Do Liberals Have an Answer to Trump on Foreign Policy?

Chris Murphy sensed well before most people that the 2016 election would largely revolve around U.S. foreign policy. Not foreign policy in the narrow, traditional sense—as in, which candidate had the better plan to deal with Russia or defeat ISIS. Rather, foreign policy in its most primal sense—as in, how America should interact with the world beyond its borders and how Americans should conceive of nationhood in an age of globalization. On issues ranging from trade to terrorism to immigration, Donald Trump reopened a debate on these broad questions, which candidates from both parties had previously treated as settled. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, focused on policy specifics. We know who won that argument, at least for the moment.

This was what worried Murphy months before Trump announced his candidacy, when the Democratic senator from Connecticut warned that progressives had “been adrift on foreign policy” during Barack Obama’s presidency, and that “non-interventionists, internationalists” had to “get their act together” before the presidential campaign. Murphy, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, wrote an article in early 2015 titled “Desperately Seeking: A Progressive Foreign Policy,” in which he noted that the modern progressive movement, as exemplified by organizations like MoveOn.org and Daily Kos, was “founded on foreign policy,” specifically opposition to the Iraq War. It needed, in his view, to return to its roots.

Ultimately, however, neither Bernie Sanders nor Clinton, whom Murphy endorsed for president, “really