Progressivism and Grand Strategy: An Exchange – The Author Replies

Abstract

Bringing left-progressive views of the world into dialogue with security studies makes us better analysts by exposing both perspectives’ limitations and blind spots. It helps us discover areas of common ground. And it permits greater specificity about the nature and severity of policy disagreements between those who retain progressive or social democratic political commitments and those whose scope of work concentrates primarily on optimizing the national security state. Nevertheless, any attempt to bridge such distant worlds was bound to generate at least as much controversy as insight. Accordingly, the responses to my research illuminate a mix of fruitful agreements, irreducible differences, and promising avenues for future research. I am grateful for all of it. Rather than respond to every point made across five very different interjections, I will clarify some key elements in my original analysis, as well as some aspects of left-progressive politics that lend themselves to misunderstanding. First, progressive grand strategies are internally coherent logics—not people—describing different ways of using policy to realize peace, democracy, and equality. Second, all grand strategy is worldmaking, and all security analysis has political consequences. Third, progressivism in US foreign policy must be a contrast with—not merely a complement to—US liberal internationalism.