During last month’s Democratic presidential debate, on November 20, a tense moment—one of the few that night—arose when candidates Pete Buttigieg and Tulsi Gabbard clashed over, of all things, sending troops to Mexico.



Days earlier, in a town hall–style gathering, Buttigieg—an eight-year Navy Reserve veteran who deployed to Afghanistan in 2014—said that he would entertain sending the American military to fight drug cartels in Mexico, “if American lives were on the line and if it was necessary to meet treaty obligations.” On the debate stage, Gabbard—the only other veteran in the Democratic race, who served in Iraq in 2004 and 2005—seized on Buttigieg’s comments as evidence that the South Bend mayor threatened Mexico’s sovereignty with a plan that would further militarize America’s southern border.

“Do you seriously think anybody on this stage is proposing invading Mexico?” Buttigieg responded. Raucous laughter among the audience ensued. The substantive stakes of their clash—over America’s use of its overwhelming military force and whether war in the service of humanitarianism is humane—were soon lost as pundits weighed in on who emerged from the scuffle “unscathed.” (It was Buttigieg, they agreed.)

As Buttigieg rises in the polls in key battleground states prior to the Democrats’ next debate on Thursday evening, he has increasingly positioned himself as the moderate alternative to left-wing challengers such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren on domestic policy. On Medicare for All and free college tuition, Buttigieg has personified the middle ground, the art of the possible. He has lampooned those universal welfare programs as unrealistic and more beneficial to the rich than the poor—“I’m skeptical of spending [tax revenue] on millionaires and billionaires”—and defended his work for the corporate-downsizing artists at McKinsey, hoping his steady gradualism on health care, taxes, and education will win over party elites, wealthy donors, and the well-to-do suburban and exurban base voters who fear that the stable status quo of the Clinton and Obama years is being disrupted by a surging left.

On foreign policy, though, Buttigieg has tried to carve a niche similar to those of Sanders and Warren … at least, rhetorically. Notwithstanding his collisions with Gabbard—an easy political target who’s flailing in debate-qualifying polls—Buttigieg has critiqued and opposed the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, expressing support for repealing the post-9/11 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that’s become a blank check for bombing: “We have got to put an end to endless war.” He has decried asymmetric trade deals, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He’s argued for targeting climate change as an existential threat to the world’s population.