Trump’s 2016 victory has generated a growing internal debate within left-leaning circles about the future direction of the Democratic Party. To date, this debate has overwhelmingly focused on domestic questions of the economy, with the Sanders wing transforming policies such as “Medicare for All” into a basic litmus test for party politicians with national ambitions. But it has not left foreign policy totally unscathed.

For a significant and vocal base of party activists, the Bush and Obama years speak to a general and systematic failure of the mainstream national security establishment. Rather than promoting peace and democratic values, that establishment’s focus on market interests and on continuous interventionism deepened global problems of inequality, conflict, and human rights abuse. At the same time, it set the stage for Trump — who implicitly invoked those failures — to distinguish and promote his own bellicose and ethno-nationalist vision of “America First.”

In this context, more and more commentators, myself included have called for the party’s social-democratic faction to offer a meaningful alternative to the bipartisan and long-standing Beltway consensus. To refuse to do so is to leave the country prey to two deeply flawed options, the national security elite’s old and discredited Cold War imperialism or Trump’s dangerous account of an America circled by racial enemies.