Wishful Strategies

Abstract

Van Jackson’s thoughtful article “Left of Liberal Internationalism” identifies three “grand strategies,” each of which reflects a strand of progressive foreign policy thinking among the contemporary US Left. For each, he connects an analysis of the global sources of insecurity with a set of guiding policy prescriptions for the United States derived from progressive ideals. Then, with an astute eye, he offers an analysis of the risks involved for each paradigm. However, on offer here is less strategy and more progressive political imagination, preferred images of the world and of America—in short, ideology. This does not differentiate progressive grand strategy from the mainstream strategic thought with which Jackson is trying to dialogue. The Anglo-American tradition of grand strategy, as we find it in international relations (IR), valorizes the United States and its role in world history. Cold War realism, like liberal internationalism, reproduced idealized images of the United States as a democratic bulwark against totalitarianism and an enlightened hegemon. Though powerful states can often afford to maintain some degree of illusion, this is not a particularly strategic way of going about things, at least from a classical, Clausewitzian perspective.1 Strategy demands above all the gimlet eye: for oneself, for one’s opponents and allies, and for the situation at hand. Part of the problem with thinking about strategy in mainstream IR is that the social and political context—the international system of states—is largely taken for granted. So too, for the most part, are Eurocentric historiographies.2 For liberals and realists, these entail rosy conceptions of liberal democracy and of capitalism, as well as triumphalist accounts of the US role in the twentieth century. Jackson wants to move beyond this. His progressive approaches purport to take seriously a domestic history