May 12 2026 - 12:45pm
The Biden boys are back in town. So reports Puck’s Julia Ioffe, who tells us that Jake Sullivan, Jon Finer and their associates have been putting themselves back out there as the Democrats’ foreign-policy brain trust. Sullivan was Joe Biden’s national security advisor and Finer was Sullivan’s deputy. The “Jake and Jon Show”, as one of Ioffe’s sources derisively calls it, has been meeting to resurrect the long-defunct group National Security Action for the 2026 and 2028 elections.
In the article, the anonymous Democratic foreign-policy wonks have a mixture of substantive complaints about the disasters this team oversaw when they were in power and careerist pleading about the need for “new blood” in the next Democratic administration. Look past the bickering, though, and the substantive problem should be blindingly obvious: this group of foreign-policy “experts” presided over an awful record.
It was the Biden administration that armed Israel to the hilt, even as backlash grew against the operation in Gaza. The issue did much to contribute to Kamala Harris’s loss in the 2024 election. Meanwhile, the commitment of military aid to Ukraine gave Republicans a chance to sound like Chomskyite Leftists complaining about “forever wars”. Finally, Harris’s baffling decision to campaign with neoconservative Liz Cheney gave many voters the understandable impression that Trump was the comparatively anti-war candidate.
Since coming to office, Trump has hardly lived up to that label, culminating in his deeply unpopular war in Iran. In a particularly shocking moment last month, the President said that it’s “not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, Medicare” because “we’re fighting wars”, which has to be the priority.
The backlash to his warmongering has been palpable and powerful. The conflict in Iran war has led to the rise of insurgent anti-war candidates such as Maine’s Graham Platner and Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed on the Left. On the other side, there has been ever more stridently anti-interventionist messaging from popular Right-wing broadcasters including Tucker Carlson. The American public has never been more receptive to a robustly anti-war message.
Voters are starting to realize that America’s global wars in recent decades have been a broadly destabilizing force, with unintended consequences and humanitarian devastation. Letting the Jake and Jon brain trust back in the room would clearly be a continuation of this failure, and running candidates who give the impression that they are listening to this pair could prove detrimental at the ballot box.
Rather, the failures of the second Trump administration have created a golden opportunity for Democrats in 2028. However, they may fumble it by suggesting to voters that they, too, aren’t interested in “daycare, Medicaid, Medicare” and instead want to neglect the needs of America’s war-weary and economically stressed domestic population.
There’s a reason that Harris lost in 2024. Democratic candidates need to realize that the American public has no great lust for war. Four years of Jake and Jon Part II, which could see the party involved in yet more wars, might be enough to pave the way for the kind of Right-wing demagogue that would make Americans miss Trump.
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