It worked so well last time, why not give it another go? The Democrat imperial advocacy group National Security Action (NSA) ran point on the party’s foreign policy messaging for the 2020 election and went on to staff much of President Biden’s national security team. They helped bring us a new hot phase of Project Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza.
According to Axios, the NSA team is now reassembling in preparation for the 2028 election. And while we’re a little ways away from any specific policy recommendations, there are plenty of hints that the group is being tasked with crafting a repackaged message that sells the same old imperial violence to the metropole.
Let’s start with the people behind NSA before turning to some of the literature on the group’s site and in reports.
What Is NSA?
It was established in February 2017 by Ben Rhodes, a former national security advisor in the Obama White House, and Jake Sullivan, a national security advisor to former Vice President Joe Biden.
Those are the two front men (and more on them in a minute), but what about the money behind the scenes? From Puck:
A month ago, a couple dozen Democratic foreign policy hands gathered for what is now fashionably called a “convening” inside the Manhattan offices of Soros Fund Management…Since its inception, the organization has been funded largely by Alex Soros, scion of the Soros empire and husband of Huma Abedin, Clinton’s right-hand woman.
Good to know.
Ben Rhodes, inhabits some fantasy world where America is a source of light for the world—as long as people from his side of the aisle are in charge. Some wars and droning people around the world into pink mist is apparently fine as long as it’s done with grace like by his former boss, Obama. And while Rhodes might be mildly critical of the US complicity in the Gaza genocide, he is still a believer in American supremacy and empire.
Jake Sullivan was the chief architect behind Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” (FPMC)— and some argue the presidency itself as Biden was largely incapacitated.
The narrative sold to the American people was that a more assertive foreign policy would help rebuild the US middle class. That term “middle class” was a red flag from the start, as it has always been part of a project of making the working class disappear.
And so it did.
While Biden pushed the Ukraine/NATO-Russia conflict and supported a genocide in Gaza, nearly all economic indicators for the working class — from credit card and medical debt to homelessness and economic inequality — continued their downward spirals under the “new FDR”.
Sanders said today again that Biden is the “most progressive president since FDR.”
This is a total lie. The workers’ share of national income has plunged to its lowest level on record under the Biden administration.
Biden was a bonanza for Wall Street. pic.twitter.com/NDjrk7JUWY
— Joseph Kishore (@jkishore) October 27, 2024
Thanks, Jake!
Similar to the way Trump’s MAGA demonizes immigrants, Sullivan’s FPMC relied on blaming nations resisting control by the empire’s capital class as the cause of the US working class’ demise.Here’s Politico way back in 2020 describing Sullivan’s pitch:
…the strength of U.S. foreign policy and national security lies primarily in a thriving American middle class, whose prosperity is endangered by the very transnational threats the Trump administration has sought to downplay or ignore.
He never really explains how and that’s probably because it’s a nonsensical argument.
As their FPMC turned to ash, Collective Biden was also busy redistributing an historic amount of wealth from the public to weapons companies — $1.3 trillion over four years — which Biden bragged about in his farewell address (military spending is set to soar higher under Trump). They resurrected talk of the “arsenal of democracy” to defend this. Probably best summed up here by former Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland:
“Vemember, zee bulk of zis money goez vight back into zee economy.”
— Herr Nuland explains self-licking ice cream cone theory to CNN’s last remaining 500 subscribers.
The neocons made a stupid, clumsy play for imperial conquest over Russia, now the whole world is witnessing… pic.twitter.com/diHiE1pGhZ
— Chebureki Man (@CheburekiMan) February 25, 2024
Can we look forward to a Nuland return in 2029? No doubt she’s coming up with big plans during her time on the National Endowment for Democracy Board of Directors. But back to NSA.
Some Democrats are complaining (off the record, of course) that “the idea that the same foreign policy leadership that brought us the Afghanistan withdrawal and the cover-up of Biden’s decline should be in charge of staffing the next Democratic administration and determining its foreign policy is tone deaf at best.”
Sullivan, in particular, has come under pillow fight fire for crafting US policy alongside Israel during its extermination campaign of Palestinians in Gaza. According to Puck, at the Soros Fund Management Meeting Rhodes told Sullivan that he “needed to reckon with the stain of that policy.” How? By confessing to war crimes and checking himself into a cell at The Hague?
No, nothing like that. Again from Puck:
The room was full of old friends committed to working out their differences respectfully—and out of the public eye.
How wholesome. The NSA board’s answer to the above criticisms of tone deafness is to bring in a new executive director to make NSA “less opaque, less elite, more engaging,” a person close to the organization told Puck. So old chums are going to move past the minor personal squabble over genocide in private but appoint a fresh face to make the group appear “less opaque.” It surely doesn’t hurt that the new director is a Palestinian-American, either, but what if we look past the identity politics?
Maher Bitar is who NSA chose to lead the group going into the 2028 primary season. Who is Bitar?
He was most recently chief counsel to Senator Adam Schiff. Naturally with his attachment to Schiff, he played a key role in Russiagate, joining the House Intelligence Committee as general counsel for the Democrats and played a role in the first impeachment of Donald Trump.
Bitar is one of at least a few clues that the NSA crowd wants Russia to regain the top spot on the imperial enemy list. In the “Issue Papers” section of NSA’s website is a long list of articles that are (justifiably) critical of Trump’s foreign policy on everything from Greenland to Iran to the Korean Peninsula.
Buried toward the bottom are two that show a desire for a renewed commitment to Project Ukraine. There’s just one problem with NSA’s focus here: will there even be a Project Ukraine to recommit to come 2029?
Nevertheless, in “Why the United States Should Not Give Up on Ukraine” NSA (no author is listed) argues the following points:
1. Vladimir Putin is not interested in peace – he’s buying time and playing Donald Trump.
2. The best path to a lasting peace is strengthening Ukraine’s leverage to force Putin to the negotiating table.
3. Putin only responds to strength.
4. Putin won’t stop at Ukraine.
5. Supporting Ukraine is good for our own economy, military, and security.
6. Preventing Putin from succeeding in Ukraine is the best way to deter our adversaries.
Noticeably absent is any “issue paper” that is critical of the US partnership with Israel cutting a wide swath of genocide, ethnic cleansing, and destruction across West Asia.
On Palestine, Zionism, and Genocide
Bitar’s leadership of NSA is causing consternation among some Zionists who argue he’s not pro-Israel enough and point to his involvement with Students for Justice in Palestine while attending Georgetown University and his past work with the with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Jerusalem.
This is, of course, ridiculous. Bitar was on the National Security Council throughout the Biden administration when, let us not forget, the genocide of Palestinians began in earnest. At first he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the NSC, and for Biden’s final year in office during that genocide Bitar was elevated to Deputy Assistant to the President and coordinator for intelligence and defense policy.
He did not resign over the genocide. He got a promotion. I cannot find any public comments made by Bitar critical of the US and Israel for said genocide nor can I find any afterwards expressing regret for his silence nor has he offered a word about Trump’s doubling down on such monstrous policies.
Bitar looks to be a classic case of Democrat identity deception. The fact Obama was the first black president and worked as a community organizer helped provide cover for his stomping on the throats of working class Americans, even disproportionately hurting black Americans. Bitar, with his Palestinian heritage and work with the UNRWA, cloaks his servitude to empire and its genocides.
Bitar is being chosen as part of an attempt to deceive voters who disapprove of Israel’s genocide, general war crimes, and embedding within the US government.
Bitar told Axios the group will host retreats, conduct polling, and be a “hub” to think through the party’s foreign policy “to be ready for 2028 and beyond.”
It doesn’t take too many retreats and polls to understand that genocide and war are unpopular, but NSA seems determined to have another go at convincing the American people otherwise. From Axios:
NSA’s challenge will be navigating the divides on foreign policy in the Democratic Party that are much deeper than they were during President Trump’s first term.
80% of Democrats now view Israel unfavorably, up from 53% in 2022, before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza, per Pew.
“Navigating the divides” is an interesting way of putting it. With 80% viewing a state committing genocide unfavorably, that doesn’t seem like such a divide. But note it does not say respond to voters’ wishes as a real democratic party would. So the way I read that is NSA needs to keep the Zionists and their Silicon Valley accelerationist partners happy while still finding a way to collect votes. That will probably lead to some catchier version of “Democrat Candidate 2028: The gentler genocidaire.”
***
And so we don’t end on too much of a down note, let’s remember that there are plenty of other ways to organize outside of electoral politics. And plenty of people are. From a Working Class Stories piece titled ‘Stick With the Doers’:
As a gas station attendant, Casey Tobias saw community members who were broke and struggling come through her line. She began serving meals to people right there in the parking lot and, over time, grew it into a huge volunteer program where her neighbors can get meals, rides, and all kinds of support…She is watching systems and support crumble in her town and figures she can’t wait for someone else to come in and fix it. She thinks she and her neighbors have the know-how and capability to get started, so they did.
The piece provides other similar examples, and here’s the takeaway:
We are mostly a petitioning country, sometimes a protesting country. We spend a lot of time asking people in power to do what we want them to do– it’s how our government is supposed to work, after all. But as our federal government turns its back on working people and towards billionaires, it seems like we need a different plan. The stories I’ve been finding in small, working-class towns across the country are action-oriented. Instead of making requests of those in power, these projects and people are using power.
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> With 80% viewing a state committing genocide unfavorably, that doesn’t seem like such a divide.
Probably more than 80% of the elected Ds favor current policy. Presumably the “divide” mentioned in the Axios quote is between the electeds and the voters. It’s the same challenge the Party always faces, how to obtain votes without governing the way the voters want.
Correct – and “navigating the divide” means a combination of propagandising voters to change their views and appearing to stand up for them while actually doing the opposite.
Thanks. Good to know that for the Dems it’s still, as Yves puts it, “all about the PR.”
And of course their other strategy is lesser evilism which works until a fed up public decides they might as well try the other evil–giving us Trump.
Some of us believe that America’s real problem is affluenza among that would be universal middle class and their even wealthier allies–the billionaires. They hope to replace the bitter clingers with more tractable poor people from below the border so the Great Replacement is not just a fantasy. Somebody has to build the mansionettes and manicure the lawns.
But it looks like the Global South is also getting uppity and threatening the whole house of cards. What to do?…
re; building the mansionettes: they do have a plan for that, bad cop/psycho cop style.
Complain but do nothing while the reps fill their concentration camps with immigrants (and brown citizens), eliminate most social welfare programs and take a hatchet to child labor laws and other worker protections.
Pretty soon they think we’ll have a huge underclass willing to do anything the oligarch overlords want with no option save armed revolution. Which of course said underclass will not bother with as they’re too addicted to their anti-social and game apps.
Karp, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, etal have already said and/or written manifestos saying that.
I would not be surprised if this becomes the dominant narrative for whatever clueless neoliberal candidate the DNC manages to dredge up for its 2028 offering (Harris again?). If said candidate loses the presidential race in a total blowout like in 2024, I am sure that the Democratic Party leadership will conclude that it was because they did not support Israel enough or endless rehashes of Russiagate. Either way, the disasters initiated by Biden and Trump will be expanded upon by a neocon Republican president-elect or a Democrat perpetuating rank-and-file Clintonian-Obamaist neoliberal ideology.
Maybe we will luck out and Massie will run on the rep side.
If we didn’t have independent media, this type of information would never see the light of day. Anyone who thinks just removing Trump from power is the answer does not read independent media. Clearly the intent of the Democrats is to take control over the system that Trump has perverted and made even mire tyrannical than what came before it. All will be right as long as the Democrats are in charge…according to the same Democrats who made Trump possible.
I’m not sure that the D’s will double down on DJT’s changes. Part of what makes “manufacture of consent” work is the appearance that the electorate is choosing who governs. The systems need to maintain those appearances in order to preserve a modicum of legitimacy for the rulers.
I think that DJT threatens that by making the realities more obvious.
> The stories I’ve been finding in small, working-class towns across the country are action-oriented. Instead of making requests of those in power, these projects and people are using power.
My representatives and senators are all democrats. I did not vote for them. I did not vote for their republican opponents in the other part of the uniparty. I have not and will not give my vote to genocidaires, Russophobes, and grifters. They respond to money. They gather in circles patting one another on the part celebrating their access to power. I look at the political class and see courtiers. They jostle, intrigue, back bite to gain one more step closer to the throne or call them apparatchiks. No difference. A plague on both.
Nothing gets better until the Democratic party leadership has been purged. They ignore their base and obsess about Trump while deliberating about what color sky will best go with the Oval Office drapes the next time they’re in charge.
Mark Gisleson: The question is, What is the party leadership? You have mentioned the Democratic National Committee.
I’d add the endless numbers of donor’s forums and political-action committees and other structures, even foundations. Close ’em. Where is Antony Blinken now? Victoria Nuland? Shut down the shell structures paying them to blab and sabotage.
And as to those in the Congress, I’d argue many, many are useless. Elissa Slotkin is a perfect exemplar, as is CIA Abigail Stanberger. Adam Schiff, wherever he is. I don’t know how high up they are — but toss them out. So what does that mean? A third to a half of the Dems in Congress have to go out on their ear?
And at the local level? How many state parties have to be decapitated to get some movement toward real movement politics? Toward some acknowledgment that FDR’s coalition still exists and brought the Dems to power for years and years — and they ran away from the base that they hate so much?
And as I write this, I know that in the Ninth in Illinois, the congressional district I still vote in, the Dems have chosen the heir to Jan Schakowsky, reliable Clintonista in foreign policy, in typical Demo nepotistic fashion: So zionist-lite Daniel Biss is about to be propelled to D.C. rather than remaining in Evanston, Illinois, as the mayor they deserve.
Not that Kat Abughazaleh did well in talking about foreign policy, either. Her public “apologia” late in the race was neo-con adjacent. Confiscate the “Russian oligarchs” money to fund Ukraine, indeed.
Lucky you. The Dems always try to get me to vote for at least one of the Menendez family.
BISS GOT LESS THAN 30% OF THE PRIMARY VOTE?!!!
Yeah, I’d say Zionism is pretty unpopular if they had to pack the D ballot with a dozen candidates. Was going to suggest you think about voting R but then looked at the Republican.
Democrats are game masters when it comes to going as low as they dare go. And, of course, you have zero assurances that the primary was not gamed which always has to be in the back of your mind when an election was that close.
When the DNC is purged (or simply Whigs itself into a frenetic implosion) it will follow like water running downhill that their puppets at the state and local level will be next to go as a revitalized base actually shows up at the caucuses and primaries to insist on candidates who reflact the views of the people, not the donors.
Not to worry, now that the neos have escalated the national debt into astronomical numbers, I’m sure the swells will be happy to turn the reins of power back over to the people. Along with a bill for $30 trillion worth of used munitions and island-sized floating targets with bad plumbing.
People get old. Parties too.
And worth remembering that the FDR good Dems included the Jim Crow Solid South. The working class base that supported that New Deal reign was often racist as a result of the upper class divide and conquer strategy of setting groups of economically competing poor people against each other.
Meanwhile the Civil Rights revolution that changed the political landscape (now the solid GOP South in my state at least) has curdled into the “black misleadership” Clyburn era. Message: it’s always about class war and only peripherally about race.
Political parties are like trees. They grow from small beginnings, get larger, give good fruit, expand their coverage, start to age, change their look, no longer give fruit anymore, wither, get eaten inside by termites & parasites, then they are only good for firewood-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Defunct_political_parties_in_the_United_States
It’s déjà vu all over again.
I find this assertion a tad hard to believe: “Jake Sullivan was the chief architect behind Biden’s “Foreign Policy for the Middle Class” (FPMC)— and some argue the presidency itself as Biden was largely incapacitated.” Unless I’m missing something, I found Jake Sullivan to be a barely coherent & lifeless bureaucrat who talked in clichés. Of course, like so many liberals, he’s lethal in office politics, I s’pose.
Recall just how much of the Dem Party is a legacy of Bill & Hill. They want to reinvent government, exorcising any last hauntings by Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. They want to go on and on and on with their absurd revenge on Russia, which, more than anything else, shows how bad these jamokes are at foreign policy. As if it were the Russians who put the Electoral College in the U.S. Constitution. They consider Hamas to be terrorisstses, because, well, terrorism. It would never occur to them to view the uprising by Hamas as part of national liberation. And it isn’t so hard (just do a search) to find that old Hillary Clinton interview from her presidential campaign in which she talks about “obliterating” Iran. And you thought that Trump uses intemperate language.
It’s interesting how often talk of use of the guillotine during the French Revolution tries to portray the meat slicing as excessive. Too many nice aristos lost their heads! Apply that to the U.S. right now: How much use of the ghigliottina would be too much ghigliottina?
In short, Conor Gallagher, thanks for the warning.
Until we get the money out of politics, until it is decided that corporations are not people, and until all citizens are equal under law, we don’t have a democracy.
Talk about “reform” is pointless: we need a “do-over.”
Agreed, when dems plead for my vote I say right after you get rid of the patriot act and citizens united and they generally look at me like I’m loony, which…well maybe I am…
Indeed. A Democrat party Congressperson I’m personally familiar with is in a leadership position and has a very safe seat in one of the bluest of blue states. Not a chance a Republican gets that seat any time soon. Does that stop this Congressperson from accepting every dollar AIPAC sends? Of course not.
Most of the hard core dems I know would vote for Hitler to get rid of Trump. They want him gone, no matter what, who, or how. He is the pain they can’t get rid of. He is all that matters, nothing else.
Run a clunker, wouldn’t matter who, they will vote for them to save democracy and the world as they know it. They will happily go along with whatever war they are told to support. They will stick some Ukraine and Israel flags in their yard and cheer $5.00 gas as the democrats they so worship fix the world. A small price to pay (it wasn’t genocide in Gaza when Biden was in charge, only Trump) and they will suck it up like a Hoover.
Reality and facts don’t matter (never did, see Russiagate). They will go back to brunch and tell us how the dems are fixing the world and how great they are. A truly delusional bunch.
We are F’ed one way or another.
“Run a clunker, wouldn’t matter who, they will vote for them to save democracy and the world as they know it.”
Yes, so true. It’s been like this for many years. They even celebrate the position. A neighbor on the next street over has a car which for years has sported a bumper sticker declaring, “Any functional adult for President.” When you get to a certain level in the PMC, if you are comfortable enough to be unaffected by policy changes, it isn’t much a matter of what your particular elite are peddling, just that your elite are winning.
Yep. And that’s a large voting block and a problem if we want real change.
Thank you for the thorough reminder about Team Blue. One hopes it reaches some of those who need it most.
Another area where one sees the Democrats’ hunger to exploit the desperation at our ever-worsening conditions is the return* to expert-worship. Every complaint about the Trump administration, down to its lowest-lowest level functionaries,** includes the word incompetence, as if they’re not doing just what they always meant to do.
Regarding Sullivan’s refusal to explain how global hegemony is necessary for “a thriving American middle class,” he might be relying on the residual cold war understanding of these things, built up over decades, in which national self-determination over there means no coffee or bananas or tin or copper or rubber over here. Think of your mid-century breakfast table (no teak, either!) without those things. This showed up in cultural output as varied as Atlas Shrugged and Three Days of the Condor (which I am sorry to mention together), and was retroactively seemingly justified by the 1973 oil embargo which definitively ended the postwar boom. (Never mind that the United States actually traded with the Soviet Union.)
If this is the implicit argument, Sullivan benefits from not having to say it, because it’s ugly, but also because it undercuts all of the (bipartisan) “energy independence” triumphalism of the past decade and a half. (If we still need to invade everywhere and kill all these people, what exactly did we poison our water supply for?)
*They never stopped, but they noticed that others did.
**Recall that, after the killing of Renee Nicole Good, every liberal had the talking point about ICE agents’ lack of training and experience, until it emerged that the killer, Jonathan Ross, was in fact highly experienced, and that his tenure predated the even the first Trump administration. I feel like there could be an allegory, here.
As I stated before, the only way to get rid of this useless relic is to build a new party on the internet with a distinct “brand” that local candidates have to align with: antiwar, antibillionaire, non-woke, pro-Bill-of-Rights, and emphatically against corruption and abuse of power. Corruption in all its forms, including what the Supreme Court has declared legal, needs to be Issue One, and totally removing the US from military conflicts abroad (including via “foreign aid” and “humanitarian intervention”) has to be right behind that. And maybe the old leftist slogan about “property is theft” is dead wrong, but “maximizing profits” above all else really is theft. Delivering public services is never improved by adding profit-seeking actors to the process. When you’ve gotten enough people signing up for that, run candidates for write-in votes with maximum publicity not dependent on big donors. Don’t try getting a new party on the ballot, because the Democrats and Republicans have gotten too slick at creating huge obstacles to that in every populous state, usng lawfare when nothing else works. Build the party identity without playing their game.
“pillow fight fire” — brilliant bon mot!
I also thought “Collective Biden” was a nice touch.
Thanks Connor. I don’t much read Axios and National Security Action wasn’t on my radar. Of course they met in Alex Soros’ offices: pretty much all of their lavish funding comes from Soros-controlled foundations.
America isn’t a democracy, it is a billionaire-centered system of Inverted Totalitarianism. Ever since Obama’s OFA bankrupted the DNC and the Clintons used their ill-gotten gains to purchase the “party” apparatus lock, stock, and paper clip, a tiny cabal of self-anointed “experts” runs policy for politicians getting past the “D” ballot gatekeeping legally enshrined in the so-called two-party system.
After Obama abandoned the pretense of caring about anything other than himself, Obama and Clinton toadies appear to have reconciled around Russia-hate, Muslim-hate, and their old Cambridge/New Haven/Princeton/Palo Alto sport of kicking down at the poors. This country is run by billionaires who more often than not inherited, married, or stole their fortunes and the grasping PMC factotums and toadies latched to them — they are emphatically not the worthiest among us.
In many ways our society is already “post-electoral” politically. The 2024 election was far from a “total blow-out.” The University of Florida Election Lab reports that of “eligible voters” (non-felon citizens 18 and older) 31 percent voted for Trump, 30 percent voted for Harris, 3 percent voted third-party, and the largest cohort of 36 percent said “F y’all’s election we ain’t playin’.”
The political system in the USA is not damaged, it is broken and there is no mechanism for peaceful change.
No functional political system would give the voters a “Choice” between Hillary and Trump, or Harris and Trump.
This is a controlled flight into terrain with the throttle at the stops.
Stay safe and enjoy the show.
The US system was never designed for the political leaders to serve anything but the ruling class. Change happens when they are forced by public opinion. Anyone waiting for otherwise is just lazy. You have to fight. That’s why whenever someone tells you in order for election purposes you need to suck up and be quiet, they are doing a far greater harm. Improving the public discourse has a more lasting effect than an election.