For this discussion, we brought together four experts:

The roundtable was moderated by:

The discussion, which took place at the journal’s “Can’t We All Just Get Along?” conference, was held in Washington on January 21, 2026 before the start of the war in Iran. This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Barbara Slavin: Let’s start with some theoreticals. What would happen if Russia isn’t satisfied with the 20 percent of Ukraine that it occupies, and it decides it wants a piece of Estonia that has a large Russian-speaking population, China goes for Taiwan, Israel formally annexes the West Bank? How do you think about these theoreticals, especially in a climate in which we clearly have no international law being respected by the United States anymore and we do what makes Donald Trump feel good on any particular day? So, start with you, Matt.

Matt Duss: I’ll start with the last one first. What if Israel annexes the West Bank? It is already annexing the West Bank. This is happening day to day. It has been happening not just under Donald Trump, it has been happening for years, and the United States did very, very little about it. I’ll come back to this probably a number of times over the course of this conversation, but so much of what Donald Trump is doing in foreign policy is what he has done in policy in general: He makes the subtext into text. He just kind of removes a veil of what a lot of us, or many people in Washington and the United States and our colleagues in Europe—as we’re now seeing are waking up—have been in denial about. He is not a cause of the problem. He is a symptom of a deeper problem. Sorry, he is an accelerant of that problem. But what we see him doing is just sharpening and following through on, I think, a corruption in our politics, a corruption in the so-called rules-based order.

I hope we’ll get a chance to just spend a few minutes on Canadian Prime Minister [Mark] Carney’s speech [on January 20, 2026] in Davos—which I think was very, very important, a landmark speech in a lot of ways—in which he said, we need to recognize this lie of the rules-based order. He cited Václav Havel’s famous “The Power of the Powerless” essay, which is one of the greatest hits of Cold War liberalism. I read it in college, I’m sure everyone here is familiar with it. But also, part of what I note was important there is that now that our Western allies find themselves on the pointy end of this hypocrisy, now it is time to call out the lie. People outside the Western world have understood that this is a lie long before now, but at least we are now in a moment that we are ready to have a more honest conversation.

Slavin: I like that idea. I remember having a conversation with some diplomats talking about hypocrisy, and how we’ve always basically been hypocritical in our defense of human rights, very selective when it suits us. When it’s an adversary, we defend human rights. When it’s an ally, we brush it under the rug. Was it better to be hypocritical or just out there? And these folks said it was better to be hypocritical.

Karen Kornbluh: Obviously we’ve been hypocritical, but as Mark Carney said, it was worth the deal. Because we upheld this international order, we bent the rules when we wanted to, that was the sort of privilege we took for being the hegemon. But it was worth the deal, and what he was saying is it’s no longer worth the deal. So, I don’t think I buy that Trump is an accelerant more than that he’s ripping off the veil. I think we’re going to have to go back to first principles, and, in this Greenland crisis, I think we’ve seen people inch back to first principles, that we need a rules-based order. I think we might see that if we had one of the crises that you talked about, but I think it’s going to be really, really hard to…I mean, what Mark Carney was saying is, we’re not going back. And you felt it with a lot of the others.

My sense is that “America First” was an answer to neoconservatism and neoliberalism, which were seen to put the American worker and the American family last, to ask them to sacrifice. And “America First” was supposed to put them first. And it hasn’t done it at all, by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, prices have been sacrificed already, because of tariffs. Small businesses are hurting, farmers are hurting. So, it already hasn’t made good. And then what it’s threatening over the slightly longer term is dollar dominance. Shutting off foreign markets, and then nuclear proliferation, war, which are all very expensive.

Slavin: Now, think how much it’s costing the French to send troops to Greenland to protect Greenland.

Kornbluh: Yeah, I won’t go further than that, but I do think that there is an enormous opportunity, now that “America First” hasn’t produced what it promised, for us to maybe throw out some of the hypocrisy and come back.

Slavin: How do we redefine it, though, David? I mean, after the debacle of Iraq, Afghanistan, of promoting democracy, so-called, and now we have this sort of naked desire for conquest and grabbing resources. How do we redefine the rules of the road such that people will believe that they’re realistic, that they have some basis, as well as some moral authority?

David Rothkopf: Well, I think you answered the question. And it was also answered to some degree in what Matt and Karen just said, in the sense that when we said we were defending democracy, we were lying. And so, stop lying. That’s a good place to start with this.

As for your first question, it used to be, some of us, in the olden days, when you did foreign policy, you thought about national interests. Or maybe you thought about strategy. And we’ve descended to the point in U.S. foreign policy where everything is driven by the id of an individual. It’s all impulse driven. And it can happen, because that rules-based international order broke down from the inside out for all of us. All the guardrails in the United States that we thought were there—in our Congress, within our civil service, within our military—those things have broken down, and the president has essentially been given free rein to do whatever he wants. And until Mark Carney’s speech, until sometime fairly recently, we have not seen anybody else stand up to be a guardrail.

Which brings me to a slightly different point that intersects with both of the prior comments, which is, three years from now, when Donald Trump leaves office, we’re going to say, “Well, where do we go from here?” And there is going to be a profoundly strong impulse. For a lot of reasons, some of which are pathological due to Washington pathologies, and some of which are heuristics in action, to say, “Well, let’s go back to the way it was before.”

Slavin: Like Biden tried to do.

Rothkopf: Yeah, we’ll go back to Biden. And then there are a bunch of people on Pod Save America who say, “No, let’s go back to Obama.” And then old-timers like Gene Sperling and I will go, “Yeah, Clinton had some good stuff, let’s go back to Clinton.”

But that’s a terrible instinct. We have to look at this from the perspective that we’re at the beginning of something. And that we are not charged with restarting something that may have worked in some way in the past. It was flawed, we were lying about it, it didn’t work the way we thought it would work. And Donald Trump has spent a year and will spend the next three years blowing it up.

So, you can’t just say, “Well, you know, USAID, that was a good thing. Let’s have that again.” It’s not coming back. Something new needs to be done. Or “Well, NATO was good, but nobody trusts us anymore.”

Should we have international alliances? We should. Should there be a rules-based international order? There should. Should we, as a leading country, play a role where we stop being hypocritical, and start standing up for real things? We should.

My final point on all of this, which is directed to those of you who might self-identify as Democrats—since it’s likely if the new ideas come, they’re going to come from the Democratic Party—is the Democratic Party has to resist its fatal instinct to begin every thought about everything by negotiating with themselves. You know, we can’t just go in and say, “Well, the Republicans won’t like that, so we’ll meet them halfway, and that’s our going-in bid.”

I think we need to do what they have done from the beginning, which is go to first principles. Go to what we think we need going forward. Go to new priorities, a new nature of leadership, and a new paradigm, and come up with new ideas.

Slavin: What are the new ideas in foreign policy that are going to get us past the mistakes of neoconservatism and id-driven dominance?

Anne-Marie Slaughter: I have a number, but I’m going to do something even more radical. I’m going to try to answer your question. Your original question, which is what happens if, in fact, Russia menaces Estonia, if China goes after Taiwan? I actually think that—it is a quite real possibility—Trump’s instinct will be to do nothing. I mean, on Ukraine, Estonia, he is willing to sell the Europeans as many arms as they can buy. And I’m half Belgian. I have spent my entire life arguing for Europe and for the EU. I think it is a far better model over time for how you organize lots of smaller and medium-sized nations.

However, he is not wrong that absent nuclear weapons, Europe can defend itself. Russia has not been able to get past the Donbas. Russia, much bigger, right? Not [just as] an economy, but in terms of the size of the military; [and] they haven’t been able to get past the Donbas. I love being in Europe, in part because they have a wonderful social welfare system that we don’t have. They don’t spend the money we spend on defense. I think we should spend less on defense. Certainly not going to be a leading campaign platform. But he’s not wrong, and the American people hear that, that if we guarantee that we’ll come in if there’s a nuclear threat, why shouldn’t they pay?

I really think he will not act. I thought Congress would stop him, I’m less and less certain of that. And I think with Taiwan, he’s more or less said it. Are we really going to send troops? Now, again, he might try to support others in the region, but I think, really, he does see zones of power. We get this hemisphere, all of it. China gets as much of Asia as it can negotiate, and Europe has Europe, and then he doesn’t really care about Africa that much, although he doesn’t want China to have it. If you really read the national security strategy, that comes through loud and clear.

Slavin: So what is the alternative to it that could convince the American people that the old alliances, or some variation of the old alliances, are still important?

Slaughter: I think you start from the proposition that that was a twentieth century, first part of the twenty-first century order. I’ve been writing this, I think, since 2000, that we really can’t get to 2045 in a world ruled by the victors of 1945, and our only chance of really saving this system as it was, was if Kofi Annan had succeeded in Security Council reform. And there was a moment where you thought, just maybe. But basically the Germans, the French, and the Brits were not giving up their seats, and nobody could…if you’d added the Indians and the Brazilians, the Mexicans and the Pakistanis went crazy, it just wasn’t going to happen. So, you actually do need an idea for a new system.

Many of us also have been arguing exactly what Mark Carney is proposing, which is a system that is based on middle powers. Now, middle powers sounds…I mean, it’s a very elastic definition. It basically includes everybody who’s not a great power or a small island state. But nevertheless, if you take all of Europe, obviously including Britain, Canada, Japan, South Korea, and Australia—all liberal, democratic states—that’s 42 percent of world GDP. Now, what if all those countries, when Trump had announced his tariffs, had said, “I’ll see you and raise you, too.”

Slavin: Throw Brazil into it.

Slaughter: Well, absolutely, you can throw others, but those are what…when Carney’s sort of looking around, he’s saying, there’s a lot of power here. There’s a lot of economic power; there’s a lot of legitimacy.

And so then here, I want to come back to the value of the U.S. order, it takes somebody who corrals everybody, who thinks, every time there’s a global problem, what are we going to do about it? Right now, Americans, or at least of my generation, that’s sort of built into, if you’re a foreign policy person, it’s not in Europe, it’s not in Canada, it’s not in these other countries. So, the ideas are there. You can design lots of different structures that are kind of regional institutions and a much looser global order, probably centered in the General Assembly, where you don’t have vetoes, but it’s only 200 nations. I mean, parliaments are much bigger than that. But the question is who’s steering it, galvanizing it, and paying for lots of it.

Slavin: Matt, Board of Peace, right? I just checked the list of countries that have agreed, you know, the list is growing, the number of countries that have agreed to be part of the Board of Peace.

Duss: The number of corrupt authoritarians who are being added, I think, is exponential every single day. I think Putin was invited to join.

Slavin: He hasn’t decided.

Duss: He hasn’t decided. He’s playing hard to get, as he often does.

Slavin: But Belarus said yes.

Duss: Belarus, so we’re clearly in the home stretch.

Rothkopf: Bibi [Netanyahu] was also invited.

Duss: This marks, I think, the latest step in a process that the United States has monopolized. For many administrations, going back to Oslo, it has decided that, okay, it’s nice if you have these UN Security Council resolutions, but ultimately, we get to decide, in consultation with the Israelis, what international law actually means, who has to follow it, and who has to face consequences. Again, this is why I’ve been talking about the corrosion of the so-called rules-based order going back a very long time. And again, even in such an order that is operating as well as one could imagine, there will be double standards, there will be hypocrisies. I don’t think it’s possible to run such a system perfectly, but I think it is possible to close the yawning gap that we have seen, and that is something Donald Trump has driven a truck right through.

Slavin: So, what body, what grouping can step in, especially when the Israelis refuse to have any other kinds of mediators?

Duss: Well, I think the United States. Again, not going to happen under Donald Trump, but the United States is the only country that can impose the costs on Israel that will get them to change their behavior. That’s all.

Rothkopf: But we won’t.

Duss: Under Trump, we won’t.

Rothkopf: We won’t under Trump.

Slaughter: We didn’t under Biden.

Rothkopf: No, we didn’t under Biden, and that was a failure. And I think U.S. policy toward Israel is over as it has been.

The 2028 election will be the first election in U.S. history in which the majority of voters were born post-1980. They don’t remember 9/11. Their entire adult political lives have seen Trump as the dominant figure. And when they look at Israel, it’s been Bibi from the beginning. They don’t trust him. They don’t trust the institutions. They don’t believe in blank checks. That’s over. And good riddance.

Slavin: [To Kornbluh] Let’s talk a little bit about your subject area, which is going to be also extremely important, and that is information technology, and how that figures into our new world order.

Kornbluh: On digital governance of AI—and before that, even governance of social media—the U.S. has been busy challenging the sovereignty of other nations to implement their own laws and decide how technology’s going to be deployed in their countries. There are a number of frameworks that have been popping up in the G7, in the G20, APAC, Council of Europe, OECD. It’s entirely possible that if we would stop acting as the salesman for big tech and would take a step backwards, that there could be some kind of alliance on digital rights. You know, surveillance, just basic guardrails, a basic floor on surveillance, on competition, elections, election integrity online, and on AI. So, I think that’s the kind of thing that you could imagine.

I’m not saying that that’s the most important foreign policy issue, but it’s a big deal. I mean, we can’t have elections if AI is poisoning what folks are hearing. And right now there’s a lot of horrible stuff going on. So, I think that’s the kind of thing that you could see happening, and right now, we’re just not even allowing it to breathe. But I think in order for any of this to happen, for the U.S. public, that’s going to have been born after 1990, I really think that we have to find a way. I think about FDR. He gave these speeches about the Four Freedoms, about the Second Bill of Rights, and what he tried to do was really merge domestic and foreign policy. And I think if we’re going to play a big role internationally, I think we have to—again, back to first principles—think about what are the advantages of interdependence? What are the benefits that we can champion at home and abroad? And I think until we do that, we’re not going to really play a positive role internationally in any consistent way.

Rothkopf: A very brief additional comment to that. I think it’s essential that one of the ideas that we put a stake through the heart of is American exceptionalism. And that this is an idea that Democrats—Barack Obama talked about it—have been afraid of moving away from, because they thought it made us look weak. But I think there are different paths to leadership. And honestly, I think the Trump Administration has put the lie to American exceptionalism…

Slavin: We are exceptional, just in the wrong way.

Rothkopf: Well, in the wrong way, but in a way that creates an opportunity for a new kind of leadership that is based on partnership; that is based on trust.

Slavin: Well, isn’t that Obama, though, leading from behind and all the rest?

Rothkopf: No. Obama said American exceptionalism was an important idea. Secondly, Obama followed through with American exceptionalism as a principle. Thirdly, Obama’s leading from behind was an excuse to do nothing, and a lot of critical issues internationally, and produced a very weak foreign policy.

One last thing that I’d like to add here, because back when I was in the Hoover administration, I was deputy and then acting under secretary of commerce for International Trade. And one thing we haven’t talked about here, but that needs to be woven into this conversation, is that most international relations aren’t about war and conflict. It’s about international economic relations. It’s about social relations. It’s about technology policy. And these things can’t be just shoved to the backseat. They need to be the centerpiece of this new order going forward.

Slavin: Anne-Marie, how dependent or interdependent do we need to be economically? Trump has this idea that somehow we’re going to manufacture everything here, which is, of course, ridiculous.

Slaughter: We’re not.

Slavin: So how do we build new rules of the road for trade that Americans can see as being fair and equitable, and that the rest of the world can stomach?

Slaughter: So, there, I can’t give you new ideas except, again to say, I think even before Trump, we were all talking about the need for major reform of the World Trade Organization. It is the Obama Administration, to my shame, I have to say, that refused to appoint or approve the appointment of some members to the appellate body of the World Trade Organization, because we were starting to lose cases, and he didn’t like it. And then Trump continued, and that meant it couldn’t function. There was a moment where we actually had a global court, but the United States was losing cases. I don’t know how you rebuild that. There’s no way to make us anything remotely approaching autarchic, which is what he seems to think. And at some point, business will respond and the tariffs will bite.

But I want to push back hard on David. The exceptionalism that the United States has embraced, like the French, it’s not like we’re not the only nation that thinks we’re exceptional, and there’s nothing wrong with thinking you’re exceptional if what you’re exceptional for is something worth being exceptional for. And the best idea was exactly that we had a values-driven foreign policy, that we were not driven by ethnic nationalism. Nor a desire to expand our territory, that we actually stood for a set of values that we were trying to live up to at home.

Obama said, as many presidents have said, because I’ve checked it, let us be known not for the example of our power, but the power of our example. And that was 2008 and when I moved to New America in 2013, I did it in part because I thought, we are not living up to our example at home. We are not remotely close to what we’re supposed to be, starting with equality, liberty, justice, democracy, all of those systems are broken. So, I’m all for being exceptional if what it means is we can point to a well-functioning democracy that actually lives up to its values. And I would start there.

The 2028 election will also be the first election where Americans under 30, there is not a European-American majority. That is huge. Right? Hispanic Americans will be close to 30 percent by the 2040s, but under 30 already. Trump is the first president ever to look at a national security strategy that puts Latin America as the region first in the list of regions. It normally comes last, either Africa or Latin America. But Africa, rightly, has gotten more attention. If you’re a country that’s 30 percent Hispanic, that’s not surprising. It’s incredibly important what happens in Central and Latin America, but it’s not that important to European Americans, because that’s not where our families came from. That’s really important.

You know the group that is doing best, the diaspora group in the United States right now? Nigerian Americans. I’d love to know what they think about what our foreign policy ought to be. I’m serious. Indian Americans, Asian Americans, why don’t we run a tour and say, “what do you think we should be standing for in the world?”

If “America First” means America values first, fine, I can live with it. If it means America the bully, which is what it means right now, absolutely not. And I don’t think a majority of Americans think that. But what I do think is that we are a twentieth-century group of foreign policy makers shaped by the twentieth century, in my case, actually, by age, who still have this notion that we’re going to pay for a lot of things because we get to be primus inter pares. And that, I don’t think, is where a majority of the American people are, and I think the Democrats should go out there and find out.

Slavin: That’s a very good suggestion. Matt, talk about the power of example. During the Iran protests, the Iran revolts, which were suppressed in such a bloody fashion, just a couple weeks ago, [there is] this kind of split screen where I’m trying to figure out what’s going on in Iran, and meanwhile I’m watching ICE tear gas and club and shoot people in Minneapolis, and those Iranian government types that are still managing to get on the Internet are saying, “What are you complaining about us? Look at you, look at you.” And I’m looking at these ICE guys, and they look like Basiji to me.

How do we get back that ability to tell the rest of the world, “Well, we have a few things here that are worth emulating”?

Duss: Right, I mean, I appreciate you making that comparison. I mean, I know it’s not an equivalence, and you don’t mean it that way.

Slavin: Absolutely not.

Duss: Again, when people talk about the enormous political crisis that Iran is undergoing, which is now deeper than it was, we’ve been undergoing our own political crisis. We are undergoing a political legitimation crisis. And we have been for a long time. We have lost a shared sense of what the American political project is. And that, again, is something that Donald Trump understood and has very effectively exploited, like any good demagogue. When Donald Trump stands up and says the system is rigged, he gets traction, because he is right. The system is rigged. It’s rigged on behalf of wealthy, powerful, influential people like Donald Trump. But people still hear that, and they’re saying, well, he gets it.

And, what David said about the temptation to go back, to try to restore, I share that, 1000 percent. When Joe Biden came up in 2021 and said, “America’s back.” That, in its way, [is] like “America First”; these are just two different flavors of nostalgia. And they are both destructive. Maybe Joe Biden’s a little bit more, you know…people liked it better, but again, these are both sense of, like, yes, we can go back and make things better the way things used to be. We need to forget that.

But we need to avoid the temptation of this idea that we just need to move forward. I think, in retrospect, one of the most destructive things that Barack Obama did was not to hold the Bush administration accountable for crimes like torture, like kidnapping, like starting a war on false pretenses. I understood the reasoning behind it. I’ve got limited political capital, I’d rather not spend it on this. But I think that turned out to be one of the most disastrously consequential decisions of his presidency, because what we face in our country right now is a crisis of impunity. The elite pay no price.

If you want to understand why Donald Trump fears no consequences, look at the guest list for Dick Cheney’s funeral. Okay? This is a guy who lied us into a catastrophically destructive war, who oversaw a campaign of torture, of kidnapping around the world. A guy who got his rich friends in Halliburton into Iraq to take money, hand over fist, tens of billions of dollars, and 20 years later, presidents, first ladies, members of Congress line up to pay their respects. That is impunity. That is corruption.

Slavin: Accountability, truth, and reconciliation obviously will be very important, but if we survive the next three years, I think a lot of people will just be so grateful to wake up in the morning and not have to worry about who’s President of the United States, yeah?

Rothkopf: That would be profoundly dangerous if that’s the reaction. If the last thing that happens after Trump leaves office, we all breathe a sigh of relief, that is going to be a failure. And I just want to underscore Matt’s point, which ties back to Anne-Marie’s point about the ways we failed in terms of our own leadership.

I’ll start with a little short anecdote, and then a little response. And the short anecdote has to do with U.S.-Ukraine policy during the Biden Administration. I had countless conversations with the people who were making that policy, who are friends of mine, who I respect a lot. And they were constantly going, well, you know, if we go this far the Russians will detonate a nuclear weapon over the Black Sea. So, we can’t go that far. And they were worried deeply about every potential risk vector that came out of Russia. And they weren’t worried at all about the risk factor of a pro-Russian U.S. president taking over the U.S. government. They didn’t recognize that the biggest threat to our Ukraine policy was U.S. domestic policy. We’ll have a lot of conversations about politics, and we’ll have a lot of conversations about policy, but the problem we have in the United States is with power. And the way power is allocated in the United States right now, and the fact that the amount of money that billionaires have put into American politics since 2010 has increased by [16,000 percent]. That’s because of Citizens United, Shelby County, because of the inability of the Congress to deal with campaign finance reform, because of the inability of Democrats as well as Republicans to fight for a more equitable system, the complicity of the Clinton Administration and the Obama Administration, to a large extent, with the Wall Street agenda.

The reality is that inequality now is worse than inequality during the Gilded Age, and the power now is much greater in the hands of the very, very rich than it was then, because there weren’t super PACs back then. There wasn’t dark money back then. There were no mechanisms for them to control power in the United States. And if we want to fix what is broken in the United States, as some of us, I know, are working on all the time. The reality is this. Our power structure needs to be changed. Otherwise, you’re going to get another Dem[ocrat] who’s going to come in and say, “Oh, I care about the environment a little more than the other guy, and let’s do some AI, because that sounds cool.”

And they’re going to then say, “But let’s keep with this agenda that gives the tax breaks to the super-rich, that gives the benefits to people who have wealth as opposed to the ones who earn income, that does these things that have corrupted our country to the core.”

Kornbluh: I just want to foot stomp what they’ve both said and add to that that if Trump isn’t calling the question, where the economy is going is calling the question. And by that I mean, I think if the midterm election is going to be about grocery prices, and as you said, data centers causing electricity prices to go up, the 2028 presidential [election] is going to be about AI, and people already feel that they’re very nervous that AI is going to take their jobs, or at least make their job less secure. They feel that big tech has too much power in DC.

And we’re already seeing startups getting doctors and lawyers and architects to train the AI to do their jobs. I just found out this week that [many] nurses, are on 4 gig platforms already. And that algorithms are going to determine their wages based on how desperate they are, because you can still buy from data brokers, you know, what loans they have.

So those who have jobs are going to find their prices algorithmically set and their wages algorithmically set, but then a lot of people, a lot of the professional class, our kids are going to, you know, it’s going to…many white-collar jobs are going to go the way of journalism, for very similar reasons. And there goes the whole upper-middle class…

Duss: Not think tank jobs, though, right?

Kornbluh: [Laughing] Definitely not think tank jobs.

I’m not arguing against AI, but I’m just saying it’s calling this question of power. And it’s calling this question of…we have to decide how we want to organize things, not let it be done to us.

And just one other point on this that I think dovetails with what both previous speakers said is that I think the American people are no longer willing to trust a foreign policy elite to make decisions for them. And I think that’s been true for a long time, but I think we really have to learn it now. I think Trump is certainly telling us in really loud terms, and I think we have to figure out a way to engage people who are standing up now—better than universities, better than law firms—and engage them, not just around elections, not just asking them to give money, not just to write postcards, but to think about what they want in terms of foreign and domestic policy.

I wrote the platform, in 2008, and it was this amazing experience where we crowdsourced it by having drafting committee meetings, where we had people from the policy committees go out, and ordinary citizens could just organize a drafting committee meeting in their church basement or their school, and then they would send in their comments. And I just thought, this is going to be a nightmare, and it was a wonderful experience, and I had to read them all, and we pulled out quotes, and we put them in. And we got great ideas, and people felt that they had contributed. And then they continued through the Obama campaign, and then they were all forgotten about, and dismissed, and not involved in governing. And I think that was a terrible, terrible mistake, and many people in the Obama Administration agreed, and Obama himself has agreed, but I think we need to involve people, not just in campaigns, but throughout.

Slavin: We need to bury the blob once and for all. I talked about Iran. I mean, every time John Bolton comes on the television, you know, and he’s now suddenly a hero because he’s a critic of Trump, and the man has not had an original idea about the Middle East ever.

Rothkopf: Right, but let’s be honest, there are Democrats, too, right? Because let’s think of how many people who are friends of ours, who are in administrations, who went off and burrowed into Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan…

Duss: Harvard.

Rothkopf: …and the Kennedy School, and, you know, burrowed off into Microsoft and these other places. And then they’re like, “Okay, I’m ready.” And we’re like, oh, well, those are good old people, they’re not corrupted by that.

But the reality is that the most corrupt place in Washington, D.C, I’ll let you know a little secret, is the breakfast room at the Four Seasons Hotel. Okay? And the reason it is, is that people wander from table to table. And somebody comes over and says, “I’d love to talk to you about your next career when the time comes”. And people go, “Oh yeah, next career, I’m going to make my money.” And then they say, “By the way, there’s one other thing that you’ve been working on, and let’s talk about that, too.” And it corrupts our whole system. It corrupts our whole system, because these people then say, “I don’t report to the American people, and I don’t report to my bosses in the government, I’m really thinking about reporting to my next boss.”

Slaughter: This is very depressing thus far. We have a lot of criticism, and a lot of agreement on what is broken, but I’m very much in agreement with David that obviously, we have to think about 2028. But if we just keep cycling, for one thing, in foreign policy, that’s already why we are not going to be trusted, even if the Dems win. As early as 2022, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, the German Chancellor Schultz was already basically saying we’ve got to have a zeitenwende (turning point), we have to spend more money on our defense, because we don’t know what will happen in [20]24. And they know that we’re in this political crisis, and they think we’re mad, but they know that we’re cycling, so we need a 2050, or at least 2035, 2045 plan, where we’re really taking seriously, yes, our political system is not representative. It is simply not representative. Seventy percent of Americans want reasonable abortion restrictions, reasonable gun safety, a whole raft of things. We cannot get it because we’re locked into a two-party system with the ability to spend unbelievable amounts of money to elect whoever you want, a primary system.

There are fixes for that, and states are starting to do them. Fusion voting. Kansas and New Jersey both trying to make it possible to do what elected Abraham Lincoln. [Multiple] parties nominated Abraham Lincoln, and they fused their votes. So, the Free Soil Party could fuse its votes with another. In the late nineteenth century, all U.S. states had those rules. New York still has it, but then the Democrats and the Republicans got together and made it illegal or unconstitutional in many. It’s not that hard to change that. It’s not that hard to get ranked-choice voting. There are a bunch of ways where if we set a 10- to 20- to 25-year plan…It takes a long time to get big change. You can get there.

We need a radically different economic system. And we need a social system that puts family next to individual workers as who we need to actually be supporting. We’re still in a social policy that assumes there’s a worker, and he earns a living and comes back and supports a family. Very few people operate that way. We need a whole set of policies that actually see that supporting people’s ability to take care of one another is just as important as supporting individual workers.

Slavin: One of the things that’s most distressing is to watch the achievements of one administration be ripped up by the next. Is there a way to give our foreign policy a little bit more continuity, so that governments have the courage to make a deal and know that it might actually last beyond the next election?

Kornbluh: Can I just say, I’ll be the skunk at the garden party. I was plunked into the State Department as a non-foreign policy person, as ambassador to the OECD. And I think there’s a little too much continuity. The Foreign Service members get promoted based on not making waves and being friends with other Foreign Service workers who promote them. And I found, at least in my little corner of Europe, a culture of…

Slaughter: Kludge.

Kornbluh: Sorry?

Slaughter: Kludge.

Kornbluh: Kludge. Okay, I hadn’t heard that word. I mean, I remember, this is a minor example, but I think this room will understand it. I had a meeting of my staff, and one of the commercial officers was just reporting back and went to this meeting, and the Europeans are going to define grapefruit so that California grapefruit no longer is a grapefruit. Now onto the next item. Wait just a minute! You know, just no sense that that was important to the United States, that we had to change it, that you had to go to battle, that you might ruffle some feathers.

What was done to the State Department, what’s being done to the State Department is terrible. I would never choose to do it that way, but I think we have to really think about what diplomacy means in the twenty-first century, when you can pick up the phone and call somebody. When minister-to-minister interactions happen all the time, what do we really need in countries? What should the culture of the Foreign Service be? What are we trying to achieve? I don’t have the answers to that at all, but we definitely do not want to go back.

Rothkopf: No, and we don’t want to go back. I for whatever reason, accidentally have written two histories of the NSC. Some of you may have noticed we don’t actually have an NSC anymore. It’s down to next to nothing. A lot of the structure that we have in the government, can be approached flexibly. And a lot of it flows from how the president wants to run it. But the State Department is too big. USAID was structured improperly. We could do with a much leaner approach there. By the way, Trump wants to spend $1.5 trillion a year on the Defense Department. The Defense Department is ridiculously over-large. We could deal with that.

But when I went into the government in the James K. Polk administration, we went out and one of the people that we spoke to was a former secretary, Pete Peterson. I sat down with him and I said, “So, Pete, what’s the advice for running a department?” And he said, “You can do three things, you can’t do four things. And never do a restructuring. Because if you do a restructuring, you won’t do anything else.”

Within these departments, we need to protect vital assets, we need to have inspectors general that work, we need to go back to civil service protections that allow us to have independent perspectives, and we need to restructure the places. But I would like to say one other thing that relates to this, and that is the big foreign policy questions we need to answer between now and 2028, as important as everything we’ve talked about here, are what can help you win? What foreign policy issues will actually help you win an election? Because if you don’t win the election, you don’t get to make these changes.

Kornbluh: Somebody said this before, but I think we can’t…this idea that we don’t negotiate with ourselves before we speak. So that if we’re going to win, I think we have to be willing to say things, say what we stand for, even if they’re going to be really hard to achieve, and state our principles, and not be afraid to do them. And I think we saw, you know, the power of that. I’m from New York City. So many people said to me about [Zohran] Mamdani, “well, can he get any of it done?” As if most Republicans are held to that standard. It’s a statement of values, it’s a statement of what my intentions are, and that I’m committed enough so I’m going to break a lot of china to try to get it done. I think that part of bridges that what do we need to say to win, and then what are we going to do?

Duss: I think David put a really good question on the table; what issues help us win? I mean, I think all of us who work on foreign policy would like to believe that foreign policy helps people win. I don’t know how often it is the case, but I’ll just say this. It’s very interesting to note that in every election since the end of the Cold War, with the one exception of 2004, the more pro-peace candidate has won. In every election since 1992, the more pro-peace candidate has won, with the one exception of 2004. Now, I’m not going to say that that is why they won, but I think that’s an interesting set of data. It tells us something about what American voters want.

But I would also say the issues are important, the positions are important, but it also is just say what you believe. You mentioned Mamdani. Mamdani took a lot of heat for his position on Gaza. It was not Mamdani who made that an issue in the campaign, it was his critics. And the fact that he stood strong on an issue of principle and took enormous heat—even for people who didn’t agree with him, even for people who don’t know or care very much about foreign policy—that said something very important. This guy is for real. He’s telling us what he believes.

And the opposite is also true. I think it worked in the opposite way for Harris. Even though she had a lot of good ideas, the fact that when she was pressed on Gaza she reverted to the same old talking points.