How the Democratic foreign-policy establishment abandoned FDR’s vision of great-power reciprocity and cooperation—and became, instead, a party of warmongers. James W. Carden, a former State Department advisor and contributing editor and columnist at The American Conservative, tells a sweeping history of the contest between the Democratic Party’s two competing traditions: those who believe in national sovereignty, civilizational pluralism, and the cooperative principles enshrined in the UN Charter; and those who embrace a crusading interventionism, which has driven US foreign policy from the early Cold War to the wars in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and beyond. The Great Betrayal traces this decades-old rivalry, from Truman’s fateful break with Roosevelt’s legacy through the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam disaster, and the post-Cold War collapse of any serious antiwar opposition within the party. He offers smart, smarting portraits of the statesmen and intellectuals who shaped each era—and of those who tried, and failed, to hold the Rooseveltian line. By the time Hillary Clinton became the Democratic nominee in 2016, Carden argues, the interventionists had won decisively. Even self-described progressives had made their peace with regime change, proxy war, and the unilateralism once associated with the Right. Carefully researched, and drawing on his own experience within the foreign policy establishment, Carden’s work has been celebrated across the political spectrum, as an unflinching account of how this transformation happened and what it has cost the United States and the world.
