Of course, a change of this magnitude would not be straightforward. Few issues are as sacrosanct in Washington as the military. Successive presidents from both parties have allocated extraordinary amounts of public money to defense—$717 billion for the 2019 fiscal year—and increased the federal deficit, all with significant bipartisan support. As Foreign Policy’s Stephen M. Walt has written, policymakers face a number of political and institutional incentives that obstruct meaningful changes to defense policy, many of which have little to do with protecting the United States.





A major ideological shift in the Democratic Party is required. Contemporary Democratic militarism is not an historical oddity, or simply the result of a more general societal shift in attitudes post-9/11. Rather, it has been an abiding feature of the party’s worldview since World War II, traceable through the Truman and Kennedy administrations.





That the liberal interventionists at the top of the party have now foundcommon cause with, and have helped to rehabilitate the reputations of, prominent neoconservatives is therefore not surprising. Both schools of thought share fundamental assumptions about the beneficence of U.S. power operating on a global scale.

Although neocons are more overt in their enmity toward international institutions, which they see as a constraint on U.S. power, liberal interventionists largely share the view that the use of military force is an effective means of shaping the world in line with U.S. values and interests.



