95 for an individual issue. If you wanted to pull a quote out of context and dunk on it for social media’s amusement, you’d have to be unusually dedicated: Each quarterly print issue takes up the shelf space of a book, running 300 to 400 pages and featuring 15 to 20 writers, with individual articles sometimes hitting 10,000 words and taking a while to meander to their main subject. There are no illustrations or advertisements. Every cover is a different shade of monochrome. While the practitioners of most 21st-century political tendencies have embraced digital technology as necessary for reaching the widest possible audiences, Liberties is resolutely analog, a throwback to the previous century in both physical form and ideological content.

Since the magazine’s launch, Wieseltier has found plenty of famous friends willing to promote his return from exile. Aaron Sorkin, David Brooks, Bill Maher, Tina Brown, George Stephanopoulos, Mario Vargas Llosa, Christiane Amanpour, and the inimitable Tom Friedman (“It’s like a meteor of intelligent substance that landed on my desk”) have all blurbed Liberties. Maureen Dowd has hosted a conversation with the editors at the Washington mainstay Politics and Prose. These advocates aren’t exactly intellectual titans, but they do tell us something about the sort of affluent liberal reader that Liberties is likely aimed at. If the old TNR styled itself as the Beltway’s know-it-all journal of ideas and “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One,” then Liberties pitches itself more as a work of pre-digital samizdat to be passed around by an aging East Coast elite that regards its arguments as dangerous and risqué—even if, in reality, they are unlikely to provoke anyone born since the Jackson-Vanik Amendment.

It used to be a lot more fun being Leon Wieseltier. Hired in 1982 by The New Republic’s then-owner, Martin Peretz, Wieseltier turned the magazine’s “back of the book” into one of the more exciting literary reviews in the English-speaking world. He also spent a lot of time cultivating a reputation as a witty, seductive raconteur and man-about-town in stodgy Washington. A memorable 1995 Vanity Fair profile captures Wieseltier at the peak of his decadence—flirting with Barbra Streisand, dating Twyla Tharp, selling review copies of books for cocaine money, supposedly working on a “physiological/historical/philosophical critique of sighing,” and taking Tipper Gore to a metal show at the 9:30 Club. He came in for his share of mockery—not only from those D.C. journalists who regarded him as a pretentious arriviste, but also from the high-minded intellectuals he modeled himself after and whom he often sought out as mentors. As Isaiah Berlin quipped, “He’s not a finisher.”

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As he climbed the social rungs of D.C., Wieseltier became interested in politics as much as book reviews. He embraced a politics of humanitarian interventionism and befriended Samantha Power, who was writing dispatches from the Balkan Wars for The New Republic. (He even gave an epic toast at her 2008 wedding to fellow TNR contributor Cass Sunstein.) Like his rough French counterpart and frequent contributor Bernard-Henri Lévy, he styled himself in these years as the moral conscience of the world, a stalwart defender of the Rights of Man, and a man of great historical importance himself. Most dramatically, in 2014, he traveled to Kyiv to lend his support to the Maidan protesters (or, perhaps, to borrow their valor for himself). His celebrity status and his politics only bolstered his stature with Peretz and within the magazine. While editors in chief came and went—from 1996 to 1999, TNR cycled through Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, and Peter Beinart—Wieseltier was an institution and was seemingly untouchable. He even got to appear on an episode of The Sopranos.

But the conditions that had favored Wieseltier’s rise turned out to be far fickler than he had ever imagined. The Iraq War, which he’d initially championed, proved to be a fiasco. The New Republic’s finances became even more tenuous, and Peretz and the circle of investors who then owned the magazine were forced to sell. Meanwhile, a younger generation of left-leaning intellectuals had coalesced around a set of new or revived little magazines—Jacobin, Dissent, The New Inquiry, n+1, The Baffler—that forthrightly rejected The New Republic’s brand of hawkish liberalism and embraced a new socialist politics. And then #MeToo came—and for Wieseltier, too. Although Idea never came to fruition, it was not as if there were many people who would miss it. The literary and political landscape seemed to have moved past Wieseltier and everything he stood for.

Liberties is thus a conscious throwback to an earlier age when Wieseltier was a mover and a shaker, someone who played a central role in shaping the elite liberal consensus. The magazine’s contributors reflect this nostalgia and broadly fall into four camps. First, there are the staples of Wieseltier-era back-of-the-book TNR: Cass Sunstein, David Greenberg, William Deresiewicz, Martha Nussbaum, Mark Lilla, and so on, who serve as a sort of liberal old guard in the magazine. Then there are the centrists, anti-woke pundits, and neocons who have made names for themselves at other outlets: Eli Lake, James Kirchick, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Agnes Callard. Next comes probably the largest grouping: academics at name-brand universities who aren’t always name brands themselves. And finally there are the contributors who are dead: Wieseltier’s friends Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Cohen, and Fouad Ajami may have all expired before Liberties was born, but their bylines nonetheless grace its pages.

Liberties is edited entirely by the 71-year-old Wieseltier and the 27-year-old managing editor, Celeste Marcus. Despite the generational gulf between them, the two have a fair bit in common. Both received Orthodox Jewish educations in East Coast cities (he in Brooklyn, she in Philadelphia). Both escaped soon after from these religious bubbles (Wieseltier: “My faith was not sufficiently strong to withstand my desire to taste wine, eat food, and kiss women”; Marcus: “As I came increasingly to love it, I nonetheless realized that there was something essential about me that would always be at odds with the texture of that place”). Both attended Ivy League colleges in their respective hometowns (Columbia ’74; Penn ’19). Both found high-profile mentors (Lionel Trilling for him, Wieseltier for her) and both rapidly made their way into the world of magazines at publications based in Washington rather than the more crowded and competitive New York. Both profess a reverence for the Western canon and the traditional fine arts (Marcus is also an accomplished painter), and both vocally despise the platform formerly and properly known as Twitter—a platform that Wieseltier has never joined, and where he could never wield the same clout he did on the elite media party circuit. “It is a medium of communication in which nothing intellectually or linguistically substantial can be accomplished,” Wieseltier wrote about Twitter in 2014. “It can be really detrimental for a writer, and really easy for them, to decide that they will advance more professionally not by writing essays or books but by living on social media,” Marcus said on a panel last year.

Their shared disdain for the Internet, and for the wider culture and politics that it has given birth to, is evident throughout Liberties. In the first issue, Mark Lilla bemoans the tyranny of a “virtual, and global, panopticon” in which “the scanning of other people’s souls has never seemed easier.” In the second issue, published in the early months of the pandemic, Marcus warns that online education can never substitute for in-person learning. Later issues feature Bernard-Henri Lévy angsting over what the Internet has done to the physical experience of reading and Justin E.H. Smith critiquing “the model of reality in which gamified structures have jumped across the screen, from Pac-Man to Twitter or whatever it is you were playing, and now shape everything we do, from dating to car-sharing to working in an Amazon warehouse.” Technophobia is explicit in the text and implicit in the format of Liberties; the medium and the message are perfectly aligned.

The specter of #MeToo, which is ultimately why Liberties exists, comes up less often and less explicitly, but there are subtle hints. A particularly awkward example is David Thomson’s essay mourning the decline of kissing, which includes the lines “Real kisses depend on risk” and “Censorship and denunciation are Santa Ana winds on the embers of desire.” In an essay that closes out Liberties’ first issue, Wieseltier obliquely refers to his own brush with cancellation, writing: “Our epistemological jurisdiction stops at the encounter with another person. She is another epistemological kingdom, not more perfect but certainly different, with something important to add, and a perceptual contribution to make. I may like to think I am what I present myself to be, but I am also what she sees me to be, because she sees me as I cannot, or will not, see myself.” The passage is a simultaneously long-winded and noncommittal way to address the allegations that Wieseltier kissed at least two junior employees against their will, made passes at untold others, shared inappropriate sexual anecdotes in the office, and in general fostered a demeaning work environment for women at the then overwhelmingly male TNR.

Though Wieseltier likes to present himself as a blunt and uncompromising writer who does not mince words, when it comes to the subject of his own behavior, he tends to retreat into philosophical clichés and opaque turns of phrase. “The enlightenment that one acquires from the judgments of others,” he writes, “is owed only to their accuracy”—but he doesn’t say which allegations against him were inaccurate. “The ineradicability of ambiguity from human relations,” he tells us, “the ignorance of ourselves that accompanies our ignorance of others, the whole fallible heap, creates an urgent need for tolerance and, more strenuously, for forgiveness”—even if we are not entirely clear what Wieseltier is asking forgiveness for. (For her part, Marcus claims that she independently investigated Wieseltier’s conduct and determined that he “just hadn’t been the person that they described him to be…. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I wouldn’t have taken this job.”)

Yet while Wieseltier asks for tolerance and forgiveness, he remains as intolerant and unforgiving as ever toward his enemies. A striking example is how he has written about his former TNR colleague Peter Beinart, who in recent years has become openly critical of liberal Zionism and has endorsed (in Jewish Currents, where—full disclosure—Beinart and I have worked together) the ideal of a single binational state.

Wieseltier disagrees and remains wedded to the two-state solution, but considering what Beinart wrote in the wake of Wieseltier’s reckoning in 2017—“Men ran [TNR], and Leon’s behavior helped keep it that way”—one gets the sense that when Wieseltier writes that Beinart “flatters himself about his moral fineness,” he isn’t referring only to Beinart’s writings on Israel and Palestine. Mocking Beinart for his “timely journey leftwards”—as though it’s a particularly convenient time to be on the left—Wieseltier goes on to deride Beinart’s “strange habit of ornamenting the expression of his views with assurances about his religious observance.” It can’t be that Beinart may have reassessed his politics or arrived at his current position from a sincere Jewish ethical framework; instead, we are told, he is “just shul-washing.” “If his thinking seems so fresh,” Wieseltier sniffs, “it is because his knowledge is so recent.”

The ad hominem attack is impressive in its pettiness, but even more so when considered against the high standards for argumentation that Wieseltier claims to have set for Liberties. Unlike the unwashed radicals on social media, Wieseltier grandly proclaims that his magazine will be dedicated to “the rehabilitation of liberalism” as a sensibility as well as a political program. “When Henry James wrote about ‘the liberal heart,’” Wieseltier tells us, “he meant a large heart, a generous heart, a receptive heart, an expansive heart, an unconforming heart, a heart animated by a wide variety of human expressions.” Tolerance, rigor, open-mindedness, and a willingness to countenance doubt and contradiction apparently are all values Wieseltier champions in theory but often ignores in practice.

For all the talk about an unconforming and receptive heart, the politics of Liberties are actually quite predictable and only rarely deviate from the liberal mainstream. The economy per se does not often come up, but when it does we have Nicholas Lemann calling for essentially Bidenomics: a kinder, gentler capitalism than Larry Summers might prefer. Aside from James Wolcott gloating over the failure of Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign, Liberties mostly ignores the resurgence of a socialist left and the revival of labor activism. At a moment when liberalism has itself borrowed some of the left’s ideas and energy to advance a forward-looking agenda, Liberties wistfully looks backward.

The nostalgia of the magazine’s liberalism really comes through when Liberties engages with the culture wars. Here, Wieseltier and Marcus are determined to hold the line against the woke vulgarians of the left without succumbing to the overt bigotry and philistinism of the right. Seemingly every issue has at least one tedious jeremiad against wokeness. I kept jotting down pithy (and admittedly a bit ungenerous) one-sentence summaries: “David Greenberg is very upset that places keep getting renamed by woke activists”; “Sally Satel thinks critical race theory is corrupting public health”; “Jonathan Zimmerman has written the one billionth article on how the woke left is stifling free speech on campus, dressed up as a history of the decline of the teaching profession.” (One piece in this genre did manage to contain elements of surprise: Mary Gaitskill’s account of teaching an undergrad writing course that seems like it could become a polemic against safe spaces but ends up somewhere much more ambivalent, driven by a genuine empathy for the traumas of her students.)

To be fair, much of the time Liberties tries to resist the discourse altogether and instead directs its energy toward defending the Western canon by publishing a lot of articles about it. Contemporary popular culture and the latest Internet controversies come up infrequently, but if you’re looking to go deep on Mahler, Nabokov, Locke, Gibbon, or Thucydides, Liberties has you covered. No one has reviewed Tár in its pages, but it’s easy to imagine Lydia Tár subscribing—or even contributing.

The journal does engage with some pressing issues of the day. It takes well-merited shots at certain leading voices on the contemporary intellectual right, including Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Bari Weiss, and Liel Liebovitz. And compared with the more demagogic anti-woke venues that have proliferated in recent years—Quillette, Unherd, Compact, The Free Press, or any number of lucrative Substacks—Liberties isn’t creepily obsessed with the supposed threat of trans-affirming medical care. In fact, the one article on the topic, by Laura Kipnis, skewers J.K. Rowling and encourages a live-and-let-live approach to gender expression.

On abortion, however, Liberties is almost comically out of step. In early 2021, the conservative Harvard Law professor Jack Goldsmith contributed a credulous analysis of the history of the Federalist Society that concludes with: “The likely course on Roe is a narrowing of the abortion right but not an elimination of it.” Less than two years later, after the Federalist Society–endorsed Supreme Court majority effectively eliminated abortion in half the country, Liberties published another Harvard Law professor—this time Wieseltier’s old friend Cass Sunstein—insisting to readers that “it is important to say that among law professors who are interested in originalism, we can find humility or uncertainty,” before acknowledging that “as it is being practiced by real judges, originalism is consistently producing conclusions that delight the political right.” (You don’t say.)

In the same issue, Wieseltier makes a strange foray into natalism, fretting that “the outraged response to Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has contributed to a certain progressive disenchantment with pregnancy” and calling out Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and two millennial women writers, Jia Tolentino and Amanda Hess (the latter described, outrageously, by Wieseltier as a New York Times “gender commissar”), for expressing that disenchantment. In a passage that would not be out of place on a men’s rights forum, Wieseltier tells readers:

The fact that I cannot speak about the birth process from the inside does not disqualify me from speaking about it altogether. (Women have hardly been inhibited by their personal unfamiliarity with the subjectivity of manhood from telling men how to live; women’s knowingness about men is one of the salient themes of our culture.)

When it comes to foreign policy, 
Liberties feels even more behind the times: Here, the magazine’s thirst to reclaim a fighting liberalism is hard to contain. In the first issue, readers are gifted with a bellicose call to arms by the neoconservative journalist Eli Lake, who argues that the “triumph of the open society…requires historical action, a rejection of narcissistic passivity, in an enduring struggle.” In the second issue, Edward Luttwak beats the drum for a new cold war with China. In the third, Wieseltier acknowledges getting the Iraq War wrong, while defending the worldview that led him to do so. “I certainly did not come away from the partial debacle in Iraq with the conviction that the United States was henceforth disqualified from international interventions,” he writes, before arguing that the Obama administration’s passivity regarding Syria was worse. A later issue includes an article defending the Bush administration’s intentions in Iraq, and another features neocon éminence grise Robert Kagan challenging Stephen Wertheim’s critique of post–World War II American interventionism.

There are lengthy defenses of democracy and human rights in Russia, Belarus, Xinjiang, and Myanmar—all worthy of defending—but the human rights abuses committed by the United States or its allies are rarely mentioned, and any introspection about the failures of the War on Terror is hard to come by. “There is no more damning evidence that the readiness for struggle is waning in America than our stupid retreat from Afghanistan,” Wieseltier writes. “Twenty years is not even close to forever.” His reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is positively tumescent: He casts it as a vindication of his entire worldview and a humiliation for his enemies on both the left and right. “Oh, for a little American hubris” is an actual stand-alone paragraph.

Among the more predictable essays, there are some standouts that demonstrate the value of long-form critical writing not pegged to any news cycle. I especially enjoyed Benjamin Moser’s “Against Translation”—a provocative title given that Moser is known for his English translations of Clarice Lispector. Taking as his starting point a description of a particular deceased person’s home library, full of books no one reads anymore, Moser argues that the version of English the whole world is learning as a second language is a homogenizing force not only in non-anglophone cultures but in anglophone cultures as well—that native anglophone readers are at risk of losing our own sense of rootedness, cultural specificity, and the ability to read with any depth. Likewise, Becca Rothfeld’s “Sanctimony Literature” is a sharp critique of the over-politicization of contemporary literature (Ben Lerner, Sally Rooney, “Cat Person”), which in her view errs “not because it ventures into moral territory, but because it displays no genuine curiosity about what it really means to be good.” Rothfeld may find the present cultural moment wanting, but she’s paying attention to it and offering close readings of it, which is more than one can say of some of her fellow contributors. A certain degree of nostalgic reverence for the past is defensible, but far too much of what is found in Liberties seems like it’s hiding from the present out of the fear that it might not have much to say about it.

In the first issue of Liberties, Wieseltier writes that “we are betting on what used to be called the common reader, who would rather reflect than belong and asks of our intellectual life more than a choice between orthodoxies. We are not persuaded that it is a losing bet.” While the magazine has its share of orthodoxies, it is fair to say that three years later, Liberties is still reliably delivering reflective and intellectually serious long-form prose—a more successful record than Twitter, or most of the venture-capital-backed, digital-first publications that thrived at the height of the social media boom, can claim over the same period. Whether the common reader has any interest is a separate question.

After reading the first 11 issues of Liberties more or less cover to cover—something I would be shocked if anyone other than Wieseltier or Marcus has ever done—I’ll confess that part of me is rooting for their venture to succeed. They’re right about one thing: The Internet has become a deeply dispiriting place, and there is something romantic about committing so unapologetically to sprawling print essays when most of the media’s trend lines are pointing to viral video clips, “smart brevity,” and AI-generated disinfo. One may agree or disagree with any given article in Liberties (and there is a lot to disagree with); one may approve or disapprove of Wieseltier (and there is a lot to disapprove of)—but at least he and Marcus are publishing actual writing.

At the same time, there are plenty of other small and medium-size magazines doing the same thing: Dissent, n+1, The Baffler, Lux, Jewish Currents, The Drift, The Point, The New York Review of Books, the magazine you are currently reading—the list goes on. Each is producing serious works of social and literary criticism, as is the current version of TNR, whose very existence Wieseltier refuses to acknowledge, referring instead to “The New Republic, of blessed memory.” They may all have their own orthodoxies and their own bêtes noires, but they are also not afraid to speak directly to our times. Social media has empowered plenty of hacks and conspiracists and bullies, but it has also brought together vibrant networks of left-leaning thinkers around intellectual projects at least as ambitious as Wieseltier’s, and in many cases more successful.

The most consequential intellectual magazines have always been about not just ideas but how they are manifested in their particular time. They and their writers try to understand the world around them; they try to argue with it; they try to remake it. This was true of the magazines Wieseltier claims to have been inspired by; it was true of the old TNR; and it remains true of many publications today. Perhaps it will be true of Liberties as well, but getting there will require its editors and writers to engage with their peers in the online spaces they’ve stubbornly avoided. Even the rehabilitation of yesterday’s liberalism is unlikely to be achieved without that.

Yes

efore Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine in February, the argument that NATO expansion over the previous 30 years had been a policy failure and a provocation was neither new nor partisan. It had been put forward by right-leaning realists in the US foreign policy mainstream, including George Kennan, William Burns, Fiona Hill, and John Mearsheimer, and it was also a common position among doves on the left, including me. Among Russia experts, it’s become conventional wisdom that President George W. Bush erred in 2008 when he insisted on an open-ended commitment to someday bring Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, likely triggering Russia’s war with Georgia a few months later and eventually its conflict with Ukraine, which began in 2014 and escalated this year. And among left-wing critics of US foreign policy, it’s conventional wisdom that NATO is a Cold War relic—a defense industry boondoggle that sucks up resources that could be invested in the social safety net.1

All of the above positions remain defensible. But it’s incumbent on those of us who have criticized NATO to consider the events of 2022 in our assessment of the US-led military alliance. At the very least, we should acknowledge that NATO expansion has never been simply a unilateral exercise of American imperialism. Many of expansion’s most vocal critics have been leading Cold Warriors, while its most committed advocates have been the democratically elected governments of the Eastern European states that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War. And in the context of Eastern Europe, Russia’s conduct over the past two months indicates that the word “defense” is not always a cynical euphemism for warmongering.2

At the risk of banality, it’s worth reiterating: Russia has mounted an unprovoked full-scale invasion of a neighboring country based on the ludicrous pretext of “denazification.” Many critics of NATO expansion failed to predict this up until the moment it happened, and many have since acknowledged this with mea culpas but without any reconsideration of their underlying analysis. We don’t know the scale of the casualties yet, and the war is ongoing, but what we do know is horrific: Cities leveled by shelling, mass atrocities against unarmed civilians, and at least 10 million Ukrainians (a quarter of the population) displaced from their homes.3

Meanwhile, however reckless Vladimir Putin’s war has been, he has been careful not to fire on neighboring countries like Lithuania, Poland, and Romania. The reason is straightforward: Those countries are in NATO, and thus under a binding defensive commitment from the US and other Western powers. And given Russia’s atrocities to date in Ukraine—which are not unprecedented, as anyone familiar with the Russian wars in Chechnya and Syria knows—it’s hard to blame the Eastern European countries that successfully sought NATO membership for having done so, or to fault Ukraine or other former Soviet republics for wanting to follow suit.4

In the long run, perhaps NATO should be broken up, and the case for eventually downsizing the US role and increasing Europe’s responsibility for its own security is compelling. But it is an odd moment for the Western left to prioritize its critique of NATO. Far from spreading militarism across Europe, ­NATO’s function now is to contain a war it did not start. It is no exaggeration to say NATO is why Russia’s assault on civilian populations has yet to spill into a wider regional war.5

To be sure, critics of NATO are broadly correct that the alliance’s role must remain defensive in nature. While it’s understandable that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has demanded that NATO establish a no-fly zone over Ukraine, such a policy would be dangerously escalatory, effectively licensing direct military engagement between nuclear-armed belligerents that could produce apocalyptic consequences—for Ukrainians above all.6

But to fixate on NATO is at best a distraction and at worst a perverse reinforcement of Russian propaganda. In the lead-up to the invasion, Putin repeatedly cited NATO expansion as part of his justification for war, even though NATO had done nothing to indicate it had any imminent plans to bring Ukraine into the alliance in the eight years since Russia annexed Crimea. To treat NATO as having directly provoked this war is to grant Russia a good-faith casus belli where none is warranted.7

If the Western left wants to engage constructively on Ukraine, there are many ways it can do so that are consistent with its core values: by urging a shift to green energy and away from the fossil fuels that prop up Putin’s regime; by prioritizing the well-being of refugees from Ukraine as well as other war zones; by demanding that Western critics of Russia’s military occupation hold US-backed abuses in places like Yemen and Palestine to a consistent standard; and by cracking down on the Western financial instruments that oligarchs from Russia and other countries have used to store their pillage. Railing against NATO, meanwhile, is tone-deaf when Russia is committing war crimes against Ukrainian civilians simply because they have the misfortune not to already be under the alliance’s umbrella.8

David Klion9

No

he North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded in 1949, and in the words of its first secretary general, Baron Ismay Hastings, it had three goals: Keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, all of these rationales have run out of gas, and it is past time for Washington to exit and thereby dissolve NATO.10

The Russian invasion of Ukraine does not change this, even if Moscow’s aggression has breathed new enthusiasm into the alliance. While the invasion has demonstrated Moscow’s bellicosity and recklessness, it has also laid bare the ineptitude of the Russian military. If the shambolic units that just hightailed it out of suburban Kyiv are the greatest threat facing our European allies, then the latter are plainly capable of defending themselves without US troops, subsidies, and micromanagement—in other words, without NATO.11

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US could have wrapped up the alliance. But instead, the Clinton administration decided that NATO should take on new members from Moscow’s former satellite states. American foreign policy figures from across the political spectrum, from George Kennan to Jack Matlock to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, warned against expanding NATO eastward, predicting it would infuriate and bring out the worst in Russia’s government, many of whose own leaders stated the same in the clearest possible terms. But Washington’s elites have tended to see NATO membership, or at least the application process, as an inalienable legal right, not as a matter of earthly politics amenable to dealmaking and compromise, with the US-led alliance loudly declaring in 2008 that Ukraine and Georgia would someday join.12

Two months into the Russian invasion, it is now taken for granted that Ukraine will never be a member of NATO. The best Ukraine can hope for is armed neutrality with political autonomy from Moscow, the goal that Washington should have been seeking for the past 20 years. We’ll never know how such a project might have worked out—negotiated Cold War neutrality did give Finland and Austria space to flourish, though they are not perfectly analogous to Ukraine—but we can very well see how things have turned out now, in no small measure thanks to promises to bring a US-led military alliance up to Ukraine’s 1,400-mile border with Russia.13

Beyond its expansion from 12 initial members to 30, NATO has also strayed from its defensive mandate. Though its bombardment of Serbia in 1999 over the breakaway region of Kosovo is vaguely remembered as a humanitarian win, it shouldn’t be. Washington, which is to say NATO, lurched into its 78-day bombing of Belgrade without exhausting diplomatic alternatives, and the bombing campaign only accelerated the genocide of ethnic Serbs from Kosovo and the Serbian slaughter of some 10,000 Kosovars.14

After Kosovo, the alliance looked outside Europe for its reasons for being. In 2011, NATO imposed a no-fly zone over Libya, and it soon stumbled into a regime-change war against Moammar Gadhafi. Now that nation is in its 11th year of civil war, and the operation is widely regarded as a disaster.15

To the degree that this rudderless security pact has made war easier, more salable, and more attractive for Western leaders than diplomacy, the alliance has been a liability to peace and stability.16

Bad wars aside, there is the issue of control. Can the defense of Europe be trusted to the Europeans? In 2022, the answer is yes. It is true that given its wealth and population, Germany may eventually wield outsize influence in a European security alliance. But that’s OK. Many Americans might find it painful to admit, but Germany is a more stable and functional democracy than the United States, with a more equitable system of representation, less polarization, and smoother transfers of power.17

Far from garrisoning more troops in Europe—the US just added 20,000 troops to the 80,000 already deployed—the Biden administration should hold the new government in Berlin to its post-invasion pledge to increase defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, up from a lächerlich 1.53 percent. The US should also lean on other member countries to meet the 2 percent threshold. To make this happen, Washington’s first step should be to redeploy its forces out of Europe without formally leaving the alliance, a move outlined by Jasen Castillo, codirector of the Albritton Center for Grand Strategy at Texas A&M, in a 2019 report from the Center for a New American Security. Recent events have not changed Castillo’s mind. “Frankly, it’s time for the UK, France, and Germany to do the heavy lifting in NATO,” Castillo told me, “especially now that the Ukraine war has revealed that Russia is not 10 feet tall.”18

Leaving NATO would not, of course, be sufficient to set hubristic Washington on a path of farsighted preventive diplomacy. But the entirety of the war in Ukraine, from the diplomatic missteps leading up to it to the underperformance of the Russian military, should show that the security pact’s liabilities continue to outweigh its benefits.19

Chase Madar20

Holding to Account

For the past 30 years, over nearly 30 books and thousands of articles, I have written about colonialism and imperialism. Some of these articles have appeared in The Nation, at the invitation of your editors. A brief conversation with one of your reporters on some of the themes that I have worked on for decades produced in him conjectures and fantasies about what he thinks I believe rather than what I am on the record as having written [“What Should the Left Do About China?,” January 24/31].

In two sentences, David Klion considers my views, and in both sentences speculates rather than elucidates. “This is more or less” what I said, he claims, rather than share my actual words. “In his telling,” Klion writes, “what is happening to the Uyghurs [in China] is analogous to what countries like the United States and Australia did to their Indigenous populations, or what the British Empire did in his native India—but somewhat to my surprise, [Prashad] didn’t mean that in a bad way.” This may have been what Klion wanted me to say or believe. The only problem is that this is not at all what I believe or say.

There is a large difference between a colonial project that destroys the basis of a people’s dignity and subordinates them to an external force, and a people’s project that struggles to find a way to undermine social hierarchies and advance the possibilities for the people. I would like to see caste uprooted from Indian society; does Klion believe that such a process is analogous to the horrendous genocide against Native Americans? I hope not. That your reporter took my views about social advancement and twisted them to imply I support genocide is shocking, deeply shocking.

Vijay Prashad
Executive Director,
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
santiago, chile

It’s painful to think that there are people on the left justifying the massive violations of human rights occurring in China. China today is doing what the US did to Indigenous and minority peoples and the same kind of “sphere of interest” bullying that it has done in Latin America. Nothing can excuse or justify it. I agree that the historical crimes of the US government make it a problematic vehicle for opposition, but really, folks, let’s show some solidarity! Boycotts and economic sanctions are entirely appropriate. But please: Fight for a global alliance and global institutions for human rights that can hold both China and the US accountable.
Michael Sappol

On October 19, 1952, my father, Archibald Singham, hid in the bushes to hear the famous and talented orator Paul Robeson speak at an event in Ann Arbor. McCarthyism was in full swing. Being a foreign student, my father feared deportation. A few years later, he met Victor Navasky in East Lansing, where Victor was helping to run Soapy Williams’s campaign for governor of Michigan. A lifelong friendship thus began. My father adored Victor and explained to me that Victor had this fantastic ability to be a principled person. Victor took clear and full measure of the perverted nature of anti-communism in the US. My father was deeply anti-imperialist, respected the work of The Nation in the 1970s and ’80s, and became a member of its editorial board.

It was thus with great shock and dismay that I read the recent piece by David Klion in its pages. Klion has previously claimed that “Russiagate” is the crime of the century, not the millions of US-caused deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Yemen. His piece for The Nation misconstrued the words of Vijay Prashad, an important Global South left intellectual, without reference to any of his written works. It lends support to those who seek to shame and silence anyone who dares to contradict the liberal US narratives on “human rights” and dares to use the word “imperialism.” It is profoundly sad to see how The Nation has fallen into the orbit of manufactured consent and red-baiting.

The 1975 Church Committee was the last time formal disclosures were made about the number of journalists and professors under the direct or indirect control of US intelligence. The Nation has now taken up the “left” flank of the new McCarthyism. Times change, and we are entering a period where, thankfully, the US will not be the dominant economic force in the world. While reactionaries in the US lament this fact, history tells us that, for the first time in 500 years, the dominance of Europeans and their enfants terribles white-settler states is finally coming to an end. This existential crisis for the West, while a moment of danger, is also a great opportunity for the poor of the world.

Roy Singham
shanghai

Klion Replies

Last September, Vijay Prashad generously spoke to me on the record for about 79 minutes; the unedited transcript of the recording was subsequently made available to a Nation fact-checker. Roughly 24 of those minutes were spent discussing China’s policies toward the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, during which time Prashad expounded his views in great detail and with multiple digressions. In compressing his comments down to a single paragraph in a piece exploring much broader topics, I necessarily glossed them in addition to including direct quotes, but I did not write that he “support[s] genocide”; for him to suggest that I “twisted [his views] to imply” that he does is exactly the same kind of leap he’s accusing me of making.

In the line he cites, I suggested that his views broadly align with those of the Qiao Collective, with which he had previously collaborated. What seems undeniable from Prashad’s words in our interview, in his letter here, and in many other places is that he believes that China’s policies toward the Uyghurs are not colonial or genocidal in nature, but rather a legitimate project of national development, offering educational and social advancement rather than violence and repression. During our interview, Prashad likened China’s policies in Xinjiang to 20th-century New York City public schools instructing Yiddish-speaking immigrants in English in order to assimilate them into American culture. He also speculated that Indians might have done to themselves what British colonists did to them in the name of progress.

As neither Prashad nor I has witnessed these policies firsthand in Xinjiang, I’ll refrain from weighing in further on the substance of his views, and simply say that I believe I accurately represented them in the context of a piece whose stated purpose was to air a range of left-wing perspectives on China.

David Klion
brooklyn, n.y.

The first “cancel culture” episode of 2022 began just three days into the new year, when the journalist Michael Wolff reported that Random House would not be going ahead with a planned collection of political writings by the late Norman Mailer. According to Wolff, the publishing house cited “a junior staffer’s objection to the title of Mailer’s 1957 essay, ‘The White Negro,’” as “the proximate cause” for the book’s being pulled. Wolff, while acknowledging that Mailer was always a controversial figure—among other things, in 1960 he stabbed his wife with a penknife—made clear in the piece that he regarded Random House’s decision as a representative and regrettable development in a publishing industry that lives in constant fear of running afoul of a younger generation of easily offended staffers and readers.

On Twitter, the usual voices decrying this trend were quick to promote Wolff’s narrative. “A junior staffer can get a book cancelled over a controversial, 60-year-old essay that sparked a brilliant, nuanced and thoughtful response from James Baldwin when it was published,” tweeted the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, who went on to acknowledge that while he was not a fan of Mailer’s “White Negro” essay, he thinks it should “absolutely be republished.” “Publishing continues its cowardly woke descent,” proclaimed Jordan Peterson. “The censor, er, staffer, should identify his/her/themselves and explain their reasoning,” sneered James Kirchick. The essay paints an unflattering portrait of the archetypal beatnik hanging out in Greenwich Village cafés in the 1950s, who, per Mailer, “had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro, and for practical purposes could be considered a white Negro.” Today it reads as a bit of a mess, but there’s certainly a valid case that, as a part of existing American cultural history, the essay deserves to be studied and situated in its context rather than censored for its antiquated racial language.

Censorship, however, is not precisely what happened here. As Alex Shephard reported in The New Republic the day after Wolff’s scoop, much of the story appears to be dubious. Shephard spoke to a number of junior staffers at Random House, who “laughed off the insinuation that any of them had the power to kill a book” and denied that anything of the sort had occurred. Additional reporting by The New York Times established that Random House remains on good terms with Mailer’s son, John Buffalo Mailer, who does not believe that the book was “canceled” or that Mailer ever could be. As Shephard noted, the reason why the anthology wasn’t picked up was probably the far simpler matter of dollars and cents: Mailer’s most significant books have faced declining sales since the late 1990s, and in all likelihood, Random House made a business decision not to pursue a collection that might have generated limited interest.

That Random House and other corporate publishing houses decide what gets printed and what doesn’t based on the profit motive is certainly concerning, although not exactly a new problem. But was Mailer—or even “The White Negro,” which is freely available on the website of Dissent—canceled? The planned Mailer collection is now being published by Skyhorse, a publishing house (distributed by Simon & Schuster, one of the industry giants) that has developed a niche in picking up allegedly canceled authors like Woody Allen. If anything, the whole affair has generated more interest in Mailer than the publishing world has seen since his death in 2007.

’ll leave it to others to litigate Mailer’s specific literary merits, cultural legacy, and politics. But what’s most striking about this contretemps is how it embodies so many aspects of the current discourse around free speech in elite circles—how a fundamentally fake controversy nonetheless dominated a certain set’s attention for a few days, before it moved on to the next controversy. Wolff called the pulling of the Mailer collection “predictable,” an adjective that can also be applied to every aspect of what followed.

In a tribute to Joan Didion, who died in December, Gawker’s John Ganz bemoaned the rising trend of “phantom cancellations,” such as Ross Douthat’s recent column daring the left to try to cancel Didion for her heterodoxies, which no actual leftists seem inclined to do. There was no widespread call for Mailer’s cancellation either. If anything, interest in both Mailer and Didion has surged in the past month—both writers, despite innumerable differences, are now held up as totems of an era when writing, and writers, seemed to matter (and when they got paid well, too). It’s understandable that both their fans and their detractors today are desperate, on some level, to re-create that world and see the current discursive sphere as comparatively stagnant and low-stakes.

But what is also striking about the Mailer affair is that it comes in the midst of many very real present-day threats to free speech, about which the loudest voices against “cancel culture” are typically silent. For instance, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis has just introduced a bill that would prohibit public schools and private businesses from making white people feel uncomfortable in the context of diversity trainings, and Virginia’s new Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin kicked off his first day in office by banning the teaching of critical race theory in K-12 public school classrooms by executive order. Meanwhile, more than 30 states have laws preventing their governments from doing business with companies that boycott the state of Israel, and Palestinian academics and their allies are constantly censored or driven out of the academy for their views. Writers like Wolff usually have nothing to say about these affronts to civil liberties, which carry behind them the weight of the legal system and are backed by exorbitant lobbying efforts; instead, they maintain a fixation on the disorganized efforts of comparatively powerless junior magazine and publishing staffers (real or imagined), undergraduates, and Twitter mobs to shame and criticize their established peers.

Which brings us back to Mailer: To the extent that postwar intellectuals like him were successful, it was because they captured something urgent about their time, challenged an older generation’s conventional wisdom, and cultivated a younger readership hungry for something vital and relevant. They were willing to criticize and openly flout the stagnant norms of their elders and did so in an era in which the real threats to speech came from right-wing censorship and McCarthyism, with the passive or active collaboration of many liberals. The best way to honor that legacy today would be to turn our attention to the meaningful threats facing those who actually challenge the political status quo.

Since March 2019, Hong Kong has confronted the greatest challenge to its relatively free and open civil society since it was transferred from British to Chinese rule in 1997. In incidents spanning more than a year, local police faced off against enormous crowds of young demonstrators fighting a losing battle to maintain the city’s autonomy within the People’s Republic of China. Using batons and more than 10,000 canisters of tear gas, officers crushed the protest movement in 2020, but the repression has continued: By February 2021, more than 10,000 Hong Kongers had been arrested in connection with these demonstrations, and over a quarter of those had been prosecuted, while tens of thousands more had sought asylum in Britain, Canada, or Australia.

For Promise Li, a young member of the Democratic Socialists of America born in Hong Kong, China’s crackdown was personal. “I have contacts and friends who are either imprisoned or under threat right now,” said Li, a cofounder of the Lausan Collective, which runs a site highlighting left-wing activist voices in Hong Kong. During the unrest, Li proposed that DSA’s International Committee put out a statement condemning the shuttering of Hong Kong’s largest independent labor organization. But the effort was rejected after a straw poll spanning the IC’s subcommittees. According to Anlin Wang, an American-born Chinese DSA member and cochair of the Asia and Oceania subcommittee, there was an overwhelming three-to-one consensus against saying anything. “We tried our hardest to make sure that this was as maximally democratic as possible,” said Wang. “I think there are strong arguments on both sides.”

To Li, the incident reflects the influence within the DSA of “tankies,” a derogatory Cold War–era term for defenders of authoritarian communist regimes, which is often used now to call someone a China apologist. “There’s a big group of people who aren’t exactly tankies but see the tankie side as equally valid and try to preserve the unity of the left,” Li said. For his part, Wang acknowledges that such views circulate on Twitter, but he said he’s never seen them in his subcommittee Slack. “When we started the subcommittee, I was very committed to making sure that it didn’t devolve constantly into ideological fights where one side gets called ‘tankies’ and the other side gets called ‘liberal sellouts,’” Wang said.

This might all seem like inside baseball, and the DSA is riven by disagreements over many topics. But it serves as a microcosm of an unresolved debate on the left that carries global implications, not only for human rights but for the climate, labor, and questions of war and peace. With 1.4 billion people and a gross national product that by some measures now exceeds that of the United States, China is seen by Washington’s foreign policy “Blob” as the first true threat to US global hegemony since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Tensions between Washington and Beijing have been increasing on every front—military, economic, diplomatic, cultural—as observers across the ideological spectrum warn of a new Cold War that could reshape the world. President Joe Biden has characterized the confrontation with China as a battle between autocracy and democracy and is carrying out a strategic pivot to Asia—quietly boosting the US troop presence in Taiwan, announcing a new defense pact with the United Kingdom and Australia, and justifying his ambitious domestic economic proposals as part of “a competition with China and other countries to win the 21st century.” If the US left hopes to have any influence over this looming conflict, either via the Democratic Party or via non-electoral action, it will have to figure out a consistent stance on China.

Many people on the left who work on China or on broader foreign policy issues are trying to navigate the space between the two caricatured poles Wang describes. They are attempting to develop an alternative to a new Cold War—a position that opposes military confrontation in the Asia-Pacific while being open to increased cooperation with Beijing on issues like climate change. They are willing to denounce China’s oppressive policies from Hong Kong to Xinjiang and also stand against the neoliberal trade order that has benefited American and Chinese corporate elites at the expense of American and Chinese workers. For this article, I talked to a range of left-leaning policy makers, activists, and intellectuals to better understand how these issues are dividing progressives and what a coherent and principled left-wing approach to China might look like.

veryone I spoke with could agree on one thing: Further escalation between the United States and China would be a disaster. Among the widely cited risks of a new Cold War—beyond the obvious risk of actual military conflict involving nuclear-armed belligerents—are the lost opportunities to work together on climate change and other transnational threats; squandered resources; increased discrimination and hate crimes against Asian Americans; a more repressive political climate in both countries; and the end of valuable civil society interactions. “I hate losing people-to-people diplomacy because of rising tensions,” said Keisha Brown, who teaches modern Chinese history and Afro-Asian diasporic identities at Tennessee State University. Brown is a cofounder of the Black China Caucus, an organization for China specialists from the African diaspora. “It’s very discouraging to know that if we do a study-abroad program, it might be difficult for students to go to China because of the state of affairs right now. I’m losing the opportunity to get more Black students to go.”

“For people actually involved in China policy, the debate isn’t whether China is a good or bad actor,” said Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The question is: What is the US going to do about it?” Wertheim is a cofounder of the Quincy Institute, a nonpartisan, anti-interventionist think tank in Washington, which he left last year. “I think China hawks want to believe that there is a larger position on the left that is apologetic for China’s repression than there actually is,” he added. “There are also people on the right who say things about China that are totally unwarranted and racist, and I see them occupying more prominent positions in our government than any fringe people who want to defend China.”

Some on the left, while wary of a new Cold War, are trying to advance non-militaristic and humanitarian foreign policy goals within this new context. “Any policy maker invested in a competition between Western and Chinese models should be pushing to show that the US will do right by the world in this time of crisis,” said David Segal, the executive director of the activist group Demand Progress; he suggests policies such as a more robust vaccine diplomacy and pushing the International Monetary Fund to issue more special drawing rights, which are desperately needed reserve assets that can allay economic suffering in the Global South. “Those who fan flames and are not advocating such measures betray their jingoism.”

There is also the case, advanced by Biden and by liberals like Matthew Yglesias in his book One Billion Americans, that competition with China can be used to spur needed domestic improvements in the US. But other progressives see engaging in the language of international competition, even to justify good policies, as counterproductive. “We don’t need China as a justification to strengthen our democracy, rebuild our industry, and create a better life for Americans,” said Matt Duss, a foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders who serves as a key link between left-leaning foreign policy thinkers and the policy-making process. “We should do those things because they’re the right things to do.”

anti-corporate regulatory regimes worldwide? Is it, in short, communist or capitalist?

Isabella Weber, a German political economist whose recent book How China Escaped Shock Therapy traces the origins of the economic liberalization implemented by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and ’80s, rejects these simplistic labels. “I think of China as a state-constituted market economy that relies on a strong capitalist dynamic,” she told me. “This is a new kind of economic system that we have to study on its own terms.” In Weber’s analysis, over the past four decades China’s powerful one-party state has created enormous markets that have reintegrated the country into the world economy (enriching capitalists and undermining unions in the process), but it has always done so in pursuit of China’s long-term economic development and political sovereignty.

This analysis is echoed by Duss, who noted that Sanders himself was an early critic of the 1990s consensus that opening trade relations with China would benefit American workers. Duss’s perspective on China is also shaped by conversations with Tobita Chow and Jake Werner, two young activists who are cofounders of Justice Is Global, a Chicago-based grassroots organization pursuing structural reforms that would result in a more sustainable and equitable global economy.

“I originally got involved in building worker solidarity between the US and China,” said Chow, who currently directs Justice Is Global. “Unfortunately, I got involved just as the Chinese government was ramping up its crackdown on labor activists to the point where that kind of work is really no longer possible to do safely. I was able to see some of the fruits of the opening up of Chinese civil society, and to see them very quickly disappearing.”

Werner, who does research on modern Chinese history at Boston University, identifies the 2008 financial crisis as a turning point. China rode out the crisis with an economic stimulus of unprecedented scale and developed domestic corporate giants that now compete with Western firms. “It has put the fear of God into the US political elite,” Werner said. “If Chinese companies take over the high-profit sectors, that threatens US power over the global system as well as the US economy, which depends on quasi-monopoly industries like tech, finance, and pharmaceuticals. If China starts to push them aside, what’s going to happen to us?”

China, in other words, has ceased to be a passive player in the development of global supply chains dominated by Western companies and is pursuing an industrial policy that challenges the US-dominated international order. It’s in this context that the Washington establishment is becoming more critical of China—and it’s also in this context that some on the left might feel inclined to defend it.

Multiple interviewees mentioned the Qiao Collective, a cryptic organization that emerged seemingly as a counterpoint to Li’s Lausan Collective in early 2020. In an e-mailed statement, the Qiao Collective—which said it reaches decisions collectively and did not identify any individual members by name—described itself as “a group of students, artists, researchers, and young professionals in the US, UK, and Canada who contribute as volunteers in our spare time. Our members all belong to the broader Chinese diaspora, with family connections to mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and throughout Southeast Asia.” It further said it is funded solely through Patreon and has no formal ties to any political party, including the Chinese Communist Party, but did not respond to queries regarding the size of its membership, how it is governed, or who specifically is responsible for organizing it.

“Despite this lack of institutional support, we are thrilled by the rapid growth and attention we have gained in the less than two years since our founding, which we attribute to the hunger in English-language media spaces for critical left commentary on China that challenges dominant Western media narratives,” Qiao wrote in its statement. The narrative that the group propagates in left-wing circles aligns closely with Beijing’s. On its website, Qiao describes the Hong Kong protests as driven by “fervent anti-communism and a fetishization of abstract liberalism, British colonial nostalgia, anti-Chinese racism, and appeals to Western intervention” and accuses activists like Li of “leftwashing” what it characterizes as right-wing protests. Qiao has rapidly become popular on social media and has contributed an article warning against a US-China war to the Progressive International, a left-wing global wire service. (Progressive International’s general coordinator, David Adler, told me his group aims to provide a diversity of perspectives.) Code Pink, the established anti-war group, cites Qiao on its China FAQ page. Monthly Review, an independent socialist magazine published in New York, has also republished the Qiao Collective—and has been criticized for doing so by Critical China Scholars (CCS), a group of young academics that is pushing back against Qiao’s narrative.

CCS defines itself as being against any government’s ethno-nationalist agenda and tries to find a middle ground between demonizing the People’s Republic of China and reinforcing its propaganda. Last year, CCS published an open letter to Monthly Review that drew the line at its collaboration with Qiao; the signatories included Li, Werner, and Andy Liu, a Taiwanese American historian at Villanova who cohosts the left-wing Asian American podcast Time to Say Goodbye. Liu says CCS has had experiences analogous to Li’s in trying to engage with the DSA. “We’ve had ongoing conversations with DSA about doing a webinar, but we got a mixed response from them, and we’re still not sure what exactly went on behind the scenes,” Liu said. “It was a bit of a surprise that DSA was not more welcoming.”

Liu added that he understands why Qiao’s message resonates with some DSA members. “We don’t want to completely alienate these people,” he said. “We understand a lot of this comes from a suspicion of US foreign policy and a critique of corporate media, and we are sympathetic to that. But I think the leftist, internationalist position should be critical of all governments.”

Li is harsher. “I think the Qiao Collective holds an authoritarian, fascistic position that has nothing to do with socialism,” he said. “The quality of their content and the caliber of their information is no better than InfoWars. But there’s been an influx of their fans into DSA, especially in San Francisco’s Red Star caucus.” Even if Qiao’s viewpoint isn’t fully mainstream within the DSA, Li added, “these outlets have sowed enough confusion with their disinformation that we can’t do much with DSA committees without it being blocked.” And Qiao has proved to be particularly effective in stifling the left’s discourse over another human rights crisis nearly 3,000 miles northwest of Hong Kong.

injiang is a region in China’s far west where ethnic Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities have experienced discrimination and cultural erosion amid a state-directed influx of Han Chinese migrants. Under President Xi Jinping, China has intensified its repression of the Uyghurs, building an enormous network of prisons, reeducation centers, and labor camps in what many foreign observers have described as a cultural genocide. The situation in Xinjiang is opaque, as the Chinese government tightly controls information and movement in and out of the region, but testimony from refugees and émigrés paints a bleak picture.

According to a widely circulated 18,000-word resource list published by Qiao, however, the lack of reliable information out of Xinjiang suggests that these accounts are “Western atrocity propaganda.” This is also more or less what Vijay Prashad, the director of an internationalist organization called Tricontinental and a Marxist intellectual who did an event with Qiao in May 2020, told me when I asked him about the Uyghurs. “The ‘cultural genocide’ charge is one that I’m not entirely sympathetic to,” said Prashad, who has visited China numerous times but has not been to Xinjiang. “Education policy is a big part of poverty alleviation,” he added. “The fact is that most modern societies have forced people to have an education.” In his telling, what is happening to the Uyghurs is analogous to what countries like the United States and Australia did to their Indigenous populations, or what the British Empire did in his native India—but somewhat to my surprise, he didn’t mean that in a bad way. “That’s the price that people pay,” Prashad told me. “You can’t preserve some cultural forms and alleviate or eradicate absolute poverty.”

To Rayhan Asat, a Uyghur human rights lawyer from Urumqi—Xinjiang’s capital—currently teaching at Yale, this stance is morally abhorrent. Asat’s brother has been imprisoned in Xinjiang since he returned from a business trip to the United States in 2016. “I don’t know what hurts more,” she told me, “the tormentors of my brother or the tankies who are enabling it and denying my pain and suffering.” Asat said she is against a US military buildup in response to the situation in Xinjiang; she acknowledged that after its wars in Iraq and elsewhere, the United States has a credibility problem on human rights. Her preferred approach would be to utilize the Global Magnitsky Act, named for a Russian anti-corruption activist who died in prison in 2009—in other words, that the US should apply targeted sanctions against individual Chinese officials complicit in human rights abuses in Xinjiang.

Duss, the Sanders adviser, independently mentioned that this could be an appropriate response to the situation confronting the Uyghurs. “Broad-based sanctions have a very bad track record of making policy better and a very clear track record of helping immiserate populations,” Duss said. “There is some evidence that Magnitsky-style sanctions targeted at specific government actors who are implicated in human rights abuses can work. But we’re going to be much more effective in making these points if we are consistent, rather than raising these concerns as a cudgel against our adversaries while giving our allies a pass.”

Aside from Prashad, everyone I spoke with for this article unequivocally condemned China’s policies in Xinjiang. But Wang, the cochair of the DSA’s Asia and Oceania subcommittee, acknowledged that some on the left feel constrained in what they can say about China’s human rights record. “It’s important to think about the real-world impact of what we do,” Wang told me. “It’s really important that we, as a leftist institution, be staunchly anti-imperialist. So if we issue a statement about China, I want to make sure that it’s done in a way that can actually help working people and not hurt their cause.” Referring to Li’s proposed statement on Hong Kong, Wang said, “We are Americans, and our country is in the process of a cold war with China. Signing on to the statement carries a serious risk that it could be used as left-wing support for the broader anti-China effort.”

Other progressives see a downside to not speaking out. “Trying to make excuses for or defend the Chinese government’s violations of human rights and aggression against its neighbors is not a winning political strategy,” Chow told me. “We’re not going to be able to bring the majority of the US population over to that position. We’re not going to find any allies among progressives in Congress for that position.”

“If you’re doing apologies for China’s treatment of ethnic minorities, you’re betraying everything the left stands for,” Werner said. “It discredits the left.”

Chow and Werner expanded on this point in a joint interview for the fall 2021 issue of Socialist Forum, a DSA publication that reached out to them for a proposed forum on the left and China. “The original idea was to address both sides,” said Chow, referring to the other side of the debate as “tankies.” “We gave them some suggestions [for an interlocutor], but they didn’t get a yes after a number of weeks.” The main pushback they did see from defenders of the Chinese Communist Party was, as is so often the case, on Twitter.

n his last day in office as Donald Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo accused China of committing genocide in Xinjiang. For someone who served in an openly Islamophobic administration to co-opt the just cause of Uyghur human rights is perverse, but one danger of ceding criticism of China to the right is that the US response to a legitimate human rights crisis ends up being led by xenophobes and warmongers.

Lausan and CCS are two groups on the left that aren’t shying away from these debates. In December 2020, they held a roundtable together, later republished by the Marxist journal Spectre, to discuss Qiao’s resource list and how it might be countered. One participant—David Brophy, a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney—recalled an argument made by E.P. Thompson: that during the final years of the Cold War, “the cause of freedom and the cause of peace seemed to break apart,” with the US monopolizing the former and the Soviets the latter. Brophy suggested that something similar is happening now, with China’s apologists prioritizing peace while its critics prioritize human rights. The questions for the left, then as now, are whether and how those priorities can be reconciled.

The University of Austin (UATX) was announced to great fanfare on Monday, November 8, on the popular Substack of former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss. “We got sick of complaining about how broken higher education is,” Weiss tweeted that morning, “So we decided to do something about it. Announcing a new university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth.” Headed by Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John’s College in Annapolis, UATX boasted a roster of prominent academics and journalists known for pushing back against what they see as the hegemonic culture of “wokeness” that has supposedly undermined free expression and intellectual inquiry at America’s leading universities.

“I am not alone,” wrote Kanelos in the announcement. He then rattled off a list of cofounders that included Weiss, Niall Ferguson, Andrew Sullivan, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Caitlin Flanagan, Tyler Cowen, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, as well as former and current university presidents like Harvard’s Larry Summers and the University of Chicago’s Robert Zimmer. Based out of Texas’s capital, which recently became home to the anti-woke Tesla CEO Elon Musk and the like-minded podcaster Joe Rogan, UATX promised to offer bright young undergraduates an alternative to the stale liberal dogmas on race and gender. Focused around the “great books,” the university would design its curriculum “in partnership not only with great teachers but also society’s great doers—founders of daring ventures, dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism, pioneers in tech, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences.” Anticipating the inevitable jeers from donors, foundations, activists, parents, students, and faculty in support of the status quo, Kanelos added: “We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.”

Unfortunately for Kanelos, opprobrium has quickly become the least of his problems. Within a week of its announcement, several of the aforementioned luminaries who had gathered around the project were already distancing themselves. Zimmer, the UChicago president, resigned from UATX’s advisory board with a terse statement implying that Kanelos had possibly misled him about the nature of his proposed involvement and “noting that the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.” Pinker, who teaches cognitive psychology at Harvard, was even more succinct in his resignation: Announcing in a tweet that he was withdrawing from the board, he added that he “won’t be speaking on this further.” (In a defensive statement on November 15, UATX acknowledged some “missteps” in its rollout of the advisory board.)

As many commentators have already noted, the problems with UATX run deeper than a botched rollout. In a conversation with The Nation’s Jeet Heer, the writer Jacob Bacharach laid out the underlying financial challenges of setting up a real institution of higher learning, as opposed to a “Potemkin university” with no assets, no degree-granting programs, no campus, no courses, and no research programs. For now, the latter is all UATX is—and for it to become anything more, it will have to raise staggering sums of money from ideologically like-minded donors, which, one reasonably suspects, is perhaps the main purpose of the project. In the meantime, those advisers who already have coveted and lucrative gigs at accredited universities are making it clear that they have no intention of abandoning those sinecures.

nly time will tell whether UATX can deliver on its grandiose ambitions, or whether it will reveal itself as a de facto grift and a source of embarrassment for everyone who was briefly associated with it. But even if it does manage to produce something resembling an actual university, UATX will never truly compete with those elite schools that it has pitted itself against. The project’s uphill battle points to a deeper contradiction within what might be called the recent wave of neo-neoconservatism that has emerged in response to the social justice movements of the past decade. That contradiction, simply put, is that these intellectuals, like their neoconservative predecessors, depend on elite institutions for legitimacy.

Some of the figures involved in UATX are directly rooted in the neocon lineage; Weiss, for instance, is a protégé of the neoconservative New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, while Ferguson and his wife, Hirsi Ali, have been vocal champions of Anglo-American imperialism in the Muslim world. Although today neoconservatism is usually linked to the foreign policy doctrine that gave us the Iraq War, it originated as a backlash to the New Left of the late 1960s, which challenged the mid-century liberal establishment’s authority on every front—including by revolting against the administrations of leading universities like Columbia and UC Berkeley. Some of the foundational figures in the movement achieved professional success in and around elite universities after World War II, and the New Left’s assault on higher education played a major role in spurring their shift to the right.

The neoconservative reaction to left-wing activism on campus has guided the center and the right through multiple iterations of campus culture wars ever since. When Kanelos writes that UATX students “will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilization and learn to encounter works not as dead traditions but as fierce contests of timeless significance that help human beings distinguish between what is true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly,” it’s hard not to hear echoes of Leo Strauss, the political philosopher and defender of the Western canon who counted many key neoconservatives as his disciples; or of Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, a touchstone of that era’s fights over campus political correctness; or of Bloom’s close friend Saul Bellow, who fictionalized Bloom in his novel Ravelstein, and who mocked multiculturalists by challenging them to name “the Tolstoy of the Zulus, the Proust of the Papuans.”

Neocons championing the Western canon is nothing new. But whereas in the past they did so in order to bolster the established universities, their heirs seek to subvert those institutions by founding a new university altogether—and one that is improbably funded by the STEM-loving tech sector. UATX’s project rejects the traditional authority of established institutions that the original neoconservatives sought to protect, even as it remains myopically fixated on them. At the same time, UATX’s boosters are dependent on these institutions for their own authority and legitimacy. The neo-neocons behind UATX are almost uniformly graduates from and/or instructors at the very same elite universities they now scorn. Weiss has a BA from Columbia; Ferguson studied at Oxford and has taught at Harvard and Stanford; Sullivan is a product of Oxford and Harvard; Loury attended Northwestern and MIT and teaches at Brown; Haidt went to Yale and Penn and teaches at NYU; I could go on. The point is not to accuse any of them of hypocrisy—it’s valid to reject one’s own educational background—but to note the inconsistency of their current position. Even as they claim that these universities have been hollowed out by a woke left, they are counting on the credibility conferred by their elite pedigrees to legitimize UATX.

Neoconservatism has never fully reconciled its supposed hostility to liberal elites with its intimately felt obsession with liberal elite institutions—a tension that persists to this day. For all the attention that Weiss and her cohort have directed toward incidents of so-called “cancel culture” in higher education, the same handful of schools tend to come up again and again in their examples. There are literally thousands of degree-granting universities in the United States alone, yet we keep hearing about a few dozen highly exclusive ones from the self-proclaimed champions of free expression. In fairness, they might argue that those are the schools that educate and socialize our ruling elite, and, as such, they deserve special scrutiny. But their focus on such a small sample size suggests just how dubious their core claims are: There’s little hard evidence that colleges nationwide are suffering from an epidemic of “wokeness.”

The schools the neo-neocons have spent much of their lives in have cultivated rarefied auras over many generations. The question everyone associated with UATX ought to be asking themselves is whether they would have attended such a school had it been available to them—and if not, why not? The answer, if they’re honest with themselves, is that elite credentials have always been precisely the point of higher education for them. Besides, what’s the fun in being a right-wing provocateur at a university founded entirely by and for right-wing provocateurs?

Editor’s note: The article has been updated to reflect that Irving Kristol was not among the neoconservative figures who had achieved professional success primarily as an academic.

I am not a fan of Neera Tanden—the head of the Center for American Progress (CAP), and President Joe Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)—and to the best of my knowledge, the feeling is mutual. This doesn’t make me special. Ask any number of leftist writers who spend a lot of time on Twitter about Tanden, and they’ll tell you the same stories: how she announced plans to fire the unionized employees of CAP’s affiliated website, ThinkProgress, and to replace them with scabs (ultimately she just shuttered the site following public backlash); how she allegedly hit a colleague, future Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir, for daring to ask Hillary Clinton about her support for the Iraq War; how she named a victim of workplace sexual harassment in a staff meeting; how she pressured critics of Israel at ThinkProgress, bowing to the demands of pro-Israel lobbyists; how she accepted tens of millions in donations to her ostensibly progressive think tank from Wall Street, Silicon Valley, insurance companies, and the autocratic regime of the United Arab Emirates; how she once suggested compelling Libya to use its oil wealth to pay the United States for its 2011 regime change operation. And that’s to say nothing of the many times Tanden has tried to bully or intimidate journalists (such as The Week’s Ryan Cooper, or me) for writing accurate sentences about her, or complained to managers or editors about comments that she didn’t appreciate—not to mention her open contempt for Sanders and his millions of supporters.

As her own mother acknowledged to The New York Times, Tanden “can be very aggressive.” Personally, I would not have selected her for a powerful position in the executive branch, and the news that her appointment may fail to pass Senate confirmation gives me and many of my peers a fair bit of schadenfreude.

Yet, despite all of this, I have a strange sympathy for Tanden’s predicament. That sympathy isn’t rooted in any expectation that she’s the most progressive nominee we could reasonably hope for from Biden (the rumored runner-up, Gene Sperling, seems like at least as good an option). Rather, I feel a certain solidarity with Tanden because, whatever issues or incidents may divide us, she’s a fellow poster on the Internet, and now she is being punished for her posts—including some that were actually correct.

Most of the grievances I listed above never came up during Tanden’s Senate confirmation hearings earlier this month, with the exception of the corporate donations to CAP, which Sanders did ask her about. Instead, Tanden was grilled on her posting habits, with Republican Senator Rob Portman going over her most provocative tweets in some detail. So far, at least three crucial swing senators—Democrat Joe Manchin and Republicans Susan Collins and Mitt Romney—have come out against Tanden’s nomination, and all of them have cited her tweets as their main objection. A Romney spokesperson said that the Utah senator “believes it’s hard to return to comity and respect with a nominee who has issued a thousand mean tweets,” while Collins herself said that Tanden’s decision to delete some of her offending tweets “raises concerns about her commitment to transparency.” Manchin said that he, having reviewed Tanden’s tweets, believes that “her overtly partisan statements will have a toxic and detrimental impact” on her relationship with Congress in the role as OMB director, a role in which Tanden would supervise executive branch agencies and present the president’s budget proposals on Capitol Hill.

According to Politico, Tanden has tweeted over 88,000 times in the decade since she joined Twitter (about 30,000 times more than Donald Trump did in a slightly longer span of time). Her addiction to posting is no secret; many young freelancers and unaffiliated “shitposters” have gotten into petty Twitter fights with Tanden and her dedicated online defenders, often lasting well past midnight. For a think tank president and would-be public servant, that certainly qualifies as “extremely online,” to use the parlance of the platform. And while I was sometimes on the other side of Tanden’s tweets, I have qualms about them being a barrier to public service.

I want to be clear that I am not being radicalized against so-called “cancel culture.” Tanden is not being denied her right to free speech, and no one has any inherent right to be confirmed by the Senate for any position. And whatever other sins she may have committed, Tanden has no record of past tweets denigrating, for instance, people of color or transgender activists. Nor is she claiming censorship; she herself has been forthright, if perhaps not entirely sincere, in expressing contrition over her more controversial posts. “I know there have been some concerns about some of my past language on social media, and I regret that language and take responsibility for it,” she told a Senate committee on February 9.

No, the really frustrating thing about this is that Tanden is being held accountable for posts that were, at least in some cases, good. Portman, for instance, highlighted the following as examples that caused him concern: “You wrote that Susan Collins is, quote, ‘the worst,’ that Tom Cotton is a fraud, that vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz. You called Leader McConnell Moscow Mitch and Voldemort.” As a progressive, my reaction to all of the above is to ask: Where is the lie? If anything, Tanden was being too kind to Senator Cruz, who in the weeks since her testimony infamously fled to a resort in Cancún as Texas was paralyzed by a snowstorm that destroyed its power grid.

It may be unreasonable to expect any of the Republican senators Tanden has personally insulted to vote for her confirmation. And while it’s certainly hypocritical of any Republican senator who stood by Trump despite his daily social media outrages to raise objections to Tanden, partisan hypocrisy in Washington is a dog-bites-man story. Still, Democrats control the Senate, and there’s no reason why Manchin, for instance, needs to stand up for his colleagues’ honor in rejecting a Biden nominee. Some senators, to be sure, are citing Tanden’s rude tweets about Sanders as well, in order to demonstrate her unfriendliness to both ends of the political spectrum. But while Sanders himself is unlikely to be enthusiastic about Tanden, he appears inclined to let bygones be bygones and is rightly more interested in the substantive issue of her corporate contributions.

Of course, I have a personal stake in arguing this. While I doubt I’ll ever be anywhere close to getting nominated for a Senate-confirmable position, if I somehow were, I’d like to think that my confirmation wouldn’t be blocked just because I once told Iran’s supreme leader to “drag” Donald Trump; or because I told someone scolding me for my own difficulties with Obamacare that I hoped he would cry when he was forced to vote for Sanders in the general election (a tweet that did not age well). Recently, I’ve been trying to do fewer tweets of that nature for multiple reasons, but one is that I understand that they could be used against me later, just as they’re being used as an excuse not to vote for Tanden now.

To this, many readers will no doubt shrug and say that it’s common sense that one shouldn’t be a jerk on the Internet. Besides, isn’t Manchin right? Don’t we have enough intemperate partisan rhetoric already? Do we really need more combative, drama-prone people at the heights of power, especially in the wake of the Trump administration?

But sometimes incivility is exactly what the circumstances call for. There are many in Washington, especially in the centrist wings of both parties, who seem all too eager to brush aside the real stakes of politics now that we have a new administration. The last one, after all, was guilty of such incivilities as establishing concentration camps for refugee children on the border of Mexico or engaging in conspiratorial denialism about a deadly ongoing pandemic. There is no polite way to capture what Republicans in power have done and continue to do. Tanden can be fairly accused of many things, but she cannot be accused of being soft on the party that just gave us four years of Trump’s misrule, culminating in the attack on the US Capitol last month. With regard to Republicans, at least, she has consistently told the truth, and it’s very revealing that telling the truth is the one thing she’s done that’s a dealbreaker for a majority of the Senate.

Anne Applebaum’s new book, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism, opens two decades ago with a rollicking New Year’s Eve party that she and her husband threw at their renovated country estate in Poland to celebrate the triumphant end of the 20th century. Applebaum is a historian of Eastern Europe under communism, the author of Red Famine and the Pulitzer Prize–winning Gulag: A History; her husband, Radosław Sikorski, is a center-right politician who at various times has served as Poland’s foreign and defense ministers. Unsurprisingly, the guest list included many center-right intellectuals, journalists, and politicians from the three countries this power couple calls home—the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland. But as we soon learn, in the 20 years since then, many of the guests have migrated from the center-right to the far right. “I would now cross the street to avoid some of the people who were at my New Year’s Eve party,” Applebaum writes. “They, in turn, would not only refuse to enter my house, they would be embarrassed to admit they had ever been there. In fact, about half the people who were at that party would no longer speak to the other half.”

Readers unfamiliar with Polish politics may not recognize names like Ania Bielecka, the godmother of one of Applebaum’s children, who has recently become close with Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the far-right Polish governing party Law and Justice; or Anita Gargas, another of Applebaum’s guests, who now spreads conspiracy theories in the right-wing newspaper Gazeta Polska; or Rafal Ziemkiewicz, who now spews anti-Semitic rhetoric on Polish state television. But an Anglo-American audience will likely recognize some of the other people who were once her center-right comrades in arms—from the disgraced conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza and the Fox News prime-time hate-monger Laura Ingraham in the United States to former National Review editor in chief John O’Sullivan and current Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom. (O’Sullivan now spends most of his time in Hungary, where he runs a think tank, the Danube Institute, backed by the far-right ruling party.)

For Applebaum, the question is how her peers—all of whom, at the turn of the century, supported “the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market” consensus that dominated not only center-right but also most center-left politics after the fall of communism—have come to avow reactionary conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, and xenophobia and to show a slavish loyalty to demagogues like Donald Trump and Viktor Orbán. Twilight of Democracy is her attempt at an answer; in other words, it is Applebaum’s effort to explain why so many of her once-close friends have turned out to be fascists.

Insofar as the book offers intimate portraits of the sorts of intellectuals who have ended up working to empower the far right, it’s a valuable document. Drawing inspiration from Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals, Applebaum makes explicit that she is not setting out to explain what makes today’s populist strongmen tick nor what makes ordinary voters support them, but specifically why some in her orbit—all highly educated, urbane, cosmopolitan journalists, academics, and political operatives—have joined their cause. Up to a point, her main argument is persuasive: that her former friends are motivated less by ideological conviction or material suffering than by humiliation and resentment. In particular, they are driven by a sense that their natural talents have been inadequately recognized and rewarded under the supposedly meritocratic rules of a liberal elite that has dismissed them as mediocrities. They are the losers of liberalism’s cultural hegemony—or so they claim—and in the illiberal politics of the far right, they have found a way to win.

It’s a plausible theory, but implicit within it is an unexamined assumption that liberal meritocracy has worked and will continue to work on its own terms. Applebaum’s blind faith in the center-right strains of neoliberalism and meritocratic mobility also conveniently absolves her and her remaining friends of any responsibility for the present crisis. Their success, when they had it, was well deserved; to the extent that they are now powerless against the dangers presented by their estranged cohort, it is only because real merit is no longer being rewarded. It never seems to cross Applebaum’s mind that having had so many erstwhile friends who ended up on the far right might say something unflattering about her own judgment—and more generally about the center-right political tradition to which she belongs.

wilight of Democracy is not a long book. Its six chapters are structured as a series of personal recollections and reporting trips framed by abstract political digressions. From her New Year’s Eve party, Applebaum takes us first to contemporary Poland and Hungary, then to post-Brexit Britain, then to Spain and Trump’s America, and finally back to her Polish country home for another, more recent party—this one attended by a younger, more liberal, and more comfortably post-national crowd, including her sons’ friends from school and university. “No deep cultural differences, no profound civilizational clashes, no unbridgeable identity gaps appeared to divide them,” she writes optimistically, though the possibility that they might not present a socioeconomically representative glimpse of the West’s future doesn’t seem to occur to her.

The most effective moments in these journeys come when Applebaum offers sharply rendered portraits of her far-right subjects. Her contempt for each of them is deeply personal, and she has a knack for understated but cutting observation. Of the director of Polish state television, she writes:

Jacek Kurski is not a radically lonely conformist of the kind described by Hannah Arendt, and he does not incarnate the banality of evil; he is no bureaucrat following orders. He has never said anything thoughtful or interesting on the subject of democracy, a political system that he neither supports nor denounces. He is not an ideologue or a true believer; he is a man who wants the power and fame that he feels he has been unjustly denied. To understand Jacek, you need to look beyond political science textbooks and study, instead, literary antiheroes.

Of the Danube Institute, the think tank run by O’Sullivan:

Hungarian friends describe its presence in Budapest as “marginal.” As a rule, Hungarians don’t read its (admittedly sparse) English-language publications, and its events are unremarkable and mostly go unremarked. But O’Sullivan has an office and a Budapest apartment. He has the means to invite his many friends and contacts, all conservative writers and thinkers, to visit him in one of Europe’s greatest and most beautiful cities. I have no doubt that, when they get there, O’Sullivan is the jovial and witty host that he always was.

Of Laura Ingraham:

Some mutual friends point out that she is a convert to Catholicism, and a breast cancer survivor who is deeply religious: she told one of them that “the only man who never disappointed me was Jesus.” The willpower she required to survive in the cutthroat world of right-wing media—especially at Fox News, where female stars were often pressured to sleep with their bosses—should not be underestimated. These personal experiences give a messianic edge to some of her public remarks.

A number of these people refused to speak to Applebaum for the book; others had only brief, testy exchanges with her by phone. One, the right-wing Hungarian historian Mária Schmidt, met with Applebaum and then published her own heavily edited transcript of the interview online, without Applebaum’s permission, after which it appeared on the official website of the Hungarian government. “It had been a performance,” Applebaum realizes, “designed to prove to other Hungarians that Schmidt is loyal to the regime and willing to defend it.”

Applebaum’s character sketches are compelling, in part because they are fueled by an implicit, if unacknowledged, self-recognition. She is able to get into her subjects’ heads because she used to be so close with them—and, though she may not consciously understand this, because they are not so different from her. For instance, she writes about two subtly different shades of nostalgia. Reflective nostalgics, including herself, love old photographs and letters but don’t actually wish for a return to the past, while restorative nostalgics, like two of her former friends in Britain, the conservative writers Simon Heffer and Roger Scruton, have channeled the romance of the past into the disruptive politics of Brexit and the UK Independence Party. Applebaum still remembers—with nostalgia!—what it felt like to bond with Heffer and Scruton over English literature and country cricket matches, which lends some pathos to her break with them over Britain’s future.

This intimacy can also be found in Applebaum’s profoundly unsettling account of the 2010 Smolensk air disaster—a horrific tragedy in which 96 people, including Poland’s then-president and a large swath of the country’s political elite, died in a plane crash en route to a commemoration with the Russian government for the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. Here Applebaum captures how a nation’s deeply felt trauma can devolve into something more sinister:

A kind of hysteria, something like the madness that took hold in the United States after 9/11, engulfed the nation. Television announcers wore black mourning ties; friends gathered at our Warsaw apartment to talk about history repeating itself in that dark, damp Russian forest. My own recollection of the days that followed are jumbled and chaotic. I remember going to buy a black suit to wear to the memorial services; I remember one of the widows, so frail she seemed barely able to stand, weeping at her husband’s funeral. My own husband, who had refused an invitation to travel with the president on that trip, went out to the airport every evening to stand at attention while the coffins were brought home.

The crash was ruled an accident, one that initially united Poles and Russians in national mourning. But right-wing Polish intellectuals, including Applebaum’s former friend Gargas, soon developed a set of elaborate conspiracy theories to explain it. Applebaum aptly compares the Smolensk theories to birtherism and QAnon in the United States, and she sees in such viral falsehoods a useful tool for autocrats: If adherents can accept one false premise, one “medium-sized lie,” then every establishment narrative becomes suspect and an alternative, fact-free political reality beckons them.

As an eyewitness to how these paranoid alternate realities took root among the elites of multiple countries, Applebaum brings a useful perspective, one rooted in her own subject position and not easily found in a political science textbook. But as she moves from one chilling anecdote to the next, the reader may begin to notice a self-flattering absence haunting Twilight of Democracy: Applebaum is willing to skewer her erstwhile friends, but she is unwilling to interrogate her own culpability and that of the center-right establishment more generally. To whatever extent she may now regret some of these friendships with the benefit of hindsight, she does not acknowledge how her past and present worldview—one supportive of neoliberal economics, military adventurism, and elite meritocracy—might also have created the room for the far right.

pplebaum may be well versed in the soap-operatic intrigues of her set, but her grasp of Western political theory is at times superficial by comparison. Typical of the many interchangeable best sellers of the anti-Trump resistance, Twilight of Democracy is the sort of book that skips briskly from Plato to Cicero to Hamilton in order to note that elites have always been skeptical of democracy, and it dutifully cites Tocqueville, Lincoln, and King in affirming the compatibility of the liberal tradition with American exceptionalism. Meanwhile, she is dismissive and simplistic toward political figures of the past who are still identified with radicalism today. At one point, she goes on a diatribe against Emma Goldman for her anarchist criticisms of American patriotism a century ago, a tradition that Applebaum then traces through to the Weather Underground, Howard Zinn, and parts of the contemporary left.

Applebaum uses these more abstractly political digressions to reaffirm her long-established center-right priors, relying on Cold War–era talking points in an attempt to locate salvageable elements of conservatism amid the current wreckage. Her second chapter, for example, starts off with a bold claim: “the illiberal one-party state, now found all over the world—think of China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe—was first developed by Lenin, in Russia, starting in 1917. In the political science textbooks of the future, the Soviet Union’s founder will surely be remembered not just for his Marxist beliefs, but as the inventor of this enduring form of political organization.”

This is at best a debatable claim, dependent on how one views, for instance, Napoleon Bonaparte, his eventual heir Napoleon III, or any number of Latin American dictators and caudillos of the 19th century. But there’s a reason that Applebaum advances it. As the author of multiple books about the horrors of 20th-century communism and as a defender of the conservative intellectual tradition, she has a stake in holding the left to account while diagnosing the right’s slide into illiberalism: It means she doesn’t have to hold the center, and her center-right flank of it, accountable.

To be fair, Applebaum anticipates this line of criticism. “Although the cultural power of the authoritarian left is growing,” she writes, “the only modern clercs who have attained real political power in Western democracies…are members of movements that we are accustomed to calling the ‘right.’ ” But that acknowledgment notwithstanding, Applebaum is convinced there is a growing “authoritarian left,” which includes many factions that in reality are often fiercely at odds with one another. It’s a left that encompasses Chavismo in Venezuela, Jeremy Corbyn in Britain, the “openly radical, far-left” Podemos party in Spain, “a generation of far-left campus agitators who seek to dictate how professors can teach and what students can say,” and “the instigators of Twitter mobs who seek to take down public figures as well as ordinary people for violating unwritten speech codes.” (Disclosure: Applebaum has blocked me on Twitter.)

one of this should be terribly surprising, given that Applebaum is among the signatories of the Harper’s Magazine letter decrying cancel culture and has backed Yascha Mounk’s like-minded Persuasion newsletter. For this increasingly vocal segment of the centrist intelligentsia, the cultural excesses of wokeness are every bit as threatening as far-right politicians wielding actual state power.

But Applebaum’s distaste for the left isn’t just a matter of petty campus and Internet feuds. By drawing parallels between the left and the far right, she is attempting to absolve the center of any blame for its role in the current crisis, even though it has held a virtual monopoly on political power in the post–Cold War period. Applebaum is eager to psychoanalyze anyone she regards as politically extreme in either direction, but she is far less willing to interrogate her own unconscious assumptions or those of her remaining friends in the center—let alone the material results of their preferred policies.

To the common charge that the neoliberal economic order hollowed out the Western working and middle classes via deindustrialization, paving the way for Brexit and Trump, Applebaum writes, “In the Western world, the vast majority of people are not starving. They have food and shelter. They are literate. If we describe them as ‘poor’ or ‘deprived,’ it is sometimes because they lack things that human beings couldn’t dream of a century ago, like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi.”

This line of argument would have been risible even before Covid-19, but Twilight of Democracy went to print recently enough that Applebaum was able to include her account of the frantic international border closings last March—which is to say, recently enough that she could have registered that food and shelter may be out of reach for tens of millions of Americans right now and that austerity and neoliberalism bear as much responsibility for this calamity as Trump. Even to the extent that she is right about minimal material needs being met, it’s frankly astonishing that she doesn’t understand how ordinary people—as opposed to her well-connected friends—could be experiencing a crisis of meaning and dignity in a political order that expects them to be satisfied with cheap consumer goods and privatized essential services.

These are concerns not just in the United States or the United Kingdom but in Eastern European nations as well, including the one that hosts her country estate. Civic Platform, the center-right party that governed Poland from 2007 to 2015 and in which Applebaum’s husband served, presided over a staggering rise in economic inequality. It imposed austerity measures in the wake of the post-2009 eurozone crisis, raising the retirement age and phasing out pensions for farmers, miners, police, firefighters, and priests. At the same time, it embraced free trade to attract foreign businesses like Google, and its leaders were recorded flaunting ostentatious new wealth as the impoverished regions in the east stagnated. These regions would become the stronghold of the far-right Law and Justice government, which came to power by campaigning against Civic Platform’s fiscal cruelty. Civic Platform also weathered a series of corruption scandals, none of which get any acknowledgment in Applebaum’s account of Law and Justice’s rise to power.

Then there’s the matter of foreign policy, something Applebaum cares about a lot more. If she rejects the argument that globalization and inequality led to the far-right revival, she doesn’t even glancingly acknowledge the argument that the post-9/11 wars and crackdowns on civil liberties might also have played a role. The 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Applebaum supported, is discussed at any length just once, when she mounts a defense of Atlanticism—or at least the version of it championed by her husband at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, which sought to build ties between the United States and Europe by embroiling both in endless wars in the Middle East. “There was a genuine coalition of the willing that wanted to fight Saddam Hussein, including [José María] Aznar in Spain, British prime minister Tony Blair, Danish prime minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Polish president Alexander Kwasniewski, and a clutch of others,” she writes approvingly, before noting briskly that the war has haunted politicians like Blair ever since.

For Applebaum, the main significance of Iraq seems to be that it drew the US and Polish governments closer together. Whatever impact it had on Iraqis themselves, on traumatized veterans returning home, and on an entire generation’s willingness to trust the very Atlanticist project to which she remains committed escapes her notice. So does the propagandistic disinformation campaign that the Bush and Blair governments deployed to whip up support for the war—essentially a conspiracy theory, and one significantly advanced by Applebaum’s current social circle.

bring up Iraq in part because if Applebaum is going to write a book about the sins of her former friends, it’s also worth noting the sins of the friends she still has. According to the acknowledgments for Twilight of Democracy, these friends include David Frum, the author of George W. Bush’s 2002 “axis of evil” speech; Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor in chief who commissioned the essay on which her book is based and who also reported for The New Yorker in 2002 about the since-discredited connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and Leon Wieseltier, who championed the Iraq War and who fell from grace in 2017 after multiple women accused him of sexual harassment during his long tenure as literary editor of The New Republic.

Another friend who read drafts of Twilight of Democracy, Applebaum proudly tells us, is Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who has been condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center for her involvement in Gamergate, the far-right online movement widely seen as a forerunner of Trumpism. At least as recently as 2016, Sommers was an associate of Milo Yiannopoulos, the alt-right provocateur whom even Applebaum describes as a “sad figure” who has “ceased to have much influence in the United States.” The bilious mouthpieces of the far right and the center-right are never all that far apart—indeed, Applebaum’s husband has had to deny that he once joked that Barack Obama’s ancestors were cannibals.

All of this is to say that if Applebaum was blindsided by the turn that some of her friends have made to the far right over the past decade, she may not be the best judge of which intellectuals carry latent fascist tendencies today, let alone a trustworthy critic when it comes to understanding the ties between her center-right politics and those of the far right.

n her section on US politics, Applebaum describes her own break with the Republican Party. In 2008, she wrote an article for Slate explaining why she couldn’t bring herself to vote for John McCain for president, a decision she attributes to “the ascent of Sarah Palin, a proto-Trump, and the Bush administration’s use of torture in Iraq.” Although she denounced the GOP’s slide into illiberalism, at the time she had mostly positive words for McCain, a fellow Cold War hawk who had spoken at the Washington launch party for her history of the gulag.

McCain was Applebaum’s kind of Republican: a champion of the liberal international order; an occasionally idiosyncratic, self-styled centrist; a friend to countless journalists; and a wisecracking, backslapping establishment elite. Early in the book, she describes her present cohort of center-right intellectuals as aligning with “the Republican Party of John McCain.” But she never fully reckons with how a figure like McCain facilitated the far right’s mainstreaming—not only by elevating Palin to national stature but also through other efforts over his long career to dog-whistle to bigots, such as his infamous opposition to Martin Luther King Day. Applebaum notes, tellingly, that after she criticized Palin’s selection, McCain never spoke to her again.

Regardless, now that Trump has been defeated by the doggedly centrist Joe Biden—who appointed the senator’s widow, Cindy McCain, to the board of his presidential transition team—Applebaum can rest assured: Not only will centrist Republicans never be held accountable for empowering the far right, they will also be actively rewarded by the ascendant centrist Democrats.

Both in Twilight of Democracy and in her recent interviews and tweets, Applebaum has insisted that the authoritarian temptation exists on both the left and the right, even if right-wing authoritarianism is the more immediate threat. That’s true to an extent, and it’s understandable that someone who has studied Stalin’s reign of terror in such detail would say so. But it’s also a dodge. Today’s rising leftists in the United States and the United Kingdom, by and large, aren’t calling for a return to Stalinism but for a social democratic model that would seek to repair the enormous human damage done by decades of the untrammeled neoliberalism that Applebaum and her friends have consistently championed.

Unlike her and her centrist peers, these leftists are also offering a constructive alternative to both the far right and the failed status quo—and one that might stand a better chance of saving liberal democracy than anything proposed in this book. Perhaps Applebaum should consider throwing them a party.

Eight months into his presidency, Joe Biden will mark the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. While he shouldn’t wait until the literal anniversary to get started, 2021 marks an ideal opportunity to break decisively with what have come to be known as the forever wars—the open-ended US military involvement in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and many other countries across the Muslim world. A generation of Americans with no memory of the 9/11 attacks is currently deployed in an increasingly aimless effort to avenge them that has now spanned three drastically different presidencies. Polling in recent years has shown consistent opposition to these wars, including from veterans, who have borne the brunt of policy-makers’ refusal to abandon a failed counterterrorism strategy.

For progressives and anti-interventionists, the early signs from Biden have been inauspicious. His inner circle on foreign policy will include Antony Blinken as secretary of state, Jake Sullivan as national security adviser, and Avril Haines as director of national intelligence. All are veterans of the Obama administration and played a significant role in formulating and directing military interventions, and all have leveraged their connections for profit in the private sector during the Trump era. In general, they are fervent believers in American global leadership, backed by military supremacy. The warm welcome this group has received within the Beltway foreign policy community—often derisively referred to as the Blob—suggests an imminent return to the pre-Trump status quo.

But the national mood has shifted dramatically since Barack Obama left office. Foreign policy is a space where many Americans across party lines are demanding a new direction, with clear support for withdrawing forces from Afghanistan and shifting resources from the Pentagon budget into domestic priorities. Democrats in particular support repealing the endlessly renewed post-9/11 Authorization for Use of Military Force, which has granted the executive branch virtually unlimited war-making powers, and which progressive legislators like Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna have fought to rein in. A Biden administration that wants to maintain broad support and transpartisan appeal could feel pressure to chart a new course.

The Democrats’ 2020 platform, to which Biden and his inner circle are theoretically committed, explicitly recognizes the need to end the forever wars. It promises to “bring the troops home” and to use force only “when necessary to protect national security and when the objective is clear and achievable—with the informed consent of the American people, and where warranted, the approval of Congress.” It specifically calls for an end to the US-backed Saudi war in Yemen, a humanitarian catastrophe, and for reversing Trump’s curtailment of travel and remittances to Cuba, a major positive legacy of Obama’s second term. It also calls for ending the Trump administration’s rush to war with Iran and for recommitting to the Iran nuclear deal, which Blinken helped shape. And unlike the party’s 2016 platform, it recognizes “the worth of every Israeli and every Palestinian” and opposes annexation of the West Bank and Israel’s settlement expansion—although it does not recognize the existence of an “occupation,” and Blinken has made it clear that Israel can count on US military aid no matter what.

To the extent that this language is promising, it represents a push by progressive groups and the Sanders campaign to influence the party’s direction ahead of last summer’s convention. But it doesn’t necessarily reflect how Biden’s team sees the world. So far, there is little indication of genuine soul-searching over Obama-era policies like the troop surge in Afghanistan, the expansion of George W. Bush’s targeted assassination program, the authorization of regime change in Libya, or the war in Yemen.

To avoid a repeat of the Obama administration’s greatest foreign policy mistakes, Biden and his advisers would be wise to recognize the subsequent shifts in both public opinion and strategic reality and to work to change the underlying US relationships in the greater Middle East. In particular, the Trump administration’s uncritical indulgence of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states must be repudiated, and there should be a swift diplomatic reset with Iran, to make clear to foreign autocrats that Jared Kushner’s corrupt approach to diplomacy was an aberration.

Rooting out the transnational corruption exemplified by Kushner will require more than just a new diplomatic approach; it will require a coordinated effort to stem the flow of illicit capital across borders and to crack down on lobbying efforts by foreign governments in Washington. As with ending the forever wars, Biden, like many of his Democratic primary rivals, is theoretically committed to such a crackdown. To follow through, he will need to take aggressive executive actions, many of which would really be domestic policy shifts with significant international implications. For instance, he could broaden the definition of “lobbyist” and impose bans on former government officials serving as lobbyists or vice versa; expand transparency measures on tax information for public officials; amend the global Magnitsky Act to target corrupt officials throughout the world, in both rival and friendly countries; and shut down international tax havens that benefit both US and foreign oligarchs. Biden could thus send a clear message that US foreign policy is no longer for sale to the highest bidder—although that message risks being muddled, given that the core members of his national security team have secured lucrative consulting contracts between their stints in government.

The US relationship with China will be an especially treacherous and central concern when Biden takes office. After two decades of relatively stable relations, during which China policy was heavily influenced by the US Chamber of Commerce and by global capital’s desire for cheap labor and weak regulations, both Democratic and Republican leaders increasingly view China as a rival and a threat. China’s initial mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the growing recognition of US-China trade’s deleterious effects on America’s economic and political health, and the ongoing cultural genocide in Xinjiang and the repression of civil liberties in Hong Kong are all legitimate reasons for this shift.

But at the same time, the Biden administration should resist the temptation to spiral into a new Cold War with Beijing, the consequences of which would be disastrous for both countries and the entire world. A Biden ad run during the 2020 campaign that struck a crude anti-China tone, and that provoked vocal criticism from both anti-interventionist and Asian American activists, hinted at this danger. Biden must avoid the further militarization of East Asia and instead focus his attention on renegotiating trade policies to prioritize labor, climate, and human rights. Under Biden, Washington should champion progressive, innovative, and multilateral approaches to transnational problems, from climate change to borderless pandemics—a process that will necessarily require cooperation with China, home to nearly one-fifth of the world’s people, which would be severely undermined by a new arms race. The 2020 platform calls for extending New START and other nonproliferation agreements and for negotiating new arms control treaties with China—a commitment that Biden must be held to in office.

None of this will come easily to Biden or his administration, but the American public, exhausted by the pandemic and two decades of war, is in no mood for military adventurism. The trillions of dollars the United States has squandered on the Pentagon since 9/11 could have been spent on universal health care, housing, and infrastructure at home and on diplomacy and nonmilitary aid abroad. Biden has rightly pledged to rebuild the State Department, which has been gutted by Trump, but he could also frame any withdrawal from militarism as a step toward reinvesting in the health and well-being of the United States. This shouldn’t be mistaken for Trump’s crude America-first nationalism; rather, it should be understood as a genuinely democratic process that reestablishes Washington’s accountability to the people. The Trump era in general and the pandemic in particular have badly tarnished America’s reputation; if Biden wishes to restore American global leadership, the best way to do so would be to demonstrate that the United States is capable of providing basic services to its own people.

Unfortunately, even if Democrats win the impending Senate runoff elections in Georgia, it seems clear that Biden will be severely limited in his ability to pass major legislation. Instead, his domestic agenda will likely be limited to executive orders and a handful of centrist compromises on managing the pandemic and its economic fallout. On foreign policy, however, a Biden administration will enjoy a relatively free hand and can be more directly responsive to the demands articulated by an active progressive base.

The good news is that progressive activism and intellectual infrastructure is far more robust than it was at the beginning of Obama’s first term, including on foreign policy, where new organizations like the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft are committed to shaking up the foreign policy consensus. Biden may be an instinctive centrist, but he cannot govern without the support of the growing progressive wing of his own party in Congress; nor can Democrats prevail in the future without buy-in from the younger generation, which leans left. Holding Biden accountable for a foreign policy that breaks with 20 years of war and recommits to human flourishing will necessarily be a collective effort. Democratizing foreign policy will, by definition, be a bottom-up project.

Over the past few years, a loose coalition of activist groups, think tanks, and policy-makers dedicated to ending the post-9/11 forever war has asserted itself in foreign policy debates. As recently as February, when Bernie Sanders appeared to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it seemed possible that US foreign policy was on the verge of turning toward a less militarized and interventionist approach. Sanders and the other major progressive candidate in the race, Elizabeth Warren, had foreign policy advisers who advocated slashing defense budgets and reinvesting in diplomacy to confront nonmilitary threats.

But Joe Biden’s decisive victory over Sanders dealt a blow to those hopes. For decades, Biden has been a representative figure of the mainstream foreign policy establishment, the so-called Blob. He supported the Iraq War, is close with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and has premised his campaign on a restoration of the Obama era.

Biden appeared to secure the nomination just as the coronavirus pandemic began radically reshaping every aspect of policy-making, including international affairs. I wanted to take the temperature of leading foreign policy progressives in light of the primary race and the pandemic to get a sense of how they might attempt to influence a Biden administration and to explore what national security means in an age of deadly viruses that don’t recognize national borders. On one key point, there was a broad consensus: Covid-19 vindicates what the left has been saying about foreign policy—that endless war has squandered resources without making Americans safer—and represents an opportunity to shift the debate in a more constructive direction. On the question of whether a Biden administration would be receptive to those urging such a shift, there was far less agreement.

n early April, Ben Rhodes, a national security adviser for President Barack Obama, wrote in The Atlantic that “as COVID-19 has transformed the way that Americans live, and threatens to claim exponentially more lives than any terrorist has, it is time to finally end the chapter of our history that began on September 11, 2001.” That is certainly the hope of all my interviewees, but for now, America’s wars rage on.

“The forever war has clearly not ended,” said one leading progressive foreign policy adviser, who requested anonymity to speak candidly. “Just because we happen to be more focused on the pandemic right now does not let us off the hook for ending wars.” But everyone I spoke to agreed on the urgency of doing so.

“On foreign policy, as on a range of other issues, the pandemic has starkly demonstrated a lot of Senator Sanders’s arguments about how we have failed to invest in our own country, people, and infrastructure,” said Matt Duss, Sanders’s foreign policy adviser. In response to the pandemic, Sanders and progressive allies in Congress recently proposed cutting the Pentagon’s budget by 10 percent, a plan since endorsed by Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “It shows very clearly that our security priorities and investments—the obsessive focus on counterterrorism, the overuse of the military as the foreign policy instrument of first resort—have been not just wrong but wildly counterproductive,” Duss said.

Stephen Wertheim, a cofounder of the Quincy Institute, an anti-
interventionist think tank that launched last year with funding from George Soros and Charles Koch, told me, “The pandemic illustrated a lot of what we’ve been saying for some time—that our main challenges from the perspective of US interests are planetary and transnational, not military threats from rival nation-states.”

Wertheim added, “What did our massive military apparatus and our national security state deliver for us against the biggest threat of our lifetime? Not much.”

By international standards, the United States has done an exceptionally poor job of containing the coronavirus. Failures at every level of government mean that Covid-19 continues to spread across the US, even as countries in Europe and Asia turn the corner. All of this suggests that American global leadership, already damaged by Donald Trump’s misgovernance, will have a hard time recovering from the pandemic. “Who would ever take that seriously after this?” said Duss. “This idea of America as this unparalleled and supremely competent global hegemon is over.”

ovid-19 is a preview not only of future pandemics but also of climate change, the transnational security crisis that will define our lives. The rest of the century is likely to see more famines, droughts, flooding, other natural disasters, resource wars, and mass migrations, all of which hurt the poorest countries disproportionately while sparing no one. In the ideal scenario, nations would come together to create solutions to these borderless threats. But it’s at least as plausible that countries will retreat into the kind of right-wing nationalism that has dominated international politics over the past few years.

“Internationalism is not a luxury. It’s a necessity,” said David Adler, an informal Sanders foreign policy adviser and the general coordinator of the Progressive International, a recently launched organization dedicated to fostering ties among left-wing politicians and movements around the world. “All of humanity is thinking about the same crisis and confronting the same question of how you lock down a population while providing for basic resources. We are all consumed by a similar anxiety.”

“But that’s a fleeting moment,” he added. “Very quickly, the old inequalities are going to settle in…. We’re moving to a politics that’s very ripe for nationalism. It’s our plight, as progressives, to have to force our way between those two perspectives to say that [internationalism] didn’t work the way it was constructed for the past half century and also that the direction of the right populists is far too dangerous.”

Kate Kizer, the policy director of the anti-interventionist advocacy group Win Without War, expressed similar fears. “I’m seeing two different paths ahead—either one of authoritarianism, driven by xenophobic nationalism, or an internationalist response that is rooted in cross-border solidarity and cooperation. It’s a little bit scary, because authoritarianism is a playbook that’s tried and true and has been well organized for a long time and building towards this moment.” She called the coronavirus crisis “an authoritarian’s dream” because it provides an excuse to declare emergency powers and suspend normal political processes and civil liberties, something already happening in countries like Hungary and Bolivia.

Covid-19 is also directly affecting the US military and its many theaters of operation. In April the Navy fired Brett Crozier as captain of an aircraft carrier after he raised the alarm about a coronavirus outbreak on his ship. In Yemen, a country mired in starvation and cholera due to an ongoing US-backed Saudi intervention in its civil war—opposition to which has been a central mission for progressive foreign policy activists—deaths from Covid-19 could exceed wartime fatalities in the internationally recognized capital of Aden. In just two weeks in May, the city recorded 950 deaths from the pandemic, roughly half of Aden’s war fatalities in all of 2015.

“The primary focus for us remains asserting congressional war powers to end US support for the war in Yemen that continues to be the world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” said Erik Sperling, the executive director of the left-wing anti-war group Just Foreign Policy. “Covid in Yemen is just starting. They have an absolutely devastated health system. We’ve had Save the Children hospitals that have been bombed by the Saudi coalition.”

The virus has also had a disastrous effect on Iran, which suffers under economic sanctions that were lifted after the Obama administration’s 2015 nuclear deal and reinstated under Trump after he unilaterally withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018. In January of this year, the Trump administration assassinated Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani, nearly setting off a regional war. The White House had already imposed sanctions, denying Iranians access to food, prescription drugs, and medical devices. More than 13,000 Iranians have died from Covid-19 as the government struggles to obtain critical supplies. In late March 34 lawmakers—including Sanders, Warren, and Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar—sent a letter to the administration urging sanctions relief. The letter was endorsed by groups such as Just Foreign Policy, Win Without War, J Street, and the Ploughshares Fund.

On April 2 the Biden campaign released an equivocal statement criticizing Trump’s Iran policy and providing guidelines for humanitarian aid to work around sanctions, but it did not call for sanctions relief. More recently, Biden’s main foreign policy adviser, Tony Blinken, said at an American Jewish Committee event that under a Biden administration, all sanctions on Iran would remain in place, including those introduced under Trump, unless Iran resumed full compliance with the nuclear deal—which it was doing before the US withdrawal, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

“It was good that [Biden] said something, but I think what he called for was the bare minimum and that he should go much further,” said Kizer. That summarizes how foreign policy progressives tend to appraise Biden. Should he win the presidency, he will be responsible for managing US military commitments in the Middle East and elsewhere, for pursuing a multilateral diplomatic strategy for threats like the pandemic, and for navigating America’s increasingly fraught relationship with China. Foreign policy progressives are ready and willing to advise him on all of these issues—but will he listen?

he figure most likely to determine the answer is Blinken, a former Obama administration national security official who has been advising Biden on foreign policy since his days on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Blinken, 58, is a former contributor to The New Republic, a partner in a private equity firm (as The American Prospect reported, a number of top Biden foreign policy advisers have gotten rich in the private sector), and an outspoken humanitarian interventionist. Blinken had a hand in Obama’s Afghanistan surge (which Biden, as several interviewees noted, opposed at the time) and intervention in Libya. In New York Times op-eds, Blinken has voiced support for Trump’s air strikes on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria and for providing military assistance to Ukraine. Blinken is visible in Pete Souza’s famous photograph of the White House Situation Room during the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Blinken also played a role in shaping the Iran nuclear deal.

Asked whether a Biden administration would be receptive to foreign policy progressives and vocal opponents of the forever war, Blinken said in a statement, “Given the scope of the challenges the next president will face, we’re actively soliciting input and advice from a wide range of experts, including many progressive leaders, to help us build out a foreign policy agenda that reflects Vice President Biden’s long-held values, and will help restore America’s leadership role in the world as we confront new threats like the coronavirus” (emphasis added).

Multiple outlets have reported that progressives have been lobbying Blinken and others to commit to some of the foreign policy proposals embraced by Sanders and Warren, with limited success at best. Duss, the Sanders adviser, said he has had conversations with Blinken, bonding over a shared passion for the Beatles. “I have known him for quite some time,” said Duss. “I like him a lot. I have great respect for him.” Duss added that he has recommended a number of people from Sanders’s foreign policy working group to work on the Biden campaign and that Biden’s team has been in touch with them.

“The Biden campaign has welcomed supporters from not only the other progressive campaigns but from all of the other primary candidates with open arms,” said another progressive foreign policy adviser. “They have incorporated advisers into their working groups. They are proactively seeking to do what they can to unify the party.” But the adviser cautioned, “I think there is still an open question about whether that will result in any substantive changes in terms of policies and whether or not any of the more progressive voices in the party are appointed into positions of influence.”

The adviser also expressed concern that Biden has yet to commit to winding down wars in the Middle East or reducing the Pentagon budget. “Trump has increased it by hundreds of billions of dollars. It doesn’t seem like too much of an ask to expect the Democratic nominee, at a minimum, to say that we’re going to undo those increases, even if they’re not willing to go further.”

Others were even more critical. “I don’t understand why Tony Blinken would want to write, very recently, an op-ed with pro–Iraq War neocon Bob Kagan in The Washington Post,” said Wertheim, who noted that while he has not spoken with Blinken, there are people in Biden’s orbit whose anti-interventionist views align with the Quincy Institute’s. “Biden’s record is the record of a mainstream Democrat over many decades—which is to say, not very good.”

In March, Wertheim criticized an essay written by Biden—presumably with input from Blinken—in Foreign Affairs laying out his most comprehensive foreign policy vision. “It claimed to end the forever war,” Wertheim said. “And then in the next sentence, it explained that what that meant was that perhaps half of US ground troops in Afghanistan and the Middle East would be withdrawn. That’s not ending the forever war.”

Lara Friedman, who succeeded Duss as president of the nonprofit Foundation for Middle East Peace, which focuses on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, was blunter. She excoriated Blinken for his statement during a webcast in May that “Joe Biden believes strongly in keeping your differences—to the greatest extent possible—between friends behind doors,” referring to how Biden would handle disagreements with Israel. The event was hosted by the Democratic Majority for Israel, a super PAC funded in part by people who have donated to Republicans and that has targeted progressive candidates, including Sanders, with negative ads.

“It’s quite striking,” said Friedman. “They didn’t put this out in August. They put this out in May, before the July 1 annexation date,” referring to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s pledge to annex parts of the occupied West Bank this summer, in violation of international law and against pre-Trump US policy. (As of this writing, the process had not formally commenced.) “He’s saying aid will never be used as leverage of any kind. He’s promising to protect Israel at the United Nations, which I have a hard time reading as anything other than a shot at Obama”—a reference to Obama’s decision not to veto a UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the West Bank in December 2016.

Friedman was pessimistic about a Biden administration’s willingness to listen to pro-Palestine activists. “If they’ve already annexed by the time you come in, how much political capital are you going to spend trying to undo or unwind annexation?” she asked.

ne issue that came up 
repeatedly in my interviews was the US-China relationship. The Covid-19 pandemic was first reported in the Chinese city of Wuhan; as a result and presumably to distract from their failure to contain the virus, the Trump administration, Republican hawks like Senator Tom Cotton, and right-wing media outlets have attempted to stoke xenophobic outrage against China. But so has the Biden campaign, which in May faced pushback from progressives and Asian American groups for releasing an ad that accused the president of having “rolled over for the Chinese.”

“Even before the [coronavirus] crisis, there was a growing narrative in Washington that the rise of China presented an existential threat to the United States,” said Kizer. “We saw this with Tom Cotton’s proposal to increase military spending for more weapons to be used potentially against China. If we continue down the path of demonizing China and the xenophobia and hate that goes along with it…we’re going to ultimately end up hurting our ability to address security challenges.”

There is also the issue of accountability for past US policies associated with the forever war. In June the Biden campaign announced that its foreign policy and national security transition team will be led by Avril Haines, who during the Obama administration served as deputy director of the CIA, a position in which she helped oversee redactions to the Senate’s torture report.

“Not only was Haines part of the torture infrastructure under [Gina] Haspel, she also actively supported Haspel, a known torturer, to lead the CIA,” said Maha Hilal, an anti-torture advocate with the organization Justice for Muslims Collective. Haspel became the CIA’s director in 2018. “Haines already played a direct role in absolving others of their crimes, so she will surely extend this to her work under a potential Biden presidency.” This might be the hardest aspect of a Biden administration for progressives to accept; given the personnel involved, there is likely to be little appetite for reckoning with the recent past.

he presumed outcome of the primaries is still a sore spot for everyone I spoke with. “It’s immeasurably sad,” said Adler. “Bernie’s campaign was the place where [progressive foreign policy] ideas were getting a fair hearing.” Daniel Bessner, a professor of American foreign policy at the University of Washington who advised the Sanders campaign, described himself as “pretty pessimistic about Joe Biden” and said he expected that a Biden administration would be very similar to the Obama administration and would rarely draw on the ideas developed working with Sanders.

But whether a Biden administration listens to foreign policy progressives will depend on not only personnel but also whether anti-war voices can organize and assert themselves. Here, at least, I found some optimism.

“There is a much more solid and continually growing and mobilized coalition around progressive foreign policy priorities that there simply was not toward the beginning of the Obama administration,” said Duss. “It came to fruition in support of the Iran nuclear agreement.”

He added that whereas the neoconservatives who have lobbied in favor of wars have long been well organized, with “a lot of donors and think tanks and letterheads and columnists,” the anti-war left’s main advantage is that its views now reflect a clear majority of Americans’. Meanwhile, in terms of infrastructure, progressives are catching up, thanks to new groups like Quincy with the budgets and connections to provide an alternative to the echo chamber in Washington.

Increasingly, elected officials are listening. After the Suleimani assassination in January, Democrats sprang into action to insist on Congress’s constitutional authority over wars, which Duss called “a positive shift” since the Obama administration—although Democrats may not be as eager to assert such authority against a Democratic president. Progressives both in and out of government are also rallying around the dovish Representative Joaquin Castro’s campaign to chair the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where he would replace New York’s recently primaried Representative Eliot Engel, a noted hawk. “Castro has shown a commitment toward various progressive causes, especially ending the US’s unconstitutional war on Yemen,” said Shireen Al-Adeimi, an assistant professor at Michigan State University and a Just Foreign Policy board member.

“I definitely agree that the outside movement is much more organized,” said Kizer. “And I think that’s going to be one of the critical things…for the Biden team to understand, that there is an active, progressive constituency who cares about national security and also that the changes that progressives are seeking on domestic policy are tightly intertwined with changes that are necessary on the international front.”

This summer, mass demonstrations across the country have pushed policy-makers to implement long-overdue reforms aimed at ending racist police violence. Biden may not have been most progressives’ first choice, and he has some responsibility for the modern police state, but he and his advisers seem to understand how that debate has shifted. Should he win in November, perhaps progressive activists will force him to reevaluate the untenable foreign policy status quo in which he is similarly implicated.

Foreign policy is arguably where US presidents are able to have the largest impact. Yet presidential candidates typically treat it as secondary to their domestic agenda. Elizabeth Warren is no exception; her main 2020 pitch is that she would take on the big banks and impose new regulations to save capitalism from itself. Still, while it has received less attention, she has rolled out a foreign policy vision that aligns with her domestic promises of “big, structural change.” It’s ambitious, bold, and progressive: It would end the “endless wars” since 9/11, prioritize fighting climate change, and aim to stamp out transnational corruption and kleptocracy. And like Warren’s entire platform, it’s the product of a team of wonks who believe deeply in their candidate, convened by an earnest expert who reports directly to Warren.

When I pitched a profile of the senator’s lead foreign policy adviser, Sasha Baker, to The Nation last October, Warren was surging in the national polls. Her main rival in the progressive lane of the Democratic primary race, Bernie Sanders, had just suffered a heart attack, and it was unclear whether his campaign would be able to continue. But by the time I filed my first draft, having managed to secure two interviews with Baker, Warren’s fortunes had fallen. By the time the piece was in its final form, she had come in third in Iowa and was polling well behind Sanders in New Hampshire.

This delay in getting my article into print was largely the result of lengthy interactions with members of the Warren campaign’s communications team, which, while friendly and professional, dragged out the reporting process. Initially, they declined to let me interview Baker on the record. Eventually, they agreed to let me tape interviews with her as long as that information would be considered off the record by default, meaning I couldn’t quote anything without clearing it with them first. A communications staffer sat in on our phone interview in November and our in-person interview in January at a pub near the campaign’s headquarters outside Boston. Based on discussions I’ve had with other reporters, this did not reflect any personal animosity toward me; the Warren team is cagey and does not generally make policy advisers available for on-the-record interviews.

But Baker deserves more attention. The 37-year-old staffer, who joined Warren’s team after a rapid ascent through the Obama administration, is the figure most responsible for shaping the Massachusetts senator’s foreign policy agenda. In person, Baker is smart, funny, and thoughtful about the daunting challenges facing any president who wants to rein in the American war machine. She is also exceedingly cautious, at least in the constrained context of our interviews, which seems reflective of the culture of Warren’s campaign. Baker described herself as a “behind-the-scenes person,” and that’s how the campaign prefers its policy-makers. Jon Donenberg, Warren’s policy director, told me in a statement that Baker “shuns the spotlight” and praised her “groundbreaking work, both in government and on the campaign.” A rising star, Baker could end up playing a major role in the making of any Democratic administration’s foreign policy, but her career and her policy approach also shed light on the strengths and the weaknesses of Warren’s campaign.

Baker’s Twitter bio reads, “Policy for team @ewarren (we write the plans),” which is a reference to Warren’s ubiquitous slogan, “I’ve got a plan for that”—the implication being that Warren and the people around her have done their homework, worked out the kinks, and aren’t just preaching revolution. But a campaign running on plans might have offered more of a spotlight to the people who write them and the values, temperaments, and experiences they bring to bear. Allowing those staffers to come forward as more visible surrogates would have reflected a campaign that felt more confident in its message and more willing to take risks in expressing it—one that might have been better positioned to channel a mobilized progressive base eager for a fundamental reassessment of America’s role in the world.

orn Alexandra Rogers in 1983, Baker grew up in the suburbs of northern New Jersey. Her mother, who is Russian Orthodox, was born to émigrés from the Soviet Union in a displaced persons camp in Germany after World War II and came to the United States as a refugee (a biographical detail she coincidentally shares with the father of Matt Duss, Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, whom I profiled for The Nation last year). Baker said that her family’s history gave her “a sense of how meaningful it is to be a citizen of this country and the obligation we have to give back.”

A product of public schools, Baker attended Dartmouth as an undergraduate, where she majored in government and was a freshman at the time of the 9/11 attacks. She opposed the Iraq War from the beginning and campaigned for then-Senator John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, in New Hampshire. After graduation, she had a brief stint at a consulting firm in Boston, which she said she “knew pretty early on was not the right fit for me.” After the Democrats won back control of the House in 2006, she moved to Washington and crashed on a friend’s couch until she found a job working for the House Armed Services Committee, which at the time was trying to impose oversight of President George W. Bush’s wars. During this period, she traveled frequently to military bases around the country as well as to Afghanistan and Iraq. “It was the height of the surge,” she said, referring to the Bush administration’s decision to double down on its counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq beginning in 2007. “There was a sense of, ‘At what point do we say this is not working?’ Even then, 12 years ago, you could really see the impact on the ground of decisions that were made back in DC.”

After two years at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where she earned a master’s degree in public policy and was a fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Baker returned to Washington during the Obama administration to take part in the prestigious Presidential Management Fellowship Program. She joined the Office of Management and Budget, where she worked in the homeland security division, supervising the relief efforts for Hurricane Sandy before moving to the national security division, where she oversaw counterterrorism projects. She was made special assistant to OMB Director Shaun Donovan and was then tapped by Obama’s secretary of defense Ash Carter to serve as his deputy chief of staff—her last job before she went to work for Warren in early 2017.

Baker considered leaving government after Obama’s second term, but Donald Trump’s victory, which she described as “personally devastating,” changed her mind. Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, she read in The Washington Post that Warren had joined the Senate Armed Services Committee, and soon Baker was interviewing for her current job. “It was the only Capitol Hill job I applied for,” she said. “I wanted to work for her because I’d seen how she was fearless in taking on entrenched power structures and challenging the status quo—and I saw a chance to bring that focus to bear on a national security complex that badly needs shaking up.”

Of Warren, Baker said, “She blew me away from the very first moment that I interacted with her.” Warren immediately asked her to summarize the debate about the impact of sequestration on defense readiness in plain English. “I really felt like we hit it off, and I never looked back.” Baker worked in Warren’s Capitol Hill office for two years before the presidential campaign heated up, after which she moved to Massachusetts with her husband, Sam Baker, who is the health care editor for the political news site Axios. “We don’t live that far from Senator Warren,” she said. “I keep looking to see Bailey,” Warren’s golden retriever and a social media star.

he informal team of foreign policy experts on whom Baker relies speak of her in glowing terms. “She combines compassion and open-mindedness with ninja problem-solving and bureaucratic skills,” said Loren DeJonge Schulman, the deputy director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, a Democratic Party–aligned think tank. She is another Obama administration alum and part of the Warren foreign policy brain trust (which is not formally employed by the campaign). “Warren talks big structural change,” Schulman continued. “Sasha is one of many engineers to get it done.”

In terms of foreign policy, “big structural change” means rebuilding the State Department, which has been gutted under Trump, while scaling back the Defense Department’s role. “Today we have a Pentagon that is so large and so overdeveloped, relative to our other instruments of foreign policy, that the way we engage with the world is through the military, and that’s completely backwards,” Baker said. Warren’s plans—all of which Baker has had a hand in—call for closing the revolving door between corporate defense lobbyists and Pentagon staffers, fighting global financial corruption by shutting down tax shelters, and reducing the military’s enormous carbon footprint.

“I think Sasha is fantastic,” said Ilan Goldenberg, a former Obama Pentagon official and a Middle East expert. “Her ability to put this incredible team together has a lot to do with how easy she is to work with and how smart she is and her vision and her ability. I’m just consistently blown away by her ability to collect these people, respond quickly in case of crisis, have a clear vision of what she wants to do, and be able to reflect the values and ideas of Senator Warren.” Other members of the team include former State Department official Jarrett Blanc, former Pentagon official Oona Hathaway, former US ambassador to Syria Robert Ford, and many other former Obama officials, most of whom have diplomatic or national security backgrounds relating to the Middle East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, or China. Of the first 14 names provided to me, seven are women—a level of parity unfortunately still rare in the national security field. Asked about her experience as a woman in national security, Baker acknowledged the disparity but said she hasn’t been held back.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have had a series of bosses who only cared whether or not you could do the job,” she said. “I’ve also had really great mentors, both men and women, who have encouraged me and who’ve never allowed me to think that my gender would be an impediment.”

Only a few members of the team have backgrounds in activism, such as the anti-war movement, or in media organizations antagonistic to US government policy. “I have enormous respect for my colleagues in the movement and the work they do to hold government accountable,” Baker said. “But I’ve also spent my career pushing for progressive change from the inside. And there’s a role for both in creating change. I think we’re going to need people who know how the bureaucracy and the system work if we’re going to be able to change it.” Her team, in other words, represents the progressive edge of the Washington foreign policy establishment—but it is still very much part of that establishment.

One name absent from the campaign’s list is Andrew Bacevich, the president of the newly founded Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an organization dedicated to military restraint. While I was reporting on Quincy for The Nation last year, Bacevich, a conservative who lives in Massachusetts, told me he’d been over to Warren’s house to meet with her and her husband, Bruce Mann. Warren had read Bacevich’s 2016 book, America’s War for the Greater Middle East, which criticizes decades of failed interventionist policy in the region. “We had tea sitting in the kitchen, and she pelted me with questions for an hour,” he said. “I was exceedingly impressed with Senator Warren.” In late 2018 he wrote an open letter to her in Le Monde Diplomatique, offering unsolicited advice on how to frame her approach to foreign policy. In the final weeks before Iowa, she wrote an op-ed in The Atlantic calling for an end to endless wars—one very much in line with Quincy’s positions—and she praised Bacevich’s book in an interview with Vice News. But neither he nor anyone else at Quincy or a similar organization is part of the campaign’s declared circle of advisers.

Last year the Warren campaign hired Max Berger, a 34-year-old activist and cofounder of the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, which opposes Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, as well as a veteran of Occupy Wall Street and Justice Democrats. Berger, not surprisingly, was targeted by right-wing pro-Israel groups after his hire, and the campaign quickly clarified that he would be working on progressive partnerships, not Middle East policy. Because of this, the Warren campaign would not allow me to speak with Berger for this piece—despite my argument that a figure with his activist background might offer a valuable perspective on the candidate’s Middle East policy.

he Sanders campaign, meanwhile, draws many of its most prominent and outspoken staffers from activism and the alternative media. Duss, Baker’s rough equivalent on the Sanders campaign, came out of progressive blogging and anti-war advocacy rather than the Pentagon or some other federal agency. In December, Politico ran an article contrasting Sanders and Warren on foreign policy and drawing the conclusion that Sanders has run to Warren’s left, “further afield of the establishment.” The article contrasts Duss’s more unorthodox background with Baker’s more traditional one. The Warren campaign declined to allow Baker’s comments regarding the Politico article to go on record, along with her comments on Sanders’s campaign or his foreign policy in general.

In the wake of several major international developments, a rough pattern has emerged in which the Sanders campaign puts out a straightforward, uncompromising statement against Trump administration policy within 24 hours, while the Warren campaign’s reaction is more carefully worded and equivocal; the next day, the Warren campaign pivots to Sanders’s position. After the killing of Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani in January, Sanders began his statement by citing his opposition to the 2003 Iraq War and called the Suleimani strike “an assassination.” Warren, meanwhile, called the strike “reckless” in her initial statement but prefaced it by saying that he “was a murderer, responsible for the deaths of thousands,” which was similar to Joe Biden’s statement that “no American will mourn Qassim Suleimani’s passing.” (Goldenberg addressed this discrepancy directly, saying, “When you don’t even acknowledge that, then the immediate accusation that comes back at you from Republicans is to accuse you of all this silliness about how you support terrorism.”)

The following day, Warren put out a more forceful anti-war statement, tweeting, “We’re on the brink of yet another war in the Middle East—one that would be devastating in terms of lives lost and resources wasted” and then referring to the strike as an “assassination,” as Sanders did. This pattern, of Sanders articulating the left’s response on Day 1 and Warren echoing him on Day 2, also played out in the wake of the recent coup against Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, and in response to the news that Brazil’s government would prosecute journalist Glenn Greenwald for his antagonistic coverage of the country’s president, Jair Bolsonaro. (A Brazilian judge has dismissed the charges.)

In other words, the difference between Sanders and Warren isn’t always about substantive policy. Neither candidate would have targeted Suleimani, and both are committed to winding down the overseas deployments that led to the strike. Instead, it’s about tone, about approaching foreign policy confidently versus defensively. The Sanders and Warren campaigns have mostly similar ideas about how they want to engage with the world. But the campaign that has drawn more support from progressive voters is the one that more clearly communicates where it stands, without any need for hedging.

eyond taking note of her official plans, parsing Warren’s feelings about US foreign policy can be challenging. At times, she has aligned herself more with the establishment than with the left, such as when she earned the approval of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board for calling Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro a dictator and dubbing his opponent Juan Guaidó the rightful president. (Sanders did neither.) Unlike Sanders, Warren does not have a long record in government or a history of anti-war activism, and her Senate career has included its share of hawkish votes, many but not all of which were prior to Baker’s hiring. I asked Baker about her own feelings, in hindsight, on a wide range of Obama-era international crises—Libya, Syria, Israel-Palestine, and more—but the Warren campaign did not allow me to share any of her thoughts on the record.

Baker is a liberal opposed to endless war, but she is wary of being defined by ideology or doctrine. Asked what she thinks of “the Blob”—the derisive phrase coined by Obama adviser Ben Rhodes for the permanent national security bureaucracy, which compulsively urges military intervention—she said she’s familiar with the term but doesn’t have much use for the concept, either. “Senator Warren values experience and expertise,” Baker said, “but it’s also important to be able to look at things with fresh eyes and to not get so wedded to the way we’ve done things in the past that we can’t imagine a different way of doing things in the future.”

Baker argued that framing Sanders’s agenda as more radical than Warren’s is unfair. “What she’s proposing makes a lot of people nervous, because it’s a big change from the status quo. And what she’s proposing as it relates to the military-industrial complex is beyond what any candidate out there has been proposing.” Much as Warren’s proposals have raised alarms on Wall Street, Baker continued, “that is also true of the defense community, where there is a dawning realization that what she’s proposing is actually quite radical and that she’s serious about it.”

The future of Warren’s campaign is still unclear. But no matter who wins the nomination, it remains an open question whether that candidate will be able to combine radicalism and pragmatism in the way Baker described. Baker represents a new generation within the defense establishment that is quietly growing in influence and questioning the sustainability of two decades of post-9/11 wars—a cohort that, with any luck, the next Democratic administration will see fit to empower.

Richard Holbrooke was an almost-great. He desperately wanted to be great, and his life, at any rate, was never boring. Born during World War II to German Jewish refugees who raised him as a humanistic Quaker in Scarsdale, New York, he lived a life that spanned the rise and arguable fall of US global hegemony, the five or so decades that George Packer, in his new biography of Holbrooke, Our Man, calls “the American Century.”

As Packer shows, Holbrooke willed himself into a symbol for that era’s values: an arrogant, brilliant, mesmerizing, self-promoting, aggressively persuasive white male liberal convinced that his boundless energy and idealism could be applied to any problem. He’s a lot of fun to read about and occasionally even lived up to his hype. But Holbrooke’s life—and Packer’s telling of it—also offers a set of lessons about the limits of American liberalism at home and abroad, in the past and in the present.

Holbrooke’s career centered on three major wars—in Vietnam, Bosnia, and Afghanistan—the complexities of which Packer explains lucidly and with a keen sense of each country’s history. During John F. Kennedy’s presidency, Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer responsible for the distribution of bulgur in South Vietnam’s so-called strategic hamlets—an experience that gave him an early sense of the futility of America’s efforts in Indochina. Three decades later, as Bill Clinton’s special envoy to Bosnia, Holbrooke came closest to achieving his potential, twisting the arms of the belligerents on all sides and brokering a painful peace at the conference he organized on an air base in Dayton, Ohio. And as Barack Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Holbrooke pushed himself to the limits of his health trying to replicate his Balkan success, though he never fully earned the trust of Obama or Afghan President Hamid Karzai or achieved a meaningful and lasting resolution to the conflict.

In 2010, during this last mission, Holbrooke died after his aorta tore during a meeting with his main patron, Hillary Clinton. Fittingly, his final moments before being rushed to the hospital took place in the office of the secretary of state, a position he’d coveted without success throughout his professional life. Even though many of Holbrooke’s high-profile mourners had come to despise him at various points in his career, his memorial was treated almost like a state funeral in Washington.

In between these geopolitical watersheds, Holbrooke raked in millions of dollars on Wall Street, wrecked multiple marriages (including two of his), made many powerful friends and enemies from Manhattan to Georgetown, and assiduously cultivated his own legend. As Packer documents, the thread linking Holbrooke’s sordid personal life with his sporadically impressive public career was a desire for credibility at any cost—with sexual partners, foreign leaders, and blue-blooded elites.

Much like the country he represented abroad, Holbrooke was always pushing and cajoling, sometimes achieving great things and almost always going too far. In this way, he embodied many of the contradictions of mid-20th-century liberalism. He enthusiastically supported the civil rights movement—stationed in South Vietnam during the Freedom Rider era, Holbrooke encouraged his brother to risk arrest for the cause—but he retained the patronizing attitudes of white liberals, eventually managing to piss off the nation’s first black president in a job interview, with the comment “You know, you don’t have to be African American to cry.” Like many in his generation, he responded to JFK’s call to service while emulating his tawdry affairs and his unshakable faith in the myth of American beneficence.

An internationalist and peacemaker, Holbrooke was nonetheless willing to support the use of military force in the pursuit of American domination. A devoted civil servant, he often allowed raw ambition and the irresistible pull of celebrity and social climbing to outpace his commitment to the public interest. And while some of his flaws were uniquely his, many others were representative of a liberal generation that came of age in the 1960s, lost its idealism in the 1970s and ’80s, and still controls most of the country’s institutions.

orn almost 20 years after Holbrooke, Packer has a few things in common with his subject, so it makes sense that he would take up a study of Holbrooke’s life. Packer’s youthful service in the Peace Corps is consistent with Holbrooke’s JFK-era idealistic internationalism, and Packer clearly feels a kinship with Holbrooke as a writer; the latter’s sharply observed journal entries take up entire chapters of Our Man. And like Holbrooke, Packer has supported a number of US military interventions, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a decision he says he now regrets. A longtime staff writer at The New Yorker and more recently The Atlantic and the author of books like Blood of the Liberals and The Unwinding, Packer is very much a creature of the Acela corridor, someone perfectly at home in the same elite New York and Washington circles that Holbrooke traveled in.

Packer’s writing style in Our Man channels the spirit of his subject’s high-society banter. He addresses his readers in the manner of a brilliant—albeit long-winded—dinner-party conversationalist, weaving in context and anecdote and gossipy digressions that make us feel we’re being given a privileged, intimate view of the American elite. (The opening line is “Holbrooke? Yes, I knew him.”) It’s certainly possible to enjoy the book as a guilty pleasure, but Packer has something more surprising in store.

The early reviews broadly agree that Our Man is a great-man narrative eulogizing a supposed liberal golden age. In The New Republic, Thomas Meaney called it “a valuable artifact from the period when militant liberal internationalism became too weary to bother with reasons, and instead took comfort in the gut of a famous man.” But the book is as much a cautionary tale about a familiar, seductive, and dangerous personality type and about the liberal idealism that Holbrooke avowed and the cynical careerism he practiced. Our Man is ambivalent about its subject at best and often outright damning.

Meaney is correct when he points out that Packer has a tortured relationship with the left, having vocally abandoned the socialism of his youth in favor of Clintonian Third Way politics in the 1990s. And he is also right that Packer can’t bring himself to engage in the more rigorous critiques of capitalism and American empire that would require him to rethink many of his own treasured liberal verities. But far from a hagiography, Packer offers here a startlingly intimate work that captures many of Holbrooke’s public and personal foibles. Readers will learn about his absentee parenting in the 1970s and his son’s drug problem in the 1980s. They will learn about the time Holbrooke elbowed a pair of elderly Holocaust survivors out of an American delegation to Auschwitz to make room for himself; about the financial improprieties of his side gig as a social prop on Wall Street providing access to foreign clients; about the time he cuckolded his best friend and rival, fellow career diplomat Anthony Lake, the Salieri to his Mozart; and about how, in his Bosnia memoir To End a War, he stole valor from Foreign Service officers killed in a road accident. (Packer devotes an entire chapter to examining this.)

Packer’s Holbrooke is an almost comical Shakespearean figure, totally lacking in self-awareness, constantly in motion, alienating people as often as he charms them, and always sticking his lunchmates with the tab. Bill and Hillary Clinton loved him, and Obama hated him, and anyone with a basic knowledge of their respective personalities will understand why.

This intimacy, in all its unflattering detail, was made possible by Packer’s access not only to scores of VIPs who knew Holbrooke (Hillary Clinton, David Petraeus, and Samantha Power, to name just a few) but also to a trove of papers and audio recordings made available to him by Holbrooke’s formidable widow, the Hungarian American writer Kati Marton. She, one surmises, wanted to enshrine her husband’s legacy and trusted Packer, who had written a sympathetic New Yorker profile of him, to do exactly that. To Packer’s credit, he has done nothing of the sort and instead has written a bruising critique of Holbrooke and the values and cohort he represents.

nsofar as he wants Holbrooke to function as a symbol for the values of Cold War and post–Cold War liberalism, Packer makes clear that he believes many of those values should now be questioned. Vietnam, in his telling, was doomed from the start, however idealistic the best and the brightest might have been. (Holbrooke was a friend of and an enthusiastic source for David Halberstam, as he was for countless reporters over many decades.) Although Holbrooke saw the disaster developing in Indochina surprisingly early, he didn’t allow it to shake his lifelong faith in America’s good intentions or to dissuade him from seeing US military force as a tool for diplomacy.

The United States’ involvement in Afghanistan also comes in for scrutiny; after all, we’re still there, with no end in sight, after almost 18 years of aimless warfare. And although Packer admires Holbrooke’s relentless and personally fatal efforts to end the war a decade ago, he nonetheless voices skepticism that those efforts ever could have succeeded. “The best ideas are useless without the ability to bring them into the world,” he writes. “And perhaps by the time Holbrooke got there Afghanistan had already become one of those terrible things that have to be done but can’t be done”—a line that captures the exact tension between what Packer understands and what he still refuses to accept about the nature of US military hegemony.

As for the Dayton Accords, Holbrooke’s crowning achievement, Packer doesn’t let his subject off the hook, either. The price for peace in Bosnia was rewarding the Serbs with territory they had just ethnically cleansed of Muslims, and after a quarter century of cold peace and corruption, the accords look as if they could fall apart any day now. Diplomacy, even at its most successful, may bring about the absence of war but can never guarantee justice.

Packer is also unsparing about the way Holbrooke’s ambition often took precedence over his idealism. He suggests that Holbrooke supported the Iraq War and advised then-Senator John Kerry to do likewise so they would look tough, in the hopes that Kerry would then win the presidency and appoint him to run the State Department. “If that was Holbrooke’s main reason for supporting the war, it might have been better to be stupidly, disastrously wrong in a sincerely held belief like some of us,” Packer writes.

Even though Packer can be withering about Holbrooke’s raw ambition and self-absorption, at times he seems to want to have it both ways. He knows that many presuppositions of the Holbrooke era are hard to defend in 2019 and even concedes the reasons. Yet, at the same time, he badly wants to defend them and can’t help but indulge in a little nostalgia. “It wasn’t a golden age, there was plenty of folly and wrong, but I already miss it,” he confesses in his prologue. The reason for this nostalgia is clear, even if he began writing the book before November 2016. For Packer, Holbrooke is the antithesis of Donald Trump and the politics he helped unleash. A liberal internationalist, a man of culture and education, a champion of refugees and the oppressed, a believer in tolerance and diversity, and an enemy of the kind of genocidal populists who arose in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and increasingly dominate politics throughout the world today, Holbrooke represents for Packer a more cosmopolitan and pluralist era.

What Packer never quite acknowledges, however, is that while Holbrooke may have spoken like a liberal idealist, he had more than a few Trumpian qualities of his own—the obnoxious salesmanship, the narcissism, the constant affairs, the flamboyant spending, the transparent need for validation, the use of public office for private gain. Holbrooke wasn’t just a prodigious womanizer; on one occasion he kissed a junior colleague while they were working at his home. (“He claimed her,” Packer puts it, “in the way of an entitled great man.”) And while Holbrooke died before he might have been held to account for his behavior, Packer has no such excuse for merely mentioning it in passing.

It’s true that Trump has never embraced a liberal politics, but it would let the liberal elites of Holbrooke’s era off the hook to treat him as somehow entirely separate from their public actions and private choices. Their failures, in many respects, helped paved the way for his disastrous presidency. They also helped birth disasters—the Iraq War and the 2008 financial crisis, to name the most obvious examples—on a scale that Trump has yet to match. Sometimes Packer acknowledges this, noting that Holbrooke’s blinkered worldview was representative of “a whole class of people in Washington and New York [who] sent other people’s children to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq while they found ways to get rich.” But often he limits his criticisms to Holbrooke alone. At its best, Our Man affirms that Holbrooke’s flaws were emblematic of more systemic problems; at its worst, it obscures this very point.

our ability to appreciate Our Man may hinge on how interesting you find liberal elites. I don’t mean you have to find them sympathetic; you just have to believe their stories are worth dwelling on, and Packer’s book is rife with gossip. One jaw-dropping anecdote concerns how in 1958 the Georgetown neighbors of JFK’s mistress tried to blackmail the future president for a Modigliani painting after bugging her apartment and recording one of their trysts. But read carefully, Our Man offers us something else as well: It gives us a better understanding of what happened to a generation of liberals who helped create the country we now live in.

On the eve of joining the Obama administration for what would be his final mission, Holbrooke was, according to Packer, “making two to three million a year from banking, boards, and speeches, but he had heavy personal expenses,” and he and Marton “owned nine pieces of property, mortgaged to seven and a half million dollars, and they leased a private plane.” The 2008 financial crash forced them to sell two of those properties, but it’s not clear that the experience impressed upon Holbrooke any self-awareness about how he and his generational cohort had abused the public trust to enrich themselves, even as they mostly colored within the lines of the law.

Packer relates the story of Angelo Mozilo, then the CEO at Countrywide Financial, who gave Holbrooke sweetheart loans and underwrote the expenses of many other VIPs: “No one gave it a thought until, a decade later, Countrywide collapsed in the subprime mortgage scandal, and Mozilo became a notorious face of the financial crisis, and his VIP program did its part in making Americans deeply cynical about elites in New York and Washington—even, it wouldn’t be stretching things to say, helping pave the way in the next decade for the election of a president who promised to blow everything up.” That “no one” extends to Holbrooke, whose concerns about such inside dealing were limited to how they might affect his various confirmation hearings.

While Holbrooke was often moved to act out of a sense of public duty, he was also blind to money’s corrosive power in late 20th century America and more than happy to benefit from the tax cuts and deregulation of the financial system that began under Reagan and persisted into the Clinton and Bush years. The devastation that Holbrooke witnessed and felt compelled to address was always that of war abroad and never of economic collapse or inequality at home.

Conscious of his family history, Holbrooke consistently defended human rights and played a central role in getting Jimmy Carter to sign the Refugee Act of 1980, which welcomed an eventual 1.5 million people from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia into the United States. And by means of what he described as “a kind of relentless harassment of the parties into concessions,” he really did help put an end to the war in Bosnia. But as a transparent social climber and someone who used his public stature in pursuit of his private interests, Holbrooke also embodied the carelessness and careerism of a generation of liberals who may have entered public life as idealists but then exited it as cynics.

acker’s 2013 National Book Award–winning The Unwinding tells the story of 40 years of American decline—from the shuttered factories of Youngstown, Ohio, to the housing-market collapse in Florida to the explosive growth of lobbying on Washington’s K Street—that led so many Americans to feel left behind and culminated in Trump’s presidency. Along the way, Packer includes a series of vignettes about well-known figures, from Newt Gingrich to Oprah Winfrey, whose stories, he implies, each in its own way, speak to the prevailing culture of self-centeredness and naked ambition among a ruling class that had abandoned the bulk of working America.

Our Man, in a sense, is a book-length version of one of these vignettes. It’s a study of how the intertwined selfishness and idealism of a liberal generation that came of age during the 1960s and ’70s led to America’s present crisis. Holbrooke, after all, was never everyone’s man. He was part of a specific cohort, and that “we” implied in the title—the circle of liberal elites that Packer himself belongs to—still has a lot to answer for.

John Quincy Adams doesn’t get a lot of respect. There are no monuments to the sixth president on the National Mall, his face adorns no paper currency, and history mainly remembers him for losing reelection to Andrew Jackson. But before Adams became president, he was an accomplished diplomat, representing the US government in multiple European capitals. On July 4, 1821, while serving as secretary of state, he gave a speech in which he declared that although the United States would always be sympathetic to national liberation struggles, “she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”1

This early warning against an interventionist foreign policy has echoed into the present. Adams’s middle name has been adopted by a newly formed think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which states that its mission is to “move US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.” The group is still raising money, but with a projected second-year budget of $5 million to 6 million, enough to support 20 to 30 staffers, it aims to match the scale of more established think tanks and to disrupt the foreign policy consensus in Washington.2

The Quincy Institute’s founders plan to attack that consensus on multiple fronts. That includes publishing op-eds and making TV appearances, writing white papers, hosting seminars and panels, and briefing policy-makers. Ultimately, it would mean creating a pipeline of young talent that can staff up congressional offices and in the future maybe even the White House, thus enabling advocates of noninterventionism to counter aggressive pushes for regime change in countries like Iran and Venezuela.3

As first reported by Stephen Kinzer in The Boston Globe, the Quincy Institute includes the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros among its founding donors—each has committed half a million dollars—and is intended to serve as a counterweight to the Blob, as the bipartisan national security establishment dedicated to endless war has come to be known.4

Trita Parsi, Quincy’s executive vice president and the founder of the National Iranian American Council, says he’s proud to have the support of both the Charles Koch Foundation and Soros’s Open Society Foundations. To explain Quincy’s ideological orientation, Parsi emphasizes “transpartisanship,” which he distinguishes from the much-derided term “bipartisanship.” Bipartisanship, he says, is when “you have two sides, they disagree, and then they come to an agreement with some sort of a compromise that neither side is really happy with.” Transpartisanship, on the other hand, means “you have two sides, they disagree on a whole bunch of issues, but they have overlapping views. Neither side compromises. They’re just collaborating on issues they already are in agreement over.” He argues that the Blob’s status quo is maintained by the mainstream policy-makers in both parties who support military intervention and that challenging it will require an alliance of politicians on the left and right who agree on the need for restraint, even if they do so for different reasons.5

“What we want to see is something that is consonant with American tradition,” says Stephen Wertheim, one of the institute’s five cofounders (and, full disclosure, a friend). In other words, this is not an inherently radical project, even if it may be received as such by some in Washington. For instance, in response to Kinzer’s article, neoconservative éminence grise and Iraq War architect Bill Kristol tweeted, “75 years of a US-led liberal international order, based on a US forward presence and backed by US might, with regional and bilateral alliances and relatively free trade, has enabled remarkable peace and prosperity. But let’s go back to the 1920’s and 30’s!”6

Eli Clifton, another cofounder, says he was encouraged by Kristol’s attack. “I welcome him being the face of the effort to criticize us. I think Bill Kristol’s track record speaks for itself,” he says. That record, which includes enthusiastic support for open-ended US military involvement in more than a dozen countries since 9/11, isn’t Kristol’s alone; the most powerful figures in the Democratic and Republican parties are just as responsible, and with a handful of exceptions, few of them have shown any inclination to change course.7

Quincy’s founding mandate is centered on two regional programs, the Middle East and East Asia (where the US has its most significant military commitments), though other areas could fall under its purview if its budget expands, and two additional programs: Ending Endless War, which will be run by Wertheim, and Democratizing Foreign Policy, which will be run by Clifton.8

Wertheim, a former academic historian, broadly belongs to the realist school of foreign policy, which sees sovereign powers as being motivated by rational interests and encourages stability in international relations. But his realism is not the cold-blooded realpolitik of Henry Kissinger; Wertheim identifies as progressive. “Force ends human life, displaces people, devastates communities, and damages the environment,” reads Quincy’s statement of purpose. As Wertheim puts it, advocates of humanitarian interventionism tend to overlook how “pushing these agendas can be used to create a prolonged conflict. And when that happens, we don’t see human rights advance. Quite the opposite.” This is a critique not only of neoconservatives like Kristol but also of liberal interventionists like Samantha Power, Barack Obama’s UN ambassador, who see a responsibility to protect vulnerable communities by the use of military force as a core principle of US foreign policy.9

Clifton, meanwhile, is more focused on the Blob itself and on the way money is used to reinforce its pro-war consensus. His emphasis will be on domestic strategies for reducing interventionism—from reasserting Congress’s constitutional authority over the president’s ability to make war to doing outreach to communities of color that are traditionally marginalized in Washington foreign policy debates. The Quincy founders believe that the existing foreign policy elite is out of step with the American public, which is far more skeptical of military adventurism, and they plan to invite underrepresented communities to participate in the institute’s events and recruit people from nonelite backgrounds into the foreign policy profession. They are also interested in including military veterans; a recent Pew poll shows large majorities of service members who did tours in Iraq or Afghanistan said they believe neither war was worth fighting.10

Clifton said his experience working for ThinkProgress, a liberal website affiliated with the Democratic Party–aligned Center for American Progress, showed him that “the supposed institutional Democratic Party’s foreign policy space was very tightly constrained.” While CAP has always maintained that its research is independent, Clifton speculates that the funding the organization received from the government of the United Arab Emirates may have created pressure to support status quo policies in the Middle East. In 2012, when Clifton and several of his colleagues came under fire from pro-Israel and conservative groups for writing critically about Israel and in support of diplomacy with Iran, CAP tried to restrict what they could write about, prompting his voluntary departure.11

When it comes to foreign policy, Clifton says, there’s little difference between CAP and Republican-aligned think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. One way Quincy will distinguish itself from its better-established rivals will be to refuse money from foreign governments.12

“There’s almost no progressive foreign policy infrastructure in Washington,” says Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser and a former colleague of Clifton’s at ThinkProgress who has been informally consulting with the Quincy founders. Duss says that the organization’s launch is “one of the most encouraging things to happen in the US foreign policy debate in a long time.”13

He adds, “You have a number of groups—such as the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the Institute for Policy Studies, the Center for International Policy, a few others—putting out good, progressive-oriented work and a coalition of advocacy organizations like Win Without War, the Friends Committee on National Legislation, and others who punch far above their weight…but the amount of resources they’re up against is pretty staggering.”14

Keane Bhatt, a communications director for Sanders and a former policy director for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says he hopes Quincy “can lend intellectual capacity” to an alliance of progressive and conservative lawmakers who share noninterventionist principles. Besides his boss, Bhatt lists Democratic Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, and Mark Pocan; Republican Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Representatives Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, and Thomas Massie; and independent Representative Justin Amash.15

“The Washington foreign policy consensus is badly broken and captured by a revolving door of corruption that keeps foreign policy elites in power despite the mistakes of the past and is fueled by arms dealers, special interests, and foreign governments,” says Kate Kizer, the policy director of Win Without War. “The Quincy Institute has the chance to be a welcome breath of fresh air.”16

o far, Quincy’s soft launch “has exceeded our expectations,” Clifton says. “We’re getting so many e-mails as well as positive responses on social media—people saying, ‘Hey, yeah, this is filling a gap.’ ” Even the more critical feedback has been energizing; in response to an article in Foreign Policy by James Traub, “Billionaires Can’t Buy World Peace,” that labels the new organization a threat to American exceptionalism, Wertheim boasts, “People are having to defend endless war. We have switched the terms of debate.”17

At the same time, potential allies likely have a few initial concerns. The most obvious is the group’s support from the Charles Koch Foundation, the mere mention of which is a red flag for progressives. Brothers Charles and David Koch, after all, are the leading bankrollers of conservative intellectual infrastructure in the US and have underwritten the Republican Party’s dominance of Washington, the judiciary, and statehouses across the country.18

Parsi notes that the Kochs also fund groups like the Cato Institute that have advocated for diplomacy by, for instance, supporting the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which was strenuously opposed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, and by major figures in both parties. He argues that the Kochs have been better allies to the anti-war movement than many prominent Democratic institutions and donors. In some ways, the bigger surprise is that Soros, who has traditionally supported the Blob’s hegemonic liberal world order, is also funding Quincy. “There clearly is a recognition among folks in Open Society that many of the past interventions have been unsuccessful, if not disastrous,” says Parsi, whereas the Kochs are “a little more decided on what they think is the right foreign policy and are only funding institutions geared to less military involvement.” (This isn’t quite true; the Kochs have also donated to the pro-war American Enterprise Institute as well as many Republican politicians who have hawkish foreign policy positions.)19

This isn’t the first time one of the Koch brothers has worked with progressives to effect change. In recent years the aggressive carceral policies supported by both parties since the 1990s have been challenged by a coalition that includes left-leaning racial justice activists and libertarians supported by the Kochs. “If restraint in foreign policy can become like criminal justice reform, I think that would be a major step,” says Wertheim. “Even during an administration that ran on racist law and order tropes, we see criminal justice reform moving forward.”20

Still, it’s important to recognize what Quincy is not: It is not a left-wing foreign policy institution, something that will remain scarce in Washington. Some of the boldest proposals coming from progressive candidates like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—for addressing climate change, reducing global poverty and inequality, and combating transnational corruption and money laundering—are not Quincy’s top priorities, even if some of the founders are sympathetic to such an agenda.21

“Once we significantly reduce the military budget, we can argue about how to use the money,” says Wertheim—that is, whether the savings from a slashed Pentagon budget should be invested in social programs or used to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.22

“I would be concerned if there are strings attached to any funding,” he adds. While Quincy’s founders expect to hire an ideologically diverse staff, that isn’t a condition imposed on it by the Charles Koch Foundation; rather, it’s intended to make a transpartisan political strategy more effective. Wertheim acknowledges Quincy’s narrow focus on the use of military force, but he attributes this to a desire to avoid overextension at the outset, suggesting that if the organization grows big enough, it can eventually expand its mandate to issues like climate change and human rights.23

Wertheim and the other founders do take the climate crisis seriously. “Militarism in US foreign policy contributes to climate change,” he says, “and impedes the international cooperation that will be needed to address it. Very few institutions confront this issue. The Quincy Institute will.” He notes that the US military is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of all institutions in the world—more than entire countries—and points to his recent New York Times op-ed in which he argues that a US-China cold war would be a climate disaster.24

In a field that has been traditionally dominated by men, Quincy is searching for a woman to serve as its president. Suzanne DiMaggio, the only woman among the founders, will serve as chair of Quincy’s board of directors. A senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the Middle East and East Asia, she grew up in a half-Japanese, half-Italian family in New Jersey. “I remember going on a field trip to the United Nations as a girl and feeling very at home there,” she says, and she ended up working there during John Bolton’s tenure as George W. Bush’s UN ambassador. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the field of international relations that I disagree with more than John Bolton,” she adds, a week after it appeared that the Trump administration, following Bolton’s advice, might start a war with Iran.25

The interim president of Quincy is Andrew Bacevich, a Massachusetts-based retired academic and regular Nation contributor who identifies as conservative. “The Quincy Institute is premised on the notion that there is a potential for forging a coalition between people on the right who don’t like the direction of US policy and people on the left,” he says. “We don’t have to agree with one another on issues not related to America’s role in the world, but there’s plenty of room for agreement with regard to America’s role in the world.”26

acevich, a former army colonel who served in Vietnam, admits he was slow to recognize the alignment between parts of the left and the right on foreign policy. “I had a bias against progressives with regard to foreign policy that I hadn’t really bothered to examine,” he says. “It was only after the Cold War went away and after this pattern of ill-advised behavior on our part began to take shape that I began to realize that the critique that came from the left had far greater merit than I had been willing to concede.”27

He is referring, above all, to the post-9/11 wars: the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq and the nearly 18-year quagmire in Afghanistan, as well as the smaller, more clandestine operations everywhere from Niger to Yemen. Quincy’s founding members say again and again that 9/11 and the Iraq War were turning points in their careers.28

Parsi, who was born in Iran and raised in Sweden, moved to Washington in September 2001 to pursue a PhD in international affairs, intending to write a dissertation about Afghanistan. But then, he says, “the week after school started, 9/11 happened and Washington, overnight, was saturated with Afghan experts.” So instead, he turned his attention to the regional struggle between Israel and Iran. He says he founded the National Iranian American Council to give Iranian Americans a voice in Washington and eventually used it to support Obama’s Iran deal, which he and other founders cite as a model for diplomacy that avoids war.29

Clifton, a college freshman at the time of the attacks, became a protégé of Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, whose long-running, progressive realist foreign policy website LobeLog will soon be renamed and absorbed into Quincy. Under Lobe’s tutelage, Clifton came to understand the rush to war as a product of deeply entrenched moneyed interests. And Wertheim, who was in high school in the suburbs of Washington during 9/11, says the Iraq War run-up spurred his academic interest in US foreign policy. This eventually led to a dissertation on the debates over internationalism during World War II that were resolved in favor of the US-led global order that he now wants to see rolled back.30

Parsi, Clifton, and Wertheim are all representative of a generation of experts who have built their careers in the long aftermath of 9/11 and for whom witnessing the subsequent failure of bipartisan national security policy has been formative. Clifton says he has spoken with academics who have watched their anti-interventionist dissertation advisees move to Washington and embrace the Blob’s logic or stay in academia and maintain their skepticism, “as if there wasn’t a home for those views in Washington.” Quincy, he hopes, will be that home.31

But no one involved has been more affected by the post-9/11 wars than Bacevich, whose son, First Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed by a bomb while serving in Iraq in 2007. He was 27 years old. Knowing this, I asked Bacevich if and how his personal tragedy has influenced his views on foreign policy. At first he declined to comment, but then without further prompting, he changed his mind.32

“In a small way, I’m trying to honor his sacrifice,” he told me. “I personally think the thousands of lives we’ve lost have been wasted. But if an effort can be made to learn from our mistakes so that we don’t repeat them, then perhaps we can say that there was some value to the sacrifices made by our soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I’ll just leave it at that.”33

Clarification: This article has been updated to specify that Charles Koch is supporting the Quincy Institute. His brother, David Koch, is not involved.

By now, Americans born after the 9/11 attacks may already be deploying overseas to avenge them. The Authorization for Use of Military Force—which passed just three days after the attacks, with only one dissenting vote, and was followed by an expanded AUMF the following year—has been used to justify military actions in at least 20 countries from the Sahel to the Pacific Rim. The combined death toll from just Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan is estimated at half a million people. Presidents as different in ideology and temperament as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump have expanded what has been called the Forever War—and their own executive powers to wage it—even as all three initially ran on some version of a more humble foreign policy.1

Still, when I asked Bernie Sanders whether he would hope and expect Congress to rein in his ability to make war should he win the presidency, he didn’t hesitate. “Absolutely. Absolutely. Look, the Constitution is clear…. Congress has for a very long time abdicated that responsibility,” he said. “If I’m president, I will certainly be an advocate of that process.”2

Left-wing intellectuals and anti-war activists have long called for the United States to end its permanent war footing across the Muslim world and to reconsider its close alliances with illiberal governments, like those of Saudi Arabia and Israel. But such views are much rarer in Washington, where lawmakers like Sanders are only beginning to meaningfully challenge the status quo. Somewhere between these two perspectives—that of the progressive policy-maker and that of the radical critic—a new vision for America’s role in the world is being shaped. I went to Capitol Hill to explore why non-interventionists eager to realize this vision have homed in on one particular war.3

Yemen, which borders Saudi Arabia but has roughly one-twentieth its per capita GDP, is currently suffering through what the United Nations, Sanders, and others I spoke with described as the worst humanitarian disaster in the world. The United States has been fighting Al Qaeda in Yemen since 9/11, using the AUMF as its justification and drone strikes against terrorism suspects as its main tactic. But in 2015, a Shiite militant group called the Houthis overthrew Yemen’s Saudi-aligned president, an ally in the US war on terrorism. In response, Saudi Arabia launched a military campaign that has since killed tens of thousands of civilians through bombings, cholera, and famine.4

The Obama administration supported this campaign from the start, arming the Saudis and providing targeting information and refueling for Saudi jets, in what many in Washington see as a tacit trade-off for Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. The Saudis see the Houthis as proxies for Iran, their main rival in the region.5

“In hindsight, no, it was not the correct position,” said Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest foreign-policy advisers. “But it was not without logic. The Saudis were hell-bent on doing something in Yemen…. And they also saw it as part of a broader Iranian ascent in the region. And frankly, we didn’t share that analysis. We did not see the Iranians as directing the Houthis.”6

Rhodes denied that there was any quid pro quo of US support for the Saudis in exchange for the Iran deal. “Our basic theory was that by being somewhat engaged, we could deal with the inevitable Saudi intervention in Yemen while seeking to impose limits on what they did and to try to broker something diplomatically,” he said. He and his colleagues expected that Hillary Clinton would prevail in 2016 and would continue to use diplomatic levers to rein in the Saudis. When Trump won instead, it was immediately clear that the Saudis would be given a freer hand and that the situation would deteriorate.7

And deteriorate it has. The Saudi-led coalition’s efforts to capture the port of Hodeida last summer intensified what amounts to a crippling economic war against northern Yemen, where millions of people are at imminent risk of starvation. Images of emaciated children have become emblematic of the Yemen campaign. At the same time, Democrats in Congress have become much more willing to criticize the war and the Saudis, especially since the shocking murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last fall. While US efforts against Al Qaeda in Yemen are covered by the AUMF, US support for the Saudi campaign against the Houthis is not, which makes it especially vulnerable to congressional opposition.8

“I thought the Obama administration was totally wrong to launch a military partnership with Saudi Arabia that set the stage for the devastation that has become Yemen,” said Senator Chris Murphy, who was the first lawmaker to attempt to end US support for the war. Murphy’s campaign was initially a lonely one, beginning with a 2016 bill co-sponsored by libertarian-leaning Senator Rand Paul that focused on ending arms sales to the Saudis. Only 27 senators supported it.9

“I came here as a critic of this boneheaded US military intervention,” recalled Murphy, who first ran for Congress in 2006 as an opponent of the Iraq War. “I was interested in having a competing narrative with neoconservatives who said that the only way to fight terrorism was to be at war in the Middle East.” That led him to study the roots of the extremist ideology motivating groups like Al Qaeda, from which he concluded that “Saudi Arabia and Gulf states were playing an enormous role.” That, in turn, made him an early critic of the war in Yemen at a time when most Democrats were reluctant to challenge Obama’s foreign policy.10

While Sanders was not involved in Murphy’s initial efforts and really started speaking out about Yemen only after Trump took office, Murphy credited Sanders for “a really fantastic idea, which was to take the War Powers Act and turn it into a modern tool to end illegal wars.” That 1973 resolution, passed over Richard Nixon’s veto, theoretically reasserts Congress’s constitutional powers over the executive branch. This spring, in calling for cessation of US support for the Saudi war, a war powers resolution passed both houses of Congress—the first time this had ever been accomplished—only to be vetoed by Trump.11

Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the House version of the resolution, sees implications beyond Yemen. He said he hopes that his bill “would make future presidents think twice about getting into military conflicts and…would embolden Congress to check presidential overreach.” He cited a recent bill introduced by his colleague David Cicilline to preemptively prohibit the use of military force in Venezuela as another example of this approach. Ultimately, Khanna said, “we have to repeal the [AUMF],” but he also envisions using the War Powers Act to rein in other wars.12

Khanna, who is a co-chair of Sanders’s presidential campaign, said that a Sanders administration “would certainly consult and get Congress’s consent” for any military intervention and “would be very reluctant to use force overseas.” He said he would anticipate a reduction in military spending, currently at record highs. However, he noted that many congressional Democrats, including some 2020 presidential candidates, have supported Trump’s military budgets. “You can’t criticize Trump’s foreign policy and then allocate him all the resources he wants for the overseas wars,” said Khanna.13

t first glance, Democrats seem united on Yemen, having voted almost unanimously to end US support for the Saudi war. But this superficial consensus papers over real divisions on what progressive foreign policy should mean in a post-Obama, post-Clinton era. When I brought up Rhodes to a Democratic Hill staffer who has been deeply involved in the House Yemen resolution, the staffer grew agitated.14

“Where was Ben Rhodes on Libya in 2011? Where was he on Syria in 2013? Where was he on Yemen in 2015? Despite having people like him who ultimately ended up opposing the Iraq War and coining the term Blob,” the staffer said, using the now-ubiquitous term for the pro-interventionist Washington foreign-policy establishment, the Obama administration “did the utmost Blob decision-making, a 48-hour process behind closed doors without any democratic input at the behest of this brutal Saudi dictatorship.”15

“I will get pretty defensive about this,” Rhodes said in response. “I’m not the problem…. I was willing to essentially walk up to the line of having my own reputation eviscerated to avoid another war with Iran.” He denied that he was involved in the meetings the staffer referenced, noting that he and the Saudis had an infamously strained relationship, although he insisted he doesn’t want to let himself off the hook.16

“I’ll take all the lumps, and people can pick apart those policies,” he added, “but at the end of the day, the challenges in our politics that lead to these outcomes have to do with much more deeply entrenched forces not just in the US government but in Congress itself. Where was Congress in helping us close the prison in Guantánamo? Where was Congress in passing [a more restrained] AUMF that we were asking them to do?”17

Last November, Rhodes and more than two dozen other former Obama-administration officials—including his CIA director John Brennan, UN ambassador Samantha Power, and national security adviser Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton’s foreign-policy adviser Jake Sullivan—signed an open letter urging an end to US support for the Saudi war. “We did not intend for U.S. support for the coalition to become a blank check,” the letter reads. “But today, as civilian casualties have continued to rise and there is no end to the conflict in sight, it is clear that is precisely what happened.”18

Rhodes said that he would support a fuller accounting of the Obama administration’s role and that one was already underway but that the purpose of the letter was to lend the credibility of mainstream policy-makers to try to win over centrist Democrats in Congress. He added that a more introspective letter might have received fewer signatures.19

Ending wars isn’t such a radical idea outside Washington. Recent polling shows an overwhelming majority of Americans support going to war only as a last resort, winding down existing commitments, and cutting military aid to allies like Saudi Arabia. As Representative Mark Pocan, a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “I think if you ask the average American…they don’t want us in endless wars overseas.” But “inside the Beltway it becomes far more difficult because there are a lot of lobbyists, think tanks, and organizations that are all trying to get in our ear about foreign policy.”20

erhaps the clearest difference between left-wing anti-war activists and Democratic lawmakers concerns the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many on the left, Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians recalls South African apartheid as a human-rights cause. Suffice it to say this is not how the issue plays on Capitol Hill, where the leadership in both parties rushed to condemn freshman Representative Ilhan Omar this year after her comments about the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and its financial sway over Congress.21

AIPAC’s annual conference in Washington, during which everyone from Vice President Mike Pence to Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took shots at Omar from the microphone, took place the same week I was in town. “I believe that you have organizations, like AIPAC and many, many others, who do exert obviously enormous impact over American policy,” said Sanders, who reached out to Omar to offer support after her remarks.22

Khanna said he didn’t support the “piling on” against Omar and called it disproportionate but nonetheless added that her comments were “inappropriate.” Murphy, while noting he doesn’t always agree with AIPAC, was more critical, saying Omar “used terminology that has absolutely been used in the past by people who were less than sincere about their criticisms of Israel.”23

Israel is a loaded issue in Washington. While J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel, pro-peace,” has given progressive Democrats cover to distance themselves from an increasingly Republican-aligned AIPAC, challenging the basic premise of a close US-Israel alliance remains almost impossible. Omar, who is a Somali Muslim and wears a hijab, has quickly found herself the main target of the Israel lobby.24

Besides her comments on Israel, Omar drew criticism from the Blob after she grilled Elliott Abrams, Trump’s special envoy to Venezuela, about his complicity in Reagan-era war crimes in Central America. It wasn’t just Republicans who criticized Omar for this; Kelly Magsamen, a former Obama-administration Pentagon official who now works on national security at the liberal Center for American Progress, defended Abrams on Twitter as a “fierce advocate for human rights and democracy.”25

Matt Duss, Sanders’s foreign-policy adviser and a former CAP staffer, takes a different view of Omar. “People often use accusations of bigotry and anti-Semitism to suppress criticism of Israeli policy and particularly the occupation,” said Duss, who has been the target of similar attacks. Of Omar’s tussle with Abrams, Duss said, “I thought it was one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. As the grandson of a refugee woman, to see this refugee woman take the opportunity as an elected representative to put this person on the spot for supporting the kind of violence that she survived…I felt like she honored my grandmother.”26

Omar, it’s worth noting, went to Congress directly from an advocacy background, and she still sounds more like an activist than a conventional politician. Anti-war activists have labored for many years against the Washington foreign-policy consensus, and politicians are finally starting to listen.27

“Democrats, particularly since 9/11, have essentially ceded the national security conversation to Republicans because there’s overarching fear of appearing weak,” said Kate Kizer, the policy director of Win Without War, an advocacy group that has played a key role in supporting the Iran nuclear deal and the Yemen resolutions. “It’s really interesting to see the new Congress come in and have a solid set of progressive members who are actually thinking about foreign policy differently…. You see this with Ilhan, who’s not afraid to speak her mind and challenge the status quo.”28

In addition to Omar, Kizer was referring to Rashida Tlaib—a Palestinian American who shares with Omar the distinction of being the first Muslim women in Congress—as well as socialist superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Those three new members of Congress are women, and so are the other advocates Kizer cited as being critical to the shifting conversation on Yemen, including Elizabeth Beavers at Indivisible, Iram Ali at MoveOn, and Kate Gould, until recently at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. “None of this would have been possible without women on the outside leading this fight,” said Kizer.29

Shireen al-Adeimi, a Yemeni-born professor of education at Michigan State University who has become an outspoken advocate against the war, is a case in point. She has been coordinating with Yemeni activists across the United States to lobby members of Congress since 2015. “They became much more clearly anti-intervention when it was no longer Obama’s war,” she said, adding that the scope of the humanitarian crisis was evident from the very start. “If Democrats had really taken the opportunity to critique Obama at the beginning, we wouldn’t be here today.”30

Kizer identified Yemen as a key issue in mainstreaming progressive foreign-policy goals, in part because it’s less politically fraught than Israel-Palestine. “Yemen represents a really critical on-ramp to change the conversation in DC, because even though there are the parallels to the Israel-Palestine conflict or US military support for Egypt,” she said, “Yemen doesn’t necessarily have the same domestic constituency, and it isn’t automatically alienating.” In other words, while the Blob may support the US-Saudi alliance just as fervently as the US-Israel alliance and while the Saudis engage in influence campaigns via think tanks and media outlets, there’s no Saudi equivalent to AIPAC and no significant electoral constituency in favor of famine in Yemen. The conflict there is the perfect example of a war that is politically feasible only in the absence of public debate.31

o understand why progressives in Congress have unified around Yemen, it’s useful to compare it with one of the biggest foreign-policy fights of the past decade. Throughout Obama’s second term, he faced constant pressure from the Blob to intervene militarily to stop Bashar al-Assad’s human-rights abuses in Syria—pressure Obama mostly resisted, covert actions notwithstanding. He even took the rare step of punting to Congress the decision to strike Syria, correctly assuming that congressional Republicans wouldn’t take up the issue. Many hawks in Washington accused Obama of complicity in Assad’s atrocities through inaction.32

But the geopolitical context of Syria is completely different from Yemen’s. Assad is not a US proxy and enjoys the backing of Iran and Russia. Obama saw no clear way to intervene in Syria without setting off an escalation of violence. In Yemen, meanwhile, an ally is carrying out atrocities with direct US support. To many on the left, the enthusiasm for air strikes in Syria and simultaneous silence about the US role in Yemen speak volumes about the sincerity of the Blob’s humanitarian intentions.33

“Yemen is a case of humanitarian non-intervention,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of international relations at Columbia University. “It marks a generational shift from the Samantha Power–esque humanitarian interventionism that sounded progressive a few decades ago but no longer does.” Power is a longtime advocate for military intervention to prevent genocide and human-rights abuses. “The Yemen campaign suggests the opposite principle: If we want to help suffering humanity, we should first and foremost make sure that the United States is not causing the suffering.”34

For now, any anti-war legislation is dead on arrival at the White House. Despite sometimes gesturing at a different approach while campaigning, as president, Trump has consistently deferred to some of the most hawkish voices in Washington, from Abrams to John Bolton, and has doubled down on the alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel. At least for the next two years, Washington will continue to wage war across the Muslim world with few checks on the executive branch’s ability to do so. But depending on who succeeds Trump, perhaps the Forever War can finally end, as all wars eventually must.35

Forty-five years after Congress passed the War Powers Resolution over Richard Nixon’s veto, the Senate finally invoked its power to end a war. This past December, 56 senators voted to cut off all US support for Saudi Arabia’s horrific military campaign in Yemen, which began in the final years of the Obama administration, sharply escalated under Donald Trump, and has led to the deaths of an estimated 85,000 children due to starvation.1

The morning of the vote, Bernie Sanders addressed his Senate colleagues next to a photo of an emaciated Yemeni child and urged them to pass the resolution, which he’d introduced along with co-sponsors Mike Lee, a Republican, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat. “We have been providing the bombs the Saudi-led coalition is using, refueling their planes before they drop those bombs, and assisting with intelligence,” Sanders said. “In too many cases, our weapons are being used to kill civilians.”2

As the Vermont senator spoke, a 6-foot-5, bespectacled bear of a man sat quietly beside him. Matt Duss, 46, has recently become one of the most significant figures reshaping progressive foreign policy in the Trump era. Since February 2017, when Sanders hired him as his foreign-policy adviser, Duss has played a key role in advancing the Yemen resolution and has deeply informed Sanders’s growing emphasis on international affairs.3

“I give Matt an extraordinary amount of credit on Yemen,” says Representative Ro Khanna, who introduced the joint resolution in the House. “He’s the principal reason that Sanders took this huge risk in introducing the War Powers Resolution in the Senate and agreeing to [support] what we had introduced in the House.”4

Sanders is reportedly about to announce a second presidential run, and attention is already turning to his foreign-policy views. In his 2016 campaign, Sanders’s primary focus was on domestic economic issues, and many critics regarded him as a lightweight on foreign policy. This time around, Sanders has won over skeptics in the foreign-policy establishment with substantive speeches in 2017 and 2018, laying out a comprehensive vision for America’s role in the world. Beyond wanting to end or prevent wars in the Middle East, Sanders has also linked the global rise of authoritarian populism to wealth inequality, and has called for an international progressive movement to combat authoritarian leaders and kleptocrats from Russia to Brazil. And while Duss doesn’t want to take credit for what he says are his boss’s deeply held views, he has had a hand in all of this.5

To the extent that Sanders is raising new ideas and challenging the interventionist consensus that has long dominated Washington, it makes sense that he’s relying on the advice of a relative outsider. The nation’s capital is infamously a town of straight-A students who hustled their way through the most elite schools and prestigious internships in pursuit of power. Duss took a more meandering path, playing in bands and working odd jobs for years before finishing college in his early 30s. He then spent the next decade influencing the public debate, mainly as a blogger, before finally emerging as a Senate staffer.6

Duss is now gaining prominence at a pivotal moment for progressive foreign policy. Since the end of the Cold War, leading Democrats have broadly subscribed to the liberal-internationalist doctrine, with its emphasis on free-trade pacts, military coalitions to overthrow dictators and prevent atrocities, and, since 9/11, ruthless prosecution of the War on Terror; any differences with their Republican colleagues have often been more of degree than kind. Foreign-policy critics on the left, meanwhile, have generally been relegated to academia and the alternative media, and have focused mainly on challenging the excesses of empire, not on articulating a more positive and ambitious global vision.7

More than most policy-makers, Duss is a product of that left-leaning tradition. His ascension was in many ways made possible by the political earthquake of 2016—not just Trump’s election, but the defeat of Hillary Clinton, the enduring influence of Sanders, and the emergence of a new generation of progressives who have grown up amid endless wars. The open question is whether Duss and others like him are capable of taking on the foreign-policy world’s entrenched status quo.8

uss was born in 1972 in the Hudson Valley town of Nyack, an hour north of Manhattan. His mother, a nurse, came from a family of truck drivers in rural western Pennsylvania; his father, a journalist and aid worker, was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany after his family, some of whom had been kulaks in Ukraine, survived famine under Stalin and some of the worst carnage of World War II. When Duss’s father was 2, his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Brooklyn. Despite their very different origins, Duss’s father and mother shared an evangelical faith; they met while attending a missionary-training college in Nyack, where they eventually settled.9

“We’re a family of refugees,” Duss tells me over brunch near his home in northern Virginia. “That’s always been part of my understanding of where we came from.” Because of his family history, Duss says, he never had any illusions about Soviet communism, but he does identify as a man of the left, a strong social democrat perfectly at home with Sanders’s political program.10

Duss himself grew up in a tight-knit community of evangelical Christians. While he wrestled with his faith throughout his teens and early adulthood—he describes himself as pro-choice, pro–LGBTQ rights, and very liberal—the communitarian and humanitarian aspects of Christianity remain central to his life.11

In 1983, his family relocated for a year to a refugee-processing center in the Philippines to work with a Christian NGO there. From age 10 to 11, Duss attended a Christian boarding school while helping refugees from Southeast Asia prepare for life in North America. He was in Manila at the time of the assassination of opposition politician Benigno Aquino, a critic of the US-aligned dictator Ferdinand Marcos. “It was an interesting vantage point for how the US was perceived elsewhere,” he says. “Obviously, I couldn’t fully understand or engage with the political conversation there—but still, it made an impression.”12

Exposure to the wider world left Duss feeling more isolated from his peers back home. Once a promising student, in junior high he became disengaged from school, grappling with his religious upbringing and preferring music to homework. At 15, he took up guitar, his influences ranging from Van Halen to indie groups like the Replacements, the Pixies, and Dinosaur Jr. It was through playing in bands that he found his peer group, which included an Iraqi-American singer who helped personalize the first Gulf War for him. “I just was uncomfortable with America sending troops around the world,” Duss says.13

After two and a half years at a small Christian college in Massachusetts, Duss found himself unmotivated and returned home to Nyack, where he worked in a variety of menial jobs while pursuing his true passions: playing guitar and writing fiction. In 1994, he moved to Seattle, where he met his wife, and where he first became involved in politics via anti-globalization activism and Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign.14

Duss became fascinated with the Muslim world on a trip to Istanbul for a friend’s wedding in 2000. He found the experience of being awakened by the morning call to prayer transformative, and began reading obsessively about Islamic history and politics. The 9/11 attacks the following year left him frustrated and concerned about the way the US media portrayed Muslims and the Middle East, and for the first time in his life he felt a sense of political mission. At a time when many US policy-makers were encouraging open-ended war across the Muslim world, Duss dedicated himself to understanding the societies that would bear the brunt of such a policy.15

In 2002, Duss transferred from community college to the University of Washington, where he finally earned his bachelor’s degree at 31 and his master’s at 34 while studying Arabic and raising a newborn. He wrote his thesis on Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite cleric who had become the political and spiritual leader of the insurgency against the US-led coalition occupying Iraq.16

After finishing his academic work, Duss and his family moved back east and settled in Alexandria, Virginia. Duss quickly took to the Beltway blogosphere and started several websites, including one dedicated to monitoring the Islamophobic writings of Marty Peretz, then publisher of The New Republic. He began receiving wider recognition writing about the Middle East for The American Prospect. That eventually earned him a staff job at the Center for American Progress, where in early 2008 he became editor of the national-security team for the liberal think tank’s affiliated blog, ThinkProgress. “If TAP was like getting signed to Sub Pop,” says Duss, referring to the indie label that signed bands like Nirvana and Sleater-Kinney, “going to CAP was like a major label.”17

“His success is an argument for all kinds of diversity in the foreign-policy community,” says Heather Hurlburt, a former State Department official during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “Perhaps ironically, it’s also a vindication of [CAP founder] John Podesta, of all people, whose early vision for the Center for American Progress was that it would hire and pay talented young people who didn’t come from super-privileged traditional backgrounds.”18

At the same time that Duss was starting at CAP, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were engaged in a heated presidential primary. During a January 2008 debate, Obama contrasted his opposition to the Iraq War with Clinton’s initial support for it. “I don’t want to just end the war,” Obama said. “I want to end the mind-set that got us into war in the first place.” For Duss, this line “was like hearing [Jimi Hendrix’s] ‘Voodoo Child (Slight Return)’ for the first time. It’s like, ‘That is rock and roll.’”19

“Matt has always been willing to challenge underlying assumptions about the conduct of American foreign policy,” says Ben Rhodes, one of Obama’s closest national-security advisers. “He rightly seized on President Obama’s statement…and he held us to that standard for eight years.”20

he Obama administration often struggled to hold itself to that same standard. The idealism that appealed to Duss and many others produced some significant achievements, notably the Iran nuclear deal, the reestablishment of relations with Cuba, and the Paris climate accord. But Obama didn’t end US military operations in Iraq or Afghanistan, and he launched new, undeclared wars in several other countries in the Muslim world. He authorized record sums of military aid to Israel and Saudi Arabia despite the atrocities they committed in the Gaza Strip and Yemen. He championed the Arab Spring, then stood by the Gulf monarchies and the Egyptian military junta as they snuffed it out.21

Obama’s foreign-policy record disappointed many activists and writers on the left. But inside the Beltway and among key Democratic institutions, it had plenty of defenders, including some who would clash directly with Duss once he’d entered the think-tank world.22

Duss worked at CAP until 2014 and blogged prolifically for ThinkProgress, where he was an outspoken voice against military interventionism, a critic of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and an advocate of diplomacy with Iran. He co-authored a report on Islamophobia in the world of conservative donor networks and think tanks, making his share of enemies in the process. He also helped identify and recruit like-minded writers to the site, including Ali Gharib (now an editor at The Intercept) and Eli Clifton (now a fellow at Type Media Center).23

Initially, Duss had a significant degree of freedom to express his opinions at ThinkProgress, which he attributes to Podesta’s hands-off approach. Asked whether that approach continued for the entirety of his time at CAP, Duss says simply, “No, it didn’t.”24

In 2011, the year that CAP’s current president, Neera Tanden, took over from Podesta, Duss’s team drew the ire of pro-Israel organizations and media outlets in Washington. Following an article in Politico by Ben Smith (now editor in chief of BuzzFeed News) spotlighting ThinkProgress’s critical coverage of Israel, Duss and several other CAP writers felt targeted. “The goal of that piece was definitely to start a campaign against us,” says Duss, who adds that he has no personal resentment toward Smith and respects much of his work. “It was clear he was working off of an opposition document that had been shopped to him that was later leaked.” Duss specifically calls out the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), The Washington Free Beacon, and some members of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies for coordinating a campaign against him and his colleagues.25

“Reporters get information from all sorts of places, and from people with all sorts of motives,” Ben Smith says in response. “That was an accurate story about the differences on Israel inside a Democratic institution—a story that is obviously still playing out in the party.” In any case, Gharib and Clifton would voluntarily leave CAP after what Duss says was significant internal pressure that interfered with their work. Duss remained at the organization for three more years, essentially daring the higher-ups to fire him.26

Faiz Shakir, who ran ThinkProgress at the time and hired all of the writers targeted by AIPAC, still speaks warmly of Duss. “Matt was advocating for the Iranian deal long before it was mainstreamed; he was also warning of the consequences of [Israel’s] settlement expansion long before the Obama administration tried to take a hard line on the issue,” says Shakir, now the ACLU’s national political director. “For his work, he obviously engendered opposition from powerful groups who didn’t want to see ideological movement on those issues.”27

Tanden’s only comment for this profile was delivered via her communications director: “While at CAP, Matt Duss made important contributions to our national-security team, and he has done critical work since.”28

While it’s clearly a sensitive subject for all parties involved, the tensions from the CAP incident presaged deeper divides within progressive policy circles. Tanden was an outspoken critic of Duss’s future boss Sanders during the 2016 Democratic primaries and remains so today. CAP’s acceptance of funds from the United Arab Emirates, which started during her tenure, was recently a source of significant internal turmoil, as was Tanden’s 2015 event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whereas Duss has vociferously criticized both the UAE and Israeli governments for years. His experience at CAP speaks to the limits of trying to challenge donors and policy-makers within powerful Democratic Party–aligned organizations—limits that Sanders will likely run into again if he seeks to reform foreign policy in a progressive direction.29

In 2014, Duss left CAP to become president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, a small nonprofit that provides grants to Israeli, Palestinian, and American civil-society groups. While at FMEP, Duss participated in working groups in coordination with Ben Rhodes to support the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran, which faced significant opposition from hawks and pro-Israel groups in Congress.30

Several times during Duss’s tenure at both CAP and FMEP, some neoconservative and pro-Israel critics accused him of anti-Semitism, a charge that he finds hurtful and absurd. A 2013 article in The Washington Free Beacon insinuated that Duss, his brother, and his father are all hostile to Jews, largely relying on their persistent criticism of the Israeli occupation as evidence. In 2015, a Republican congressman issued a press release accusing Duss and his family of “anti-Sematic [sic] ties,” again citing as evidence their criticism of the Israeli government. “Any fair reading of my work—and, frankly, my life—refutes that plainly,” Duss says.31

Duss’s deep interest in the Israel-Palestine conflict is rooted in both his Christian upbringing and his humanitarian instincts. The first of his many visits to Israel and the occupied territories was in 2003, in the middle of the second intifada, while his brother was doing relief work there. “A bus had blown up in Jerusalem a week before, so the reality of terrorism is there; you have to recognize it,” Duss says. “But at the same time, watching the daily indignity and humiliation and violence that is visited on Palestinian civilians in multiple ways… there’s no justification for that.”32

The public conversation about Israel has shifted in the past few years. Younger Jews on college campuses and elsewhere have become disenchanted with Israel and more critical of the occupation, and this has created more space in the media and in politics for views like Duss’s. The new Congress includes several Democrats who have endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement, a position that many other Democrats not only oppose but are trying to make illegal. Neither Duss nor Sanders has endorsed boycotting Israel, but both have defended the right to engage in such boycotts, and in 2015 Duss testified before Congress that “it is a mistake to focus on the BDS movement while ignoring the main reason for its continued growth, which is the failure to end the occupation.” While some BDS activists may consider that a moderate position, no one has ever voiced it in the context of a presidential campaign.33

uring the 2016 Democratic primary contest between Clinton and Sanders, Duss bemoaned the absence of a real foreign-policy debate. At the time, many progressives were frustrated with Clinton’s reflexive hawkishness, on the one hand, and Sanders’s perceived lack of a serious interest in international affairs, on the other.34

Had Clinton defeated Trump that fall, Duss expected to remain at FMEP and attempt to push the new administration toward a more progressive approach to the Middle East. Instead, mere weeks after Trump’s shocking victory, Duss met with Sanders in person and soon found himself working for the Vermont senator, taking a pay cut in order to directly shape policy on Capitol Hill. “He’s very much like he is in public, except funnier,” Duss says of Sanders, “and that’s how I immediately knew we could work together.”35

While they come from very different backgrounds, Sanders and Duss share something important in common: At least by Washington standards, they both spent their 20s adrift. After graduating from the University of Chicago, where he was more interested in activism than in grades, Sanders moved to Vermont and worked as a carpenter while making radical film strips and writing for alternative publications. He didn’t win an election until he was 39, didn’t go to Washington for another decade after that, and has only emerged as a leading national figure in the past few years. Like Duss, Sanders has stubbornly held onto a set of core ideals and waited, at whatever cost to his career, for the national debate to shift his way. As Duss puts it, both men’s identities were fully formed outside the Beltway.36

“People with Matt’s views don’t always work within the US government, so I was glad he took on his current role as an adviser for Bernie,” Ben Rhodes says. “It’s good for the Senate to have a progressive activist in that role, and it’s good for someone like Matt to learn how to navigate the complexity of being a Senate staffer.” Rhodes, who rocketed to international influence at 29 on the basis of his “mind meld” with Obama, is the most obvious example of the kind of role that Duss might be expected to play in a Sanders administration. Rhodes was also a critic of the US foreign-policy establishment, which he dubbed “the Blob,” and its interventionist consensus—and during his time in the White House, he made many of the same enemies that Duss has.37

In the lead-up to the 2020 Democratic primaries, a number of the expected major contenders have tacked left on the domestic-policy issues that Sanders staked out in 2016. But no one has indicated as clearly as Sanders that there needs to be a break with the foreign-policy consensus that Clinton embodied and would have reinforced. No one besides Sanders has hired an adviser with such a clear track record of defying the Blob. But while foreign policy could be an issue that attracts activists to Sanders, it will also likely inspire attacks, especially with regard to Israel. In fact, Ann Lewis, a pro-Israel Democratic operative who pressured CAP over Duss and his cohort in 2012, now co-chairs a well-funded new organization, the Democratic Majority for Israel, dedicated to countering the growing criticism of Israel among progressives.38

Then again, the world has changed a lot in the past decade, and some Democrats are optimistic about ending the status quo. “Matt represents a real break from interventionist thinking,” says Ro Khanna, “and it’s why foreign policy is going to be an advantage for Bernie Sanders if he runs. Last time, they said he was naive on foreign policy. This time, he’s responsible for the biggest foreign-policy success of the past few years, with the Yemen vote. And I would give a lot of credit to Matt Duss.”39

Duss himself is insistently modest, refusing to claim any special credit for Sanders’s perceived new outspokenness. He compares his boss to the legendary jazz trumpeter Miles Davis. “One of Miles’s real geniuses was as a band leader, assembling the best players of the moment and getting them to play better than they ever had before—and in many cases than they ever would again,” Duss says. “This is the best band I’ve ever played in.”40

Russiagate is, essentially, a political corruption scandal. Sure, it’s a big, juicy, fascinating, disturbing corruption scandal, and in theory it should bring down Donald Trump’s presidency, even if that may be a pipe dream as long as Republicans control the Senate. But it’s just a corruption scandal. In our media culture, however, it has become so much more than that.

To some writers on the left, Russiagate is a 21st-century resurgence of McCarthyism (never mind that Vladimir Putin’s government is the furthest thing from communist, and that not one American leftist has been blacklisted over Russiagate). And for those bent on downplaying the scandal’s importance, every individual story can be dismissed in isolation as soon as it breaks. No one scoop ever proves the existence of a vast conspiracy, and there is always someone, somewhere, who is breathlessly overhyping the latest details, which means it’s easy enough to shrug the whole thing off again and again and to pretend readers aren’t capable of recognizing patterns or making inferences. At this point, believing that the many well-documented points of contact between the Trump campaign and Kremlin-connected Russians are a meaningless coincidence is as wild a conspiracy theory as anyone has advanced, but when has that ever gotten in the way of motivated reasoning?

Of course, those skeptics aren’t wrong in pointing out that breathless overhyping of Russiagate has been an irritating feature of the past two years, especially on cable news networks like MSNBC and on social media. A recent column in the Los Angeles Times by Virginia Heffernan neatly summarizes this tendency. Heffernan interviews Mother Jones reporter David Corn and rightly credits him for his many substantive Russiagate scoops, going back to 2016. She also, however, includes this absurd passage:

[…] while some media organizations sidelined, or cautiously framed, the Trump-Russia story, a much more important group of commenters were far less timid. Let’s give a round of retweets for the concerned citizens of the United States.

Take one look at Twitter: swelling numbers—initially thousands, then tens and perhaps even hundreds of thousands—gather now to raise their voices to undo Trump’s constant gaslighting about the Mueller investigation, which is decidedly not a witch hunt.

From all quarters, these citizens have kept the Trump-Russia story front and center for the electorate, and provided analysis and even scoops that clarify and help to remedy the global catastrophe that is Trump’s presidency.

Heffernan goes on to credit a number of Twitter personalities with retweeting “articles about the corruption of the president and Mueller’s heroism” and “initially us[ing] #resistance to corral their posts, and later a set of beloved Trump-Russia memes.” Never mind that not one of these personalities is responsible for advancing the story in any meaningful way; there are also countless examples of them getting things wrong, chasing dead ends, and in many cases indulging wild and cynical conspiracy theories that, if anything, bolster the White House’s lies by cluttering and undermining the truth. Even the more responsible among them can only be credited with reading reputable reporters and pithily summarizing what they read.

In reality, Russiagate has been the subject of intensive and sober reporting by every major news organization, some of which has earned Pulitzers (and some of which has fallen apart, as can happen with any complex story). The mainstream media’s failures in covering Russiagate while it was unfolding in the months before the 2016 election were real, but they were rooted in failures of our political system—above all, in Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s threat to politicize any public statement by President Obama outlining Russian interference, and Obama’s willingness to be cowed by McConnell rather than lending his credibility to the story when it might have made a difference. The media were thus forced to rely on anonymous leaks from the intelligence community to report on Russiagate. At the same time, most mainstream media companies hewed to an obsessive bothsidesism, which meant that it would be Donald Trump’s word against Hillary Clinton’s as to whether Russian interference was taking place, and that their respective partisans would believe whichever version they were told.

Some independent commentators have developed their own sources and have done deep, no-nonsense analysis of the scandal as well, most notably Marcy Wheeler, the brilliant, Grand Rapids–based national-security blogger who is probably the single most essential writer on Russiagate. But these tend to be the exceptions; in general, independent Russiagate sleuthing is best understood as a form of entertainment, not journalism.

A recent article in BuzzFeed by Katherine Miller gets at this dynamic well. Miller sees media coverage of the Mueller investigation as “the biggest internet fandom there’s ever been,” a sprawling prestige drama practically designed to encourage fan theories, some of which might even be true. This is also the implicit premise of Leon Neyfakh’s hit podcast Slow Burn, in which he carefully re-reports the Watergate and Clinton-Lewinsky scandals (Iran/Contra is next) in order to capture what it felt like to experience them in real time, with Russiagate always the unspoken but obvious point of comparison. Neyfakh captures the way enticing bits of information are released to the public over time, how difficult it can be to see the overall picture, and how much room these scandals leave to fill in one’s own preferred narrative.

But take a step back and none of this is as complicated as it seems. We know Russian agents made repeated overtures to Trump campaign officials at the same time that they were hacking the DNC’s e-mails (a digital-age version of the burglary at the heart of Watergate), up to and including the candidate’s immediate family; that no one reported these overtures to the authorities; and that multiple participants have lied to federal investigators. We know that Paul Manafort has pleaded guilty to federal crimes and repeatedly tried to undermine the investigation. We know that Trump has all but openly declared his efforts to obstruct justice. We know that Robert Mueller has patiently, strategically released indictments so as to box in Trump and his defenders and that this has only accelerated since Democrats won control of the House, which will allow them to launch serious and open-ended investigations. We know that the Trump Organization is basically an international money-laundering scheme, one that implicates many foreign governments and entities besides Russia.

The scandal has been staring us in the face since the day Trump asked Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s e-mails on national television. It doesn’t take a genius to see what happened. It does take a very stubborn kind of personality to deny it.

en Rhodes joined Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign at 29 and advised the president for eight years as both a speechwriter and deputy national-security adviser. He was a critical player in US foreign policy and played especially influential roles in shaping the Iran nuclear deal, the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, and the debates over intervention in Libya and Syria, and was often at the center of media controversies in Washington.

Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Rhodes by phone. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, which focuses on his frustrations with the group-think of “the Blob,” his term for the Beltway national-security establishment, and his concerns about the direction of US foreign policy under Donald Trump. He also discusses the need for a more left school of foreign policy in Washington to push for its agenda and how this absence affected policy-making in the White House.

—David Klion

David Klion: How would you have classified yourself in terms of foreign-policy orientation back in 2008 versus now? I’m referring to schools of thought like liberal, realist, or neoconservative.

Ben Rhodes: Ten years ago, I would have classified myself as a liberal with some roots in liberal interventionism; however, already with a strong dose of skepticism about the use of the military informed by Iraq. Even before 2008, I had become skeptical of using military force to promote democracy. I did hold open the door to humanitarian intervention in some circumstances, but I had absorbed some amount of humility over what could be accomplished. I believe that our example is the most important aspect of democracy promotion, and I remember having debates with people on the neoconservative side and arguing that we had sacrificed our example with torture and Guantánamo in the Bush years.

In the ensuing eight years, I became more and more skeptical of the American military’s capacity to shape events in other countries. We can stop certain things from happening for a finite amount of time; we can remove people from power; we can kill terrorists; but I fail to see any evidence in the post–Cold War period for the capacity to build something using military force, unless there are certain circumstances like in the Balkans in the 1990s, where Europe is playing a role in absorbing the post-conflict areas. Those interventions probably played a role in making interventionists believe they could work in the Middle East.

DK: So is there a label you prefer since the end of your time in the White House?

BR: I think all of these labels are pretty scrambled now. They’re based on a 1990s view of power that doesn’t exist anymore. There was a transitory point between the end of the Cold War and 9/11, before Russia had reasserted itself and China had emerged, when the US had a certain freedom of action. What frustrated me in government was that Washington hadn’t recognized that change. We were debating a context that had disappeared. People who had labels like “liberal interventionist” or “realist” or “neoconservative” seemed to proceed from the assumption that the US could do whatever it wanted. Like that it could evict Russia from Crimea, for example.

And it ignored the very fact of the Iraq War. I catch a lot of grief for mentioning Iraq a lot, but it was the largest strategic mistake that the US has gotten into, and it’s like it has to be banished from memory. We were accused of over-learning the lessons of Iraq, which was similar to the idea of Vietnam syndrome, but how on earth would we not draw that conclusion in both cases?

DK: Did you have any concept of being on the left or of there being meaningful political forces to the left of you?

BR: Over the course of the eight years, I felt more and more on the left. I emerged out of the type of people, generationally, who were well versed in leftist critiques of American foreign policy, from Pinochet to the Vietnam War. I was a Nation reader but I was also a New Republic reader. I probably wouldn’t have thought of myself as a leftist but as someone who was familiar with and sympathetic to aspects of left-wing critique. I didn’t feel defined by it. But over the course of the eight years, I found myself on the left end of a lot of debates, whether it was Afghanistan or detainees or Cuba. If I looked over my left shoulder, there wasn’t a lot I saw, and that wasn’t where the pressure came from.

DK: Were there any specific policy debates where there was some pressure coming from the left?

BR: On drones, surveillance, and Afghanistan, there was pressure from some Democrats from Congress, MoveOn, the ACLU. If the issue dealt with the set of post-9/11 authorities, like surveillance or drones, I think there was some pressure from the left, probably rooted in leftover coalitions from the Bush years. But that never rooted itself in a broader worldview. That wasn’t portable to debates about, for instance, the Arab Spring, or how we deal with trade, or other traditional foreign-policy concerns.

And I guess on the Trans-Pacific Partnership, what was difficult was that there was definitely a criticism of a large trade agreement like that, but I had difficulty knowing what the proposed alternative was. The problem with the left on a lot of things is that a lot of positions were formed in opposition. I was quite interested in some of the provisions in TPP and the impact they could have on somewhere like Malaysia or Vietnam. TPP did require them to enact certain labor protections. There was a role for civil society [in TPP]. If you talk to civil society [groups] in Vietnam, that was the only case in which government was acknowledging a role for it.

To me, it’s evidence that if the United States is not more present in shaping how the Asia-Pacific region operates, China is going to exert its influence for illiberal ends. People will suffer; things progressives care about will suffer. Part of a left-of-center worldview is that there should be international legal frameworks. But I’m fully cognizant that that is not going to be an issue that’s front and center in a domestic political context. How are you able to have a coherent critique of American actions in the world and the actions of our allies and the economic infrastructure we’ve built and balance it against a similarly clear-eyed recognition that, absent us, China or Russia is going to pursue an even worse world order? When you’re actually in power, you grapple with this.

DK: Did you or do you have any concept of America as an empire, and concerns about whether America has the right to wield the global power it has? Especially considering the people who are now in power

BR: Yeah, I think America as an empire is a fair concept. When you are in government, you become acutely aware that no other country has anything comparable in terms of a global set of military installations, alliances, and an ability to dramatically alter the fates of foreign countries. We may not be an empire in the traditional sense of the word, but the US plays the role that empires have previously played, whether it’s British or Hapsburg or anything else.

Trump hasn’t taken an individual action that is as damaging as the Iraq War, nor has there been anything as damaging as the financial crisis. However, I think that the mere fact of Trump being elected is more damaging than anything Bush did. And it’s not just Trump but that America elected Trump. A lot of countries could at any given time find fault with America, including close allies in Asia and Europe. But they assumed that the United States was fundamentally stable in its orientation. With Trump, I think it’s causing every other country to fundamentally question that assumption and the extent to which they rely on the United States. The world has shown a lot of deference to us to make mistakes, Vietnam and Iraq chief among them. The Trump years are going to test that proposition.

DK: But do you see any continuity between the Bush and Obama years and the Trump years? A lot of the bad things going on now didn’t start with Trump.

BR: The one critique from the left that I don’t see made a lot is that Trump is impossible without 9/11. I think we’ve gotten a series of things wrong since then. I don’t think you can assess Iraq and Afghanistan, the militarization of our foreign policy, some of the executive powers, and not feel that something has gone terribly wrong. I would include some Obama-era policies in that; others I would defend. The jingoism and xenophobia unleashed by Fox News used to bubble under the surface, but the backlash against these endless wars and immigration and refugees led us in part to Trump.

Do I agree more with the Blob than with Trump? Yeah, but I don’t think the answer is to go back to the Blob, because it’s partly how we got to Trump.

DK: Were there left advocacy groups, think tanks, or media entities that you felt meaningfully exerted pressure on your decision-making on major issues like the Iran deal, Syria, Libya, drones, Cuba, etc.? If so, which groups and how? If not, how would it have made your experience different if there had been?

BR: I don’t think I ever felt left pressure on most traditional foreign-policy issues. Maybe on Afghanistan, I’d feel some pressure from a bloc in Congress echoed by left-of-center organizations like CAP [Center for American Progress]. But on the nature of our relationship with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, or the absence of an AUMF [Authorization of Military Force] beyond 2002, I didn’t feel that pressure. On Israel-Palestine, there was constant pressure from the right, and I never felt any from the left. And that was one where I would have liked to feel more balance. You had J Street and you had public-opinion polls, but that wasn’t reflected by who was in government or by mass mobilization. I don’t think there was a significant set of people representing a left point of view in Congress.

In the media, it’s striking how much the drivers of opinion on foreign policy come almost entirely from the right. If you look at who’s on television and the opinion pages, it’s dominated by the right, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Israelis. And frankly, when we got into fights like Iran, we were able to assemble enough of an eclectic group to win that fight, whether it was antinuclear groups or scientists. Cuba: Same thing, where we found this coalition of younger Cuban Americans and business interests that wanted to expand in Cuba. But with the UN resolution condemning Israeli settlements in late 2016 after the election, I was taking all these hits alone on TV, and Netanyahu was shaping all the questions I was getting. Just how intense the opposition there was to even this incremental step, over the tiniest detail on the number of settlement units. I remember getting fact-checked with a correction because I’d referenced the number of settlement units as settlements on the PBS NewsHour. The other side would get these things wrong all the time, and they would never get fact-checked.

When I took on Iran and Cuba, I was acutely aware that people [in DC foreign-policy circles] don’t always want to be the tip of the spear, because it can jeopardize things like Senate confirmation hearings down the line. The backlash I took kind of confirmed their caution. Just like if I want to be on a corporate board that interacts with lucrative Gulf interests, I would never say some of the things I would. There are all kinds of systemic, structural ways restricting what people on the left can do in government. And there’s nothing on the other side. We couldn’t even get Democrats together to reject the Gina Haspel nomination.

DK: What would it mean to have a left foreign-policy bench in DC? How might it distinguish itself from existing institutions?

BR: I think it’s badly needed. I think you would have to fund it. It was telling to me that, even in the Iran debate, if we asked senators what would be helpful to them, they went to groups like MoveOn, but there was still a shortcoming of infrastructure dedicated to these positions. Our efforts on Iran and Cuba had to be ad hoc. The right financed organizations, think tanks, and media outlets over a series of decades to disseminate a particular worldview and became so powerful over time that people found their way onto TV and into the government. On the left, the big ideas are in academia, but the think tanks have crowded out academia. If you look at who’s at the Aspen Ideas Festival or other events like that, it’s always former administration officials and think-tank figures.

Even the academics I listen to, like Andrew Bacevich, were ones who had found a way to be heard in DC foreign-policy debates. I knew his view would be different than the Blob. Obama read his book and had him in to the White House, because as president he didn’t think he’d ever talked to someone with this view, which was closer to Obama’s than, say, Bob Kagan’s. On Cuba, basically everyone who knew anything about Cuba thought US policy was a disaster. But otherwise, it’s hard to go out and see who’s writing in journals.

I was around DC after the 2004 election, and there were all these worthwhile efforts like the Truman Project or CNAS [Center for a New American Security, founded in 2007] that were mostly focused on responding to the war in Iraq rather than creating an infrastructure that produced an alternative set of pressures and positions. Even if you take J Street or the Ploughshares Fund or my new group [National Security Action], it’s all people trying to fight off the worst things, and it’s not a coordinated long-term effort to reevaluate failures going back to the ’90s. That creates the bench of people that come into government.

If you look at the right, it’s all the same people revolving through the foreign-policy establishment over decades, and it’s not the power of their ideas, it’s the power of financing and coordination. Every one of these little groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel [had] a bigger budget than anyone pushing back against them. People like Noah Pollak and Seth Mandel are constantly given platforms where they reach a lot of people. They would criticize me for not being experienced enough, but these guys have no experience beyond being right-wing pundits.

DK: Are you interested in serving in a future administration? Are you talking to potential Democratic candidates for president?

BR: I’ve talked to a number of people who I assume are running for president, not in any formal role. I feel somewhat liberated by the sense that I would serve in another administration, but I don’t feel that I have to. I don’t want to act like I have to, because it would shape what I would say. I don’t want to hold my finger over the button before I send a tweet or reread some op-ed I wrote and worry about how it would affect my confirmation process.

Republicans positioned themselves as the party of democracy and human rights for years, even as the policies of people like John McCain often flew in the face of that. So there’s room for Democrats to take up that role. There’s also room for new ideas. What is the role for the defense budget, for instance, and what can you do as a progressive if you scrap unnecessary programs like nuclear modernization? What would a Paris-type agreement for refugee policy look like? What would it mean to incorporate climate into national-security policy? How could we rein in the unlimited War on Terror? There’s a lot of new ground for Democrats to fight over.

DK: Are there any elected Democrats in particular who you think are taking positive steps on foreign policy now?

BR: My sense from talking to candidates and members of Congress is that, with some exceptions, foreign policy is always a kind of secondary issue to Democrats. In the Senate, I like how Chris Murphy approaches foreign policy. He does guns and health care but he does other things too. Here’s a Democrat who thinks it’s worth his time to address the war in Yemen. Elizabeth Warren has taken some steps to be more vocal. Bernie Sanders has, too, since the election. I’ve talked to all three of them, not in the context of their running for president. In the House, I like Adam Schiff; I talk to him a fair amount. I talk to Ro Khanna, who’s consciously trying to fill this role.

In general, Democrats don’t tend to these kinds of issues, and then, in the last few weeks of an election, there will be a barrage of unfair ads about Iran or MS-13. We can lament that they’re unfair, but in part because Democrats haven’t spent a lot of time talking about [national security], they’re caught off guard. If someone starts attacking your health-care plan in the last week of the campaign, you have an answer to that. But if you haven’t been talking about Iran, it’s much easier to be defined.

But the point I try to make to people is: Look at the price I’m paying for what people like you on the left probably think are incrementalist reforms. It just shows you that there’s not that support structure in place that would give someone like me confidence in the future that, when they charge up the hill, there might be people with them. The left is good at holding people like me and my feet to the fire in ways that can impact our social circles, but less impactful on policy debates. But it was very important to us that people on the left chose to support the Iran deal. It gave us a team. The deal probably wasn’t everything the left wanted, but they saw it was better than a war.

The left, as a rule, has been sharply critical of US foreign policy. Ask anyone who supports free universal health care and abolishing ICE about America’s role in the world, and they’ll probably recite a long list of coups (Iran, Chile), wars (Vietnam, Iraq), and trade policies (NAFTA, TPP) that amount to a global imperial project with an appalling body count. Every US president since at least the Second World War has been complicit in this project, and the next one will be, too.1

And yet, if that president is a Democrat, she or he will have pledged to enact a substantial part of the left’s policy demands. This will require the left to formulate not only a domestic agenda, around which there is an emerging progressive consensus, but a foreign policy as well. The next Democratic administration will also likely include a cohort of millennials who have never served in government before—and whatever their feelings about the American empire, they will suddenly be charged with managing and shaping it, with surprisingly few checks on their ability to do so. They may question their right as Americans to wield such power or seek to mitigate its effects. But, nonetheless, they will have to wield it.2

The last young idealist to gain so much influence so quickly over international affairs was Ben Rhodes, who joined Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign as a speechwriter at age 29 and closely advised the 44th president throughout his two terms in office, serving as deputy national-security adviser and playing a key role in the crafting of Obama’s foreign policy. Before that, Rhodes’s foreign-policy experience had been limited to writing speeches and reports for former longtime congressman Lee Hamilton, the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank; before that, Rhodes had published one piece of fiction and had just completed an MFA in creative writing at New York University.3

If you have a liberal-arts education and have spent any time in DC, you’re familiar with this guy, and maybe you even identify with him. If so, Rhodes’s story, recounted in his new memoir, The World as It Is, will lead you to consider what you might do if you suddenly had the opportunity to help remake the world every day for eight years. What long-suppressed progressive foreign-policy goals would you try to advance? What imperial wars would you try to prevent or end? Where might you succeed and where might you fail, and how would it weigh on you?4

nyone who has followed international news over the past decade is familiar with Rhodes’s work. His unique position as speechwriter and adviser allowed him to function as a kind of translator between the president, the foreign-policy establishment, the media, and the public at home and abroad. When Obama, in Cairo, announced a new era of engagement with the Muslim world, it was Rhodes who drafted the speech. When Obama opted not to launch air strikes against the Assad regime in Syria, Rhodes was his most vocal defender against an enraged chorus of Beltway hacks. Rhodes was also instrumental in selling Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran to Congress, led the secret negotiations to restore US-Cuba relations, and played a significant role in normalizing relations with Burma.5

It was also Rhodes who was primarily responsible for the messaging debacle that allowed the attacks on the US embassy in Benghazi to be turned into a right-wing conspiracy theory; Rhodes who was called upon to defend drone strikes to the public; Rhodes who championed the pro-democracy protesters of the Arab Spring and then watched helplessly as the popularly elected president of Egypt was overthrown in a military coup backed by US allies; and Rhodes who was the frequent implied target of derisive, typically anonymous media leaks chastising the Obama administration for an incoherent and naive approach to foreign policy.6

The criticism directed toward him was in part the result of Rhodes’s own tendency to put himself forward as the avatar of Obama’s foreign policy. Perhaps the most infamous example was when he granted extensive access to the journalist David Samuels, an editor at Tablet and an outspoken critic of the Iran deal, who then wrote a profile of Rhodes for The New York Times Magazine in 2016. Samuels portrayed the youthful aide, with a mixture of admiration and contempt, as a Holden Caulfield–esque prep-school brat and a dark mastermind manipulating the press into appeasing Tehran and allowing Syrians to be slaughtered.7

“The aftermath of the Samuels piece was basically a two-year information campaign against me,” Rhodes told me in a phone interview, adding: “And yeah, I do think Samuels intended that.” Rhodes regretted his cooperation, and most in the Beltway agreed that Samuels did not make him look good. In Foreign Policy, for example, Thomas Ricks wrote a piece headlined “A stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the asshole who is the president’s foreign policy guru.”8

However, at least to some of us on the left, Rhodes didn’t come off so bad. “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru”—the title of the Times piece—sounded like a pretty cool gig. In a capital defined by blinkered groupthink and reflexive military interventionism, Rhodes seemed refreshingly independent and thoughtful. He wasn’t a leftist, and he didn’t categorically object to the use of American power abroad, but he appeared to genuinely want to work toward a more peaceful world, and he also seemed to have internalized Obama’s “Don’t do stupid shit” maxim—both of which distinguished him from many of his peers.9

The Samuels profile was also where Rhodes introduced the term “the Blob” to describe the permanent DC foreign-policy establishment that he and Obama saw themselves as challenging, which was largely committed to perpetuating its own power and reinforcing the status quo. It was a memorable and apt phrase: If people like former CIA director and defense secretary Robert Gates and Senator John McCain were complaining about Rhodes to their many friends in the press, and if Samuels was attempting to warn pro-Israel hawks not to trust him, then—again, at least to some of us—that spoke well of Rhodes. While many on the left would have preferred a more radical vision for US foreign policy, what could be more aspirational than going from writing fiction in Brooklyn to personally helping to reopen relations with Castro’s Cuba and pissing off the Blob along the way?10

ne surprising thing about Rhodes’s book, however, is that Rhodes himself is much more representative of the Blob than Samuels’s profile had implied. Samuels wrote that, for Rhodes, “the Iraq war was proof, in black and white, not of the complexity of international affairs or the many perils attendant on political decision-making but of the fact that the decision-makers were morons.” He neglected to mention, however, that Rhodes had originally supported the war. Samuels did note, in a memorable opening paragraph referencing Don DeLillo’s Underworld, that Rhodes’s life was changed the day he watched the Twin Towers fall from the Williamsburg waterfront, but he skipped over the part where Rhodes briefly considered enlisting in the military. Likewise, Samuels asserted that Rhodes wanted to “create the space for America to disentangle itself from its established system of alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Israel and Turkey,” but did not mention that Rhodes had once been a member of AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group.11

Samuels, in other words, made Rhodes sound a lot edgier in his Times piece than Rhodes makes himself sound in his memoir. In fairness, the world has changed a lot in the past two years, and Rhodes is no longer in the White House personally advising the president. Instead, he’s yet another former Obama staffer reduced to rhetorically defending the liberal order as Donald Trump casually annihilates it. Two years ago, Rhodes derided the Blob, but today he doesn’t totally dispute that he was—and is—a part of it.12

“You know what that New York Times story got wrong?” Obama told Rhodes after the Samuels profile appeared. “The notion that there’s something wrong with storytelling—I mean, that’s our job. To tell a really good story about who we are.”13

Rhodes, like Obama, always wanted to be a storyteller, and The World as It Is is not a typical 
Washington memoir. For one thing, it’s good: Rhodes really is a gifted writer, equally talented at capturing mundane late nights in his windowless West Wing office, chaotic mass demonstrations around the world, and tense meetings with international power brokers. He makes sharp observations about other government officials, especially the president himself. Few, if any, White House staffers had a closer personal relationship with Obama, one that was commonly described as a “mind meld.”14

Obama emerges as a nuanced character here, not an object of blind worship, even though Rhodes clearly has a deep love and admiration for his boss. As captured by Rhodes, Obama is frequently more candid about the role that race played in shaping his political circumstances than he ever permitted himself to be in public. He is prone to flashes of irritation, both at Rhodes and at his various political opponents, and he is sometimes stubbornly committed to a course of action that Rhodes, at least in hindsight, questions. But he shares with Rhodes a constant appreciation for his role in history, for the vastness of the power at his command, and for the unique opportunities the presidency affords him to make a meaningful impact.15

Alone among the serious Democratic candidates for president in 2008, Obama had opposed the Iraq War from the outset, which likely played a critical role in his narrow victory over Hillary Clinton. In his debates with Clinton, Obama was critical of Washington’s hawkish foreign-policy consensus, most notably stating that he would be willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, and North Korea. For progressives, especially in the then-robust anti-war movement, Obama seemed to offer an opportunity to reverse not only the Bush administration’s aggressive militarism, but also the decades of failed bipartisan policies that had preceded it.16

According to The World as It Is, Rhodes’s close relationship with Obama was cemented by his own criticisms of the Beltway worldview. The two met in May 2007, when then-Senator Obama had announced his presidential campaign but had yet to catch fire. Holding a debate-prep meeting in Washington, Obama solicited opinions from a group of experts as to whether he should vote for additional funds for US troops in Iraq; Rhodes was the only person who urged him to vote no. Obama followed this advice, and thus began a long partnership in which Rhodes’s consistent purpose was to hold Obama to the high ideals he had campaigned on.17

his proved to be far more difficult than either Obama or Rhodes had anticipated. From deploying more troops in Afghanistan to failing to close the prison camp at Guantánamo, at almost every turn Obama and Rhodes would find themselves submitting to the Blob’s consensus. Often, though not always, they would be persuaded that the consensus was correct.18

One telling passage in particular opens an early chapter of the book. “What is American foreign policy?” Rhodes asks.19

Day in and day out, it’s a trillion-dollar annual enterprise that plows forward like an ocean liner, shaping the lives of people in its wake whether they know it or not. The embassy in New Delhi tries to help U.S. businesses get into the Indian market. The USAID mission in Nairobi meets with the Kenyan Ministry of Health to help the fight against HIV/AIDS. A scholarship student from Indonesia boards a plane bound for an American university. The U.S. military conducts a joint exercise with the South Koreans to deter North Korea. Our intelligence community shares information about a terrorist plot with Europeans. A Special Operator leaves a Baghdad trailer at dawn to capture or kill a terrorist. A taxpayer-funded F-16 fighter aircraft is delivered to the Egyptian military.20

What Rhodes is really saying with this panorama can be stated more succinctly: “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” No one president, much less an adviser, can single-handedly right the course of this ocean liner, and this president and this adviser certainly didn’t. It’s both an accurate statement and something of a dodge: While it’s true that Obama and Rhodes faced resistance at every stage, it’s not necessarily true that they did everything they could have done under the circumstances.21

Rhodes implies something similar in a more mournful passage in the book’s final pages, as he confronts the infuriating reality that Obama is being replaced by Trump.22

I closed my eyes. Somewhere out there, in the vast expanse of darkness, was the story of the last eight years, the world as it is. Markets once crippled by crisis teemed with optimistic forecasts on computer screens. Iranian centrifuges sat idle in a storage warehouse with electronic seals. Yazidi women and children who had escaped from Mount Sinjar awaited a new life in Turkish refugee camps. A team of women in Laos scoured the rough grass for unexploded bombs. Syrian prisons were filled with human beings suffering untold horror. A refugee went looking for a job in Berlin. An aging survivor of the atomic bomb in Hiroshima went about her day in a tidy apartment. Vladimir Putin presided over a revanchist and rotting Russian regime. Angela Merkel prepared her run for another term as German chancellor. NATO patrolled the skies over Estonia. Mohamed Morsi sat in an Egyptian prison cell….23

Rhodes goes on like that for another handful of sentences, concluding with “My own daughters lay sleeping in my small apartment, unaware of the convulsions in the world around them.” I cite these lengthy passages, which resemble cinematic montages, because they capture something essential about Rhodes’s, and Obama’s, worldview after eight years in the White House.24

Obama and Rhodes were always conscious of the fact that they were making history, but they also often seemed to view themselves as passive observers, detaching their own agency from the world they were observing. They wielded unmatched global might, but they understood that they had only a finite ability to shape how it was employed. “The world is what it is,” as the late V.S. Naipaul wrote; there is, in Rhodes’s view, little that he or Obama could have done to fundamentally change it.25

Part of the problem here is that, for all their perspicuity and self-awareness, their view of American power was missing a critical component. Although it’s not a term that either Rhodes or Obama would typically use, their vision of a more peaceful world order was constantly stymied by the contradictions of American empire. They had been granted all this power that, they believed, they could use to do good, yet it rarely occurred to them to ask whether they or any other American had any right to that power, and whether it could be exercised in a way that was not an expression of American domination.26

While Rhodes and Obama were fully cognizant of the many atrocities and strategic mistakes committed by the United States, especially in Iraq, they still saw America as a necessary counterweight to rival powers like China and Russia, and they believed that far greater evils would result from an American retreat. By maintaining American supremacy, they also, in the end, were compelled to turn the empire over to people who clearly should not hold any power at all.27

ike many other Obama staffers, Rhodes probably imagined that he would write a very different memoir, one that confronted the administration’s failures and disappointments but ultimately had a triumphant narrative. Instead, the book’s prologue conveys his profound disillusionment. Rhodes begins by describing his final world tour with Obama, in the weeks after Trump’s victory but before the inauguration, during which the outgoing president reflects on his own suddenly endangered legacy. “Maybe we pushed too far,” Obama muses to Rhodes in Lima. “Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe.” When Rhodes tries to reassure him, Obama pushes back: “Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or twenty years too early.”28

The memoir’s title, The World as It Is, captures Rhodes’s growing pessimism. When he entered the White House, the Blob essentially comprised three schools of thought: the liberal internationalists, who championed humanitarian intervention as long as it was backed by multilateral institutions; the neoconservatives, who preferred the go-it-alone approach to American empire exemplified by the Iraq War; and the realists, who urged restraint in the use of force but also valued stable relationships with often illiberal regimes. Like his colleague Samantha Power, Rhodes was initially more concerned with the world as it ought to be and sympathetic to the liberal interventionism that had prevailed among many Democratic foreign-policy elites. But over the course of his time in office, Rhodes moved closer and closer to the realist camp and came to take a much more instrumentalist view of American power abroad.29

One reason was that, as Rhodes grew closer to Obama, he began to embrace the president’s more skeptical view of American power. Contemplating a missile strike against Syria that he ultimately rejected, Obama told Rhodes: “It is too easy for a president to go to war.” Not long after, Obama challenged the conventional wisdom that the United States should have intervened to stop the 1994 Rwandan genocide. “You can’t stop people from killing each other like that,” the president explained.30

Yet while Obama and Rhodes both grasped the failure of neoconservatism from their first days in the White House and came to recognize the dangers of the kind of interventionism espoused by figures like Power, the Obama administration repeatedly intervened anyway, deploying military force in ad hoc ways that in themselves were troubling. Obama toppled Gadhafi in Libya and called for Assad to step down in Syria, in both cases without any real plans for how to establish stable regimes after the ouster of these dictators. He surged US troops in Afghanistan even as he and Rhodes openly questioned the wisdom of doing so, withdrew them from Iraq, and then resumed military operations there after the rise of ISIS. Obama and Rhodes insisted on the legitimacy of international law and institutions, and yet, under their tenure, the United States carried out an extrajudicial, legally dubious campaign of assassinations against terror suspects in multiple countries. Both had sincere doubts about exercising American power, but they proved to be no match for the relentless pressure from the Blob to exercise it anyway.31

ith the rise of a more left-wing and egalitarian domestic politics, it is becoming clear that we need an alternative approach to the liberal-internationalist, realist, and neoconservative thinking that has long dominated the Blob. This alternative approach, while it may exist in embryonic form in the ideals of some in Washington, has never found a name, much less the institutions that would support and nurture it. Where do those of us whose instincts are progressive and humanitarian, anti-war and anti-empire, find a home? Could such viewpoints ever flourish in a capital where seemingly everyone pledges fealty to the American “national interest”? What, in short, would it mean to be a leftist in foreign policy?32

In Rhodes’s memoir, we see occasional glimmers of what a left approach to foreign policy might look like. He describes in great detail the personal relationship that he developed with Alejandro Castro Espín (the son of Raúl and nephew of Fidel) while negotiating to restore relations with Cuba, offering a heartening glimpse of what US foreign policy might look like if it were entirely predicated on good-faith efforts to create a more peaceful, just, and open world. And everywhere Rhodes goes, he makes sure the president meets with people from all walks of life. He also tries to make amends for past US crimes; for instance, inspired by an episode of the late Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown, he convinces Obama to pledge $100 million to cleaning up unexploded ordnance in Laos.33

But it’s impossible to read The World as It Is without thinking about how everything that Obama and Rhodes worked to achieve is now in mortal jeopardy. The mere fact of Trump’s presidency undermines whatever claim the American empire might have made to moral authority, and while Rhodes understands this, he has yet to absorb the full implications. Rhodes’s own post–White House efforts feel like a stopgap. In February, he and his friend Jake Sullivan, who served as Hillary Clinton’s chief policy adviser, launched National Security Action, a group intended to revitalize liberal foreign policy in the age of Trump. Putting aside its unfortunate initials, the new group’s advisory board is a who’s who of liberal internationalists. According to its website, it is primarily “dedicated to advancing American global leadership and opposing the reckless policies of the Trump administration that endanger our national security and undermine U.S. strength in the world.”34

While National Security Action has some new and potentially laudable ideas for addressing issues ranging from the global refugee crisis to government corruption, there is little reason to think that it will stray far from the Beltway’s conventional wisdom. In our phone interview, Rhodes acknowledged that much of what NSA is doing can offer only a short-term remedy. The group, he admitted, “has an emergency function and is not trying to be a long-term solution.” Its main purpose is to brief and prep Democratic candidates to respond to the immediate crisis posed by Trump.35

Looking ahead, however, the left will need to think beyond both the old and new NSAs. The American public will need to develop a better understanding of the costs of American empire. We need more politicians, backed by an army of pundits and experts whose voices echo through the mainstream news outlets, who can unambiguously denounce the US alliances with Saudi Arabia and Israel, the atrocities in Yemen and Palestine, the damaging environmental and labor effects of our trade deals, and the virulent spread of corruption and kleptocracy around the world, much of which has been facilitated by America’s promotion of neoliberal economic policies abroad.36

Rhodes himself seems to recognize this. “The left is good at holding people like me and my feet to the fire,” he noted in our interview. But to do that effectively, the left needs a more detailed and durable agenda for changing Washington’s approach to the world and challenging the basic premise of US hegemony. The next Democratic administration will have an easier time resisting the Blob if more legislators, bureaucrats, pundits, policy wonks, and voters demand that it do so. It is urgently necessary to institutionalize the left’s demands and to make all of these disparate voices an acknowledged part of our foreign-policy debates, before the next Ben Rhodes is given a chance to advise the next president.37

What did everyone think was going to happen?

There’s nothing we learned from Donald Trump’s meeting in Helsinki on Monday with Vladimir Putin that we didn’t already know. Seeing the president of the United States praise a foreign adversary to his face while insulting his own intelligence services carries some remaining power to shock, but nothing about Trump’s past statements, including his tweets in the days leading up to the summit, suggested anything very different was in store. We certainly should have been prepared for the likelihood that Trump would flatter Putin, denounce the media, and generally humiliate the United States for no discernible reason.

On the one hand, it’s healthy that the public is capable of expressing outrage. It’s reassuring that Trump’s appalling behavior and flagrant corruption haven’t been completely normalized. And yet there’s something empty about this reaction every time it occurs. The fact that Trump is unfit for office isn’t news.

Here’s what is news: Last Friday, just days before the Trump-Putin summit, Robert Mueller indicted 12 Russian intelligence officers, charging them with hacking, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money. Allegedly, these officers were behind the hacking of the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and the e-mails of Clinton campaign officials in 2016 and released stolen e-mails via Guccifer 2.0, the entity that furnished them to WikiLeaks in order to spread chaos and distrust among Democrats.

As Putin made clear in the joint press conference on Monday, Russia has no intention of extraditing any of these officers to stand trial in the United States, but that’s not the point of the indictments. More likely, Mueller intended to send a message to several figures not named but whose identities are strongly implied. One individual, described as “a person who was in regular contact with senior members of the presidential campaign of Donald J. Trump,” is almost certainly longtime GOP operative and dirty trickster Roger Stone. The indictment describes this individual’s discussions with Russian agents regarding the release of stolen documents, citing language that precisely matches Stone’s previously reported August 2016 discussions with Guccifer. It’s easy to see how Stone himself could be charged with conspiring with foreign hackers, and how the mere threat of such charges could pressure him to flip on Trump.

But even more intriguing is the allegation that on August 15, 2016, the indicted officers “received a request for stolen documents from a candidate for the U.S. Congress” and that they “sent the candidate stolen documents related to the candidate’s opponent.” Without anything beyond that description to work with, it’s best not to speculate as to who this candidate might be, but it’s safe to assume they know who they are. This is a shocking allegation, and it hints at larger implications of Russiagate that the public is nowhere close to coming to terms with.

It’s rarely recalled now, but back in May 2017, The Washington Post published the transcript of a conversation from June 2016 among the House Republican leadership, in which House majority leader Kevin McCarthy made clear that he was aware “the Russians hacked the DNC and got the opp research that they had on Trump” and speculated “there’s two people, I think, that Putin pays: [Representative Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.” Amid laughter, House Speaker Paul Ryan insisted that the conversation remain off the record, adding, “What’s said in the family stays in the family.” Ryan would later claim he and McCarthy were joking.

The point here isn’t necessarily that Rohrabacher, a Republican congressman from California, solicited illegally obtained documents from Russian officials. There are other plausible candidates who might have done that. The point is that Russiagate, which is widely understood to be a scandal surrounding Donald Trump’s close associates like Paul Manafort, may go wider and deeper, and could implicate at least one member of Congress.

Moreover, it seems that the Republican leadership was at the very least aware of this possibility, amused by it, and did nothing whatsoever to alert the public or any relevant authorities. They were happy to enjoy the benefits of Russian interference and said so openly among themselves. Similarly, as the Post reported, when Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell was informed of Russian interference in September 2016 in a meeting with President Obama and other senior officials, he threatened to cast any public announcement of the threat as partisan politics. It’s not a stretch to say McConnell deliberately undermined national security for partisan advantage, a decision that has paid off with the signing of a massive tax cut for the wealthy and the looming establishment of a durable right-wing majority on the Supreme Court.

In other words, Russiagate isn’t just the narrow story of a few corrupt officials. It isn’t even the story of a corrupt president. It’s the story of a corrupt political party, the one currently holding all the levers of power in Washington. After Trump groveled before Putin in Helsinki, many Republicans in Washington proclaimed their solemn concern, just as they did when the president expressed his sympathy for the white supremacists in Charlottesville last year. But all of them are fully aware that they are abetting a criminal conspiracy, and probably more than one.

Shortly after the Trump-Putin press conference, federal prosecutors announced the indictment of Maria Butina, a Russian national in Washington, DC, who, unlike the 25 Russians the special counsel has so far indicted, was arrested over the weekend. Butina, who in 2016 attempted to arrange a meeting between Trump and Putin, is accused of operating as a foreign agent to gain influence in Republican political circles and advance the interests of the Russian Federation. Working on behalf of Alexander Torshin, the deputy governor of the Russian Central Bank, she appears to have brokered ties with the National Rifle Association and conservative religious organizations, which she herself accurately identified as the financial backbones of the Republican Party in Congress.

Butina is a colorful example of an increasingly common phenomenon in Washington: foreign nationals, not only from Russia but from dozens of other countries, who blur the line between lobbying and spying until it’s imperceptible. This is what the evisceration of campaign-finance laws has yielded: a capital where American corporations and foreign governments see every official as being for sale.

Mueller, who knows more than anyone in the media about the extent of the Russiagate scandal and never leaks, isn’t telling us that Trump colluded and obstructed justice—we already know that, because we literally saw Trump request on camera, in the summer of 2016, that Russia hack the Clinton campaign, just as we later saw him bluntly admit to the world that he fired James Comey to end the Russia investigation.

Instead, we are being told something much more frightening: that Russiagate doesn’t end with Trump and his inner circle, that some members of Congress may be implicated, and that the Republican leadership therefore has a personal stake in preventing anyone beyond Manafort and a few other flunkies from being held accountable. Mueller and the FBI are giving everyone a glimpse at the scale of official corruption in Washington, and they’re warning us that they aren’t going to be able to rein it in all by themselves.

e live in a broken world, and many of the best people in it are broken too. Anthony Bourdain had the life many of us dream about; not just wealth and fame, but wealth and fame derived from exploring and sharing the fullness of human experience, from telling honest stories from everywhere about everyone, while eating what always looked like the best meals on earth. His compulsively watchable travel shows—No Reservations, The Layover, and Parts Unknown—made it possible to believe that social justice and earthly delights weren’t mutually exclusive, and he pursued both with the same earnest reverence. Most celebrities make life look like a guilty pleasure at best and a dystopian horror at worst; Bourdain made life look like it was worth living, which makes his suicide at 61, at what seemed to be the pinnacle of personal and career success, all the harder to comprehend.

Bourdain acknowledged his own depression, and for much of his life, he also struggled with addiction. He kicked the harder drugs, cocaine and heroin, years before he became famous, but he continued to drink, spending whole episodes of Parts Unknown on epic benders from Seoul to Batumi. He could be accused of glamorizing alcoholism, and in fact he accused himself of having glamorized a kind of swaggering masculinity in the restaurant industry in the best-selling books that launched his career. In Kitchen Confidential, he did offer lurid tales of “heavy drinking, drugs, screwing in the dry-goods area, unappetizing revelations about bad food-handling and unsavory industry-wide practices.” Yet he also wrote about these and other things with a sensitivity and ruefulness that marked much of his later life.

What really interested him about food was the sensual pleasure of eating it and the hard reality of the labor that went into it, and he never lost sight of either. His mission was to affirm the value of life, even as he saw it devalued all around him. When he traveled to war zones, from Libya to Iraqi Kurdistan, he sought to relate to the people caught in them as familiarly as anyone he met in London or Tokyo or New York. He reported on Brexit and Israeli settlements; he traveled to Gaza (probably no mainstream American TV journalist has ever produced a more humanizing segment on Palestinians); he showcased thriving immigrant communities in Houston at the height of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

Possessing a restless intelligence and curiosity like his can be exhausting. Bourdain was a natural writer because he was constantly observing everything around him, recording the best and the worst, processing, contextualizing, drawing out meaning. He loved the world and his unique access to it too much to ever grow complacent, even though he certainly could have. He was keenly aware of the perils of becoming a fraud, mocking celebrity chefs and refusing to allow himself to be defined as one.

He used his position of prominence to bring light to those suffering in the dark. In one episode of Parts Unknown, he dined with Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov before his assassination in Moscow; in another, with Iranian-American journalist Jason Rezaian before his imprisonment in Tehran. He could find wonderful people eating wonderful food anywhere. He knew exactly how bad things could be, and yet he was determined to find the ways things could still be great.

very celebrity’s life is marketed as an aspirational fantasy. Bourdain’s was marketed to a smart, discerning audience that saw travel and dining not just as leisure activities, but also as continuing educations. Bourdain ate in plastic chairs in grubby urban markets and in Michelin-starred restaurants with the same evident relish, and he asked pointed questions about local politics in both. Having it all meant having access to bourgeois cosmopolitan luxuries and unpretentious everyday pleasures and acknowledging no inconsistency between the two. It meant celebrating consumption and reporting on injustice at the same time. It meant moving effortlessly in and out of one’s bubble, challenging and rewarding oneself, engaging with the world both as it is and as it ideally might be. Bourdain recognized these contradictions; he didn’t try to resolve them, but he was honest about them.

When the #MeToo movement began last fall, his partner, Asia Argento, was at the center of it as one of Harvey Weinstein’s most prominent accusers, and Bourdain’s moral outrage was palpable. No male celebrity seemed to take the culture’s systemic violation of women more personally. Where other men saw #MeToo as an accusation, Bourdain saw it as an injustice, one he was determined to exorcise his own complicity in. He was one of a handful of prominent straight men—Bruce Springsteen, his fellow New Jerseyan and depressive, is another—who simultaneously embodied and interrogated American masculinity, and who tried and mostly succeeded at offering an alternative to the dominant toxic strain. When Mario Batali, one of his many friends in the restaurant industry, was exposed as a predator, Bourdain stood firmly with the accusers.

“I’m not going to the White House Correspondents’ dinner,” he told The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe in a profile early last year. “I don’t need to be laughing it up with Henry Kissinger.” “Any journalist who has ever been polite to Henry Kissinger, you know, fuck that person,” he added. “I’m a big believer in moral gray areas, but, when it comes to that guy, in my view he should not be able to eat at a restaurant in New York.”

Bourdain at his best was like punk at its best: profane and combative, but righteous rather than cynical or nihilistic. He had seen up close what Kissinger had done to Cambodia and was incapable of overlooking it, even with a CNN contract. Contrast him with Samantha Power, who posed for a photo with Kissinger at Yankee Stadium after launching her career with a book about American indifference to genocide, or with Stephen Colbert, who danced with Kissinger on the final episode of his Comedy Central show. Bourdain meant every word he said.

Better than most traditional journalists, Bourdain understood that the point of journalism is to tell the truth, to challenge the powerful, to expose wrongdoing. But his unique gift was to make doing all that look fun rather than grim or tedious. Very few storytellers offering honest portrayals of the world can still find it full of joy as well as sorrow. Bourdain did so, while rarely striking a false note. This required relentless self-criticism, another quality Bourdain possessed in abundance and frequently shared. Even as he was beloved by everyone, he always seemed incredulous of his own success, perhaps even of his own survival. Humility is too weak a word for this; what Bourdain really was was angry, angry that he had it so great when others did not.

Depression can sometimes be the price paid for seeing the world too clearly, in all its contradiction and cruelty, and for being unable to endure the full weight of it. No one saw more of the world more clearly than Anthony Bourdain, and the awful tragedy is that the one thing he may not have seen clearly was his own irreplaceable contribution.

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

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hat is the left’s foreign-policy approach to Russia?1

Long before the advent of the Trump presidency, progressives had been vocal critics of US actions overseas. Yet they have given much less thought to what US foreign policy should be in the plausible event that a left-leaning Democrat wins the White House in 2020.2

Whoever the next president is, one immediate problem facing him or her will be how to deal with Russia, which most Democrats—as well as independents like Bernie Sanders—hold responsible for interfering in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. Even apart from this apparent meddling, managing relations with Russia will be a top priority for any new administration. The next president will face immediate pressure from the national-security establishment to implement a tougher approach to Russia in Trump’s wake. This could include new and rigorously enforced sanctions, increased arms sales to Ukraine, a renewed push for NATO expansion, more pressure on Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, a new cyberoffensive against Moscow in retaliation for 2016, and covert support for opposition movements in Russia and its former satellites.3

This agenda is unlikely to make America or the world more secure, since it will simply further escalate the current dangerous tensions with Russia and increase the risk of future attacks on US institutions. So what should the next president do instead?4

Take On Russia’s Oligarchs—by Taking On America’s

obert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia has been largely opaque, but from the indictments issued so far, as well as the recent subpoena of the Trump Organization’s records, it is clear that a central issue is money laundering. Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his deputy, Rick Gates, have been indicted on a variety of charges, from laundering millions of dollars to tax evasion, bank fraud, and violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) by working as unlicensed lobbyists. Yet what many in Washington have portrayed as shady financial maneuvers in a new Cold War looks a lot like something else: large-scale white-collar crime.5

It should not have taken an international political scandal before the perpetrators were held accountable. Unfortunately, much of the illegal activity that Manafort and Gates were allegedly engaged in is common in Washington and New York, where foreign governments, both allies and adversaries, routinely funnel money in order to promote their interests. Consider the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is under scrutiny from Mueller not only for his contacts with Russia, but also because officials in the United Arab Emirates, China, and Israel sought to influence him. This is the context in which Russian interference should be understood: not as an unprecedented attack on US institutions, but as an especially dramatic example of how those institutions have been made vulnerable to manipulation by foreign governments and financial interests.6

Most Democrats and Republicans in Congress are committed to punishing Vladimir Putin and the network of oligarchs surrounding him by expanding the sanctions regime first imposed by the Obama administration following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Congress has attempted to force Trump’s hand by imposing new sanctions in retaliation for the alleged election interference, but the Trump administration has been lax in enforcing them. However, even properly enforced sanctions cannot solve the underlying problem: Russia is functionally a kleptocracy, and the United States bears some responsibility for making it that way.7

In the 1990s, Washington encouraged the rapid and blatantly rigged privatization of Russia’s economy, resulting in skyrocketing inequality, the impoverishment of millions, and the elevation of a tiny billionaire elite. While Putin has claimed credit for a revival of economic stability and a measure of prosperity in the 2000s, driven to a large extent by high energy prices, over time he has consolidated power at the top of a fundamentally corrupt system. The United States has emerged as a leading destination for Russia’s elite to park their fortunes, often at the expense of middle-class Americans in major real-estate markets like New York, and with the help of banks and law firms happy to turn a blind eye to corruption overseas. Russian money laundering through high-end real estate is also a major issue in London, where Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn has proposed tackling it in response to the recent poisoning of former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Going after the money is far more likely to produce meaningful results than expelling diplomats, the strategy that the United States and its European allies have so far pursued. Some of the recent sanctions, which target a list of wealthy Russians for enumerated corrupt activities, are more promising, but they still represent a flawed attempt to punish individuals close to Putin rather than a comprehensive effort to reduce global corruption.8

The United States has little standing to condemn Russia’s oligarchs while the Trump administration openly loots the public with a tax-reform bill designed to benefit the wealthiest Americans and with taxpayer dollars constantly funneled through Trump Organization properties. The next administration should make the case that the transnational oligarchy stretching from New York to London to Moscow poses a national-security threat by undermining the integrity of our political process. It should expand FARA and end foreign lobbying, both legal and illegal, on K Street. It should crack down on money laundering through banks and real estate, as well as offshore tax havens.9

Contrary to what some writers on the left have argued, the American public is legitimately interested in the Trump-Russia scandal and isn’t going to stop paying attention. But rather than singling out Russia, the next president should pledge to take on kleptocrats everywhere, using Trump’s outrageous corruption (including but certainly not limited to his Russia ties) to make the case for a more just economic order.10

In addition, the next president should place a champion of global environmental justice in charge of the State Department, rather than an ExxonMobil CEO (the recently departed Rex Tillerson) or an outspoken Islamophobe and climate-change skeptic (the yet-to-be-confirmed Mike Pompeo), to make clear that the oil-and-gas industry is not in charge of US foreign policy. Exxon, like other energy companies, has lobbied for normalized US-Russia relations so that it can exploit Russia’s vast natural resources, and was even fined by the Treasury Department for violating the sanctions regime against Russia by signing an agreement with the oil giant Rosneft while Tillerson was still CEO.11

Work for Peace and Recommit to Disarmament

he consensus in Washington is that the United States must contain Russia’s imperial revanchism on every front, as though the Cold War never ended. But this only encourages a similar consensus in Moscow, empowering hard-line nationalists who see their country encircled by US proxies and consider neighboring former Soviet republics to belong in Russia’s rightful sphere of influence. Those countries, including flash points like Ukraine and Georgia, are entitled to sovereignty under international law, and Russian encroachment on that sovereignty, from Crimea and the Donbass to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, deserves condemnation. But the next president must also make clear that the United States does not intend to expand its own sphere of military influence via NATO or in any other capacity.12

Moscow opposed, and still deeply resents, the expansion of NATO into the Baltic states and Eastern Europe in the 1990s and 2000s, in particular the 1999 NATO military campaign against Yugoslavia, which proceeded despite a Russian veto at the UN Security Council. With considerable justification, Russian military planners see NATO as existing primarily to surround and isolate Russia.13

For better or worse, Washington is now committed to the security of its Baltic allies. But the next president should affirm that the United States does not have long-term designs on a military alliance with Ukraine, Georgia, or any other country on Russia’s border. This does not mean abandoning those countries; the United States and its European allies should commit to negotiating a just peace that will preserve Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and must work to ensure that Russia complies with the 2014 Minsk Protocol. Russia must not be rewarded for the illegal annexation of Crimea, which should not be recognized as long as Putin is in power. Down the line, negotiations on a UN-sponsored referendum to determine Crimea’s fate could be held if tensions ratcheted down. The reality, as most policy-makers in Washington are well aware, is that the citizens of Crimea would be unlikely to choose to return to Ukraine in any fair and independent vote.14

With respect to Syria, Washington is understandably wary of rewarding Russia’s horrific conduct in defense of Assad’s regime. While there is no justifying Russia’s or Assad’s atrocities, the United States also played a role in stoking this civil war in the first place and bears responsibility for its interventions in Iraq and Libya, which Putin opposed and whose results have been catastrophic. Moscow views Washington’s enthusiasm for toppling dictators as destabilizing, and while this view is motivated by Russian geopolitical interests, that doesn’t make it wrong. The next president must be willing to work for a negotiated peace between all factions in Syria, accepting that Assad will be left in control of much of Syria’s territory for the foreseeable future, with the long-term goal of withdrawing US and Russian forces from the region.15

Finally, the next administration should seek to once more engage Russia in negotiations over nuclear weapons. During the Obama administration, the United States and Russia signed the 2011 New START accord aimed at dramatically limiting the deployment of strategic nuclear arms by both countries. Trump, however, has disparaged the treaty and recently committed the country to a new nuclear-arms race. If there is one lesson to be drawn from Trump’s volatile and unpredictable behavior as president, it’s that nuclear weapons are far too destructive for any nation to possess. The United States and Russia must recommit to diplomacy with the aim of further arms reductions and a stronger global nonproliferation regime.16

Break Up Tech Monopolies

t is reasonable for the United States to want to hold Russia accountable for its 2016 interference, including the dissemination of fake news via social media and the e-mail hacks of the Democratic National Committee. A proportionate response would be to release embarrassing information about the shady finances of Putin and his inner circle. But this may have already occurred in the form of the Panama Papers, a giant info dump on the global oligarchy published in early 2016 that Putin blames on the US government (along with distorting evidence in the Russian Federation’s Olympic doping scandal).17

It is in neither country’s interest to pursue this tit for tat indefinitely, although arguably both Americans and Russians benefit from the exposure of their elites’ secrets. Ultimately, there will have to be negotiations, including other major powers like China, to establish rules of the road for cybersecurity. At the same time, the United States should embrace strong campaign-finance laws in order to insulate itself from interference not only by foreign powers but by oligarchs and corporate interests everywhere.18

But if the United States wants to prevent Russian cyberattacks in future elections, one crucial step would be to begin dismantling the tech monopolies that have left the US electorate exposed to foreign influence. In 2010, Russia’s then-president, Dmitry Medvedev, visited Silicon Valley as part of the Obama administration’s ill-fated “reset” policy. An impressed Medvedev met with the CEOs of companies like Apple and Google. While Medvedev’s dream of a Russian Silicon Valley remains unrealized, Russia has plenty of homegrown tech talent, as seen in the “troll factory” that sought to manipulate American swing voters.19

The next US president should make clear to the public that the biggest tech companies have gotten too powerful, and that their hoarding of private data for profit undermines national security and election integrity. Social media can be a powerful tool for political organizing and protesting authority, but when it is regulated only by the free market, it becomes a way for wealthy interests—including foreign governments—to manipulate people. Renewed antitrust enforcement should be a priority in general, but with regard to Silicon Valley it would offer the additional benefit of countering foreign influence and restoring the credibility of real news.20

Russian hackers have exposed a flaw in the US political system created by years of coddling unaccountable monopolies. Lawmakers have pressured companies like Facebook and Twitter to crack down on Russian bots, but this doesn’t address the underlying threat that for-profit social networks pose to the democratic process. The extent of this threat is clear from the revelations about how Cambridge Analytica used Facebook data, acquired without the consent of Facebook users, to help the Trump campaign target voters. As Tamsin Shaw, a professor at New York University who has written about cyberwarfare, told The Guardian, “Silicon Valley is a US national security asset that [Russia has] turned on itself.” The only effective solution is to break these monopolies up and regulate them like utilities.21

Support Human Rights, Not Regime Change

espite the claim by New York Times national-security correspondent Steven Lee Myers that Putin is “a hero for the world’s populists, strongmen and others occupying the fringes of global politics, both left and right,” few on the left are under the illusion that Russia is a utopia. As Jeremy Corbyn wrote recently, “Labour is of course no supporter of the Putin regime, its conservative authoritarianism, abuse of human rights or political and economic corruption. And we pay tribute to Russia’s many campaigners for social justice and human rights, including for LGBT rights.” Bernie Sanders has voiced similar sentiments, stating that “our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.”22

Putin has attacked civil society, consolidated control of the media, and marginalized opposition parties. One of the most prominent opposition leaders, Alexei Navalny, was barred from running for president this year in what everyone understands were sham elections. Many journalists and politicians have been murdered, and LGBTQ people have faced discriminatory laws throughout Russia and a brutal purge in Chechnya. And with the close cooperation of the Orthodox Church, Putin has stoked xenophobic nationalism, homophobia, misogyny, and jingoism, not only at home but with his support for far-right parties across Europe. The left has an interest in countering this influence, but the next president must do so in a way that is not a cover for empire and is not aimed at regime change in Russia. Putin uses the perception of Western designs on Russia to maintain his legitimacy and to justify his most aggressive policies.23

Putin will eventually leave power, but it is not Washington’s place to facilitate this, nor is it an inherently desirable outcome. No one knows what will follow in Putin’s wake, or who could fill his role after nearly two decades (and counting) in the Kremlin. And no one doubts that Putin is genuinely popular, although support for him in the largest cities, where he has faced mass protests from educated younger Russians, has slipped.24

The United States should not ignore human-rights abuses in Russia. But principled criticism is only undermined by the perception that civil-society groups in Russia serve as fronts for US intelligence, and Russia has become increasingly hostile to such groups. The next administration should make clear that the United States is not trying to bring Putin down, and that its support for human rights is genuine. It should be wary of directly supporting opposition figures, who are easily tarred as US puppets. And it should lead by example and hold its allies accountable for their human-rights abuses and elite corruption as well.25

Ultimately, the best way the United States can help civil society in Russia is by normalizing relations enough that private civil-society groups from the United States and other countries can more effectively work in tandem with their Russian counterparts. It is hard to argue that the US-Russian tensions following the failure of Obama’s attempted “reset” have done Russian civil society any favors.26

Punish the Real Culprits

n short, the next president’s Russia policy should reflect an agenda of combating corruption, inequality, and abuses at home. If the US political system is vulnerable to interference from abroad, it is only because it has decayed from within. Thus, while Russia should be held accountable for its intervention, the greater priority must be to hold accountable those Americans who accepted Russia’s assistance in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the public. The most important thing the next administration can do to prevent another 2016 is to root out the institutionalized corruption in Washington that Russia successfully exploited, and to investigate, expose, and prosecute everyone in Trump’s orbit who knowingly facilitated Russian interference. The only way to secure American democracy from foreign influence is to make America more genuinely democratic.27