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Several years ago, I was commissioned by The Spectator magazine to examine what was commonly said to be a “civil war” over foreign policy within the Republican Party. Upon some consideration, I came to believe there was no such thing. For all of President Donald Trump’s bluster and criticism of NATO, for all the hand-wringing by good Washington liberals over his shoddy treatment of our “allies,” for all the pointed back and forth over Israel between America First and neoconservative podcasters and op-ed writers—for all that, the balance of forces within the Republican media and political establishment were what they had always been: reflexively and unthinkingly hawkish on Russia and China, and utterly beholden to the Israel Lobby.
As early as November 2024, I speculated that a second Trump administration might well result in a war with Iran. Working through what was (or was not) roiling the Republican Party led me to think more systematically about something that had been bothering me for some time, and that was:
What exactly happened to the Democrats?
In the decade since Donald Trump was first elected President, the Democratic Party has quite purposefully transformed itself into a Party of War. The last two Democratic administrations, those of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, embarked on regime change operations and proxy wars in places rather remote from American shores and interests—in Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine. On foreign affairs, today’s Democratic establishment (by which I mean leading members of Congress, and the scholars and operatives within Washington’s think tanks and media outlets) brooks no dissent.
Skeptics and opponents of Washington’s regime change projects and its effective co-belligerency in a war between Ukraine and Russia have been routinely denigrated by leading Democrats as “apologists” for Russia. Part of the reason for this is that the Democratic foreign policy establishment has fallen prey to a kind of absolutist groupthink based on an imagined world of absolute good and absolute evil that supposedly exists outside the supremely insular urban bubbles in which these cosseted policymakers and analysts live and work.
Another reason for the Democratic Party’s habitual hawkishness has to do with the lack of debate and competition within the party over national security matters. Such was not always the case. For much of the eighty years following the end of the Second World War, there existed a healthy, sometimes fierce competition among Democrats regarding the US and its role in the world: On one side, there were what I call the Rooseveltians; on the other side, the Achesonians.
The competition between the two camps shaped US foreign policy throughout the Cold War. It was only with the arrival of the post-Cold War era that the competition dried up—and turned into a rout in which the Achesonians triumphed. The dueling camps take their names from, of course, President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945) and Secretary of State Dean Acheson (1893–1971). Born to patrician families a decade apart at the close of the nineteenth century, Franklin Roosevelt of Hyde Park, New York, and Dean Acheson of Middletown, Connecticut, were products of the WASP gentry of that time. Both men were educated at Groton, the Episcopalian boarding school in Massachusetts, and went on, respectively, to Harvard and Yale, before embarking on careers in law and politics.
As with many of his contemporaries, Acheson joined Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in 1933, but left shortly thereafter. Roosevelt’s “to the manor born” bearing rubbed the notoriously arrogant Acheson the wrong way. Years later, Acheson could barely conceal his annoyance when he recalled his interactions with Roosevelt, writing that, “It was not gratifying to receive the easy greeting which milord might give a promising stable boy and pull one’s forelock in return.” Some disagreed. Winston Churchill famously said that meeting Roosevelt was ”like opening your first bottle of champagne.” Parenthetically, the British prime minister knew a thing or two about the topic, having reputedly consumed forty-two thousand bottles of it in his lifetime. Acheson returned to the Roosevelt administration in 1941 as an assistant secretary of state and remained in government service until January 1953, having reached the pinnacle of the diplomatic profession as secretary of state.
By that time, Roosevelt had been dead for nearly eight years and in the ensuing period, Acheson, with the blessing of his boss, President Harry S. Truman, crafted a foreign policy that was in many ways the antithesis of that which Roosevelt had hoped to achieve after the Second World War—one based on great power cooperation, non-interference, and reciprocity as embodied in the principles of the UN Charter. A line from Roosevelt’s final State of the Union message to Congress in January 1945 captures the essence of the Rooseveltian creed: “Nations like individuals do not always see alike or think alike, and international cooperation and progress are not helped by any Nation assuming that it has a monopoly of wisdom or of virtue.” Achesonianism, on the other hand, is more “my way or the highway.” Long before George W. Bush uttered “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” or Donald J. Trump threatened European leaders for failing to fall in line with his grand plan in Iran (whatever that is), Acheson was threatening the prime minister of Canada for not doing enough to help Harry Truman execute his own war of choice in Korea.
Critics of the Rooseveltian/Achesonian dichotomy may dismiss it as a mere rhetorical dressing-up of the more common categories of Hawk and Dove. While not entirely unfair, I would note that the Rooseveltian/Achesonian categories are intended to encompass more than just the proclivity of one or another politician or policymaker to favor war over diplomacy. Unlike the Achesonians, those (few of us) who hold to the Rooseveltian tradition in US foreign policy find inherent value in Augustine’s Just War doctrine (410), the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), and the UN Charter (1945). Rooseveltians make room for civilizational difference and understand that cold wars are as corrosive (if not strictly as lethal) over the long term as hot wars. The Achesonians harbor a crusader mentality that is absent from the Rooseveltian tradition. Still more, the Rooseveltians would have been puzzled by the idea, now au courant, that everything everywhere is now the business of the US government to adjudicate and rectify—by force if necessary.
And so: Truman and Acheson engineered a radical break with Roosevelt’s post-war vision. The launch of the modern national security state in 1947, followed by the adoption of National Security Council Memorandum 68, gave rise to a militarized vision of ‘containment’ and set the course of US policy during the succeeding forty years.
Following the war in Korea and Truman’s decision not to run for a second full term in 1952, the Rooseveltians made a comeback of sorts by way of Governor Adlai Stevenson’s two bids for the White House in 1952 and 1956. But by 1960, Stevenson was out and John F. Kennedy was in. The 1960 general election was, on the surface anyway, a contest between two hawks, Kennedy and Nixon; and with Kennedy’s victory and the appointment of Acheson proteges such as Dean Rusk, the Achesonians were back in business—or so they thought. To an extent, Kennedy borrowed from both the Rooseveltian and Achesonian traditions. Until the near-catastrophe of the Cuban Missile Crisis, his administration governed mainly in the Achesonian style. But after successive crises, in Cuba and Berlin in 1961, and Cuba, again in October 1962, Kennedy realized that a new approach was needed. There are parallels between what occurred after Roosevelt died and after Kennedy was assassinated. In both cases, the successors gutted the foreign policy legacies of their predecessors. What is clear is that Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, expanded the war in Vietnam with the support of the Achesonians Kennedy himself put into high office, including Rusk, Robert McNamara, and McGeorge Bundy.
Ultimately, the pattern established in the early 1950s prevailed again in the late 1960s: After unwise overreach in Asia, the Achesonians were once again challenged by the Rooseveltians for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet in 1968, that quest ended not just in electoral loss, but in tragedy with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. From 1968 to 1992, the Republican Party held the White House for all but four years.
This period witnessed the defeat of the Rooseveltian George McGovern at the hands of Richard Nixon in 1972, and later the internecine battles between President Jimmy Carter’s Achesonian National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski and his more cautious, Rooseveltian Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance. It was during these wilderness years that the Achesonians, chief among them a Washington socialite and scholar named Madeleine Korbel Albright, began laying the groundwork for the Achesonians’ return to power. Albright, who had been a member of Brzezinski’s NSC, went on to play a pivotal role in shaping and implementing US foreign policy under Bill Clinton.
Besides Albright, the principal foreign policy power broker under President Clinton was the former TIME Magazine correspondent, Strobe Talbott. Talbott and Albright did much to mold the next generation of Achesonian policymakers. Albright’s proteges include former Deputy Secretary of State, Wendy Sherman, and Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, James O’Brien, among many others. Upon her passing in 2022, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius commented that, “nearly every member of the Biden administration foreign policy team can trace a lineage to Albright.”
Which explains rather a lot.
By the turn of the century, the game was nearly up for the Rooseveltians. Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California was the sole vote against granting the Bush administration blanket authorization for its Global War on Terror in 2001. Bush’s invasion of Iraq won 29 Democratic votes in the Senate—among them three future Democratic nominees for president (Kerry 2004, Clinton 2016, Biden 2020). But the pattern of the early 1950s and the late 1960s reemerged after Iraq. After a period of presidential overreach, this time under Bush-Cheney, a corrective appeared in the person of Illinois Senator Barack Obama. But Obama, despite his high-flown, Kennedy-esque campaign rhetoric, was an Achesonian at heart. Within days of his historic election in 2008, Hillary Clinton was named secretary of state, and longtime Republican, Robert Gates, was asked to remain at the Pentagon. In terms of both personnel and policy, the Achesonians triumphed during the Obama years and helped set the stage for a New Cold War.
Our story ends where it began: With a perilous Cold War between nuclear-armed powers. The difference this time is that the New Cold War involves the US facing off against an “authoritarian axis” that includes China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The Achesonians have triumphed, while the Rooseveltians are nowhere to be found on the national stage. There are now vanishingly few voices willing to speak out against the US foreign policy establishment’s most dangerous delusions.
James W. Carden is editor of the Realist Review and a contributing editor to The Nation magazine.