Lately, the news coming out of Washington has been reminding a lot of us of an old, well-worn pattern in politics: when things start sliding toward more authoritarian control inside the country, you almost always see a more aggressive, muscle-flexing approach overseas at the same time. Leaders who are busy tightening their grip at home tend to reach for military tools abroad. So the sudden loud talk about sending troops into Venezuela, or the steady march toward a full-blown clash with Iran, isn’t just some one-off headline. It’s part of a deliberate push to put the United States back on top of the global stage, acting as the unchallenged boss who doesn’t need anyone’s permission.

That’s why the No King movement—born out of anger over democratic backsliding here at home—can’t stay locked inside a purely domestic bubble if it wants to make any real difference. To actually push back against concentrated power, it has to face the fact that the same forces driving authoritarianism inside the country are fueling the same kind of bullying abroad.

The usual way people talk about these issues pretends there’s a clean wall between “what happens at home” and “what we do overseas.” But that wall has always been an illusion. Both old-school realists and critics of empire have pointed out for decades that the way power gets used in one........

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