Original Coverage & Source Attribution: foreignpolicy.com
There is a trope of U.S. political journalism so time-tested as to nearly rise to the level of a verity: In making their choices, voters in the United States place little emphasis on foreign affairs. But yesterday’s overwhelming victory by opposition Democrats has proved that this falls well short of a rule.
One needn’t take this on my authority. On Wednesday morning, after picking through the disastrous results for his Republican Party, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance posted on social media: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. … [E]veryone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
There is a trope of U.S. political journalism so time-tested as to nearly rise to the level of a verity: In making their choices, voters in the United States place little emphasis on foreign affairs. But yesterday’s overwhelming victory by opposition Democrats has proved that this falls well short of a rule.
One needn’t take this on my authority. On Wednesday morning, after picking through the disastrous results for his Republican Party, U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance posted on social media: “The reason we lost is the war. The president himself said so last night. … [E]veryone knows why we lost. And any honest conversation about where we go from here must start there.”
Vance was attributing a clarity to his boss that U.S. President Donald Trump has shied from exhibiting on the United States and Israel’s ill-conceived and poorly executed war against Iran, which many observers believe was largely inspired by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli leader has long sought to persuade U.S. presidents to attack Iran, and in Trump, he finally found a willing—or gullible—partner.
As is well understood by now, Trump and Netanyahu’s war against Iran failed according to nearly all of its many shifting rationales. It did not destroy Iran’s Islamic system of government. It did not permanently defeat Tehran’s regional ambitions and may not even have downsized them. Iran still maintains extensive control over the supply of oil to global markets through the Strait of Hormuz, and its Yemeni allies, the Houthis, have demonstrated not just persistence but surprising prowess in attacking Saudi Arabia and other key Arab allies and arms clients of the United States.
But this is only the beginning of the pain that this war has incurred for the United States. Perhaps the single biggest factor in the elections, it has driven up U.S. gasoline and diesel prices far above their prewar levels, and in doing so, it has stoked inflation and driven up interest rates, creating hardship for tens of millions of Americans.
Skeptics may say this simply confirms the old wisdom that Americans only care about foreign affairs when it costs them money. But that is a distinction without much difference. Voters were not confused about the cause of their hardship. As Vance himself acknowledged, they knew it was the war.
This conflict, which was unquestionably a war of choice that many Americans see as having been unnecessary, has also badly depleted many of Washington’s most capable and expensive munitions, weakening its military posture in the world’s most sensitive theaters: the East China Sea and both Ukraine and NATO’s borderlands with Russia.
Combined with the extended deployment of aircraft carrier battle groups in the Middle East, this depletion has left both Taiwan and islands disputed between Beijing and Tokyo more vulnerable than at any time in recent memory to Chinese attack. Meanwhile, even if Trump were able to wake up from the trance that Russian President Vladimir Putin seems to have put him in, Washington now has far fewer of the advanced weapons systems that Kyiv desperately needs to defend itself from Moscow’s indiscriminate missile and drone attacks.
Beyond the midterms, foreign policy is likely to remain on center stage in the struggle between Trump and Congress over the next two years. Presidents who lose one or both chambers of Congress during midterm elections almost always face a sharp limitation in their powers. It is the rare administration that is able to pass any major domestic legislation under these circumstances. And so lame ducks tend to focus their energies on foreign policy, an arena in which the Constitution grants presidents tremendous sway.
At the same time, Democrats in the Senate and House of Representatives are unlikely to be able to pass any major reforms that the president will sign into law. Like Trump, these legislators may find that some of their greatest opportunities to affect U.S. policy and the country’s place in the world relate to international affairs.
Their first priority, given that it was a campaign promise across congressional races, will be to end the conflict with Iran. But how to do so from Capitol Hill? The answer lies in stringent control of the budget and enforcing the kind of accountability that was totally abandoned by the pliant, outgoing Republican Congress. Trump is seeking a vast increase in military spending, and the incoming Congress has the power to make sure that extending the war in Iran will not be funded.
This will not be easy. Congress has almost always found it difficult to resist new spending requests for the Pentagon. But this Congress, and its Democratic leaders, will be judged in good part on its ability to rein in Trump in the Middle East. That will require sorting through military appropriations with a fine-toothed comb and holding hearings that seek to extract clarity from the president’s military and foreign-policy appointees to an unaccustomed degree.
The bombastic and ill-prepared U.S. defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is the most obvious target here. But Secretary of State Marco Rubio should receive equal attention. So far, he has been supremely slippery in terms of evading frank and detailed discussion of the Iran war, and that must end now.
If Iran sits atop the list of foreign-policy priorities for the new Congress, though, it nonetheless has serious competition. The Democrats can and must bring about badly needed accountability in other areas as well. Here, I’ll start with the United States’ increasingly grotesque collusion with Russia in its war on Ukraine. This has recently gone beyond limiting arms supplies to Kyiv and potentially hindering satellite intelligence through Elon Musk’s Starlink system that Ukraine badly needs for defense. Now, it includes casting a succession of economic lifelines to Moscow through oil deals with Russia and pressure on Europe to restore Russian energy supplies.
Congress will also have a vital role to play in achieving transparency in the White House’s smash-and-grab coup in Venezuela, in which it abducted a sitting president, installed a client to lead the country, and then secured opaque arrangements for Washington and U.S. private interests in Venezuela’s vast, if decrepit, oil industry.
More broadly, Trump has ridden roughshod over relations with advanced industrial allies all over the world, from Canada to Japan to South Korea. Meanwhile, he has turned the country’s back on the so-called developing world, displaying a crude disregard for the fellow humanity of people in poorer countries, many of whom once looked up to the United States. At a minimum, Congress must lay bare the sheer incoherence and self-destruction at work in these Trump policies in areas from economic growth to mutual defense to global public health.
Lastly, I come to Israel, not because it is the least of these topics, but because it may be the most difficult. Democrats will have to reckon with their own divisions before they can reckon with the wrongheadedness of overall U.S. foreign policy toward the country. Yet the time has come for the United States to stop indulging Israel’s worst behavior, including the genocidal atrocities of its campaign in Gaza and the settler violence and growing dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank.
Trump himself tried to get ahead of this issue on the day of the election by saying that the United States will no longer massively underwrite Israel’s defense, as it has done for decades, and sell Israel the arms that it needs instead. But much more is required.
The United States has long been more a willing than unwitting partner of Israel in the destruction of Palestinian communities. It play-acted around dedication to a two-state solution for years prior to the Trump administration, which simply dropped the mask and ceased even pretending to care about the fate of Palestinians.
Democrats know that growing popular disenchantment with Israel’s heedless violence was a significant factor in this week’s victory. Now they must get over the notion, still popular in many quarters, that to forthrightly criticize Israel’s behavior and hold this long-standing U.S. ally to account constitutes antisemitism. In fact, treating Israel with respect demands this. And so will the preservation of the U.S.-Israeli alliance.
On Israel, as on Iran, voters have moved faster than the Washington consensus. The old truism held that Americans do not vote on foreign policy. This week they did, and the Democrats they elected should take them at their word.
