What’s the Left’s Vision for Foreign Policy After Trump?

June 9, 2026

Guests: Matt Duss

Matt Duss is executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and a former foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders; he advocates for a progressive U.S. foreign policy centered on restraint and global solidarity.

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About this episode

Klein interviews Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy and former foreign-policy adviser to Bernie Sanders, about what a left foreign policy looks like after Trump. Duss argues progressives need an alternative to both Trumpian transactional nationalism and the old liberal-internationalist consensus: a policy organized around global solidarity, military restraint, and tackling climate and inequality. They discuss Gaza as the defining moral rupture for the Democratic coalition and Duss's critique of the rules-based order as rhetoric masking American empire. Klein pushes him on hard cases — Ukraine, Taiwan, China — where anti-militarism collides with deterring aggression; Duss contends deterrence and diplomacy can coexist, and that unquestioned military primacy has failed on its own terms.

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