Can America Still Lead? Foreign Policy in an Age of Division with Joel Rubin
What happens when America loses its foreign-policy playbook? RBI acting director Eli Karetny talks with veteran diplomat and policy strategist Joel Rubin about the vacuum of strategic vision shaping U.S. decisions from Venezuela to Ukraine to Gaza. Rubin pulls back the curtain on factional battles inside both parties, the dangers of politicizing diplomacy, and why rebuilding a bipartisan foreign-policy consensus may be critical for American leadership in a volatile world.
Please see a slightly edited transcript of the interview below.
Transcript
Eli Karetny 00:06
In these uncertain times, when the country is deeply divided, when the party in power promotes authoritarian norms over established liberal practices, and when the international landscape is characterized by regional tensions and the return of great power rivalry, we look for new sources of hope, new leaders, and new visions.
Can the Democratic Party provide the nation with new ideas that can raise our hopes, while the MAGA world is energized by and unified around Donald Trump? What policy correctives can the Democrats offer? What goals can they articulate to help guide us through this transition period—what the foreign-policy scholar Charles Kupchan has called “the interregnum”?
Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues.
My name is Eli Karetny. I teach political theory and international relations at Baruch College, and have for years been a deputy director of the Ralph Bunche Institute at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. With our director, John Torpey, on leave this year, I have the privilege of serving as the Institute’s interim director, which means I have the honor of hosting this podcast.
Here with me today is Joel Rubin. Joel is a foreign-policy expert, media commentator, and Jewish community leader with more than 25 years of experience in Washington. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Legislative Affairs under President Obama, and was a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor in the U.S. Senate, earning the Congressional Staffer of the Year Award from the Military Officers Association of America.
In the nonprofit world, Joel has held key leadership roles as executive director of the American Jewish Congress and founding political director of J Street. Joel is also the author of the influential Foreign Affairs newsletter The Briefing Book on Substack.
Welcome, Joel. Thanks for joining us on International Horizons.
Joel Rubin 02:07
Eli, it’s great to be with you.
Eli Karetny 02:10
Let’s start with U.S. foreign policy and global affairs. I want to ask you to address several global trouble spots, sources of regional conflict or tension which threaten the stability of the international system. But let’s try to discuss these issues from the perspective of policy differences.
How do these issues divide Democrats and Republicans, and how might these issues create divisions even within the parties, possibly even leading to realignments or new coalitions?
There was a phrase that was once operative—that politics stopped at the nation’s border—the idea that there’s a kind of organizing principle on foreign policy where the parties come together and present a unified front in the foreign-policy realm.
In the Cold War, it was containment, anti-communism. There was an effort at post-9/11 foreign policy to organize foreign policy around anti-terrorism, the Global War on Terror. But where are we now in the foreign-policy world in terms of organizing principle? Is there such an organizing principle?
Joel Rubin 03:21
Well, Eli, you are putting your finger on what has in many ways been the greatest gap in American national security that we’ve had since the end of the Cold War, which is this lack of a unifying mindset, a theory around which to organize, and a sort of vision that can bring broad swaths of the American people on board, so that we can go back, in many ways, to the bipartisan worldview of America’s role in the world.
And I say that working in the midst of a political environment that’s incredibly toxic, as you know, and as your listeners know. I’ve had the privilege, the honor, of working in both Republican and Democratic administrations. I served as a career State Department officer in the Bush administration on military affairs and Middle East affairs. I moved to the Democratic political community on foreign policy on Capitol Hill afterwards and, as you mentioned, worked with the Obama administration as an appointee.
I began my career, like you, as a Peace Corps volunteer, which is inherently American first and not focused on ideology, but focused on peace and engagement. And I really feel like here in Washington, people are grappling with this gap and hurting from a foreign-policy perspective by not having a theory that brings us together in how we should operate in the world.
And you see the result: the partisanship and the debilitation of how we conduct foreign policy, the inconsistency, the flipping and flopping back and forth between administrations. One does a deal, the other undoes the deal, then the other one comes back in and rejiggers that old deal—and it’s a mess. It’s a real, real mess.
And I think that, for Americans, it puts us in a very weak position vis-à-vis, to your broader point, the competitions that we’re in, which are real. There is a real competition with China, there’s a real competition with Europe, there’s a competition with Iran—adversarial ones—and we need to know what we’re doing. Right now we are in all different parts, spread out and inconsistent and unclear about our role in the world.
Eli Karetny 05:55
So before we look at some specific regional trouble spots, I want to stay on this theme of some kind of unifying or organizing principle.
You mentioned national rivalry or national competitions. Are we in a world now—a kind of a return to great-power rivalry and the pursuit of national interests? You know, is “America First,” in a way, the operating principle here—that not only America but all nations are pursuing their interests, that’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it will now continue?
We had maybe some pockets historically where there was international cooperation, or there was a kind of a bipolar world and some big themes emerged to organize international relations, and that’s just not there, and we’re back to what the realists see as the historical norm, which is national competition and the pursuit of interests.
Or are there potentially some ideas that can serve to organize nations? Is there a possibility of dealing with a rising China? Is there an issue of managing American decline? Are we at a time where we’re back to spheres of influence?
You know, what are some of the ideas that strategists in the Democratic Party are thinking through when it comes to foreign policy?
Joel Rubin 07:36
There’s a real competition underway right now in terms of defining what the theory of the case is for the Democratic Party, and then, as a foundation, growing, of course, into the broader electorate.
One of the things that I find most challenging at this moment as a Democrat is that, like in many other issues as well—but certainly in foreign policy—there is now a trend to pander to our base at the expense of having a broader theory and a broader policy set to drive what our actual ideas are.
And so if the base wants, for example, to cut off aid to Israel, or if the base wants to move, let’s say, move troops out of harm’s way in a variety of areas where they are sitting and stationed, then that’s what the base gets in a lot of the arguments in think tanks around town and people who are putting ideas together.
And I love that you mentioned Charlie Kupchan, who’s a friend and a neighbor not far from where I live. And you know, Charlie’s of a different school, and there are other dynamics. They look at the broader consensus that one looks for.
So now we see in the political environment—and professionally for me actually, I’ll just sidestep and I’ll come back to it—but I was a career guy at State when we invaded Iraq and felt the pressure of invasion coming from the political appointees of the Bush administration. It was not driven by the American people or by the career experts. It was a political choice by the Bush administration and its political appointees to move a policy towards invading another country—disastrous idea from the get-go.
And what happened in those moments, in that period, as a career guy working in this space, it’s like, my God, it’s the political appointees that control the decisions. You can have all the best ideas in the world, but it’s the political power that matters.
So for me, professionally, I took a risk and I went to work on Capitol Hill for the Democratic Party writ large, and have stayed in that lane, because the people who get elected are the ones that ultimately make the choices. They get elected in Congress, or they get elected to the White House, and they make appointments within the White House structure—those are the people driving the policy.
So the real question then is, for a Democrat, how does one keep the people in mind? Right, like there’s a theoretical argument—we need to support the American people, we have to have the American people’s support. I buy it, I agree.
Now, in a tangible way, to explain it this way: if you don’t have the votes, you don’t get the jobs. If you don’t get the jobs, you don’t make the decisions. And so you have to do something policy-wise that is enticing to the voters so they give you the power. Very brass-tacks political. And that means elections are central. So who’s winning elections?
And the further we get polarized in the party, the more the base drives policy, the more likely we have people elected who are pandering to the base rather than looking for broader unifying theory. And then we have the ping-pong that I described a moment ago.
So part of the argument I’m trying to make—and I’ll make in my book as well—is that we have to think bigger. We have to have policy that speaks to the broader American community.
I’ll close with this: this is where Donald Trump put his finger on something when he said “America First.” He understood the negative political repercussions of the Iraq War. Forget the policy, the disaster, the lives lost, the trillions spent—the political implications he got.
Now, he’s not an isolationist; obviously he’s going everywhere around the world. He’s not a pacifist; obviously he’s starting a war in Venezuela as we speak. But he understood the zeitgeist of the American people—that they didn’t want stupid wars overseas, and they wanted America first. And so that’s what he tapped into.
And so the challenge for Democrats is how to have an “America First” that the broad swath of the American public loves, that also speaks to our values as Democrats: in promoting those values, working on democracy, working on human rights, working on climate, working on conflict resolution.
That’s the challenge, and quite frankly, we’re not there yet, and we’re heading in the other direction of a politicization of our foreign policy, to the extent that we are sending people in or demanding they take positions that the broad majority of the American people are not necessarily on board with. That’s the challenge that we’re in right now.
Eli Karetny 12:45
So you bring up this interesting dynamic where the party base and maybe the elites—the foreign-policy elites, the strategists—may not always be on the same side of some of these policy issues.
So I wonder if we can turn to four regional hot spots and get your view on where the base is and where the foreign-policy elites might be on these issues.
You mentioned Venezuela and the Caribbean. You know, you have your Peace Corps experience—yes, I’d love to hear how—in Costa Rica, where some of those experiences might have informed some of your views about how best to handle challenges in the region.
So maybe let’s start with the Caribbean, broadly speaking, and then move to a few other areas. Where are the elites and where are the people? What’s even happening—maybe give a little bit of background: what’s going on in the Caribbean, and under what authority is the administration even acting or considering action?
Joel Rubin 13:57
Well, the burden of having served in the Congress as a staffer is that you get really—like me, I served in the Senate, and then I was the senior point person to the House for Secretary Kerry, so I’ve worked with both chambers extensively. The burden is that we actually think process matters and that the Constitution matters—you know, the rule of law, these arcane concepts, the structure of American democracy. The Congress has a role in oversight. Imagine that, right?
So yeah, this is a highly illegal venture, what’s underway right now, where we are moving aircraft carrier groups and striking civilian boats without clarity as to who exactly we’re hitting. Forget the policy—about whether or not it’s effective, which we can debate, we actually should debate. I have an opinion about it, but we should have a debate about whether or not this is the right approach to do counter-narcotics in Latin America.
So that’s the argument: it’s counter-narcotics. But methinks that’s a little too convenient, to be blunt. I think we’re moving in a slow regime-change mode towards Venezuela. Maduro, as the leader, is no one to be admired or applauded, but you know, there’s a long history of gunboat diplomacy by the United States in Latin America that we haven’t done for a number of years.
And I think what we’re seeing then is a sort of theory for Trump and his team of “America First” expanding to the Western Hemisphere—moving military assets to the Western Hemisphere, “cleaning up the bad guys,” bullying Panama or Mexico. Mexico is sort of like, this is the region that matters, and this is what we’re going to focus on. And the Defense Department, in its national security and defense strategy, is aligning and realigning in that direction to focus on the immigration issues as well as part of that.
And so that’s what we’re seeing. And if you stick on the Latin America hat—and having served in Costa Rica and Central America for a couple of years, you know, as an American Jewish kid going to a small rural Catholic village and having the best time and feeling completely accepted and able to be myself, and learning empathy not through a book, but just by learning how to do work with people who you organically have nothing in common with, and then you realize you have everything in common with because we’re all just people—that teaches me that we in the United States have a big debt that we still owe to Latin America.
So I backpacked throughout Central America a couple of years after Peace Corps. I went to graduate school, and then I came back and I backpacked all the way from Costa Rica through to New Mexico. And you can see the carcasses of bad ideas from the United States littered throughout Central America. You can see the bullet holes in Nicaraguan buildings and the anti-American graffiti. And it’s not anti-American because they hate America; it’s anti-American because we were funding dirty wars in Central America—in El Salvador and Nicaragua in particular, in Guatemala—and we did that for whatever reason: the Cold War; we can get into that, I’m sure your audience does it better than I do.
But the bottom line is that we left a lot of bad taste, and we need to be mindful of that, and we need to not stir up these old passions. We have a great relationship with Latin America now, compared to any point in the long history of relations. President Kennedy kind of shifted it and moved to a development model and moved to USAID and Peace Corps and used that language. Of course, with Cuba there’s a lot of tensions always, but it’s a different approach from what the United States’ Monroe Doctrine used to be, which was to just beat everybody up.
We’re now kind of returning to that previous model, and I think that’s incredibly dangerous. I think it’s un-American. I think it’s ahistorical in terms of where things have been trending. I think it’s an opportunity for Democrats as well to connect the dots.
So we are stirring it up, and once you stir things up—having gone through the Iraq War experience and watching that and all—you don’t know how it ends, and we don’t control all the variables.
Eli Karetny 18:40
So what could that look like—a kind of a Democratic corrective, taking into consideration all these complicated factors that you mentioned?
You suggest that maybe Trump is moving towards a kind of regime-change mindset in Venezuela. If so, that wouldn’t be a regime change in the mold of the kind of neoconservative imperialism that we saw after 9/11, right? Trump—and for good reason, and Obama as well—were harsh critics of neoconservative policy. The people, ordinary Americans, aren’t on the side of supporting that kind of adventurism.
So what makes Trump’s potential regime-change mindset more in line with past Cold War practices—maybe putting friendly dictators in place, that kind of orientation of regime change—versus, not to defend democratization in the region, but, if you can say anything positive, this is why maybe so many liberals joined forces with the neocons after 9/11: the values mattered. It’s not just about power and interests and, as you said, kind of “beat up our enemies.” There’s an element, at least, of being on the side of freedom and democracy. Now, for the neocons, that was mainly rhetorical. But are there some lessons for the Democrats here?
Joel Rubin 20:16
There are tremendous lessons in reminding the American people that you can’t go into a war without casus belli, right? Without a real justification. And the American people don’t like that, and they reject that.
When I do panels and political commentary about that, the MAGA folks are always very nervous about that. But, you know, to this bigger point about what’s our Latin America policy—when I talk to folks who are the leaders in Latin America in the Democratic Party, friends I’ve worked with for a number of years, they will all tell you that this is so extreme, it’s so out of character with everything we’ve been doing for the last six decades in Latin America: trying to build up development and build up institutions.
I did a congressional delegation a decade ago. I went with a bunch of members of Congress and, as State, and we went to the jungles of Colombia and saw USAID projects where we were spending millions of dollars to help farmers stop producing coca—or cocoa, too—and move to regular crops. They moved actually to cocoa from coca, but basically, to get out of the drug trade. And you look at that and you think, that’s the way to do it.
I would call it a little more of a neo-imperial, transactional dynamic, which is what we’re experiencing right now: this sort of idea that we, the United States, can bully our region into conformity and submission.
The American people don’t buy that. And this goes back to the point politically: the American people won’t vote for that either. A neo-imperial foreign policy is not an attractive foreign policy, just like isolationism is not an attractive foreign policy.
I think what’s attractive to the American people overall—get out of the primaries and into the general—is a sense of pride, of patriotism, a sense of looking for partners and allies, of problem-solving, of not making stupid mistakes and sending your troops into quicksand and getting them killed. Realistic, pragmatic, not adventurism.
Right now we’re getting very close to adventurism with Venezuela, and this is not what they voted for. If you can say one thing about what the MAGA voters voted for, they did not vote for this. They voted for, if anything, the isolationism that they’re not getting. And we could talk about it in the context of Israel and Palestine—I’m more than happy to as well—but I don’t think anybody saw this coming at all.
Eli Karetny 23:29
So let’s shift to a few other regions and think through how Democratic strategists are thinking about foreign policy in China, in Russia–Ukraine, and in Israel–Palestine as well.
Let’s go in sequence. Maybe let’s start with Russia. What would a Democratic alternative foreign policy look like in terms of supporting Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia?
Joel Rubin 24:06
Well, I mean, look, I’ll tell you, Eli, I was talking with some—I hate to say, like, you know, I’ve worked in Washington, and I’ve been here for 27 years, so a lot of my community of Democratic foreign-policy folks, we’ve gone through the ranks and people have these great experiences—and I had coffee the other day with a former ambassador, and we were talking about Russia and Ukraine and the policy.
And I’m like, look, the thing that really frustrates me is that Biden’s policy on Ukraine essentially bled Russia. And you combine that with the decimation of Iran in the Middle East, and it was like poof went Assad. And if Russia had not been stood up to back in 2022 by American support—because we were the only backstop alongside the brave Ukrainian people, of course, yes, they’re the first—Russia would have taken over Ukraine, and they probably would have just colonized it and set up camp, and who knows if they would have gone further.
But what it did was it extended into a place where they now have to import North Korean troops; they can’t protect Syria, and so now we have a new leadership in Syria, and that’s a good thing, right? So from a big strategic perspective, I am aligned with where the Biden policy was on that.
I think that we stand up for our allies. I think that we reinforce our alliances and our partnerships. I think that we come to the aid of democracies in particular, and I believe that the American people support that. Poll after poll after poll—and this is why Trump has been unable to shake that policy loose from the Biden trajectory—support that. They don’t support backing Russia or withdrawing support from Ukraine; they don’t want that. That’s not what the American people want.
And that’s where you see the kernel of political power into broad bipartisanship. When you see the base—and I see folks making the argument that, oh, we should just be realist, we should let Russia take over Ukraine. Why is that realist? Why is that realist? Who decides that it’s realistic to allow one country to gobble up another? And it turns out that wasn’t even realistic, and they were wrong, right? Just to be very blunt, they were wrong.
You hear it from all sides of the aisle, and you can tell my annoyance about the realists, because I think the realists are faking it. They’re not realists; they’re just picking a side. And so they pick the Russian side, and the Russian side has not won this war.
And so I think the American people are happy about that—not because they inherently hate Russia, but because they inherently understand the value of sticking up for our friends in a time of need. And to me, that’s where the Democratic foreign policy was a winner. It was a winner, especially juxtaposed against Afghanistan, which was the right call and a calamitous execution of that call.
And so that’s how we do it: we have to appeal, even if our base may not be happy, we have to appeal to the broader ethos of American values. That’s how we make the arguments in the political context.
Eli Karetny 27:29
On this last point, let me gently push back—don’t be gentle, yeah.
What if this is one of those areas where there’s space between the strategic calculations and the political calculations? What if the American people or the Democratic base is not in line with thinking through these things in this kind of strategic way that you’re laying out, and the foreign-policy strategists have one point of view in terms of ongoing engagement and support with Ukraine—which has these potential secondary benefits: bleeding Russia, weakening Russia, creating space in other parts of the world where an engaged Russia that’s so committed to Ukraine can’t be engaged everywhere.
So even if there’s something to that strategic calculation, is that something where you try to convince the Democratic base of that way of thinking, or is this an area where, you know, you’ve got to win elections, you’ve got to lean in the direction of what the base wants? How are people thinking through this?
Joel Rubin 28:52
Couple thoughts. First of all, to that last point: you have to win elections, right? If you want the money to flow, you have to have the people in the jobs that are going to provide that money, right? So you have to win elections, and that means that—
And when I say “the base,” so I actually—we mentioned this before, but I was the National Jewish Outreach Director for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign, so I’ve worked and I’ve run for office before as well, didn’t win; won some local races too—actually a lot of fun—in town council where I live. So I’ve kind of been in these spaces at the national level where it’s politics; it’s not just political argument, but it’s actually politics.
And I’ll tell you what our biggest failure as Democrats is: our inability to communicate about foreign policy. “Aggravation” can’t even begin to describe how I felt about the political loss around the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which, in many ways, was the inflection point for President Biden’s term from a political perspective. He did not recover from that, and we didn’t explain to the American people effectively why we were withdrawing after 18, 19, 20 years.
It was a base request. The base didn’t protect him and support him. Instead, they put out statements of concern about what would happen to Afghanistan after leaving, despite lobbying for a decade to get out of Afghanistan. It was a calamity.
And I still see today in the Democratic Party a bias towards only talking about domestic issues and just not talking about foreign policy. Just no. And the result is that in these critical discussions, like we’re talking about with Ukraine—the strategy and the politics—the only way to connect the dots is to explain it and to make it real.
There was work done called “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” by Jake Sullivan, who became National Security Advisor. He did it during the first Trump term at the Carnegie Endowment, sort of looking at ways to engage the middle class on economic issues in the international context. He probably didn’t—I haven’t read it in a while, but I don’t think he recommended a massive tariff policy, okay? So we’re getting “foreign policy for the middle class” in a different direction. But it was like, that was an attempt to connect and communicate, but more of a consume-it rather than sell-it.
So the question now is: we know the voters matter, we know that bipartisanship is essential, consistency is essential, we know the strategy debates in Washington are all over the place, but the secret magic glue in all of this is selling it and communicating and expressing it. And we are really weak right now in that lane in the party.
So connecting the strategy—explaining why it is in our interest to stick up for Ukraine, why it helps American survival, why it helps Europe, why it helps the broader peace environment around the world, even though it’s military support—that had to be beaten down into the heads of people every single day on Capitol Hill, through the press, you name it, and it just… we didn’t run on it, and we got beaten up for it.
Eli Karetny 32:38
So it’s a perfect segue to shift to talking about China trade policy, also Taiwan policy. But I want to frame this by saying that we see, despite the MAGA world energized and unified around Trump, that masks deeper divisions that are going on within the conservative world.
On economic and trade policy, you see divisions between the old conservative–libertarian free-trade coalition that was oriented toward globalization and the new right MAGA coalition, which is America First and kind of Bannon’s economic nationalism. So you see these tensions playing out there within the party.
Are there parallel tensions playing out within the Democratic Party on questions of economic policy and trade policy and how that all applies to China?
Joel Rubin 33:44
You know, what’s fascinating about the tariff issues is that in the Democratic Party, tariffs in many ways were a Democratic tool. You see a lot of domestic, especially in the labor space, a lot of interest and intrigue in tariffs. They’ll all say, “Well, we don’t want to do it the way Trump’s doing it.”
I would actually argue, stepping back—forget the value of tariffs—what Trump has done is made himself the center of the universe through this tariff policy. And it’s quite fascinating. It’s like, who needs a U.N. when you can have tariffs on the world, and everybody has to come begging you for some kind of deal? It’s a pretty effective tool at making the United States the go-to place for a negotiation.
Now, substantively, I’m shocked by it. I don’t think, with China, we have any clarity on our China policy. We are not engaged with them on negotiations over nuclear weapons. We don’t give clarity on Taiwan. The visit with Xi was inconclusive at best.
In many ways, the sort of pressure on China is off right now. The spike in tariffs is down. The sort of credibility of the tariff policy is in tatters, because it’s very much at the whim of one man rather than supported by Congress. We’ve seen Congress vote down tariffs towards Brazil, as an example recently. We see the Supreme Court testing whether or not they’re legal under IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which is the base tool being used for tariffs.
So it’s a mess, and it’s confusing. Even Peter Navarro—former Peace Corps volunteer, Mr. Anti-China—did you know that? Yeah, how about that? Peter, Mr. China hawk. Where is he? I don’t know where he is right now these days, so I’m not sure what the China policy is any longer.
So I think for Democrats, when it comes to the tariffs, there is desire to use tariffs to protect and support certain sectors of the economy, but not as a bludgeon and a weapon to change broader national international policies, because it’s just not been a tool that we’ve used. And I think it’s a very vulnerable tool; it’s resting on quicksand for the reasons I described a moment ago.
I think with China—I’ll tell you, I was in China in 2019 on a trip, and it was a fascinating country. I found it really intriguing and obviously historically significant, and also the most totalitarian place I’ve ever set foot in. And, you know, depressing in many ways, because when human beings live in a totalitarian society, they’re different. They look down on the ground, they walk past you quickly, they’re not happy. You can feel it in the air; it’s a different vibe.
In some ways, you know, it’s like when we see ICE coming into certain areas, or when we move the National Guard into Washington, people just kind of hid. They self-modulated: “Well, I’m not going to go out tonight,” right? Everything just went calm.
Did I lose you?
Eli Karetny
No.
Joel Rubin
Oh, good, good, good. Sorry, I saw a thing here, sorry folks, I thought it froze for a second.
So I think for us, we have an opportunity as Democrats to recognize: (a) there are major strategic challenges, but (b) they’re not our enemy, China. But (c) we can’t look away, and we can’t apologize.
I saw some blogger—Hasan Piker—was in China, basically talking up how great the country is. Like, really? Why don’t you go ask to see the Uyghur camps? Go have at it; see what’s going on there. It’s not cool, it’s not great. It’s a great country, but what they’re doing there is not great.
And I think for Democrats, we have an opportunity to expand the aperture of the argument beyond just human rights and democracy into all these different areas and really straighten out this relationship. Because, of course, with the Chinese, they know what they’re doing. They have a plan, they have a strategy, and they are creating deep concern amongst our allies throughout Asia. And ever since the collapse of the TPP a decade ago, our strategy on China—on containing China, dealing with China, as Democratic Party policy is concerned—kind of has been, even under Biden, inconclusive at best.
Eli Karetny 38:59
So many things you said really resonate. I have to say, my parents are from Soviet Ukraine. They left in the late ’70s, and growing up I often heard stories about what it’s like growing up in a totalitarian regime and walking with your head down and being afraid to say what you really think and getting in trouble for telling jokes.
Joel Rubin 39:20
Yeah, like I’m not making this up, right? Like, no, I never grew up in totalitarianism. We are so spoiled, lucky in this country that we can scream and yell out there and expect to have the right to do so.
Eli Karetny 39:33
You know, it’s funny you say it that way, because as a teenager, once I became more politically aware when I got to college and my parents started hearing me criticizing American capitalism with my kind of newfound lefty sensibilities, that’s exactly what they would say to me: you don’t even know how spoiled you are, this kind of… anyway, that’s a whole other discussion.
Joel Rubin 39:56
But no, I do want to actually take a moment to point out that’s why I love America, right? That’s why this is a great country. This is a great country, and it is a flawed place, but it has enabled, as a Jewish American in particular, enabled me to feel equality and openness and the right and the ability to be completely—to try to maximize who I am. And I’m not alone in that feeling.
But that’s why we fight for it, right? That’s why you get into politics, it’s why you get into policy, it’s why you get into academia. You do it because you’re trying to make a better place of already a great place. We are very lucky to be living in this country.
Eli Karetny 40:41
It’s beautiful to hear you kind of combine both the prideful elements—appreciating American democracy and our way of life—and also maintaining a critical perspective, that there’s a way to hold on to both of those.
Nowadays, in the political atmosphere that we live in, you don’t hear that kind of nuance. It’s either a full-throated America First nationalism or a kind of overly critical “everything is all evil.”
Joel Rubin 41:15
Very polarized.
Eli Karetny 41:18
Yeah, very much. I appreciate hearing that from you.
And I wonder, just to look for where these elements are existing within the Democratic Party and to return our focus to a few trouble spots—thinking about China still—you mentioned the contrast that I hear between your perspective and the way you presented Hasan Piker’s perspective on China, and maybe it’s indicative of broader differences on the left.
I wonder if some of these differences you see in the progressive wing—the Bernie–AOC–Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party—and the Obama–neoliberal–moderate wing. Are these differences— to what extent are they still existent or maybe deepening on economic policy and on China policy?
Joel Rubin 42:22
Well, they’re really deepening on Middle East policy, for the very end.
That’s the catnip of American politics these days—Jews. They love to talk about us.
So, you know, and I worked on Middle East peace issues for years and have had my own challenges in different lanes, trying to keep an ethical perspective on it while understanding that there are going to be different fights.
To this question of tensions: there are sort of tensions, but they’re not so hard. There are definitely differences within the party between more establishment figures and more progressive figures. But in the broad architecture of how we think about America’s role in the world, we’re still generally there: belief in institutions, a belief in the rule of law, a belief in America as a force for good; supporting international development aid and assistance; using diplomacy as the primary tool of American power; recognizing threats.
Where you start to see the thing fray is when it really gets wrapped up into finger-pointing and name-calling and the sort of excessive attacking within the party that we saw particularly around Gaza. Let’s just say bluntly: the war in Gaza has created deep fissures within the Democratic foreign-policy community that, by and large, is aligned with what I said a moment ago.
It’s like the Coke versus Pepsi taste test where you’re blindfolded—you drink one, drink the other, you barely know the difference, right? Same thing with Democrats in foreign policy: if you were to blindfold yourself and see what they say, you’d barely find the difference. But for Gaza—and the way it became used as a domestic political tool in both directions—Israel has been a domestic political juggernaut.
So now it’s like the conflict over there in the real world is not necessarily at all reflective of the conflict over here in our politics about what to do about the conflict over there. And this disconnect, I think, is the danger. I think that’s the red alert for Democrats: that our policy-making arguments in foreign policy, when you talk politically, it’s more about one’s use of it as a political weapon for political gain here, rather than problem-solving over there. And that, to me, is where I think we’re seeing some dangerous spots, if I made sense.
Eli Karetny 45:48
Yeah, but let’s stay there. Let’s kind of wrap things up on the Israel question—Israel–Palestine, Israel, the Gaza war—and where these very complicated and emotional, intense issues, how they play out differently in the parties.
We’re seeing lots of controversy with Tucker Carlson interviewing Nick Fuentes and how it heralded the kind of divisions that are exploding on the right. Maybe you can say a few words about that, and then, looking on the Democratic side of things, how are the Israel issue and, more broadly speaking, antisemitism as an issue—how are they playing out within the Democratic Party? So maybe, if you could address a little bit of each of those things.
Joel Rubin 46:50
Yeah, I got it for you in about three seconds.
Look, for the listeners, I bring a bio here that can’t be stereotyped, because I worked on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as his Jewish advisor in 2020. I was the founding political director of J Street in 2008—our first lobbyist as well as political director in charge of our endorsements. I worked for the American Jewish Congress, which is an establishment Jewish organization. I’ve grown up spending time in Israel, spending time in the Arab world, have family in Israel. I’m an American national-security foreign-policy guy.
So I bring a lot of different baskets here, and I try to think, when I deal with these issues and I go on TV a lot about them, I try to think about how to talk about them. My sort of safe space, my core argument is always: what’s in the American interest here? As an American, what’s in our interest?
And on Israel–Gaza, the Israelis—I’ll just be blunt—are a longtime American ally, a very important ally in the Middle East and a democracy. It’s also a country that is deeply flawed, that has been maintaining an occupation in the West Bank in particular, and of course surrounding Gaza now for two decades. That is an unresolved conflict after failed years of diplomacy, where the Palestinian Authority, after Oslo, dealt consistently with Hamas undermining their ability to do peace negotiations, and Israel got a prime minister assassinated for it as a result. Those are facts.
And the attacks on October 7 were heinous and dangerous to our ally’s survival. They were highly effective, from the Hamas perspective, at harming Israel’s sense of invulnerability and security. And the Israeli response has been incredibly dangerous, damaging, and overwhelmingly horrific to civilians in Gaza, which occurred during a time period where Hamas refused to return hostages it stole in order to encourage Israel to conduct those kinds of attacks. That’s reality. I’m sure people can argue with me differences in reality, but I see that and I say:
As an American, ally Israel—we support your ability to both get your citizens back, your hostages back, keep your security, support that, and also keep the door open to a pathway for a solution to this conflict, a better day for the Palestinians—which, by the way, Trump’s team put in the U.N. draft resolution: the idea of a pathway to a state for the Palestinians just yesterday, which is a good thing.
Here, though, in our Democratic political environment, it’s now essentially: Do you believe Israel is going to happen? So Mamdani—when he ran for New York mayor—he was asked many times about whether or not he recognized Israel as a Jewish state. He would not say yes. That omission should be a red flag for anyone who believes that Israel is just a country that exists, right? Why would you not say yes and also add on, “Of course Palestinians should have a state, and Palestinians were represented by Arabs in ’47–’48 who rejected the Israelis”? Yes, I’ll die going over the history.
But by saying that, what he did is he lit a match in the Democratic primary process, which he knew he was doing, because it was, in many ways, the animating factor behind the energy of his campaign. So now what we’ll see is Democrats in primaries across the country being asked that same question. And there will be candidate questionnaires for endorsements, like I used to organize at J Street—though we never asked that question back then; it was a very different environment in 2008.
They will be asked: Do you believe Israel should exist? Did they commit a genocide? Do you think we should cut off military aid to Israel right now, or “no money for offensive weapons”? And that will now become a new litmus test for Democratic candidates. And so you have a whole new crop of candidates that will have to answer those questions, and that means less nuance in their foreign policy. That means they are being told they have to be adversarial with an ally to get the candidate’s or a group’s support.
So I fear it’s going to further inflame and polarize our Democratic debate over Israel, rather than calm it down and be inclusive about, as an American, what’s in our foreign-policy interest. You know what our foreign-policy interest is? Not having a big-ass war again in the Middle East; getting peace; helping the Palestinians to get rid of Hamas and build a state of their own that lives in peace alongside the Jewish state of Israel, which also does have several million—couple million—Arab citizens of Israel as well in their democracy. That’s the American interest.
And so I fear that we are on a knife’s edge, politically, in the Democratic Party of moving away from that into a much more polarizing argument in our primary process, which—I don’t know if I answered your question—but that’s where my head was.
Eli Karetny 53:06
So many important things you brought up there, and if we had more time, I’d really want to push deeper into this—
Joel Rubin
Sorry.
Eli Karetny
No, no, it’s really such an important topic, and I’m glad we’re at least addressing it, at least beginning to address it.
So maybe just to wrap things up, let me take one step deeper in responding to what you just mentioned—several of the things you mentioned. If the Israel issue—and to the extent that there’s the Israel piece of it and then maybe there’s the antisemitism piece of it, which are kind of interlinked but not the same issues, they get blurred, but I think it’s important to pull them apart—but in this checklist of questions that primary voters will be asked—Should there be a Palestinian state? Is this a genocide? Should the U.S. continue to be providing military support to Israel?—these kinds of questions, are they questions that will continue to divide each of the parties, or could they lead to a kind of realignment where this issue is important enough that the parties reform partly around a set of issues, this being one of the issues that wind up leading to a party realignment? Could something like that happen?
Joel Rubin 54:41
Well, this goes to the whole theme of our conversation, and I want to go back to this, which is that to really not have this issue tear apart both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, you have to have success on the ground. You have to have something over there working, right?
And how do you do that? As a Democrat, you support the process underway. You support the aid to Israel. You support the support for the Palestinians—the aid to the Palestinians—the end of this fighting. You cheer Trump when he gets a peace arrangement—I won’t call it “deal,” but an arrangement like he had.
You rebuild bipartisanship. If you really care about the Democratic Party not tearing itself into a reform party over foreign policy, you have to support Trump in doing the right thing, because he’s the president for the next three years.
I think we Americans have gone through too much pain and suffering—not to mention the people on the other side of our wars—by politicizing our foreign policy. Iraq, to go back to the original sin of our last 20-something years in the Middle East—the politicization of the Iraq War was calamitous across the board.
If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in my 25-plus years of work in Washington, it’s that politics does need to stop at the water’s edge on these foreign-policy issues. We can still be Democrats and Republicans; there will still be many, many issues to fight over. For those who want to defeat Trump or his acolytes at the polls, trust me, there’s a lot of things you can argue about.
Don’t undermine the potential for peace and stability in order to gain political advantage, because that will boomerang back against you as well—not to mention the fact that it’s just the wrong thing to do.
So that’s where we’re at. I will criticize Trump on Gaza if he does the wrong thing, but I will support him if he’s doing the right thing. And I think for Democrats, antisemitism—for Republicans, antisemitism—both sides are having their moment of “Holy shit”—excuse my language—it’s really bad out there, and it’s only getting worse.
What I don’t want is to see what I’m seeing on social, which is a lot of the far left and the far right people hanging out with each other now talking about how bad the Jews are. That is not a good thing for America, not to mention for Jews. And today it’s Jews; tomorrow it’ll be some other group. It’s not good.
So we have to calm the waters, and the best way to calm the waters, ultimately, is to support good progress on the ground in the region.
Eli Karetny 57:45
On that very important point, Joel Rubin, thank you very much for an enlightening conversation. Really enjoyed having you on the podcast. Thank you very much, Joel.
Joel Rubin 57:56
My pleasure. Bye.