Grand Strategies of the Left, Out Now! PART I

Today’s the day, y’all! The book I wish we had when I was working on the presidential campaigns in 2019/2020 is available now!

This is going to sound very woo woo, but there were times while I was writing it that it really felt like something was pouring out of me onto the page and I didn’t have a lot of control of it. I temporarily turned on some kind of spigot in the universe and was just collecting what flowed out.

That’s not how my writing process normally works, and I’d love to get back to that place because, tbh, there are a couple chapters in this book that even I think are damn delightful to read, and edifying (there are also a few cringe typos, as ever).

Grand Strategies of the Left ends up being, among other things, a written record accompanying my own political evolution. The larger project it represents (it’s the culmination of several other outputs) forced me to grapple with a very messy ecosystem of left-progressive thinking about foreign policy, how to make sense of it, and how it all fit in relation to the traditional ways I was trained to think as a former national security wonk.

This post is Part I of multiple posts about the book. Over the coming months, I’ll have more to say about why it matters and why you should own a copy.

The timing of the release was accelerated to get ahead of the 2024 election season, but it’s not great timing in terms of my workload at the moment. Whereas I did a lot of media whoring for my previous books, I have little choice but to be more selective about promoting this one.

Anyway, you’re going to see me intermittently refer to the book because it weaves through so many themes that I write and speak on. I know not everyone identifies as a leftist or progressive and that’s fine—you don’t need to be for this book to be useful. It’s really a book about making a meaningful and durable security in the world, but the ideas for doing that happen to exist mostly among people with deep commitments to peace, democracy, and equality.

Per the marketing copy, Grand Strategies of the Left:

• Bridges the gap between leftist criticism, traditional security studies, and grand strategy

• Offers coherent alternatives to liberal internationalist foreign policy

• Maps the varieties of American progressive foreign policy

More soon!✌️

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