What Would a Left Foreign Policy Look Like? (w/ Van Jackson)

Current Affairs

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We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What would a left policy on Ukraine look like, for instance?

Van Jackson is a leading left foreign policy thinker. His new book Grand Strategies of the Left aims to think through the toughest questions about what it would actually mean to have a "progressive" foreign policy. Jackson notes that because the DC think tank world is dominated by hawkish "blob" types, a lot of the most thorough research and thinking on foreign policy is done by people whose values he rejects. In this conversation, we talk about how the existing establishment sees the world, and how we can look at it differently.

"In prioritizing what it sees as the foundational sources of global insecurity, the progressive perspective portrays itself as uniquely realistic compared to its prevailing liberal internationalist alternative. It diagnoses the problems that preoccupy militaries as the surface level of deeper political dysfunctions, making mainstream grand strategy and security studies appear solution-less insofar as they deal only with national defense policy or strategy. Progressive worldmaking, in other words, directs us to reshape the very context that gives rise to traditional security problems." - Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left