The depictions of progressive statecraft in this book should be understood in relation to the ways that scholars and practitioners alike talk, think, and make claims in the idiom of security, which can obscure as much as it reveals. While “national security” and “national interest” dominate discourses of grand strategy, for instance, they leave much to be assumed and specified.
Scholars often represent the ends of grand strategy as vital or long-term “national interests,” with “interests” being vague and highly fungible.Footnote 1 Where interests are defined clearly, they are typically reducible to narrow conceptions of security – national survival, battlefield victory, or power position.Footnote 2 Such language blurs the chasm of difference that often exists between that which serves the interests of an entire nation and that which serves (and works against) the interests of particular classes, races, genders, or institutions within that nation.
Security’s referent object, meanwhile, rarely gets interrogated. “National security” is a misnomer referring to state or regime security, theories of international politics exhibit a well-known state-centric bias, and the primary means of securing the state tends to be through the military. The assumption that “grand strategy is ultimately about fighting” is exceedingly common in grand strategy research.Footnote 3 The result is a fixation on “the threat or use of force for policy ends.”Footnote 4 These tendencies are intrinsic in “classical” grand strategy scholarship, which places a premium on questions relating to the accumulation and deployment of military power as a way of securing states from foreign predation, annihilation, and/or battlefield defeat.Footnote 5 The traditional view of security studies as a discipline shares these classical priorities.Footnote 6
Grand Strategy’s Grand Problems
This obsession with military affairs invites a number of criticisms. Grand strategy’s focus on war bleeds too easily into becoming a rationalizing instrument for war, lending to a reputation for being exceedingly reactionary and militarist.Footnote 7 It is guilty of a certain elite, “great-man” reading of history, making its connections to a notion of the common good threadbare. You could be forgiven for thinking that this form of analysis exists only to counsel those with power on how to retain or maximize it.Footnote 8 And to the extent grand-strategic studies have taken domestic political ideologies seriously, they have been confined only to conservative politics.Footnote 9
But the biggest problem with classical grand strategic thinking is that it limits the possibilities for how America relates to the world, and in the grimmest way. Specifically, a rationalist bias pervades debates about US grand strategy. For instance, Barry Posen and Andrew Ross described four ideal-type categories of grand strategy at the dawn of the post–Cold War era that endure in most analyses today: primacy, cooperative security, selective engagement, and neo-isolationism.Footnote 10 A generation later, scholars still describe America’s grand strategic choices in roughly these terms – restraint, deep engagement, liberal internationalism, and conservative primacy.Footnote 11
But as Posen and Ross freely acknowledge, the theoretical traditions underpinning their typology are all rationalist – three variations of realism (primacy, selective engagement/offshore balancing, and neo-isolationism, respectively) and one variant of neoliberal institutionalism (cooperative security/deep engagement). This not only perpetually privileges questions of military force and the aggregation of hard power but also constrains how scholars diagnose and policymakers respond to security/insecurity in the world. Realism typically black-boxes the state, obscuring problems and solutions that come from within it.Footnote 12 And rationalism, the larger epistemic commitment that realism falls within, caricatures reality in ways that can be unhelpful.Footnote 13 International actors are not always and everywhere rational utility maximizers, and the assumption that causality in the observable world must follow from microfoundations is at best questionable when we know that certain patterns of world politics reflect and are reflected in macro-level social structures and relational processes of interaction.Footnote 14
Such biases may offer analytical advantages from time to time, but they are a shoddy foundation for an entire research program meant to inform real-world politics. They are the kinds of limitations that narrow the imagination regarding what America’s international role and conduct ought to or could be. If this rationalist tilt in US grand strategy debates covered the full range of real-world political thinking, occluding alternatives might have analytical merit. But it does not. So we must illuminate what lay beyond it.
The Progressive Worldview and Durable Security
The modes of reasoning discoverable in progressive thought stand as implicit critiques of the narrow band of choices available in grand strategy debates. They also share a number of attributes that distinguish them from prevailing discourses about grand strategy.
One is that while progressives can be said to hold security as the ultimate end of foreign policy, they define security as a necessarily political condition. “Security” does not refer to power position or national survival directly; it relates to greater peace, participatory democracy, and equality.Footnote 15 These visionary ends inform the progressive commitment to a set of core principles (economic equality, anti-authoritarianism, and solidarity), because there is no realizing the former without some fidelity to the latter. Security conceived in this way also presupposes national survival and the absence of war, but to seek such minimalist aims in a political and economic vacuum would not furnish security but rather precarity and outright militarism.
Second, progressives view the conditions of security (peace, democracy, and equality) as interdependent, making the taproot of a progressive approach using and constraining the power of the state in a manner that, as much as possible, deals with underlying causes of insecurity. “The aim of security policy,” argued fellows of the progressive Transnational Institute, “should be the establishing of the long-term social and ecological conditions for well-being and justice – the necessary bases for genuine peace – rather than a reactive approach to short-term security threats.”Footnote 16 This shares something of Karl Marx’s dictum that “To be radical is to grab things by the root. But for man the root is man himself.”Footnote 17 Similarly, in his “Letter to the New Left” in 1960, C. Wright Mills intoned that leftist demands ought to be based on an understanding of foundational causes; “our work is necessarily structural,” he insisted.Footnote 18 Accordingly, the answers to the problems of war and injustice – which are related – are presumed to be upstream of the decisions of “great men,” the shape of militaries, and the outcomes of battles.Footnote 19
This view – even more than a thick versus thin conception of security – is the most striking break between progressive grand strategy and the rest. Progressives see the geopolitical games nations play as symptoms of a security deficit whose solutions are found mostly in public policy, which vastly expands the ways and means available in progressive grand strategy while also rendering more realistic evaluations of the costs and risks of military tools. National “defense,” by contrast, is a largely negative project – at least in the way it has been deployed since the early Cold War. Traditional national security is really a domain of proximate causes. Dwelling exclusively in it confines the world to perpetual insecurity.
Third, progressives find talk of “interests” obfuscatory. It is not that interests do not exist; they do. But if security is a political and ecological condition, then “interests” should not be something apart from it. The question that subsumes “Whose interests?” and even “What are interests?” is “Security for whom?”Footnote 20 Rare is the policy that benefits both the masses and their ruling classes, and oligarchs from different countries have far more in common with each other than they do the workers – of whatever national origin – whose surplus value they hoard. State/national security is a public good only insofar as it functions as a tool servicing more peaceful, democratic, and egalitarian ends. As such, the progressive view of security is self-consciously internationalist, but in a manner that dissolves hard distinctions between domestic and international imperatives to begin with. This is true of democratic socialists,Footnote 21 neo-Keynesians,Footnote 22 and left-liberal progressives like Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, who argued that progressive “issues don’t exist in a vacuum. If you care about democracy, or human rights or the environment here, then you have to care about these fights everywhere, and you need to be engaged in them everywhere.”Footnote 23
But as Daniel Bessner, a self-identified anti-hegemonist quipped, “Sad to be an internationalist in a world of nation-states.”Footnote 24 “Internationalism” has a flattened, co-opted meaning in most debates; progressives’ internationalism is not reducible to military operations or security commitments abroad. Progressives believe long-term security is indivisible. While they have competing theories for realizing it (and sequencing the goals that constitute it), the state or nation will only realize durable security for itself when humanity has greater security. But when should security come at the point of a gun?
Anti-militarism
That question is why it is vital to understand the centrality of anti-militarism to the progressive worldview. Progressives’ anti-militarist commitment distinguishes them from liberal internationalists more than any other (and separates those who identify as progressives in domestic politics only from those with a progressive worldview). When militarism became a diagnosed problem in industrial societies during the nineteenth century, it was understood narrowly as circumstances where “the military aspect of politics became a state’s overriding concern … preparations for war gained the upper hand over considerations of ‘the steady art of statecraft’.”Footnote 25 Today, militarism is sometimes broader, taken to mean “the social and international relations of the preparation for and conduct of organized political violence.”Footnote 26
Because military-first politics are a blight on democracy, anti-militarism has always been a through-line for the American left that informs its anti-war sensibility.Footnote 27 The American Union Against Militarism, the institutional vanguard against not just America’s participation in World War I but also the military buildup that would have been required to wage the war, gave birth to a spinoff organization called the Committee for Democratic Control. The latter’s very name points to the conceit of anti-militarism – preserving democracy, which war and war preparation risks denuding of any real meaning.Footnote 28
Opposition to militarism also persisted as a through-line for the American left from the global peace and nuclear disarmament movements of the early Cold War to the New Left’s opposition to the Vietnam War, and later the Nuclear Freeze Movement of the 1980s.Footnote 29 C. Wright Mills condemned militarism as “The doctrine of violence, and the inept opportunism based upon it,” because it “substitutes for political and economic programs. That doctrine has been and is the fundamental basis of U.S. policy. And that policy is bankrupt …. It has increased the insecurity of the United States and the world at large.”Footnote 30 By the early twenty-first century, with liberal representing cultural and identity politics associated with the left, the thing that defined progressive more than anything was opposition to war – especially the Iraq War.Footnote 31
Despite a century-long tradition of anti-militarist activism and a vibrant feminist and critical literature naming the problem of militarism in societies (depicting it as bound up with patriarchy, imperialism, and white supremacy),Footnote 32 militarism as a concept is alien to the discourses of Washington policymakers, “defense intellectuals,” and mainstream security studies. The threat, deployment, and use of military force is so central to America’s modern national security state that to critically invoke the idea of militarism at all risks indicting the very edifice of US foreign policy.
But anti-militarism does not inherently rule out the use of force, which means it is not reducible to pacifism.Footnote 33 It proscribes wielding the use or threat of force when such actions are understood as tragically self-perpetuating or self-undermining. As Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’s foreign policy adviser, explained, “because military violence leads to so many unintended consequences, to outcomes that we can neither foresee nor control, American foreign policy needs to dramatically de-emphasize military power” in its engagement with the world.Footnote 34 Anti-militarism thus does not denote an absolute commitment to nonviolence; it indicates an earned skepticism of military responses to foreign policy problems that requires diagnosing and resisting dynamics of self-entrapping violence. This guards against the liberal “imperial temptation” and distinguishes progressive security thinking from the liberal primacist or neoconservative logic of simply promoting global democracy at the point of a gun.Footnote 35
The problem, as foreign-policy progressives see it, is that the military as a security tool presents a fundamental mismatch between problem and solution in most instances. As a matter of budget, attention, and imagination, US foreign policy is heavily invested in warriors and weapons systems “despite not offering a credible solution to modern problems like cyber attacks, pandemics, and climate change.”Footnote 36 Bertrand Russell’s truth is instructive about the progressives’ sense that militarism is bad strategy – “To advocate democracy by war is only to repeat, on a vaster scale and with far more tragic results, the error of those who have sought it hitherto by the assassin’s knife and the bomb of the anarchist.”Footnote 37 US participation in World War I, for example, unleashed antidemocratic forces, needlessly securitizing politics and stigmatizing egalitarian values for a century to come.Footnote 38
The war exposed violence as a crude, risky means of achieving political ends – one that tends to work for reactionary aims better than progressive ones. Similarly, when the progressive Institute for Policy Studies formed in 1963, it did so on the basis of many specific critiques of Cold War foreign policy, but above all it resisted what it saw as attitudes of militarism substituting for rigorous policy arguments. The justifications for arms racing and threat-making had been too shallow – even nonsensical – to justify risking democracy and the planet itself.Footnote 39 Even in the Biden era, sitting Senators opposed national infrastructure investment and spending on a green climate fund on the grounds that the Pentagon needed those resources to compete with China.Footnote 40
Such myopic statecraft is militarism in action – the same myopia that has kept America continuously in conflict overseas for a century while only taking notice of it in spurts and starts.Footnote 41 So while there are people who vote Democrat and can think of themselves as “progressives except for U.S. primacy,”Footnote 42 they are liberal internationalists (not progressives) on matters of foreign policy. Anti-militarism insulates the progressive worldview from the reactionary potential within progressivism.
Avoiding False Frames
What makes progressive grand strategies projects of worldmaking, then, is that even the most restrained versions counsel how to build toward something. To think of grand strategy as worldmaking is to center “how state power ought to be wielded, on behalf of whom, and at whose expense.”Footnote 43 Contrary to how mainstream grand strategic ideas tend to function, progressive worldmaking is expressly not about entrenching the interests of a ruling class, accruing power for its own sake, or preserving an unbalanced political status quo. In an academic sense, that makes this book part of a wave of recent grand strategy research that surfaces social logics of power,Footnote 44 seeks comparative-empirical (rather than just theoretical) grounding,Footnote 45 and takes domestic history and ideology seriously.Footnote 46 In a practical sense, that makes this book uniquely transparent in its willingness to not just acknowledge but foreground how superficially apolitical security analysis does political work. Grand strategy is worldmaking because grand strategy always has grand political implications – any strategy with the ambition of directing the national security state presupposes allocating resources and exercising (state) power, often at scale. But progressive grand strategy is worldmaking for the many, rather than the few.
As subsequent chapters make clear, progressive grand strategy has much to say about even defense policy. But contra classical grand strategy and traditional security studies, it also finds affinity with the more expansive “non-traditional” security concerns that have marked the evolution of security studies since the 1980s.Footnote 47 The human security agenda, for example, which stresses anthropogenic threats (climate change) and naturogenic threats (pandemics), has historically gotten short shrift in grand strategy literature but is instrumental in how progressives think about security.Footnote 48 But the reason that progressives take these issues seriously is that they believe foreign policy ought to attend to the root causes of geopolitical problems, which are necessarily located disproportionately in the “non-traditional” policy spaces rather than in debates about the threat and use of military force.
There is a tendency among traditional national security analysts to think of nonmilitary security issues as “values-based” ones, and then to contrast that with some kind of supposedly hard-nosed analysis that boresights on guns and bombs and the like. The implication being that tools and techniques of war ought to have primacy over “values.” But this is a false contrast. To prioritize guns and bombs at the expense of other issues is often to claim a particular set of values – specifically militarist, hierarchical, exclusionary, and functionally antidemocratic values – over others. It also mischaracterizes what progressives are doing. Unlike guns-and-bombs enthusiasts, progressives’ values do not bracket off but rather are based on claims about the roots of insecurity.
