Resource Author: Matt Duss

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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[Video] Live from Chicago: Critical Examination of the 2024 Party Platforms

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About the Speakers

Maya Berry
President, Arab American Institute; Member, Democratic National Committee

 

Matt Duss
Executive Vice President, Center for International Policy; Former Foreign Policy Advisor, Senator Bernie Sanders

Dr. James Zogby
Executive Director, Arab American Institute; Previous DNC Delegate and Platform Committee Member

For

 

 

 

[Video] FP Live: What We’re Learning About Harris’s Foreign Policy

On Aug. 22 at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Vice President Kamala Harris will take the stage to officially accept her party’s nomination. After a week of speeches, will a new Democratic foreign policy take shape? Will Harris try to put daylight between herself and her current boss, U.S. President Joe Biden?

On August 23 at 11am ET, FP’s Ravi Agrawal hosted a conversation with Anne-Marie Slaughter, the CEO of New America and a former head of the U.S. State Department’s policy planning team, and Matt Duss, executive vice president of Center for International Policy and a former foreign-policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders. They will outline what we know and don’t know about the foreign-policy plans of a potential Harris-Walz administration.

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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.

The Killing of a Hamas Leader Is Part of a Larger War

The assassination of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, presumably by Israel, is the latest deliberate provocation in a series of deliberate provocations to keep the conflict going. Yet every provocation risks wider regional conflagration, and so long as US policy continues to shield Israel from the consequences of its actions, instead of pushing it to the negotiating table, the situation becomes more precarious.

Most crucially, the United States has plenty of existing leverage over the actions of Israel that the Biden administration could pursue, most immediately by adhering to, instead of sidestepping, US legal limits on arms sales to the country.

There’s another way, Matt Duss and Nancy Okail write for The New York Times:

At the time of this writing, a ground war in Lebanon and devastating, sustained missile barrages may still be staved off, but to do so will require deft, immediate diplomacy and actionable changes on the pipeline of arms to Israel. That will necessitate more action than we have seen in the last 10 months, leading us to worry that the conflagration may occur as much as the Americans would like to wish it away.

The time is late, but it is essential now for President Biden to finally apply real pressure to stop this war, by halting the supply of offensive arms, facilitating the return of hostages to Israel and enabling the provision of desperately needed humanitarian aid into Gaza. The United States must state loudly and clearly that the country will no longer support this war. And then show that it means it.

Read the full piece.

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Harris Candidacy Gives Democrats a Chance to Pivot on Gaza

When President Joe Biden announced he was dropping his bid for reelection and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to succeed him to the Presidency, he created the space for Harris to set out a new policy on Gaza. In Foreign Policy, CIP executive vice president Matt Duss writes that Harris can plot a new path, distinct from Biden’s nearly unconditional support for Israel’s indiscriminate destruction of Gaza.

Writes Duss:

While no one expects Harris to dramatically distance herself from Biden, there are steps that she can take to show that she speaks for the Democratic Party of today and not 40 years ago. She can announce that as president, she will immediately suspend the U.S.-supplied military aid being used in violation of U.S. law. She can publicly make clear that she agrees with the assessment of countless Israelis—including Israeli opposition lawmakers and top sitting security officials—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is stalling hostage release and cease-fire efforts in order to cling to power. She can reject the baseless and inflammatory claims that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), the largest and most important relief agency in Gaza, is a “Hamas front,” and state that she’ll work to see UNRWA funding resumed as soon as legally possible. In doing so, she would join U.S. partners—such as Britain, France, and Germany—that have already resumed their contributions.

Read the full piece here.

 

Matt Duss on Netanyahu visit & protests, Gaza policy, Kamala Harris

In his first public call since leaving the race, President Joe Biden vowed to end the war in Gaza during his final months in office as he is set to meet with Netanyahu this week.

But much of the attention will be on Vice President Kamala Harris. The presumptive Democratic nominee will reportedly have her own face-to-face chat with Netanyahu.

CIP executive vice president Matt Duss joined Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s RN Breakfast to discuss. Listen here.

Continue reading “Matt Duss on Netanyahu visit & protests, Gaza policy, Kamala Harris”

Harris bid for Oval Office puts spotlight on foreign policy track record

As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visits Washington and prepares for a July 24 address to Congress, CIP executive vice president Matt Duss discusses Kamala Harris’s record on Israel-Palestine. The Hill’s Laura Kelly and Rafael Bernal report:

Advocates for a tougher U.S. policy towards Israel point to Harris’s March speech in Selma, Ala., as a promising example of the vice president addressing the plight of Palestinians at a time when Biden was under increasing pressure to hold back weapons deliveries to Israel over the toll of death and destruction in the Gaza Strip amid its war against Hamas.

“The Israeli government must do more to significantly increase the flow of aid [to Palestinians]. No excuses,” Harris said to applause.

“She really lifted up the humanitarian crisis in Gaza in a much more aggressive way, much more critical of the Israeli government’s approach there. I think that was noticed by everyone,” said Matt Duss, executive vice president for the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

But it’s unclear if Harris’s speech represented a major policy difference or only a shift in rhetoric. Stepping forward as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, she now has an opportunity to articulate what she wants to do differently, Duss said.

He added it’s an important signal that she will not attend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on Wednesday. A number of Democratic lawmakers have announced they will boycott the speech, largely progressives.

“I hope and expect that she and her team will engage with the whole array of voices that make up the Democratic Party, and that includes its growing progressive [wing].”

Read the full story in The Hill here.

Duss on Democracy Now! discusses JD Vance, Trump and Biden foreign policy

Following J.D. Vance’s first speech at the Republican Convention as the official vice presidential nominee, CIP Executive Vice President Matt Duss joined Democracy Now! to discuss the competing narratives and records on foreign policy espoused by Vance, Trump and Biden. Below are excerpted transcripts of Matt’s discussion.

On the Iraq War:

“The story he wants to tell America about Trumpism, about the MAGA movement is that he was misled; he was told by Washington elites that this [the Iraq War] was a just war, a necessary war and was lied to, so he did his duty as an American citizen and went to serve in Marines in Iraq but then came to realize that that war was based on a lie. And of course that is a very valid argument. It was based on a series of lies and and and untruths and had enormously disastrous effects of course for the region but also for the United States. And that’s again an area where President Biden is quite vulnerable. He was a strong supporter of the Iraq War and to this day has never fully accounted for his support for the war.”

 

On Trump’s foreign policy record:

“If you look at the actual record of Trump’s presidency, it was in fact quite militarist. It was not isolationist, it was certainly not dovish in any respect. It was just unilateralist. And that I think is consistent with what we saw [in Vance’s speech] last night. It’s not that the United States will be pulling back from the world necessarily. It’s that we will be much more aggressive in advancing our own perceived interests. And if you look at some of the steps Trump took with North Korea, we came closer than ever before to a war in North Korea in 2017. We were on the brink of war with Iran in the wake of the assassination of Qasem Solemaini in January 2020. There was of course the attempt at regime change in Venezuela. So again, I think it’s important to understand all of these in the background even while we recognize the validity of the critique of the foreign policy establishment that we’ve seen from Trump and now from Vance.”

 

On support for Israel:

“What [Vance] said at the beginning about the kind of political support from many Americans, particularly Christian Americans –I myself grew up in the evangelical church so I can relate to what he’s talking about– there is a deep understanding, a deep sympathy culturally, religiously and politically for the state of Israel for a whole bunch of reasons. I think that is valid, it’s important to understand that. But I think there is a separate conversation about what is the correct policy if people care about Israel. What actually leads to security, not just for Israelis, but to Palestinians, for Palestinians, and for people across the region. And I think that is where we’re going to have real disagreement.”

Read Matt’s recent analysis with co-author Daniel Levy, In the U.K. and France, There Was a Gaza Vote. And in the U.S.?, in The New Republic.

On the Abraham Accords and plans for a normalization deal between Israel and Saudi Arabia:

“You heard […] Vance praising the Abraham Accords, and unfortunately the Abraham Accords are not a formula for genuine security. It’s important to understand what the countries in the region –Israel, the United Arab Emirates, some of these other undemocratic and repressive countries– see the purpose of the Abraham Accords as, and that is sustaining their own undemocratic rule. I think that ultimately is not going to be formula either for security of Israel in the long term, certainly not for the Palestinians. I don’t want to blame the Abraham Accords for October 7th attacks, but I will note that the logic behind the Abraham Accords, which is that the Palestinians can just be pushed to the side and kind of just managed in perpetuity. That is the logic and environment in which the October 7th attacks happened.

“Unfortunately this is not an area where the Biden administration is able to offer a counterargument because President Biden himself has adopted the Abraham Accords and now pretends that they can be a basis for regional peace and security, which they cannot.”

In the U.K. and France, There Was a Gaza Vote. And in the U.S.?

Today, Matt Duss of CIP and Daniel Levy of the U.S. / Middle East Project have an article in The New Republic arguing that a Gaza voting block helped the left in France and cost Labour votes in the U.K., and will likely play a pivotal role in the 2024 Presidential election in the United States.

Describing the UK experience, they write:

Among Muslim voters and a slew of progressive and younger voters, positions on Gaza had translated into electoral choices. That had never happened before in U.K. politics. While some of it may have been a luxury vote, assuming an inevitable Labour win, Britain’s governing party is well aware of the consequences for maintaining its rule if this trend cannot be reversed. In sum, the evidence suggests that the narrative that Labour’s aggressively distancing itself from Corbyn-era criticism of Israel by aligning with the Sunak government on Gaza was an essential element of its success was not only wrong but precisely wrong, with that shift acting as a drag on the party in the current circumstances.

Read the full piece here.