Transcript

Alex Kane: Hello, and welcome to On the Nose, the Jewish Currents Podcast. I’m Alex Kane, the senior reporter at Jewish Currents. Today’s episode was recorded last night at the McNally-Jackson Bookstore in Manhattan. I hosted a discussion about foreign policy and the 2024 election with historian Stephen Wertheim, Arab American leader Maya Berry, and national security reporter Spencer Ackerman. We discussed Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’s foreign policy visions, regional war in the Middle East, and the bipartisan consensus on upholding US Empire. Here’s our conversation, I hope you enjoy.

AK: And a quick note on what the conversation is not. It’s not a discussion about who you should or shouldn’t vote for. We’re a 501(c)3 anyway, so we can’t really endorse. It’s also not a conversation meant to downplay significant domestic policy differences on, say, reproductive freedom between Trump and Harris. But—so, I decided to organize this event because I was reading the news, and I’m certainly obsessed with the news, and just really struck by the lack of front page foreign policy discussion, and also struck by the remarkable continuities in the foreign policy visions of Harris and Trump, and really wanted a space to discuss that. And we had a really, what I would say is a wild series of events that is a through-the-looking-glass moment for me, particularly as it pertains to foreign policy. We had a set of polls over the past few months that have captured the absolute cratering in Arab and Muslim support for Kamala Harris. An Arab American Institute poll published last month found that Trump and Harris are virtually tied among Arab voters by a margin of 42, 41%. We’ll talk more about that with Maya.

AK: And then there was this bizarre series of events beginning on October 21st. So, the Harris campaign is hosting an event with Liz Cheney, former Republican congresswoman, obviously the daughter of Dick Cheney and herself a very prominent national security neoconservative. Very, very hawkish on the Middle East. Harris has been going around the country with Liz Cheney. She had a rally in Michigan. They kick a Muslim Democratic activist out of the rally. It’s unclear as to why; they don’t really explain it. He’s kicked out of their rally. He later goes on and says: I’m not sure why. I think it might be because it’s not a place—the Harris rallies are not a place for Muslim Democrats. The Harris campaign expressed regret for the incident later. Five days later, Trump holds this Michigan rally where he has Muslim religious leaders on stage, some of them in religious dress; they enthusiastically endorse him as a peace candidate. And at that rally, Trump calls Cheney a Muslim-hating warmonger, which is a repetition of messages that he’s posted on Truth Social. The next day, Trump comes here to New York, hosting a rally at Madison Square Garden which has Rudy Giuliani spewing anti-Palestinian racism, saying things like the Palestinians are taught to kill us at 2 years old and that Harris wants to bring Palestinians to the United States, as if that’s a horrible thing.

AK: I start with that because it really encapsulates a totally upside-down political situation as it pertains to foreign policy; the party that used to capture voters angered by post-9/11 US foreign policy, the Democratic Party, has now become the party of national security orthodoxy, fully committed to disastrous US Policy in the Middle East, all while alienating Arab and Muslim Americans who were key to Biden’s victory in 2020. Meanwhile, the Trump campaign, which is obviously led by a man who, in 2016, campaigned on literally banning Muslims from entering the US, is picking up at least some Muslim Arab support, criticizing neoconservatism to do so, while also still pledging to support Netanyahu and Israel’s horrific war in Gaza. So yeah, this is where we are. So, I wanted to bring all of that to you guys and basically get at understanding this bizarro land and wanted to begin with Maya, because Maya has been spending a lot of time in Michigan, and I wanted to start with her. If she could just tell us: What are you seeing in Michigan as it pertains to foreign policy? How are Arab and Muslim communities in Michigan, as diverse as they are, reacting to this? And what does it tell us about the foreign policy debate right now?

Maya Berry: First of all, thank you all for coming to be with us so that we’re not all crying alone. We can just be together. And thank you for our bookstore. So awesome to be here among books. I would start by saying that I don’t mean to be a contrarian, but I often find myself navigating these spaces and putting it in more context—and indeed, I was recently in Michigan. Michigan’s my hometown. So, I’m going to be clear about this: I’m a Dearborn kid. So, if anyone’s got anything to say about Dearborn, Michigan, let’s talk separately.

MB: Dearborn, Michigan, though, as amazing as it is, and metropolitan Detroit, as amazing as it is—Dearborn is, at this point, majority Arab American, only city in the entire country to have to do that. Metropolitan Detroit has the highest concentration of Arab Americans. The entire state of Michigan has the single largest population that’s represented there; California has more because it’s the Republic of California. But Michigan is Michigan. So, it’s an incredibly important constituency. And I do think that Arab American voters in the state have the capacity to determine what happens tomorrow. Without a doubt, I really do. And I worry about that, for a variety of reasons, which I’m happy to get into. But the point I would make is that the conflation of Arab Americans and American Muslims is something we just have to be cautious about when we talk about these issues. Arab Americans—the majority of them are Christian. Until recently, a plurality of the American Muslim community was Black. One of the single largest segments, growing segments of the American Muslim community is Latino.

MB: So I am an Arab American, and I am Muslim, and I’m an immigrant. Those three things make me an actual outlier in terms of the Arab American population numbers. So, when we talk about—someone comes at you and says the majority of American Muslims voted for Bush in 2000—flag on the play on that on because that’s actually not necessarily accurate. And the erasure of the diversity in the American Muslim community is something we need to be careful with when we talk about these issues. So, I’ll keep my comments around the Arab American piece. And we have been polling Arab Americans since the mid-’90s, and I want to be clear on this. Our institution is also 501(c)3, Yalla Vote campaign that we created in 1998 just gives information to voters. We don’t tell them—we’ve never told them who to vote for. The president of my organization happens to be a Democrat. The chairman of my board happens to be a Republican, but we’re completely nonpartisan. So, I will delve into statements that are my own, personally, as we have this conversation.

MB: So, we’ve been polling since the mid-1990s on Arab Americans, and it is very rare that foreign policy comes out as one of the top three issues for Arab American voters. I mean, you would see that that’s quite common with your average American voter as well. The recent poll that we did, the number one issue was jobs and the economy. Gaza was number two. Number three was gun violence, and number four was reproductive freedom—because I think it’s important to understand that it’s very hard to separate these issues out. So there is something absolutely unusual happening right now about foreign policy and the way that it’s playing out in this election cycle, without a doubt. And it’s happening certainly for Arab American constituents, but it’s also happening for Black voters, and young voters, and young progressive Jewish voters, and Asian Americans. And at this point, the Biden coalition, as we understand it—the issue of Gaza has played out so significantly that it’s informed their decision-making process in a way that I think is different than we’ve seen previously on a foreign policy issue.

MB: So when we think about what happens in a place like Michigan (and I’d love—I can literally sit all night and talk about like the way these campaigns have been playing out there), and in terms of what I’m seeing on the ground, I would tell you—well, let me take you back to the first poll. Not the one we did most recently, but the one that we did in October immediately after the attack and when Biden was still the nominee. Since we’ve been polling in the mid-1990s, Democrats have always outnumbered Republicans among Arab American voters. For the first time ever, we had more Republicans than Democrats in October of 2023, entirely a product of the October 7 attacks and what happened subsequently, in terms of the Biden administration afterward. In this most recent poll, with Harris on top, there’s been a recovery now, where it’s 38% Democrats, 38% Republicans. Even that, I would tell you those have been unusual. The community tends to be about a third independent, and then there’s this tension and back and forth between the Republicans and Democrats. During Bush, post-Bush Gulf War, it was 2-to-1 Democrat over Republican. So, all that’s to say it’s a perfect constituency that’s ripe for courting if you actually just engage them in a way that’s respectful and acknowledging of what the issues are.

MB: And I think I’ll stop only to say that part of the other piece that’s challenging for our folks as we talk about this is that we have very strong feelings about what’s happening. For obvious reasons. I think anybody with a heart does as well. So, I think all of you would have very strong feelings about what’s happening. There’s also an element of not understanding what’s happening in the context of US interests. There is a very real cognitive dissonance that plays out when you talk, at least among family and community members—they’re like: How is this possible? And sometimes it does come back to: How does this serve our own interests? How does this help America and the world, if this is what we’re actually doing? And it doesn’t get into the conversations about international law, humanitarian law versus rules-based order, it doesn’t get to that. But it does get to a place of like: How is this something that is either good for humanity and certainly good for US Interests?

AK: So, let’s take a step back and talk about questions around US interests and, broadly: What are Harris and Trump’s foreign policy visions? In what ways can we say they’re similar, and in what ways are they different? And we can start with Stephen.

Stephen Wertheim: Sure. Well, thank you, Alex, for having me and thinking to organize this conversation. Yeah, we’re not hearing very much about foreign policies in this election. We’re hearing a decent amount about foreign policy, but so much of it is about American identity and a narrative about what America is in the world rather than actual policy disagreement. That’s usually the case in presidential elections unless something that really galvanizes the country in foreign policy is going on. But I think it’s especially the case with this election, partly because that’s what Donald Trump does. And then Kamala Harris has decided to just run on an orthodox foreign policy pitch that she’s inheriting from Joe Biden, and just stick to that, and leave you to guess how she might be different if she actually becomes president. So, the basic narrative, in that sense, is for Trump: It’s about the United States. The world is on fire. The United States is out of control. There’s all these bad things happening, and somehow, the person of Donald Trump will make it better. So, his line about both Israel’s wars and the war in Ukraine is the same: If I were president, nothing, none of this would be happening, and I’ll end it very quickly.

SW: Harris’s presentation is more about—like the rest of her campaign: We have kind of a good system, a rules-based order. US global leadership and alliances—these are good things. Trump is screwing with that; he doesn’t understand the difference between dictators and Democrats, or US allies and US adversaries. And that’s basically her story, which maps onto her story about the American system at home. So that’s basically what we’ve got. It isn’t much. What they agree on is actually a pretty common bipartisan consensus that has descended from the end of the Cold War, in which the United States tries to be the dominant military power on a global scale. The United States is now committed to defend more countries than ever before in its history with expanding alliances, military positions, et cetera. They actually agree on that. And what they’re arguing over is which person, as president, can make a trajectory that doesn’t look very good (to most Americans) be reversed. And the answer is, probably, that changes in policy have to go a lot further than what any individual over four years could accomplish. So, we’re simply not having that.

SW: I think the biggest difference that we can see is on the question of allies, where Trump is quite comfortable putting pressure on US Allies—except, I think, when it comes to Israel (allies and security partners, I should say, because Israel is not technically an ally, though it’s treated better than many allies), and so he has this transactional quality with allies that the Democratic Party dislikes. And so, I think, with respect to Ukraine, that’s where the sharpest difference seems to be: Where Trump seems to really want to be the person who will broker peace quickly between Russia and Ukraine, whereas Harris will continue whatever the Biden policy is, which itself is unclear because I think many in the Biden administration are seeing that the war is not going well, and it may be time to shift gears and potentially do something that sounds like what Trump is promising (but not in such a sudden way, and not with the possibility of cutting off aid to Ukraine). In other words, trying to broker some a ceasefire in the war. But it’s unclear, to be fair, whether Harris would go in that direction, and she certainly hasn’t suggested as much.

AK: Maya, Spencer, anything you want to add?

Spencer Ackerman: Sure, and thanks very much for having me. Thanks to Jewish Currents, thanks to McNally Jackson, and thanks to my friends on this panel. I would put it as two different approaches to the pursuit of primacy, which is what their foreign policies have in common. We have, as Stephen mentioned, extreme vagaries, still, with the Harris campaign. I was in Washington the other weekend and talking with people who will be involved, should Harris be elected, in the effort to push her to the left on Gaza and on the Middle East in general. And I was asking about pressure points, about who they expected Harris to hire for key positions particularly relevant to this. And the answer was that the people I spoke to didn’t know because Harris is both rather new in this space (she hasn’t really been in Washington very long) and she hasn’t really created a profile, and a patronage network, and an alumni system the way someone like Joe Biden had over four decades, where you could see who his key personnel were. People are curious, I would say, not even really speculating about whether Brett McGurk, who is one of the architects of the Biden administration’s Middle East policy, is going to stay or not. And a lot of this remains unsettled.

SA: But what we can really see is that the important divergence, as Stephen mentioned, is on Russia, and in particular on the Ukraine war, which for Trump, we see with—particularly aides of his who will probably serve in senior Pentagon positions or State Department positions, like Elbridge Colby, who want to pursue primacy, primarily in Asia, and accelerate what the coalescing Cold War on China will be, with not just its trade elements but then its defense elements for commitments in the Pacific. And also for the relationship with India and so forth. And Harris instead would pursue primacy basically across all domains. And what certainly they have in common on the Middle East is going to be under such enormous strain, precisely because of the regional war that both of their policies accelerate.

SA: I think we saw last night when Harris was in Lansing. She issues this statement—this is worth parsing, just because you can read so much into this if you want to, but we can go through it in turn. But she goes, “I will do everything in my power to end the war in Gaza, bring home the hostages, end the suffering in Gaza, ensure Israel is secure, and ensure the Palestinian people can realize their right to dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination.” That’s the furthest that she’s gone on this issue. I could not tell you what that means. “Everything in my power to end the war in Gaza but ensure Israel is secure” flounders on the crucial question of whether, as she is very, very clear about rejecting to this point, whether she will support or be open to any conditionalized aid, let alone an arms embargo on Israel. We have seen zero evidence of that. I think a lot of people who watched the elevation of Harris in Biden’s abdication waited with such bated breath to see—anything at all—in terms of differentiations on this issue and, as everyone on this panel can testify, just simply got kicked in the teeth again and again and again. I don’t really know how to read that statement, except to do this interestingly Trumpish thing, as Stephen has mentioned, of promising absurdities to different constituencies in the hope of enough of it getting them over the line.

SA: The idea of Trump pretending to be a peacemaker is just absurd and can drive someone to the point of distraction. This guy is, right now, talking about starting a war in Mexico, and the ways in which he feeds off this extant fury (very justified, in my opinion)—fury at Harris, the Democratic Party, and the Biden administration for putting the United States rather squarely, materially, behind a genocide—is what I think says everything about the cognitive dissonance necessary to say that someone who is telling Netanyahu to complete an ethnic cleansing of Gaza should be someone that they would vote for. I think that can really be only understood in that context.

SA: And the foreign policy coalition that the United States has put together around the world first got, after the illegal invasion of Ukraine, the wake-up call that it really needed ahead of everything after October 7 when the United States could not rally significant portions of the non-European world toward condemnation and material consequence (or even legal consequence) for a blatantly illegal invasion. And after October 7, the way the Biden administration has decided to pretend there is no direct contradiction, and even minimal cognitive dissonance, about the ways in which it is sponsoring Israel’s genocide and the way in which it is seeking, as it would put it, to save Ukraine from the fate of Russian aggression has led, I think, to a point of no return in which the rationale—not necessarily the material basis for American primacy, but the rationale for it—of supporting a rules-based international order based on liberal values, broadly construed, which often means simply dominant American trade and corporate interests—that’s all gone.

SA: No one is—no one, no one is saying anything beyond that anymore. No one. After a year in which we’ve watched children die in the most horrific ways, every day, over tiny screens in our pocket, there’s no other sentence that can be passed on the rules-based international order. Trump is this rent-seeking person which, as Stephen mentioned, will put US allies to the screws of the costs of US empire. Except the way that actually gets cashed out is, very often, less than material. But instead, Harris is posturing as if this coalition has, in the eyes of not just most regions around the world that aren’t Europe, a future, and a future that people would wish to bandwagon with, is going to lead the United States down even further paths of desperation, and, I’m worried to say, brutality in the course of pursuing primacy.

MB: I mean, I would only add even the rules-based order piece is a line away from the international humanitarian law. Rules-based order just meant what the United States wants, and that’s what the Biden administration came in to tell us: that rules-based order, we’re going to pivot to this. So even the point you’re making is: We pivoted away from this idea—international humanitarian law—to rules-based order, and then we can’t even honor that. The only other point I would make about the language: She has said Palestinian self-determination in other ways. And the ask from us, as a constituency on this issue, has been just simply acknowledge—there is a recognition that she’s the vice president and not the president. We have to respect her limited capacity to do certain things. But she has deviated from the president in some meaningful ways. On the filibuster, for example—that’s a huge thing. To say: I’m going to come in and change on the filibuster. There are other ways when she can do that. So the one ask was to—which is, think about how low the floor is on this—the one ask was just say, you will honor US law; you will apply US law, you will do the Leahy Amendment, you’ll do the arms control. We didn’t even get specific. Just say, US law. So there was a moment where she offered that as a comment. And the problem with—and I think the right phrase, frankly, is Trumpian—it is important to think about how much the Democratic Party has, in some ways, adapted to operating in this post-Trump environment. So, she made a great statement. She said it, and then the next day, the campaign spokesperson will come out with a statement that says: The vice president will unequivocally support Israel, and da, da, da, da. So, whatever window you thought could be opened up to say: Hey, I acknowledge this moment in history and what’s happening—as Spencer eloquently laid it out for us, there’s a pivot back that brings us back to this cognitive dissonance that I struggle with.

AK: Thank you. Thank you so much for that. Yeah, I remember this moment when Harris—when the news dropped on, I think it was a Saturday. All of a sudden, scrolling through Twitter, as I do, and seeing a lot of people: Oh, this is the moment she can shift from Biden. She can save her campaign. She can win the election. She can win Michigan if she shifts policy in the direction that Maya was talking about. And she really did not do it. So, I want to get at why that is. What explains this reluctance to break from Biden on this charged issue, in which you see—if you look at polling of Democrats, you see the majority of Democrats don’t support current US policy on Israel, backing Israel as it carries out this horrific assault and genocide. What does a counterfactual Harris campaign, in which she does break from Biden, look like? I want to put that to Stephen first and then hear from you, and then also get at why she’s not breaking from Biden, why she didn’t take that counterfactual path.

SW: On the Gaza issue, I think we have to recognize she’s the vice president. As Maya said, she’s in a bind. It becomes big news if she, as the sitting vice president, puts forward a different policy from her sitting president while that administration is in power. So, grant her some latitude. However, she could have squared the circle in some creative ways. You mentioned one of them, which is signal a certain seriousness of purpose about applying existing US law. Another would be to say that: If the war on Gaza continues when I am inaugurated—I agree with the Biden administration’s approach up to that point, but enough will be enough. After all, Joe Biden already said that Hamas lacked the capability to carry out another attack on the scale of the October 7 attack. And the United States will continue to make sure Israel is secure, but that doesn’t apply to offensive operations that are not in America’s interest and that are not in Israel’s own interest, et cetera.

SW: So that could have been a creative option. Obviously, that’s not what she’s chosen to do. And then we could go down the line on a host of foreign policy areas where, for example, on the war in Ukraine, she could have also said: I too want to bring this war to a close. Here’s how I envision the war eventually ending. And try to put forward a more serious answer than what we get from Trump’s fantasy of the war ending in 24 hours or—it was moved up to, like negative 24 hours, because it would end even before he takes office. Anyway, she could have tried to outflank Trump. Basically: You’re trying to be the peace candidate? I’m the real peace candidate. She’s chosen not to do that. So that’s something to linger on for a minute.

SW: But what are the possibilities that might explain these choices? Just to stick on Gaza, it could be that Harris thinks that the Biden administration policy is the right policy on the merits. It could be that she’s not so sure about that, but she fears the politics of breaking in any significant way and making this a big issue in the campaign, which would, obviously, do her well with certain voters who might vote Democrat but also could raise risks in another direction. And in general, she seems pretty risk-averse across the board in this regard. The third possibility is that she may actually, as reporters have sometimes commented on over the course of the past year, she may actually be relatively concerned with the Biden administration’s approach and with Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and she may actually be willing to do something a little bit different if she’s elected—she’s just afraid of the consequences of saying so politically during this campaign.

SW: So, what it is—I don’t know, but it is notable that it really matters how a president and their advisors perceive the domestic politics of foreign policy. That will shape their calculations. Even if they think the right policy is something, they will be inhibited because foreign policy is rarely where they want to stick their neck out and spend political capital. So, I think the campaign—we don’t know much about what she really thinks about foreign policy issues from this campaign, but we can see that the campaign calculated that a fairly orthodox support approach to foreign policy was the safest or best political approach in this campaign when she might have had the opportunity to outflank Trump on who is more anti-war. So that does seem to be somewhat notable in telling us how she and her team will approach foreign policy issues if she is elected.

AK: Spencer, Maya, anything you want to add about why Harris has chosen the path she has, and also the electoral assumptions and consequences of that?

SA: I would say a couple of things. One is the residue of the War on Terror—which, I’m a broken record on this, but I would hasten to add is not a finished thing—is really strong. And both in terms of that as a series of institutions, a series of operations, a series of policies, and also a series of cultural understandings, all of which have cheapened Arab and Muslim life—and there’s no reason to euphemize that. There is every reason, also, to understand that the resonance of October 7 took over a 9/11-esque attitude in elite discourse, certainly discourse that everyone in this room is familiar with. And the Harris campaign had, I think, an important point of divergence that Stephen mentioned, which is on May 31st, when Joe Biden basically says that the United States is now—the position of the United States is that Hamas is no longer capable of pulling off another October 7, subtly redefining what an Israeli war objective was. From essentially—just to be blunt—regime change in Gaza, away from Hamas, toward something that the Israeli defense establishment at that moment was pointing out was an unfeasible goal that was jeopardizing the lives of the hostages.

SA: At that point, Kamala Harris could have simply taken the position without getting into the difficulties of visibly diverging from US Foreign policy, by reiterating at every step: The position of the United States is for a ceasefire. When I am president, this war has to stop. And you don’t have to get more complicated than that. All of the institutionalist reasoning that we’ve seen from the Democratic Party over this year has been from the same quarters that elevated Kamala Harris to the position that she’s in. And, having been frustrated on some journalistic efforts at getting into this, I think at a certain point we have to stop—I don’t want to say being generous, but we have to stop moving past what’s in front of our eyes, which is that this is a policy she has decided is going to be what she sticks with; that she thinks it is a right and good policy for the United States to continue to back Israel unconditionally and potentially expand this war throughout. I mean, it is already a regional war, but it can get so much worse. And there’s just simply been no evidence that Harris was interested in taking these creative routes to signaling that this is not what she wanted but would not contradict the sitting president.

MB: So, I actually think it’s the latter of these, which is that it’s not something that she would align herself with. And it’s based both on—even within the vice president’s office, in terms of her national security team versus the folks like Brett McGurk and others under Biden. So, I think there’s reasons to think that that’s the case, though I think you’re absolutely right in that nothing, we’ve got nothing, nothing that would suggest that they’re willing to be serious on the subject. There have been the three sentences you read, the three sentences that get repeated over and over and over again. So even if there’s a thoughtful exchange with someone, you would default to a talking point.

MB: So part of the reason your question is like: Why is it the same? Regrettably, I think you have literally some—I don’t mean to personalize it, but you literally have some of the same people running the Biden campaign now running the Harris campaign and making sure that she doesn’t get this question anywhere. And that’s not happening because the American people are like: I’m—post October 7—observing things now I didn’t know about, and more importantly, I didn’t know about our role in them. Like, I did not know the United States was the one that was allowing the 76 years of dispossession, the 56 years of occupation, and this unfolding genocide in Gaza. I didn’t know that right now, Israel is actively engaged in flattening, eliminating whole villages in southern Lebanon. And if you look, I don’t think we have heard, yet, any substantive statement from Vice President Harris on the issue of Lebanon. And we’re looking because we post those things on our website to share to people, This is what they’re saying on these issues. So, it’s challenging to understand that this is what’s happening, and we want to take this campaign seriously. I mean, it is serious, but it’s incredibly difficult when the lack of substance that’s come out of both, in terms of this is what our policy platform is. So, we can joke that the Trump campaign puts their policy in all caps on their platform—and it’s in all caps. But it’s not funny that the Democrats literally leave us with very little at this point on this issue as well. And that’s incredibly disconcerting, I think, at any time. But it’s really disconcerting when the next president of the United States can see an escalating—because you’re right, there’s already an active war happening—that can see it escalating.

MB: And I just wanted to share with you all, super quick on this point. We put a poll, five questions, in the field over the weekend. We also do American attitude polling on specifically Palestine/Israel. And we put one into the field this weekend that we got back this morning and just released it today. So it’s on our website. A majority of Harris voters (65%) and a plurality of Trump voters (at 45%) believe that the United States should comply with US laws and not provide unrestricted assistance to the Israeli government if it continues to put civilian lives at risk in Gaza and Lebanon. So I would also suggest, in terms of the substance (and I do think it’s immoral to support a genocide), so in addition to that piece of it on the substance, it’s also political malpractice. I moved to Washington in 1995; my first convention—I’m a Democrat—I attended as a kid in 1992. And I remember then being in a conversation—they weren’t talking to me because I was too young—but the guy next to me was basically saying: Look, there’s no room for you in this party because if we bring you in, we’re going to lose Jewish supporters. And I never understood this zero-sum piece, which is like, it’s this or this. It has definitely never been this or this, but it’s certainly not now. And to continue to approach this way in places like Michigan, in places like Pennsylvania, in places like Wisconsin, in places like Arizona and Georgia and much broader coalitions, is crazy. And I don’t know why they haven’t figured that out at this late date.

SA: Can I just add one thing? Something that I have heard over the last year when I’ve been in conversation with the pro-Palestinian side, particularly in activist groups that are willing to engage with politics (and I bet a whole lot of you in this room have heard this too), is that over the last year, the sense inside such circles is that the Democratic Party is looking to exclude them as a constituency. And I had to bring that up, building on what Maya just said: that the Democratic Party would simply prefer to replace these cognitively uncomfortable, leading to political and material commitments that most of the party’s leadership is not prepared to make, with other elements that could make up the difference. And I think that is part of what we’ve seen with the Kamala Harris embrace of the Cheneys and trying to rerun this (very familiar from 2016) failed play, in which there are just so many anti-Trump Republicans that you no longer have to listen to the most anguished cries of a constituency that has been demanding anything, barely, over the last 20 years except basic dignity and freedom.

AK: Spencer, I want to go back to you and then get to everybody else. I have about two more questions, and then I want to do audience Q & A. You wrote a whole book about this, so I was wondering if you could just reflect on how we got to this point where the Cheneys are campaigning with Harris and Trump says he’s the peace candidate.

SA: I’ll slow run it. Okay. After 9/11, until about two or three years into the invasion of Iraq, the Democratic Party was for the machinery of the War on Terror. There were softer edges applied to it, but it was. And then, when Iraq was exposed as the disaster it was, when it became no longer possible to convince a sizable constituency of Americans that this war was going well (and that’s before it gets into the question of whether it served American interests at all), the Democratic Party shifted on a dime. People—like Nancy Pelosi, especially, and Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry—decided to embrace, as much as they possibly could, this transition whereby the Iraq War could be something less of a millstone around the Democratic Party’s neck as they tried to apply it against the Bush administration.

SA: Barack Obama arrived on a formula whereby you could oppose the Iraq War and move toward what was then the leftmost in mainstream politics’ position of the possible, which is a withdrawal from Iraq, in exchange keeping the rest of the War on Terror and accelerating it in important ways. This transitioned the Democratic Party, ironically, back to a position where it was most comfortable throughout the Cold War, which was a position in which it could align with the security institutions of the United States. It wouldn’t always be a comfortable alliance, but if the Obama administration decided that ultimately, it had to make its peace with the security agencies that were maintaining its War on Terror, it had to also make sure that it wasn’t outwardly demonizing them and cultivating constituencies for either the abolition of the War on Terror (let alone for justice for the victims of the War on Terror). We reached a point where it was undeniable that the War on Terror was a horror and a failure. And that horror and failure sat most cognitively dissonantly with the elements of the far right that had previously vociferously supported the War on Terror and was also in this position of agony, in certain ways, of being latched to this war, while Republican leadership advocated, as Mitt Romney famously said, “double Gitmo.”

SA: Trump comes down the gilded escalator at Trump Tower and does away with all of that, in a manner that quickly coalesced a Democratic response that saw, for one of the most opportune moments since 9/11, the prospect of seizing the mantle of champion of the security agencies—which was, throughout the War on Terror, a place that it wanted to get to, while showing to these agencies that the right was an unreliable partner because of how ultimately erratic and inconsistent with advocacy of American primacy. This became a widespread misinterpretation that the Trump campaign and then presidency cultivated rather deliberately: that it was somehow not an outgrowth of the War on Terror and not a malignant expression of it but instead an alternative to it. In office, that was how Trump governed. In every single theater of the War on Terror, Trump escalated. Trump began an entirely new paradigm for war with China that the Democratic Party decided that it could find its peace with and could ultimately align with, in certain ways that would give the security agencies and institutions more confidence in it than in Trump. That’s how, ultimately, we get to the Cheneys with Kamala Harris, campaigning together on a shared vision of what American places in the world ought to be.

SW: I also think there’s been a shift over the Biden years. So if you go back to 2020 and you look at what the Democrats were talking about when it comes to foreign policy and their endless primary debates, they were, I think, trying to position themselves as the less militaristic party. They were emphasizing climate change. The pandemic, obviously, was a big issue. They were talking about ending forever wars. Joe Biden said he would end the war in Afghanistan and thought forever wars were really terrible. And he said he would treat the Saudis like the pariahs that they were. So no less than Jake Sullivan, current national security adviser, wrote in The Atlantic magazine in 2019 that the Democrats had this problem on foreign policy. They were standing behind these big slogans like the United States is the “Indispensable Nation,” and Trump’s “America First” was winning. And he wrote that the “Indispensable Nation” sounds wearying. It comes with no limits. He actually seemed to say it’s a bad idea. It’s actually not what the United States should try to be in the world.

SW: So, fast forward to 2023: Joe Biden gives his most notable foreign policy address of his presidency in the weeks after the October 7 attack, and it’s about why Congress should grant his request for more than $100 billion in emergency military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan. And it’s totally an ideological pitch. It’s all about: The United States is the indispensable nation; we’re the arsenal of democracy. He even does a callback to Madeleine Albright, who was famous for talking about how the US is the “Indispensable Nation” in the 1990s. So, I think there was a shift in the Biden administration itself. It came in having gone through the Trump years, yes, with this temptation to seize the mantle of strong on national security against this strange guy, Trump. But, actually, over time, I think a lot of Democrats learned that there were elements—that Trump was at least reading in the electorate that needed to be listened to.

SW: Then there was a shift, and there were some debates in the first year of the Biden administration about: Could we really draw back the US Military presence in the Middle East? And the withdrawal from Afghanistan was part of that moment. And then, internally, they decided they were not going to draw back beyond Afghanistan. The way in which Biden was punished politically for the results of the withdrawal was an important lesson for that group. And then the war in Ukraine began, and that revived a lot of traditional thinking about how the United States should be standing up to bad guys on the march around the world. And so, I think there’s a lot of deeper structural elements that, Spencer, you’re pointing to that are absolutely present. But at the same time, the Democrats haven’t always been here, even under Joe Biden. And there may be some possibility of at least coming back to where the party was around four years ago or so, even if we’re not hearing that debate at the moment.

AK: I’m going to do one more question, and then we’re going to do audience Q & A and then wrap it up. The last question that I have is: What has to change? Like, what is a realistic vision that Harris or Trump could advance that would actually address the global crises, particularly in the Middle East, but also around the world that we’re experiencing? And also, why is it so damn difficult for us to even envision such a radical change? We could maybe start with Maya and then go Spencer and Stephen.

MB: So I think security and energy—our interests in the region are tied to security and global energy policy. So our own security is, I think, an appropriate thing to be concerned about. In keeping that piece of it, one thinks about the entire policy toward the region for decades in a way that’s a little bit different. I can’t speak to it in terms of Trump. Generally, all we have to go by are what they did during their term when they were there, and then what potential advisors would come in. And I think it wouldn’t be about the security bucket but rather the energy bucket. Like, I do think there’s a real element of the way they would realign, lean into the Abraham Accords. So we’re talking about real estate in Gaza and fixing what we’re going to do with bringing the Saudis into this deal as well. I think there’s more of that.

MB: But the part that’s hard, as you consider this, is that we didn’t see the Biden administration pivot away from the Abraham Accords either. So you had Trump, who during his administration allowed the US to formally recognize the annexation of the Golan Heights. And when you’d have these conversations, we would say: Well, Biden didn’t do that, and they didn’t suspend this. And then recently, in a post-October environment, they—Phil Gordon, Vice President Harris’s National Security Advisor—put something out suggesting that we did think the Golan was part of Israel. And it’s like: But wait, that was their policy. You never adopted that formally. And then you get referred to a statement that said: Barring the legal requirements of this issue we’re talking about. How do you leave the legal argument when you’re discussing annexation of land? So from my perspective, I leave it to the brilliance of foreign policy experts like you to tell us. But I do think that the idea—let me phrase it this way. For folks like me, foreign policy is never without its domestic implications, ever. Period. So we’re at a point where there has to be a shift in thinking. There has to be some new ways of saying: We cannot continue to do what we’ve done. Even if you don’t think about the way that Arabs have been dehumanized, even if you don’t even think about how many have been killed since—even if you overlook that, which by the grace of God, nobody should, right? But even if that were the case, how could you possibly suggest that what’s been happening is at all aligned with what is US interest moving forward? So how do you stand from the State Department podium and talk about Ukraine, and then the second question that gets asked about Gaza and then answered the way—you can’t.

MB: You mentioned that the candidate—and this is a silly thing that came up in Michigan. You mentioned the candidate—so the Muslim who was removed from the Harris event is actually someone who ran for Congress against another candidate who won. He had a ticket, there were no issues at all, and he was asked to leave. And Congressman Ro Khanna ended up sitting down with him at a restaurant in Michigan and tweeted out the photo to be like: We welcome you in the Democratic Party. So there’s a need to—I don’t think it’s that these institutions are ideal. My institution was created in 1985 specifically for the political exclusion of our community. We were fine to be Arab Americans in different spaces. We could be your doctors, we could be your teachers (as long as we didn’t talk about Palestine). But what we couldn’t do is actually participate in the political process. We had candidates returning our money. And which candidates, which party? They were Democrats, folks. Because it was Democrats that perceived this as the zero-sum approach, of: If I am pro-Palestinian, then I will lose support from the Jewish community. And just as outdated and insane as that was back in the ’80s, it’s certainly not viable anymore in 2024. So what happens in that case is some guy gets asked to leave. I mean, if you look at how that happened, the candidate he ran against was at that event. And I’m like: That’s not how this is supposed to work. And then you get a national story that’s completely self-inflicted error, political malpractice. It’s wrong. How do you take that politics and try to apply it to the serious issue of foreign policy? I think until we get past that, we’re going to continue to have these same conversations in a way that are incredibly harmful to people in the world and certainly harmful to US interests.

SA: This may be a little bit of a 30,000-foot response to your question, Alex, but: Another foreign policy is possible, but it cannot coexist with the pursuit of primacy. As long as the pursuit of primacy is fundamentally the strategy of both the Democratic and Republican candidates, changes around the margins are the most that can be possible. Another policy, another grand strategy for the United States happens to be one that is urgent and necessary for the entire world, which is to say to reorient both foreign and energy policies, as well as all sorts of other outgrowths of that, around the imminent and manifesting climate catastrophes that exist—that no nation can solve by itself. And this approach would naturally lead toward seeking détentes, toward seeking ceasefires.

SA: One of the things that doesn’t get said so often is that after Iraq, the basic construction for the United States’ regional hegemony in the Middle East is to cobble together a coalition against Iran. That is what, ultimately, the Abraham Accords are about. The Abraham Accords were less of a diplomatic achievement than an arms deal. And when we look at the ways in which (to speak to Stephen’s point) the Biden administration talked about, while it was campaigning, burgeoning apathy toward the forever wars that it had typically supported. It often spoke of that in terms of them being a detriment to the maintenance of primacy in an era of great power competition, which would inevitably be an era of resource competition as it’s shaping up—not just natural resources, but manufactured resources, with semiconductors and advanced chips, like we’re seeing take shape as the foundation of the Cold War against China.

SA: As long as this doesn’t change, as long as one of—and we have to say it—the least democratic aspects of American public life is foreign policy and national security. So, it is an exceptionally difficult thing for people power to change. But one way that you could accomplish that is by looking at what, over the last couple years, labor has been going through, and what labor is putting out, about demanding a working-class foreign policy that privileges a transition away from the essentially hypercarbon economy that we have, in realistic ways, to both mitigate and ultimately make ourselves more durable and resilient against catastrophic climate change. You can read something that was published last month called Just Transition by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, and they talk about this in particular where their union is most dense, which is in aerospace. You can hear this also from the UAW, one of the most important unions that, very early on, called for a ceasefire in Gaza as one of its new foreign policy interventions after the election of Shawn Fain and his reform slate. You’ve also heard from regional directors of the UAW talking about potentially getting to a point beyond that, where the unions start exercising power in their factories when it relates to munitions manufacturing, to transition toward a different kind of economy. All of that is up for grabs and not remotely shown to be interesting at all to the Democratic, or for that matter, the Republican candidate. But I think this conversation has particular relevance for the Democratic candidate.

SW: So let me flip the question around and ask you whether the current foreign policy approach is viable. I’m not sure that it is. So, there was a congressionally mandated commission that evaluated the national defense strategy that the Biden administration put out, and it said: Wait a minute, the United States is trying to be the frontline security provider for three regions of the world simultaneously right now (outside the Western Hemisphere)—Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It’s obviously not going very well. If we’re going to just meet these ambitious objectives of basically making the rest of the world sit still—primacy—then we’re going to need a massive increase in defense spending to make this remotely plausible, to deter everybody all at once. They admitted—to their credit; this is a bipartisan commission of people familiar in the national security space—they admitted that this would require cuts to Social Security and Medicare and raising taxes. So good for them for admitting that. But that’s the course we’re on. Or we have more of the same, hoping that things don’t really escalate to the point where the US is clearly going to be overstretched in an unambiguous way (we may be there by January, given the way things are going in the Middle East).

SW: Or we get to the point where the United States is coming to blows with—has to decide: Does it want to enter into a major power conflict with Russia or China? Relations are so bad among those three major powers (or, between the United States and Russia and between the United States and China) that this is a very plausible scenario that keeps people up at night in Washington. And who knows how our society will react if we’re actually asked to fight for Taiwan, for example. That is a totally uncertain prospect because people have not faced a foreign policy choice with that kind of implication for their personal lives, for the economy, etc., since Vietnam. The scale of a US-China war could even exceed what it meant for the United States in its war in Vietnam. So, we’re really facing a point where I’m not sure that the current approach is sustainable. And that does present certain pressures to come up with an alternative, to avoid some politically painful things like doubling defense spending—which nobody in this campaign is talking about despite the agreement on American military primacy. So I think an alternative that you could start to see emerging from some experts, and even some political figures, would involve the United States disentangling itself from the greater Middle East (something that used to be talked about quite recently in our politics), shifting to a supporting rather than leading role in European security, where the European powers themselves take on the lion’s share of responsibility for defending themselves against the threat that Russia poses. And then that leaves Asia, where the United States would focus its military efforts. But then there’s a wide possibility of ways it might do that. I would advocate working toward a competitive coexistence relationship with China, which won’t be easy, but is plausible, I think.

SW: And I think you could see either candidate, if they’re president, at least adopting some parts of that basic approach. But a major problem that we have is that it’s very hard for our political system to accept the United States pulling back anywhere in the world. Again, I think the way that Biden was punished for executing a withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was not handled in a smooth way, but honestly, there was no way to lose a 20-year war to the Taliban and make the result look nice. It was not available. So, I think it was inevitable that whoever was the president, who was left holding the bag when the last US Forces left, was going to be punished. And that was extremely unfortunate in terms of disincentivizing future presidents from taking risks to pull back and then see what the consequences might be. And frankly, does anyone really think the United States should be fighting still in Afghanistan today? So, I think that is going to be a major challenge for future presidents. But on the other hand, the choice may be something really costly for the United States if we don’t find a way to change course.

MB: Alex, may I come in? Just briefly on this point, by the way—Spencer’s book is really one of the best reads on the issue of understanding this global terror, War on Terror, and your newsletter is actually called Forever Wars. So, one of the things to understand—and it’s an excellent newsletter if you don’t sign up for it—but one of the things is, the thing about War on Terror is it doesn’t end. Like, if you frame this as a War on Terror, we’re never going to stop doing this. If you talk about US foreign policy in the context of supremacy, there is no—there’s no part of the world that we don’t get to engage in, and I think that’s a linkage. It’s important to understand about the way we are seeing this conversation play out, or in the absence of it playing out—because they’re not talking about it, and not making those linkages. So it’s not a serious pursuit of this. But both of those things, I think, are really problematic.

AK: So, let’s take three questions and then wrap it up. I’m just going to choose randomly, and then we’ll have brief responses and continue the conversation over drinks. The person—Naomi, Hadas, and you there with the—yes, you. So first Naomi and then Hadas,

Naomi: Thank you so much. This has been really interesting. You touched on this a little bit, but I was wondering if you could talk more about the Jewish vote and the Harris campaign’s calculations. Do any of you have a sense that the campaign is worried about Jewish voters who may be Trump-leaning or walking toward Trump if they were to come out and say something a little bit more critical of Israel? How does the Harris campaign view the Jewish vote right now around this issue?

AK: Hadas, do you want to—

Hadas: Yeah, thank you for a great panel, fan of everyone here. How much do you think the foreign policy about Israel fits into this American grand strategy of supremacy? And how much is it on its own track of—irrational, or follows its own logic? So I’m assuming it’s in the middle, but how would you—

AK: And the last one.

Audience Member: So, this panel talked a lot about both parties’ unwillingness to fully engage with the topic of Gaza. I wanted to explore that a little more and anchor my question around the DNC, which seemed to be one of too many efforts to deplatform pro-Palestinian and anti-war voices. I’ve also seen it carry a lot of important parallels with the 1968 DNC. So, my question around that is: How should we explain this refusal to engage with pro-Palestinian, anti-war voices and this inability that comes with it to escape this tragic historical loop?

AK: All right, you guys got that? We have Jewish vote and Harris; foreign policy supremacy and Israel; and echoes of ’68 and how the Democrats are viewing this constituency. Take whichever one speaks to you most and then we’ll wrap it up.

SA: On the supremacy issue: Israel acts as a frontiersman for the United States in the Middle East. I think that’s the easiest way to understand the function that the US/Israel relationship plays as a matter of foreign policy. And then, as a settler colonialist nation, the United States sees itself in really important ways in Israel, and as—I think there’s no real way around it—as a Christian nation, in many ways. What Israel crystallizes is a messianic potential that also speaks to very old traditions in American history. And for those reasons, I think this has really been quite an enduring relationship that has now produced this ongoing horror for 76 years.

MB: So just on that point, I think one of the most important things that’s happened in the post-October 7 environment is that we have a deeper understanding of Christian Zionists and the role that they’ve been playing in the harm of US Policy in that part of the world. And I think it goes directly to understanding that, because I don’t think if you’re focused on our own security—or again, this global energy policy—that it makes sense to do what we’re doing with regards to Israel. Even if you say it’s the most important BFF ever, it still doesn’t—you know, it’s going to align. In terms of the Jewish vote piece, I think the only thing I would point to is that—so, disinformation campaigns exist because they figure out what are the places where they can insert, and then they run with them. And we’ve seen some pretty extraordinary disinformation play out that’s targeted both Arab Americans and Jewish Americans. So, we have a pro-Republican super fund dark money PAC that’s been running ads for Arab Americans. While I was sitting here, I literally got a text that tells me again—because I used to be registered to vote in Michigan, so I’m on some list, and I’m still getting them daily: “Israel is the single most important issue to me. And Kamala has to say certain things”—I mean, you can do a dramatic reading—“but Kamala has to say certain things. But trust me, she’s pro-Israel, she stands with us. Please make sure you’re going to vote.” It is not coming from the Harris campaign. It is coming from a Republican-funded PAC that’s targeting my community in Michigan this way and then running alternative ads for the Jewish American community in Pennsylvania. So, I think I think they figured out there’s something here. I just do think the majority of the American Jewish community is going to continue voting for Democrats. I don’t think that’s changing.

MB: In terms of the DNC point, I would just note that we were there. I was there. I was outside overnight when they said no on the Speaker. Honestly, I would characterize it the same exact way, which is: When the floor is uphold US law, when the floor is put a person on the stage who can speak to what’s happened personally post-October 7, and that doesn’t happen? It just doesn’t align with a candidate who—I just don’t understand. If you want to win, why would you do things like this? And my only explanation is—and I like to win for me that’s really important—so my only explanation for this is that there just has been this political consultancy class that has deviated from—I’m sorry, that has failed to deviate from where we are. They’re not reading the room. There’s poll after poll. Even if you disregard, again, my constituency, poll after poll will tell you Americans aren’t down with this. So just a tiny bit of pivot on this, I think, would have produced a different outcome. And we saw that in our poll: 59% of Americans had supported Biden. And when we did our poll in October, it was at 17%.

MB: They were ready to support Harris. They were clinging to this; give us anything to work with. And the fact that she brought it up to 41% (so the last poll was 42%, 41%), is a sign of the desperation that folks feel. Because the existential threat we feel as human beings in America right now, to our own well-being and our own democracy, is felt by Arab Americans the same way. It’s just: Don’t ask us to choose democracy or genocide. That’s just not the way to do this. So that’s also a piece of this that I think is very challenging to understand the why.

SW: I can’t speak to the Harris campaign’s view of basically anything, but that includes how they see Jewish voters. But I wonder whether they were also concerned not so much about Jewish Americans but about this play for suburban white people who are ex-Republicans, who they want to get. These are the people that they were going for by bringing Liz Cheney out to campaign with Harris. And back-engineering what the logic would have been, it would have been they’re worried that Harris is prone to be portrayed as some kind of radical person, perhaps because she is South Asian, Black and female, and Palestinian or Arab American will code radical. And they wanted to avoid that and court this other group. So that might be—that might help to explain the calculation. And obviously, there’s all kinds of problems in our society that are embedded in a calculation like that.

SW: With respect to the Israel primacy question, I think it’s actually hard to define an underlying strategic logic that comes back to American security or prosperity for much of what the United States does in the Middle East. I can start to sketch the logic during the Cold War, and that’s where the US Alignment with Israel is cemented. But after that, I really have to put domestic politics at the center of that. And then the ongoing hostility between the US and Iran, and the unwillingness to back away from any security partners or allies that the United States had during the Cold War, to get us up to the present. So, even in terms of the US’s strategic objectives in the Middle East, being so lockstep with Israel carries costs. And we’ve seen that over time, it used to be more reflected out in the open with the first Bush administration. So, I think it’s turtles all the way down—domestic politics would be my central explanation. And whether domestic politics are correct, though, whether the people implementing policy are reading things correctly, is not so obvious, though.

AK: That’s going to do it. Thank you so much to Spencer, Maya, and Stephen.

AK: And that’s our show today. Thanks to our panelists and to our producer, Jesse Brenneman. Please rate and review our show on your podcast apps. And if you want immediate live stream access to more live events like the one you just heard, sign up to become a Jewish Currents member at JewishCurrents.org. We’ll see you next time, after the election.