Country: United States

Awarding Right Wing Nationalists Undermines Democracy

Rula Jebreal is an award-winning journalist, author, scholar, and foreign policy expert and is a board member of the Center for International Policy

Last Tuesday, the Atlantic Council gave its “Global Citizen” award to Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni. In her acceptance speech, Meloni stressed the importance of patriotism, Western Civilization and remembering one’s roots. Let’s be clear about this: Her conception of patriotism is ultra-nationalist. Last year, Meloni hailed Spain’s neo-fascist Vox Party as patriots when she endorsed them. This at least is consistent. Meloni hails from the tradition of the neo-fascist Movement and has tried to rehabilitate Italy’s fascist past – a bloody history she never totally disavowed. 

The Atlantic Council presents itself as a champion of liberal values, freedom of expression, and the “rules-based international order”. It is putatively opposed to far-right extremism and authoritarianism abroad. Its decision to bestow an award, and its own imprimatur, on someone whose rule and associations are increasingly authoritarian is therefore baffling. 

Since she was elected two years ago, Meloni has been waging a war on journalists, historians and critics, weaponizing defamation lawsuits to intimidate and silence them. I was the first journalist to be sued over a tweet exposing Meloni’s espousal of the Great Replacement Theory, which casts migrants and asylum seekers as criminals and invaders. The Great Replacement Theory has become a staple of neo-fascist ideology, and has motivated racist violence from the Christchurch mosque massacre in New Zealand to theTree of Life synagogue massacre in Pittsburgh.

As if this was not enough, now Meloni’s pro-Putin deputy Matteo Salvini is also suing me for calling him an extremist. In 2018, Salvini’s own party pick as candidate, Luca Traini, was convicted for terrorism because of his attempt to murder six people of color. Traini was cited in the manifesto of Christchurch murderer, who was inspired by Traini’s terrorism. 

Venerating Meloni simply because she has taken the correct position on Ukraine is to miss the forest for the trees.

The environment of fear and persecution that Meloni is fostering in Italy goes beyond attacking professional critics. Meloni is also dismantling LGBTQ rights. Italy is removing gay mothers from children’s birth certificates, as part of the right-wing government’s crackdown on same-sex parenting.

In her award acceptance speech, Meloni defended her brand of nationalism and warned about the creeping infiltration of the West’s enemies, declaring “patriotism is the best response to declinism [sic].” Given her record, one wonders if she was referring to migrants and minorities or the opposition at home that she has often criminalized and incited against. 

Three years ago when Meloni participated in the congress of Spain’s neo-fascist Vox party, she emphasized their shared values: “no to the LGBT lobby, yes to the natural family, no to gender ideology, no to the violence of Islam, no to big international finance, no to the bureaucrats of Brussels.”Meloni’s affinity for Vox is understandable. The party’s charter violates Article 25 of Spain’s Constitution and includes a call to repeal democratic parties, oppose gender equality, LGBTQ+ rights and abortion.

Meloni also engaged in self-praise about her achievements in the field of anti-migrant dehumanization and brutalization, going so far as to present her bankrolling of brutal Arab dictators and warlords in Libya and Egypt (to block migration to Europe) as akin to the fight against slavery.

It’s clear that the Atlantic Council’s decision to give Meloni this award was driven by her support for Ukraine, for which the Council has been one of Washington’s most outspoken institutional advocates (It is also worth noting that, apparently at Meloni’s request, the award was given by right-wing oligarch Elon Musk, under whose control Twitter/X has become a sewer of conspiracy theories, misinformation, and harassment). The Center for International Policy, on whose board I serve, also supports the defense of Ukraine against Russia’s war of aggression. We believe fundamental principles of international law and democratic values are at stake there.

But venerating Meloni simply because she has taken the correct position on Ukraine is to miss the forest for the trees.  Legitimizing far-right leaders –who are actively undermining press freedom, inflaming hatred and xenophobia, weakening LGBTQ rights in their own countries in the mode of Vladimir Putin–  does not uphold democratic values, it betrays them.

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CIP Welcomes Introduction of Migration Stability Resolution

In response to the introduction today of the Migration Stability Resolution by Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) and his colleagues, the Center for International Policy issued the following statement from Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams:

“For too long, the U.S. approach to migration has focused on barricading our borders rather than addressing the realities compelling people to leave their homes — including crises exacerbated by U.S. policies. We applaud Congressman Casar and his colleagues for taking this critical step to review and move toward better U.S. policies to address the conditions giving rise to increased migration and displacement.”

For more on the introduction of the Migration Stability Resolution, read this press release.

For more discussion of the challenges and priorities in migration policy, check out this discussion from CIP’s 2024 Conference.

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Statement on Introduction of Joint Resolutions of Disapproval on Weapons Sales to Israel

In response to the introduction by Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of Joint Resolutions of Disapproval to block new sales of more than $20 billion dollars in offensive US weapons to Israel, Center for International Policy Vice President for Government Affairs Dylan Williams issued the following statement:

“The resolutions introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders and his colleagues are an appropriate, measured, and sadly necessary response to a security partner’s repeated violations of US and international law. These Senators should be applauded for taking concrete action to enforce the requirement that other countries only use American weapons for legitimate defense purposes and in accordance with the law of war.

“Israel has the same right as any other country to defend its people from attacks and war crimes like those perpetrated in the Hamas-led assault on October 7th. It also has the same obligation as every other country and combatant to abide by international humanitarian law – and as a US security assistance recipient, relevant American law – in doing so.

“The evidence is overwhelming that Israel has failed to abide by standards set in US and international law in its Gaza campaign. The obscene civilian casualty figures, the targeting of schools, shelters and hospitals known to house large numbers of the displaced and wounded, and the restriction of the delivery of critical food and medicine speak to a pattern of flagrant disregard for its obligations under the law.

“Tragically, the Biden Administration has failed to enforce the law with regard to Israel, enabling the Netanyahu government to deepen and expand a campaign in Gaza that has killed tens of thousands of civilians, subjected hundreds of thousands more to malnutrition and disease, and left the territory in ruin. Even as Netanyahu’s own negotiators revealed that the Israeli Prime Minister was obstructing a ceasefire and hostage release agreement, President Biden continued to supply weapons to Israel in violation of US law and his own administration’s policies. Now, as hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah escalate and large numbers of Lebanese civilians are being subjected to the horrors already visited on the people of Gaza, the administration is preparing to send more than $20 billion in new weapons to the Netanyahu government.

“We welcome Senator Sanders’ initiative to put a stop to this carnage and US complicity in it. As these resolutions will not be voted on for several weeks due to the pre-election recess, we again call on the Biden administration to do what it should have done months ago, and immediately suspend offensive arms transfers to Israel.”

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Politics, Primacy, and the Crisis of US Foreign Policy

Editor’s Note: On September 17, Van Jackson participated in a talk organized by the New Zealand Fabian Society to discuss how the US presidential campaign pitting Kamala Harris and Tim Walz against Donald Trump and JD Vance represents competing claims to America’s political character that have clear implications for how America relates to the world. These are his remarks, which can also be viewed here.

Everybody wonders how changes in American politics might impact the prospect of World War III, America’s role in the world, the changing logic of trade, financial flows, and industrial policy. Basically, what’s the connection between American politics and the emerging world order such as it is? 

In answer of that question, I want make three points, which I’ll then situate in the context of the US presidential election.

The first point is that America’s current approach to Asia is closer to a primacist grand strategy than to any alternative strategy—and that’s a big deal because the requirements of primacy and the requirements of sustaining peace in this region are incompatible.   

The second point is that it’s not useful and is in fact dangerous to think of great-power competition as a struggle for hegemony or domination—that’s not what’s happening. 

And three, what’s actually happening is an ethnonationalist competition within capitalism. 

And these three points about how we should understand the world situation owe something to American politics. 

Kamala Harris, for her part, has not proposed a different way of seeing China or relating to the world—she’s a bit of a blank slate on foreign policy but she’s also (as far as we’ve seen) a primacist and American exceptionalist. Trump and the MAGA movement are effectively far-right accelerationists on China and are still primacists on foreign policy generally, but they talk about it more nakedly and have different priorities for how to exercise primacy. 

Primacy or Peace

So on the first point—the ongoing American bid to sustain regional primacy is at odds with regional stability. Primacy is a strategy that seeks security in a predatory way—it tries to preserve and prolong an extreme imbalance of power, and it’s single-minded about the threat from so-called great powers.  

And this is a source of regional instability because of how it encourages others—like China—to react. One of the closest things we have to an iron law in international relations (we have no iron laws, for what it’s worth) is the observation that states tend to balance against the strongest power in the system. US strategy tries to defy that historical observation.  

Now, Washington policy elites prefer not to talk openly about primacy—they say “liberal hegemony,” “favorable balance of power,” or “rules-based order.” But I was once a strategist in the Obama administration.  

By definition, in America’s own declassified strategy documents under Trump, under Biden, and actually going back to George HW Bush—and these are all publicly available now—the US seeks preeminence in military, economic, and political life. That comes closer to a grand strategy that scholars call primacy than it does any other kind of strategy.  

And because primacy is structural domination as an end and means of policy, it’s the most perverse way imaginable of trying to uphold peace or stability.  

Peace requires regional cohesion, a level of interdependence and mutuality, and above all it requires military restraint. A child would understand that.  

And yet primacy right now requires the opposite of all that—regional fracture and bloc politics, techno-containment and economic decoupling, it requires military superiority, which in turn requires arms-racing.  This is context within which AUKUS becomes a thing.

Primacy is a zero-sum way of relating to the world that requires keeping others down.  And in our current fallen world, primacy necessarily comes at the expense of peace.  

And for those of us who take our image of America from the long unipolar moment—the late ‘80s through maybe the Obama years—this is hard to come to terms with because we’ve taken for granted that American primacy is always in the background and not especially onerous or dangerous.  

There’s a way in which it’s all we’ve ever known—we have naturalized living with an extreme imbalance of power that history tells us cannot last forever.  

And so we should start by acknowledging that whether a strategy is good depends on context.  What primacy causes the US to do depends on the circumstances.  

At the end of the Cold War, the circumstances were that we inherited this extremely lopsided imbalance of power.  Primacy was the default that said “We’ll just preserve what we inherited and build a world order around it.” In that context, primacy was not especially costly for the US, and it was not especially risky at the level of global stability because America didn’t have anyone who was capable of challenging it.  

But times change. Technology changes. Distributions of power shift. Political economy has shifted (I’ll talk about that in a minute). And Asia has radically changed since the ‘80s—so much so that now Washington doesn’t even want to call it Asia anymore! They want to call it Indo-Pacific!

What I’m saying is that it was easy to believe that primacy was a global public good when Uncle Sugar had all the power and there were not even imagined alternatives. But that’s not the world we live in now. 

With the exception of Australia and a few right-wing governments, every smaller power in Asia and the Pacific is actively trying to avoid a new Cold War, avoid this thing we call “great-power competition” as much as possible. They’re resisting rivalry and bloc politics in different ways and we can talk about that in Q&A.

But the point is just that a power imbalance favoring America matters because there’s a way in which America’s insistence on primacy is now everybody’s problem—not only because it worsens the many problems that we see when we look at China. But also because it narrows the space of possibility for smaller nations to look after their own interests. 

Rivalry Doesn’t Mean Struggle for Hegemony

So America’s doing primacy, primacy is antithetical to peace.

The second point I wanted to make is that it’s wrong to think of Sino-US rivalry as a struggle for hegemony or domination. But the US is approaching rivalry precisely that way—it’s approaching rivalry as if it’s a struggle for domination. But it shouldn’t be, it’s far from clear that China is seeking the kind of domination that we fear, and China lacks the power to dominate even if it did want to.   

The reason policymakers in Washington think the primacy toolkit (of containment and arms-racing and tariffs) is so essential is because they have this view that America writes rules or China writes the rules. Obama used to say that all the time and we just read it innocently in that moment, but it hits differently now. And this is why policy needs an analysis underneath it, not just vibes. 

China’s material power comes from the privileged position it occupies within the capitalist world-system. China cannot airbrush out the United States without undercutting its own power because the Core of our world system is the US. And even in relative decline, the US still has unique advantages. It’s the first among unequals in a more multipolar world.

So imagining that China could take over the world or displace the US is to imagine China defying the realities of how power is structured.  

But think about it. China’s ability to economically coerce others, its ability to pour resources into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), its ability to finance infrastructure development in other countries—all of this is dependent on it occupying a particular position in Asian political economy and global production networks. To some extent it even depends on continuing access to the US market.

So because the world-system is structured in this highly networked way, there’s a way in which China’s fate is Asia’s fate, and Asia’s fate is America’s fate. Pretending otherwise is dangerous but it’s also kind of wooly-headed.

So I’m not saying that America doesn’t have conflicts of interest with China—it does. But primacy makes those conflicts worse. It only makes sense if you assume world order has to be run by a single great power and it’s either us or them. And that’s just not true. That’s actually what neofascists like Steve Bannon have been trying to make a self-fulfilling prophecy.  

So if we’re clear-eyed, we should see that China is a problem that holds up a mirror to the problems in our own nations. But it’s also a problem within a world-system that favors America—China’s not some free-floating bad guy who stands outside of world order threatening civilization as we know it.  

China is embedded in global order with us and there’s very good research showing that its ruling regime is satisfied with most aspects of the world as it’s currently structured. 

And I don’t want blow anyone’s mind here, but there are growing signs that both China and the US are in relative decline—and we don’t have a convenient narrative for that alternative future, but it sure as hell isn’t “American hegemony or Chinese hegemony.” 

And even if Sino-US rivalry was about who rules or who dominates, the only sane response to that would be to denaturalize it—take it apart, challenge the premise.  Because a story about great powers battling for domination is a story that won’t end well for most of us.  

Ethnonationalist Competition Within Capitalism

So primacy is antithetical to peace, and China can’t take over the world.  

The third point I wanted to make is that rivalry between the US and China should be understood as an ethnonationalist competition within capitalism.  

So up until the 1970s, advanced economies used to be producerist, manufacturing economies. That became less profitable as manufacturing became more competitive. And as profits fell, investment capital in advanced economies looked for profits through services more than production.  

The era we now call neoliberal globalization has been an era of financialization and de-industrialization in the West. And during my lifetime, manufacturing was never a sign of an advanced economy—because manufacturing was an activity that had shifted from rich countries to the global South in the search for new markets and cheaper labor. And China was a major beneficiary of that process, which is how it became the world’s factory.  

I think most people know that much.  But less obvious is that what we’ve seen over the past half century is that financialization of the economy—neoliberal globalization itself—has had diminishing returns and is unacceptably volatile…especially since 2008.  

We keep ending up in these cycles where investment capital floods into a sector, creates a speculative bubble, and then too much capital chasing too little profit leads to overproduction. Overproduction drops prices, drops profits, and that creates a fiscal crisis.  

So neoliberal globalization is now facing its own crisis of capital accumulation—and we see evidence of that crisis in economic stagnation. Global growth has slowed, and in many places it’s stopped altogether. So the previous economic order isn’t delivering the goods like it used to, but recurring crises also call the order into question politically.  

And you might be wondering, what the hell does all that have to do with foreign policy or World War III. Well, the US, China, and rich nations that can afford it have decided that the answer to an era of low growth is zero-sum economic nationalism. The tide doesn’t lift all boats if the tide isn’t rising.  

So now the US and China have turned to using the power of the state to secure a competitive advantage in strategic sectors of the economy. In fact, China was doing this first and the US decided to emulate China.  

One long-term problem with this is that we’re already overproducing relative to demand in the so-called strategic sectors of the world economy. And looking out five to ten years, we’re actively building toward yet another fiscal crisis, but this time in these strategic sectors—semiconductors, AI, green tech, and military hardware.

But that’s long-term. The more immediate problem is that in order to do state-driven political economy, you end up having to exploit nationalism—use state power to build national power, strengthen yourself and weaken your competitors. But nationalism is a dangerous force. It’s prone to a politics of reaction—it’s inherently exclusionary, it often assumes scarcity, and it becomes a justification for violence. And in the US and China in particular, it’s ethnically charged—it’s ethnonationalism.

In both countries, nationalism has an exceptionalist quality—they both talk and act as if they’re special…as if their behavior is exempt from the rules that everyone else plays by. And when powerful nations do that, it leaves the rest of us in a world where the great powers are competing for a greater share of global growth while that same growth is declining in relative terms. And that relative decline of growth intensifies what starts to look like an inter-imperial competition.   

So great-power exceptionalism is not new but it could co-exist in a high-growth world—it wasn’t a source of WWIII in a high-growth world. We’re not in that world anymore. So what we’re left with is militarism and economic nationalism. And who benefits from that? Not lovers of peace. Not lovers of democracy. And definitely not workers, ironically, given the promises attached to slogans of a foreign policy “for the middle class.”

And a lot of America’s insistence on primacy is a fear that it’ll be excluded from Asia, recognizing that Asia is the future of the global economy. And American elites are convinced that primacy is the only way to ensure their access to Asia.  

This is wrongheaded. Policymakers are thinking about China and America’s role in the world in a fundamentally incorrect way that’s super dangerous but that also justifies some pretty evil behavior. To take just one of many examples, American primacy in the Pacific is built on the back of not just a US sphere of influence there but also sustaining actual formal colonies in the year of our lord 2024. 

But the rest of us don’t have to accept that—we should be able to see clearly that what’s happening is an elite-driven ethnonationalist competition within capitalism. Primacy makes it worse. No great power is gonna save us. And to get at the root of the problem will not involve bombs and bullets—it will involve 1) changing how the great powers relate to each other, and 2) fixing some of the pathologies of our global economic order.  

China and the US Election

But the reason all this matters in the context of the 2024 presidential election is both that US politics has fueled this monster of a situation, but it’s also constrained by it in ways that are not good.  

So Kamala Harris doesn’t bring much foreign policy experience to the table. In 2020, she ran as a progressive, but that was a very popular thing to do in 2020, and she ran as a very mainstream progressive that was trying to look tough on security and appeal to Wall Street’s interests.  

Take that as you will, but she’s not known for taking big risks, doesn’t have a record of challenging the prevailing conventional wisdom. And so personnel is always policy, as they say, but this is likely to be especially the case in a Harris presidency; to a large extent, we should expect that she’ll take her cues from her personnel and the Democratic Party.  

It matters, then, that 99% of the foreign policy staff surrounding her are all from the Biden administration—and they’re a cadre who explicitly believes in American exceptionalism and a strategy of primacy.  

So even though Kamala hasn’t carved out explicit positions on most issues, she’s hawk-leaning/hawk-adjacent on everything so far. She talks about Gaza better than Biden, but she has explicitly said she’s going to keep flowing arms to Israel. She’s explicitly endorsed military superiority, so the trillion-dollar defense budget is going to continue. She supports Bidenomics, which is economic nationalism as part of a strategy to rebuild the middle class on the back of rivalry with China—which, we can talk about this, but that won’t succeed because it’s full of contradictions.   

In her entire foreign policy world, which is dozens of people, there’s only two to three people that you could consider remotely progressive. Tim Walz, on the other hand, her VP, is pretty progressive and does have a more relational view of China—he has a track record opposing this whole Cold War situation we’ve gotten ourselves into.  

So the best hopes for stability in a Kamala presidency depends a bit on whether she makes unconventional staff picks, and to some extent on her Vice President. And that’s unpromising, because vice presidents tend to be pretty ceremonial.  

And yet, as much as Democratic Party thinking about foreign policy is in flux and unpromising, the right-wing, Trumpist version of all of this is not a slow-burn crisis; it’s an urgent crisis.  

MAGA and Trump have laid out all kinds of markers indicating they’re going to be much more confrontational with China even though the Biden admin itself has been more hawkish on China than even the previous Trump administration had been. MAGA has promised to outspend Biden on defense. They have pretty insane and vocal views about nuclear arms-racing.  Republicans see Palestinians the same way Zionists do in Israel—which is mostly as a threat.

There’s a meme out there that MAGA and Trump are isolationists…And that could not be farther from the truth. They’re unilateralists, they’re militarists, they take a ‘clash of civilizations’ view of the world—which is pretty explicitly racialized.  But they’re not isolationist.

And so you could almost understand the Democrat-Republican divide on foreign policy being basically about Democrats wanting to preserve and expand an empire that has cosmopolitan qualities but is an empire all the same…versus Republicans wanting the benefits of a global empire without any of the obligations of maintenance that come with it.  

And so the MAGA movement is looking at war with Iran; war with Mexico; extortion of allies; economic nationalism on steroids; and a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine that makes the entire Western Hemisphere a formalized American sphere of influence again.  And its real alliances would be white, culturally Christian, right-wing countries like Russia and Hungary. So if MAGA gets its way, they’re going to reimpose something like a global color line.  

And Trump himself makes all of this a little less predictable, and we can talk about that, but his unpredictability is located within these preferences. So presumably Republicans wouldn’t go to war with Mexico and Iran at the same time, but both options are on the table. Trump is happy to stoke Sino-US rivalry and position America to end up in a war with China, but chances are he isn’t going to directly, proactively launch such a war.  

So the commonality here is that America’s policy elites are committed to primacy. They’re fairly locked in to relating to the world in a highly predatory, militarized way. And regardless whether it’s a Democrat or Republican presidency, they’re committed to cannibalizing the existing economic order as part of doing economic nationalism. But one party is a much more immediate threat than the other, and one party offers a more favorable terrain to struggle for peace than the other.

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Rooting in Care and Peace to Confront a Militarized Energy Transition

By Diana Duarte, Director of Policy and Strategic Engagement for MADRE, a global gender justice organization and a feminist fund, and Jean Su, Energy Justice Director and a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, where she works on international and domestic U.S. campaigns to end fossil fuels and develop just energy systems. 

The harmful connections between fossil fuel extraction and violent, militarized resource domination have long been documented and exposed – and disgracefully continue today. Just recall the complicity of the oil company Shell in the military detentions and executions of environmental activists in Nigeria, or the ways that competition over oil has fueled conflict from Iraq to Syria. Environmental activists opposing the East African Crude Oil Pipeline – slated to be the world’s longest heated oil pipeline – have met Ugandan military violence in retaliation. Here in the U.S. that same militaristic violence accompanies fossil fuel expansion: thousands of Indigenous water protectors have been targeted, assaulted, and jailed for challenging Canadian oil giant Enbridge’s Line 5 and Line 3 oil sands pipelines. 

Now, as policymakers and climate advocates seek a transition away from the fossil fuel era, we have a vital opportunity to break from that violent dynamic. We could imagine a future where we all not only enjoy safe, plentiful and regenerative energy, but where the way we create that energy is peaceful and rights-based.

Solutions, Distilled Transitions to the resilient renewable energy systems essential to averting the catastrophic climate harms of the fossil fuel era must not repeat the violent, extractive practices of the fossil fuel system. The $1 trillion needed annually for climate change is a better investment in human security than the $2.44 trillion the world spends on militaries every year. Compelling policymakers to consistently engage with frontline communities, which they must for a just transition, requires power, leverage, and coalition work. from Rooting in Care and Peace to Confront a Militarized Energy Transition by Diana Duarte and Jean Su for the International Policy Journal

But there are warning signs that show we’re heading down a dangerous path. Right now, there is not only a risk of militarizing the “clean” or “green” energy agenda – and reproducing the harmful approaches of the fossil fuel era – it’s already underway. In the US and around the world, governments have propped up the notion of a “green” military as part of their climate agenda. Governments and corporations, with military and police collusion, are displacing communities to make way for hydroelectric dams, wind farms, and lithium mines. Environmental activists and community leaders who press for rights-based, inclusive energy policymaking that leaves no one behind have been met with harassment and violence.

Our futures depend on renewable energy, but urgent energy and climate priorities cannot justify violent action and militarized policy. What’s more, as the volatile, conflict-ridden fossil fuel era has amply demonstrated, reliable and effective access to energy cannot be sustained at the point of a gun. 

The pathway out of this toxic dynamic is to create and resource channels for global progressive social movements to integrate transformational values of care, peace, and human rights in our climate and energy policymaking. These movement-driven values can serve as guiding lights to illuminate a way out of the global climate catastrophe, particularly by identifying and building power around policy demands constructed in partnership with frontline communities.

Militarizing the Transition to Renewable Energy

In 2021, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin named the destabilizing impacts of climate change and called it an “existential threat,” paving the way for additional Pentagon budget requests for billions in “climate investment” for military infrastructure and capacities. U.S. military bases have also been called “proving grounds” for clean energy usage.

We’re living through a climate emergency, where every day brings horrific news and more warnings that time is running out for lifesaving climate action. So there’s no doubt that the climate crisis is existential, requiring significantly scaled up action from many sectors of our societies. Yet the urgency and scale of the crisis does not mean that every action is justified, effective, relevant or safe. In our deeply militarized world, armed agents of states already have immense power and capacity, with the US military atop that hierarchy. Policymakers too often and too easily default to thinking that there must be a military solution to every problem. But as policymakers choose a way forward, they must reckon with the consequences of marshaling military might into the fight for the climate.

Our already astronomical Pentagon budget and the default to deploying US military force have denied funds from urgent domestic priorities like health care, education, and housing. Rather than “green” the military, we should demilitarize, reducing not only the immense carbon footprint of the US military but also the over-propensity towards the use of violence as a means to confront global crises. Rather than touting clean energy upgrades to our military bases, we should demand actual justification for the excess and documented harms of some 750 bases in some 80 countries – more than any other country or people in history – and reduce this massive network. The greenest thing any military can do is reduce the scale and scope of its operations. 

The greenest thing any military can do is reduce the scale and scope of its operations. 

While it is impossible to quantify the full, intangible cost of what people and communities lose when forced from their homes by climate change or extractive industry, the Climate Action Network has adopted $1 trillion a year in grants and equivalent finance as the dollar target for climate action in developing countries. While the costs of a climate transition will be real, a green energy transition rooted in care can offer outsized yields relative to the money set aside for it. One trillion dollars is also, in real terms, just over two-fifths of the $2.44 trillion total global spending on militaries in 2023. The Department of Defense, for fiscal year 2025, requested $849.8 billion, or an annual figure 85% of the way to a trillion. Budgets are moral documents, and compared to the shared peril from climate change, massive spending on violence through the military offers far less returns for human security.

Moreover, militarized approaches – that tend to prioritize domination, competition and control – divert attention away from a foreign policy rooted in diplomacy and cooperation, essential qualities in confronting a collective threat like climate breakdown. Climate change is a threat against our shared security as humans and all beings that live on this planet. But a militarized formula for protecting a limited view of “national” security – against a threat that respects no borders and that requires collaborative action to confront it – will only set us back.

Climate change is a threat against our shared security as humans and all beings that live on this planet.

Meanwhile, grassroots activists worldwide have sounded the alarm that people’s rights to livelihood, land, health and more are already being cast aside in the rush for land and resources to feed the energy transition. In many of these cases, activists who have sought to push back have been met by police and military force. 

For instance, the military junta in Myanmar this year announced plans to restart a major hydroelectric dam project. Some 13 years ago, environmental activists organized to block the dam’s construction, speaking out for communities that would be displaced and benefit little from an arrangement to send 90% of the energy produced to neighboring China. Given the military’s intensified repression of activism since its coup in 2021, these environmental defenders are in increased danger today.

South America’s “lithium triangle”–a stretch of the Andes and salt flats of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile–is witness to rampant Argentinian police oppression and excessive violence against Indigenous peoples and environmental activists. Argentina holds the second-largest deposits of the metal in the world, and recent amendments to the Jujuy area’s constitution opens the door to greater extraction without prior, free and informed consent from Indigenous communities. 

These frontline communities know all too well that peace, human rights, and climate justice are inextricably linked. They have lived out the interconnections between militarism and extractivism, a poisonous blend already seeping into the “green” transition. Importantly, they have nurtured grassroots and global movements to channel this holistic expertise into policy spaces.

Another Way Forward

The way forward lies in applying a core set of values in our policy efforts, moving us towards a demilitarized, care-oriented future. A pathway that transitions us to resilient renewable energy systems essential to averting catastrophic climate harms of the fossil fuel era, must also be one that does not repeat the violent, extractive private-government practices of the fossil fuel system. Several animating principles illustrate what this transition can look like. 

Centering grassroots leadership and meaningful consultation 

The realm of climate and energy policymaking is often dominated by the language and priorities of political and corporate elites, far removed from the analyses and lived experiences of communities impacted by climate disaster, by destructive and militarized megaprojects, or by energy inequity. Few channels exist for movements and civil society to articulate and press their demands before policymakers, and those that do are often difficult to navigate, inconsistent, or actively delegitimized. 

This confluence of threats to democratic policymaking is often referred to as “shrinking civil society space,” and it’s one of the most significant obstacles to achieving a just, peaceful climate policy.

Important efforts have been undertaken to address this threat and build a stronger infrastructure between grassroots movement and policy spaces. For example, Diana’s organization, MADRE, as an international human rights organization and feminist fund, has partnered for decades with Indigenous women’s organizations in frontline communities worldwide, whose work provides immediate and lasting care for frontline communities. This work is further animated by collective, generational wisdom that prioritizes stewardship of ecosystems and balance among living beings. MADRE has created opportunities for these grassroots partners to inform and shape US policymaking, transmitting their recommendations such as for governments to ensure and resource Indigenous women’s policy leadership, enact international human rights protections in national law, and collect disaggregated data and evaluate policies using inclusive and participatory methods.

This work is further animated by collective, generational wisdom that prioritizes stewardship of ecosystems and balance among living beings.

The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition, of which MADRE is a part, has also hosted a series of consultations over the past year, bringing together grassroots organizers and human rights advocates to envision a future beyond fossil fuels and create guidelines for policymakers to advance a just and feminist energy transition. The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) has worked with feminist advocates worldwide to spell out clear guidance for U.S. policymakers on transforming our energy system.

Gendered divisions of labor, particularly in rural communities worldwide, often assign women the responsibility to provide for household energy needs, increasing their care burden while also generating valuable insights into how decentralized energy access can and must operate. The SHINE Collab, which advocates support for women-led, community-driven and decentralized renewable energy, has used participatory methods to document women’s gendered energy needs and insights. These are among many examples of the direction that civil society organizations can provide to policymakers on just approaches to the energy transition.

The need for consultation with impacted communities has been encapsulated in the language of international human rights. The global Indigenous movement already spent decades honing a framework that can guide us now: the concept of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC). That principle is captured in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, signed by all UN member states except an ignoble few, including the US. Effective, meaningful implementation of FPIC at the national and local level would require that governments set up transparent, accessible and predictable channels to share full information with communities that will be directly impacted by energy projects, and that policies would not proceed without consent and integration of communities’ priorities.

By definition, free, prior and informed consent cannot be coerced; it cannot be militarized.

Too often, we’ve seen superficial and manipulative attempts by governments and corporations to seek out so-called community consent. In Guatemala, where land activists have been murdered to silence protests, Indigenous women have taken a leading role in organizing community opposition to hydroelectric mega projects. They named the injustice of corporations promising to provide poor Indigenous communities with benefits like health care and education, while obscuring the reality that communities would also lose access to their water and receive no electricity from the project. 

To compel policymakers to consistently engage in real engagement and consultation with frontline communities requires power and leverage. We can achieve that by combining our strengths across movements.

Consolidating shared strategies across peace and climate movements

In many policymaking spaces, peacebuilding and climate concerns are not as siloed as they once were, and policymakers and advocates more routinely make links between threats like resource depletion triggering intercommunal conflict, or the harms of war impacting local environments. 

Increasingly, however, climate and peace advocates are going beyond simply naming these causal loops and are instead embracing the interconnections between struggles, building cross-movement infrastructure and seeking collaborative opportunities to co-create shared strategies.

For instance, in October 2023, anti-war and climate advocates gathered in Washington, DC for a day-long strategy session to map out the intersections between their campaigns and identify shared threats and opportunities. The discussion coalesced around key directions for collaborative action, such as: creating narrative frameworks that offer up care and climate justice as alternatives to militarism and extractivism, engaging in research and analysis to map the linkages between the military-industrial and fossil fuel complexes, and consolidating our networks to advocate in US foreign policymaking spaces around climate and peace.

As we de-silo our work and analyses through such collaborations, advocates also reveal that the threats we face are not only the specific violence of wars or climate disasters. By examining where policymaking power lies and how it functions, we better understand that the root causes of these particular threats are entangled militarist and extractivist frameworks that have captured our policymaking, nationally and internationally.

Confronting this embedded power is no small feat, and requires that climate and peace movements combine our capacities to map out opportunities to compel policy change, to strategize our entry points, and to mobilize a wider constituency for change.

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Democratic foreign policy cannot be for elites alone

Alex Thurston is Associate Professor in the University of Cincinnati’s School of Public and International Affairs.

The foreign policy establishment has been famously cast as a bipartisan “Blob” with monolithic views. Yet if the Blob is bipartisan, the Democratic foreign policy network has become the core of the Blob today. Democratic foreign policy hands view themselves as the keepers of order within American foreign policy, the crew that cleans up Republican foreign policy disasters. Democrats stand as reliable defenders of an American imperial order, the party tasked with winding down unwinnable wars (Iraq under Barack Obama, Afghanistan under Joe Biden) while prosecuting wars where the U.S. is ostensibly not a front-line combatant (Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza). Serious reforms to status quo American foreign policy have been fleeting. As vice president, Kamala Harris has championed the Democratic foreign policy status quo; at the insider-heavy Munich Security Conference in February 2024, she offered up the party’s mantras about American leadership, “international rules and norms,” and the importance of alliances with Europe and beyond. As the new nominee and through her choice of Tim Walz as vice president, Harris has stirred some hope that she will prove less militaristic than Biden and that her advisers will listen more to dissenting views.

A more progressive foreign policy would need a different kind of executive, but also a different cadre of people to implement it. Reformists can and should cut their teeth in the existing Democratic foreign policy world, resigning when morally imperative but gleaning knowledge of how things work when possible. The challenge is instead to make the foreign policy elite more answerable and vulnerable to mass politics. Solutions, Distilled, from Democratic Foreign Policy Cannot Be For Elites Alone by Alex Thurston for the International Policy Journal

The Democratic foreign policy elite sometimes tinkers with the status quo, but in relatively superficial and fleeting ways. Obama’s team showed imagination on Iran and Cuba, and Biden’s team promised a “new Washington consensus.” Yet Trump easily undermined Obama’s reforms, especially on Iran, and Biden’s team did not fight back vigorously once Democrats were back in power. Nor did Biden’s team undo Trump decisions such as moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. As on many domestic issues, Democrats portray themselves as the adults while mostly letting Republicans shape the playing field. Democrats’ defense of the status quo, moreover, often brings both criticism from the non-governmental players in the Blob (the think tank set and the editorial pages of East Coast newspapers) and fallout among their own base; in different ways, Ukraine and Gaza both exemplify how Democrats act out the preferred policies of the Blob, take elite criticism for not being hawkish enough, and simultaneously lose ground with Democratic activists and core voters.

As on many domestic issues, Democrats portray themselves as the adults while mostly letting Republicans shape the playing field.

A more progressive foreign policy would need a different kind of executive, but also a different cadre of people to implement it. If the National Security Council-led “Process Makes Perfect” when it comes to debating foreign policy in the White House – a dubious claim, actually – then that “process” also involves not just selecting among options but constructing those options for the principals. The people who steer the process matter.

Yet pathways into the Democratic foreign policy establishment remain narrow. One is to be a politician whose brand revolves partly or heavily around supposed foreign policy expertise, for example Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, or John Kerry. Another path is to be a career political appointee, in the mold of Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, or Susan Rice – and, one could add, in the mold of Harris’ top two foreign policy advisors, Philip Gordon and Rebecca Lissner. A third path is to rise through the civil service (especially the Foreign Service or the CIA) and then convert bureaucratic capital into political capital, in the mold of Bill Burns or Linda Thomas-Greenfield. More complex pathways are possible too, involving careers in journalism, the NGO world, academia, or other sectors – Samantha Power came out of journalism and academia, for example. These pathways have some commonalities, however: they are all highly dependent on mentor-mentee relationships, and at the highest levels of a presidential administration, the representatives of different pathways tend to talk and sound the same.

Pathways into Power

Senior policymakers in the Biden administration today, mostly born in the 1960s and 1970s, represent the third or fourth generation to 1) steer the national security state, itself a relatively recent creation that dates to the end of World World II, the National Security Act of 1947, and the advent of the Cold War; and 2) manage the “liberal world order,” also a WWII-era phenomenon centered upon the Bretton Woods institutions, the United Nations, and NATO. 

Aside from the handful of Senators to brand themselves as foreign policy experts, the Democratic Party’s foreign policy professionals have no political constituency of their own; few of them are household names. Being a career political appointee requires close relationships with elected politicians and with more senior members of the foreign policy elite. Moreover, power within any given administration can manifest in different ways; the author James Mann, for example, argues that during Obama’s first term, the cabinet (Secretary of State Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, etc.) had less direct presidential access and empowerment than did members of Obama’s inner circle, such as Ben Rhodes and Denis McDonough. In Biden’s administration, in contrast, levels of formal and informal power sometimes seem to align, as with Blinken’s appointment as Secretary of State.

For career political appointees, the path into power often involves academic accomplishment (a Rhodes Scholarship, and/or an Ivy League J.D. or Ph.D.), then work for a Senator, then a senior post in a Democratic administration, followed by a cabinet-level post. Vetting and selection mechanisms kick in early; it is not that working-class Americans are completely frozen out, but attending a state school, or missing out on the mentorship that prepares one for major fellowship competitions, acts as a major brake on early access to the network. And if the foreign policy elite is becoming more diverse over time by gender and race, it nonetheless continues to skew male and white. Even more subtle, meanwhile, are the homogenizing effects of the selection mechanisms when it comes to ideological diversity, or lack thereof; the Ivies, the elite fellowships, and the early career opportunities in government or at top publications can all act as screening devices for junior applicants to the Blob.

the Ivies, the elite fellowships, and the early career opportunities in government or at top publications can all act as screening devices for junior applicants to the Blob.

To take a few examples of career political appointees, a 30-year-old Blinken served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council in a mid-level role from 1994 to 2001, then became a key aide to then-Senator Biden on the Foreign Relations Committee. Blinken followed Biden into the Obama administration and, in 2021, was tapped as Secretary of State. Sullivan, a Yale-educated lawyer, worked for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. That role opened the door to a 31-year old Sullivan joining Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2016. When Clinton became Secretary of State, Sullivan served in two key posts – Director of Policy Planning at State, and then as National Security Advisor to then-Vice President Biden. Had Clinton won the 2016 presidential election, Sullivan likely would have become National Security Advisor, one of the youngest ever. He eventually did take on that role in the Biden administration (2021-present). 

For career bureaucrats, meanwhile, the Foreign Service and the intelligence community offer structured, hierarchal paths to advancement. If the bureaucrat rises high enough, he/she becomes visible to the politicos in the White House. A post such as Assistant Secretary can offer an audition for even more politically important jobs in a subsequent administration. One representative of the bureaucratic path is Bill Burns. The son of a major general, he won a Marshall Scholarship to Oxford in 1978, completed his Ph.D. there, and then joined the Foreign Service in 1982. He served in the offices of both of Bill Clinton’s Secretaries of State and then, starting at 42 took up high-profile posts as Ambassador to Jordan (1998-2001), Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs (2001-2005), Ambassador to Russia (2005-2008), Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs (2008-2011), and Deputy Secretary of State (2011-2014). Burns’ rise proceeded under Democratic and Republican presidents alike, but his post-Foreign Service career has seen him gravitate towards the Democratic establishment, serving as president of the liberal think tank the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (2014-2021) before accepting the directorship of the CIA under Biden.

Bureaucrats-turned-elites are major assets to any administration – these bureaucrats bring substantial government experience to the table, as well as long-practiced diplomatic skills. If there is an American “Deep State,” then Burns personifies it; indeed, some post-October 7 coverage suggests that it is Burns, rather than Blinken, who is the real voice of American negotiations in the Middle East.

Power, finally, and lesser-known figures such as Richard Stengel, exemplify paths that run through journalism or other sectors. Power, a war correspondent, joined Harvard in 1998 to establish the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy; she earned fame, and a Pulitzer, for her 2003 book on genocide, A Problem from Hell. She then became a key advisor to Barack Obama, eventually serving, starting at 42, as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations during his second term and returning to the White House under Biden as director of the United States Agency for International Development. 

Pathways When Out of Power

One important facet of such figures’ careers is what they do when Democrats are out of power. The typical moves are to think tanks, universities (again, especially Ivy Leagues), or consulting firms. Such roles can keep foreign policy professionals visible (through speaking engagements, appearances in the media, and/or participating in policy reports and high-level working groups) and can help them maintain and expand their networks. Consulting firms are, obviously, lucrative ways to leverage government experience and political connections, but are also important parts of the foreign policy infrastructure, again allowing out-of-power elites to stay connected to key contacts at home and abroad, and also to create professional perches for peers and proteges. When out of power, top figures not only often find prestigious and lucrative perches but also combine multiple roles – as think tankers and consultants, for example – to burnish their images as serious thinkers while simultaneously cashing in.

Key pipelines into the Biden administration included two consulting firms: Albright Stonebridge Group (an outgrowth of former Clinton secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s consulting firm, founded in 2001, which merged in 2009 with Stonebridge International, a firm launched by Albright’s fellow Clinton administration alumnus Sandy Berger, who had served as National Security Advisor from 1997-2001); and WestExec Advisors (founded in 2017 by Blinken and several other top Obama officials). Although such firms are substantially smaller than Wall Street giants such as Goldman Sachs and Citigroup, they play a broadly similar function in the revolving door of Washington, allowing the kind of zig-zagging career mobility (and profitability) for the foreign policy elite that major investment banks and corporations have allowed for the financial elite. WestExec has been criticized for the opacity of its client list, and for the ways in which the firm leveraged promises of “face time” with once-and-future officials as a selling point for clients.

Another way that out-of-power Democrats occupy themselves is, of course, with planning how to get back into power. A key venue between the Obama and Biden administrations was National Security Action, a 501(c)(4) advocacy group. Co-chaired by Rhodes and Sullivan, the group included Blinken, Burns, Thomas-Greenfield, and a host of other familiar faces, many of whom joined the Biden administration. Various institutions, then, allow the Democratic foreign policy elite to bide their time and stay in the game while between White Houses. It may also be time out of power, moreover, that reinforces the network’s cohesion even more than time in power; the shared experience of opposing a Republican president, planning lines of attack and promises for the future, and engaging in shared consulting and corporate work likely also serve to bind a diverse elite more closely together.

Worldviews and Goals of the Democratic Foreign Policy Establishment

What do the Democratic foreign policy elites want and believe? From their writings and statements, many senior members of this club exhibit a generic liberal view of America’s place in the world, tinged with elements of progressivism. 

There are no specific values that one could permanently associate with Blinken or Sullivan, for example. While out of power, Democratic foreign policy elites – as with top candidates for office – gesture towards the imperative to uphold “our values” and restore a perceived normalcy in American life and foreign policy. National Security Action, for example, “work[ed] to ensure that America endures as a beacon of opportunity, dignity, and hope to people around the world.” The group declared, “We reject the false choice between welcoming immigrants and refugees and ensuring our security” and also said that “enabling or excusing oppression abroad today only fuels the injustices and instability that endanger us all tomorrow.” Back in office, however, the Biden administration proved more than willing to crack down on immigrants, and even more willing to double down on alliances with autocrats around the world.

Similar promises from Sullivan and others that U.S. foreign policy under Biden would “work better for the middle class” had relatively little substance and were soon abandoned. The policy paper Sullivan helped organize in 2020 recommended, among other items, to “shift some defense spending toward research and development (R&D) and technological workforce development to protect the U.S. innovative edge and enhance long-term readiness,” but the defense budget has instead grown each year under Biden.

When called upon to articulate a view of America’s role in the world, the top Democratic strategists are often vague. In October 2023, Sullivan penned an article for Foreign Affairs called “The Sources of America Power.” The article became infamous for Sullivan’s boast that “although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades” – lines written and spoken before Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023 and the ensuing genocidal response by Israel, but naïve nonetheless. More telling of Sullivan’s worldview, however, was this sentence: “The essence of President Biden’s foreign policy is to lay a new foundation of American strength so that the country is best positioned to shape the new era in a way that protects its interests and values and advances the common good.” Such sentiments amount to little more than an argument that America is inherently good, so therefore it should lead the world, and therefore America must be “strong.” This is less a foreign policy than it is a vague, all-purpose justification for ad hoc decisions. 

Such sentiments amount to little more than an argument that America is inherently good, so therefore it should lead the world, and therefore America must be “strong.”

Harris’ advisors are clearly reflective – Gordon published a book in 2020 called Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East – yet there are limits to their introspection. If Gordon is a reformist, as some have argued, he is a moderate one at most. Gordon’s thinking in Losing the Long Game revolves around cost-benefit analysis in a framework that still assumes and extols American primacy, rather than a wider set of questions about how, for example, U.S. failures in the Middle East could provide impetus for a fundamentally different approach to the region and the world. And reflection can turn into overcorrection; among various troubling notes in the book, Gordon portrays Obama’s (very reluctant) support for Egyptian protesters in 2011 as a form of “regime change” gone wrong, collapsing U.S. rhetorical support for largely non-violent Egyptian protests with the more aggressive U.S. interventions in Syria and Libya. And despite Gordon’s reflections when out of power, Biden himself has appeared to call for regime change in Russia and, depending on how one parses his statements, Iran. Biden’s statements could be seen as gaffes, but the instinct to push for regime change in adversaries runs deep, and no senior staff resigned over either remark. Meanwhile, Lissner co-authored a book in 2020 called An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for 21st Century Order. Endorsed by Henry Kissinger, the book’s call for openness is welcome – but is the key question facing the U.S. really how to “win”? 

Even those individuals who do enter the foreign policy elite with a more recognizable set of values (or, more cynically, a “brand”) typically end up becoming defenders rather than reformers of existing policy frameworks; the ultimate example is Samantha Power, an ostensible critic of U.S. inaction in the face of genocide but, while in senior posts under the Obama and Biden administrations, a rather conventional liberal hawk.

There are also no specific policies that Democratic elites consistently defend. Many of the top officials in Biden’s administration, for example, were involved in negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the “Iran Deal”) under Obama, but showed little hunger to restore the deal under Biden. Some fixtures of Democratic White Houses are more associated with specific policies – Middle East hand Rob Malley, for example, is seen as a leading Democratic expert on Iran and a proponent of easing tensions – but those associations can in fact become professional liabilities, and Malley was subjected to an extended barrage of criticisms in the press before being placed on leave in June 2023 under unclear circumstances concerning his security clearance.

Democratic foreign policy elites will sometimes innovate, but more often they default to defending the status quo of the moment, while invoking 1945 and 1989-1991 as idealized moments of supposed “order” in a U.S.-centric worldview. The goals of any given moment – for example, the administration’s reported push for a “grand bargain” between Saudi Arabia and Israel as a purported path for ending the Gaza war – often appear predicated on a hunger for “normalcy” and an eye to what would play well with establishment media, rather than on introspection about America’s changing place in the world or about why the status quo might be a problem rather than a destination. It is striking, meanwhile, how often Democratic foreign policy elites invoke George H.W. Bush, Brent Scowcroft, and James Baker as foreign policy hands they admire – a Republican-lite foreign policy sometimes appears to be the horizon of imagination for today’s top Democrats.

a Republican-lite foreign policy sometimes appears to be the horizon of imagination for today’s top Democrats.

If ideological vagueness, a belief in American greatness, and a preference for the status quo are all interwoven with a hierarchical, elite, and difficult to permeate network, then it is little surprise that the Democratic foreign policy establishment is largely self-perpetuating and unfriendly to genuine reformers. New entrants to the establishment are almost invariably proteges of existing members, and/or the senior campaign staff of winning presidential campaigns. Meanwhile, surviving and rising in that world requires intricate knowledge of the government’s inner workings as well as a sophisticated mental rolodex of who is who in Washington. If one is working sixteen-hour days at the National Security Council attempting to plan foreign trips and write talking points for a frazzled boss all while running “sub-IPC” meetings and plotting one’s next career move, what time is left to question whether American foreign policy is heading in the right direction?

Opportunities for Reform – or Revolution?

The reproduction mechanisms of the Democratic foreign policy elite are strong. From one’s undergraduate years on, access to opportunities relies heavily on connections to top mentors, who are overwhelmingly likely to prefer people with worldviews similar to their own – or at least malleable ones. The rewards for ideological and professional conformity are huge: proximity to power when Democrats are in office and, when out of office, lucrative positions within consulting firms and/or prestigious perches within universities and think tanks. All of this adds up for considerable longevity, over decades, for people who make it into the foreign policy elite. Whether or not Harris wins in November, and whoever the next Democratic president is, Biden administration figures such as Blinken, Sullivan, and their close proteges are likely to continue shaping Democratic executives’ foreign policy for years to come. One can also look ahead to key incubators for upcomers – the State Department’s Policy Planning unit, for example, or the National Security Council’s myriad senior directorships – to get a sense of what the next cadre of senior policymakers will look like.

The rewards for ideological and professional conformity are huge

Is such a system impenetrable to change? For would-be reformers, one exciting prospect would be a presidential candidate who bypasses the foreign policy establishment and brings genuinely fresh perspectives into senior levels of government. As the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primaries showed, however, the obstacles to such a scenario are massive. The 2008 election is another cautionary tale, in fact; a president whom many perceived as a reformer ended up welcoming numerous upholders of the status quo into his administration.

Another potential prospect is reform from without – in other words, building up an alternative cadre of foreign policy experts. To some extent, that alternative cadre already exists, just not in a cohesive way; people with progressive foreign policy visions are already distributed throughout academia, think tanks, NGOs, and the wider society. Yet their empowerment would, again, be predicated on appointments to key positions, which in turn depends upon access to powerful elected politicians. And appointments to such positions are no guarantee against the ensuing pressures for ideological conformity and malleability.

an “inside-outside” strategy appears most promising

For the time being, an “inside-outside” strategy appears most promising. Reformists can and should cut their teeth in the existing Democratic foreign policy world, resigning when morally imperative but gleaning knowledge of how things work when possible. Critics can and should challenge the Democratic foreign policy elite and worldview, and not just issue by issue but in a holistic way that lays bare the vacuity of appeals to American power, greatness, and leadership. Ultimately, more creative and broad-reaching coalitions will be key to transformation – it is not the pens of academics and unconventional analysts that will give Harris pause on Gaza, but the tens of thousands of uncommitted votes cast in primaries. Biden’s team has claimed to be implementing a foreign policy for the middle class, but they have largely spoken for the middle class rather than with it or through it, and listening efforts have been token and performative.

For progressives and leftists, a mass working-class base, involved directly in the articulation and advocacy of an alternative foreign policy, is one key to achieving change. Such an effort, already underway in tentative forms, would involve connecting the cadres of an alternative foreign policy team more directly and intensively to the workers unionizing Amazon and Starbucks, as well as to the mostly domestically-focused organizers pursuing single-issue campaigns at the state level. To make those connections stronger and more powerful will take new and more robust institutions, as well as a great deal of listening from the reformists currently embedded in the offices of progressive members of Congress, NGOs, and academia. It is unlikely that status quo-minded Democrats could be dislodged from the foreign policy ladder simply by being out-argued; the challenge is instead to make the foreign policy elite more answerable and vulnerable to mass politics.    

 

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The Democrats’ Pro-Worker Agenda Can Go Global

As a candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris is signalling her rejection of a corporatist neoliberalism in favor of progressive, worker-first policies at home. Such a policy would build on the existing pro-labor success of the Biden administration, but it also presents an opportunity to move towards a more pro-worker foreign policy, without getting caught in great power competition.

Writes Matt Duss:

The United States can build a more equitable global order, or it can frantically try to maintain global primacy, but it can’t do both. The Harris-Walz team has an important task and a big opportunity to diminish this contradiction and complete this transformation. Just as the neoliberal era proved that giving carte blanche to big corporations—whether they’re car companies or weapons manufacturers—is not a means for achieving broad economic progress or security, the past 20 years of the “war on terror” showed that a heavily militarized foreign policy feeds global insecurity and shreds the fabric of international norms.

As outlined by Trump and Vance, the Republican vision is essentially zero-sum: The United States and its workers only win by others losing, and vice versa. The Harris-Walz team can offer a vision of contrasting solidarity, which doesn’t seek to build political consensus by vilifying the foreign enemy of the moment but rather seeks ways to uplifts workers and their communities in every country.

Read the full piece at Foreign Policy.

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UNBURDENED: How Harris could forge a post-neoliberal U.S. foreign policy

As Vice President Kamala Harris proceeds into the election and looks to carve out a path distinct from incumbent President Joe Biden, foreign policy is an area where she can make the most stark contrast with not just her opponent, but her predecessor. Anand Giridharadas interviewed CIP’s Matt Duss about what to do differently.

Their conversation is far reaching, from Gaza and arms shipments to international law and industrial policy. One major call from Duss is for a break with neoliberal economic visions of the past, ones that supported bad governments abroad in order to provide American capital access to cheap workers in those countries.

GIRIDHARADAS: What is the right message for Harris then? How do you talk about [this post-neoliberal economic approach] in terms that are not distorted by this — as you just put it — new hotness of great power competition.

DUSS: I think focusing on: This is what is going to be good for American workers. It’s going to be good for workers around the world. We are not pitting American workers against workers in China or anywhere else in this zero-sum competition. What we are doing is going to be good.

Again, the United States government’s first responsibility, first and foremost, is to the people of the United States. But making a pitch not only here but globally to say, Listen, we want to raise worker standards. We want to raise labor standards. We want to protect labor’s right to organize. That’s a very powerful message. And I also think looking at the speech that JD Vance gave at the RNC — in some ways, that was a mirror image or a darker version of the speech Jake Sullivan gave at Brookings because it was billed as a foreign policy speech.

And yet it was all about trade. It was all about how the elites have failed working people. That is a very powerful message. And people can call him weird all they want, but I’m saying that was a map to what they are trying to do.

Duss offers concrete policy recommendations for Harris, including:

Use leverage. “Enforce that law as a way of putting genuine pressure on the Israeli government, Netanyahu in particular, to accept a ceasefire”

Talk to Iran. “Getting to some regional agreement, a smaller nuclear deal that would at least have the U.S. and Iran talking and building some measure of familiarity and trust so that we better understand each other’s aims”

Reposition the United States in support of international law.

Ditch the “great power competition” frame. “I think defining our entire approach to the world through the lens of strategic competition is ultimately going to lead us down a very bad path that eventually leads one place, and that’s to conflict. It is not going to lead to more security and prosperity. It leads to more conflict. It’s just spending more on the military and spending less here on our people at home.”

Labor protections at home and abroad. “Minimum wage legislation. Minimum corporate tax legislation nationally and globally. The global corporate minimum tax is a huge one that her administration should really lean into. Global minimum corporate tax and a global minimum wage raising America’s minimum wage substantially. Leaning into the social safety net.”

Compassionate migration policy. “We’re not going to scare people away from the border given what they’ve already risked to get here. You need to address the reasons that they are choosing to flee.”

Rethink sanctions, “which don’t actually produce policy change. They just produce more refugees, more migrants. They produce more corruption on the parts of elites inside these countries.”

Read the full piece, which covers everything from Gaza to climate change to Iran, at The.Ink.

Unaccountable military surplus fuels police violence at home and abroad.

Lillian Mauldin and Janet Abou-Elias are co-founders of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and research fellows at the Center for International Policy. Liv Owens, Mekedas Belayneh, and Rosie Khan are all researchers with Women for Weapons Trade Transparency and, respectively, a doctoral candidate at City St. George’s University of London, an economic master’s candidate at John Jay College, and an environmental policy master’s candidate at Duke University.

For the past ten months, the world has watched the devastating Israeli assault on Gaza in which more than 38,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, 70% of them women and children. Protestors internationally have drawn public attention to the mass civilian casualties and unprecedented destruction. Student protests and encampments across the United States erupted in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, only to be met with increasingly violent and militarized responses from law enforcement.

Equipped with riot gear, tear gas, and rubber bullets, police forces have swiftly and aggressively dismantled peaceful demonstrations. Columbia University police used crowd control weapons and riot squads to break up encampments and deployed surveillance drones to monitor protester activity. Indiana University authorized state police to set up snipers aimed at protestors from the top of the student union building. At UCLA, the only pause the police took from throwing stun grenades at the encampments was during the hours-long attack from violent counter protesters. For this, police opted to stand aside and watch. At the University of Arizona, police confronted peaceful protestors with MRAP-style armored vehicles called Lenco BearCats. Then they deployed ​​chemical agents against the crowd.

These instances of selective brutality are no surprise; if anything, it draws stark parallels to the historic suppression of dissent in the U.S. From the Bonus Army to the Civil Rights Movement protests, the Kent State Shootings, The War on Drugs, the “Battle of Seattle”, the Ferguson Protests and Standing Rock Protests, the current militarized response to these student encampments follows a grim precedent of police intimidation and violence.

As defense contractors and weapons manufacturers seek new markets, they find lucrative opportunities in selling military style equipment to domestic police forces.

The military-industrial complex plays a significant role in encouraging increasingly militarized responses by law enforcement agencies against civilians in the United States. As defense contractors and weapons manufacturers seek new markets, they find lucrative opportunities in selling military style equipment to domestic police forces. Programs such as the Department of Defense’s 1033 and 1122 federal surplus programs facilitate easier access to weapons and tactical gear designed for warfare.

This normalization of military style tools in police arsenals creates a mindset that views civilian protests as combat situations requiring aggressive force. Consequently, police departments equipped with advanced weaponry and armored vehicles are more likely to resort to brutalization and violent tactics, even in situations involving peaceful demonstrations. This not only escalates tensions and leads to excessive use of force but also undermines the principle of policing by consent, transforming community protectors into warriors prepared for battle.

What is the 1122 Program?

The 1122 program is one way excess military equipment from the bloated Pentagon budget is offloaded to police departments, bringing militarization abroad back home. Established in 1994, the 1122 Program is managed by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Army, and the General Services Administration to allow law enforcement agencies to purchase discounted military equipment for counter-drug, homeland security, and emergency response activities. These discounts are meant to encourage local police departments to purchase equipment from the DOD inventory and contractors, propping up the same military-industrial companies that profit off of war abroad and police violence at home.

Federal agencies responsible for the program have failed to track, audit, or account for the weapons and gear that are transferred or sold through it.

The excess production of military equipment by these companies justifies the need for DOD programs that sell accumulating surplus equipment to various law enforcement agencies. Since the program primarily gives ownership of equipment to police departments, there is very little tracking of the military equipment that is sold to them. The 1122 Program does not have an audit mechanism; therefore, its sale of secondhand military weapons and other equipment, such as surveillance gear, does not have any safeguards to protect against its improper use. Currently, the program has no centralized database of purchases so there is no mechanism for public accountability or awareness of the distribution and use of military equipment by police. Federal agencies responsible for the program have failed to track, audit, or account for the weapons and gear that are transferred or sold through it. Meanwhile, police brutalization and use of excess force is ever present. With military equipment in the hands of police, there are dangers of significant misuse and harm going unchecked.

Missing records, no audits, and dangerous by design

Throughout Women for Weapons Trade Transparency’s investigation into the program starting in 2021, we sought clarity on the program’s record-keeping processes, departmental oversight, and typical purchases. We encountered unclear purchase record-keeping procedures that varied by state, agencies that were uncooperative and violated their obligations to open records law, and state points of contact who had little or no information about the operations of the program in their state. When we attempted to confirm which law enforcement agencies were enrolled and which state agencies managed them, our inquiries frequently yielded no certain answers.

Despite filing open records requests with dozens of local and state agencies in states that participate in the 1122 Program, we were only able to acquire centralized, organized spreadsheets of purchases from Colorado, California, and Massachusetts. Most state agencies denied or ignored our requests. When government staff responded to our requests, they would commonly misdirect us to other agencies, misinterpret our requests, or reject our requests without valid explanation.

A lack of record keeping on 1122 Program procurements creates a risk of military style equipment being unaccounted for in police inventory. When asked if purchases from the 1122 program are audited after procurement, a Texas official responsible for administering the program in the state commented: “Once the items are received, our office does not inventory, account or audit.” A New York point of contact commented that “[my] responsibilities and duties end at the approval of the purchase. I do collect Contract Usage forms. The NYS 1122 Program does contain language in that the ultimate responsibility lies with the customer.” A Colorado point of contact confirmed separately: “We verify that purchases are made by state and local governments in support of counter-drug, homeland security and emergency response activities prior to procurement of vehicles. We do not trace purchased vehicles after they are received by the state and local agencies. Vehicles become property of the agency once received…”

Without state or federal level end use monitoring, the 1122 Program fails to create safeguards to protect against violence perpetrated by equipment

What’s more, the federal government does not require any oversight to monitor an agency’s compliance with counter drug, homeland security, and emergency response purposes. Without state or federal level end use monitoring, the 1122 Program fails to create safeguards to protect against violence perpetrated by equipment and against diversion into the wrong hands. After months of FOIA request correspondence with the Defense Logistics Agency, we finally acquired federal level data on 1122 Program transfers. Unfortunately, the data was incomplete, accounting only for purchases through the program after 2017, and moreover, missing item identifications for years prior to 2020. The total 1122 Program acquisition value for years 2017–2021 was given as just $379,473. However, this number contradicts data we received on the state level. A Colorado point of contact estimated that the state had purchased $1 million in vehicles in one year through the program, a number far greater than what was reported by the DLA for total nationwide purchases.

The inconsistent data across local, state, and national levels uncovers a disturbing reality that 1122 Program transfers are largely unaccounted for. It is clear from the harms that occur as a result of this gross negligence and inconsistency that the 1122 Program should be sunsetted by Congress.

Connecting the dots to increasing criminalization

In June 2024, the Supreme Court ruled that unhoused people could be arrested for sleeping in public spaces, overturning a previous rule that cities could not do so if there was insufficient shelter space in the city. With U.S. law enforcement agencies over-funded and relied on to tackle issues of U.S. infrastructure, lack of social services, and public health crises, these already vulnerable populations are exposed to an even higher risk of encountering unlawful violence from militarized police forces.

Criminalization of unhoused people has long perpetuated cycles of poverty and injustice. But as federal programs like 1122 continue to equip police with dangerous military style weapons and vehicles, and this criminalization of unhoused people is legalized nationwide, the threats to life and safety of Americans without homes becomes even greater and widespread. Police have historically ignored the constitutional rights of vulnerable populations during interactions and arrests. The U.S. Department of Justice issued a report on the Phoenix Police Department in June of this year after an almost three-year investigation. It found that Phoenix police routinely violated the rights of unhoused people “by unlawfully detaining, citing and arresting them and unlawfully disposing of their belongings.” Further, the report found that over a third of all “arrests in Phoenix from 2016 to 2022 were of people experiencing homelessness” and that many of these arrests were unconstitutional. The DOJ — the highest law enforcement authority in the country — has confirmed that these police committed crimes against the very individuals they are sworn to serve. And because Arizona is enrolled in the 1122 Program, these same agencies have the ability to purchase military style equipment and weapons.

In response to the report, Ann Oliva, CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, commented: “Criminalization doesn’t end anybody’s homelessness. The way to resolve homelessness for people is to provide housing and the supportive services that people want and need… we need investments at the federal level to address the affordable housing crisis and shortage that is impacting not just Arizona but communities across the country.”

The pathological warrior-cop mentality, the violations of unhoused people’s rights committed by police, and the brutal repression of domestic political protests are manifestations of the imperial boomerang – inevitable consequences of the U.S.’s foreign policy

The aforementioned increasingly violent and militarized responses from law enforcement in response to protests since April also highlight a larger trend of repression and criminalization of protest and free speech that is aided and abetted by military equipment transferred through the 1122 Program. A recent analysis of police misconduct lawsuits filed during the 2020 protests in response to the murder of George Floyd revealed that the police response to many protests broke laws and violated rights. Many of these lawsuits also resulted in police reforms, including restrictions on the use of “less lethal” weapons, such as rubber bullets, pepper balls, and tear gas that have long been used to crush dissent in the United States around the world. If weapons such as these are being scrutinized and restricted, military style equipment purchased through the 1122 Program such as MRAPs and BearCats should be too.

Furthermore, studies have found that additional force by police leads to increased violence and a positive feedback loop of escalation from both protesters and police forces. Additionally, empirical analysis of the correlations between police militarization through the 1122 Program’s sister 1033 Program and police violence revealed “a positive and statistically significant relationship between 1033 transfers and fatalities from officer-involved shootings.” The pathological warrior-cop mentality, the violations of unhoused people’s rights committed by police, and the brutal repression of domestic political protests are manifestations of the imperial boomerang – inevitable consequences of the U.S.’s foreign policy.

Intertwined international and domestic militarization

“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.”

― James Madison, speech at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia

Investigative scrutiny, such as Government Accountability Office reports on DOD’s Section 333 Train and Equip programs, highlights how U.S. military resources are not only allocated for foreign allies’ military forces but also integrated into their law enforcement agencies. Programs such as Worldwide Warehouse Redistribution Services (WWRS), DOD’s Section 333 Authority to Build Capacity, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency’s Excess Defense Articles (EDA) showcase how the US operates a durable system for distributing weapons and other military equipment to the local and federal level forces of other nations. These programs are not isolated: they demonstrate a U.S. strategy of distributing military-grade equipment internationally through numerous channels, which has far-reaching harms for civilians policed by both military and law enforcement forces.

The 1122 Program’s impacts on domestic militarization and other programs like EDA and WWRS paint a picture of the broader landscape of militarization. While the 1122 Program enables states and local governments in the United States to access federal equipment and discounts for domestic use, EDA and WWRS enable the redistribution of surplus U.S. military equipment to international customers. This common mechanism of reallocating excess military resources demonstrates the similar causes and effects of domestic and international militarization: inflated defense budgets beget greater civilian harm. In these ways, the repurposing of military equipment raises concerns about the budgetary and human security implications of such programs.

This common mechanism of reallocating excess military resources demonstrates the similar causes and effects of domestic and international militarization: inflated defense budgets beget greater civilian harm.

WWRS exemplifies the complexity and opacity of U.S. military transfer programs. This program facilitates the transfer of articles acquired under the U.S. Arms Export Control Act through Foreign Military Sales (FMS) cases or Direct Commercial Sales (DCS) purchases. Essentially, WWRS operates as a global redistribution center for excess U.S. military equipment. U.S. Government organizations are eligible to be WWRS buyers as well as foreign FMS customers. The anonymity maintained for both buyers and sellers within this program raises concerns about its lack of transparency and oversight, much like that of the 1122 Program. As such, both programs display larger trends of a lack of end use monitoring of U.S. supplied weaponry, leading to their potential misuse.

EDA repurposes surplus U.S. military equipment to foreign governments and international organizations with the primary goal of modernizing U.S. ally forces in line with U.S. foreign policy objectives. This program underscores the similarities between international militarization and domestic militarization practices. The equipment provided through EDA is often the same equipment that could be accessed domestically through programs like the 1122 Program, such as armored vehicles, MRAPs, and surveillance gear. Clearly, the line between military forces abroad and law enforcement agencies at home has been blurred. DOD’s Section 333 Train and Equip Programs similarly militarize foreign security forces and have funded police abroad in their counter terrorism and drug trafficking activities, which directly mirrors the purposes and mechanisms of the 1122 Program in the United States.

The parallels between international and domestic militarization practices raise concerns about the lack of accountability and oversight of these transfer and security cooperation programs. The redistribution of military-style equipment, whether to international allies or domestic agencies, can lead to the misuse and diversion of such equipment. For instance, there is a risk that this equipment could be used to suppress democratic protests or other forms of civil unrest, both abroad and at home. The opaque nature of these transfers obscures the end-uses of such equipment, thus eroding public trust and posing threats to civilian safety.

there is a risk that this equipment could be used to suppress democratic protests or other forms of civil unrest, both abroad and at home

After drawdowns from conflicts such as that in Afghanistan, the U.S. has often repurposed military equipment by transferring it to domestic law enforcement agencies. This process is in addition to the over $7.1 billion in U.S.-funded military weapons left in Afghanistan, which face a high risk of diversion in the region and have already appeared in conflicts such as in the disputed South Asian region of Kashmir. Following the U.S. drawdown, CENTCOM reported that “984 C-17 loads of material” had been transported out of Afghanistan. Among this material, the DOD declared 17,074 pieces of equipment as federal excess personal property, which was sent to the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA) for disposition. Contrary to some media reports equating “disposition” with “destruction,” most of this equipment is unlikely to be destroyed. Instead, it often finds its way into the hands of local police through programs like the DOD’s 1033 Program. These transfers have resulted in police departments acquiring surplus military gear, including armored vehicles and tactical equipment. This raises an important question: how often do military drawdowns and other foreign engagements lead to spikes in the transfer of military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies?

The linkage between military drawdowns abroad and upturns in 1033 transfers at home is evident in the data. Stephen Semler, co-founder of Security Policy Reform Institute, observed that there was a significant uptick in the transfers of surplus military equipment to domestic law enforcement agencies as the U.S. military pulled out of Iraq. This pattern is particularly clear from the flow of MRAPs (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), which were produced in large numbers to protect troops from improvised explosive device (IED) attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. As military operations decreased, these vehicles, along with other excess equipment, were funneled into the 1033 Program, flooding police departments with gear intended for war zones. The surge in military budgets during this period also contributed to an abundance of surplus equipment, further fueling the transfers. This trend underscores the direct relationship between overseas drawdowns and the increased militarization of police forces at home. If this pattern holds true for the 1033 Program, then it is likely that a similar trend of cyclical militarization occurs with the 1122 Program.

The Solution

The 1122 Program’s lack of oversight and inconsistent data collection practices obscure public and policymaker understanding, hindering effective civilian and governmental scrutiny. This scrutiny is crucial, as the transfer of military equipment to local police forces blurs the line between military and civilian roles. It encourages a warrior-cop mentality, leading to a more aggressive and confrontational style of policing inappropriate for community-based law enforcement. Increased surveillance and excessive force suppresses dissent through intimidation and violence, threatening First Amendment freedoms of speech and demonstration.

Sunsetting the 1122 Program would have three main benefits.

First, sunsetting the 1122 Program would address critical issues in U.S. foreign policy by curbing the overproduction of military equipment that contributes to domestic and international militarization and surveillance. By reducing the domestic demand for such equipment, the incentive for manufacturing and exporting militarization would diminish. The aggressive posture that currently drives U.S. foreign policy is unsustainable and deadly – and it should be divested from. This shift is essential, as it not only promotes a restraint and peace-oriented foreign policy but also counters the normalization of using military-style weaponry against civilians.

Second, discontinuing the 1122 Program would significantly reduce the demand for the mass production of military-style equipment, thereby lessening the environmental impact from the extraction of resources needed for its production. The consumption of fuel and energy involved in the manufacture and deployment of this equipment exacerbates environmental degradation both domestically and internationally. Directing funding away from militarization would not only mitigate these environmental harms but also support global efforts to avoid conflict stemming from resource extraction. This realignment would reflect a strong commitment to responsible governance and international cooperation, fostering a more sustainable and peaceful global landscape.

Third, redirecting funds from the acquisition of excess military equipment to the provision of social programs can address the root causes of crime and improve overall community safety and health, creating a more just and equitable society. At a time when communities across the United States face significant challenges such as poverty, public health crises, and inadequate social services, it is imperative to prioritize funding for programs that directly benefit the well-being of residents. State and local governments have much more finite budgets than the Pentagon and the federal government, and yet, they still inevitably subsidize the DOD and weapons manufacturers through the 1122 Program. Sunsetting the 1122 Program would free up these dollars to be used for much needed social and infrastructure projects and will foster a more transparent, accountable, and humane approach to both national security and international relations.

* This publication was made possible in part by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author.

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(AI)mageddon: Who is Liable When Autonomous Weapons Attack?

Militaries are increasingly incorporating autonomous targeting and decision making into machines. While previous autonomous features, like maintaining stability on a drone during a flight, are only tangentially connected to the process of killing, others, like targeting algorithms used, are much more directly implicated in the act.

This is of particular concern when it comes to assigning responsibility and liability for the actions taken by an armed machine. Autonomous features, often branded as Artificial Intelligence, lend themselves to an obscured chain of responsibility, with error possible in the sensor, the coding, the algorithmic process, the orders given by human controllers, or caused by emergent behavior.

Janet Abou-Elias and Lillian Mauldin, of Women for Weapons Trade Transparency, write that accountability and international cooperation are vital to mitigate the harms from lethal decisions by machines on the battlefield.

To address the pressing need for accountability in AWS, policymakers, legal experts and international organizations must work together to strengthen legal frameworks. This includes drafting and agreeing to clear regulations that delineate responsibility for AI-driven actions in warfare to ensure that all stakeholders are held accountable for any violations. Implementing these measures will be undoubtedly challenging as resistance from powerful defense lobbies and the inherent difficulties of achieving international consensus are prospective barriers.

International cooperation is crucial to bridge the legal gaps surrounding AI in warfare. It is only through consensus — building efforts that global standards of  transparency, accountability and oversight can be adhered to. By learning from other AI-regulated industries, such as the automotive sector’s efforts to regulate autonomous vehicles and adapting those lessons to a military context, the international community can better safeguard against harms of AI technologies in warfare.

Read the full piece at the Fair Observer.

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