Do Democrats Have a Plan for the Post-Trump World Order?

MUNICH – The Friday nightcap session at the Munich Security Conference focused on “seismic shifts” in U.S. foreign policy, and it featured a bit of an odd grouping: Matthew Whitaker, the current United States ambassador to NATO; Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive Democratic congresswoman from New York.

The panelists sat in a circle at the center of the room, surrounded on both sides by the audience, all wearing lanyards around their neck, some sipping wine, and many reaching upward to take photos. The tilt of their iPhones gave away who they were all here to see.

This event was one of a few in Ocasio-Cortez’s foreign-policy coming-out party in Germany where she, along with other Democrats who are not-so-subtly seeking national office in the future, sought to lay out a vision for American power after Donald Trump, in a world that the U.S. president has radically remade.

In Munich, U.S. Secretary of State Marcio Rubio proposed a “new Western century,” built around a manufactured claim of shared Christian and white heritage, propped up by an elementary-school understanding of world history. Democrats rejected that, but the challenge for the party, including the maybe 2028 candidates, is the same one faced by all leaders in Munich: There’s a rough consensus that the world is transitioning to a new order, but no one really has any idea what the world is moving toward.

There’s a rough consensus that the world is transitioning to a new order, but no one really has any idea what the world is moving toward.

This transformation—or rupture—has tended to sanitize an old order that has had its many critics, on both the left and the right. Of late, the eulogy has mostly focused on an idealized American reliability and predictability, and a commitment to alliances and cooperation in rules-based international order. The unequal application of those rules that has allowed for costly military intervention and economic exploitation does not get quite as much airtime. There is also a fear, including in Europe, that what replaces it might be even more destruction. It helps explain why some Democrats clung to it, some more forcefully critiqued it, and some fell in between, acknowledging the damage done by Trump 2.0, but maybe not quite ready to let go.

Across those camps, many politicians still found themselves using different versions of the “r” word: rebuild, redeem, recover, reassure, remind them it’s not all Trump. This reflexive desire to convince allies and partners that Trump will be gone, and that repair of the old order is possible, does not serve as quite the same salve to allies that it was ten years ago—less reassurance, more manifestation.

“I hope if there is nothing else I communicate today: Donald Trump is temporary. He’ll be gone in three years,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said on a panel on climate change, as he was also advocating for leaders to continue to see California as a “stable and reliable” partner in countering Trump’s damaging environmental policies.

Other Democrats pushed back on specific Trump policy. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) lambasted the administration’s Gaza reconstruction plan, which he tied to the president’s corruption. Another governor, Whitmer, criticized Trump’s tariffs. “The damage that has been done from alienating allies through tariffs, I think is going to take a long time to recover from, and that will continue to vex us as a nation,” she said during that foreign-policy panel.

On that same panel, Ocasio-Cortez elaborated on more of her foreign-policy thinking, which was, again, the draw of the event. “We have an opportunity to explore what a world would look like if we upheld democracy, human rights, trade that actually centers working-class people instead of accruing overwhelmingly the benefits of trade to the wealthiest,” Ocasio-Cortez said, in response to a question on the new world order.

This is part of a “foreign policy for the working class,” which Ocasio-Cortez later discussed alongside Rep. Jason Crow (D-CO). The two described the policy as one of American military restraint, where strategic alliances would benefit the interests of the working class, rather than corporations.

“What we know is that isolating ourselves from the world will deliver disastrous consequences at home and abroad,” Crow said. “Our foreign policy is being turned into an extortion ring for Big Oil, for the Trump family, for elites. They’re bullying our partners and allies … We want to be a force for good.”

In some ways, this has echoes of the Biden administration’s “foreign policy for the middle class,” which sought to address domestic economic concerns in global policy. Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, who is also advising Ocasio-Cortez, said the Biden approach recognized the problem, but mostly shaped the message to make the same old policy sound more appealing.

“How do we better sell continuing American global military hegemony to the American people, rather than hearing that Americans just aren’t that into global military hegemony,” Duss said. “I think that is what progressives have brought: Americans are just not that into global military hegemony because it’s destructive, it’s wasteful. It increases inequality, it steals money from the working class, and it funnels it upwards to a tiny, unaccountable elite.”

Ocasio-Cortez also described this kind of foreign policy as a way to address income inequality and push back against the authoritarian, populist right around the globe—a kind of foil to the transnational MAGA movement Rubio described.

A deeper reckoning is required among the Democratic Party about what U.S. foreign policy needs to be to serve Americans at home and allies abroad.

Yet even she couldn’t escape the reassurance instinct. “I know that the Democratic Party is here for our allies,” she told the crowd Friday. “We are shocked at the president’s destruction of our relationship with our European allies, his threatening over Greenland is not a joke. It is not funny. It threatens the very trust and relationships that allow peace to persist.”

“I believe what I can say is that unequivocally, the vast majority of the American people do not want to see these relationships frayed, and they are committed to our partnerships and our relationships and our allies,” she added.

That does not seem like a promise the U.S. can really make, or at least it’s one that doesn’t mean all that much as Europe tries to untangle itself from the United States. This isn’t Trump’s first term, where President Joe Biden saying “America is back” was enough to somewhat soothe U.S. allies who also wanted to believe MAGA was an aberration. In Trump’s second term, those illusions are gone, especially in Europe, which has been taking it on the chin since Vice President JD Vance went to the podium at Munich last year.

That requires a deeper reckoning among the Democratic Party about what U.S. foreign policy needs to be to serve Americans at home and allies abroad. It’s worth noting that Ocasio-Cortez got a lot of attention at Munich because she always gets a lot of attention, and this was a new stage for her. That was particularly true when she stumbled, including a long pause and tortured response to a question on Taiwan, which tended to overshadow both the substantive breaks and points of agreement with the past that characterized her approach.

This was the largest U.S. delegation to the security conference ever, and the weekend is a mix of competing panels and press conferences and missed connections, which means it offers far from exhaustive, or definitive, answers about how Democrats are imagining a post-Trump world. What Munich made clear is that many really are trying to figure this out in real time, with some doing it more quietly than others.

There were real glimmers in Munich of what the U.S. could build toward after Trump, but much of it is still based on a familiar framework, which positions the U.S. as mostly a global power, with allies and partners, retaining its influence and leverage and authority. But beyond what this new world order might bring, no one knows what kind of America we will be in a year—or three.

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