Tuesday’s election made clear that endless wars, political corruption, and the high cost of living are three of the American public’s top concerns. They are deeply interrelated—and the new Congress must address all three. That will require a true foreign policy revolution that grapples not just with the outrages and failures of the Trump administration’s foreign policy but also with the ways in which past Democratic or Democrat-supported foreign policies have contributed to today’s crisis. There will be a temptation among some Democratic leaders, in Congress and beyond, to limit the scope or pace of change. But to find a way out of today’s crisis and move beyond the failures that have afflicted American foreign policy for the past several decades, Democrats will need to have the courage to face a hard truth: that President Donald Trump’s abuses of power and unilateral warmaking are not so much a break from Washington’s militarist mindset as they are a particularly aggressive, predatory expression of it.
The incoming Democratic majority will face a national security environment in which the most severe challenges to U.S. safety and prosperity come from within. That’s why Congress should shut down the Iran war immediately but also recognize that it can make the United States more secure only if it pairs a foreign policy shift with a frontal assault on spiraling costs and political corruption. Political polarization; government corruption and dysfunction; increasing dominance of political and economic life by a small handful of mercurial oligarchs; and a president who recklessly and unilaterally launches unauthorized military interventions while relentlessly seeking opportunities to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies—all pose more immediate danger to the safety and prosperity of the American people than does any foreign enemy.
When Democrats take control of Congress in January, they will have considerable power to challenge the corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration. Control of committees and of the congressional calendar will provide the opportunity for sorely needed oversight. But although the Trump administration deserves aggressive investigation, Democrats must aim higher—and use the opportunity to articulate a genuinely compelling alternative for American foreign policy.
A HARD LOOK
The first and most urgent task will be ending the Iran war, a reckless and unpopular conflict that has become even less popular as Americans have felt its effects on their wallets. Congress must respond to widespread bipartisan anger among voters at Trump’s war and abuse of war powers by using all the tools it has, especially its power to cut funding. It has been encouraging to see Democrats continuing to oppose any supplemental budget request by the administration for the war. It is an area where Democrats have gotten tripped up in the past when they’ve been afraid of accusations that they don’t “support the troops” if they oppose funding for foolish, counterproductive wars. With Democrats having held firm against any additional funding for the war, those days appear to be gone. That is good.
But Democrats need to go further. They should be prepared to oppose all funding for the military, including blocking votes on the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill setting out the broad scope and budget for the Defense Department, in order to put an end to hostilities in Iran. In fact, not only should they be willing to withhold funding from the Pentagon, but they should also be willing to withhold funding for the entire government, and threaten another government shutdown if the bill does not prohibit any funding for Trump’s war. December 11 is the deadline for a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and operating. If ever there was a reason for Democrats to threaten to withhold their votes, stopping a blatantly illegal and globally destructive war that American voters have now resoundingly rebuked is it.
Democrats must also be willing to take a hard look at the continuity between Trump’s use of military violence and past uses of force by administrations of both parties, and the bipartisan support for that violence. The groundwork for the Iran war was laid by the Biden administration’s unstinting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza (as even some former administration officials have acknowledged), but also by years of U.S. refusal to impose any consequences on the Israeli government despite clear evidence of ongoing violations of human rights and international law. Trump’s strikes on alleged “narcoterrorist” drug boats in the Caribbean represent the logical evolution of long-standing treatment of the United States’ drug problem as a “war,” and of casually applying the label of “terrorist” to justify any and all measures, including execution without due process. Seeking accountability for these abuses will require acknowledging the past complicity of both Republicans and Democrats.
Democrats must also take on corruption, a key node connecting the country’s domestic and foreign policy crises. In doing so, they will be walking through an open door. Polls consistently show that political corruption is high on Americans’ list of concerns. According to a recent Harris poll conducted for The Guardian, “Nearly nine out of 10 Americans said that government corruption, as defined as elected officials putting their own or their donors’ financial interests ahead of the public’s, is a problem.” A mid-October CNBC All-America Economic Survey found that voters are more concerned about government corruption than any other issue, including high grocery and gas prices. In September, Gallup reported that “Americans’ perceptions of government corruption in the U.S. are at their highest level in 20 years, with 89% of U.S. adults saying it is widespread.”
The first and most urgent task will be ending the Iran war.
To say that the Trump administration provides a target-rich environment for a strong anticorruption push is to commit felony understatement. Exposing foreign gifts to Trump and conflicts of interest by family members, contracts awarded to Trump’s oligarch donors and new tech buddies, and the selling of pardons, as well as restoring enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and related task forces, should all be part of the plan. Democrats should drill down into Trump’s wildly corrupt “Board of Peace” for Gaza, which U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat set to chair the House Judiciary Committee, rightly referred to as a “global slush fund.” The obvious conflicts of interests of Trump’s diplomatic envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner also demand investigation.
The good news is that effective anticorruption does not necessarily require new legislation; it merely requires that existing legislation be enforced. An August 2025 essay in Foreign Affairs, co-authored with my colleagues Casey Michel and Trevor Sutton, laid out a more expansive case for Democrats putting anticorruption at the center of their foreign policy platform. (A recent essay by Casey Michel lays out a more detailed agenda for the new Congress.)
Ultimately, the most important step toward tackling corruption will be reforming the campaign finance system. The United States is an outlier among developed democracies in that its system of campaign finance allows for what is essentially legalized bribery. Legislators speak openly about campaign contributors expecting “returns on investment” for their political donations. This is an outrage. In recent years, foreign actors have increasingly begun bankrolling American legislators, taking advantage of massive loopholes in campaign finance laws and the Federal Election Commission’s lack of enforcement.
Confronting this will be no small task. At a minimum, Congress must move to legislate a response to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which effectively greenlighted bottomless campaign funding from American corporations. It must also reform the Federal Election Commission, providing the body with much-needed resources to investigate campaign finance crimes and restoring the practice of allowing congressional appointments to the commission, which has become little more than an appendage of the executive branch.
TOWARD A NEW FOREIGN POLICY
All of the above steps must be connected to the top concern among American voters at this moment—the high cost of living. Democrats have disagreements in several policy areas, particularly in foreign policy. Their coalition is diverse. But there is consensus around addressing Americans’ material needs urgently and aggressively. Such an approach would confront Trump’s reckless use of tariffs (while recognizing that the neoliberal taboo on tariffs is a thing of the past), rising gas prices because of the Iran war, the need to restore the global minimum tax, the threat of job losses to AI, and the increased power of tech oligarchs over Americans’ economic and political lives, including on foreign policy, as Elon Musk’s restriction of Ukraine’s Starlink connection demonstrated. The approach should involve a mix of tactics, including hearings, oversight investigations, and legislative proposals.
Many of these efforts may not produce new laws in the next two years. But they could become the backbone of a winning agenda for Congress and for a Democratic administration in 2029. Most important, they would represent a step toward the forging of a new American political consensus on which a new and durable foreign policy can be built.
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