https://portside.org/2026-09-19/first-principles-new-progressive-foreign-policy

For many years, progressive movements and activists have longed for the moment when we could imagine a real foreign policy rooted in true internationalism and solidarity.

But in our efforts to influence actual policy decisions, we’ve settled for important but smaller asks — ending specific wars, blocking the transfer of certain weapons to Israel, reducing military aid, cutting the military budget. That made sense — our movements’ view of the world was rarely fully reflected in Congress, the State Department, or the White House.

Now some of those limitations are fading. There are new possibilities rising as we see new candidates with incredibly progressive politics win their campaigns — and even more importantly, we see in recent years the extraordinary shift in public discourse about the U.S. role in the world, especially (though not only) throughout the almost three years of U.S.-enabled genocide in Gaza.

The escalation of global crises — especially those caused, exacerbated, and sponsored by the United States — means we need to do more as movements, and to demand more from our elected representatives. Israel has lost the battle of legitimacy. U.S. credibility and influence around the world are crumbling, not only as a result of President Trump and his MAGA movement extremism but also because of the foreign policy failures of discredited establishment Democrats like President Biden.

The flailing White House and its hollowed-out State Department are stumbling through the huge failures of Trump’s insatiably wealth- and ego-driven foreign policy. They face an unending war with Iran that has spread across the region and is threatening the entire global economy, Ebola exploding across parts of Africa, poverty and unprecedented inequality shattering lives around the world, and a genocide in Gaza visible globally in real time. The U.S., long the wealthiest, militarily strongest country in the history of humanity, is certainly still powerful, but is increasingly losing its ability to impose its will.

The new cohort of progressive candidates and the movements supporting them face a huge challenge of not only defeating the current foreign policy but also creating the beginnings of an entirely new approach. And for candidates, electeds, and campaigns who have focused overwhelmingly on progressive domestic issues, nothing about that challenge will be easy.

Starting from First Principles

Many countries around the world — from Spain to the Philippines, South Africa to Greece, and Brazil to Uruguay and beyond — have a legacy of powerful left movements morphing into more formal organizations, and from there transforming into political parties. Eventually the parties choose candidates to run for political office, in more or less democratic multi-party systems, and ultimately some of those candidates even reach, at least for a while, the highest levels of government.

That path provides not only a clear arc from organizing to power, but also a set of consistent political principles and policies on which left candidates can ground their campaigns for office. But the left and even the broad progressive movements here in the United States have not been able to claim that particular arc of history for a very long time. As a result, we are operating, in this unusually electorally focused year, without a clear set of unifying principles.

Those principles are not completely missing. Policy initiatives once sidelined as positions only of the left have instead unified broad movements and become part of mainstream discourse. The most prominent probably include Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, the Fight for Fifteen, and the Dream Act/DACA. A generation of young people came of political age mobilizing on those issues alongside the crucial struggles against racist police violence, and many turned towards various strands of socialism to support and build those campaigns.

The central mobilizing issues of today’s Trump era — including ending ICE, rejecting AI/data center construction, housing for all, and challenging authoritarianism and the billionaires — emerged on the scene alongside those earlier priorities. Today’s arguably most influential democratic socialist leader, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, cut his political teeth on those issues.

What we still don’t have is a clear set of foreign policy principles, let alone specific policies responding to particular global crises, around which progressive movements will unite. The one exception, paid for with Palestinian blood, is Gaza. The most massive mobilizations in the country responding to Israel’s live-streamed genocide in Gaza took place during the Biden years. Those mobilizations and the movement behind them animated politics, and shaped big new majorities for ending Washington’s military support of Tel Aviv. Following decades of elite adulation and broad public support, Israel is now widely reviled as a pariah state.

Trump’s re-election changed much of the political picture, but the centrality of Gaza as the moral core of our movements — especially, though not only, among the young — represents a vitally important crack in that pro-Israel consensus. It has profoundly reshaped longstanding political assumptions, normalizing unflinching criticism of Israel and rejecting AIPAC funding as requirements for progressive candidates. As a result, Israel and the legitimacy of Palestinian rights are central issues in many races. Even in places where the assumed campaign focus would be domestic, candidates are inescapably being compelled to talk about it.

And yet Gaza is not enough. Certainly, ending the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran emerged quickly as another specific demand within the broad anti-authoritarianism/anti-fascist movement, and there are other foreign policy positions on which most progressives would agree. The easy ones (to agree on — not necessarily to achieve!) would probably start with cutting the military budget, abolishing nuclear weapons, opposing U.S. wars and military interventions, and working cooperatively with other countries on international crises including climate and global health.

But there is no clearly articulated set of principles, or of specific policy goals based on those principles, which represents a consensus position claimed by candidates and electeds, and upheld by the diverse progressive, left, and socialist activist constituencies across this country. We need to step up that process now, both in anticipation of the coming elections of this year and 2028, and to define what U.S. foreign policy could or should look like in the future.

Understanding that official U.S. positions will never completely match all that our movements fight for, what principles should undergird a progressive official U.S. foreign policy? What follows here is an attempt to identify some of those principles, with a few examples of what they might look like in practice.

Foreign policy should be based on diplomacy, not the use or threat of military force.

That means strengthening real diplomacy rooted in a serious commitment to international law and multilateral treaties​, diplomacy that aims to prevent and/or solve conflicts through genuine, good-faith negotiations. It means rejecting the use of “soft power” diplomacy designed merely to strengthen U.S. domination and supremacy.​

What might that look like in practice?

• End the Iran war, accepting that serious negotiations, not more force or more sanctions, will be required.
• Relatedly, prohibit any use of force against any country, including Iran, with whom the U.S. is negotiating a ceasefire or peace treaty.
• Recognize and engage with China as an economic and diplomatic rival, and a potential partner in solving global crises, not a military threat.
• Recognize that while Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was clearly illegal, past U.S. provocations, including NATO expansion, had raised tensions with Russia and made Ukraine a target for Moscow’s retaliation. Today the conflict must be approached with a far greater commitment to international diplomacy than we’ve seen so far.
• Begin rebuilding the foreign service with staff educated in and committed to using diplomacy and international law as real alternatives to war, not as “force multipliers” to achieve military goals. We must not see a return to earlier years of secretaries of state cheerleading for military force instead of diplomacy.

Foreign policy should end the U.S. war-based economy that has shifted resources away from social needs — especially damaging the lives of poor and low-wealth people across this country — and has destroyed people, societies, and the environment around the world.

That means massive reductions in the military budget and redirecting hundreds of billions of dollars saved to jobs, health care, environmental justice, education, child and elder care, and other social needs across the U.S., and to increased humanitarian and development needs around the world, especially in countries devastated by past and current U.S. wars.

• Challenge congressional assumptions that more and bigger weapons and “the most lethal military” will somehow keep people in the U.S. safe — they will not.
• Acknowledge that between the $1 trillion 2026 and proposed $1.6 trillion 2027 military budgets, the increase alone (about $600 billion) is more than twice the total military budget of China, ostensibly Washington’s biggest challenger.
• Move to cut the proposed 2027 military budget by at least half, making sure that the money saved goes to strengthening diplomacy, social needs at home, and support for impoverished, climate-threatened, and war-ravaged communities and countries around the world.

Foreign policy should reject the 250-year-old U.S. search for regional and global hegemony and empire.

That means abandoning efforts towards global military control and “full spectrum dominance,” including by shutting the 750-800 military bases and other installations outside the United States designed for projection of military force.

Other progressive demands stemming from this principle could include:

• Lift all economic sanctions regimes affecting entire countries or peoples, or that impose extraterritorial secondary sanctions on other countries, and reject any new such sanctions (which are themselves an act of war).
• Stop all attacks on civilian boats in or near Venezuelan or Ecuadoran territorial waters based on unproven claims of drug violations. End the so-called “Donroe Doctrine” and acknowledge that even if any of those boats contained smuggled drugs, murdering their crews is completely illegal.
• Recognize Venezuela as a sovereign, not a vassal, state by ending the U.S. seizure and withholding of Venezuela’s oil income and its control of Venezuela’s imports and overall economy, and return Venezuela’s right to solve its problems internally.
• Stop all threats of military attack or regime change against Cuba. Recognize how economic sanctions are creating enormous suffering on Cuba’s civilian population, end the “maximum pressure” campaign, and lift the trade embargo to allow free trade, tourism, cultural and people-to-people exchanges, and medical and health collaboration.
• Definitively end U.S. territorial claims to Greenland, Canada, Panama, Gaza, Mexico, the Strait of Hormuz, the moon, or elsewhere.
• End the pressure on NATO to increase purchases of U.S. weapons and escalate the militarization of Europe. Reduce NATO’s primacy in Europe in favor of diplomatic/human rights-focused multilateral organizations such as the Council of Europe and the OSCE.
• Officially end the Korean War with a lasting peace agreement to replace the 1953 Armistice.

Foreign policy should be rooted in the rule of law, rejecting all claims of U.S. exceptionalism.

That means recognizing U.S. accountability to international law, including joining the International Criminal Court as a full member and pledging to implement all decisions of both the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

Related steps would include:

• Recognize Israel’s settler occupation of Palestinian territory, the existence and expansion of settlements, and the separate and unequal legal systems applied to Israeli Jews and Palestinians (including Palestinian citizens of Israel) in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem as completely illegal under international law. Reverse all U.S. policies currently supporting the occupation, including ending all arms transfers, military aid, and efforts to integrate U.S. and Israeli military forces and producers, as required under the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion and Provisional Ruling, and the related UN General Assembly resolution passed in 2024.
• Lift all sanctions imposed on ICC staff, UN experts, and others for their work at the ICC, and abandon all threats to undermine, weaken, or destroy the international courts.
• End the U.S. pressure campaign against South Africa rooted in the country’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice, including the exclusion of South Africa from participation in the G20, the denial of visas to South African officials, and U.S. support for the false claim of “white genocide” in South Africa and its resulting privileging of white South Africans as the only people allowed to claim refugee status in the U.S.
• Stop violating customary international law and the UN Charter Article 2 (4), which prohibit the arrest of a sitting head of state, and release Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and First Lady Cilia Flores.

Foreign policy should acknowledge and implement U.S. responsibility for reparations and repair for the lives of millions of people displaced and the thousands of communities destroyed by U.S. actions (whether military, economic, or climate-related).

That means creating and implementing laws to guarantee legal, social, and financial support for communities and people to rebuild their lives at home, and to recognize, respect, and implement the internationally guaranteed rights of refugees and asylum-seekers to seek and find better lives inside the United States.

Related demands include:

• Stop detaining migrants in the U.S. who are not convicted of a violent criminal offense, and allow them to live and work legally in the U.S. while their immigration status cases go through the court system.
• Abolish ICE and end the collaboration between federal immigration enforcement authorities and local law enforcement agencies.
• Reinstate TPS protections including residency and work permits, ensure individual access to court hearings before TPS is withdrawn against anyone, and expand TPS to broader sectors of the global community.
• Recognize that rights guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, including the right to speak and protest, apply equally to all people in the country, whether they are citizens or not.
• Ensure that migrants forced from their homes because of circumstances caused by U.S. actions have full access to TPS or equivalent protections. This would include migrants from Haiti, Afghanistan, and Palestine, among others.
• Begin processes of investigation, apology, and reparations for U.S. crimes, including but not limited to wartime massacres, in Korea, Vietnam, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, or elsewhere.
• Be prepared with War Powers Resolutions, specific budget prohibitions, and other means to prevent future military interventions and wars being attempted by current and future administrations.

Foreign policy should embrace democracy and not interfere (openly or covertly) in people’s efforts to build real democracy around the world, and repudiate the claim of “promoting democracy” as a cover for military intervention.

That means rejecting all efforts towards regime change of governments who disagree with the U.S., and ending all campaigns using claims of “democratization” as an excuse to escalate militarism.

• Stop demands on other governments to spend more of their own money on military weapons and forces, which undermines democracy in those countries and does not make anyone safer.
• Remove Cuba from the U.S. list of “state sponsors of terrorism” and move towards normalization of relations, including the repeal of all regulations aimed at extraterritorial enforcement of the embargo. Repeal the Helms-Burton Act to ensure a Congressional role in shaping new relationship with Cuba.

Foreign policy should recognize the obligations that come from being the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of humanity.

That means supporting multilateral institutions and creating new U.S. institutions designed to supply urgent and long-term humanitarian aid, speed green energy transition, provide development support and more, while rejecting the hegemony-driven goals of earlier aid systems.

• Rebuild and re-fund USAID or a replacement institution designed to coordinate global assistance — humanitarian, emergency and development-based — at scale, with the sole goal of aiding people, not to achieve “soft power” for political or strategic goals.
• Challenge the politicization of aid distribution to ensure that reaching people in need remains the goal rather than strengthening particular allies, factions, or other groupings.
• Ensure that longstanding crisis areas, such as Sudan, Yemen, DRC, Haiti, Afghanistan, and others are included in access to U.S. support regardless of political challenges inside.
• Provide political and economic support, to scale, for global projects under the control of multilateral and/or civil society organizations, designed to repair the environment and move towards environmental justice.

Foreign policy should aim to create new kinds of internationalism and global solidarity.

That means both creating multilateral institutions and coalitions, and providing support to civil society institutions (without imposing control over them) to address international crises including wars, endemic diseases, extreme inequality, and climate catastrophes (especially those caused or exacerbated by the United States).

Progressives should also support:

• Efforts towards complete nuclear disarmament, not just non-proliferation.
• Abiding by decisions of international courts and other institutions to guarantee universal human rights.
• Ensuring global access to existing and new vaccines, technologies, and more.
• Protecting and ensuring the rights of refugees and other migrants regardless of their point of origin.
• Committing to serious efforts to end fossil fuel dependency and repair the devastated environment.

Hopefully these principles can serve as a beginning reference point for what foreign policy could look like as more progressives, leftists, and socialists are elected to bring those new policy ideas to life in a much-changed — and far more open — political environment.

A second part will follow, focusing on some of the specific global crises and challenges that the new cohort of progressive candidates and electeds will need to address.

 

Phyllis Bennis directs the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

 

Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF) is a “Think Tank Without Walls” connecting the research and action of scholars, advocates, and activists seeking to make the United States a more responsible global partner. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies. FPIF provides timely analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international affairs and recommends policy alternatives on a broad range of global issues — from war and peace to trade and from climate to public health. From its launch as a print journal in 1996 to its digital presence today, FPIF has served as a unique resource for progressive foreign policy perspectives for decades.