Yes, “Trump is a vandal,” as Adam Tooze noted in a Financial Times article that examined both the Trump administration’s record thus far and that of the Biden years. “But in tearing down the status quo he does no more than confirm the obvious—that the elite coalition that favoured US global leadership has lost its political grip.” War is an elegy for this elite coalition, far less valuable as a record of what went down than of how the 2024 Washington foreign policy establishment wants to see itself. In its total absence of interest in any real reflection on what the Biden administration could have gotten wrong, the book serves instead as a compelling brief on why Trump was reelected.

Read the rest at The Nation.

One of the arguments that I’ve heard from former administration colleagues and other Democrats is that we need to focus on the real threat of Trump and Trumpism and not fight within the Democratic coalition. This echoes the words of former President Barack Obama in 2009, when he decided not to seek legal accountability for Bush administration torturers: “Look forward as opposed to looking backward.”

But this misses two things. First, this is not simply “looking backward.” The Gaza genocide is ongoing. It is happening now. It is, if anything, intensifying. Accountability is necessary to prevent not just future crimes, but also to try to stop a current one.

Second, Obama’s decision may have made shrewd political sense in the moment, but, like the decision not to impose any consequences on the corporate executives who collapsed the economy in 2008, it reinforced a system of elite impunity that has corroded U.S. democracy. The reason that Trump gets traction when he says that “the system is rigged” is because the system is rigged. It’s rigged on behalf of rich people such as Trump. And it’s rigged on behalf of well-connected and influential people such as former senior government officials who face no consequences, legal, professional, or otherwise, for aiding and abetting the worst crimes imaginable.

If we are serious about rebuilding U.S. democracy, unrigging the system and ending that impunity is imperative. The fight for accountability for Gaza is inseparable from the fight against Trumpism.