After Donald Trump’s first election, it was easy for Democrats to cast him as an aberration from the norms and practices that had broadly oriented American foreign policy for decades. But Joe Biden’s presidency now feels like an elegiac effort to restore U.S. leadership of a rules-based international order. Trump’s second term, meanwhile, is poised to usher in a full embrace of the zero-sum transactionalism that order was created to supersede. Democrats must adjust to this new reality: the old United States is not coming back, and the rest of the world does not expect it to.

It was not Trump alone who brought about this transformation. Confidence in U.S. leadership, at home and abroad, has long been diminished. The invasion of Iraq and the excesses of the so-called war on terror unraveled confidence in Washington as a steward of global security and offered a useful framework for leaders in Moscow and Beijing to excuse autocracy and actions that flew in the face of the rules-based order. The 2008 financial crisis and the continuing concentrations of wealth fueled by globalization incentivized challenges to the post–Cold War embrace of democratic capitalism. These challenges came from autocratic populists within liberal democracies as well as from blocs of countries that offered an alternative to American hegemony. Technology—particularly the explosion of unregulated social media—was an accelerant to these trends, as the proliferation of platforms and access to data offered autocrats tools for surveillance and control, while facilitating the spread of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and negativity that polarized citizenries around the world.

Biden’s policies presented a schizophrenic response to this dynamic. From his initial declaration that “America is back,” Biden gestured to a restoration after the anomalous Trump years. But the unraveling of the rules-based order that had already taken place over the course of the first two decades of this century rendered that an impossibility. Biden’s own policies often recognized that reality, even as the words he used to present those policies spoke the familiar language of American primacy within a rules-based order. This put a bright spotlight on the hypocrisy and hubris that have often characterized the aspects of American foreign policy that exist outside the rules, which fuel the narratives of autocrats and populists alike. “We may not be pure,” their argument goes, “but nobody is.”

Consider the tensions in recent American foreign policy. The declaration of a battle between democracy and autocracy came with exemptions for autocratic partners in places like Riyadh and New Delhi. Calls for the collective action that is necessary to combat climate change and manage the emergence of new technologies were contradicted by the industrial policy embedded in the Inflation Reduction Act and a web of export and investment controls designed to contain China. Global norms were cited to justify the intensive use of sanctions, but these efforts only drove together governments with different ideologies, such as China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as well as alternative alliances like the BRICS. The expansion of NATO and mobilization of allies behind Ukraine owed less to principled calls for democratic solidarity than they did to a realist reaction to the threat posed by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s frontal assault on the West. While framed as a defense of a liberal order, Washington’s policies were often a response to its absence.

Biden’s most prominent foreign policy initiative during his final year in office was unconditional support for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s destruction of Gaza and his military escalation in Lebanon. In the immediate aftermath of October 7, a common refrain from administration officials was that Biden was trying to “hug Bibi” to maintain influence over Israel’s actions. This approach wildly misread Netanyahu’s governing coalition and the current moment: the U.S. was pursuing a reflexive policy of support for Israel that failed to account for how much the Israeli government and the world had changed. Even casual observers could see that no rules-based order governed Washington’s support for Israel; that Biden’s refusal to apply any U.S. leverage undermined calls for military restraint, humanitarian aid, and a negotiated cease-fire in exchange for hostages; and that Netanyahu’s own political interests gave him every incentive to ignore calls for de-escalation. In the end, Biden hugged Bibi all the way into Trump’s arms.

THE POPULIST APPEAL

While Trump casts himself as a radical disrupter, he is a familiar figure in today’s world: a far-right nationalist at a time when that brand of politics is ascendant, a strongman in a world full of them. Indeed, in many parts of the globe, there is nothing new about a self-interested autocrat who surrounds himself with oligarchs, who weaponizes the justice system and politicizes the military, and who allows his son-in-law and assorted cronies to enrich themselves through the monetization of foreign policy. What’s new is the United States—with all its power—embracing this form of politics with a popular mandate.

Since his ascent in 2016, Trump has successfully tapped into a populist fatigue with American national security policies. He has consistently railed against forever wars, free trade, free-riding allies, an unaccountable “deep state,” and the harm that globalization has done to the working class. The irony is that, for a long time, the policies that produced these outcomes were more popular among Republicans than Democrats. Moreover, the hypocrisy embedded in the rules-based international order often served to benefit the interests of the United States and many of the same corporate and financial elites who are now aligned with Trump. Yet Trump’s unabashed willingness to purge the Republican Party of his ideological opponents offered a crude and visible form of accountability to an angry electorate that saw little reckoning happening elsewhere.

In response to Trump’s attacks, three successive Democratic nominees for president have positioned themselves as unwavering defenders of the national security establishment. The Biden administration’s final major piece of legislation before the recent election was a nearly $100 billion package of support for Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine, which the president signed amid a cost-of-living crisis. In her unfortunately truncated campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris did not break with Biden over his support for Israel’s war in Gaza, vowed to strengthen the world’s most “lethal military,” and even welcomed the support of Dick Cheney, the hawkish architect of the now universally loathed Iraq War. Although each of these actions could be rationalized individually, collectively they bespoke a misreading of how the politics of national security have changed. By fully embracing the mantle of hawkish defenders of the status quo, Democrats allowed themselves to be held responsible for the failures of the post-9/11 era.

In doing so, Democrats often seized on a blend of polling and common sense. For instance, most Americans do favor supporting Ukraine, working with allies, and defending democracy in the abstract. At the same time, however, many Americans have come to see U.S. national security policy writ large as an instrument of a broader system that has not served their interests and is unresponsive to their concerns. They see one forever war metastasizing into another, U.S. foreign policy buttressing elite interests, and disorder online and at the border as emblematic of a government that has fallen behind the times. Meanwhile, appeals to democratic values are undercut by the ongoing carnage in Gaza. In that environment, cynicism creeps in: If the world is a chaotic place populated with transactional strongmen, why not turn to our own?

To be clear, the remedies that Trump is preparing to impose are not correctives to the grievances he has identified. An overuse of tariffs—combined with more sanctions and further decoupling of supply chains—would only exacerbate inflation while amplifying the geopolitical influence of China. A shift of that kind would also reduce the cost to China of a potential blockade or invasion of Taiwan. Mass deportations will tear at the social cohesion of American communities, drive up prices, and undermine the strength and vitality that the U.S. has traditionally drawn from immigrants. Tax cuts, deregulation, and a federal embrace of cryptocurrencies will fuel inequality and encourage oligarchy. The abandonment of action on climate change could have catastrophic consequences as the planet careens past a tipping point. U.S. alignment with the Israeli far right could lead to the annexation of parts of Gaza and the West Bank, with devastating consequences for Palestinians and perhaps the stability of neighboring states. The abandonment of Ukraine would lead to an end to that war on terms favorable to Russia while eroding U.S. influence in Europe. The dismantling of American national security agencies through unqualified appointments and purges of the civil and foreign service will concentrate power in the White House while undermining the long-term capacity of the government to protect the safety and interests of the American people. And these are just the things Trump has said he will do: if his COVID-19 pandemic response is any indication, there is little reason to trust that he will competently manage the inevitable crises to come. This is a harrowing thought in a world of great-power conflict.

Yet even if the MAGA ascendancy lasts only another four years, there is no going back from this turn of events, no return to a pre-Trump era of American leadership. Whatever emerges will have to be different not only from Trump but also from what preceded him.

NEW IDEAS FOR A NEW ERA

The last time the Democratic Party faced this scale of electoral defeat was also the precursor to its greatest twenty-first-century success. Following George W. Bush’s popular-vote victory in 2004, the Democrats ran populist campaigns against an insular and interventionist foreign policy establishment—embodied by Dick Cheney—that had ignored the reality that it could not dictate events around the globe. Democrats rode their opposition to the Iraq War to large House and Senate majorities in 2006. Two years later, Barack Obama defeated Hillary Clinton and John McCain, the establishment favorites in both parties, by attacking their support for the war and promising to challenge Washington’s “conventional thinking.”

This time, the Democratic Party needs to position itself in opposition to self-interested power structures that are not responsive to the vast majority of the world’s people. Biden occasionally did this, but he did so by awkwardly trying to meld domestic economic nationalism with a restorative foreign policy premised on American primacy. Rather than treating Trump as a malign interloper to a virtuous establishment, Democrats should oppose him as the manifestation of a corrupt, self-enriching, oligarchic global elite. There should be no artificial divide between the party’s domestic and foreign policy messaging. Americans are not wrong to feel that the system is rigged: what Trump’s supporters ignore is the plain reality that it is rigged by people like Trump and the billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. This calls for a critique of Trump that is about corruption rather than incompetence; an unabashed agenda for the reform of unaccountable corporate, technological, and financial systems; and far more humility about America’s capacity to engineer global politics through sanctions and military assistance. It also requires more overt solidarity with like-minded parties and civil society confronting these forces around the globe, in much the same way that the far right has networked over the past decade.

Instead of reinforcing a rules-based order that has been eclipsed by events, Democrats need to put forward a vision for how to begin negotiating the construction of a new one. Issues such as the global clean energy transition, the need to regulate social media and artificial intelligence, and the return of a nuclear arms race cry out for a return to great-power negotiations instead of dangerous escalation and unsustainable defense spending. The necessary embrace of alliances such as NATO and the G-7 should be supplemented by a commitment to expand partnerships with developing countries, with a focus on issues such as climate change, technology, food security, combating transnational criminal networks, and managing migration flows. Traditional human rights advocacy should evolve beyond a post–Cold War framework that emphasized elections and integration into largely Western institutions, and should encompass issues such as resource exploitation, gender equality, and guardrails on technology that speak to the yearning for people—in the United States and abroad—to control their own lives. Instead of simply defending U.S. national security agencies and international institutions, Democrats will have to put forward ideas for how to rebuild them.

Of course, many debates on foreign policy will continue to center on contentious issues. One simple proposition for the Democratic Party is to align its approach to foreign policy with the views of its own constituencies rather than the Washington interest groups or hawkish pundits who often seem to be the intended audience for leading Democratic politicians and national security practitioners. There is no reason to support unconditional military assistance to Israel against the will of the party’s voters. There is no reason to pursue pointlessly hard-line policies in Latin America to appeal to a subset of the Florida electorate that is among the most Republican in the country. There is no reason to spend well over a trillion dollars modernizing U.S. nuclear-weapons infrastructure in deference to maximalist strategic thinking and a cloistered defense industry. The best way to project strength is to have the courage of your convictions.

All of this must be communicated in a manner that makes sense to people. National security elites underestimate how incomprehensible and self-censoring they sound to most people. The studious acronyms, the ceaseless jargon (think: “the Quad” and “frank and candid discussions”), the expressions of “deep concern” about things the U.S. does nothing about, and the repetition of paeans to the “rules-based international order” sound more like they are designed to conceal truth than reveal it. Trump lies a lot, but he speaks in a language that sounds blunt—if not honest—to many people. More candor about the state of the world would be both more effective and liberating.

In its best moments, the Democratic Party has advocated for fairness, equality, and the dignity of all people, all of which are essential building blocks of a democracy that works at home and an international system that works abroad. Democrats should embrace this legacy by retiring the language of primacy and the defense of outdated power structures. When everything around you is being torn down, it’s time to build a new foundation—to borrow a phrase—unburdened by what has been.