The debacle over the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ letter on Ukraine reflects the underlying tensions between progressive values and realist grand strategies of restraint—as well as the danger of progressives failing to see the difference between the two.
I think a lot of people are kidding themselves about what grand strategy is—it’s worldmaking. It’s an attempt to put the power of the state in service of grand political purpose. States big and...
The global distribution of material power changes from time to time. It’s something that happens, not something we should spend any amount of time pursuing or avoiding. I say this as someone who...
There’s a battle going down inside the Republican party for what conservative foreign policy ought to be. The problem is that stakeholders in the debate are misrepresenting its terms, and...
The US needs a more restrained approach to its national security, but not all arguments for restraint – and not all policies of restraint – rest on solid foundations.
Most versions of the left gain little and sacrifice much in accepting a realist epistemology. Theories of international relations are just tools for making sense of patterns and puzzles in the world; they don’t need groupies.
This piece is the third of a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Neoliberalism — the ideology of the primacy of capital — has been bad for American statecraft. It’s a major reason why we have no economic strategy. And I’m totally a get-out-of-neoliberalism stan. But where we go from here matters. The new post-liberal right, for example, also hates neoliberalism, but of course it wants to take us into a future that looks something like the Handmaids Tale. Democrats, on the other hand, see...
This piece is the second in a three-part series grappling with the role of political economy in making a just, sustainable international order. Writing about America’s economic strategy deficit got me pondering why the United States had such a stunted economic imagination. How could the government that many consider to be the global economic hegemon be inept at economic statecraft? For one thing, I think the popular impression of America as the world’s economic hegemon is overstated. Yes, the United States has many economic advantages. Its domestic market is still the destination of choice...
I read a lot of crap this year, but the good stuff was really good. The Causes of World War Three, by C. Wright Mills This book is from 1961, just after Mills's famous "Letter to the New Left" and just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. The book basically predicts the Cuban Missile Crisis down to the U-2 incident. But what's remarkable is his ability to marry analysis and prose. His passionate critique of power rivals the evocative language of Fanon or Du Bois, and his criticisms work at the level of both extreme specificity and general frames and mindsets. Nearly every page has memorable...
G. John Ikenberry is one of the most influential scholars of “liberal international order.” It’s likely that he, along with Dan Deudney, is responsible for popularizing the phrase. John’s most recent book, A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order has reportedly shaped the thinking of the Biden foreign-policy team. I interviewed him for a recent podcast.
I apologize for inflicting this on you all, but I've found that blogging helps me think through ideas and questions—especially given the Duck's readership. So, without further introduction, here are some half-baked notes on Progressive foreign policy. Preliminaries The 2016 primary contest highlighted the general atrophy of progressive foreign-policy thought and infrastructure. Virtually the entire left and liberal foreign-policy apparatus lined up behind Clinton, whether because of affinity, hope for employment and fear of retaliation, or out of the calculation that she was the only viable...