Though it might be hard to spot amid all their other challenges, liberals in the United States have a foreign policy problem. With a growing populist backlash and the re-election of Donald Trump, liberals, particularly in the Democratic Party, are keen to find an agenda that can kickstart American growth and prosperity and repair the democratic injuries of recent years. But groups such as the abundance movement have largely ignored foreign policy, preferring instead to leave that to existing foreign policy elites, whose invocations of liberal values and democracy sound like an ideal fit for a democratic rejuvenation at home.
This is misleading. The last thirty years have been a period of pronounced overextension in U.S. foreign policy, and it has upset the balance between promoting liberal values overseas and protecting liberalism at home. Worse, the two primary camps in today’s foreign policy debates—Trump’s America-First nationalism and Biden’s global democracy-vs-autocracy framework—are simultaneously protectionist and militarily interventionist. If liberals are to build an effective domestic agenda, they instead need to tether it to a more modest, realist foreign policy capable of protecting American democracy and prosperity at home. This need has only been heightened by the Trump administration’s disastrous war with Iran, which looks increasingly likely to seriously strain the American economy.
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Liberalism has a long and contested relationship with foreign policy, with which we do not have time to engage fully here. For classical liberals, the notion that international engagement and economic intercourse can promote greater harmony is obvious; the spread of liberal values and democracy around the world is laudable. At the same time, libertarians are correct in their long running concern that “war is the health of the state.” An activist, interventionist, military-heavy foreign policy inevitably produces greater taxation and threats to civil liberties. The result is an intrinsic tension between the kind of interventionist foreign policy some claim is necessary to promote liberal values globally, and the health of liberty and democracy here at home.
There is also—as many Cold War battles over U.S. foreign policy highlighted—a tension between the “national interest” and the universalizing tendencies of liberal thought. From debates in the nascent American republic over whether the United States should intervene to promote the French Revolution, there have always been times when the prosperity or survival of the nation conflicts with liberal values. As Hans Morgenthau has put it, “The individual may say for himself: ‘Fiat justia, pereat mundus (Let justice be done, even if the world perish)’, but the state has no right to say so in the name of those who are in its care.” Eisenhower, for example, declined to support Hungarians in their anti-Soviet uprising in 1956 due to fears of nuclear conflict.
Throughout U.S. history, policymakers have tried to blend liberal idealism and realist prudence into a workable compromise. The last three decades, however, have been a time of idealist excess. Since 1991, the United States has been ensconced in a “unipolar moment,” a period of pronounced U.S. power and dominance created by the collapse of the Soviet Union. With no great power competitors to oppose it, policymakers took the opportunity to pursue grand liberal crusades, described by the scholar Barry Posen as liberal hegemony—a bipartisan marriage of unmatched military power with radical policy aims. Realist prudence has been largely absent.
Indeed, “radical” understates the case; U.S. foreign policy since 1991 has been profoundly transformational, including attempts to maintain American military primacy; to liberalize both international trade and domestic markets around the world; to enforce liberal norms through international institutions; to spread democracy by the sword; and to prevent atrocities globally by rewriting the norms of sovereignty. Though U.S. policymakers themselves often portrayed these choices in terms of an existing liberal order, they were in practice trying to reshape the world in a deeply revisionist way.
Some of these policies produced good outcomes. Globalization, for example, helped to lift at least a billion people around the world out of poverty. In the post-Soviet space, a number of countries successfully navigated a reform process to become stable democracies with appropriate rule of law, integrated into European markets. Others, however, failed or backfired. The War on Terror yielded blowback and the rise of new terror groups like ISIS, and the U.S. failed to transform either Iraq or Afghanistan into vibrant democracies, or even stable ones. NATO expansion contributed to Russia’s territorial aggression in Ukraine and Georgia, and trade liberalization with China has come to be perceived in Washington as a mistake. Despite liberal justifications, too, it was all too often the case that in practice U.S. foreign policy was illiberal, from sanctions to drone strikes.
The post–Cold War period represents the zenith of American power and ambition. It also reflects the limits of our ability to use that power to export liberal values globally. In large part because of these failures, the last ten years have seen a period of foreign policy debate. Opposition to endless wars helped both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to beat the electoral odds and become president—even if both ultimately continued an expansive foreign policy while in office. The global geopolitical shifts of recent years have added to this ferment, creating a messy debate among those who seek retrenchment from the War on Terror, those who seek to pivot the U.S. to face China, and those who want to build a new liberal order focused on tech, AI, or other emerging technologies. Almost everyone engaged in this discussion believes that the United States made mistakes during the unipolar moment, but they differ in how they understand those failures and want to reform U.S. foreign policy.
The most visible of these emerging worldviews today is seen in the Trump administration: a conservative, nationalist worldview that privileges the national interest and regularly employs military force. For those of a liberal persuasion, it’s hardly an ideal vision; some have even described it as “illiberal hegemony.” The Trump approach is nonetheless not all bad; it has pushed European states to contribute more to allied defense, and pursued peace talks in Ukraine, Gaza, and elsewhere. But it is also profoundly protectionist, supportive of illiberal regimes around the world, and willing to use the tools of state coercion against American citizens. It is also all too easy—as the current war in Iran shows—for these quick, sharp uses of military force to slide into something bigger and more destructive.
The other foreign policy worldviews on offer are not particularly attractive to liberals, either. Progressive criticisms of Trump, for example, are often equally protectionist and redistributive; they often take opposition to capitalism or global trade as a core principle. Traditional Republican neoconservatives give voice to liberal values but are still wedded to deeply illiberal policies, supporting regime change in Cuba, Iran, and elsewhere. Many, though not all, of the “Never Trump” neoconservatives who have been welcomed into the liberal fold since 2016 are openly supportive of the current war in Iran, and of blank-check support for Israel.
Perhaps the most problematic worldview, however, is that of mainstream Democrats, who seem increasingly to endorse Joe Biden’s view that the United States must remain the world’s indispensable nation, standing as the bulwark of a new liberal order against autocracy.
This might sound counterintuitive: surely the appropriate place for liberalism at the current moment is in opposition to illiberal tendencies at home, and in opposition to Russia, China, and other autocracies abroad. But this returns us to the tradeoff between universalizing liberal values and the health of American democracy and prosperity. The Biden administration approach effectively endorsed an open-ended competition against China, Russia, and other autocracies, using U.S. military and financial coercion. Such an approach was unsuccessful during the peak of U.S. power during the 1990s and 2000s. Liberal internationalists cannot explain how similar goals can be accomplished under today’s constraints, when they were not accomplished without them.
This approach to the world is also expensive. The Commission on the National Defense Strategy recommended in 2024 that the United States would need to spend an additional $10 trillion (on top of the existing projected defense budget) to sustain America’s vast existing global commitments. The Trump administration is today asking congress for a $1.5 trillion defense budget. Such spending would be a drag on economic growth, hobbling available funding for all kinds of other projects and requiring both cuts to entitlements and tax increases.
This approach is also increasingly illiberal in an economic sense, with protectionist export controls, trade restrictions, and even industrial policy masquerading as necessary for great power competition. In practical terms—whether it is decoupling from foreign trade or the growing marriage between foreign policy and domestic industrial policy—the Biden administration and the Trump administration are far more alike than not in the economic space.
Despite these downsides, there is remarkably little contention on foreign policy within the Democratic Party. Unlike domestic policy, where new approaches like the abundance agenda are pushing forward liberal-infused notions of how to remedy the flaws of the post–Cold War moment, the foreign policy community remains far less open to new ideas. This absence is all the more notable considering that splits within the party over Gaza appear to have been detrimental to Kamala Harris’s electoral chances, according to a suppressed post-election post-mortem conducted by the party. Democrats’ response to the current war in Iran is another case in point. Though many have openly criticized the White House’s choices (i.e., Sen. Chris Murphy), others have focused primarily on procedural criticisms. Former Biden Middle East coordinator Brett McGurk, for example, has argued that Trump is failing by not building an allied coalition to protect shipping during the war. Michael McFaul, an influential Democratic foreign policy hand, has argued against the war while supporting the killing of Iran’s supreme leader and expressing his support for regime change.
The implicit message is clear: regime change and war are fine, but they should be coordinated with allies and managed more efficiently. There are even suggestions that Democrats in Congress should vote for a $200 billion war supplemental—so long as they can get matching funding for Ukraine. If the party is to succeed in building an appealing post-Trump politics, they will need a better foreign policy than this.
Luckily, there are other foreign policy approaches available. The United States could return to a more pragmatic, realist set of strategic principles—righting the balance between realism and idealism that has become so lopsided since 1991. U.S. policymakers have most often returned to their realist roots in times of significant international turmoil. Two examples stand out: Dwight Eisenhower’s realism enabled the United States to navigate the difficult and dangerous days of the early Cold War, and Richard Nixon embraced the realism of hard choices in the 1970s, when global financial upheavals, energy crises, wars, and anti-colonial movements threatened to undermine the foundations of U.S. power.
These policymakers’ decisions were guided by practicality and a view of the world as it is, rather than by grand proclamations of the world as we wish it to be. Their approach differs strongly from the transformational way policymakers since 1991 have thought about the world. America can reclaim that realism, engaging with the world on its own terms, navigating this period of shifting geopolitical winds while prioritizing the security and interests of the American people.
For liberals, it is this last point that is most important. For thirty years, U.S. policymakers have prioritized the spread of liberal values around the world, but often at the cost of domestic liberalism. Today’s policymakers must prioritize American democracy and prosperity at home.
Economic strength, for example, depends on access to global markets and resources. Our policy actions in Iran today may be destabilizing, but disconnecting America from the world in economic terms would leave it substantially poorer. Prosperity cannot supersede all other national security concerns; some limited exceptions should be made to build resilient supply chains and maintain the defense industrial base. Yet to remain prosperous, America must retain access to a variety of critical resources and inputs for manufacturing, and the American population should be able to benefit from foreign trade. Unlike the Trump administration or the Biden administration, a defense of free trade should be at the core of any liberal foreign policy. Indeed, it is hard to imagine any domestic abundance agenda succeeding without it.
The health of American liberalism and democracy at home is harder to link directly to foreign policy. We know now that America’s expansive post–Cold War foreign policy—most notably the War on Terror—has served to undermine core rights at home in the realms of privacy and press freedom, and contributed to the populist authoritarian turn in right-wing politics at home. But hindsight offers no easy answers for how to avoid such consequences in the future, other than perhaps to suggest that policymakers should be very wary of developing the kinds of tools that can be used to undermine democracy at home and abroad, from warrantless wiretapping to economic sanctions. Without the War on Terror, it seems likely that ICE would not be nearly as well equipped for their current excesses; policymakers going forward should ask themselves what ills future governments will do with the tools we may develop to guard against Chinese trade or Russian disinformation.
Liberalism’s foreign policy problem is one of inertia. Americans face a choice in the next few years: can the country reconceptualize its role in the world, from global hegemon to a more constructive, shared leadership role? Can policymakers right the balance between liberalism and realism in foreign policy without falling headfirst into protectionism or callous militarism? Liberals have largely focused in recent years on domestic visions for U.S. prosperity in this new era. But in doing so, they have effectively ceded the foreign policy space to existing elites and their overly expansive foreign policy crusades. Liberals need to think more about the international dimensions of their policies, and how foreign policy could help or hinder these domestic visions. They could do worse than look to a more realist foreign policy, one that accepts that foreign policy is meant to safeguard the body politic, not to transform the world.
