Tuesday’s election made it resoundingly clear that the American public is grappling with a profound sense of economic and political unease. Across the country, voters signaled that endless foreign conflicts, systemic political corruption, and the crippling high cost of living are no longer peripheral issues—they are the defining domestic and national security challenges of our time. These three crises are deeply interrelated, feeding into one another in ways that diminish public safety and drain household budgets. As the new Congress prepares to take office, it faces an inescapable mandate to address all three fronts simultaneously.
Doing so will require nothing short of a fundamental foreign policy revolution. Lawmakers must grapple not just with the outrages, overreaches, and failures of Donald Trump’s administration, but also with the uncomfortable reality that past Democratic or Democrat-supported foreign policies laid the groundwork for today’s crises. Within the Democratic Party, both in Congress and beyond, there will undoubtedly be a temptation to limit the scope or the pace of change. Yet, if lawmakers hope to find a way out of the current national malaise and move beyond the systemic failures that have afflicted American foreign policy for decades, they must muster the political courage to face a hard truth. President Donald Trump’s frequent abuses of power and unilateral warmaking are not a sudden, inexplicable break from Washington’s long-standing militarist mindset; rather, they represent a particularly aggressive and predatory expression of it.
The incoming majority will inherit a national security environment where the most severe threats to American safety and prosperity do not necessarily lurk overseas, but originate from within. This realization underscores why Congress must move immediately to shut down the ongoing conflict with Iran while simultaneously pairing any foreign policy shift with a frontal assault on spiraling domestic costs and institutional corruption. Political polarization, government dysfunction, and the increasing dominance of political and economic life by a small handful of mercurial oligarchs pose a far more immediate danger to the American people than any foreign adversary. Add to this a president who recklessly and unilaterally launches unauthorized military interventions while relentlessly seeking opportunities to enrich himself, his family, and his cronies, and the picture of domestic vulnerability becomes complete.
When Democrats assume control of congressional committees and the legislative calendar in January, they will wield considerable institutional power to challenge the malfeasance of the executive branch. Control of hearing rooms and the legislative schedule will provide a long-overdue opportunity for rigorous oversight. Yet, while the Trump administration certainly deserves aggressive and thorough investigation, Democrats must aim higher. They must use this legislative leverage to articulate a genuinely compelling, coherent alternative for American foreign policy that breaks definitively with the past.
A Hard Look at Foreign Interventions and Bipartisan Complicity
The first and most urgent task facing the new legislative majority will be bringing an end to the war with Iran. This reckless and deeply unpopular conflict has become even more toxic to the public as ordinary Americans feel its direct effects on their wallets, particularly through rising fuel prices. Congress must respond to widespread, bipartisan voter anger by deploying every legislative tool at its disposal, most notably its constitutional power of the purse.
It has been encouraging to observe Democrats standing firm against supplemental budget requests submitted by the administration for the war. Historically, this is an area where Democrats frequently stumbled out of fear of being accused of failing to "support the troops" if they opposed funding for counterproductive conflicts. With lawmakers holding the line against additional funding, those days of political timidity appear to be receding. That is a welcome development.
However, Democrats must be prepared to go much further. They should be willing to oppose all unvetted funding for the military, including blocking votes on the National Defense Authorization Act—the annual legislation that sets the broad scope and budget for the Department of Defense—to force an end to hostilities with Iran. In fact, lawmakers should be willing to withhold funding from the Pentagon entirely and threaten another government shutdown if spending bills fail to explicitly prohibit any allocation for Trump’s war.
With December 11 serving as the deadline for a continuing resolution to keep the federal government funded and operating, the leverage is clear. If ever there was a definitive reason for Democrats to withhold their votes, stopping an illegal and globally destructive war that American voters have resoundingly rebuked is it.
Beyond immediate battlefield engagements, Democrats must take an unsparing look at the continuity between Trump’s use of military violence and past uses of force by administrations of both parties, alongside the bipartisan support those actions historically enjoyed. The groundwork for the current conflict with Iran was laid, in part, by years of unconditional U.S. support for international military actions and a persistent refusal to impose consequences on foreign governments despite clear evidence of ongoing human rights violations and breaches of international law. Similarly, Trump’s strikes on alleged narcotics targets in the Caribbean represent the logical evolution of treating domestic and international drug problems as a perpetual military war, routinely applying the label of "terrorist" to justify extreme measures without due process. Seeking genuine accountability for these abuses requires acknowledging the past complicity of both major political parties.
Alongside foreign policy reform, Democrats must confront corruption, the central node connecting the nation’s domestic and foreign policy crises. In tackling this issue, lawmakers will find themselves pushing against an open door. Public opinion polls consistently demonstrate that political corruption ranks near the very top of Americans’ concerns. A recent Harris poll conducted for The Guardian revealed that nearly nine out of ten Americans believe government corruption—defined as elected officials prioritizing their own financial interests or those of their donors over the public good—is a severe problem. A mid-October CNBC All-America Economic Survey similarly found that voters are more anxious about government corruption than any other issue, surpassing even high grocery and gas prices. Furthermore, Gallup reported that public perceptions of government corruption have reached their highest level in two years, with 89% of U.S. adults viewing it as widespread.
To say that the current administration provides a target-rich environment for an aggressive anti-corruption campaign is an understatement. Exposing foreign gifts, probing conflicts of interest involving family members, scrutinizing federal contracts awarded to major oligarch donors and technology allies, and investigating the selling of pardons should form the core of the congressional agenda. Lawmakers must also restore robust enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and related federal task forces. In particular, Democrats should drill down into the administration’s opaque and controversial advisory boards and diplomatic initiatives, such as the Gaza-focused initiatives that critics have rightly characterized as potential slush funds, alongside the glaring conflicts of interest surrounding special diplomatic envoys.
The encouraging news is that effective anti-corruption
efforts do not necessarily require passing entirely new legislation; often, they simply require rigorous enforcement of existing laws. Legal scholars and policy analysts have repeatedly laid out expansive blueprints for placing anti-corruption measures at the center of a progressive foreign policy platform, detailing actionable agendas for the new Congress to pursue.
Ultimately, the most critical step toward dismantling systemic corruption will involve reforming the broken campaign finance system. The United States remains an outlier among developed democracies, maintaining a system that effectively permits legalized bribery. Legislators frequently speak with candid acceptance about campaign contributors expecting direct returns on their political investments. In recent years, foreign actors have also begun injecting vast sums into American politics, exploiting massive loopholes in campaign finance regulations and the Federal Election Commission’s chronic lack of enforcement.
Confronting this reality will not be easy. At a minimum, Congress must advance legislative responses to the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United decision, which effectively greenlit bottomless, anonymous campaign spending by corporate entities. Lawmakers must also reform the Federal Election Commission itself, providing the agency with the necessary financial resources and investigative powers to police campaign finance crimes, while restoring independent congressional oversight to an agency that has increasingly functioned as an appendage of the executive branch.
Forging a New Political Consensus
All of these intersecting reform efforts must ultimately connect to the single greatest concern weighing on American voters: the punishingly high cost of living. While the Democratic coalition encompasses diverse viewpoints across various policy domains, a firm consensus unites the party around the urgent need to address the material needs of everyday citizens.
Such an approach requires confronting the economic fallout of reckless tariff policies—while simultaneously acknowledging that the old neoliberal taboos against tariffs are firmly a thing of the past. It also means tackling rising gas prices driven by foreign wars, restoring global minimum corporate tax standards, preparing for the looming threat of widespread job displacement driven by artificial intelligence, and checking the immense, unchecked economic and political power wielded by technology oligarchs. As recent events have demonstrated—such as the restriction of critical satellite internet connections in active conflict zones by private tech billionaires—the unchecked influence of unelected corporate actors over foreign and domestic policy is no longer sustainable.
Effectuating this shift will require a diverse mix of tactics, including high-profile congressional hearings, rigorous oversight investigations, and targeted legislative proposals. While many of these initiatives may not immediately result in signed statutes over the next two years, they can serve as the foundational backbone of a winning, coherent agenda for Congress and a future administration. Most importantly, these steps represent a vital movement toward forging a new American political consensus—one upon which a durable, responsible, and sustainable foreign policy can finally be built.
