This is a lightly edited transcript of the June 28 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of Right Now on The New Republic. I’m joined by Jonathan Guyer. He’s the program director at the Institute for Global Affairs. He’s also been a great writer about foreign policy for a long time, most notably at The American Prospect and at Vox, and he has a new piece out about AOC that we’ll get into in a bit. But Jonathan, welcome. Thanks for joining me.
Jonathan Guyer: Great to be with you, Perry.
Bacon: So the piece you wrote recently, that we’re going to talk about, is called “AOC Meets World,” and it was in Foreign Policy very recently. So give us an overall sense of what made you decide to write about AOC’s foreign policy? I think there’s obvious reasons, but what made you kind of want to write about her in terms of foreign policy context?
Guyer: I think she represents this leftward tilt of the Democratic Party, and also—I don’t want to say the failure, but the ambiguousness of the left’s foreign policy. I think the left, and a couple of the experts in the piece said this, has not always had a great strategy when it comes to foreign policy. It’s been a big question mark. And I think if you talk to people in and out of Washington, they’ll say, I don’t really know what AOC’s foreign policy is. Which is, I don’t think, entirely correct. I think she has a pretty developed worldview. She’s taken a lot of positions on Gaza, on Latin America.
But the impetus for this piece is, I think she is really dipping her toe into world affairs. She spoke at this major foreign policy conference in February, the Munich Security Conference, which is where the contenders for the next primaries go and sort of strut their stuff. Gretchen Whitmer was there, a number of other muckety-mucks.
So the idea that this was her first time there—and my reporting showed that she’d been invited before in 2020, decided not to go. She’s really associated with this DSA grassroots push to take care of her constituents in New York, focus on domestic policy.
But I think, as we’ve seen with the Democratic Party over the past decade, you can’t really separate domestic policy and foreign policy. You and I have had a lot of these conversations over the years. You can’t separate them. The way America conducts itself domestically reflects its role in the world.
So I think part of this piece was trying to figure out, how does one of the shining stars of the Democratic Party, the most popular or among the most popular possible candidates for the next presidential—how is she figuring out who she is? And it’s not like she fell out of a—what is it—a coconut tree, like Kamala said.
Bacon: Yeah, I was going to say.
Guyer: She has a very developed worldview, AOC. It’s just, she’s, I think, a really all-star politician, carefully messaging and developing strategies and talking with some very intelligent people. But obviously, there’s a lot we can get into here.
Bacon: So the thing that struck me by you saying is—we’ve had this sort of, I don’t want to say new left, but this sort of more developed progressivism, that started with Sanders’ 2016 campaign and grows from there. That has mostly been focused, I would argue, on domestic politics—Medicare for All, anti-billionaires, anti-plutocracy. I would say the first seven, eight years of that was really focused on that.
But I would argue in some ways now, the leading issue, or one of the leading issues of that, is a foreign policy issue. I would say the war in Gaza. And it’s a critique of both the Republicans, but also it’s a critique of the Biden administration and centrist Democrats. So I don’t know if the left has a foreign policy vision. It certainly has a vision on that foreign policy issue, I would say. You agree?
Guyer: I would even broaden it a little bit, in that the domestic issues that AOC is most associated with, like you say—fighting against the oligarchy, she joined this tour with Bernie Sanders. Climate, Green New Deal. Immigration. Obviously, a member of the squad who pushed back, part of that resistance in Trump 1.0. Those are actually global issues. None of those are really domestic alone.
And I think there’s been this kind of job of the great monks of Washington foreign policy to cordon off domestic and foreign policy—and this has been going on since the Cold War—and saying to the young guns like AOC and many others, Hey, leave foreign policy to us. We’re the experts. And I think what she does when she goes to Munich is she takes all of these dynamics that have been a big part of her career—as youngest member of Congress to be elected as a woman, someone who is part of that kind of Democratic contender who ousted an incumbent and represented all this—and said, Hey, fighting the oligarchy is part of foreign policy, and is part of the reason we have a Trump presidency for the second time. That’s part one.
The second part is, I think on Gaza, she’s largely been consistent. I went back—one of her first interviews, I think she wasn’t even elected yet, she had just won the primary—was on PBS, and she described a massacre of Palestinians in Gaza, and obviously setting in the structural dynamics, what’s been happening in Gaza, has been an occupation and violence for several decades. So she kind of said this and got incredible pushback, and also wasn’t really fully briefed on it. I think she had the right message, but couldn’t explain it right to a TV audience. To her credit, she was a newly minted contender, and so forth.
So part of this piece was trying to figure out, how did she go from there to now, where I think she has a pretty developed point of view on Gaza and has gotten a lot of flak from the right, a lot of flak from the left. But I’d say if you look at her messaging over time, it’s been pretty consistent.
So when she warns of famine in Gaza in 2024, when she’s put out some very strong criticism of the Biden administration or the Trump administration, or when she goes to Munich and calls what’s happening in Gaza a genocide—it’s not really part of this new left moment. It’s part of a progression over time, where she has been trying to bring in some of these principles towards US foreign policy. And I think, as we know, principles and US foreign policy don’t always mix, for worse, I would say.
Bacon: I want to separate out a little bit what the left is doing and what AOC is doing—those are related—and then come back together a little bit. So I do see Gaza as a seminal issue of left foreign policy right now. Do you agree?
Guyer: I do, yeah. And I think it’s like a new Vietnam, and a litmus test, and there’s only one right answer, I would say, for the left and for the new generation of DSA contenders who are trying to shape not just domestic policy, but foreign policy.
Bacon: And a related question—there’s a piece in The New Yorker about the Biden foreign policy. And so I think you’re also seeing this issue, but I’m curious what you make of it, is what I perceive as an effort almost to say that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer, the architects of Joe Biden’s Gaza policy, should be disqualified from membership in Democratic leadership in the future. They shouldn’t get these big jobs in the future. That’s my sense of what’s going on.
Talk about that a little bit, in terms of what the left is trying to do about the people who were involved in Biden’s foreign policy.
Guyer: Absolutely. So I’d say this even came from Brian Schatz, the senator from Hawaii—I think he said something like this, and others have said that. I think a lot of the grassroots organizing groups—and there’s a whole left quotient of kind of Project 2020-whatever that’s going to shape the next presidency—are saying, We have to get rid of these advisors who enabled some of the most heinous war crimes of this century so far, that were done with US weapons and US leadership backing the Israeli government headed by Netanyahu.
And I think what we’re seeing at the same time are the Biden personnel, the senior leadership who had been involved in Middle East policy since the Obama years—secretary of State Blinken, Jake Sullivan, many of their kind of top lieutenants—and this is my analysis here—seem to be saying, This was really President Biden’s decision. We were trying to figure out the best way to manage this and work with Israel under all these constraints.
But I would say—and this isn’t uniquely AOC—but this changing US public opinion, changing views of the MAGA right, changing perspectives of Israel and the world, actually has totally changed the way that I think the next president could deal with Israel, could deal with Palestine and the Middle East. So those old constraints have fallen by the wayside, but we’re seeing many Biden alumni doing a bit of reinterpretation and saying, “We did the best with what we had,” and so forth.
It’s a really contentious moment. And if you look at who’s advising AOC, it is not these people. It is a lot of the strongest critics of the Biden administration—namely Matt Duss, who’s someone who writes sometimes for The New Republic and has been a Bernie advisor—
Bacon: Has been here on this show. Yeah.
Guyer: —and so forth. I figured. Yeah, exactly.
Bacon: And to come back to—I guess I’m going to ask you, as a person who follows foreign policy: Jake Sullivan was probably—the national security advisor is rarely the same person twice. The secretary of state is rarely the same person twice. So Tony Blinken was not likely to be secretary of state in 2029, no matter what.
So what are we really talking about here in terms of who is not going to get a job, who would’ve otherwise? Because I don’t think those two people would’ve got those jobs even if there wasn’t a Gaza policy.
Guyer: I think we’re talking about two things, Perry. One is the Biden legacy, which is really important. This was a guy who, when it came to economic populism, was trying to be the next FDR, and this Gaza tragedy threatens to upend the entire Biden legacy. So we’re going to have memoirs from the former president, from Tony Blinken, from other senior advisors coming out this fall, and they’re all going to be grappling with, what does that mean?
But spinning it forward, what we saw in the Obama years is everyone kind of moved up a notch. Blinken, Sullivan—they were all kind of deputies, and then they became the principals. And there’s a huge possibility that Mr. Sullivan could be the next secretary of state, could be a UN ambassador.
Bacon: You think still?
Guyer: Depending on who’s the—you know, if it’s a very traditional Democrat, if it’s a Gavin Newsom—
Bacon: Josh Shapiro, yeah.
Guyer: Exactly. But if we have a Jon Ossoff, or, who knows, any number of progressives—people are angling. And this is the off-season, everyone’s favorite game of not just who are going to be the next presidential contenders, but who are the advisors and who’s in good standing. When I interviewed Mr. Sullivan several years ago, before Biden even was the heir apparent, he hadn’t even chosen which candidate. He was advising Klobuchar. He was advising Biden. It was kind of different times.
So we’re still way before that consolidation, and it actually gives the Democrats a really unique moment right now, with the midterms coming up, to say, big picture, conceptually, what does this party represent foreign policy-wise? Because a year and a half from now, there’s not going to be time to deal with these nitty-gritty issues. It’s going to be a bruising fight to take the White House.
So right now, you’re seeing the biggest grand strategy questions of, should the US be a moral force for good? Should we go into some sort of more realist tack? Should we focus more on the Western Hemisphere? These are pretty big questions that don’t actually get discussed a whole lot. But I do think people like the mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, with the clarity he speaks with on Gaza, has forced a discussion, among others. But there is a real foreign policy debate happening among Democrats, which is not always happening, right?
Bacon: Not at all. And so it seems to me AOC’s foreign policy—if I was just watching the speech in Munich, or the speeches in Munich, I get the idea. The idea is that the oligarchy and the authoritarianism and the democratic decline we’re seeing around the world is in part tied to economic policy around the world that is rewarding—the decline of the middle class is helping, around the world, is helping lead to oligarchy, dictatorship.
And so therefore, we need to address the economic conditions around the world if we want to address the... In other words, the democracy threat that Biden talked about a lot is also about oligarchy, and you have to fight the oligarchy to restore democracy. Is that essentially what we’re talking about here?
Guyer: Yeah. That’s a big part of what she talked about in these couple different kind of Q&A sessions. I think that message irked some on the left, that thought it was a little bit too black and white, good and bad. But on the other hand, many people thought this was a really strong message. I interviewed this former head of the Center for American Progress and Obama ambassador Patrick Gaspard, who is now advising Mamdani, and he actually said, “Look at this other moment from her time in Germany.”
She was in Berlin. She was speaking to a more centrist group at a university forum, and someone challenged her on Gaza, saying, This is a pro-Israel party platform you’re speaking with. What are you doing here? And she said, “If we don’t go together, we all fall apart. We have to unite the left, the liberals, the kind of social left.” And so that was another message that might’ve gotten lost in all of...
It’s tough to be AOC. You’re a lightning rod for every piece of racist vitriol, every misogynistic racist. Some of the criticism has very little to do with the substance. But on the substance, I thought that was another interesting foreign policy message—we don’t need a moral purity test, we need to unite to beat the Republican Party in the next election.
Bacon: So I think Biden would’ve agreed we need a big tent, and that’s the kind of—he was trying to unite people around the world. I think the point where I think it’s different is, I don’t think Biden necessarily would’ve said the cause of authoritarianism is wage stagnation, oligarchy. Or maybe he said that, but it was at the 2020 front.
I think at the beginning, he was saying the cause of authoritarianism was, like, people not respecting democracy, people like Putin, people like Trump. I think he was more individualistic and less—AOC is making—I’m not sure Biden would necessarily forcefully disagree with it, but I think AOC’s making a more class-based foreign policy point than Biden would’ve. Is that correct?
Guyer: That’s right. And she declined to do an interview with me for this profile. But I spoke with a lot of people around her, allies, advisors, and so forth, and that kind of working-class foreign policy was something people kept coming back to. And it’s something we’ve seen from other members of the squad. I think it resonates a lot. Graham Platner has now been fully disgraced, but what he represented was, is there a working-class foreign policy here?
The other thing I would add, Perry—and it’s something that is, I think, a distinction from the Biden administration—was she was drawing connections between all these different theaters of war, and saying, what the US is doing in Venezuela or Cuba, Gaza, Europe—these are all connected. We can’t separate these out when the US is using economic sanctions as a tool of first resort. That connects Iran to Venezuela.
And there’s a bigger story that she’s telling that I think Democrats have long struggled to make, because—not to dumb it down—but foreign policy is complicated. It’s hard to tell one big story. And I think the US has such an entrenched military-industrial complex, so many bases and drone strikes and all this stuff, it’s hard to imagine a world where the US is an unambiguous force for good. And I don’t think she’s actually saying that. She’s trying to narrow where there’s things that can be changed, and parallels between these different conflicts.
Bacon: So I, as someone who liked AOC and maybe is biased toward her, thought the coverage of her speech was very fixated on, did she use the right foreign policy code words on Taiwan and so on. Do you think she is someone who needs a lot of training in this area?
Or, in my view, she’s being policed by the foreign policy establishment that doesn’t agree with her and is looking to police her gaffes on the code words, because they don’t agree with her broader vision? What do you think?
Guyer: No, I agree with you.
Bacon: Could be both, by the way.
Guyer: And I’m not trying to be a cheerleader for her, as a kind of—
Bacon: I know you’re not. Yeah.
Guyer: —a reporter. I want to weigh all the different criticisms, left and right, speak with all the people around her, understand how she came out at this place. But yeah, I think there was a real emphasis on the supposed gaffes—the ums and uhs that she said in an answer were all written out in The New York Times, and I don’t remember the last time ums and uhs from other members of Congress.
I think on the substance, a lot of it was pretty mainstream—which was maybe that’s the hard thing to grapple with. But some of the experts I spoke with who work at places like MoveOn basically were like, This is a big deal. They have a Latina woman in her 30s on this stage in Munich, where it’s really largely white men who have dominated the foreign policy sphere. And she does threaten them.
But the other point I think you’re making is, she doesn’t necessarily have the traditional credentials of, let’s say, an Elissa Slotkin, who was in the CIA, or some other prominent lawmakers who work on foreign policy. But digging into her background, I found that she actually has a lot of the markers of true geopolitical intelligence.
She spent time in Niger as an undergraduate, doing homestays, understanding how US development and humanitarian assistance really works. That’s what she studied at university. She has a sense of foreign policy that is not wholly untraditional. It’s just that there is a certain cabal that kind of determines what the national security leadership ought to look like, and she hasn’t exactly fit that mold, let’s say.
Bacon: You mentioned—you interviewed Matt Duss, we mentioned him earlier. So Matt Duss was an advisor to Bernie Sanders and his campaigns. He was close to the Biden people for some period, and then broke away even before Gaza, is my impression. So talk about who is around her. They’re not necessarily the sort of people who served Clinton, Obama, Biden, but who’s around her in terms of foreign policy?
Guyer: So her chief of staff, this guy Mike Kaska, comes from Bernie’s office. So that’s one thing to note, is she’s within these kind of progressive circles. Matt, who now runs a progressive think tank in DC, has gathered experts. He’s primarily a Middle East guy, but has brought in China and other foreign policy experts to have a kind of a kitchen cabinet around AOC.
But one of the most interesting things that I dug into was her foreign trips. She’s gone on a handful of congressional delegations, and one that really stood out was a trip she did to Latin America that was done with one of the major Latin America-focused progressive think tanks. And these are guys—I keep saying guys, but obviously I’m meaning that more broadly—who focus on how economic sanctions really affect people, how they damage the lives of people in Cuba and Venezuela, and not your typical hyper-security-focused think tanks. This is much more human-centric, human-focused.
And when she went to Latin America—I spoke with a number of Latin Americanists who said she didn’t just meet with the US Chamber of Commerce or the kind of economic chieftains that members of Congress tend to meet with. She met with grassroots leaders. She met with Indigenous organizers. She met with the kind of folks doing politics that reflect how she did politics in New York and the way that she came up.
So I found that to be a kind of interesting detail, and I do think it represents the kind of—you know, spinning it forward—what AOC and a number of other representatives are trying to do, which is, at this moment in US politics, where you have an imperial presidency, she’s trying to make connections with Lula in Brazil, with progressive leaders throughout Latin America, similar to what she was doing in Germany—finding liberals and leftists who she can work with, the Green Party, social Dems, and forging these connections in a way that isn’t exactly your typical mano-a-mano, let’s say, way that members of Congress tend to interact when they go abroad.
Bacon: As I read this piece, I was reminded of something. I’ve been doing this for a long time. So I wrote a piece in late—early 2006 about a famous Democratic politician, and who he was meeting with and how he might run for president. His name is Barack Obama, obviously—a similar kind of piece to what you did, talking about who’s around him and so on. And I generally liked what President Obama did, but in office, he, I think, adhered to the blob’s points of view a lot, ultimately.
And his foreign policy—the things he talked about as a candidate, opposing the Iraq War, being different—in office, I would argue, he was a fairly standard Democrat on foreign policy. Do you think AOC is vulnerable to that same kind of thing if she became president? Ultimately, she would appoint the Jake Sullivan types and be 88 percent the same as President Shapiro or Buttigieg would be?
Guyer: I think this is maybe the core question, Perry, and I don’t totally explore it in this piece, but I have some thoughts. I think one of the things you’re identifying is the gap between President Obama’s message and his policies. I think his message was pretty remarkable—going to Cairo to give a speech and end the war on terror and the war on Islam and so forth, and hiring someone like Samantha Power, who is an expert in genocide and US failures in foreign policy, and giving all these people like Ben Rhodes the ability to shape policy.
But at the end of the day, as we saw over those eight years, the people who held the Cabinet positions, the Hillary Clintons and the Robert Gateses—and now we’re going probably way far back for some of our viewers here, but you and I know this history really well—these were really traditional, bipartisan members of the blob. And I think this is where the rubber hits the road. It’s really hard to change US foreign policy.
It’s not just the State Department or the Pentagon. It is all these entrenched institutions, and it’s trying to have a reckoning with the architecture of American military bases abroad, the way that big institutions work, and this other whole dynamic, which is the allure of power, and the allure of wanting to be respected and liked by peers of both parties, and by projecting US leadership, whatever that means, in the world.
But I think since President Obama, a lot has changed in Washington. We’ve seen the fracturing of the Republican Party and a new movement—probably most aptly represented by JD Vance, and there’s a lot of questions around it—but of a kind of a more restrained, less militaristic Republican Party. Lot of debate to have around that, of course. Not trying to cheerlead anybody. But this is kind of categorically different, that you have a President Trump who’s run on populist perspectives that basically says we need a ceasefire in Gaza, to the left of President Biden. It’s surprising.
So I think one of the main challenges that Obama faced, and that the next president will face, is having the bureaucrats, the people that can actually make government work—and not to fall into the deep state fantasy of President Trump, but you got to maintain this whole massive US bureaucracy of thousands of appointees, of entire military and intelligence and all of this, and I don’t think you can just unwind it.
So I think if AOC, or whomever the next Democratic president, wants to really change US foreign policy, you do need some insiders who can change stuff, but it can’t just be the message. The message is one part of it, but you also have to figure out the actions. And I guess that’s what a whole lot of Democrats are trying to figure out in the off-season.
Bacon: Two final questions. I guess in writing the piece, I think there’s an answer to this question, but do you consider her a likely presidential candidate?
Guyer: I do, but I’ve also heard rumors that—what if Senator Schumer doesn’t run again, that maybe that would be a better call. She is super popular. I think she represents what Gen Z wants in Democratic politics. I think the Mamdani wave here in New York puts a lot of wind in her sails, and I think she has a lot of cred to take on what Trump represents beyond Gaza and Middle East policy and Western Hemisphere policy, but on some of these core domestic policies we talked about—with wildfires burning, with immigration crackdown and all this stuff. She comes in with a lot of credibility to change the game.
But I don’t know. It’s going to be a bruising two years, and I think we’re also going to have to see—everyone always says this is going to be the midterms that’s about foreign policy. But if this midterms is indeed about foreign policy, I think we’ll get more clues on who the next Democratic nominee might look like.
Bacon: That builds my final question, which is: is this Democratic primary upcoming, is it like most of the Democratic primaries I’ve covered—the exception being 2007, when who voted for the Iraq War was a big issue? In general, it’s not been a big issue in Democratic primaries. But right now, I would argue, if you go to Michigan, El-Sayed’s opposition to the war in Gaza and Stevens’ votes is an issue. I’m not sure if it’s a huge issue, but it’s an issue. A lot of the leftist candidates are saying, We should spend money here at home and not on bombing people abroad, and I think that has become the way to talk about Gaza.
But I am curious—the Gaza war, there’s still things happening in Gaza. Obviously, the war in Iran is happening right now. And I think it’s hard to know, but do you really think, when we’re talking about the South Carolina primary in November 2027, in the months before that, are we going to be talking about foreign policy? Or are we going to be back to talking about affordability and housing? Is foreign policy going to be a big part of the mix, a small part of the mix, a medium part of the mix? What do you think?
Guyer: No, so I would argue, Perry, that it is absolutely going to be part of the mix, and for the simple reason that I filled up my car yesterday and it was $70 for a tank. And foreign policy is often in the rarefied realm of the experts and, by design, doesn’t usually involve the people.
But gas prices, supply chains—our polling with the Institute for Global Affairs shows that, I think it’s something like 78 percent of Americans are hurting economically, and they associate it with the Iran war. So every day this war that isn’t a war keeps going, people experience it.
Bacon: No, I was saying, like, in the next—hopefully the Iran war will not be happening in November 2027. So assuming the Iran war is not happening, then is there other—I assume gas prices always matter, but foreign policy beyond gas prices, will it be part of this primary process, do you think?
Guyer: So I’m from Michigan, and I think that it is a huge debate right now. You have a very robust Arab American, Muslim American community. You have a huge Jewish community that faced this heinous terrorist attack earlier this year. And it is the conversation people are having, and it’s very divisive.
I don’t have a crystal ball about what’s going to be happening two years from now, but look, we have a president who has pursued some very reckless wars. And we could say Venezuela has gone somewhat well, but it does seem like we could stumble into Venezuela 2.0, Cuba, these strikes on boats throughout the Caribbean. These are all these tipping points that could happen that just remind voters how central foreign policy is.
And again, just to bring up our polling at IGA, most Americans don’t think the Iran war has made them any safer. This is a hugely unpopular war. We don’t have boots on the ground, but we do have US troops dying. We have a new figure from the Pentagon that some six hundred US service members have been injured, and—I don’t have the number in front of me—more than a dozen have been killed. This stuff really resonates. This is not abstract.
And I think the question will be, who’s going to seize the mantle? Is it going to be Vance or Rubio, with a strong message that resonates with voters? Or will AOC or Chris Murphy or other Democrats, whether more progressive or more traditional, have a better story to tell? Because I think the Biden story of foreign policy, that we are going to build back better worldwide, is not resonating for folks. So that’s why this AOC message that I’ve been reporting on does have some interesting kernels, but we’ll see how it develops.
Bacon: Jonathan Guyer, great piece in Foreign Policy. The piece is called “AOC Meets World.” And I recommend everyone read it and check out Jonathan’s other work. Are you on Bluesky? On Twitter? Where do people find you?
Guyer: I’m on Twitter. I have a really old handle. It’s MidEastXMidWest. Probably need to update that. But yeah, I’m on Twitter, writing for all sorts of spots. And check out the Institute for Global Affairs, where we’re trying to get the pulse of how Americans view foreign policy.
Bacon: If you want to read a piece that will interest you and maybe outrage you, Jonathan wrote this great piece about Samantha Power in New York Magazine in 2024. It was a great piece.
Guyer: Oh, thanks. Yeah, 2024, I believe. So basically been trying to find the people and personalities that capture all these tensions in US foreign policy. So thanks for having me, Perry. Great to see you. It’s always great to chat with you.
Bacon: Thank you. Bye-bye.
