What’s the Left’s Vision for Foreign Policy After Trump?

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: What’s the Left’s Vision for Foreign Policy After Trump?

Date: June 9, 2026
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Matt Duss, Executive Vice President, Center for International Policy

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Overview

Ezra Klein sits down with Matt Duss, a central figure in progressive foreign policy circles, to dissect the growing rupture in Democratic foreign policy—especially as it relates to Gaza, Israel, and the broader question of what a left-leaning American foreign policy could and should look like after Trump and Biden. The episode navigates internal Democratic Party conflicts, the new litmus tests created by the Gaza crisis, the leveraging of values versus interests, and how the left envisions American power, partisanship, and global solidarity going forward.

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Key Themes and Main Purpose

• The internal reckoning and transformation in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy, triggered by the Gaza crisis and broader Middle East issues.
• The contours of a progressive or leftist foreign policy: its differences from Bidenism and Trumpism.
• Accountability, elite impunity, and the role of process in building trust with the American public.
• How the left should think about values (democracy, solidarity, anti-corruption), economic justice, domestic vs. international interests, and power in the world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Gaza Crisis as a Defining Rupture

Timestamps: 01:02–05:37

• Ezra Klein draws parallels between the Iraq War’s reshaping of Democratic politics and the current split over Gaza within the party.
• Institutional Democratic figures like Brian Schatz and Chris Van Hollen publicly demand new foreign policy leadership and moral clarity, urging a break from the old guard.
• Gaza has become a primary litmus test in Democratic primaries, with insurgent candidates campaigning on anti-war and anti-occupation platforms.

“If you don’t have the courage to call out the moral abomination of a genocide, then what do you have the courage to call out in the first place?” – Ezra Klein (03:41)

2. The Biden Administration’s Response & Crisis of Credibility

Timestamps: 05:38–10:18

• Matt Duss argues the reckoning must go beyond debate; party leadership must confront not just the policies, but also the patterns of disinformation around Gaza.
• Duss criticizes the Biden administration’s refusal to acknowledge what was happening on the ground, despite clear evidence from NGOs and human rights groups.
• He asserts that unlike the rapid response to name Russian war crimes, the administration claimed a lack of visibility on Israeli actions despite deep access.

“They were choosing not to see things that were happening. Everyone else in the world could see these things were happening.” – Matt Duss (07:20)

3. The Persistence of the Foreign Policy Establishment

Timestamps: 08:18–10:55

• Biden’s long-standing commitment to the US-Israel alliance, including a doctrine of “no daylight” between the two nations, shaped the administration’s policy.
• Staffers, facing these “guardrails,” adapted to the president’s limits, which meant real pressure on Israeli policy was almost never on the table.

4. Why Progressives Defended Biden Despite Gaza

Timestamps: 10:18–11:50

• Duss explains Sanders and AOC’s reluctance to call for Biden to step down, despite their opposition to his Gaza policy, as a pragmatism informed by their ability to influence other domestic policies.
• The left’s awareness of centrist party dynamics also played a role: “I think all progressives in the Democratic Party are aware that we have a centrist establishment that is always looking for reasons to call us disunifying wreckers.” – Matt Duss (11:18)

5. Rethinking Policy Toward Israel

Timestamps: 11:51–18:03

• Conditioning (or even ending) US aid to Israel, or at least strictly applying existing laws around arms sales and human rights, is becoming mainstream in left/progressive circles.
• Duss calls for real disincentives for Israeli expansion and settlement, including sanctions and consequences for illegal actions.

“Let’s really tee up a policy that empowers the best actors in Israel and Palestine rather than the worst ones.” – Matt Duss (14:03)

6. On Leverage, Complicity, and Upholding the Alliance

Timestamps: 18:03–21:22

• Klein and Duss debate whether US support gives actual leverage or simply extends complicity.
• Duss points to the Yemen War as a parallel, where support was excused as giving the US “influence,” but in practice affirmed atrocities.

“Even if you don’t change their behavior at all, you are at least no longer providing arms for a genocide. I count that as a win in and of itself.” – Matt Duss (19:09)

7. Toward a Values-Based Foreign Policy

Timestamps: 21:22–24:46

• Duss and Klein discuss the push from progressives for a foreign policy built explicitly around values: democracy, solidarity, material well-being, and “doing less harm.”
• Duss highlights the necessity of embedding solidarity into policy: “What we can do at the start is do less harm.” (22:51)

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Trust, Accountability, and the Foreign Policy Elite

8. The System is Rigged: Loss of Trust and Establishment Failure

Timestamps: 25:50–30:20

• Duss and Klein explore the deep distrust Americans have toward elites, with wars and economic crises fueling the perception that the system is rigged.
• Cites J.D. Vance’s anti-elite, anti-war campaign narrative as a powerful populist alternative: “The system is rigged. Americans can see it, they can feel it...” – Matt Duss (27:31)

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Reclaiming the Anti-War Mantle

Timestamps: 30:20–33:21

• Duss, citing electoral history, notes that anti-war candidates have often won since the Cold War, suggesting Democrats have political space for a less militaristic global posture.
• Trump capitalized on anti-war sentiment but failed to deliver; Democrats have sometimes vacated this ground when they could own it.

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The Limits of Control and American Responsibility

Timestamps: 33:21–46:39

• Klein challenges Duss on whether left-leaning presidents would feel as free, in moments of crisis, to step away from American responsibility as theory suggests.
• They discuss the motivations behind involvement in Ukraine, Gaza, and competition with China—how much is primacy, how much is responsibility, and what would realistic restraint look like?

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“Elite Impunity” and the Need for Internal Accountability

Timestamps: 49:52–54:36

• Duss strongly argues for ending the cycle where people in power in foreign policy face no consequences for catastrophic errors or complicity.
• Gaza is taking on the same role for this generation as Iraq did in 2008 primaries: a test of moral and strategic clarity and party credibility.

“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 part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials who carried out that policy should not work in government again.” – Matt Duss (51:02)

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Debating the “Rules-Based Order”

Timestamps: 54:36–62:08

• AOC’s idea that “maybe we were in a pre-rules based order” is explored as skepticism about US double standards and the legitimacy of the global system.
• Duss argues for greater humility, more genuine multilateralism, and an America willing to be restrained by international rules when necessary.

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Centering Foreign Policy for the Working and Middle Class

Timestamps: 66:00–77:35

• Duss applauds the Biden team for foreign policy for the middle class but criticizes the way competition with China has dictated trade and economic policy.
• Discusses the challenge of balancing trade protection for workers and the demand for cheap goods, suggesting a broader social safety net and a return to solidarity as part of the answer—not just tariffs or wage floors.

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Left Nationalism vs. Left Internationalism

Timestamps: 77:35–78:31

• Duss identifies as an internationalist, but concedes that any sustainable internationalist foreign policy must be rooted in American domestic consensus.
• Privileging American workers is reasonable at times, but left internationalism must also address prosperity and justice globally.

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America, China, and Global Primacy

Timestamps: 78:07–80:46

• Duss rejects the “America must dominate” mindset: “We have to coexist with China… I haven't really seen evidence that China just wants to supplant the United States.”
• American primacy should not be a goal in itself unless it is necessary for American security, which Duss does not believe.

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Immigration, Solidarity, and the Left

Timestamps: 80:46–85:41

• On immigration, Duss advocates for a legal and orderly system, but also an embrace of America’s history as a nation of immigrants—rejecting both closed borders and the open-borders strawman.
• Recognizes the political and cultural tensions that come with integrating new waves of immigrants, but emphasizes the economic and social strength they bring.

“We need leaders who are willing to make that positive case while acknowledging, yes, of course, we need to enforce the law.” – Matt Duss (82:29)

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Anti-Corruption as Moral Core

Timestamps: 85:41–90:14

• Duss, echoing Senator Ossoff, calls for a holistic anti-corruption agenda, including campaign finance reform and measures to address international kleptocracy.
• Emphasizes that fighting corruption at home and abroad is key to restoring faith in American democracy and foreign policy.

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Blurred Boundaries: Domestic vs. Foreign Policy

Timestamps: 90:14–91:39

• Duss notes that issues like immigration, climate, trade, and even campaign finance have profound foreign policy implications, and vice versa.
• Calls for a conscious approach where the impact on American communities is always considered—but not the only factor.

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Moral Interventions: Doing Good Beyond Interests

Timestamps: 91:39–93:07

• Duss and Klein agree that while most foreign policy should have tangible benefits for Americans, the US should act in circumstances of humanitarian need, even if direct benefits are unclear.
• Cites the ongoing public support for Ukraine as evidence that moral arguments can resonate even when not directly tied to domestic gain.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Ezra Klein (01:28): “Israel and Gaza feel to me like they are becoming the center of a similar rupture [as Iraq].”
• Matt Duss (07:20): “They were choosing not to see things that were happening. Everyone else in the world could see these things were happening.”
• Matt Duss (14:03): “Let’s really tee up a policy that empowers the best actors in Israel and Palestine rather than the worst ones.”
• Matt Duss (19:09): “Even if you don’t change their behavior at all, you are at least no longer providing arms for a genocide. I count that as a win in and of itself.”
• Matt Duss (27:31): “The system is rigged. Americans can see it, they can feel it in the lack of control that they feel over their own lives...”
• Matt Duss (51:02): “It was a policy of supporting genocide. And I think part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials who carried out that policy should not work in government again.”
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (54:43): “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...”
• Matt Duss (80:22): “Is American primacy necessary to keep Americans safe, prosperous and free? And I don’t think it is.”

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Additional Resources and Book Recommendations

(93:13–95:24)

1. Chris Murphy’s "The Crisis of the Common Good"
2. Suzy Hansen’s "From Life Itself" (on Turkey)
3. Leonard Cohen’s "Book of Mercy"

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Conclusion

This episode provides a deep, candid look at how the American left is rethinking foreign policy after nearly three decades of bipartisan consensus, wars, and missed opportunities. The Democratic Party faces a stark reckoning on Gaza and Israel, evolving toward a values-driven, restrained, anti-imperialist vision that centers working people—but must answer hard practical questions about power, alliances, and global economics. Echoes of Iraq, distrust in elites, and new moral and electoral litmus tests shape the debate, with calls for accountability and genuine internationalism at the core.

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Recommended Segments (Timestamps)

• Gaza as a party rupture: 01:02–05:37
• Disinformation and White House policy: 06:34–08:38
• Aid, arms sales, and upholding the law: 12:26–14:42
• Leverage over Israel vs. complicity: 18:03–19:09
• Values-based foreign policy: 22:51–24:46
• Loss of trust and “the system is rigged”: 27:31–30:20
• Elite impunity and demand for accountability: 49:52–51:02
• Debate about the rules-based order: 54:36–58:40
• Foreign vs. domestic policy and blurred boundaries: 90:14–91:39
• Corruption as a foreign policy priority: 85:41–90:14
• Final book recommendations: 93:13–95:24

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This summary captures the complexity, passion, and direction of post-Trump, post-Biden left-leaning foreign policy thought as debated by two of its key intellectual architects, and serves as an essential guide for anyone wrestling with what comes next.

Transcript

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

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[Ezra Klein]

I think we may be in a moment of foreign policy rupture in the Democratic Party. It reminds me of years ago when the Iraq war remade the Democratic Party 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

[Matt Duss]

to 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.

[Ezra Klein]

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 in Democratic Party's political 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 a 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. You're watching Democrats bend over backwards in the most pretzel like way to justify the war. They're like, this is an illegal war, but if they asked me, I'd fund it. If you don't have the courage to call out the moral abomination of a genocide, then what do you have the courage to call out in the first place? This is a moral Rorschach test for our party. It was very present in the New Jersey House primary that Adam Hammawi, a doctor who had treated the injured in Gaza, just won. I was running on something very simple, is that we should be speaking spending on health care, not bombs. We should be spending on our communities here, you know, in New Jersey, in America, and not funding bombs overseas for, you know, atrocities and genocide. We should not be funding the endless wars that we're seeing. It's been at the center of the House primary in my district in New York, where Brad Lander is running against the incumbent Dan Goldman. And much of Lander's attack is centered on Goldman's support for Israel. Representative Goldman does not view what's happening there as a genocide. I've been fighting against Israel's occupation of the west bank and Gaza since 1990.

[Matt Duss]

I've never heard him say the word occupation in that context.

[Ezra Klein]

Lander, too, is well ahead in recent polls. Into all of this comes Trump's war in Iran, a war he has fought alongside Israel, and just the general failure of his tariff and foreign policy. And so it's made this moment a moment when something new really could emerge. The Democratic Party's not going to go back to Bidenism. It is not going to try to replicate Trumpism. So what would something different actually look like beyond just Gaza, though, of course, including Gaza, what would it do differently? Matt Duss is the Executive Vice President at the center for International Policy. He's worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the center for American Progress. He served as Senator Bernie Sanders foreign policy advisor, and he's advised Representative Alexandria Ocasio. Cortez, thus is really at the center of. Of foreign policy thinking among the elected left. I want to have Mon to explore a question that I think might come to define the 2028 primary. What would a left foreign policy look like? What would it actually try to do in the world. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes. Matt Duss, welcome to the show.

[Matt Duss]

Thank you.

[Ezra Klein]

So you wrote a piece in the Nation recently saying that Democrats can't avoid a reckoning on Gaza. What is that reckoning?

[Matt Duss]

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 altern, 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]

What do you mean by a campaign of disinformation?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I'm looking at, you know, the way that the Biden administration talked, the White House, the, you know, the State Department. You had this constant refrain of, oh, we're not seeing that. We've not made that assessment.

[Ezra Klein]

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.

[Matt Duss]

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 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. Yesterday, President Biden said that in his

[Ezra Klein]

opinion, war crimes have been committed in Ukraine. Personally, I agree.

[Matt Duss]

The idea that they could not make a similar assessment of a military into whose operations the United States has vastly more visibility, I think is just. It's just not credible.

[Ezra Klein]

See, you know, many of the people in the Biden administration, you've talked to them. What do you think happened? And when I asked, I mean, in a very specific way, what do you think were the set of commitments or values? Because these people see themselves as having deep commitments and deep values. That, in your view, went wrong and led to the policy that we had?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I think first, this really does come down to Joe Biden. Not only Joe Biden, but Joe Biden, I think, had a very particular conception both of how US Policy toward the Middle east, how US Policy toward Israel should work. And he had a very serious confidence, I would say misplaced, but he had great confidence in his own judgment about how to use US Foreign policy. He had a view of the US Israel relationship, which is, he said many times there should be no daylight. If there were differences in opinion, differences in policy, those should be expressed privately, whereas in public, the United States should remain essentially in lockstep with whatever the Israeli government was doing. And I think he has had that view for a very long time. His view was, okay, you know, we're going to express some differences with what Israel's doing here and there, but we're not really going to put any real pressure on them to change policy. You know, as a former staffer myself, I know that once the boss has kind of laid down the parameters of where he or she is willing to go and not go, I think staffers start to tend to shape. You know, you stop arguing and you say, okay, this is these, these are the guardrails. And you start to shape policy within those guardrails. And Biden made clear repeatedly, and he made clear actually during the 2020 PR, when Senator Sanders kicked off a debate about conditioning military aid to Israel. I mean, Biden at the time called that a preposterous idea. There was that one time when he withheld one shipment of 2,000 pound bombs. But other than that, there are really no consequences for what the entire world could see was an ongoing set of atrocities.

[Ezra Klein]

I have a question about this that maybe you know the answer to, because it's always confused me. I think it's fair to say at this point for the left, Gaza exists as a, if not the central failure of the Biden administration. And I agree with you that much of that comes down to Joe Biden himself. When Biden was being pushed to step down, some of the strongest people fighting that effort trying to keep Biden in place were Bernie Sanders and aoc. And I never quite understood why. You know them better than I do, partly given, like the centrality of Gaza now. And obviously that was true in 2024. What was going on there?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I can say what I know. From my perspective, I think their view was they knew Biden, obviously they disagreed with the Gaza policy. They were two of the most vocal critics of the Gaza policy. But they knew that when it came to other policies in domestic economic policy, trade policy, they at least had an ear in the White House. Joe Biden and his team had been willing to talk with, engage with them on a whole range of issues beyond foreign policy. But I also, I gotta say, I feel like there was also, I think, a pragmatic sense. And this is just my suspicion. I don't have any inside information. I think it makes sense. Like, listen, if someone's going to push Joe Biden out, it's not going to be the progressive left. They're very aware. I think all progressives in the Democratic Party are aware that we have a centrist establishment that is always looking for reasons to call us disunifying wreckers. So I think that kind of played into their hesitance as well.

[Ezra Klein]

Let me then ask you about the way the policy is changing. As you say that in the 2020 campaign, Bernie Sanders kicked off a debate on conditioning aid, which is something that has been anathema in the Democratic Party for a long time. All of a sudden, it's not. I thought the op ed by Senator Chris Van Hollen was a pretty significant moment. I mean, he's an establishment figure who's been very outspoken on Israel for a long time. It's worth saying. Let me ask it directly. What, in your view, should the Democrats position towards Israel be? What is the right policy here?

[Matt Duss]

Well, I think first of all, it's to end aid. It's to end. I mean, Israel is a wealthy country. There's really no need for American taxpayers to continue to subsidize their defense budget. I mean, that's a position that was put out there by aoc. And I think about five minutes later, Rahm Emanuel came up right behind. So very interesting. These are two people who kind of represent different poles in the party, but I do think we're getting close to that. But then moving from that, I think it's not just aid, it is sales. And we do have laws on the books. I mean, this is why I found the whole conditioning aid, conditioning arm sales debate so bizarre. The way it was treated as some kind of, you Know, kind of weird punishment. We have laws on the books that condition aid to every country according to a set of principles. Whether it's the Leahy Law, whether it's the Arms Export and Control Act. There are existing laws that, you know, prohibit or restrict the sale of arms to militaries or military units that have a proven record of human rights abuses. We have simply not upheld those laws. Multiple administrations have simply ignored them. And again, this is what I was saying about the Biden administration.

[Ezra Klein]

I have a question for you. Would you say we follow those laws in general and make an exception for Israel or do we not follow them in general?

[Matt Duss]

I think there are certain countries, Israel being one, Egypt, others countries that we have.

[Ezra Klein]

Saudi Arabia.

[Matt Duss]

Saudi Arabia, yes. I mean, so I think, listen, the arms lobby is an extremely powerful one. There is a strong incentive to just kind of push these sales through.

[Ezra Klein]

Do you think it comes from the arms lobby or do you think it comes from the American foreign policy establishments or the President's feeling that the alliances with these countries are important for other reasons?

[Matt Duss]

I think it's all those things. I mean, in some cases it might be one more than the other. But I do think this gets to a much bigger problem. Is that the security state, the military, industrial complex, whatever word we're gonna use now, I mean, this is a real problem. This is how we. Part of how we ended up in this ridiculous war with Iran. But getting back to what the Democrats position should be on Israel, I think, yes, first of all, uphold our existing laws when it comes to arms sales. But also, let's really tee up a policy that empowers, you know, the best actors in Israel and Palestine rather than the worst ones. Because unfortunately, as I see it, that is what our policy has been doing for the past 20 plus years.

[Ezra Klein]

Can you describe how it's done that and then what the alternative will look like?

[Matt Duss]

Right. I mean, I think we've had a policy where basically all the consequences and disincentives and punishments and sticks, so to speak, have been focused on one side. Not entirely, but mostly that's on one side. The less powerful side, the Palestinians. There's always some kind of new condition that's placed on them to receive aid. And again, some of this is legit. Obviously we should impose consequences for terrorism. I mean, that is true. But at the same time, there are zero consequences that are imposed, any real meaningful consequences that are ever imposed on the more powerful side, the Israeli side. And I think this dynamic has, has really given Israel a very reasonable belief that they can just Press forward with de facto annexation, which is ongoing as we speak, with entrenching their control over all of the land of Israel and Palestine in perpetuity and to weaken and diminish the Palestinian national movement to just a completely controlled subject population within a greater Israel. That's the situation we're in right now. And the reason this keeps ticking in one direction is because there's no reason for it not to. There are no consequences for more and more extremist leaders in Israel to raise and implement more extremist policies at the same time. You know, Palestinians look at that and they look at their own kind of ineffective, corrupt leadership and they're like, what is this? They see only more occupation. And it empowers extremist voices who are saying, no, the way to get our freedom is through the gun. And that's what I mean when like we have pursued policies that have empowered some of the worst actors who don't want peace.

[Ezra Klein]

So this is specific for me. What are these policies and what would their alternative or opposite look like?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I would say first of all, let's look at Gaza. You need, first of all, governance. Basic, you know, Gaza, as I'm sure your listeners know, I mean, it's a ruin now. It's still, it's a series of tent cities. But the way to bring order, the way to bring services to people, the way to bring real control is to have it governed by Palestinians. That's ultimately the only way that you're going to be able to not include Hamas. I think it has to include some kind of tacit agreement with Hamas. As we all know, Hamas remains in Gaza. It has not been destroyed. So they continue to be a relevant force. But I think what we have to come around to is just understanding that the disarmament of Hamas will never happen under a situation of occupation. It will only conceivably happen under a situation of legitimate Palestinian self governance.

[Ezra Klein]

And what does it look like on the other side? What have these policies been and what would they be towards Israel?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, first off, let's start to create disincentives for these policies. Let's state plainly that the settlements are illegal, that officials who support them and facilitate their growth should face consequences. They should face sanctions. I think one of the very few good things that the Biden administration did on Israel Palestine was sanctions against violent settlers. But I think that's just the tip of the iceberg. But I think it will start to shift the dynamic once you show that there are real costs for these policies.

[Ezra Klein]

Let me ask you about attention here. Something Biden administration officials often told me was including on the show at times was that there was only so far they could push or restrain Netanyahu. And they thought it was better to remain in conversation, to remain with some leverage over the Israeli government. It's funny, when you were talking about why AOC and Bernie might have wanted Biden to stay on the ticket despite deeply disagreeing with him on Gaza, well, they had his ear. And even right now, there is huge amounts of criticism from the Israeli opposition that Netanyahu is listening too much to Donald Trump and not launching the scale of assault on Lebanon that he has promised and that they want him to launch. So even the incredibly modest level of concession Netanyahu appears to be making to Trump has become a political liability for him in Israel. So there is some tension here between kind of maintaining the line of communication and the possible influence over Israeli decisions, but then you're complicit in them, arguably. How do you think about that?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah. Well, I would say three things. One is, first of all, even if you don't change their behavior at all, you are at least no longer providing arms for a genocide. I count that as a win in and of itself. Second of all, this idea that, okay, they could just move forward without us, I don't. I mean, we have enough, you know, Israeli security officials, not just recently, but going back many years, saying, Listen, without U.S. support, we could not. We simply could not continue. I mean, that is what the Israeli security echelon believes. And third, this idea that they were just staying engaged to have influence, I don't buy that. And the reason I don't is I'm gonna go back to. I believe it was 2019. This is when I was working with Senator Sanders on a war powers resolution on y. The United States was involved in support of the Emirati and Saudi war on Yemen. Massive humanitarian crisis at that time, the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. And Senator Sanders and along with Senator Chris Murphy, Senator Mike Lee, offered a war powers resolution, which basically says the president has taken the United States into a conflict without the appropriate authorization from Congress. And at the time, a number of former Obama administration officials published a letter which we really appreciated, saying that they had made a mistake because this war started under the administration. And initially, President Obama and his team supported it for exactly the reason you just said in Israel, which was to say, okay, we don't necessarily like this war on Yemen, but staying engaged and staying supportive of what the Saudis and the Emiratis are doing will give us some influence in how this war is conducted. They said in that letter that was a mistake. We were not able to have meaningful influence. And in fact, what we did was just give affirmation to a terrible war. And some of the people who signed that letter went on to serve in the Biden administration and are now out here offering the exact same argument for why it was better to continue supporting Netanyahu and Israel in Gaza. And I don't buy it.

[Ezra Klein]

The other argument, you'll hear this sometimes from Democrats, very often from Republicans, is that Israel's an American ally, we stand with our allies. Israel is a important strategic partner in the region in intelligence and cooperation and other things. And so there is an American strategic interest. More of a realist take than a values based take in maintaining a tight alliance. Do you buy that?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, are we benefiting from our relationship to the Middle east right now? What's happening? Are we benefiting from this relationship? I mean, yes, I hear this argument a lot. It's kind of almost like a holy writ in Washington, but I do question it. Yes, it's good to have allies. It's good to have Democratic allies. I think the United States should work with allies to defend their legitimate security interests. I think what Israel has been doing is not remotely legitimate. When I hear people bring up, oh, like do we have this cooperation on technology, on tech? And my answer is, well, for what? Obviously this is very, very good for Israel. This alliance has been very, very good for Israel. But when I look at the costs and benefits, both strategically, ethically, morally, politically, diplomatically to the US Israel relationship, I don't think it works out in the U.S. s favor.

[Ezra Klein]

I think Saud is up to a larger foreign policy debate that is happening right now about what should drive American foreign policy. And when I listen to some of the people, some of whom you have advised, who are articulating this on the left, aoc, Bernie Sanders, people like Chris Murphy and Jason Crow, congressmen, something they center is that our foreign policy should be based on values. Hear a lot of talk of interest, but they will talk a lot about values. What values? What does it mean to have a values based foreign policy?

[Matt Duss]

Well, I would say democracy is one self government, a government that delivers for its people. And that sounds simple. It is. But I would kind of take things back to some very first principles about what foreign policy is for. Any country's foreign policy is meant to advance the safety and the prosperity of that country's people. That's what American foreign policy is for I think as a progressive, I would add the word solidarity. I mean, I want to be in solidarity not only with people in my country, but communities outside our country. And I feel like even though we don't have the ability to fix the world, I think what we can do at the start is to do less harm. There are places where the United States has done and is continuing to do enormous harm. 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 Crow 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 an opportunity by challenging some of the very basic kind of preconceptions of, you know, post war uniform polar moment, American primacy that is enabling us to have a debate. And we have to have it.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

This podcast is supported by Better Help. Summer can feel like a sprint. Kids home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer. Thrive.

[Ezra Klein]

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[Podcast Host/Announcer]

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[Ezra Klein]

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 Crow, 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.

[Jason Crow]

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. And that requires looking back over the last 30 years and looking at it through the lens of the people that I grew up with in a working class town in the upper Midwest, those who I fought with and those who I now serve. In those last 30 years, we've had over 20 years of failed military interventions, $3 trillion, 3 million combat tours, over 7,000 of our own dead, tens of thousands of others dead. And what's not in those numbers is the unequal burden that was born by the working class.

[Ezra Klein]

He goes on to say in that speech that we often mistake the core debate here for being a policy conversation, but what is is a conversation about trust and that the foreign policy establishment has lost trust, it has broken faith. So you're sort of half in and half out of that establishment. I think a good place to start is how do you see this question of trust? How was it lost if it was, and what, what builds it?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, well, again, I mean, what Congressman Crow said right there about the key divide being between those who see Trump as the problem and Trump as a symptom, I think is right on. I think that explains a lot of the debate right now. I'm very much on the symptom side. And I think the lack of trust, I mean, it really does come down to this one line from Trump that others have used, and that is the system is rigged. And Trump gets traction with that because he's right, the system is rigged. Americans can see it, they can feel it in the lack of control that they feel over their own lives of economic lives, political lives, social lives. They feel, I mean, I think confronted by technology that is designed to entrap them, they feel kind of exploited by different costs to extract the maximum amount of wealth of every step they take, every symptom of every disease, every game that their kids play in sports. And I think that attaches to foreign policy because one of the big, whether it's the war in Iraq, which was, you know, again, sold to the Americans on what people understand now were misstatements or outright lies. You had the Internet financial crisis in 2008, which, again, not necessarily a foreign policy crisis, but I think its global impact and certainly its domestic impact, all of these things add up to an elite establishment that either doesn't know what it's doing or is simply looking after its own interests. And I think one of the speeches that I've referenced a lot is the speech that J.D. vance gave at the Republican National Convention in 2024, where he talked about his own personal story, as Congressman Crow did there. But J.D. vance, I think spoke very, very effectively about someone who grew up in rural America as he did, and what communities, deindustrialized communities, suffered. The lie that was told about neoliberal trade economics, nafta, the war in Iraq that he served in. He laid out a whole story of elite failure of l were told to working people like the ones that he grew up with in small towns like

[Ezra Klein]

mine in Ohio or next door in Pennsylvania or Michigan. In states all across our country, jobs were sent overseas and our children were sent to war. And somehow a real estate developer from

[Jason Crow]

New York City by the name of

[Ezra Klein]

Donald J. Trump was right on all of these issues, while Biden was wrong.

[Matt Duss]

And I think what Democrats really have to do and I think what Congressman Crow was starting to talk about in that speech, which I think was a really good speec speeches. Democrats need to come up first of all with an acknowledgment of the real problem that connects with the one that Americans are feeling, but offer a compelling vision. Okay, this is how we're actually going to govern in a way that can change your life and make it better.

[Ezra Klein]

You mentioned J.D. vance in the 2024 campaign. Vance ran that campaign very much articulating a view that Donald Trump was the anti war candidate, that Donald Trump meant an end to these kinds of foreign entanglements, these dumb wars. Now, obviously we are enmeshed in Iran. What happened?

[Matt Duss]

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 gonna get out of these dumb, endless wars. That's actually something he ran on in 2016 as well. Well, and 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 gonna 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 even Joe Biden in 2020, he ran on a pledge to end the forever wars. He ran on a much less militaristic 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.

[Ezra Klein]

That. Well, 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. 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% and 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 should based upon. 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 7. It's another thing Biden responds to as opposed to something he is creating. How do you think about those from this perspective? Maybe not where the Gaza war eventually went, but these are early moments because a lot of foreign policy is not what the president decides to do. It is something has happened and now he has to make a decision.

[Matt Duss]

Right. I mean, let's take all of those first. Yes. I mean, personally, I think all things considered, his response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a good one. He's gotten know, criticism from his right, those who believe that he should have just given Ukraine all the weapons immediately. Some on the left who say, no, he, we, we provoking Russia. I mean, my own view is like, yes, Russia what invaded Ukraine, it was reasonable to help Ukraine defend itself. I think there are legitimate, you know, criticisms that the Biden administration should have been more willing to, you know, get into talks with Putin along the way. I am still unconvinced that Putin was ever interested in Ending this war. I don't think he's interested in it right now. Obviously, he gets a key vote, but I think, you know, comparing that to Gaza, and I think he made a huge mistake in twinning Ukraine with, with Israel in the speech he gave in October of 2023.

[Ezra Klein]

Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common. They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy. Completely annihilated.

[Matt Duss]

Because, yes, the precipitating factor for, you know, the Gaza war, what became the Gaza genocide were the attacks of October 7th. But that war did not begin on October 7th, as you know. I mean, it did not come out of nowhere. Israel was not just sitting quietly, minding its own business. There was an ongoing campaign of expulsion, of ethnic cleansing, of violence that existed in the Palestinian territories and had done so for many years. 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 US'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 7th. I think his administration had taken steps that led to October 7th. Obviously, Hamas deserves.

[Ezra Klein]

That's a big claim. Say more of what you mean by that when you say they took steps that led to October 7th.

[Matt Duss]

I do think by buying into the idea, I mean, let's understand, the Abraham Accords were about a number of things. One thing they were about was sidelining the Palestinian issue.

[Ezra Klein]

Do you just want to describe these quickly? Because they started under Donald Trump, not Joe Biden.

[Matt Duss]

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, Israel and regional Arab governments. They were presented as major peace agreements, despite the fact that 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 US Part of why this was a success is that it kind of demonstrated their long standing 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 7, 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.

[Ezra Klein]

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. Yes, I mean it is a more than horrific attack. Yes, 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?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I think the response initially was the right one, which was to show strong support for Israel, for the people of Israel. I think 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. Certainly I would say by the middle of November it was abundantly clear that this just was not an act of self defense anymore. This was a series of atrocities meant to just obliterate Gaza and to kill civilians. I mean, I think this is kind of the core understanding is that the way that the Biden administration and many in Washington talk about this issue is that they treat civilians suffering civilian casualties as if it's a regrettable kind of consequence of an overall just objective. It is not. Civilian suffering is part of the policy. And I think that became very, very clear certainly by November.

[Ezra Klein]

I think by the end of Biden's presidency, the feeling many Americans have about him is not so much that they dramatically disagree with any one of his decisions. The public opinion on Israel and Gaza is split at that point. It's not like a winning issue in one direction or another. Ukraine is a kind of complicated issue. It's that they don't like the way America seems focused on these places that are not important to them. Prices are high here and yet we're spending all this money arming Ukraine. We're engaged in somehow this war that Israel is waging in Gaza that seems like a mess, that seems horrible, that you're seeing on your phone the atrocities of. And in some way, I think what people hated about Bidenism by the end was that the world felt out of control. There's something Chris Murphy, Senator Murphy, wrote on his substack just recently. He wrote, we would be misreading a lot of the essential elements of Donald Trump's foreign policy if we just said it was about jingoism or xenophobia, because a lot of what he talks about is really about power. His message is that these global forces that we are endlessly told are just out of our control can be inside of our control. I think this is actually a pretty important insight because I think one of the tensions of American foreign policy and part of the American public opinion towards foreign policy is. Is on the one hand, we do feel a sense of responsibility. We don't want bad things to happen elsewhere in the world, and particularly some set of them. We feel that we should engage in them. On the other hand, we don't want to engage too much. And then when we do engage, and it turns out we cannot control them at an acceptable cost, or maybe, as we found in Iraq or Afghanistan, at any cost, we get angry about that. And this tension of wanting control but not having it is, I think, a real knot at the center of the politics of foreign policy here. And I'm curious how that lands for you.

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I do. I think Senator Murphy has really been. He's one of these. Obviously, he's a strong voice on foreign policy, but as you noted there, I think he also has a very strong, compelling theory of the deeper case of the problems in our politics right now. And I would agree with that. Although I think part of this, the tension between wanting to do good, good, wanting to have control and losing control, I mean, that's going to keep happening as long as we have this foreign policy that is driven by sustaining American primacy, by trying to sustain America's role as a global hegemon.

[Ezra Klein]

Well, what do you mean by that? Because the things we're talking about here, I actually don't buy that what we were doing in Ukraine is trying to sustain America's role as a global hegemon. I don't buy that. In Gaza, what we are trying to do is sustain America's role as a global hegemon. I don't think that's how the Biden administration justified it to themselves. I don't think that's really how they thought about it. So either. Do you disagree that that's what they were really trying to do.

[Matt Duss]

I would agree with you a bit more on Ukraine. I do think there were habits of mind, especially from Biden, who's not even a person, not a creature of the post Cold War. He's a creature of the Cold War. So I do think that this idea of the US 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 US 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, because that was kind of the overriding focus of Joe Biden's foreign policy. And if we remember going back to, I think it was 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, which is China. And I do think the China focus, 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.

[Ezra Klein]

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. And the way I read these different events, involvements is the reaction of the Russia invasion is 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 being the munitions factory for Ukraine, America would have been happy to have let them do it, at least to some degree.

[Matt Duss]

I don't know. I hope they are doing that now.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, I hope they're doing that because

[Matt Duss]

ultimately that's where this needs to go.

[Ezra Klein]

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. 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, rig 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. And on the other hand, I just think, say Ukraine is a hard problem problem and that we don't really want to be doing this. But a lot of things happen in the world that we don't like and we have to kind of make kind of tough decisions around them. But I'm not sure that in some of these cases that a President Bernie Sanders, a President aoc, a President Chris Murphy would be free from the pull of American responsibility, the sense that if we don't stop something from happening, it'll happen and then we will be blamed. Both we here being this imaginary administration by either the American people who don't like what just happened, or bad things will happen in the world which will eventually end up on our doorstep.

[Matt Duss]

I think that's all. I mean, I agree with that. I mean, there are certain things that are beyond the US's control. It's not. I've never said, and I don't believe that it's all part of some grand plan. There are a lot of contingencies that popped up, a lot of unforeseen events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the Biden administration certainly did not want to happen. And as I said, I think all things considered, they respond to that pretty reason reasonably. But I do think that when you look at the sweep of Biden's foreign policy, kind of captured in one of the things that he said upon taking office when he went to Europe, America is back. We've gotten past this brief little hiccup with this weirdo Donald Trump, and now America's back doing America things and everybody can chill and America's back in the business of helping the global system run. And I think we had already moved beyond that. Both in terms of what America was capable of, what others in the world were interested in. So, yeah, I would certainly agree. There are times when only the United States, as of right now, certainly the United States has the capacity, whether it's in arms, whether it's in convening capacity, whether it's in influence, whether it's in economic power, whether it's in diplomatic power to help solve and address certain problems. But I think the debate has to be, okay, what are those situations and what tools should we deploy in those situations?

[Ezra Klein]

Let me take the American global hegemony question from a broader perspective. You said that the American foreign policy establishment often asks a question, how do we better sell continuing American global military hegemony to the American people, rather than hearing that Americans just aren't that into it. Americans, you said, are just not that into global military hegemony because it's destructive, it's wasteful, it increases inequality, it steals money from the working class and it funnels it upward to a tiny, unaccountable elite. I think there's a broader than Ukraine or Gaza or even China. I think there's a broader view on the left that America's view of its role in the world and what it puts into maintaining that role in the world is destructive. So make that broader case to me and what it would look like to turn away from that in our foreign policy.

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I think Americans want their country to be strong, to be powerful, to play a major role in the world. I think any country's people do. And more than that, I'll say I think America, Americans want their country to do good in the world. That's how I feel. I think that's broadly shared. But I do think we have to look really, really take a very, very hard look at what global military hegemony, global whatever term you want to use for it, is actually delivering. And this is where I would go back to J.D. vance's speech at the 2024 RNC. We've had just multiple wars. We have them ongoing right now. They're not as big as Iraq and AF Afghanistan were, but we have many American troops deployed around the world on counterterrorism missions. Do we actually need all of this to keep us safe? How much are we spending on this, and to whom are the benefits really accruing? I think the question a lot of Americans ask when they see their communities having been de industrialized, their children face a worse future than they do, is, okay, 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.

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

This podcast is supported by BetterHelp. Summer can feel like a spot Sprint kids, home, trips to plan, routines flipped upside down. It's easy to slip into survival mode just trying to get through it. Then suddenly it's over and you're wishing you enjoyed the days just a little bit more. Therapy can help you slow down and actually be present for the moments that matter. With BetterHelp, you can connect with a licensed therapist from anywhere on your schedule. Don't just survive this summer, thrive. Visit betterhelp.com NewYork Times I'm Kiana and

[Ezra Klein]

I leveled up my business with Shopify. Once I figured out that Shopify was a thing, I never turned back. I can create a site with my eyes closed. Shopify thinks ahead of us, you know,

[Matt Duss]

and it thinks about the customer more than anything.

[Ezra Klein]

Every day I'm thinking about some other new business, but Shopify is doing it to me because it's so easy to use. It's like, I can't stop. I'm addicted. Start your free [e-mail] you have this line that elite impunity is at the core of our political crisis. Tell me what you mean by that.

[Matt Duss]

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 part of political corruption. It's part of the loss of control. It's a reflection of the system being rigged.

[Ezra Klein]

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, but I think that the next Democratic administration should have sort of a full turnover in its foreign policy staff. I've seen you sort of connect this to the need for a reckoning around Gaza. So what does that actually imply?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I think there's two things about that. One is, 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 of Talent. 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 in to 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 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 part of restoring accountability is making clear that the senior officials who carried out that policy should not work in government. Government again.

[Ezra Klein]

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. Does Gaz here become sort of like the Iraq war in the Democratic Party, or are Democrats more divided on that than they were on the Iraq war? I mean, I mean, there is this question of, do Democrats split over this? In the same way that I wonder about this for Republicans after Donald Trump, Israel and support for Israel really seems to me to be a question that is splitting both parties internally.

[Matt Duss]

I hope it doesn't become like the Iraq war, because I don't think anybody really paid a price for the Iraq War, at least the officials who carried it out. I want to see some consequences for the people who carried out the Gaza policy. I mean, in terms of the demand debate, I do think, yes, this is becoming a litmus test, your position on Gaza. It really does go to credibility, the way someone chooses to talk about this. For example, Kamala Harris, the language she used, oh, too many civilians have died and we're pressing for a ceasefire. It didn't convince anyone. Even for people who perhaps didn't care about the issue all that much, they could tell that this was not genuine. And I think the reverse is true. I think for Zoran Mandani, the way that he, he didn't raise Gaza, by the way. I mean, Gaza was raised by his critics because they thought it would be an effective way to weaken and criticize him. And they did that because they don't know what time it is. He stood firm on a set of principles under fire. And I think even for people who, 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?

[Ezra Klein]

So I want to play here something that Congresswoman Ocasio Cortez said at.

[Matt Duss]

So I don't know if it's necessarily

[Ezra Klein]

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

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

and we have an opportunity to explore

[Ezra Klein]

what a world would look like if

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that

[Ezra Klein]

actually centers working class people instead of

[Podcast Host/Announcer]

accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest.

[Ezra Klein]

Tell me about that idea that we were actually in a pre rules based order.

[Matt Duss]

Right. I mean, I think it's a great line. I mean what I've, you know, 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 Congressman 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 gotten to a point point where the double standards and the hypocrisies had gotten so stark that the system has just lost legitimacy. And you know, what about the international system? Can we really revive and strengthen such that we can use the term rules based order unironically?

[Ezra Klein]

So you've been bringing up JD Vance and I think one interesting difference between the way even skepticism, criticism of the foreign policy of the past 20 or 30 years emerges on the right and the left is on the right. It has taken shape as a critique of rules. And Donald Trump, I think in particular holds to the view that America should not be bound by rules, should not be bound by institutions to the extent we always should just create our own, that we dominate in a more thoroughgoing way. I think J.D. vance has certainly been supportive of Donald Trump and his project to do that. I think on the left there's more of this idea that actually the rules might protect us more than we think they do, that allowing ourself to be bound by them would be better than where we have ended up, that it would have kept us out of Iraq. Right. Because we cannot in fact get the UN to go along. So I'd like you to go a little bit further with this. When you say, okay, if we did try this rules based order, if we were bound by rules in these slow, frustrating multilateral institutions where Russia and China can veto things on the UN Security Council, there is a tension between positive restraint and then being subject to the agendas about actors. How do you think about it?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I think what you just laid out there is right. It's basically a zero sum critique versus a positive sum critique. I mean for Trump, for Vance, as you said, it's all about America should be able to do whatever we want. If we're getting a good deal, others have to lose and vice versa. But also this is the kind of positive, some kind of principle that kind of undergirded the creation of the international system. The idea that countries, including the United States, will agree to be constrained by a set of rules and that ultimately makes us safer. I mean, I think that's it right there. But the process and the project of re accrediting the concept of international order, the concept of international rule I think is one we have to undertake. It's not going to be one administration. And in order to do that, I think we have to re accredit it with the American people. So I hope that we'll have candidates and hopefully a president.

[Ezra Klein]

Is that possible to do? I mean, here I'm mindful of what Murphy said because this to me is one of the deep contradictions here. I don't think people, I don't think Americans want what we've ended up doing. And also, I mean I was around in Washington at a time when the rules based international order was stronger, let's call it, and it was many ways very unpopular. I mean, we got here on a pathway that comes, I think from in the 90s. People feeling that the UN and others made it almost impossible to respond to genocides and Rwanda and Yugoslavia. It goes to sort of George w. Bush after 9, 11 and the feeling that America just has to do whatever it needs to and it can't be held back. And that, I think, was obviously a terrible mistake. There's this sort of amazing moment in the Obama administration where he says there's a red line if in Syria, Assad uses chemical weapons. And then at the last minute he says, I want congressional authorization if I'm going to do this. And he doesn't do it. And I supported that. I thought he made the right call. But I think certainly in Washington, Washington, he got an enormous amount of ongoing criticism from it, including, by the way, from Donald Trump for being weak. And this goes to this broader point of the fight over control, because what you're kind of saying to people is you will get better outcomes by giving up control, by binding yourself and the power you have to these rules and these institutions that you do not have full authority over. And you might end up not being able to do things that you think are a good idea that you were elected to do. And in the teeth of this moment where we have a completely, I think, unaccountable president acting wildly, erratically, recklessly, all of a sudden, there's a lot of interest in should Congress retake its war powers, should we, you know, reinvest energy in the UN and the World bank and, you know, all these organizations. But it feels like we just end up a little bit on this pendulum. And this pendulum, I think, is very much, again, about control. So how do you sell people on the idea that binding American power in rules that will bind us even when we don't want to be bound is a good idea?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah. I mean, first of all, you have to show people that they have to be able to feel that it's true. And let's be honest, I don't think an election is necessarily going to be won or lost on this argument. You know, it's, you know, just since you mentioned the, the red line comment, I think that gets to a lot of what we're seeing right now in terms of Congress taking control and taking responsibility. You know, there are some, as we see, that most, if not all Republicans are fine with letting Donald Trump just carry forward. I mean, they have had multiple opportunities to vote for war powers res resolutions, whether it's on Venezuela, whether it's on Iran, whether it's now on Cuba. I mean, they're choosing not to take ownership. And I think this goes to a much deeper problem. It's not a problem of one president or one administration. I think it really goes to the deeper political problem of how we've just, you know, the use of military violence has become just such a regular occurrence. And I. And I think people do have an kind of, I think an innate understanding that it is not supposed to be this way, because it is not.

[Ezra Klein]

This is something that Congressman Crow really emphasizes in that speech he gave at cap. That I think is really correct.

[Jason Crow]

The first question you should ever ask a member of Congress before they ever start talking about foreign policy is, are you willing to reclaim your foreign policy powers? Our founders believed that Congress had fundamental role in our foreign policy policy, from trade to treaties to war powers and to appropriations. For decades, Congress has ceded and given up many of those powers. Our founders knew that these things were too important to be entrusted simply to the executive because it needed accountability to those closest to the people.

[Ezra Klein]

I. I think, I mean, let's premise here. The Iraq War is a absolute unmitigated catastrophe. And I think about the debate that led to it and the absence of debate that led to Iran. And I think that given how little support there was for Iran, you could not have gotten that vote through Congress. And so I'm not saying that having Congress will always stop you from making dumb decisions. Ultimately, Congress did give Bush power to go to war in Iraq, but nevertheless, it at least forces. It slows things down and forces a debate and forces a process that I think is valuable. And I think foreign policy can often seem very hard to pin down because, well, it's Ukraine, it's Gaza, it's China, it's Venezuela. I mean, all these are different situations, but I think something connecting many of them is that they're operating with, without a process that restrains the President. It's very strange to me how little the President can do on most domestic policy right now, given the filibuster and a polarized Congress and much else. And then we give him all this power on foreign policy, which of course also creates an incentive for the President, when he can't get much done domestically, to start trying to create a legacy through ambitious foreign policy adventurism. And that feels to me like an interesting place where something could really change. And I've seen it from Bernie Sanders, from Ro, Khanna, from aoc, from others. A real focus on Congress should reclaim its role here because at least forcing that through the more representative body where the American public has more say in the moment, you can imagine that as a Kind of more procedurally based order that at least to the extent it binds us, it binds us domestically.

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I think that's right. It's not the whole story. Let's not put too much into the process. The process matters. But I do think that the criticism that some have made of arguments around war powers, and I tend to agree, is that, for example, the problem with the Iran war is not that Trump failed to file the appropriate paperwork. It is a manifestly stupid idea from the beginning. And I think keeping that second, second part in mind is really important. I want leaders, yes, it's important to reassert Congress's constitutional authority over military violence. But we need leaders out there articulating why this is just a horrible idea.

[Ezra Klein]

But this is your whole argument. I mean, I agree that we need leaders articulating why it's a horrible idea, but I think your whole argument, at least some of the rules based argument, is that sometimes you're going to have stupid ideas.

[Matt Duss]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

And sometimes you're going to have stupid leaders. And the point of having rules and processes is because you don't believe you will always be governed by the wisest of philosopher kings.

[Matt Duss]

Absolutely. That's right.

[Ezra Klein]

The other dimension of a lot of the foreign policy arguments I've heard from people like AOC and Sanders is the idea that you need a foreign policy that centers the working class and that foreign policy is domestic policy on some level, that this kind of division we've created is, is not real. Now, Joe Biden also said that he said he was going to have a foreign policy for the middle class that was a big way that he and Jake Sullivan and others express themselves as having a pivot from what had come before. So what is different in the way that you and others more on the Democratic Party's left flank are imagining this compared to what Biden and his team were doing when they sort of announced this transformation.

[Matt Duss]

Yeah. And I do think that the foreign policy for the middle class I think was good. I mean, that's something. I really think that Deserv deserves praise. Trump shocked everyone by winning in 2016. And I think that the foreign policy for the middle class kind of represented a real effort, a real self critical effort to say, what have we missed about what Americans believe and don't believe about foreign policy? I mean, in the language of recovery, the first step is admitting you have a problem. And I think that effort was a recognition of the real problem. And I think it's kind of. Of conclusions were represented in a speech that Jake gave at Brookings in April 2023. And this was interesting because it was the National Security advisor offering essentially a speech on the global economy, America's trade policy. And it represented a turning of the page, so to speak, from the old neoliberal era. So recognizing first of all that a lot of the theories that underlie that era, the idea that, okay, if we just get rid of taxes and we kind of let free trade people trade and make money and kind of constrain states from imposing rest and regulation, then rising tide will lift all boats, so to speak. That was an important recognition that. Yep, you know, that turns out that's not really true. It's produced a lot of very bad consequences that have led us to this moment. But I think the question is, having acknowledged that and having come back to the idea that, yes, it is right and appropriate for governments to play a major role in shaping and guiding the economy, the question is towards to what end? And I think obviously one of the main ends is to benefit the safety and prosperity of the American people. But going back to what we've talked about with China being the kind of guiding focus of the Biden administration's foreign policy, you know, I think there are a couple ways you could have gone from that speech. One is how do we really invest in a genuinely more equitable global trade order? How do we invest it? You know, build an order that protects workers, not just in the United States, but empowers workers around the world, including in China, and does not pose American workers and Chinese workers as in a kind of zero sum competition with each other. And then there's the other path, which I think they took, which just say, okay, now we're getting back involved in the economy because we are in this strategic competition with China, and we now see trade as yet another weapon in the toolbox to kind of assert America in this competition. And I think that was the wrong choice. I think we need to go with a high option A.

[Ezra Klein]

So what would option A have looked like in practical terms? What would they have not done that they did, or what would they have done that they didn't do?

[Matt Duss]

I think certain ideas. I mean, the global minimum corporate tax is one thing that they worked on. I think discussing a global minimum wage is another thing. Just for an example, that's something that Senator Sanders has proposed for starters. Because I think part of the challenge that we face is we have a developing world world, if we can, whatever term we want to use, global south, that has very young populations, they are already engaged in shaping the global Agenda. The United States needs to have a relationship with these countries. Obviously China has done a lot of work to build its own relationships in these countries. I don't want to treat these countries as simply an arena for US and China competition. But I think we need to approach this in a positive some way.

[Ezra Klein]

What would the global minimum wage look, look like? How would you apply that to a country? I was in Kenya not long ago. I mean huge amount of Kenya is in the informal economy where much of the country is very, very poor. Right. And certainly not the poorest country in Africa. When you're imposing a global minimum wage on these countries, presumably with some of the stick being American trade opportunities, what does that actually look like?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I don't know what it looks like but I'm saying the United States.

[Ezra Klein]

Wait, these Jabba says.

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I mean getting the United States to propose this and putting the United States in the position.

[Ezra Klein]

But I'm asking is it a good idea? You have to know what it would look like to know if it's a good idea.

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, okay, fair question. Still, still working on what it exactly looks like. But what I'm saying is proposing, you know, putting the United States in the position of we are not just there to extract wealth, we're not just here to empower the people that have been dominating and exploiting you.

[Ezra Klein]

I guess maybe the question I was getting at here, because it's interesting to me where you went with that. I think the question I was getting getting out there is is the global minimum wage an effort to protect American wages or to raise other countries wages? Because those are two actually quite different projects.

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I think it's based on the idea that Americans security is bound up with the security and prosperity of others around the world. I mean this is not just a, you know, a high flown bit of rhetoric. I do think it, I mean as someone on the progressive left, that's an understanding that I bring is that if we can diminish deprivation, disease and suffering in other communities around the world, all ultimately that is going to accrue to our own safety.

[Ezra Klein]

I agree with that. I think the thing I'm pushing on here is in what way would America imposing wage standards on other countries whose economies it doesn't really understand and certainly does not directly manage. When I do foreign economic reporting and probably when I do it from places that are poor, I am always struck with how maddeningly hard, hard it is to make a poor country forget rich, just middle income. And so it's like I could see a version of this that is actually you have found another way to talk about a kind of protectionism because we're not going to do trade with countries that can undercut our wages by a certain amount. That's not going to help those countries that will hurt them.

[Matt Duss]

I think that's right. But ultimately, ideally, this wouldn't be just the United States saying we're doing this by ourselves. This would be something the United States could work with other countries, including China, China on to propose.

[Ezra Klein]

But this is also a place where the foreign policy for the middle class ideas that Biden had, some ones I read from Sanders and AOC and others, it seems to me that people don't always define clearly what it is the middle class wants. And one thing I think we've seen in recent years is, yes, the middle class, the working class, the country wants good jobs and good people wages and also they want things to be cheap. And people talk about the era of neoliberalism now as a sort of a huge failure. And I think one thing we've seen is that whether it was a failure in some respects or not, and I think in many respects it was people liked the cheap goods. And being in this extended period where post pandemic and then in the Trump tariff regimes and the Russian invasion of Ukraine on energy projects prices and then the attack in Iran, people are very angry about goods getting more expensive. And we could have much cheaper electric vehicles in this country if we would let the Chinese electric vehicles in the Biden administration put huge tariffs on those to make sure we couldn't have those. But then also people were very mad about the cost of cars in that same period. And so there is this hard balancing of you can do quite a lot actually to protect American in jobs and industries by making trade harder or raising the various forms of standards, wage floors, et cetera, within our trading regimes by walling off parts of the Chinese manufacturing juggernaut. But then you make things here more expensive and then you get hit from the other side and the middle class is like, I feel stretched. So how, as somebody who's been part of these discussions about a foreign policy for the middle class, do you to balance the effort to protect jobs, the effort to raise wages, and also the now demonstrated fury that people have when tradable goods increase in price?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I think part of it is people are outraged not just at the rising cost, but they're outraged at the idea they're being nickeled and dimed for everything, whether it's for healthcare, whether it's for Education, as I talked about earlier, every step it seems like someone is extracting some little bit of value from everything that you, you do. I think in order to address this question, we really have to take a, a bigger look at our entire social safety net, or lack of one. I mean, I think, you know, that

[Ezra Klein]

feels to me like a dodge. I, I agree with you that we need to improve our social safety net and get rid of junk fees and things. But, but on these questions like trade, you'll have a direct question like you can make things cheaper by letting, by taking down the tariffs on China. You could make them more expensive by increasing the tariffs on China. Those things might have meaningful effects on American manufacturing jobs and wages. Is the question of what you're prioritizing that feels like a fair question?

[Matt Duss]

I think it is a fair question and I don't think it's a dodge because I do think that part of what we lack right now is a sense of a common project. I mean, people feel that they're just being victimized and exploited. They don't have a voice, they're susceptible to demagogues like Donald Trump who come in and say, listen, I will be the instrument of your righteous grievance. So again, I'm not going to say that we can tee up a good argument, restore America's, you know, the shared sense of the American project and people suddenly won't care about rising prices of goods. But I do think that is part of the answer is just addressing the idea that people just feel like they're getting hit with costs all over the place. These problems go back a long time. But I think the crisis that we're in right now is a legitimation crisis. People just don't feel that the systems under which they live of are representing their interests, are really delivering for them. And I know this is a much bigger problem than I have an answer for, but I think that recognizing the conversations that we're having about foreign policy, you know, we can propose all the good ideas we want for how America should, should act in the world, but if they're not rooted in an actual durable political consensus, they will fall apart.

[Ezra Klein]

I think one interesting, like maybe the, the sub theme of some of what we've just been talking about is, is what you're trying to build here a left nationalism or a left internationalism. And the reason I ask it like that is that there have been some moments where what I've sort of heard is very much a rising tide lifts all boats that America can be out there making Other countries more stable, richer, more prosperous, that would rebound to our benefit as well. And then there's also a question about our common project. There are a lot of policy tools that I think are. I mean, it's not all zero sum, but some of it is about privileging American workers over people in other countries. And I think that's a very reasonable thing for a national community to do. Privileging American industries over industries in other countries. But there are choices on the margin of these two projects.

[Matt Duss]

Sure.

[Ezra Klein]

How do you see that?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, I see myself very much as a left internationalist, but I also recognize that to develop a durable and solidaristic internationalism, it has to be rooted in an American domestic political consensus. And a lot of Americans, probably most Americans, for very good reason, are mainly interested in themselves, their family, their community. And in order to kind of offer a workable foreign policy that people will support, I have to show, and leaders have to show, we have to show that it is answering those concerns.

[Ezra Klein]

What does that imply for how America and Americans understand, understand the relationship, the competition, whatever you want to call it, with China? You earlier were sort of critiquing the idea that our relationship with China should be built on maintaining America and primacy. But if not that, then what? How do you understand what we want vis a vis China?

[Matt Duss]

I mean, first we have to understand we need to coexist with China. China has a huge economy. It is already a major player on the global, global stage. And I think there's a school of thought in Washington who believe that China's ultimate goal is to supplant the United States and to reshape the global order in its image. I'm less convinced of that. But for me, the question always comes down to, okay, what does the United States want? We're going to need to find ways to cooperate with China. There are going to be areas where we have competition. There's going to be areas where we have conflict. But I think the problem with, with, with defining the relationship, relationship as competition is one that eventually will lead to conflict. And I do think it's interesting. I mean, Donald Trump, a lot of people were surprised, including me, given that in his first administration, he is really the one who made China the focus. And Washington very, very quickly shifted focus to that. And Biden picked up the ball in his presidency. And interesting, Trump, when he came back, relatively little attention on China compared to what a lot of people assume would be the case, given how prominent it was in his administration. And I think you saw some of that reflected in the recent summit. If anything, I think we should be conciliatory. He was very conciliatory because I think Xi has shown him that China has cards to play. The United States simply cannot assert its will on China. And that's a reality that I think Washington needs to grasp, is that we don't get to just set the rules and have China follow them at the same time. Time I haven't really seen evidence that China just wants to supplant the United States. I see China acting within an order that the United States essentially helped develop. And I think we can work with that.

[Ezra Klein]

Should American primacy be a goal?

[Matt Duss]

I think the question is, is American primacy necessary to keep Americans safe, prosperous and free? And I don't think it is. I mean, I want an America that is powerful. I want an America that is influential. I want an America that can influence, advance, you know, the safety of the American people. And as I conceive of that safety, it involves, you know, promoting safety and prosperity in other communities around the world.

[Ezra Klein]

And then how does that make you think about immigration? You know, there's this interview I did many years ago with Bernie Sanders that always goes around where I asked him about open borders and he's like, no, no, that's a Koch Brothers plot. I think if you take global poverty that's seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US Are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders, about sharply increasing foreign aid. Open borders. That's a Koch Brothers proposal. The idea, of course, I mean, that's a right wing proposal which says essentially there is no United States. I think people thought that I was asking him that because I support open borders rather than I was interested in what he would say. But the reason I asked him that is that I have always thought the question of immigration is very hard on the left because if you have solidarity with people in other countries, people who are trying to come here because their countries are unsafe, people are trying to come here because the money is here, because the better jobs are here, because you can make a better life for your family here, and you actually do believe in the equal dignity of all people, it becomes hard to see, say, well, why shouldn't we let you in? The limiting principle of immigration at a moral level is a very difficult one. And I think it's more difficult on the left when there's less of a kind of bounding nationalism. But I think immigration is a much more central question in our policy, foreign policy, than it was. And it is very tied up with a foreign policy for the middle class. And it's also tied up in this question of control. I think part of what people hated about the border under Biden was it was out of control. So what should the left's position on immigration be?

[Matt Duss]

I think the left's position should be that we need a legal and orderly system for people to immigrate here. But it's also based on understanding that we have long been a nation of immigrants. And I don't think that's just a slogan. Listen, I'm the son of an immigrant. Me, too. This country gave my family a lot. This country let my family in when they were fleeing war. That's true of so many other families right now today. That means a lot to me about. That's part of being American as I define it. In addition, I think there's clear evidence that immigrants are a driver of economic growth. This country is stronger and more prosperous because of. Of immigrants. So I think we need leaders who are willing to make that positive case while acknowledging, yes, of course, we need to enforce the law. We need people to apply for asylum and migration legally. Unfortunately, it's one of these many issues that seems to have just become just an issue in the culture war.

[Ezra Klein]

But I think there are two questions here that are hard and that Democrats are going to have to come up with an answer. For Democrats of all stripes, one is, ideally, how many people should immigrate here, including legally, in the first term? Trump would often fuzz. Was he talking about illegal immigration or illegal migration? Clearly, he's talking about all immigration. He doesn't want basically anybody coming to this country. I mean, not literally nobody, but they have what they meant by seal the border.

[Matt Duss]

White South Africans are welcome.

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, white South Africans are welcome. So there's that. There's also the problem that the Biden administration faced. I mean, Kamala Harris took heat when she went and said, our message to you, I'm paraphrasing here, is don't come here right now.

[Matt Duss]

No, I think that's an actual quote.

[Jason Crow]

I want to be clear to folks in this region who are thinking about

[Ezra Klein]

making that dangerous trek to the United States Mexico border.

[Matt Duss]

Do not come. Do not come.

[Ezra Klein]

And one of the things that I think we saw in the Biden administration was when the broad impression was that we were very, very friendly to immigrants coming here, that a lot of people came. And so part of how Trump closed the border is a pulse of cruelty, a constant pulse of cruelty. And for the Biden administration, they lost control in, in part because they, I think, were caught between the desire for an orderly border, which they did desire, and the belief in kindness. Like that seems harder to balance.

[Matt Duss]

No, I. It clearly is. I think part of it is also addressing, you know, the, the sources of anger and grievance that drive support for dramatic crackdowns on immigration. This idea, you know, that people believe that now these immigrants are coming and taking, unfairly taking what's mine. They're coming in and, and changing the way that I have to live. I think there's a way to address that. That has to be part of the debate we have on reordering our immigration system.

[Ezra Klein]

And then I want to end on this, because this is already, I think, a very unifying idea for Democrats. But the question of how to make it tangible is harder. You, like many others I've seen, have said that corruption, and probably anti corruption, should be at the center of foreign policy, that we should understand that as a domestic question, we should understand it as a foreign question, and that Democrats, particularly as the Trump era wears on, should find a way to make that core to their vision of the world. So how do you make that core to your vision of the world? What does it look like to center that in the way you've been describing?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I mean, I think this goes back to the kind of key claim that we discussed earlier, Trump's refrain that the system is rigged. And again, this system is rigged, people can see it and feel it. I mean, there are ideas that, that we have and we've put out there. As for, like, international efforts against kleptocracy, closing down international money laundering, for which the United States is a main destination. I mean, who knew that trusts in South Dakota would be one of the main ways that kleptocrats abroad hid their money? But South Dakota, apparently very popular, but I think, and starting here with campaign finance, and I know that's a tall order, we've got Supreme Court rulings that have determined that money equals speech. But I think teeing up a conversation about what Congress can actually do to change the laws around campaign finance, it may take a constitutional amendment. And again, given our political polarization, that sounds completely unreasonable, realistic. But I think Americans will really respond to an argument that really addresses their sense of loss of control, that elites have taken control of a system for their own benefit, not for the benefit of the country at large. And I think one of the best messengers on this has been George's Jon Ossoff who seems to drop an amazing video on this every couple months and I think something he said a few months ago that really struck me, he was like, even before Donald Trump came out on the scene, the United States was the most corrupt modern democracy. And I think that's true. And I think getting out there on that message is a way to start addressing this.

[Ezra Klein]

And so. But you think the way, I agree with you that the way to start in the domestic scene is campaign finance reform. And I also agree that look, it's hard to change the Constitution, hard to change the Supreme Court, but you can build a politics as the right did on overturning Roe, grow on an extended long term effort to do that and you can eventually succeed. And there's a lot you can do on that particular issue in the meantime too. But in terms of foreign policy, what does it mean to make that are there people we don't work with? I mean one thing I remember seeing with the Biden administration was that they were holding Saudi Arabia a little bit more at arm's length and then oil prices started to go up. Then all of a sudden they felt they couldn't in anymore. And so all the questions of human rights abuses and other things began to dissolve. And that often is where I watch our foreign policy shift away from values. People have good intentions, but then there are other things that the American middle class wants, right? The American working class wants like cheap oil. That means you're working with autocratic strongmen in highly corrupt countries. So what happens when the values you want to put forward and center in your foreign policy conflict with the things that you believe the American people want and can only be got at the price they want from working with these countries.

[Matt Duss]

I mean again, it's going to sound like a punt, but I'll acknowledge, yeah, there's going to be trade offs, there's going to be decisions you have to make. Sometimes you're going to prioritize those values, sometimes you're going to have to kind of back foot them a little. I guess I'd have to look at the particular situation to give an answer. But I would say internationally the United States is a major defense destination for global clats, as is uk. I would say the US and UK can do a lot. I mean even from where we're sitting here in New York, you know, a lot of these buildings are just, you know, they're parking spaces for ill gotten gains. The same is true of London. I think the US and UK just addressing their own houses could start to have an international impact. I know that's separate from the question you're acting, you're asking, but I do think that, that that is a way to internationalize an anti corruption policy.

[Ezra Klein]

I think in some of these issues we're talking about, it raises the question of where is the line between domestic and foreign policy, particularly when we're talking about a foreign policy for the middle class. How do you think about what falls in one bucket, what falls in the other? What's in the wrong bucket? Is buckets even the right metaphor?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I don't have a great answer to it. I think a lot of the things we talk about, I mean, I'll say this, I think we talk about foreign policy in ways that we don't often recognize as foreign policy. Like when we talk about immigration, there are obviously huge international implications for immigration. Climate, obviously, same thing. America's foreign policies impact these things. Global trade, global economics, jobs here, these all have a foreign policy component. And this is again something that I did appreciate about when I mentioned the Biden administration's global, global economic approach. They see that as a part of foreign policy. Trade was not over here and foreign policy over here. These things are, are deeply connected. I think. I guess the way I would try to answer it is to say whenever we are talking about foreign policy, whether it's about the Middle east, whether it's about Russia, Ukraine, at least being mindful of, okay, how does this actually serve American communities? Even if every, every speech doesn't necessarily have to have that paragraph, you need to be able to answer it.

[Ezra Klein]

What do you think about places where I'm trying to think about the right way to frame this, that it doesn't serve American communities. But it is important elsewhere, and I'm thinking here about possibly interventions in humanitarian crises, certain forms of foreign aid. Obviously, the Trump administration has really gutted foreign aid. How do you think about those moments when you kind of can't say our foreign policy is actually a domestic policy? We're actually doing these things because morally we think it is good. We are a rich country, we are a powerful country, and we are going to use some of that power elsewhere?

[Matt Duss]

Yeah, I think there are going to be cases like that. And we need a president who's able to articulate that strongly to the American people. I think a lot of Americans are receptive to that, but they need to hear a convincing argument for why this is doing the right thing. Even if that doesn't end with, and here's how it's going to create new jobs in your community. Like I said, I think Americans generally want the country to do good. That doesn't mean we need to get up in everyone's business all over the place all the time. But I think when they for example, I think it's very interesting how fairly steady support for Ukraine's defense has stayed despite Donald Trump taking a very different approach to it than Joe Biden, to say the least. I think there is something about the justice and the morality of helping a country defend itself from the aggression of a more powerful neighbor that Americans get, even if they might not connect it directly to how that's good for them in their community and their family.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that's a good place to end, always. Our final question, what are three books you direct men to the audience?

[Matt Duss]

Well, the first is you mentioned Senator Chris Murphy and his new book, the Crisis of the Common Good. I've just been reading and I really recommend it because as I said, I think Senator Murphy has been someone who has really articulated a strong theory of the case of what really ails our politics, the loss of a sense of community, the idea that these systems are out of control and they are unaccountable, the idea that just wealth is being extracted from us at every step and what it takes to rebuild a shared sense of purpose. Recommend that one. The second one is by journalist Susie Hansen. It's called From Life Itself. It's a book about Turkey through just exploring one neighborhood in Istanbul that she's reported on over 10 years, how this neighborhood changed in influx of immigrants, refugees from Syria, looking at the country's politics, obviously the ride of Erdogan and the akp, how Turkey's democracy has changed and diminished. And the last one is book by Leonard Cohen. It's called Book of Mercy. So my mom recently passed away. She was was, among other things, a woman of deep religious faith. And I was raised in the church and when I was younger, I remember I've just been thinking about the time we would spend talking about the Bible. And the Book of Psalms was a particular favorite of ours, the Psalms of King David and the Book of Mercy, or just Book of Mercy is what it's called. It's by Leonard Cohen, who people will know it, a famous songwriter and singer. But this is a book of modern psalms. And like all of Cohen's work, it struggles with pain and beauty and suffering and meaning. And it's just been something that I shared with her in her last months, but has also meant a great deal to me as I've been dealing with this and as I struggle with what this all means.

[Ezra Klein]

Matt Dass, thank you very much.

[Matt Duss]

Thank you.

[Ezra Klein]

This episode of the israel clanche is produced by roland hu. Fact checking by michelle harris with mary marge locker and julie beer. Our senior audio engineer is jeff geld with additional mixing by isaac jones and johnny simon. Our executive executive producer is claire gordon. The show's production team also includes marie cassione, annie galvin, kristin lin, emma kelbeck, jack mccordick, marina king and jan cobel. Original music by aman sahota and pat mccusker. Audience tragedy by shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser. Every day brings somewhere to be and everyone counting on you to get them there. With seating for up to seven, the 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee L keeps busy schedules, moving from early practices to late night games and the triumphant ride home. Available 4x4 capability help helps you drive safely and confidently. When weather shifts or plans change, the laughter, high fives and shared wins become the memories you cherish in the 2026 Jeep Grand Cherokee L. Jeep and the Jeep Grill are registered trademarks of FCA US LLC.