The recent congressional election results have delivered an unmistakable message to Washington, highlighting that endless foreign conflicts, systemic political corruption, and the crushing weight of the high cost of living rank among the American public’s most urgent concerns. These challenges are deeply interrelated, and the incoming Congress faces immense pressure to address all three fronts simultaneously. Achieving this will require a genuine foreign policy revolution—one that grapples not only with the outrages and failures of the current administration’s approach to international relations, but also with the ways in which past Democratic and Democrat-supported foreign policies have contributed to today’s cascading crises.
Within the Democratic party, there will undoubtedly be a temptation among some leaders in Congress and beyond to limit the scope or pace of change. However, to find a viable path out of the current national crisis and move beyond the foreign policy failures that have afflicted the United States for the past several decades, Democrats will need to summon the political courage to confront a difficult truth. President Donald Trump’s abuses of power and unilateral warmaking are not merely a sudden, isolated break from Washington’s long-standing militarist mindset; rather, they represent a particularly aggressive and predatory expression of it.
The incoming congressional majority is stepping into a complex national security environment where the most severe threats to American safety and prosperity are increasingly homegrown. This reality underscores why Congress must act immediately to shut down the ongoing war with Iran, while simultaneously recognizing that it can only truly secure the United States if it pairs this foreign policy shift with a frontal assault on spiraling household costs and deeply entrenched political corruption.
Today, the compounding pressures of severe political polarization, government corruption and 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 safety and prosperity of the American people than any foreign adversary. Compounding these domestic vulnerabilities is a political leadership that has repeatedly shown a willingness to launch unauthorized military interventions while relentlessly seeking opportunities to enrich itself, its family members, and its political cronies.
When a new Democratic majority assumes control of congressional committees and the legislative calendar in January, lawmakers will possess considerable institutional power to challenge the corruption and malfeasance of the Trump administration. Control of the legislative agenda will provide an invaluable opportunity to conduct sorely needed oversight. Yet, while the administration certainly deserves aggressive and thorough investigation, Democrats must aim higher. They must use this pivotal moment to articulate a genuinely compelling, alternative vision for American foreign policy that breaks definitively with the past.
A Hard Look at Foreign Policy and Militarism
The first and most urgent task facing the incoming legislature will be ending the war with Iran. This reckless and deeply unpopular conflict has become even more toxic to the public as everyday Americans have felt its direct economic fallout reflected in their wallets. Congress must respond to the widespread, bipartisan anger among voters by deploying every constitutional tool at its disposal, utilizing its foundational power of the purse to halt the conflict.
It has been an encouraging sign to see Democrats continuing to oppose any supplemental budget requests submitted by the administration to finance the war. Historically, this has been an area where Democrats frequently faltered, often paralyzed by fears of being accused of failing to "support the troops" if they opposed funding for misguided or counterproductive military ventures. With lawmakers holding firm against additional war funding, those days of political hesitation appear to be fading, which represents a significant shift in legislative backbone.
However, Democrats must be prepared to go much further. They should be willing to oppose all unvetted funding for the military, including blocking crucial votes on the National Defense Authorization Act—the annual legislation that sets the broad operational scope and budget for the Department of Defense—to force an end to hostilities in Iran. In fact, lawmakers should be willing not only to withhold funding from the Pentagon, but also to withhold funding for the entire federal government, threatening another government shutdown if the must-pass spending bills fail to explicitly prohibit any financial allocation toward the administration’s war efforts.
December 11 marks the critical deadline for a continuing resolution to keep the government funded and operating. If ever there was a definitive justification for lawmakers to withhold their votes, stopping a blatantly illegal and globally destructive war that American voters have now resoundingly rebuked is it.
Beyond the immediate crisis in Iran, Democrats must also take a hard look at the structural continuity between Trump’s use of military violence and past uses of force by administrations of both political parties, as well as the enduring bipartisan support that has sustained such violence over the decades. The underlying groundwork for the Iran war was systematically laid by the Biden administration’s unstinting diplomatic and military support for Israel’s actions in Gaza—a reality acknowledged even by some former administration officials—as well as by years of institutional U.S. reluctance to impose tangible consequences on the Israeli government despite clear, documented evidence of ongoing violations of human rights and international law.
Similarly, the administration’s aggressive strikes on alleged "narcoterrorist" boats in the Caribbean represent the logical evolution of the government’s long-standing treatment of domestic drug issues through the prism of a militarized "war," and the casual application of the "terrorist" label to justify extreme measures, including execution without due process. Seeking genuine accountability for these profound abuses will require leaders from both major parties to acknowledge past complicity.
Confronting Corruption and Campaign Finance
To successfully navigate this moment, Democrats must also take on corruption, which serves as the central connecting node linking the nation’s domestic and foreign policy crises. In tackling this issue, lawmakers will be pushing against an open door of public sentiment. Polling data consistently demonstrates that political corruption remains a paramount concern for the American electorate.
A recent Harris poll conducted for The Guardian revealed that nearly nine out of 10 Americans view government corruption—defined specifically as elected officials placing their own financial interests or those of their wealthy donors ahead of the public good—as a major problem. Furthermore, an mid-October CNBC All-America Economic Survey found that voters are more anxious about government corruption than any other issue, ranking it even higher than high grocery and gas prices. These findings align closely with Gallup reporting from September, which showed that public perceptions of government corruption in the United States have reached their highest level in two decades, with 89 percent of adults describing it as widespread.
To say that the Trump administration provides a target-rich environment for a robust anticorruption initiative is an understatement. Exposing foreign gifts extended to the president, conflicts of interest involving family members, lucrative federal contracts awarded to political oligarch donors and allied tech figures, and the questionable selling of pardons should all form core pillars of the legislative oversight plan. Additionally, restoring rigorous enforcement of the Corporate Transparency Act, the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and associated federal task forces is essential.
Lawmakers should also drill down into the administration’s controversial "Board of Peace" initiative for Gaza, which U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, the Maryland Democrat slated to chair the House Judiciary Committee, aptly characterized as a "global slush fund." The glaring conflicts of interest surrounding diplomatic envoys such as Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner likewise demand thorough congressional investigation.
The encouraging reality is that effective anticorruption enforcement does not necessarily require the passage of entirely new legislation; frequently, it simply requires the vigorous enforcement of existing laws. An essay published in Foreign Affairs co-authored by policy experts Casey Michel and Trevor Sutton laid out an expansive case for placing anticorruption at the absolute center of the progressive and Democratic foreign policy platform, while subsequent detailed agendas presented by researchers have provided a roadmap for the new Congress.
Ultimately, however, the most vital step toward permanently tackling corruption will involve reforming the deeply flawed campaign finance system. The United States remains a distinct outlier among developed democracies, maintaining a political funding system that effectively permits legalized bribery. Legislators have frequently spoken quite openly about campaign contributors expecting direct "returns on investment" for their financial political contributions, a dynamic that remains a profound democratic outrage. In recent years, foreign actors have increasingly begun bankrolling American legislators, exploiting massive structural loopholes in campaign finance laws alongside a prolonged period of lax enforcement by the Federal Election Commission.
Confronting this systemic rot will undoubtedly be a formidable task. At an absolute minimum, Congress must move to legislate a comprehensive response to the Supreme Court’s landmark 2010 Citizens United decision, which effectively greenlit bottomless, untraceable campaign spending by corporate entities. Lawmakers must also reform the Federal Election Commission itself, providing the regulatory body with the necessary resources to actively investigate campaign finance crimes while restoring the traditional practice of allowing independent congressional appointments to a commission that has increasingly functioned as an appendage of the executive branch.
Toward a New Political Consensus
All of these interconnected reform efforts must ultimately be tied directly to the paramount concern weighing on American voters today: the high cost of living. While the Democratic coalition contains diverse viewpoints and internal disagreements across several policy areas—particularly regarding foreign policy—there exists a broad, unified consensus around the urgent need to address the material needs of everyday citizens aggressively.
Such an approach requires directly confronting the administration’s reckless use of tariffs, while acknowledging that the old neoliberal taboos surrounding trade protections are firmly a thing of the past. It also means addressing rising gas prices driven by foreign entanglements, restoring the global minimum corporate tax, mitigating the looming threat of widespread job displacement driven by artificial intelligence, and challenging the outsized economic and political power wielded by tech oligarchs over everyday Americans. The heavy influence of private technology magnates—demonstrated vividly when figures like Elon Musk have restricted national infrastructure connections, such as Ukraine’s access to Starlink during critical moments—highlights the urgent need for public oversight.
To advance these goals, the incoming Congress will need to deploy a diverse mix of tactical maneuvers, including high-profile congressional hearings, rigorous oversight investigations, and targeted legislative proposals. While many of these initiatives may not immediately result in signed laws over the next two years, they have the potential to serve as the foundational backbone of a winning political agenda for the legislative branch and a future executive administration by 2029.
Most importantly, pursuing these interconnected goals would represent a crucial step toward forging a new American political consensus—one capable of sustaining a durable, reformed foreign policy built on accountability, economic fairness, and domestic renewal.
