U.S. Congress/Eric Connolly
Ro Khanna first ran for Congress in California in 2004 as a bold, if unsuccessful, anti-Iraq War challenger to a pro-war Democratic incumbent. After serving in President Barack Obama’s Department of Commerce and teaching at Stanford, Khanna beat another Democratic incumbent in the 2016 general election and has served in the House since then. A co-chair of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign and a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, he’s emerged as a steady challenger of the military-industrial complex and U.S. military interventions abroad. Khanna recently spoke with The Progressive about the need for a new approach to international relations.
Q: There are fifty-nine members of the House Armed Services Committee. This year, you cast the sole “no” vote on the proposed $886 billion defense bill. Why?
Ro Khanna: [The CBS News program] 60 Minutes is doing better oversight than the Congressional committees at this point. The reality is that you have price gouging and price inflation for at least $400 billion of the defense budget that’s in acquisition. That money’s going into the pockets of defense contractors. We also don’t even know how much of the production is happening in America. You have these defense contractors profiting. They’ve “offshored” some of the production. There is no oversight. What I’m saying is that you can have a precise, strategic national security budget that meets the challenges with China and Russia without having a budget approach $1 trillion and line the pockets of defense [industry] executives.
Q: You have referred to the network of more than 800 U.S. military bases around the world as vestiges of the Cold War that are ill-suited to modern challenges. You argue that the United States should rethink its commitment to having all these bases. This would reshape defense policy, but how would closing bases reshape foreign policy?
Khanna: There is an emerging consensus in America that we have been engaged in endless wars overseas at the expense of building the strength of communities here at home; that we have been spending trillions of dollars on overseas conflicts [and] bases while seeing towns like Lordstown, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, devastated, with no [economic] security for families living in those communities. So there is an opportunity, post-Cold War, to look again at where all these bases are to make sure that the ones we need strategically are retained, but the ones that aren’t serving a strategic purpose, we [should] look to close [them] down . . . . Having a more strategic footprint around the world will also lead to some restraint so that we are vigorously defending our national interest but not getting into wars that are undermining our strength.
Q: While serving as Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams famously declared in 1821 that the United States “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” That was a warning that the United States needed to avoid getting drawn into conflicts. Isn’t that the problem with all these bases? Don’t we run the risk of getting so deeply engaged with so many governments that the United States gets pulled into conflicts that we shouldn’t be a part of?
Khanna: Absolutely. The risk, when you have such an overextended military, is that it can get us into conflicts, because, obviously, we then have to defend our troops [and] bases. We have more targets that are vulnerable.
We need to look at this in the context of modern security needs. Do we need bases to make sure that there’s effective deterrence of China in the Taiwan Strait? Absolutely. Do we need to make sure there’s effective deterrence for Putin’s Russia, [so that it doesn’t] march into Eastern Europe? Yes. But does that mean that we need all the bases that were there during the Cold War? No. And that’s not just my concern—that’s the opinion of generals who are fairly hawkish, like General Mark Milley [the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff], in their defense posture. The fact is a number of defense secretaries have said we need to do this. It’s just hard because the political will hasn’t been there.
Q: You’ve been critical of U.S. interventionism. Several years ago, you tweeted, “The neoconservative hawks that have driven our foreign policy blunders in Iraq, Honduras, Syria, Libya, and many other countries are back at it again in Venezuela. Progressives need to stand up to the regime change doctrine and seek diplomacy and restraint.” Many Americans share that view, but how do we get policymakers to adopt a more restrained approach?
Khanna: You started to see it with President Biden, who was aware on the 2020 campaign trail of the frustrations that people had with the policy in Iraq—a blunder. The twenty-year war in Afghanistan—a mistake. The invasion in Libya, which didn’t turn out well. And so he comes to power and pulls out the troops in Afghanistan. And, by the way, it’s progressives like Bernie Sanders and me who have had his back. Very few of the people who actually supported him during the campaign defended [the troop withdrawal] . . . but his decision turned out to be correct.
“You can have a precise, strategic national security budget that meets the challenges with China and Russia without having a budget approach $1 trillion and line the pockets of defense [industry] executives.”
You’ve had the President change policy on Yemen. Some of us want him to go even further, but he formalized what Sanders and I did in the War Powers Resolution and stopped any refueling of Saudi planes bombing Yemen. You’ve had the President exercise a fair amount of restraint in the conflict in Ukraine that doesn’t get talked about enough. Yes, he’s been unequivocal in standing with Ukraine and providing them with assistance for their territorial integrity. But he has not done things to provoke a conflict with Russia and has been very careful to avoid that . . . . All of this is to say that progressives are having an impact on recognizing the mistakes of foreign policy over the last twenty years. There are places where we need to push further, but we’re in a different place than we were with the consensus that existed after 9/11.
Q: You are the grandson of Amarnath Vidyalankar, an anticolonial campaigner in India. Does that personal history influence your thinking regarding international relations?
Khanna: Yes, my grandfather’s life has had the biggest impact on my aspiration for public service . . . . I would say that there are a few lessons. One is just the nobility of politics. Here was someone who spent fifteen years in the Indian independence movement, who was jailed twice, who had no idea whether it would succeed or not, and yet was part of a movement that led to the freedom of a nation. And so politics is a calling that can really make a dramatic difference in the destiny of people—and that sense I got from my grandfather.
The second sense I got from him is a respect for the dignity and aspirations of people around the world—that we want the United States to be a country that isn’t just looking to carve up the map of Africa in our own national interest, but to ask first, what does a country seek for its own destiny, and to respect that. To respect self-determination—not only in the narrow sense of self-determination being opposed to colonialism, but in a deeper sense of allowing a nation to develop its own aspirations, its own ideals, its own way of life. That is something I think a just American foreign policy has to look at. And it’s given me a sense that human rights are essential to the international order.
Q: You’ve been critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Hindu nationalism, but you also supported the invitation for Modi to address the U.S. Congress. How do you reconcile these stances?
Khanna: It’s a challenging situation, but I agree with former President Obama that we have to engage with world leaders—we have to engage with the elected leader of India, who represents 1.4 billion people, while at the same time also respecting minority rights and having that conversation. And I did. I had that conversation directly with the prime minister and Indian government officials, and I think that is a constructive way to go forward. [Journalist] Fareed Zakaria has a wonderful [op-ed] piece [on this question]. He, like me, has spoken out against efforts to squelch pluralism, but he also believes that you have to engage, that that’s the best way to improve things.
Q: You have been highly engaged with trade and economic issues regarding China. But you’re careful to warn against veering toward a new Cold War. How should the United States do that?
Khanna: I have called for a rebalancing of the relationship with China and a rejection of a Cold War paradigm . . . that would hurt our efforts to tackle the climate crisis and lead to global GDP dropping overnight.
There is no doubt that we made a mistake in this country to hollow out our industrial base and allow the Chinese to [become dominant] in so much production. We’ve got a trade deficit that is $400 billion. What we should focus on is building our productive capacity here, reclaiming our lead in steel and aluminum and electric vehicle production. And China should diversify its economy, because it’s over-indexed for export promotion at the expense of the welfare of its own people, and under-indexed in services, finance, and technology. That rebalancing, I believe, can be a path to greater American security and prosperity, but also a path toward peace.
Q: You have been one of the few elected leaders to criticize the prosecution of Julian Assange. Why did you speak up? And why do you think so few other officials have done so?
Khanna: The prosecution was overly broad and would have a chilling effect on journalists. The way the prosecution of Assange reads, it would basically hold journalists accountable for getting source information, even if they had nothing to do with illegally obtaining it. For me, [speaking up] was a defense of the freedom of the press—[of actions like those involved with] the Pentagon Papers that have been so essential in holding our own government to account. Obviously, the Washington beltway paints folks as weak on national security if you stand up for the press. But I think what makes us strong is exactly the freedom of the press. It’s why I defended Wall Street Journal reporter [Sabrina Siddiqui] from the attacks she’s facing for asking a question [about hate crimes in India] of Prime Minister Modi. We have to defend freedom of the press vigorously, whether it’s in the United States or anywhere in the world.