As the insurgent left wing of the Democratic Party captures headlines and wins votes, many of its supporters are coalescing around a growing set of policy priorities: universal health care, higher taxes on the rich, the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. But when it comes to matters of war and peace and to America’s place in the world, the left is either silent or confused.

In the 2016 Democratic presidential primary campaign, Bernie Sanders did not make foreign policy a focus. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently dismissed questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict by claiming she was “not the expert on geopolitics on this issue.” And as other candidates across the United States scramble to get votes from self-declared socialists by, say, supporting single-payer health care, few feel the need to appeal to the left on foreign policy.

To be fair, there are good reasons leftists haven’t grappled much with foreign policy. For one, there are few decision makers from whom they can learn: Since the early days of the Cold War, foreign policymaking has been dominated by a bipartisan commitment to militarism and American hegemony; those who depart from the consensus view have largely been kept out of the State Department, the Pentagon and other parts of the government. At the same time, the left itself lacks institutions dedicated to developing foreign policy ideas. While Republicans and moderate Democrats have a host of think tanks pushing interventionism, no corporation or billionaire has yet decided to fund a left-wing foreign policy think tank to which politicians could turn for advice.