Democrats are announcing Presidential bids seemingly every week, and they will soon be forced to craft foreign-policy agendas. Last week, we got a taste of some of the dynamics at play, when the Senate voted overwhelmingly in opposition to President Trump’s proposed withdrawal of troops from Syria and Afghanistan. The twenty-six senators who opposed the resolution included the Presidential candidates Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar, which raised the interesting question of how the Democrats’ foreign policy would and wouldn’t distinguish itself from President Trump’s.

To talk about this subject, I spoke by phone with Jake Sullivan, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College, and the former national-security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. He also worked as Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief-of-staff during her tenure as Secretary of State. Recently, Sullivan has written about the need for Democrats to recapture the idea of “American exceptionalism,” which he believes has been misused by the likes of Trump and Dick Cheney. During our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed the biggest foreign-policy dangers for Democrats, the real reasons that the Obama Administration aided the Saudi war in Yemen, and whether Trump’s embrace of foreign strongmen is really so different from the realpolitik of previous American Presidents.

How do you define American exceptionalism, and how do you think Democrats can or should employ it in the coming election?

The best view of American exceptionalism, from my perspective, is not that America is better than other countries—not America, love it or leave it, but America, warts and all. The notion that the United States has unique and distinctive attributes and capacities that really do distinguish us from any previous power in history and any potential future power—that allow us not only to deliver for the American people but to also contribute to the greater global common interest.

What are the “attributes” that differentiate us?

The United States is unique among countries in having been founded on an idea, not on territory or tribe, and that idea has dimensions that are core to the American story, but also core to the broader human story—a sense of aspiration, a sense of human rights and freedoms and the idea that actually we are all interconnected and that we need to work through institutions to safeguard our life and freedoms and to advance them more generally. So that’s one aspect of it.

The second aspect is that American foreign policy, unlike the foreign policy of other great powers through history, has not been zero-sum, has not relied on a notion that a dog-eat-dog world’s O.K., as long as you’re the biggest dog.

Third, we are a nation of problem-solvers in a world full of problems. There is a streak among the American people and throughout American history, and especially in difficult times with our foreign policy, where we look around the world and see challenges and roll up our sleeves and say, “What are we going to do about that?”

It’s not to say that we don’t screw up, and it’s not to say that we haven’t had plenty of failures and foul-ups in our foreign policy, but it is to say that we aspire to something, and, if we keep working to achieve those aspirations, as imperfect as the work along the way will be, then we can be a different kind of power than the ones that have typically been seen through history.

Without quibbling for now about what U.S. foreign policy has been, you are essentially describing the United States’ foreign policy as the polar opposite of the Trump Administration’s foreign policy. Do we need to face up to the fact that this is perhaps what American foreign policy is now, without wishing it were something else?

I certainly can’t be complacent. We’ve got to fight for it. Part of what I’m trying to do is to make the case for something that many people, including myself, took for granted for a very long time, took for granted in part because of the sensibility I developed as a Minnesotan growing up in the late Cold War. We can no longer do that. We can no longer take this for granted. I can’t sit here today and tell you the United States is innately thus and it will always be thus. What I can say is these attributes and these capacities are still very much alive in this country.

What do you think has been the Trump Administration’s biggest break from the foreign policy not just of the Obama Administration but of the postwar era?

I think you could select from a menu, but at the top of the list would be the shift from positive sum to zero-sum. The notion that if another country is doing well, it must necessarily be at our expense, rather than all of us can do better together. At its best, American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War has rejected that view, to our benefit. We have had a notion of enlightened self-interest. It’s what led us to rebuild vanquished foes. It’s what led us to continue to invest in Europe so that we didn’t have a Third World War in the twentieth century. It’s what led us to shape a secure environment in Asia, that, yes, actually did contribute to the economic growth of many countries in that region.

A very close second on the list, though, is the view that Trump has espoused that values don’t matter at all in U.S. foreign policy—that, you know, how people are treated around the world, whether they have access to basic rights and dignity, is irrelevant to the United States. We don’t care about it. If another country’s willing to buy our goods, or buy our weapons, then it’s all just fine and good. They can do whatever the heck they please. That’s been a big break, too, from a strong bipartisan tradition in our foreign policy that has tried to stand for something more, that has actually tried to reflect our values.

How well do you think the Obama Administration stood up for the values you’re talking about, and are there areas where you feel like the Administration came up short?

Every Administration comes up short on this, because the charge of a President and the object of U.S. foreign policy is to secure and safeguard the basic interests of the United States, and that requires engaging in geopolitics. That was true during the Cold War, it was true after the Cold War, and when you’re engaging in geopolitics you’re sometimes necessarily pitting short-term security and stability interests against long-term commitments to values, and you’re having to balance the two against each other. Others have said more eloquently than me that hypocrisy and inconsistency are the necessary by-products of a foreign policy that both has to look out for our interests and tries as best it can to advance that. Just as a broad commentary on U.S. foreign policy going back to our founding, we are always falling short of our ideals, and we certainly did do that during the Obama Administration.