Polling in the US on the politics of the “working class” (which pundits find it surprisingly hard to define)

One of the more irritating assumptions by the US press and political pundits for the last several years is the notion that “working class” voters can be equated to people who don’t have a college education, sometimes specified as not having a four-year college degree.

Jared Williams, director of the left-leaning Center for Working-Class Politics and law professor Joan Williams recently used this definition in a survey they did: “those without college degrees in the middle 50% of US income distribution.” (1)

Who are the “working class” in election surveys?

While we can acknowledge that some kind of definition is required if we want to define a group like “working class.” Often news reports on surveys will make the definition be even more narrowly defined as defining anyone without college degrees as working class.

In the US and many other countries, there is some kind of official definition of who is eligible to be a member of a labor union. And when we think of it that way, the college/no-college distinction becomes pretty fuzzy. Two of the most powerful unionized groups in the US are public employees and health-care workers. Most nurses and very many public employees are people with college degrees of some kind. Many administrative workers in the private sector like computer programmers or systems administrators who work for wages or salaries and who do not manage other employees also have college degrees. Once upon a time, newspaper reporters were stereotypically working-class employees, and many media workers of all kinds who would today be eligible to join unions have a four-year college education.

On the other hand, there are many owners of small and not-so-small businesses who do not have college degrees but who are very affluent from entrepreneurship or inheritance.

In other words, that commonly used definition of “working-class” voters can be misleading. Measurement of public opinion is obviously a less precise measurement than physical weights or volumes. Also, a chronic issue for using income level in opinion polls is that such information is usually collected via self-reporting and is not considered particularly reliable. Also, do spouses of wealthy partners who don’t themselves have college degrees count as “working-class”? (It gets complicated.)

Messaging and narrative for working-class voters

Such definitions is always a challenge when evaluating analyses of how working-class voters respond to particular issues. It doesn’t help that the meaning of “working-class” voters has various political meanings. When Republicans talk about working-class voters, it usually just means “regular white folks” (whatever Republicans consider “regular” these days). When Democrats, and most left-liberal and social-democratic parties elsewhere, talk about working-class voters usually means something like “people who might be in a union.”

In the US, the fuzziness in talking about the working class is also complicated by the pollsters and campaign consultants who try to segment their ads and messaging to micro-targeted particular slices of voters. Opinions on issues like the price of gas or property taxes can be more easily measured fairly precisely, and consultants like to call those kitchen-table issues, which are assumed to be the only issues voters “really” care about. And quantifiable issues like gas or housing prices or even recessions can be expressed in well-measured numerical trends. Issues like fairness or rule of law or democratic processes or the effect of gun proliferation aren’t so easily quantifiable. The effects of racism or xenophobia are also much more different to measure quantitatively. And producing many targeted ads can be financially more desirable for campaign consultants than fewer ads with broader messages.

When fuzzy stereotypes become political analysis

Jared Abbott and Joan Williams write:

Resisting authoritarianism is the second-highest priority for Democrats’ college-educated base. But for working-class Americans, it’s only the 19th priority (out of 20), we found in a new survey. The gap between these two groups was larger than on any other issues: elites prioritized resisting authoritarianism an astonishing 33 percentage points more than non-elites did.

Democrats’ dilemma is that their college-educated base insists they stand up to Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, but they also need to win working-class votes. The way to thread that needle is to recognize that what’s needed to defend democracy in the short term is different from what’s needed to defend it in the long term.

Abbott directs the Center for Working-Class Politics, which produced a report, “Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes” in conjunction with Jacobin and the Rosa Luxemburg Stifung, both of which can be safely described as left-social-democratic. So he’s not some random conservative columnist. Willimas is an emeritus law professor and author of Outclassed: How the Left Lost the Working Class and How to Win Them Back.

Those introductory paragraphs taken alone would suggest that working-class voters don’t really care much about abstractions like democracy. They make the entirely sensible suggestion that Democrats focus on corruption. Entirely sensible because the US has never experienced anything like the massive corruption of the federal government under Trump 2.0.

While “resisting authoritarianism” was a low priority for working-class voters of any race, “reducing corruption in government” was the third highest priority for white working-class respondents, fourth for working-class Latinos, and sixth for working-class African Americans, our survey found.

In fact, reducing corruption was one of only two top working-class priorities we identified that wasn’t economic. A study out of the UK explains why. It found that working-class Britons use “corruption” not in a narrow legal sense but to express “deeply rooted feelings of injustice and unfairness”.

It’s true that “authoritarianism” isn’t as common a part of the US vernacular language as “corruption”, their essay suggests that “democracy” is not something of particular interest to those voters they consider working-class. And that sounds uncomfortably close to the Democratic “consultant-class” insistence that candidates should not talk about broad issues like, you know, war. Or the maintenance of America’s democratic system. Or preserving the rule of law.

But the periodic ritual of voting is a secular version of a sacred rite in America. Yes, even for people who vote by mail. Going to the polling station and signing in with the often-female staffers handing out the ballots, maybe running into people you know there, almost always seeing other people from your area taking part in what most people started learning in elementary school was an essential part of what it means to be an American: Yes, people understand that this is something basic to be an American and a responsible citizen. And many of them wear an “I voted” pin or sticker the rest of the day as a sign of pride, and to remind others that it’s election day.

Part of what’s missed in a careless approach – or in one fixated on very quantifiable “kitchen-table issues” – is often in major part a confusion between “narrative” and “messaging”. Narrative is about a broader theme, e.g., Make America Great Again. Messaging is about specifics. If the broad narrative is MAGA, it has to be made more vivid with messaging about perversely violent criminal immigrants or “trans for everybody” (one of Trump’s more bizarre pieces of messaging).

What Abbott and Williams say in the quotes above provides another good example. Corruption is a broad concept which has both “a narrow legal sense” but also invokes “deeply rooted feelings of injustice and unfairness.” But if political messaging connects with specific things – like Donald Trump shamelessly selling pardons to some of the sleaziest people around, or making additional fortunes off insider trading, or his immediate crime family like Jared Kushner getting large sums of “business investments” with countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia with whom he’s allegedly conducting diplomatic business on behalf of the US government – those are things that voters don’t need a college degree – or even a high-school degree, for that matter – to understand its corruption and ripping off public money.

Something similar is true for an abstraction like democracy. Being denied the right to vote is not a “kitchen-table” issue like the price of eggs. But it’s something that advocates for “female suffrage” (women’s right to vote) and the civil rights movement in the US South took very, very seriously. And they understood that it affected them in real and important ways – even though those ways are quantifiable in the sense that grocery prices are.

Abbott and Williams even include this strange comment: “Many working-class voters don’t rush to defend democracy because they feel it’s failed them for the last 40 years.” Tell that to the people of Minneapolis who were willing to risk violence, imprisonment and murder from the ICE Gestapo earlier this year to defend democracy and its conjoined twin, the rule of law.

A discussion last year from Williams and Alissa Quart addressed the issue of: “How does cultural contempt from professional elites fuel resentment, deepen political polarization, and reinforce inequality?” (From its YouTube description)

Notes:

(1) Abbott, Jared & Williams, Joan (2026): To protect democracy, Democrats should talk about corruption – not authoritarianism. Guardian 02/18/2026. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/18/democrats-corruption-authoritarianism> (Accessed: 2026-21-09).

For a barrage of polling results, see also: Working-Class Social and Economic Attitudes: An Analysis. Center for Working-Class Politics/Jacobin/Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung-New York, June 2025. <https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/20091032/CWCP-Jacobin-report-20250721.pdf> (Accessed: 2026-21-09).

(2) Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Lyric Video). Bruce Springsteen YouTube channel 01/29/2026. <https://youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si=8VWOBs7z48KTf5tV> (Accessed: 2026-21-09).

(3) How the Left Lost the Working Class. The 92nd Street Y, New York YouTube channel 06/13/2025. <https://www.youtube.com/live/ThwzoCXJ87o?si=-Ipxm4JryW1rPUVl> (Accessed: 2026-21-09).

Russia and Ukraine, a war with no end in sight

Trita Parsi discusses the US-Israel War on Iran and the domestic politics of it. On the latter, he criticizes the Democrats for using the device of criticizing Trump for being too weak in confronting Iran. (1) The latter is a lazy centrist Democratic posture. In 2004 when John Kerry was campaigning for President, he framed his criticisms of the Cheney-Bush Administration Iraq War in term of the need to win the war in Iraq rather than shutting down the disastrous intervention.

It’s one of those habits Democrats fell into by giving clowns like James Carville way more credibility than they ever deserved.

John Mearsheimer’s advocacy of his “offensive realism” theory of foreign relations often leads him to make gloomy predictions. But he has the annoying habit of often being right about the topics he analyses. He also has a particular style of wording his points in a way that forces the listener to think more closely about what he is saying. And on issues like the Iran and Russia-Ukraine Wars, he obviously pays close attention to the available information and knows how to employ historical examples without reducing them to clichés.

He recently started his own podcast in which he gives presentations directly to the audience. A recent one carries a title that Ukraine’s more enthusiastic partisans would not have selected: “Is Ukraine Committing National Suicide?” (2)

Both the Russia-Ukraine War and the current Iran War – which has involved a number of countries in the Middle East besides Israel and Iran – keep reminding us that in foreign policy and wars, multiple things can be true at the same time, things that can seem to be contradictory.

For instance, it can be true (and is) that Russia’s seizure of the Ukrainian province of Crimea and of large parts of the eastern provinces (oblasts) of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, were acts of aggression that violate international law. It can also be true (and is) that Russia had real security concerns about the possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of the NATO alliance.

It can be true (and is) that Ukraine is extremely unlikely to recognize Russian annexation of those five provinces. It can also be true (and is) that there is no realistic hope that Ukraine can militarily retake those provinces in any immediate future or in any immediate peace settlement.

The current war began in February 2022 with the Russian invasion. Ukraine was able to retake some of the ground initially captured by Russia, including a significant counter-offensive in mid-2023. But the war since then has essentially been a protracted war of attrition, with the front lines largely frozen in place, with gains by either side difficult and very limited. The heavy use of drones on both sides of the lines of occupation has made seizing and holding territory very difficult for both sides. Advances by either side have been slow and costly.

One surprising part of the general reporting and analysis of the war is the treatment of the strategic bombing campaigns of both sides. Strategic bombing aims at targeting military and economic facilities to undermine the enemy side’s ability to wage war. As distinct from tactical bombing in direct support of ground and sea forces. With the assistance of its allies and its own technical capabilities, Ukraine has been making some spectacular strikes inside Russia, including on Moscow. But the value of Ukraine’s strikes in weakening Russia’s ability to wage war is questionable, especially in comparison to Russia’s strikes on Ukrainian strategic targets.

As Robert Pape, Mearsheimer, and others have been continually pointing out, particularly in relation to the Iran War, as damaging as “strategic” bombing of civilian areas is, it has never in itself led a civilian population to demand their government stop waging a war. As a general rule, having a foreign country bombing one’s neighborhood doesn’t give the civilians in the area being bombed extra sympathy for the side doing the bombing. It just doesn’t work that way. And there’s seems to be little sign of major Russian dissent against the current war in any case. But Ukraine’s boosters in the media often present such Ukrainian strikes on Russia civilian targets and cities deep inside Russia and

Mearsheimer’s analysis above looks at the substantial long-term disadvantages facing Ukraine. The fact that the Russian seizure of Ukrainian territory was illegal – and very arguably unnecessary in strategic terms from Russia’s actual situation – does not mean that Ukraine has a good practical chance any time in the immediate future to recapture the occupied territory militarily. On the other hand, countries facing foreign invaders or foreign occupiers have often shown themselves to be willing to wage protracted resistance against them. Nationalism and patriotism can be powerful motivators.

But it doesn’t mean that David always wins over Goliath. At some point, Ukrainians are likely to decide that continuing the current war of attrition offers fewer obvious advantages than establishing some kind of stable ceasefire without any formal final resolution of the occupation.

Back to multiple things being true simultaneously, it can be true that Russian leaders are overly suspicious and/or paranoid about the danger that an independent Ukraine poses to its national interests. It can also be true (and is) that Western policymakers see the current war with Ukraine as weakening Russia and giving European allies a chance to improve their preparedness for a potential future conflict with Russia with minimal reliance on the US, whose reliability as an ally can’t be restored simply by Trump leaving office.

Mearsheimer makes some important practical points about Europe’s official stance on what he describes as exaggerated fears of Russia promoted by European NATO and EU members. He argues that some of that fear is real, although he thinks it is greatly exaggerated, and continues to argue that Russia has never made explicit claims to take over all of Ukraine. He has argued since 2022 that Russia’s goal was to seize and control parts of Ukrainian territory to prevent it from becoming a NATO member, and also to make Ukraine into a dysfunctional “rump state.” It’s not that he regards that as a good or legitimate goal but rather one consistent with the Russian government’s calculation of its own security interests.

Mearsheimer also points out that European leaders sounding the alarm about Russian intentions serves two other political purposes. One is to use that argument to slow the process of American withdrawal from a commitment to actively defend Europe in case of an actual Russia attack. Another is to use that as a way to help persuade European publics of the need for more robust defense spending. To a certain extent, current European governments are arguing the case for military Keynesianism as an antidote to the chronic austerity politics that has plagued the EU, largely an inheritance from the longer German commitment to what Paul Krugman has called “austerianism.” (Russian threat or not, it has been a bad, very damaging policy habit which at least created a climate that has benefited the neo-fascist-type parties in Europe.)

Despite the recent publicity about “hybrid” attacks, If the recent incident with drones at the Leipzig airport was intended to be a serious military attack, it was a pretty pitiful attempt. But we can expect more news of such provocations. And, yes, Western countries will be also carrying out such stunts. If Russia actually carries out a military strike against Western countries or seizes territory of a NATO countries – this is where the Suwalki Gap/Suwalki Corridor along the Polish-Lithuanian border comes in as a possible target – then we’re getting into actual World War III territory. Which of course no one in their right mind wants to see happen.

Speaking of which, there is an increasing amount of talk about World War Three in connection with Russia’s and China’s current relations with Iran. Mercy Kuo, for instance, recently wrote in The Diplomat:

Both Russia and China share a common motivation to weaken the U.S. either leading to its defeat or to a protracted war that bleeds U.S. strength, ties it down in the Gulf, and prevents greater military support for Ukraine, Taiwan, and Washington’s Asian and European allies. They also aim to weaken American alliances, damage America’s global standing and economy, and increase its domestic polarization. Moreover, this war validates their ideology about the decline of an American-led world order and the alleged rise of a new multipolar order, thereby lending credence to that ideology. (3)

Which is basically a melodramatic way of saying that the relative power of the US in the world is declining in relation to the increasing influence of China and Russia and that big powers continue to maximize their own influence. And of course they seek to take advantage of the fact that the US is currently led by a President with no strategic vision beyond self-enrichment and no capability of conducting anything like normal diplomacy.

Russia has formal relationships with Iran and they have been cooperating with Iran since the joint US attack in January:

The expectation that Russia would come to Iran's aid is based not least on the support that Iran has provided to Russia in the war against Ukraine. The close relations between the two countries go further back. Since 2015 at the latest, when Tehran and Moscow both intervened militarily in Syria to support the regime of Bashar al-Assad, cooperation between the two states has become much more intensive, especially in the military sphere. The Western sanctions that hit Russia after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and especially since the major attack on Ukraine in 2022 also indirectly contributed to a rapprochement. The US had already imposed the first sanctions on Iran in 1979, followed later by other Western countries, and these coercive measures were also tightened after 2022. (4)

Mearsheimer does not see any immediate threat of direct, overt Russian aggression against current NATO members. He notes that the current war with Ukraine has produced a lot of Russian casualties and has done significant damage to its economy. On the other hand, despite all the triumphalist rhetoric from Western critics of Russia, Russia has ramped up its military production in a big way since 2022 and now has a much larger army with considerable combat experience. Which is presumably not the result expected by those who accept as quasi-religious dogma that the Soviet war against the Muslim guerrilla fighters in Afghanistan brought down the Soviet Union. (Or their war against the “brave mujahideen freedom fighters”, if one prefers).

Notes:

(1) "New Low in U.N. History": Trita Parsi on Trump's Threat to Annihilate Iran at General Assembly. Democracy Now! YouTube channel 09/23/2026. <https://youtu.be/l5vl6zkDCOM?si=YDfETUUzLzcbXt09> (Accessed: 2026-24-09).

(2) John Mearsheimer-Offensive Realism YouTube channel 09/22/2026. <https://youtu.be/zmatx3ZJDKY?si=QlAyFMd6owaCBUHj> (Accessed: 2026-24-09).

(3) Kuo, Mercy (2026): The China-Russia Factor in the Iran War. The Diplomat 09/23/2026. <https://thediplomat.com/2026/09/the-china-russia-factor-in-the-iran-war/> (Accessed: 2026-24-09).

(4) Gasimov, Zaur (2026): Balanceakt im Nebel des Krieges. Die Beziehungen zwischen Russland und Iran. Osteuropa 76:1-2, 83-84. Translation from the German original.

Kamala and Al-Sayed

Democratic progressives were understandably concerned about whether Kamala Harris’ appearance with Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed on Tuesday would help El-Sayed more than hurt him. They appeared together at a roundtable discussion focused on material health for African-American women.

MS NOW carried the appearance live: (1)

Fitting for the setting, she makes a solid Democratic indictment of Trump’s cutbacks in health care opportunities via Medicaid. Including declaring, “The attack on DEI is an attack on maternal care.” She can make this kind of appeal when she puts her mind to it, as many California voters are likely to recall from her years as Senator. This is a style she did not adopt often enough in her role as Vice President.

The setting was a good one to allow El-Sayed to remind voters that he is a medical doctor who takes health care policy issues very seriously who can convey urgency and seriousness in addressing such issues. The discussion is a also good reminder that issues of health and social justice are also proverbial “kitchen table” issues, the cliché of which Democratic political consultants seem to be so fond.

Kamala is highly likely to be a candidate for the 2028 Democratic Presidential nomination. So going to Michigan for a high-profile appearance with one of the current new starts of the Democratic Party is an obvious move for her. But criticisms of her and the Biden Administration by grassroots progressive Democrats have made her somewhat less than a highly-desired campaign supporter in various statewide races. As the New York Times reports:

Democratic candidates, wary of campaigning with someone tied to the unpopular Biden administration, have not rushed to take Ms. Harris up on [her offers to make campaign appearances for them]. In recent weeks, Democratic Senate candidates in Alaska [Mary Peltola], Iowa [Josh Turek] and Kansas — states without large Black populations — have pre-emptively and publicly uninvited her from campaigning with them.

Several Democrats mentioned in the Harris donor document as candidates who could use her help do not appear eager, either. Aides to James Talarico and Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic nominees for the Senate and governor in Texas, as well as to Gov. Katie Hobbs in Arizona, told The Times that they did not want Ms. Harris to come.(2)

So her joint appearance with El-Sayed may be more significant for Kamala’s future electoral prospects than it is for El-Sayed’s current campaign. She also has plans to appear together with Sen. Jon Ossoff in Georgia, who is running to retain his current seat.

Without rehashing the whole sad story of her Presidential candidacy after Biden’s withdrawal from the race, it seems to be a fair assumption that lack of enthusiasm for her candidacy among the Democratic base contributed a lot to the lower Democratic turnout in 2024 compared to 2022. Her refusal to criticize Biden over his effectively unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza War was a serious discouragement to many potential Democratic voters. Grassroots Democrats were also very concerned about Trump’s xenophobic positions, and with very good reason.

Democrats and Immigration

But Harris in the 2024 campaign also complained that the Democrats wanted to be even tougher on deportations than Republicans but the mean Republicans were blocking those proposals in Congress!

The last big federal immigration reform was passed during Ronald Reagan’s Presidency with his support that created a quick path for longer-term undocumented residents but failed to create a realistic legal program for needed immigrant workers, which are particularly essential in US agriculture and construction. George W. Bush as President proposed an actual liberal immigration reform that would have addressed that as well.

Sadly, neither Presidents Bill Clinton nor Barack Obama nor Joe Biden proposed anything similar, though Obama’s “Dreamers” programs was a decent gesture but far from what the Bush proposal would have been. Clinton adopted a cruel policy violating international law that refused to allow Haitian asylum-seekers to land in the US and instead set up an ugly program of detaining them in Guantanamo Bay, which including denying urgently needed medical aid for HIV patients. Democrats can rightly claim high deportation rates of undocumented immigrants during the Obama and Biden Presidencies - but they couldn’t be bothered to try to pass constructive immigration reforms even as liberal as those of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. And Kamala Harris as the 2024 Presidential candidate had only more hardline anti-immigrant rhetoric to offer.

The ACLU in 2024 appealed to Kamala and the Democrats for a more constructive policy: “As shown in poll after poll, the American public wants policies that provide status to longtime undocumented residents and provide an orderly, fair, and secure path to apply for humanitarian protection in the United States.” Her campaign did not take the advice.

Human rights advocates, progressives, and anyone with a concern for a pragmatic and realistic immigration policy are right to be critical of the Democrats’ poor record in this regard. And of course under Stephen Miller’s draconian anti-immigrant policies during Trump 2.0, it’s difficult for anyone to imagine Republicans advocating the kind of pragmatic and even decent immigration reforms enacted by Reagan and advocated by Bush II.

And Harris’ campaign managers somehow thought it would be a great idea for her to campaign together with Liz Chaney, who supported her father’s war in Iraq and the torture program he championed. Except perhaps for “Trump”, the name “Cheney” is about as toxic a signal to Democratic voters as it could be.

Harris in 2026

One of the establishment Democrats’ arguments that became standard in the 2016 primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders was to argue that Sanders received fewer Black votes than Hillary and to claim this showed an inadequate commitment by progressives to the establishment version of “identity politics.” This trope is still around, and its advocates point to the fact that El-Sayed’s primary opponent Haley Stevens. Stevens immediately endorsed El-Sayed after the primary.

Harris’ appearance with El-Sayed should help reassure any Democratic-leaning voters who might actually worried about that tired argument. With just over a month left before the election, it’s entirely normal that the party's last Presidential nominee would want to boost the official Democratic Senate candidate in a large state like Michigan! And this is Kamala endorsing him and his candidacy, not him endorsing her for a new Presidential run.

Moral of the story: It’s much better for Democratic Presidential candidates to campaign with leaders like Abdul El-Sayed instead of Liz Cheney!

Originally posted in the ProDA-Progressive Caucus of Democrats Abroad Substack.

Notes:

(1) LIVE: Kamala Harris stumps with El-Sayed. MS NOW YouTube channel 09/23/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/EmsZsYsmzz0?si=DP-n8M8QxaOD3Fct> (Accessed 2026-23-09).

(2) Epstein, Reid (2026): Many Democrats Are Avoiding Kamala Harris. Abdul El-Sayed Is Welcoming Her. New York Times 09/225/2026. <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/22/us/politics/kamala-harris-el-sayed-michigan-midterms.html?searchResultPosition=1> (Accessed: 2026-22-09).

Bad guys you may never have heard of: Danube Institute of the United States [DIUS], defending “Western civilization”

Annika Brockschmidt is a German historian and excellent political analyst who is very well informed on the US Christian Right, and on the Trumpista movement more generally.

Her article on the Danube Institute features this image: (1)

As she explains:

The majority of the homepage is occupied by a pair of buildings. On the left is the 2000-year-old Roman Pantheon, whose famous inscription informs the onlooker that “Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius built this during his third consulship.” On the right, a much younger historical landmark, the familiar cupola of the US Capitol. Above both a headline declares, in all caps: “TWO CONTINENTS. ONE CIVILIZATION. Fighting for Our Future.”

This isn’t a website for an organization dedicated to classical architecture or travel, it’s the homepage of the Danube Institute of the United States [DIUS], a nonprofit “public charity” associated with the Budapest-based Danube Institute, which was built by Hungary’s former prime minister Viktor Orbán and his right-wing allies to (successfully) establish a hub of the International Right in Hungary. Just as the future of the government-funded DI was clouded by uncertainty due to Orbán’s recent defeat, the US version was quietly launched last month. With ties to the Heritage Foundation just like the Hungarian original, the new DIUS (which is registered as a 501(c)(3) public charity, vows to “[form] a bridge across our common civilization. Two continents. One conservative movement. One chance to fight… [to build] a West worth preserving.” [emphasis in original]

The idea of a Nationalist International is a bit bizarre in concept. But it’s not at all new. European fascism in the 20th century was very much an international phenomenon and its influence extended beyond Europe, including into the US.

That doesn’t mean they were ideologically identical in all respects, of course. In the rogue’s gallery of far-right leaders shown above, Georgia Meloni shares the authoritarian and anti-immigration Zeitgeist of the others. But her own ruling party is not pro-Russian in its orientation while the Fidesz party of the also-pictured Victor Orbán is pro-Russian.

Brockschmidt also notes how “the West” functions in the political vocabulary of the Nationalist International:

The “saving the West” narrative is widely used by right-wing European populists and extremists, because, unlike traditional Christian nationalisms, it packages a similar civilizational, racial, and religious sense of hierarchy into a more secular framework. This makes it useful in the more secular areas of Europe so it can retain its appeal to both the conservative mainstream and right-wing extremists like the AfD, while still inviting the Christian Right into the fold. It can be deployed in opposition to LGBTQ-rights and feminism—although these days it’s largely used to frame migration, specifically of Muslim immigrants, as an existential threat to the “true” (white and Christian) European identity. [emphasis added]

The historian Josephin Quinn reminds us that the concept of “the West” as distinct civilization is historically relatively new, and emerged in the context of wars and political rivalries:

[T]he increasing popularity of the language of 'Europe' in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reflects continued fear of the Turkish empire to the east and new distaste for the 'savages' encountered further west. By 1748 Montesquieu could contrast the 'genius for liberty' in Europe's states with despotic Asia's 'spirit of servitude'.

But it was only in the nineteenth century that scholars mapped shared cultures on to specific geographies that emerged and developed in isolation from each other. This is when they fused ideas of Europe, East and West, reinforced them with notions of civilisations and racial hierarchy, and invented 'Western Civilisation'.

The question we now face is not whether Western Civilisation is bad or good, but whether civilisational thinking helps explain much of anything at all. Understanding societies in terms of lonely trees and isolated islands is 200 years out of date and it is demonstrably, historically, wrong. lt is time to find new ways to organise our common world. [emphasis added] (2)

The rhetoric of “civilization” for the far right in not about good conduct or constructive political and economic policies. It’s about race and nationalism.

But she also stresses that Western “civilization” in the sense of soft power was also not purely “Western”:

Fascination among the European intelligentsia with contemporary Turkish power, Arabic traditions, Chinese society or Native American thought was not always predicated on Western superiority. And fascination with the foreign past continued: the first English translation of Kalila wa-Dimna [a Persian collection of animal fables] was published in 1570 by Sir Thomas North, whose translations of Plutarch inspired several of Shakespeare's plays. As an editor put it in 1888, it was 'the English version of an Italian adaptation of a Spanish translation of a Latin version of a Hebrew translation of an Arabic adaptation of the Pehlevi version of the Indian original'.

Which seems like a good excuse to insert this clip of Peter, Paul and Mary singing a Pete Seeger song: (3)

Notes:

(1) Brockschmidt, Annika (2026): The Innocuous-Sounding Glue That Binds the Global Right. Religion Dispatches 08/14/2026. <https://religiondispatches.org/2026/08/14/innocuous-sounding-glue-binds-global-right> (Accessed: 2026-18-09). The image is apparently from Religion Dispatches rather than from the Danube Institute itself.

(2) Quinn, Josephine (2024): How the World Made the West: A 4,000 Year History, 415-416. London: Bloomsbury.

(3) All mixed up by Peter, Paul and Mary (1992). Lane Cohen YouTube channel 11/24/2025. <https://youtu.be/9pJQk5XN_GY?si=bBxJ-804Y36YiNrd> (Accessed: 2026-20-09).

Abdul El-Sayed schools FOX News hack about asking sleazy questions

Kamala Harris, the 2024 Presidential nominee and Joe Biden’s Vice President, plans to campaign for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan in support of his Senate race as the Democratic nominee.

El-Sayed went into the proverbial lion’s den back in August with Jesse Watters on FOX News state TV:

This is instructive, since Watters doesn’t even pretend to be anything but a partisan hack in the interview. (Trigger warning! Non-Republicans may find Watters’ approach to be downright skin-crawling.) Actual journalists try to ask probing and challenging questions. But parodies of journalism like FOX News are only interested in “gotcha questions” and seek to elicit comments that can easily be clipped and used out of context against El-Sayed or any other Democratic figure they can pillory.

It’s interesting in a tactical sense to see how El-Sayed responds to Watters’ non-stop provocations in a way that gets across his own points while highlighting the Watters’ obvious and pronounced attitude of sneering contempt towards him. The Republicans and their media hacks are good at that approach, and Democrats constantly have to look for ways to counter it.

It’s also notable that El-Sayed treats Watters as what he is, a polemicist attacking him on a partisan basis (with dumb talking points) while constantly highlighting the sort of hack pseudo-journalism that Watters embodies.

He doesn’t flinch when Watters says, “you want socialized healthcare.” He doesn’t quibble over the phrasing but instead talks about how his proposal would bring down health care costs. With the Republicans babbling this year about Democrats being Communists - a Golden Oldie of an accusation that they never seem to be able to give up entirely – it’s worth keeping in mind that Medicare for All would “socialize” health insurance, just as the current Medicare program does, i.e., the government would provide it instead of private insurers.

Back in the 1940s when President Harry Truman was advocating his own version of Medicare for All, the Republicans seized on the concept of “socialized medicine” to characterize the government-owned hospitals that were part of the new British public healthcare system that the postwar Labour government had enacted – which the Republicans then as now regarded as a terrible thing to have. One advantage of having more Democratic candidates now explicitly embracing the concept of democratic socialism is that they are more accustomed to handing the use of “socialism” as a smear word. But there is also a general history of Democratic advocacy for government-provided heath insurance since Truman’s day that has pushed back on such rhetorical postures – including contrasting the frustrations millions of people experience with private health insurance to how well the nationalized health insurance known as Medicare functions.

A notable moment is when Watters asks El-Sayed if he wants to abolish the Second Amendment, with FOX News featuring this caption during that part of the discussion:

El-Sayed doesn’t duck the question, though he dismisses it. And why shouldn’t he? If he’s not advocating a particular position, there’s no reason to play the game of answering a clickbait question.

Not that any Republicans actually care, but it was first in 2008 that the Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller recognized the Second Amendment as supposedly conveying any private, individual right to own guns. The Amendment itself is explicit that it’s about the right of states to form their own official militias, known as the National Guard these days. And at the time, such state militias were used as slave patrols to capture runaway slaves. It was an explicit concession by the free states to the slave states.

The fact that the 2nd Amendment specifically authorizes state militias could wind up playing an important role in blocking attempts by the Trump Administration to use state militias to interfere with November’s voting and vote-counting procedures. California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom just made a a move that's both substantive and usefully symbolic:

... Governor Gavin Newsom today signed a bill that would prohibit other state militaries from entering California without the Governor’s explicit permission.

At a time when the Trump administration is increasingly treating states as targets rather than partners, Senate Bill 1354 by Senator Bob Archuleta (D-Pico Rivera) makes clear that California will not surrender its constitutional role, its values, or the rights of the nearly 40 million people who call this state home.

This new law gives the Governor — as commander in chief of California’s militia — a defined role in determining when out-of-state military forces may enter California for state missions.

Finally, around 18:00 in the video clip, Watters does his duty as a FOX “News” hack and sets himself up to look ridiculous by asking El-Sayed if he supports sex change surgeries for minors. As anyone with the slightest familiarity with US laws on the subject knows, such surgeries for minors are illegal in all fifty states. This is a classic hack tactic to try to get a Democratic candidate to sound like he’s defending something that is not “A Thing” because it’s illegal across the country and no Democratic nominee for anything is advocating it. Watters asks El-Sayed (who’s a medical doctor) if he thinks “it’s okay for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” (FOX News always tries to keep it classy!)

El-Sayed’s response: “Do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised? … You probably should want to move on.”

 

This post originally appeared on the ProDA-Progressive Democrats Abroad Substack.

Effective and constructive foreign policy requires actual diplomacy

Paul Krugman during the post-2008 period promoted a comment from the economist Rudiger Dohrnbush about the 1994 Mexican debt crisis: “It took forever and then it took a night.”

Something similar might be said of the year 2026 in American foreign policy.

Anatol Lieven spoke to Tom Switzer about the protracted war of attrition in the Russia-Ukraine War: (2)

Über-Realist John Mearsheimer talks about the current situation of the war and comments he heard on a recent visit to Russia: (3)

Trita Parsi also discusses the disaster of the US-Israel War on Iran: (4)

A couple of things stand out in these videos. One is how drastically the previous US status has declined. Some of that was more-or-less inevitable as China became relatively more powerful and as countries like India and Brazil became more influential. But we can hardly say it has been a smoothly managed decline over the last six decades or so.

But there are longer trends, and there are the specifics of diplomacy and military policy. There is an old saying: It’s easier to get into a war than to get out of one. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine War and the current Iran War, the US could declare it’s just stopping its participation in both. In practice, though, any half-stable peace settlement in both cases would require complicated diplomacy conducted by competent diplomats. And, as the discussions above indicate, the Trump Administration has been incapable of that in both cases.

The current diplomatic gambit of Canada becoming a possible “associate member” of the EU is only one illustration of the tailspin in which basic US diplomacy finds itself. Currently there is no such thing as an EU “associate member,” by the way, though the EU does have elaborate diplomatic networks, including official “partnerships.” The EU is more flexible and creative than American pundits tend to think. So associate membership could become A Thing. It’s worth noting that becoming a full member of the EU includes an explicit mutual defense commitment. So Canada joining such an alliance would inevitably been seen as a negative thing by the US, and not just by Trumpistas.

Sometimes, plain incompetence plays a bigger role in statecraft than we would like to think.

A further comment on the status of the war in Ukraine. It’s a stalemate. Since mid-2023, it’s become a protracted version of the trench warfare of the First World War, only this time with efficient drones instead of rudimentary air forces. There are still respectable media evaluations claiming that Russia is on the ropes and if Western nations keep pouring aid into Ukraine and cheering for the home team (Ukraine), then Ukraine will somehow someday win and Russia will be humiliated and revert to the internal mess of the early 1990s. Or something like that.

This is where serious diplomacy by the US in conjunction with the EU countries and Britain could be useful in coming up with a Korea-style settlement, which seems to be the most optimistic prospect for Ukraine and Europe in the immediately foreseeable future. No European country is going to commit forces to direct combat with Russia inside Ukraine in the current situation. And by most accounts, it certainly appears that Russia is able and willing to continue the war of attrition indefinitely. The Russia-hawk crew in the foreign policy establishment still seems to be committed to the fantasy that the US-backed mujahedeen “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan were what brought down the USSR. And if the Ukrainians will stay willing to continue the war, that will weaken Russia.

But actual stable settlements for Ukraine and the Middle East requires competent diplomacy. And the Trump 2.0 regime seems incapable of that in either region.

Notes:

(1) Interviews-Dr. Rudi Dornbusch. Frontline website, n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/mexico/interviews/dornbusch.html> (Accessed: 2026-17-09).

(2) Is Ukraine winning the war? Lieven. Switzerland with Tom Switzer YouTube channel 09/16/2026. <https://www.youtube.com/live/2HIs-InkolM?si=Byx44T32dXKOQXR9> (Accessed: 2026-17-09).

(3) John Mearsheimer-Offensive Realism YouTube channel 09/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/M0MpV8RdDlk?si=08IrJSPiv3AkMXjJ> (Accessed: 2026-17-09).

(4) Why some US allies are quietly rooting for Iran. Middle East Eye YouTube channel 09/16/2026. <https://youtu.be/42IQjld0on0?si=d9PIG4tpn4D9L2-6> (Accessed: 2026-17-09).

The latest round of hand-wringing over not pandering to the radical right (Saxony-Anhalt edition)

The first-place finish of the far-right German party Alternative for Germany (Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) in the federal state (Bundesland) of Saxony-Anhalt (Sachsen-Anhalt) has set off a new round of discussion about what would happen if another Nazi-like government should come to power in Germany.

Some sample headlines:

Le Monde English: France stunned by the far-right's victory in Germany's Saxony-Anhalt regional elections

Reuters: Far-right win leaves Germany's Merz shaken as AfD plots path to power

New York Times: This Tiny Anti-Establishment Party May Put Germany’s Far Right in Power

Der Spiegel Substack: Germany’s Political Tailspin

Here is a good discussion by two scholars, Jackson Janes and Zsuzsanna Vegh, on the implications of the Saxony-Anhalt vote via the Krasno Global Events Series at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill: (1)

The question of the AfD’s vote percentage in this smaller Bundesland is tied up with larger international disputes over whether democratic parties should maintain a “firewall” against far-right, antidemocratic parties. The “firewall” is a Germany-wide and EU-wide issue. But each election has its own peculiarities. This is an attempt to put the news and the post-election discussion into a broader context.

It’s worth noting that the Trump 2.0 Administration supports the AfD as one of their favored European parties:

U.S. President Donald Trump has congratulated Alternative for Germany (AfD) Tuesday for its landslide victory in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the far-right party won nearly 44 percent of the votes on Sunday.

“Wow! The Populist Party in Germany just had a really big night,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “They finally got tired of the absolutely horrible Immigration rules and regulations which have hurt Germany so badly.” He concluded his message with a German variant of his Make America Great Again acronym, “MGGA!!!” [Of course, Trump and/or his Truth Social assistant Natalie Harp got the AfD's name wrong!]

It is unusual for a sitting U.S. president to comment on German state elections, however the Trump administration has cultivated close ties with the AfD. U.S. Vice President JD Vance met the party’s co-leader Alice Weidel at the Munich Security Conference in February 2025 and criticized Germany’s “firewall” against the party. AfD officials visited the White House later that year, and senior Trump allies and administration figures have repeatedly backed the party. (2)

At that now-infamous appearance at the Munich Security Conference in 2025, our Opus Dei Vice President J.D. Vance lectured the European democracies about how they shouldn’t have a “firewall” against specific parties because it is undemocratic to do so.

His argument, of course, was nonsense. In parliamentary systems, it is part of the system that any party that does not win a majority of seats will form a coalition with one or more parties to form a government. The fact that they choose some party over the others to form a government doesn’t mean they are being undemocratic to the parties that are not included in the coalition. It’s just how parliamentary systems work.

Saxony-Anhalt has a population of 2.2 million, making it one of the smaller German federal states. For comparison, it has a smaller population than the US State of Mississippi (3.0 million) but bigger than Wyoming (a little less than 600 thousand). Sachsen-Anhalt was part of the former East Germany, the German Democratic Republic (GDR). It was an important industrial state in the GDR but industry has declined in a major way since German unification in 1990.

This is a map showing Saxony-Anhalt in the north of Germany (Wikipedia):

Saxony-Anhalt rarely makes worldwide news unless there is some kind of political or physical disaster. (The same is true for Mississippi and Wyoming in the US.)

The states in Germany all have parliamentary governments, as does Germany at the national level.

The six parties that won seats in the Saxony-Anhalt state parliament (Landtag) were the following. The parties are seated in their order in the left-to-right ranking, as follows:

The Left (Die Linke)
Social Democratic Party (SPD)
Greens Social Democratic Party (SPD)
Christian Democratic Union (CDU)
Bundnis Sarah Wageknecht (BSW)
Alternative für Deutschland (Afd)

This table shows them in that right-to-left configuration with their party colors (Wikipedia, 08/15/2026):

What would an AfD-headed government look like in Sachsen-Anhalt?

The Saxony-Anhalt Landtag has 83 seats, so it would take parties representing at least 42 seats to form a government. The AfD has 39 seats. And if we go by the ranking, it could form a majority with the BSW. But a two-seat majority is pretty thin. And the BSW takes it name from its leader Sarah Wageknecht who, to put it generously, has played a quirky political role since 1990, from a Communist hardliner to a xenophobic populist.

This means that the likelihood is the AfD would either have to form a government with CDU participation. They could also form a minority government that would be “tolerated” by the CDU or the BSW. The best chance the AfD has for a Landtag government that could survive for more than a few weeks would be a coalition government with the CDU as junior partner.

The “firewall” against the far right

There has been much discussion in the press about what in German politics is called a “firewall.” Since the German Federal Republic (West Germany) was founded in 1949, the pro-democracy parties have pursued a policy of not making coalitions with parties that show signs of not being pro-democracy. For decades, German politics had basically three parties: the SPD, the CDU/CSU (Christian Democratic conservative), and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). The FDP is a liberal party in the sense that “liberal” is used basically everywhere in the world but the US and Canada, i.e.: business-friendly, deregulation, civil liberties, austerity economics, limited government.

(The CDU and the CSU (Christian Social Union) operate as a cooperative bloc in national elections. The CSU is essentially a Bavarian party, which is generally more conservative than the CDU.)

The German Green Party – officially Bündnis 90/Die Grünen – was founded in 1980 and has played a “kingmaker” role in national policy by winning enough votes to be a junior partner to the SPD and the CDU.

The Left Party is historically an organizational descendant of the former East German Communist Party (more-or-less).

Although smaller parties were active, from 1949 to 1989 (Fall of the Berlin Wall) Germany’s politics was basically a three-party system. The laws in Germany and Austria and in various other European democracies allow for banning parties that don’t support the basic democratic and constitutional governments. While that can sound ham-fisted to Americans alert to civil-liberties violations, in practice the American legal system does the same thing. There are legal definitions of what legally constitutes a political party.

So when we hear about the AfD in Germany or its model party the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) being far-right and anti-democracy parties, that is a political judgment, and a scholarly one for professional researchers and political scientists. And politics is about, well, making political judgments.

It has been the practice in Germany and Austria and various other countries since the Second World War has been to avoid coalition governments at the national or state level with far-right parties. This was based in particular on how both Mussolini and Hitler came to power with the endorsement and support of conservative, non-fascist parties.

But 1922 and 1932 were a long time ago. So, the argument goes, why not let them into a coalition government and see if that “tames” them? The record with the FPÖ in Austria is clear. After decades in which the FPÖ took place in state governments and had two stints as a coalition partner with the Austrian Christian-conservative ÖVP at the national level –which went really badly both times – the FPÖ is basically as extremist and irresponsible as it ever was. (And that’s putting it generously!)

Another line of argument, also plausible on its surface, is that the far-right parties are responding to voters’ feeling of “economic discontent” (to use a favorite phrase of lazy US legacy media commentators) or vague alienation or social-status jitters when people look at immigrants all over the place. It’s not that these kinds of commentaries are completely wrong. But those who use them often try to avoid more specific and relevant observations. Usually this is accompanied by advice to the more mainstream and pro-democracy parties to try to make constructive compromises with far-right critics and cooperate on constructive policies.

In the European context, xenophobia has been a remains central focus for far-right parties, certainly including the AfD and the FPÖ. Experience from France, Britain, Italy, Germany, Austria and the US and other places as well has shown remarkably consistently that when the conservative parties try to attract voters by aping the xenophobic politics of the far right, it weakens support for the conservative parties and increases support for the far-right parties.

Harry Truman addressing the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a left-liberal activist group, told them in 1952:

I've seen it happen time after time. When the Democratic candidate allows himself to be put on the defensive and starts apologizing for the New Deal and the fair Deal, and says he really doesn't believe in them, he is sure to lose. The people don't want a phony Democrat. If it's a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat, and I don't want any phony Democratic candidates in this campaign. [emphasis added] (3)

Something similar happens in European elections, as well. It’s just that with parliamentary systems, there are typically several significant parties from which to choose, not just two.

Notes:

(1) The Rise of the Far-Right AfD Party in Germany with Dr. Jackson Janes & Zsuzsanna Vegh. DrasnoUNC YouTube channel 09/14/2026. https://youtu.be/cPZzwjoZQO4?si=ovcklsLrqKvUWZon (Accessed: 2026-16-09).

(2) Zakharova, Daria (2026): Trump hails AfD win in Saxony-Anhalt. Politico EU 09/09/2026. <https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-congratulates-afd-saxony-anhalt-election-win/> (Accessed: 2026-16-09).

(3) LibQuotes. <https://libquotes.com/harry-s-truman/quote/lbx4f8m> (Accessed: 2026-16-09).

The Carter Doctrine and the US role in the Middle East today

The Carter Doctrine isn't much mentioned today. But it represented a major step toward the involvements the US has more recently undertaken in the Greater Middle East, including Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran.

Nikolas Gvosdev mentions it in The Carter Doctrine Conundrum: Has Trump Repudiated a Foundational Element of U.S. National Security Strategy? The National Interest 01/10/2020:

Forty years ago, President Jimmy Carter made a commitment that the United States would guarantee the free flow of energy from the Persian Gulf region to the rest of the world. In his State of the Union address [01/23/1980], he declared that instability in the region “demands collective efforts to meet this new threat to security in the Persian Gulf and in Southwest Asia. It demands the participation of all those who rely on oil from the Middle East and who are concerned with global peace and stability. And it demands consultation and close cooperation with countries in the area which might be threatened. Meeting this challenge will take national will, diplomatic and political wisdom, economic sacrifice, and, of course, military capability. We must call on the best that is in us to preserve the security of this crucial region. Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.” His successor as president, Ronald Reagan, issued a “corollary” to the so-called Carter Doctrine in October 1981, whereby the internal stability of the governments of the region, as well as defending them from external attack, became a prime national interest of the United States. [emphasis added]

George McGovern addressed the Carter Doctrine a few months after it was promulgated in How to Avert a New 'Cold War' The Atlantic June 1980. The title of the article is a reminder that while today the Cold War is conventionally dated from 1945-1948 to 1989, definitions have varied. Global Security's entry on Cold War reads:

By one reckoning, the Cold War began in the 1945-1948 timeframe, and ended in 1989, having been a dispute over the division of Europe. By another account, the Cold War began in 1917 with the Bolshevik Revolution, and ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union, having been a conflict between Bolshevism and Democracy.

The latter definition is a quirky and very ideological (i.e., hard right) one and is much more rare.

The term "Cold War" was first used in 1947 by Bernard Baruch, senior advisor to Harry Truman, the 33rd president of the United States, in reference to the frequently occurring and exacerbating crises between the United States and the former Soviet Union, despite having fought side-by-side against Nazi Germany in the Second World War.

The ultra-respectable Encyclopædia Britannica expands on the origin of the term:

The term was first used by the English writer George Orwell in an article published in 1945 to refer to what he predicted would be a nuclear stalemate between “two or three monstrous super-states, each possessed of a weapon by which millions of people can be wiped out in a few seconds.” It was first used in the United States by the American financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch in a speech at the State House in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1947.

Britannica leans toward the later beginning date: "The Cold War had solidified by 1947–48, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe had brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets had installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe." (emphasis added) They also use 1991 as the end date, but focus on the ebbs and flows of its intensity:

The 1970s saw an easing of Cold War tensions as evinced in the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) that led to the SALT I and II agreements of 1972 and 1979, respectively, in which the two superpowers set limits on their antiballistic missiles and on their strategic missiles capable of carrying nuclear weapons. That was followed by a period of renewed Cold War tensions in the early 1980s as the two superpowers continued their massive arms buildup and competed for influence in the Third World. But the Cold War began to break down in the late 1980s during the administration of Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev. ...

On December 31, 1991, the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist, and 15 Soviet republics became independent countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. The Cold War had come to an end.

It was the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 that presented the opportunity to announce the Carter Doctrine.

Given my admiration for Carter's post-Presidential career and his important and substantive contributions to world peace, I'm almost tempted to apologize for discussing the problematic nature of his signature foreign policy doctrine as President. But the reality is, it was an unncessary surrender to the hawks in his administration led by National Securit Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski. And we now know that it had some grim implications. Not the least of them was the contribution that the US support for the mujahadeen Islamic fighters opposing the pro-Soviet government played in generating the brand of Muslim fundamentalist terrorism with which we have more recently become familiar. Osama bin Laden got his start as a jihadist in Afghanistan.

Robert Hunter, a National Security Council staffer at the time, writes that he "conceived the Carter Doctrine and, except for the 'action clause' cited above, added by National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, I wrote virtually all the State of the Union Address" that announced it. (The Persian Gulf Crisis: Beyond The Carter Doctrine LobeLog 09/23/2019) He also argues that the original version was focused very much on the Soviet Union: "the purpose was both clear and limited: to make sure that Moscow did not miscalculate". He elaborates:

Consider the circumstances in January 1980. To Western surprise, the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan. It had forces capable of pushing into Iran, perhaps all the way to the Persian Gulf. Iran was in the throes of a revolution. The United States seemed paralyzed regarding what to do about the U.S. hostages held by the new Iranian government under Ayatollah Khomeini. Thus, the Carter Doctrine had only one purpose, other than to state the obvious (that the flow of oil was important): to deter the Soviet Union.

McGovern argued in 1980 - very plausibly - that the Carter Administration had overrated the nature of the kind of Soviet threat the Afghanistan intervention represented. And he explained his concern that the Carter Doctrine played to the advantage of Cold War hardliners:

To all these possible factors--local, regional, and internal to the Soviet Union--the Carter Administration was indifferent, caught up as it was in the excitement of unveiling its new doctrine. It was almost as if, when the Soviets moved into Afghanistan, we were relieved to find ourselves freed from the complexities of ird World nationalism and the Islamic revival and back on the comfortably familiar turf of a bipolar Cold War world. Once they heard the call of the Carter Doctrine, the Iranians would naturally forget about the shah, the Arabs would forget their differences with Israel, our allies in Western Europe and Japan would gratefully follow our lead, and all would join with us in a grand alliance against Soviet aggression. Now the unwelcome "lesson of Vietnam"--as Daniel Yergin put it, "that 'fundamental designs' may be illusory and that global implications may be secondary to local issues"--could also be cast aside. Americans could be patriots again, without bothering to make the troublesome distinction between patriotism and jingoism.

In this altered environment our "hawks" joyfully trumpet the coming of the "second Cold War." They are also proclaiming their own vindication: have they not warned us all along that detente would fail? They have indeed, but the question remains whether they merely foresaw the breakdown, or helped to contrive it.

McGovern made a point of the kind I dearly wish we heard more often from Democratic leaders today:

Preventing nuclear war has become a national interest second to no other, as well as an interest we share with the Soviet Union and with all other nations. It cannot be too often emphasized that a third world war would in no sense be comparable with the ërst and second world wars, which, destructive though they were, left the world physically intact. Although projections differ as to which side might emerge from a nuclear war with the larger fraction of its industry intact and of its people still alive, no one contests that the losses would be in the hundreds of millions and that our society and economy, even were we to emerge as the "winner" of the conìict, would be grievously crippled. [my emphasis]

McGovern's long essay covers a lot of other ground relating to the Cold War. It's an impressive piece, one showing that there were alternative contemporary possibilities that could have steered developments in a very different direction.

One comment he made in this article is the one that most stuck with me for years: "In the last resort we must be prepared to use military force to assist friendly governments in the [Persian Gulf] region against external or internal threats." (my emphasis) McGovern was well aware of the ugly imperatives imposed on US foreign policy by the country's (then) direct dependence on foreign oil. These days, , that direct dependence has disappared. And yet our Trump even in his first Presidency was babbling about seizing Middle East oil. (Tim Wyatt, 'Maybe we will, maybe we won't’: Trump doubles down on threat to take oil from Syria Independent 01/11/2020)

McGovern made it clear what kind of solution to the dilemma of that time he preferred: "Strengthening our capacity to defend the Arabian peninsula, coupled with an effective and convincing energy program at home, is the real 'message' we need to send to the Soviets, and for that matter to OPEC and the rest of the world."

Lobe argues on the later development of the Carter Doctrine:

Only later did the Carter Doctrine get morphed into something broader, at least in the view of promoters of a wider set of engagements in the region. This wider set of engagements included, but was not limited to, protecting the flow of oil - the long-standing implicit U.S. interest. Indeed, protecting oil shipments in the Persian Gulf has, along with the U.S. commitment to Israel’s security, been an “evergreen” Middle Eastern interest of all U.S. administrations since the late 1940s, when Britain and France withdrew from the region.

What I have written here may sound Jesuitical, but it is not. It shows that the United States in 1980 was responding to the circumstances of the time - a palpable Soviet military and geopolitical threat - which circumstances collapsed with the end of the Cold War. The evergreen U.S. interests have continued, but without the overarching geopolitical implication - namely, that if the U.S. does not act, a major external competitor for power will fill the vacuum. [my emphasis]

US-Israel War on Iran – until 2029?

I shocked myself listening to a PBS segment a few weeks ago in which David “Bobo” Brooks said he wouldn’t be surprised if the current war with Iran is still going on in January 2029. (1) I’m so used to rolling my eyes at what Bobo has to say about wars, I was surprised that my immediate reaction was, well, he could be right about that!

Given the negative effects of a continuing war on the world economy, that seems hard to imagine. But we could be looking at just that. Scott Lucas recently commented on how the war is continuing and spreading: (2)

The problem is that the only way of avoiding a years-long war is for the US to pull out of the war. Robert Pape in the podcasts below talks about why that turns out to be a difficult decision for leaders to make.

But Trump did make a decision to do just that in Afghanistan in the withdrawal agreement he negotiated with the Taliban in 2020, during his first term. Sylvie Kauffmann reported for Le Monde English:

To begin with, Trump negotiated his withdrawal agreement with the Taliban on his own. Alone, meaning not only were Western partners not consulted, but even the Afghan government was excluded from the talks, a Taliban condition that the US president accepted.

The main concern for the Republican president was to succeed where Barack Obama had failed. He wanted to boast in his 2020 campaign for re-election that he was bringing the boys home. The details of the deal mattered little. [my emphasis] (3)

It was a sloppy deal, which didn’t even involve the US client government in Afghanistan, only the US and the Taliban. But it was left to the Biden Administration to implement the withdrawal in 2021. And Trump is still trashing Biden for the withdrawal from Afghanistan on terms Trump himself agreed to. Would the actual withdrawal itself have been better executed if Trump had been re-elected? Theoretically it’s possible, though it’s hard to imagine. Impossible to imagine, actually.

Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan described the withdrawal as follows:

The president [Biden] had deep conviction on this issue. He thought we had to end the era of forever wars. Whenever he posed the question, how and when does this end, other than with the US just deciding we are calling it, he did not get a satisfactory answer. The answer tended to be one more year and then one more year, and then, finally, President Trump signed a deal with the Taliban that set the date of May 1 2021, for all American troops to be out of Afghanistan. And that was the situation president Biden confronted when he came in. So he had a choice: he could either let May pass and go back to war with the Taliban, at which point he would have had to add troops because Trump had drawn us down to 2,500. So send more forces to fight and die in Afghanistan in the war’s 20th year. Or choose to follow through on a withdrawal, which we then executed over the next four months.

And for President Biden, part of this overall story of renewing the sources of American strength was also taking the massive strategic liability of an endless war in which America was spending blood and treasure and bringing it to a close. And you said it all went wrong. What I would say is that the withdrawal had significant challenges and tragedy, the loss of 13 American service members. But, sitting here today in 2025, I would be happy to debate people who say, no, no no, we should still be in Afghanistan. [my emphasis] (4)

That was a case where just deciding to leave was the only real way from keeping on with an indefinite war that was doing nothing for American interests. Obama as President could have and should have pulled US forces out – but that’s another story. So just pulling out of a forever war is something that Trump knows about.

The huge difference between that war and the current one against Iran is that Afghanistan did not have the ability to bring on a worldwide depression. And the Iran War has involved numerous countries in the Middle in direct combat operations, including Israel. A US exit from the war on terms that will fully restore traffic in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait being blocked by Iran’s Houthi allies in Yemen will have to involve the US putting some substantive restraints on Israel. Iran has been demanding that an agreement would have to include Israeli withdrawal from territory it is illegally occupying in Lebanon and Syria.

And one weakness that the US, Israel, and their allies have is the present shortage of missile interceptors. Mark Cancian of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) recently observed recently:

[T]he U.S. arsenal is depleted. Some elements are quite depleted. We looked at seven munitions that have been heavily used in the war against Iran. Half of them, we've used a quarter to a third, and about half of them, we've used half of the available inventories, and that creates a what we call a window of vulnerability. There are alternatives, but the alternatives involve greater risk. So it will take several years - one to five - to replace these and then another several years after that to get to where the war planners want to be. …

There are the air and missile defense munitions, Patriot is probably the one most people have heard about. And then there are long-range attack munitions. Tomahawk is probably the one that people have heard of. [my emphasis] (5)

In other words, it would require some complex diplomacy by the Trump 2.0 regime. And we haven’t seen much evidence that they are capable of such a thing. So, we really could be looking at Hormuz and Bab-el-Mandeb Straits still closed in January of 2029. And much, much more regional damage in between. Having a US Administration with no actual strategic concepts for foreign policy and no evident ability to conduct normal, competent diplomacy is really a problem.

Israel, of course, remains a major factor and influence on US policy in the Middle East. Given that the Israeli goal for years has been to weaken all potentially rival government in the area while annexing more and more territory contingent to Israel, the current Israeli government is presumably happy about the level of destruction and disruption the US-Israel War on Iran has brought about.

Another legacy from Trump 1.0 is, of course, the cancellation of the JCPOA, the solid nuclear agreement that the Obama Administration negotiated with Iran. Trump in his first term, acting in concert with the demands of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pulled out of the agreement which acted as an effective guarantee that Iran would not acquire a nuclear weapon.

Robert Pape has been doing a lot of interviews this year on the Iran War, which he has been wargaming for years and consulting for the US military on the topic. He presents a sobering picture of the present stance of the Trump 2.0 regime on the war. (6)

In the second podcast at the same YouTube channel, Pape addresses the ways in which Russia has also been affected by an escalation trap in the Russia-Ukraine War, another conflict which Trump 2.0’s lack of strategy and competent diplomacy hasn’t been able to stop. (7) Despite Trump’s infamous campaign promise to stop that war on his first day in office.

Notes:

(1) Brooks and Marcus on the Iran conflict becoming a 'forever war'. PBS NewsHour YouTube channel 07/25/2026. <https://youtu.be/PfqRRLcWFRQ?si=EOu5wMWAnbzxHH8t> (Accessed: 2026-27-07).

(2) US War on Iran Becomes An "Uncontained War" Across Region. Scott Lucas Worldview YouTube channel 09/12/20206. <https://youtu.be/ZLZts79_egU?si=EUIN1PsoYD6ZYcCG> (Accessed: 2026-12-09).

(3) Kauffmann, Sylvie (2025): The 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan, a solo decision. Le Monde English 06/19/2025. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/history/article/2025/06/19/the-2021-us-withdrawal-from-afghanistan-a-solo-decision_6742489_157.html ?srsltid=AfmBOoqoZzZqKT2R4Qagmuopae2deEzfszOHkMvfDtK0r6ILSRpMI008> (Accessed: 2026-27-07).

(4) Rachman, Gideon (2025): Transcript: A foreign policy debrief with Jake Sullivan. Financial Times 05/29/2025. <https://www.ft.com/content/515f4d78-be95-4e09-9be2-8663d0f6d2ec?syn-25a6b1a6=1> (Accessed: 2026-27-07).

(5) Defense strategy expert reviews how the Iran War drains vital U.S. missile inventories. NPR 07/25/2026. <https://www.npr.org/2026/07/25/nx-s1-5904597/defense-strategy-expert-reviews-how-the-iran-war-drains-vital-u-s-missile-inventories> (Accessed: 2026-27-07).

(6) Iran War Expert EXPOSES Trump ESCALATION TRAP!!! (1 of 2). Legal AF YouTube channel 07/26/2026. (Accessed: 2026-26-07).

(7) Iran War Expert REVEALS Trump's CATASTROPHIC FAILURE (2 of 2). Legal AF YouTube channel 07/26/2026. <https://youtu.be/oU_urdNNJJE?si=VFX4iTZc63W9GLV2> (Accessed: 2026-27-07).

25 Years Since the 9/11 Attack

Deutsche Welle English has this new retrospective of nearly and hour and a half on the 9/11 attack. (1)

That documentary describes the event as “the day the world changed forever.”

It’s the sort of platitude that such retrospectives often use. The standard where-we-you-on-that-day anecdotes are featured in the DW documentary, as well. It’s understandable that media retrospectives would use those freely, because it engages personal memories among those who were old enough to remember where they were that day. (I was also somewhere. I won’t bore anyone with the story here.)

Osama bin Laden’s grandiose plan didn’t play out exactly as he hoped: to the extent we know what he was actually hoping. It seems clear that he expected the US to overreact and do a lot of damage to itself and its position in the world. And that did happen. From today’s perspective, he could have done much more to achieve that goal by pouring lots of Saudi oil money into making Donald Trump a Presidential candidate. But it was difficult in 2001 to know what the self-destruction of a unipolar superpower might look like. We have a much better idea now.

As the documentary notes, a huge increase in Western hostility toward Islam in general was one of the subsequent results, with the enthusiastic encouragement of US neoconservatives and the US’ close ally Israel. Now, 25 years later we’re in yet another Forever War with Iran. Which almost certainly will to even much more damage to the US and the Middle East than it already has.

I’m tempted to use the phrase “chickens coming home to roost,” just because it drives rightwingers crazy. But the term “blowback” popularized by Chalmers Johnson seems more useful. As Johnson himself wrote the month after the 9/11 attacks:

The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims. Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any chance of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it no targets. On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are “a beacon for freedom” and because the attackers were “evil.” In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, “This is civilization’s fight.” This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values–as a “clash of civilizations,” in current post-cold war American jargon–is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the “blowback” that America’s imperial projects have generated.

“Blowback” is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA’s fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided “covert operation” of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy. [emphasis added] (2)

Johnson’s concept of blowback was not about karma or morality. It was about taking a practical understanding of possible negative consequences of foreign policy action. It’s about be realistic about cause-and-effect much more so than it is about passing legal or moral judgments on particular actions taken – though such judgements also need to be made.

Important related event sequences

Johnson relates that a big part of this sequence of events was the installation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iraq in 1953 by supporting the overthrown of the more democratic government headed by Mohammad Mossadeq (1882-1967). Operationally that coup was a success that benefitted US and British foreign policy at the time and made international oil corporations very happy – particularly the American ones. (3)

That worked out well from Washington’s official point of view for 27 years, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the 47 years since then, the US has been dealing with the blowback. The 1979 Revolution and the taking of American hostages became a turning point for the view of Islam in general which many policymakers adopted, and which led them to think that actively supporting the Muslim rebels against the Soviet Union and the government in Afghanistan that it backed was a splendid idea. Neocons to this day still cherish the idea that US support for the “brave mujahedeen freedom fighters,” as they were described by the American press was the fatal blow to the existence of the Soviet Union.

Juan Cole wrote in 2018 (during the Trump 1.0 Presidency):

It’s hard today even to imagine that, in the late 1980s, the rightwing Christian Voice Magazine published a “candidate’s biblical scoreboard,” urging its readers (and potential voters) to rate their politicians by how “biblically” they cast their ballots in Congress. One key measure of this: Did that legislator support the anti-Communist Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan, a cause warmly supported by evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign? Now, attempting to appeal to twenty-first-century evangelicals, President Trump has announced that “Islam hates us.”

The kaleidoscope of geopolitics and Islamophobia is now spinning so fast that it should make our heads spin, too. At times, it seems as if Donald Trump is the anti-Ronald Reagan of the twenty-first century, idolizing former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, but seeing former U.S. allies in the Muslim world like Pakistan as purveyors of “nothing but lies and deceit” — until, that is, with bewildering rapidity, he suddenly gives us the “good” (that is, oil-rich) Muslims again, willingly performing a sword dance with the Saudi royals, seemingly entirely comfortable with the scimitar of the Saracen. [empjasis added] (4)

The most famous of those brave mujahedeen freedom fighters was the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, a guy named Osama bin Laden, who was to become America’s Enemy Number One after “Nine Eleven.”

The ties of the US intelligence agencies and in particular those of one-time CIA Director George H.W. Bush and his two-generation Presidential family to the Sunni fundamentalist Saudi monarch were a key element in the process that gave rise to US support of the brave mujahedeen freedom fighters in Afghanistan. (5)

In the 1980s while the US was gleefully assistance the anti-Soviet brave mujahedeen freedom fighters, it didn’t forget Iran in the meantime. St. Ronald Reagan as President managed to do friendly arms-for-hostages deals with Iran to help covertly the pro-dictatorship Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. But from 1980 to 1988, the US was also actively helping our loyal Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein wage war against Iran, including providing him with chemical weapons and nerve gas for that remarkably bloody war.

But then our solid ally Saddam decided to seize some of the territory of Kuwait, an oil-rich company friendly to Saudi Arabia, so President Bush Sr. invaded in 1991 to push Iraq out of Kuwait. This was an intervention sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, a conventional war to push out the forces of an illegal invader. But what the generals call “war termination” has often proved to be very tricky for the US. And so it was with this war.

Having accomplished its main mission, Bush Sr. and his Defense Secretary, Dark Lord Dick Cheney, decided to go for regime change in Baghdad. They encouraged Iraqi Kurds to stage an uprising, which Saddam’s government crushed without the US doing much to support our Kurdish allies. So the US imposed a drastic economic sanctions regime against Iraq that basically led to the Iraq War of 2003-on, whose results are now well known.

And when the collapse of Yugoslavia led to a round of Balkan Wars, the Clinton Administration engaged in the Kosovo War, whose ambiguous results are still a major headache for the foreign policies of European countries. The Clinton Administration also engaged in the intensive four-day bombing campaign against Iraq that was bizarrely designated Operation Desert Fox. (Desert Fox was the nickname of the German general Erwin Rommel of World War II renown.)

In retrospect, the Forever Wars were already underway.

The US invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attack and quickly dispersed the Al Quida forces there, although the Bush II Administration held back from a concentrated strike against their forces when they had withdrawn into the Tora Bora mountains. The Shrub Bush Administration was addicted to a neocon obsession that terrorism was always some form of state-sponsored terrorism, and so continued a war against the Taliban government that lasted until 2021, when the US left with the Taliban once again in control of Afghanistan. (6)

And now we’re in the current Forever War with Iraq. Led by a chowder-headed President who has no idea how to get out of it.

Notes:

(1) 9/11 - The day that changed the world. DW Documentary YouTube channel 09/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/ppUSZlntc7M?si=SfD5nlvQcjFwBUh4> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).

(2) Johnson, Chalmers (2001): Blowback: US actions abroad have repeatedly led to unintended, indefensible consequences. The Nation 09/27/2026/2001. <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/blowback/> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).

(3) Lindsay, James (2026): The 1953 Overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. Council on Foreign Relations 08/19/2026. <https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-1953-overthrow-of-iranian-prime-minister-mohammad-mosaddeq> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).

(4) Cole, Juan (2018): Hating Muslims in the age of Trump: The new Islamophobia looks like the old McCarthyism. Le Monde diplomatique English 10/10/2018. <https://mondediplo.com/openpage/hating-muslims-in-the-age-of-trump> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).

(5) See Craig Unger’s books House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) and The Fall of the House of Bush (2007).

(6) The U.S. War in Afghanistan. Council on Foreign Relations 09/27/2022. <https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-war-afghanistan> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).