A Manifesto for Foreign Policy Realignment
Advocates for peace and the working class must push beyond the false promise of primacy draped in liberal internationalist rhetoric. Here’s how.
I mused recently that:
today’s neoliberals are the most powerful constituency advocating against clashing US and Chinese ethnonationalisms.
One of the strategic challenges facing socialists, progressives, and anti-colonialists is how to prevent the interests of capital from cohering into a unified opposition to demands for peace and democracy. Capital is not monolithic at the moment, it’s broken into sections, some of which are actually harmed by ethnonationalist politics. That section of capital is ripe for a concord with the left…
This is more than just musing though. It follows from my analysis of our conjuncture, which, for reference, draws from Pacific Power Paradox, Grand Strategies of the Left, this, this, and the forthcoming The Rivalry Peril.
Bottom Line: There is a power politics involved in trying to change America’s primacist foreign policy. Advocates for peace, the working class, or restraint must recognize when their interests converge with others who also see the perils of primacy. And right now, neoliberals are a lesser threat than militarists and ethnonationalists.
The Limits of Left-Liberal Unity
If you find your political allies on the wrong side of war crimes, it might be time to rethink political alignments.
I’ve always advocated for a left-liberal coalition against fascism (or whatever you want to call it), and still do. And I am not anti-liberal. But in foreign policy, this effort to keep leftists and liberals in lockstep has done as much harm as it has good.
The Biden administration was staffed at the top by liberals who were my friends—literally, we had brunches together and exchanged Christmas cards and took trips together. But the second I started to criticize Biden’s foreign policy on narrow analytical grounds—and I was pulling my punches, I assure you—I got sidelined, for the most part. Soon, every critic, every dissident, was policed out of relevance from Democratic circles.
But you know who got brought in the tent? Liz Cheney! Max Boot! Hal Brands! Hawks, all of them. Kissinger was on Biden’s Defense Policy Board until the day he died. Staffers at AEI (!) and the Hudson Institute (!!) were consulted on strategy documents during the Biden years. Might as well have asked the Proud Boys what they think of nuclear policy.
What I’m saying is this: The past four years have shown that most liberals will not be talked out of a commitment to primacy and American exceptionalism. Some of them were left-curious during Trump’s first term, but now it seems they would sooner turn hard right than turn barely left.
The bland fanatics who sustain American militarism refuse any understanding of history that would make Americans face the deaths of 14 million souls during the Cold War, America’s more than 60 attempts at regime change abroad (44 on the side of autocracy) during that same time, America’s ongoing imperial relations in the Pacific, the 929,000 casualties resulting from the War on Terror, the $14 trillion spent on defense the past 20 years, the 400% increase in Salafi-Jihadist violence from 2011 to 2018 alone, or the fact that 25% of America’s 400 military interventions have occurred during the era of US hegemony. Great power corrupts, absolutely.
If your worldview erases or ignores this list of nightmares—a list that cannot be separated from liberal internationalism as it has actually existed—then of course you’re going to believe that the dark character of geopolitics today has nothing to do with your past choices. Of course you’re going to think primacy, coded as “global leadership,” is the answer. And of course, therefore, you’re going to think there’s actual strategic benefit to hyperventilating about China.
Most people who work in the national security state—for now—vote Democrat, and the Democrats, in turn, have relished their newfound identity as the party of the national security state.
As I’ve written extensively, neocons have taken over the Democratic Party’s foreign policy arm. This is how we’ve gone down the path of anti-China hysteria, sanctions on everyone we disagree with, a trillion-dollar defense budget, and material support for both genocide and a region-spanning war in the Middle East: A party that’s supposed to represent the common man instead sends resources that might help his life to defense contractors while encouraging him to die for abstract reasons. And anyone who dares protest that situation the wrong way? That’s what police are for.
We have no choice but to travel the path that has the greatest likelihood of forcing US foreign policy to peacefully adapt to a changing world.
Triangulating Peace, Restraint, and the Working Class
So what is to be done? The national security state must be bridled, and that means: