Democrats have boxed themselves in as a war party

While analyzing the tailspin of the Biden presidency and the failed campaign of Kamala Harris, few pundits have questioned that militarism is a political necessity as well as a vital tool of U.S. foreign policy.

Harris checked a standard box at the Democratic National Convention when she pledged to maintain “the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.” Yet the erosion of the Democratic Party’s base is partly due to the alienation of voters who don’t want to cast their ballot for what they see as a war party.

That perception is especially acute among the young, and notable among African Americans. Many have viewed President Biden’s resolute support for the Israeli war in Gaza as a moral collapse. When Harris remained loyal to it during the fall campaign, her credibility sank.

Events in recent weeks have done nothing to reassure those repelled by the Democratic administration’s approach. Biden’s purported 30-day deadline for Israel to start allowing adequate food into Gaza expired shortly after the election — without Israeli compliance — while the humanitarian disaster in Gaza actually became worse than ever. Biden's White House pretended otherwise.

The ongoing hellish realities for Palestinian civilians in Gaza caused 40 percent of Senate Democrats to vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) post-election resolution to block $20 billion worth of military aid to Israel. But near the end of November, Biden followed up by greenlighting an additional $680 million in arms sales to Israel. While Republicans remained in lockstep for arming Israel, the budding dissent from congressional Democrats remained ineffectual.

On Ukraine war policy, dissent has been rare from Democratic lawmakers. Two years ago, 30 progressive House Democrats sent a letter to Biden that suggested “a proactive diplomatic push” could be useful for achieving a ceasefire — but they quickly withdrew the letter after an angry backlash from hawkish leaders in their own party. (Republican lawmakers are split on Ukraine policy — many want the U.S. to recklessly confront China instead of Russia.)

Few Democrats have mustered more than feeble caveats about open-ended military aid to the Kyiv government, merely watching as the Biden administration repeatedly crosses its own red lines on such matters as approval of longer-range Ukrainian missile strikes into Russia. For the Ukraine war, in the lexicon of high-ranking Democrats, “diplomacy” has been a dirty word.

Overall, the president has accelerated the war train (sometimes hailing more war production as good for the U.S. economy), with party leaders providing fuel and Democratic constituents confined to the caboose. The opinions of the party faithful count for little.

Polling has made clear that an overwhelming majority of Democrats want a U.S. arms embargo against Israel. On Ukraine, a poll early this year found that while less than one-fifth of Democrats wanted to end all military aid to Ukraine, upwards of half wanted to make it conditional on diplomatic talks, a stance firmly rejected by the administration.

Fond of telling the world about the imperative of a “rules-based order” to stop cross-border aggression, Biden and his secretary of State, Antony Blinken, rationalize breaking the rules at will. This year, in the Middle East, the U.S. launched bombing attacks on Yemen, Syria and Iraq. Objections from leaders of the president’s party have not been audible.

The Democratic Party deserves its image as a party of war. To explore possibilities for how that might change will require a candid assessment of how that image came into focus in the 21st century.

Soon after Barack Obama became president in 2009, he made the “war on terror” explicitly bipartisan. With the Democratic Party in tow, he tripled the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, peaking at 100,000 in 2010 —  swiftly escalating a war inflicting widespread carnage in rural areas out of media sight.

In Iraq, the war effort persisted as the number of U.S. boots on the ground slowly declined. Meanwhile, Obama stepped up drone attacks in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. And with disastrous consequences for Libya, Obama had the United States lead NATO’s seven-month bombing onslaught of that country in 2011, incubating terrorism that expanded far beyond its borders.

Today, the most powerful Democrats are well attuned to the dominant media messaging and the agendas of megadonors, establishment “think tanks,” Pentagon contractors and their lobbyists swarming Capitol Hill. With the military budget approaching $1 trillion, along with multibillion-dollar weapons shipments to allied nations, corporations of varied sizes make huge profits from war. And revolving doors between arms sellers and government arms buyers never stop spinning.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin came to that job in 2021 from the board of Raytheon Technologies (now RTX), one of the nation’s largest military contractors. As the New York Times noted, he was also “a partner in an investment firm that has been buying small defense firms.” The revolving also often spins in the other direction, with officials going from Congress or “national security” positions to lucrative jobs as lobbyists or members of corporate boards.

For decades, most Democrats in Congress — fearful of soft-on-defense charges from Republicans — have assumed that militaristic policies are smart politics. But public support for such policies has waned, a fact that Donald Trump shrewdly exploits by baiting Democratic leaders as warmongers when he isn’t excoriating them as wimps.

In the wake of the Harris defeat, the party is now close to leaderless, which is just as well. When the Democratic National Committee elects its new chair on Feb. 1, replacing the current Biden loyalist Jaime Harrison, the opportunity exists to begin shaking the party loose from its hidebound foundation. 

Conditions may soon shift for the Democratic Party to start moving beyond its war culture. But that will require a willingness to challenge the assumptions of elected Democrats who are in sync with what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” 

Norman Solomon is co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His book “War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine” was published in 2023.