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Chapter 1: What foreign policy challenges does the Democratic Party face after Trump?
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The Iraq War, which is why Barack Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary, changing the course of American politics. Because I will offer a clear contrast. As somebody who never supported this war, thought it was a bad idea, I don't want to just end the war, but I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place. That's the kind of leadership I intend to provide.
Right now, Israel and Gaza feel to me like they are becoming the center of a similar rupture. The thing that started here for me was a few weeks ago, Brian Schatz, who is a Democratic senator from Hawaii. He's often talked of as maybe the next Senate Democratic leader after Chuck Schumer. So a guy with an incredible sense of the pulse of the party.
He tweeted, I'm not into blacklisting anyone from future work in their area of expertise, but I do think it's fair to want a whole new crop, 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.
Then Senator Chris Van Hollen, again, very well respected in the party, very much someone in its mainstream. He wrote an opinion piece for The Times laying out how different he thinks the Democratic Party's policy on Israel needs to be, how badly he thinks the Biden administration's policy failed. And then he went on to say...
Primary voters won't trust any Democratic presidential candidate who does not have a record of moral and strategic clarity on these issues, especially if, as a legislator, he or she voted to send Mr. Netanyahu bombs even as his government imposed a total blockade on Gaza.
Nor will they support a 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." Complicity is a strong word in an internecine Democratic fight here. Then we've seen a number of Democratic primaries beginning to split over Gaza.
It has become an essential issue in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, where Abdul El-Sayed leads in many of the new polls.
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Chapter 2: How have Israel and Gaza become central issues in Democratic primaries?
So you wrote a piece in The Nation recently saying that Democrats can't avoid a reckoning on Gaza. What is that reckoning? Well, I think first it involves understanding that we're not going to sidestep Gaza as an issue as the party moves forward. I do think the Gaza debate, the Gaza debacle, the Gaza genocide stands for a lot that is wrong with our politics.
And I think if Democrats are going to be able to offer a compelling alternative vision of how they're going to govern, they really need to have a discussion, have a debate, have a reckoning with what the Biden administration did, not just with the policy.
But with the campaign of what I think was clearly disinformation that accompanied that policy, and that's going to involve some very tough conversations, that's going to be putting, you know, a spotlight on some key officials who served in the Biden administration and some of whom probably hope to serve again and probably should not get to. What do you mean by a campaign of disinformation?
I mean, I'm looking at, you know, the way that the Biden administration talked, the White House, you know, the State Department. You had this constant refrain of, oh, we're not seeing that. We've not made that assessment.
We have not made an assessment or drawn the conclusion that they are in violation of international humanitarian law when it comes to the provision of humanitarian assistance into Gaza.
Given the nature of Hamas's track record of co-locating itself with civilians, using civilians as human shields, we're unable to make a conclusive determination as it relates to violations of international humanitarian law.
We at this time have not made an assessment that the Israelis are in violation of U.S. law.
And it was clear that they were choosing not to see things that were happening. Everyone else in the world could see these things were happening. Palestinians themselves were were reporting these things were happening. Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, international NGOs were reporting that these things were happening.
This is one of the things that I really, I think, underlines this disconnect here is the Biden administration made an assessment within a month of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Within a month, Secretary of State Blinken came out and made an assessment that Russia is committing war crimes.
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Chapter 3: What does a left foreign policy look like according to Matt Duss?
That's not the entire story of our foreign policy by any means. I think the United States has done enormous good over the past decades. I think there's enormous good we can do into the future.
I would also say, and this is something you've heard, you know, from people like Congressman Crowe, from AOC, obviously, from Bernie, from Senator Murphy, the people you mentioned is, you know, we need a foreign policy that really delivers for America's working families. I think we need to take things down to the wheel, so to speak.
And, you know, I'm not in the habit of really complimenting Trump all that much, but I do think he has provided an opportunity or at least revealed something. an opportunity by challenging some of the very basic kind of preconceptions of, you know, post-war unipolar moment American primacy that is enabling us to have a debate. And we have to have it.
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So I want to explore what that foreign policy would look like. And I think a good place to start is a speech that Congressman Crowe, who's from Colorado, former army officer, gave at the Center for American Progress. I think it was last October. I want to play a clip of it here.
The biggest divide that I see right now and how we view this problem is those who believe that Donald Trump is the cause of it versus those who believe that Donald Trump is a symptom of it.
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Chapter 4: What reckoning does the Democratic Party need regarding Gaza?
Now, obviously, we are enmeshed in Iran. What happened? Well, it turns out that Donald Trump lies. That is one of the things that happened. But you're right. I mean, both Vance and Trump in the months and especially the weeks before Election Day 2024 leaned in hard on this anti-war message. Trump was a pro-peace president. We were going to get out of these dumb endless wars.
That's actually something he ran on in 2016 as well. And, you know, I think it is very interesting. If you go back every election since the end of the Cold War, in every election, including starting with 1992, with the one exception of 2004, the more anti-war candidate has won.
I'm not going to say that they won because they were anti-war, but I do think that is a very interesting set of data, which I think says at the very least that there is an audience for a much less militaristic vision of America's role in the world. I mean, even Joe Biden in 2020, he ran on a pledge to end the forever wars. He ran on a much less militaristic vision.
platform that he ended up teeing up for Kamala Harris in 2024. And Trump took advantage of that. Democrats just abandoned the anti-war lane and left it wide open for Trump. And again, I said then and I say now, obviously, no one should believe Trump. But I do think he had at least the political intelligence to recognize that that was an attractive message.
And I think Democrats really need to understand that. Let me try to make the case for the other side of this. Putting aside the question of who performs electorally, because I think that's kind of tricky and why they perform electorally. You take Biden as an example. I think Biden thought he had learned some important lessons.
And one thing that his people always bragged about was that he was the first president in some time to have not committed American troops to new wars. They ended the Afghanistan war. People hated the way that looked, at the very least. That's when Biden's approval rating fell beneath 50 percent and never recovered. But then it wasn't Joe Biden who invaded Ukraine. It was Russia.
I mean, you named earlier the very first value that a left foreign policy based on democracy, right? You have Russia invading a democracy. Biden, I think, is trying through this period to calibrate a response to that that does not enmesh American troops, but nevertheless does not abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. You know, Hamas attacks on October 7th.
It's another thing Biden responds to as opposed to something he is creating.
Yeah.
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Chapter 5: How does the Biden administration's approach to foreign policy differ from previous administrations?
Biden came into the Middle East having promised to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. He came in and more or less kept Trump's policy in place. We're going to keep pressure on them to try to get a longer and stronger deal. And I think this was based on a belief of the need to maintain the U.S. 's position as the regional security guarantor in the Middle East. And I think that was a huge mistake.
So I don't think it's quite right to say just that he was responding to the events of October 7. I think his administration had taken steps. That led to October 7. Obviously, Hamas deserves the blame. That's a big claim. Say more what you mean by that when you say they took steps that led to October 7.
I do think by buying into the idea, I mean, let's understand the Abraham Accords were about a number of things, but one thing they were about was sidelining the Palestinian issue. Do you just want to describe these quickly? Because they started under Donald Trump, not Joe Biden. That's right. So the Abraham Accords were announced in August of 2020.
An agreement first between Israel and the UAE, brokered, I guess, to some extent by the Trump administration, although they always like to take more credit, I think, than they really deserve. Quickly joined by Bahrain, but they were significant because these were the first agreements in a very long time that normalized relations between Israel. and regional Arab governments.
They were presented as, you know, major peace agreements, despite the fact that the UAE had never really been at war with Israel. Still, the fact that this relationship between Israel and the UAE, which had gone on for years under the surface, was now public. was an achievement. There's no doubt.
But from Netanyahu's perspective, and I think from Netanyahu's supporters' perspective in the U.S., part of why this was a success is that it kind of demonstrated their longstanding argument, which was that we don't need to solve the Palestinian issue first. As many have claimed, we can kind of just push this to the side and move forward and have normal relations with the rest of the region.
And I think it's pretty clear that even though the Abraham Accords weren't like the precipitating factor for October 7th, It was one of the factors that led to Hamas's thinking about why they needed to take action, horrific action, no doubt, to kind of put the Palestinian issue back on the regional and global agenda.
So to stay there for a minute, although I want to ask broader questions about this, what do you think the Biden administration should have done immediately after October 7th? Because, I mean, that attack is a – I mean, it is a more than horrific attack. It is a genuine act of war. It is war crimes. And done to an American ally, certainly, at that moment. What should the response have been?
I mean, I think the response initially was the right one, which was to show, you know, strong support for Israel, for the people of Israel. I think Joe Biden going there himself – But he didn't use that credibility to do what I think he should have done, which was very quickly within weeks.
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Chapter 6: What role does corruption play in shaping foreign policy?
So I do think that, you know, this idea of the U.S. helping to confront Russia was something that was kind of deep in his foreign policy DNA and I think part of what we saw in Gaza and what led up to it.
as I was saying, was driven by an effort through the Abraham Accords, through this proposed U.S.-Saudi-Israel peace agreement, which would involve security guarantees with Saudi Arabia, was based, in my view, on sustaining America's role as a regional security guarantor and also to box China out of the region. I mean, because that was kind of the overriding focus of Joe Biden's foreign policy.
And if we remember going back, I think it was was it June 2021 where he had a summit with Putin. I think the goal of Biden's Russia policy initially was to be like, all right, let's just park Russia and Putin over here. We're not going to have a great relationship with them, but we want to kind of bring some predictability to the relationship so we can focus on the real problem first.
Which is China. And I do think the China focus, you know, the kind of obsession with strategic competition with China, I do think that what underlies that is an effort to sustain America's global primacy. So I do agree with that. I agree with this on China. But I think all these are a little bit different.
I think the reason this distinction might be important is that obviously people's goals matter. Mm-hmm. And the way I read these different events, involvements is the reaction of the Russian nation was really a view about Ukraine and Europe and what America's role was in that and not wanting to allow Putin just begin taking territory because that would be destabilizing for the world.
And we had to do it because nobody else could. I think if it was the case that Europe was more capable of taking you know, being the munitions factory for Ukraine, America would have been happy to have let them do at least to some degree. I don't know. I hope they are doing that now. Yeah, I hope they're doing that. Yeah, because ultimately that's where this needs to go.
On Israel, I think a lot was driven by Joe Biden's actual commitment to Israel, which is something sort of you said earlier as well. And then China, I think there's a different set of questions that are very real there about American primacy. Yeah.
But the reason I'm focusing on this for a minute is that I think that there is a difference that gets conflated often in foreign policy and we move on different sides of it between is what we are trying to do uphold responsibilities that maybe we don't really want to be doing, the American people don't really want to be doing, but in the long term, it's better for the global system that somebody is doing it versus are we actually trying to dominate the system, bring it in our favor, keep competitors from rising up?
And those are sort of two different problems, because on one level, if you say we should stop just trying to ensure American hegemony, which I think is also a little bit different than primacy, right? Hegemony is a control. Primacy is a leadership. I think a lot of people nod and agree, and I probably nod and agree.
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Chapter 7: How can the U.S. balance its foreign policy with domestic concerns?
I think the question a lot of Americans ask when they, you know, they see their communities having been deindustrialized, their children face a worse future than they do, is, OK, I want America to do good. I want America to be strong. But again, as you said earlier in the conversation, I don't understand how these conflicts and our engagement in them is actually doing that.
You have this line that elite impunity is at the core of our political crisis. Tell me what you mean by that. I mean the sense that the wealthy, the powerful, the well-connected, the influential don't pay a price. They operate according to a different set of rules. than the rest of us. I think this is, it's part of political corruption. It's part of the loss of control.
It's a reflection of the system being rigged. So there's that broad version of it, but you've also made this point, and I've seen others begin to make this point around the foreign policy establishment and around people in democratic politics, people in Republican politics.
Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii, recently put out this tweet where he said, look, I'm not trying to blacklist anybody here. But I think that the next Democratic administration should have sort of a full turnover in its foreign policy staff. You know, I've seen you sort of connect this to the need for a reckoning around Gaza. So what does that actually imply?
I mean, I think there's two things about that. One is... You know, from Senator Schatz's comment, I think there's a sense that there has been just this kind of group of democratic foreign policy professionals that tend to cycle in and out of democratic administrations and they move up to the next job and that we need to reach out to a much broader pool.
There are a lot of very smart, young foreign policy folks in Washington and beyond who want to get engaged. We need to draw them into the process so we don't keep repeating and regurgitating the same policies and the same approach.
But I think there's also a second piece of it, and I think Senator Chris Van Hollen got to it a bit more sharply in the op-ed that he wrote in The New York Times a few days after Senator Schatz's tweet. And that had to do with specific actors inside the Biden administration who he said should not serve in future administrations. And I think this is part of accountability as well.
We're going to have policy disputes, policy disagreements, policy debates. I do think that the Biden administration's Gaza policy was beyond just a policy dispute. It was a policy of supporting genocide. And I think if part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials who carried out that policy should not work in government again.
So does Gaza here become – is it becoming? I mean, I'm sort of watching this in primaries, and I think it's a pretty important thing happening right now. You see it in the Michigan Senate primary. You see it here in New York where Brad Lander and Dan Goldman are running against each other. You saw it in a New Jersey congressional primary.
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Chapter 8: What is the future vision for American foreign policy?
Under fire. And I think even for people who probably don't know or maybe care about the issue as much, they saw that and that added to his credibility. So I do think, yes, for a lot of Democratic voters, many of them care about the issue. They want their leaders to be on the right side of it. But it also gets to a much larger idea of can I trust this person?
Are they for real or are they just going to regurgitate the usual set of established talking points?
Yeah.
So I want to play here something that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez said at Munich.
So I don't know if it's necessarily that we were in a post if we are in a post rules based order. I think it's possible that we were in a pre rules based order. And we have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, democracy.
Trade that actually centers working class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest.
Tell me about that idea that we were actually in a pre-rules-based order. Right. I mean, I think it's a great line. I mean, what I've, you know, when I'm in conversations about the so-called rules-based order, I've often referred to, you know, I think it was Gandhi's comment when he was asked what he thought about Western civilization. He said, I think it'd be a great idea.
That's what I think about a rules-based order. I think that's what the Congresswoman was getting at there. Yes, there is a lot about the post-World War II order that is admirable, that's very optimistic. There are elements of it that we definitely should try to revive and save. I think the United Nations... And all the various organizations that work under its umbrella are very important.
Having a global center where people can talk about their problems rather than fight over them is hugely important as a concept. Yet I do think we've gotten to a point where the double standards and the hypocrisies had gotten so stark. that the system has just lost legitimacy.
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