Back in March, roughly two months after Donald Trump assumed the presidency, Ben Wikler began working in earnest to prevent another war. As the Washington director for the progressive group MoveOn—which fought doggedly but unsuccessfully against the United States invasion of Iraq in 2003—Wikler has been meeting regularly with colleagues from CREDO Action, the American Civil Liberties Union, Win Without War, and ReThink Media, gaming out conflict scenarios under Trump. How might the president exploit a national security crisis? Would there be a law-and-order domestic crackdown? What exactly would it take to stop war with North Korea or Iran?

Last week, Wikler told me “the threat of an armed conflict with North Korea is ever-present, and the risk [is] that Trump will steer us toward war with Iran.” Both of those threats are now more acute after Trump’s terrifying speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, in which he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, called its leader Kim Jong-un “rocket man,” and called the Iran nuclear deal “an embarrassment.” In a joint statement, MoveOn, CREDO, and Win Without War said, “We need to stop this slow roll toward a catastrophic war and work towards defusing the North Korean crisis diplomatically. Trump’s U.N. speech represents yet another reckless escalation in the ongoing tit-for-tat between North Korea and the United States that does nothing but edge us closer to nuclear war.” They added, “There is no military solution to this problem.”



Given the constant domestic crisis of the Trump administration—the latest insanity being another last-ditch effort to repeal Obamacare—it’s understandable that the Democrats haven’t focused as much on his foreign policy. Yet Trump’s U.N. speech heightens the need for the opposition to communicate its own international agenda, clearly articulating how Democrats would engage with the world if they retook power. Senator Bernie Sanders plans to outline his vision for a progressive foreign policy in a speech on Thursday to Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. But Democrats on Capitol Hill haven’t laid the groundwork. “We don’t have a clear progressive foreign policy,” Representative Ro Khanna of California told me this week. “I’m not confident we have enough mobilization, enough awareness, and enough coherence of perspective to avoid another intervention that gets us entangled abroad.”

Despite Trump’s warmongering, liberals can take comfort from a few realities about today’s political climate. Americans are less eager for military action than they were during George W. Bush’s first term, and less supportive of the president. Gallup polling showed most Americans approved of Bush’s job performance before 9/11, and his popularity skyrocketed to 90 percent after the terrorist attacks. Trump, by contrast, hovers around 40 percent. This isn’t a public predisposed to trust him, particularly with something as serious as a war. “He’s not going to get the benefit of the doubt the country gave to George W. Bush,” said Murshed Zaheed, CREDO Action’s political director. Zaheed will never forget “the massive frustration we all felt on the ground when we saw national leaders like Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and Tom Daschle fold like cheap cards and acquiesce to Bush,” but he says “the left flank is better situated to put pressure on the Democrats” under Trump—“to act like an opposition party, not a minority party.”

There are also ways the anti-war movement is stronger than it was more than a decade ago. “There wasn’t an infrastructure in the progressive movement as it exists today,” Zaheed said. “You had MoveOn, but they were in their early stages.” Today these activist groups represent millions of Americans, armed with new tools and strategies. Whereas the movement against Iraq was largely dependent on mainstream media, progressives today are using email and social media to mobilize massive demonstrations, including recent actions against health care repeal and Trump’s Muslim ban. “We have seen how the left can respond effectively when it comes to fighting back against Trumpcare,” Zaheed told me. “The fact that we’ve slowed them down this much speaks to the effectiveness of the mobilization of the online communities.” He said their anti-war tactics would be traditional—“I wish I had something really exciting to tell you in terms of a battle plan”—but insisted, “We will make sure the activism machine is just revved up to ensure there’s an active response from the left flank of American politics.”