Toward a Foreign Policy for the Working Class
A foreign policy for the working class is not merely a call to rebuild America’s physical and technological infrastructure but to restore its moral and spiritual foundations.
In the third century AD, a North African Christian theologian named Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” In doing so, Tertullian set up a dichotomy between the City of Reason and the City of Faith. Are reason and faith compatible in solving human problems?
Today, Washington DC, New York City, and Silicon Valley are the three cities that represent the United States on the world stage. They blend the might of American power with the largesse of American wealth and the genius of American technology. Most U.S. national security elites float between these cities, serving either in government or plotting their next chance at a political appointeeship. Success breeds deeper insulation within a bubble of like-minded cosmopolitans.
As a result, most are out of touch with the concerns of working-class Americans. They write white papers decrying an eroding “Washington Consensus” rather than on how deindustrialization has outsourced American blue-collar jobs. Despite the brightest minds serving at the highest levels of government, Washington offers little tangible to the American working class struggling with rising costs and increasing threats to their security.
Meanwhile, the American working class—which is rapidly diversifying—has reshaped the country’s politics. Working-class voters have played a decisive role in the past three major presidential elections, realigning both major parties away from the post-Cold War consensus on free trade and military intervention overseas.
The political center of gravity in America has shifted toward the working class on both sides of the aisle. This is a good thing. There is an opportunity now to make the bipartisan populist shift actually serve the American working class. To revive the American Dream, national security elites should reorient their efforts away from defending broken global institutions and toward relentlessly advancing the interests of the American working class.
America today faces the twenty-first-century version of Tertullian’s question: What do DC, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley have to do with the working class? Our blueprint for a foreign policy for the working class has three main pillars: physical and economic security for Americans, reindustrialization and technical education, and patriotic capitalism. A critical fourth overarching theme buttresses these pillars: faith in America. Our plan is ambitious, but if implemented correctly, it would have deeper buy-in from the American people and clearly demonstrate the concrete benefits of engaging with the world beyond our shores.
Physical and Economic Security
After 9/11, the United States became entangled in hot wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while engaging in costly democracy promotion and nation-building efforts. Meanwhile, America’s great power rivals were preparing for an eventual confrontation with the West. Today, the United States faces a peer competitor in the People’s Republic of China and a revanchist Russia, both of whom seek to end U.S. primacy in the world—for good.
Most Americans do not wake up each day worrying about the United States’ relative power to China or Russia. But their actions directly threaten Americans’ physical security. Chinese precursor chemicals end up in the fentanyl that floods U.S. communities. Fentanyl overdose deaths comprise 70 percent of the more than 100,000 American drug overdose deaths each year. To put that in perspective, that is approximately the number of American military deaths from each year of the Second World War.
U.S. service members—drawn from the ranks of the working and middle class—are exposed to a growing arsenal of drones, cruise missiles, and anti-air systems designed specifically to overmatch U.S. air and naval superiority. Even the continental United States itself is no longer secure. From the development of hypersonic missiles to Chinese and Russian encroachment in the Western Hemisphere, recent events hearken back to the darkest days of the Cold War.
The Monroe Doctrine once served as the bedrock of America’s strategy to prevent European meddling in the Western Hemisphere. Today, Europe is no longer the main threat; China and Russia, the giants of Eurasia, are. Washington must rearticulate the Monroe Doctrine, focusing on ensuring no Eurasian power establishes a foothold in the Western Hemisphere while also prioritizing competition with China, the country that has most directly harmed the American working class through job outsourcing, synthetic drug export, and technological theft.
At the heart of this doctrine is securing the homeland from transnational threats, notably the flow of deadly drugs and transnational crime into our communities. The United States should double down on counternarcotics initiatives and place countering transnational threats at the center of its Western Hemisphere diplomacy. Washington also needs to make clear to neighbors—privately but firmly—that any Chinese or Russian military presence in the Western Hemisphere is a red line, including at the Panama Canal, which sees 40 percent of all U.S. container traffic. Expanding the American line of defense north to include Greenland, as farfetched as it may sound, is essential to pushing back against Russian encroachment in the Arctic and for early warning against nuclear attacks.
In the East, the United States needs to focus on China, full stop. U.S. trade with the Indo-Pacific equals nearly $2 trillion per year, with the United States receiving nearly $1 trillion in foreign direct investment. American smartphones and supercomputers depend on the uninterrupted flow of high-end semiconductors from Taiwan—and given the current pace, we’re unlikely to eliminate reliance on Taiwanese high-end chips before the mid-2030s. The future of the American economy—and indeed, the well-being of its working class—rests on uninterrupted access to Asia. Chinese annexation of Taiwan in the 2020s would jeopardize all that.
Statecraft is the art of prioritization. Doing so will require more than writing the umpteenth strategy document about a conceptual “pivot” to Asia. Washington needs to pivot tangible resources from other theaters. That includes both hard power—troops, jets, air defense platforms, and foreign military sales—and also soft power, including White House and Cabinet-level visits.
Washington can compensate by shifting toward burden-sharing in Europe and order-building in the Middle East while abandoning costly nation-building elsewhere. Such realignment often evokes accusations of isolationism from the DC elite set. Yet, this critique conflates strategic prioritization with retreat, mistaking the disciplined allocation of American finite resources for the abdication of duty.
Reindustrialization and Technical Education
For nearly three decades, both political parties subscribed to the belief that free markets would inevitably lead to freer and more democratic societies. Both Democrats and Republicans have since recanted that view.
In May 2023, then-National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan blamed the pursuit of “trade liberalization as an end in itself” for hollowing out America’s industrial base. In his confirmation hearing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio decried how “an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed industrial capacity, and pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and rivals.”
The nation now confronts the decades-long decimation of its industrial capacity and blue-collar expertise. At the same time, the relentless push for “college-for-all” has left millions of Americans tethered to underpaid, service-sector jobs, overeducated and underemployed. Rebuilding America’s industrial base for the twenty-first century will require a new industrial policy focused on strengthening strategic sectors.
In 2022, the U.S. semiconductor industry received a boost with the passage of the CHIPS Act. Similar investments must continue in other strategic industries, including shipbuilding, data centers, and large-scale manufacturing—all of which will create good-paying jobs for working-class Americans. Public investment also heralds private sector investment. For every dollar Washington spends, Wall Street doesn’t just offset but multiplies.
However, to truly rebuild the industrial heartland, America must also train the hands that will work it. Washington must shift resources toward hands-on, technical education rather than continuing to pour resources into a generalized education system ill-equipped for the demands of a modern, industrial economy. Doing so will equip a new generation of workers with the tools to drive high-wage, high-skill industries, reigniting American innovation and prosperity.
Patriotic Capitalism
In December 2024, the Chinese AI company DeepSeek released a large-language model that outperformed leading U.S. artificial intelligence models at a lower cost. The release of a new model on par with the most advanced AI models in January 2025 triggered a $1 trillion sell-off of American AI sector stocks. The feat was even more impressive given the layers of U.S. export controls on advanced chips to China.
The structural drivers behind DeepSeek’s success, including state-backed research and development as well as vertical integration, mirror those fueling China’s dominance in electric vehicles. Chinese firms are outselling and out-competing American firms in key emerging technologies and in developing markets.
The lesson here is unequivocal: containment can delay but not disrupt Beijing. China’s techno-economic model—a fusion of state capital, open-source proliferation, and a culture of forced innovation—means that breakthroughs in one sector, like AI, catalyze advancements in others, like EVs and semiconductors.
In response, the United States must unleash the secret weapon that won the Cold War: Patriotic Capitalism. Then, commercial ingenuity drove defense innovation and vice versa. Silicon Valley is the vanguard of this charge, namely by reforming the defense industrial base and challenging monopolies held by legacy prime contractors. Silicon Valley must galvanize its vast resources and ingenuity to dominate sectors where American technology still commands supremacy—quantum computing and space technology—through audacious public-private alliances with DARPA, the Defense Innovation Unit, NASA, and the Department of Energy.
Venture capital is the other critical force multiplier in this technological race. VCs injected more than $130 billion into defense tech startups over the past five years. Private equity firms are backing firms that are developing cutting-edge military applications, including autonomous drones and AI-driven battlefield analytics.
Yet the United States’ ambition cannot end at mere innovation or profit. It demands nothing less than resurrecting America’s role as a Cold War technological superpower—a fully integrated ecosystem where finance, intellectual capital, human ingenuity, dual-use industries, and blue-collar dynamism converge. This is not incrementalism; this is USA Inc.—a colossus engineered to scale across industries and project dominance globally.
Renewing Faith in America
In Tertullian’s time, the phrase “civis Romanus sum” ensured a Roman citizen’s safety regardless of where he traveled in the ancient world. Any would-be troublemaker paused at the thought of angering the most lethal, prosperous, and technologically advanced empire.
However, the same phrase also evokes the idea that being Roman was what made one different. Roman values—which included valor, dignity, and gravitas—were what set Romans apart from Carthaginians or Seleucids. U.S. foreign policy must work today in service of defending precisely what makes being American different.
The United States of America is not merely a nation of land and borders but a nation of people and ideals. It is a fortress, not of walls, but of values—a sanctuary where faith, in all its forms, can thrive. Whether rooted in religion, community, or the boundless promise of opportunity, this faith binds us together as one people.
John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, used the phrase “a city on the hill” to express his belief that the colony would serve as a moral and religious example to the world. The United States has always been strongest when it has a compelling vision—whether it was the founding ideals of liberty that swept aside British rule or the struggle against totalitarian fascism and communism in the twentieth century.
Our leaders must confidently express their faith in America as a force for good in the world. This new American faith is not blind patriotism or nativist jingoism but a deep, unwavering trust in the American experiment. It is a belief in the enduring promise of America as a beacon of hope, a place where individual liberty remains sacred and inviolable. It is the conviction that this nation, flawed yet striving, can still light the way for the world.
The ripple effects of this renewed faith in America would be nothing short of transformative, reaching deep into the fabric of the nation and reshaping its very soul. It offers a form of human security that transcends mere survival—security that nourishes the working class, replacing the pervasive anxiety of the “Anxious Generation” with a profound sense of belonging, purpose, and hope.
A foreign policy for the working class is not merely a call to rebuild America’s physical and technological infrastructure but to restore its moral and spiritual foundations—ensuring that the City on the Hill remains a radiant beacon, a testament to humanity’s boundless potential when united by a shared belief in something greater than itself. And when Americans are united in that common cause, America will once again be unstoppable.
About the Authors:
Andrew Hanna is a former congressional staffer serving on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He is currently affiliated with the Middle East Institute. Andrew previously worked at the United States Institute of Peace and Politico. He graduated from Princeton University summa cum laude with a B.A. in Near Eastern Studies and from Georgetown University with a M.S. in Foreign Service. His writings have been published in Politico Magazine, The Washington Monthly, the Middle East Institute, the Iran Primer, the Wilson Center, and the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. The views in this article represent his own.
Mohammed Soliman is a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute. He also serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and a visiting fellow with Third Way’s National Security Program. He sits on advisory boards for Ideas Beyond Borders, the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law (ISAIL), and the Global Commission on Responsible AI in the Military Domain (GC REAIM). Follow him on X: @ThisIsSoliman.
Image: CK Foto / Shutterstock.com.