It’s not a good time to be police unions’ favorite Democrat.

Congressional Law Enforcement Caucus Co-Chair Bill Pascrell has represented the suburbs of northern New Jersey since 1997. He has comfortably coasted to victory nearly every year since, only facing a serious primary challenge in 2012 when the borders of his district were redrawn.

But this year, things have changed. Progressive insurgents have knocked out long-time Democratic incumbents in primary elections across the country, including in nearby New York City.

And one of Pascrell’s biggest political assets has become a liability during the ongoing national debate on police brutality. Pascrell’s opponents are hammering him for taking more police union donations than any other lawmaker, but Pascrell also lost the endorsement of New Jersey’s largest police union after voting for a major police reform bill.

Progressive challengers Zina Spezakis and Alp Basaran both see an opening, hoping to unseat Pascrell in Tuesday’s primary election. Spezakis seems to have gained most momentum; the Bernie Sanders campaign spinoff Our Revolution and the environmentalist Sunrise Movement have both thrown their weight behind her.

The National Interest sat down with Spezakis (virtually) to understand her views on foreign policy and national security. Whether or not she wins Tuesday’s primary, Spezakis represents the views of a rising generation of Democrats who see climate change, pandemic preparedness, and civil rights as national security issues on par with terrorism and war.

Below are excerpts from the conversation.

The National Interest has readers all around the country. I know your campaign has tackled some conversation of national importance. I'm wondering if you could just walk my readers through what your victory would mean for Americans outside of the 9th District.

That's a good question. I jumped into this race because I work in clean energy, and I've always been an environmentalist. When I read the UN's IPCC report in the fall of 2018, it really scared me.

I looked at my congressperson to try to figure out what his climate record had been. He's a Democrat but he hadn't done pretty much anything. It's an issue, truly a crisis that's not only going to affect people in my district and around the country, but also around the world.

The way I see it—we have the majority of the technology that we need to drastically start transitioning our society, our economy, our industry, our energy systems to a hundred percent renewable energy, and really start cutting down emissions. But unfortunately we've lacked the political will for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about, not the least of which is campaign funding.

If I wasn't going to now, when was I going to do it? In ten years time, when it was past the point of no return? Quite honestly, Matthew, sometimes it's believed that we may be at the tipping point anyway.

So this next election, to me, was critical. And I think it's critical for a lot of Americans, not only with respect to the climate crisis, which is not something you see every day. It's in the back of people's minds, but the problem with that is that the laws of physics don't wait for anybody. This is happening whether we like it or not.

And the climate crisis is not only an environmental and ecological issue, but frankly it's a justice issue. There's environmental racism everywhere you look.

It's a national security issue. I'm reading a book called All Hell Breaking Loose, which describes the U.S. military's perspective and response to what they see—because they tend to believe the scientists—of what's going to happen to our national security interests. It's going to be a humanitarian crisis.

At this point we're not going to reverse it. We're past that point, unfortunately, but the difference in this election is whether we're going to slow it down enough to give future generations a fighting chance to start reversing it, or do we risk something runaway happening where regardless of what we do, we can't affect it.

That's the choice in this election.

Climate change, actually, is a good segue into what I wanted to talk about, which is national security issues, and how things we don't really think about as national security problems are deeply related to international politics.

What role do you think Congress can play in marshaling an international response to climate change?

This is related to a question I get often: "what would be the first thing that you would do when you get to Congress?"

It's a surprise to many people that I would actually look at our tax code, for the simple reason that there's a lot of archaic code that allows for subsidies to fossil fuels. According to a recent IMF paper I read, I think the U.S. pays out [several hundred billion] in fossil fuel subsidies

Fossil fuel subsidies are bad for a variety of reasons. A, it's not a level playing field from a market perspective, and B, it makes a lot of the fossil fuels that are pulled out of the ground economical. Without these incentives, without these subsidies, a lot of the oil, a lot of the gas would just stay in the ground. It would never come out.

The reason I think we have a lot of subsidies still in place, is because there's a lot of oil money, fossil fuel money that gets donated to campaigns. Whether they want to admit it or not, if you're getting millions of dollars from an industry, you're not going to vote against its interests. That's just human nature.

From a congressional perspective, Congress makes these laws. Let's start looking at where these incentives are. Whether they're in loan guarantees, or preferential tax treatment, or whatever, let's start dismantling them now.

The reason they were there was because of national security issues, back in the day. These were put in place decades ago, before we had renewable technologies that would provide alternatives. The reason that they're there is no longer valid, or is quickly losing their validity.

The climate crisis, with respect to national security—I read so much about this and I kind of see what's coming—if anybody else was me, they'd be terrified.

Here's an example. The entire equatorial region of our planet is quickly desertifying. It's turning into desert. You can't grow food on a desert. You can't dig wells to get clean water in a desert.

If you think we have an issue with migration right now—and the U.S. military realizes this is going to happen—you're going to have climate migrants all over the world. With respect to our own hemisphere over here…if I was a betting woman, I would bet they head north rather than south.

Yes, we have a very large military, and it can handle a lot of things around the world, but what climate change does to the resources of the U.S. military is that it strains them significantly.

We can respond to maybe one, two, three humanitarian crises around the world, but when we have more than that, when we have dozens, and they're happening simultaneously, which is what's going to happen, we can't respond to humanitarian crises, even if you want to take the argument that we need a large military to deal with these humanitarian crises.

And they know it, so it's unfortunate that our current administration has put its head in the sand with this. Delaying makes it much worse.

Another national security and international relations question with climate change is China, because a lot of people are saying we need to work with them if we need a comprehensive climate solution.

They are the second-largest or largest economy in the world,but we are also clashing with China on a variety of issues: trade, but also human rights and labor rights, intellectual property.

I'm wondering what your approach to Beijing would be.

Yes, they are the largest emitter, but part of the reason they are the largest emitter is because basically we've moved all our manufacturing to China. We're responsible for a lot of those emissions, quite honestly, even though the U.S. is about fifteen percent of the world's emissions.

China's a large actor. We definitely need to cooperate with them in order to make any sort of a dent in emissions. That is the truth. China, for its part, and even some of the European countries, are much more active in decarbonizing their economies than we give them credit for…

I applaud them for their efforts. I condemn them for the way they treat Muslim minorities.

But diplomatically, when you approach—I don't even want to say opponent—when you approach another power, I think we have to approach not only China but also the rest of the world from the perspective of, "what do we have in common?" rather than an adversarial or antagonistic approach to it.

I believe in the diplomatic route. Those things have to be completely exhausted before we do anything else.

We have a lot in common. I would expect any Chinese family would want a clean world for their family. I expect the leadership would want that, too, for the population, in order to avoid unrest.

The humanitarian issues are—I mean, they're concentration camps [in Xinjiang] and we can't overlook those. But let's start in an area that we agree with, and then work to solve some of those other human rights issues, because adversarial contact is not going to solve any human rights issue. It has not been proven to.

I want to jump to another national conversation your campaign has touched on, which is the Black Lives Matter protests…

There's another angle to this, related to national security, and that's police militarization.

Are there reforms that you would support that would make it harder for the President to deploy military force at home, or for local police departments to get military equipment from the Pentagon?

I've been doing quite a bit of research on that. There are different things you can do with respect to addressing this issue. You can put body cams on people. You can train them. You can renegotiate contracts.

One of the most effective ways of reducing police brutality is to demilitarize, frankly, the police. You have seen probably the same Twitter videos, where the police are walking down the street looking like they're heading into the Middle East, into Afghanistan or something.

They don't need the excess equipment from the U.S. government. I don't know what that does, but I've seen a study that [says] you see lower rates of police brutality in police departments that don't have that military equipment.

One of the things that really surprised me was the body camera issue. It has a small effect, but not as big of an effect as you would think. I understand that we need to pass something, but I don't know whether all the terms of the policing and justice bill have been well thought-out.

I personally feel that we need to start re-allocating some of the resources that go into the police into mental health issues, because a large number of calls that the police get are from people who are suffering from mental health issues.

Education, housing, jobs, or infrastructure. I looked at my own town's budget, and I'm still wading through it, but I was really surprised to see the amount of money that the police force gets paid.

I live in a sleepy suburb—we need police, but we don't need millions of dollars of police.

You mentioned police militarization, and you said oftentimes police walk down the streets looking like they're on the way to Afghanistan. Well, you know, we're still involved in Afghanistan and a lot of Middle Eastern countries.

That's the root cause of a lot of police militarization—the fact that our country is still producing this equipment in large numbers and training people for these conflicts.

What would your approach be to the Middle Eastern conflicts, especially as we nearly went to war again in January?

We spent almost $7 trillion in the last nineteen years. The reasons we went to war, most reasonable people would agree, were fabricated, a lot of them.

We've been doing this for twenty years. Most of my adult life, we've been at war. And we have not managed to make a significant—for the $7 trillion we have spent, we have not managed to become much safer, and we've lost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Congress needs to—we control the purse. We need to stop funding a lot of this stuff. We need to stop voting for expanded powers to give the President...

I'm not sure why Congress sort of relegated or gave away its powers that way, because frankly, that's what they did, but frankly that needs to be reversed, because I think a lot of stuff happens underneath that.

We just need to have people who are going to be fearless enough to call this out. I don't understand why more people are not screaming about this. People are dying every day in the Middle East, we're not any safer, we're spending trillions of dollars that could be better used to update our infrastructure here and get ready for climate change.

It's a matter of priorities…

I would support reversing the AUMF [Authorization for the Use of Military Force]

Would you return to the Iran deal of 2015?

I would return to a deal. The 2015 deal wasn't perfect, but it was something, and it was a start. It was something that engaged the country diplomatically.

Completely throwing it out the window—you're throwing the baby with the bathwater, what Trump did—hasn't done anything. Has it made us any safer? Has it made Iran less antagonistic towards our allies or towards us in the Middle East?

I don't know. That's a question.

I would return to a deal. I would start engaging with them diplomatically.

A large part of our tensions with Iran—as well as with Cuba, Venezuela, and many other countries around the world—is economic sanctions.

Some people say it's a tool of diplomacy, because it lets us pressure bad actors without going to war, but other people say it's another form of war that hurts civilians and actually leads to more tensions.

What's your stance on sanctions?

It's hard to make a broad statement for every country, but you touched on it. In many of these cases, the powers that be hurt less under a sanctions regime than ordinary people, than families…

I think the United States, when we're trying to persuade—whether it's China with the Uyghurs—although I don't think China's going to react a lot to sanctions, because they can retaliate—or whether it's any other part of the world, I don't think sanctions are as effective as we like to think they are.

I, as a mother, always think of the kids who suffer under regimes like that. We've got to find a better way.

The last thing I wanted to touch on—do you think the coronavirus pandemic has any lessons for the way we treat national security, both abroad and at home?

Yes! First of all, the corona pandemic showed the cracks in our system a lot. It was everything from healthcare to the way we're structured as a republic.

It's hard to analyze what's happened here—in an ideal world, you want to take out the Trump factor, and the fact that he just ignored the pandemic, which allowed it to balloon the way it has…

It's a great argument to have close ties [between medical communities], whether they're your "adversaries" or allies, because you find out quicker about a pandemic that might have started in China. If you find out quicker, you respond quicker. That's one thing I would say about that.

With respect to our own national security—what's it doing to our borders? I'm not sure it's doing much to our borders, but given the fact that we are one of the more infectious countries in the world, I would say other countries don't want to let our citizens in.

I looked at travelling into Europe, and I'm like, oh, I can't go in with an American passport, or I have to be quarantined. That's affected at least the perception that we are a superpower…

One thing I will say, though, with respect to Trump—I think, honestly, if we had started implementing a lot of these progressive policies a decade ago, you wouldn't have had the Trump administration for the simply reason that a lot more people would have been better off, and wouldn't have seen Trump as their last resort, because the Democrats hadn't fulfilled their promises for the working class.

Certainly there's a lot of things to discuss in terms of missed opportunities. It seems like a lot of the problems we ignored for the past—however many years—are now hitting us right in the face.

Look, we are one world. We are a plane ride away from a pandemic. As far as a pandemic is concerned, there are no borders, regardless of how many walls you try building.

We only need one person with a bad germ to get into this country. You can't police that. That's impossible to police.

We need to know as soon as possible whether something is happening, and we need to have the political courage—and I speak to the executive here—we need to have the political courage to say, we're in trouble guys, all hands on deck, let's get this done.

The countries did that, like New Zealand, most of the European countries, even the country where my parents come from, Greece, they're well past the peak. They have flattened the curve and they are reopening their economies.

In New Zealand, they haven't had a case in three weeks, and they just allowed mass sporting events again. [Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern] has done a good job down there. She's an empathetic leader, and she wasn't afraid to tell people the truth.

But when you're beholden to corporate interests, it's harder to tell people the truth.

Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest. Follow him on Twitter: @matthew_petti.