Are Democrats Regretting Trying To Out-Hawk Trump?

The Democratic Party has been trying to paint negotiations as appeasement. During the 2024 elections, the Democratic platform condemned then-candidate Donald Trump’s “fecklessness” on Iran and “love letters” to North Korea. When Trump argued that the U.S. should negotiate with countries like Iran and Russia over economic sanctions, Kamala Harris’ campaign attacked his “weak” and “reckless foreign policy.”

But some Democrats seem to regret taking that line. “Being afraid to negotiate, to my mind, is the ultimate sign of weakness because it just proves that you think that if I get in a room, you’re going to trick me and I’m going to do something stupid,” Rep. Adam Smith (D–Wash.) said during a panel discussion Wednesday. 

Smith, the highest-ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, was speaking to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, an antiwar nonprofit where I worked as a researcher in 2020 and 2021. When asked by Quincy Institute Vice President Trita Parsi whether Democrats were seen as warmongers, Smith admitted that the party “walked into that problem.”

The congressman argued that Democrats must “much more aggressively embrace diplomacy. I think we should have been much louder during the Biden administration.” He claimed to have always believed “that the Biden administration should have directly talked to Russia,” although not in a way that led to “shutting off Ukraine and leaving them completely vulnerable the way Trump just did.”

Smith concurred with Parsi’s claim that Democrats could “reclaim the position as the party that actually promoted diplomacy, opposed stupid wars.”

Not all Democrats agree with Smith’s criticism, of course. During confirmation hearings for Trump appointee Elbridge Colby last week, several Democratic senators doubled down on a hawkish line of attack, complaining about Trump’s eagerness to talk to Russia. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D–Ill.) put it the most bluntly: “Trump is in the middle of a capitulation, not a negotiation.”

At the Quincy Institute event, Smith blamed “pressure from the right and pressure from the left” for the Democrats’ muddled stance. The Democratic Party is trying to balance between Republicans, who call Democrats weak in the face of adversaries, and leftists, who believe that Democrats are in bed with “neoconservative global dominance visions” and “jump all over us for anything we do,” he argued.

“My father used to have this expression that between two stools, you sit on the floor,” Smith concluded.

Smith isn’t the first person to note the problem of the “defensive crouch” in Democratic foreign policy. By accepting hawks’ “framing of the issues” and trying to win on those grounds, Democrats often “box themselves in to continuing policies that they have previously declared failures,” journalist Daniel Larison wrote in 2021, several months before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began.

Rather than drumming up public support, Democrats’ hawkish turn has hurt them politically. Americans disapproved of former President Joe Biden’s handling of Russia and Ukraine by 22 percent in 2024, but a slim majority approved of Trump’s handling of the issue by February 2025, polls showed.

Trump’s more hawkish proposals—taking over Gaza, Greenland, and Canada—poll very badly. A new poll released by CNN on Wednesday shows that a slim majority thinks that Trump is not “an effective world leader.” It’s not that Trump’s foreign policy is particularly popular; it’s that Democrats’ hawkish approach has been particularly unpopular.

Beyond criticizing the domestic politics of hawkishness, Smith acknowledged that it’s “simply not possible to have that level of dominance” over the entire world that the U.S. had after World War II or the Cold War. “We’re going to have to look for partnerships, alliances and a little bit more flexibility on the whole democracy, autocracy thing, in order to build that stable world that we envisioned,” he said.

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