Foreign Policy

What is happening in Gaza is a genocide and the United States is funding it. I am going to say it plainly because no one in this seat has been willing to. The death toll, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, the deliberate targeting of journalists and aid workers, the killing of children at a scale that any honest person can see and name.

I support an immediate and permanent ceasefire, the recognition of a Palestinian state, the restoration of UNRWA funding, and an arms embargo on any government under active investigation by the International Court of Justice for genocide. The United States Congress should not be funding what the ICJ is investigating.

The United States has been complicit in the Saudi-led war in Yemen for nearly a decade. We have provided refueling, targeting assistance, intelligence sharing, missile defense, and a steady flow of US-made bombs that have hit hospitals, weddings, school buses, and refugee camps. The result is the worst humanitarian crisis in modern history.

I worked through US Yemen policy at the Kennedy School in a National Security Council simulation. I was assigned the role of USAID Administrator. The position I took then is the position I take now. The United States should immediately end all lethal support to the coalition, scale up humanitarian assistance, restore funding to relief organizations operating on the ground, and back the bipartisan war powers framework that Bernie Sanders and Mike Lee built years ago and that previous administrations have ignored.

Ro Khanna has been doing this work in the House. I will join him.

All United States military aid should be conditioned on compliance with international humanitarian law. That is not a radical position. The Leahy laws already require this on paper. They are not enforced because no one in Congress is willing to enforce them. I will be.

I will vote against any military aid package that does not include real conditions, real reporting requirements, and real consequences for violations. Aid is leverage. Refusing to use it is a choice that has been made by every previous member of Congress to hold this seat. It is not the choice I will make.

The drumbeat for war with Iran is the same drumbeat I heard before Iraq. Same sources, same talking points, same assurances that this time we will be greeted as liberators.

I wrote my Kennedy School Final Paper on how the Iraq War was sold to Congress and the country. The mechanism was specific. Cheney built an in-house intelligence shop at the Pentagon called the Office of Special Plans, staffed by politically-connected policy analysts rather than career intelligence professionals. Its job was to find evidence supporting a war that had already been decided. Information was fabricated. Iraqi defectors with their own political agendas, including Ahmed Chalabi, fed the narrative back. Cheney himself echoed it on Sunday shows as if it were independent confirmation. Congress voted on it. Thousands of Americans, including people I served with, paid the cost.

The same machinery is being run on Iran right now. The names have changed. The technique has not.

I oppose any U.S. military action against Iran without explicit congressional authorization. No imminent-threat exceptions, no expansions of existing AUMFs, no mission creep dressed up as limited action. A vote, on the record, before Americans are sent to fight.

For more than two decades, presidents of both parties have used the 2001 and 2002 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify deploying American troops, conducting strikes, and waging shadow wars in countries Congress never authorized. The 2001 AUMF was passed three days after September 11 to authorize a response to that attack. It has been used to justify operations from Somalia to Niger to the Philippines.

This is not how a democracy is supposed to commit its soldiers to die. Iraq produced the fighters who became ISIS. Syria produced the opening that let them seize cities and recruit at scale. The wars share authorship. We do not get to vote for one war and pretend we did not vote for the next one it produced.

We need to repeal the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs, restore the constitutional requirement that Congress declare wars, and force every member to vote on every conflict by name. If a member of Congress is not willing to vote for a war by name, they should not be sending soldiers to fight it.

The deterrence framework we inherited from the Cold War assumes that the primary nuclear risk is a state-on-state exchange between great powers. That assumption is increasingly stale. State-on-state nuclear use would draw immediate global economic isolation and joint military retaliation. The cost is too high for any rational state actor.

The actual nuclear risk in the modern era is proliferation to non-state actors. Terrorist organizations have no economy to sanction or capital to retaliate against. They face no deterrent. I argued this in my Kennedy School work on Walzer and deterrence theory and I argue it now.

Our priorities should be aggressive nonproliferation enforcement, securing fissile material everywhere it exists, supporting the Iran nuclear deal framework that successfully constrained Iranian nuclear development before it was abandoned, and refusing to start new nuclear arms races we do not need.

The United States is the largest arms dealer in the world. We sell weapons to authoritarian regimes that use them against their own citizens, to governments that torture, to militaries that target civilians. We do this because the contracts are profitable for the defense industry, and the defense industry funds the campaigns of the people who write the rules.

I took no money from defense contractors and I will take none. I will support independent review of every major weapons sale, public transparency on every authorization, and a hard ban on transfers to any government with documented patterns of human rights abuses or active ICJ investigation.

I worked inside the Pentagon and the defense industry. I saw what waste, fraud, and the revolving door look like from the inside. I called it out. The retaliation cost me my career. I am bringing that same posture to Congress.

The country that sends Americans to war owes those Americans a country to come home to. We do not have that. The VA is underfunded and understaffed. Veteran suicide is at epidemic levels. The disability claims backlog is in the hundreds of thousands. I have lived through this system. I am still living through it.

I wrote about veterans in the closing of my Kennedy School Iraq paper. The veterans who came home and could not survive the answer to their own question: what was it all for. I was one of those veterans. People I served with did not survive the answer.

Veteran suicide is not separate from foreign policy. It is foreign policy. Every member of Congress who votes to send Americans to fight is also voting to produce the next set of suicides at the VA. We owe better to the next generation of veterans than to repeat what was done to mine.

We need full funding for the VA, not privatization-by-attrition. We need a serious federal response to veteran suicide that goes beyond hotline numbers on posters. We need legal accountability for the contractors who profited from our wars while veterans were left to figure it out alone.