Can the Democrats Find a Foreign Policy?

The Democratic Party’s foreign-policy experts assembled what they dubbed a shadow cabinet during President Trump’s first term to counter the new leader’s disruptive approach to global affairs. As Trump harangued allies and threatened to abandon NATO, the group condemned his deference to Russian President Vladimir Putin and his support for the Saudi war in Yemen, proposed alternative policies, and called for a restoration of the rules-based order. The idea was to convene such governmental and academic firepower that “what we would put out would be unimpeachable and unquestionable,” Ned Price, who was involved in the effort and later became the State Department spokesperson, told me. Many of the shadow cabinet’s members, such as Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, became principal policy makers when Joe Biden assumed the presidency in 2021 and made his triumphant declaration: America is back.Today Democrats are not sure they want those people back. In a recent New York Times guest essay on how the party should view Israel, Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland said Democratic-primary voters would not support any candidate “who plans to re-enlist the senior Democratic decision makers who whitewashed the truth during the Biden administration and refuse to acknowledge their complicity.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii posted on X that although he isn’t “into black listing,” he believes “it’s fair to want a whole new crop of foreign policy staffers” in the next Democratic administration: “It’s not like the same 120 people are the only people who know anything.”When voters returned Trump to office, in 2024, no one revived the shadow cabinet, which had operated under the auspices of the advocacy group National Security Action, co-founded by Sullivan. Overall, the Democratic foreign-policy elite had lost its mojo. Not only was Trump’s reelection a validation of his norm-busting, transactional “America First” view, but Biden’s approach had come to a disappointing end. There was t