Unipolarity — The world being primarily beholden to the whims of a singular power, is long since over. The question now seems to be how the last holdouts against recognizing the obvious fact of multipolarity in the D.C. political establishment are coping. 

In a recent Foreign Affairs piece by Megan A. Stewart, Jonathan B. Petkun, and Mara R. Revkin, we are offered one potential vision of what a progressive foreign policy vision for the future might look like. Someone who was a former Bernie Sanders supporter with past ties to the progressive movement, but who is also firmly in the realism and restraint camp, like I am, can read this piece with interest but in doing so detect major points of objection with the authors. Namely, that their thesis presupposes American domestic priorities can be successfully evangelized abroad, that multipolarity will allow this values-based posture without backlash, and assuming the progressivism of today is a radical break with the unipolar hubris of yesteryear.

The primary purpose of the “The Progressive Case for American Power: Retrenchment Would Do More Harm Than Good” is to advocate against retrenchment and for a robust grand strategy force posture abroad by the United States, albeit with enough reforms to be in line with progressive values and correct for past excesses. 

To make this case, the authors begin the piece by acknowledging the undeniable reality that over two decades of the War of Terror policies have been a disaster for the United States and the world at large, and that U.S. policy has often been fueled by a chauvinism that can alienate other countries. 

Despite these excesses, however, the authors contend that the backlash to them risks over-corrections, which would include creating dangerous conditions where the United States withdrawing from the world enough to make power vacuums that will be filled by rival countries with hostile values. 

There are correct observations in the piece. For instance, the authors are rightly skeptical of a type of “anti-hegemonism” that fuels a certain section of anti-Americanism on the left which replaces the positive vision of American exceptionalism with a negative one, and in so doing loses sight of all the other morally ambiguous great power actors with agency of their own at large in the world today. They are also correct to imply that a country that completely gutted its investment in defense investments would lose its deterrent power. 

The problem is that these relatively practical observations are then wielded to make a series of contradictory points in favor of an interventionism that performatively breaks with the mistakes of the past while fundamentally repeating unipolarity’s key philosophical and strategic errors.

 To quote: “Proponents of both progressivism and deep engagement want Washington to work with allies through multilateral institutions such as the U.N. But progressives go further, championing significant changes to these institutions, with an eye to making them more equitable rather than necessarily U.S.-led.” Some of these ideas, such as expanding the Security Council to include nations like Brazil and India, have merit, but a diversification of the Council is as likely to lead to a diversification of values as it is a convergence around contemporary North Atlantic progressivism.

The authors themselves correctly state that the U.S. “does not operate in a vacuum”, however. Acknowledging the reality of multipolarity and the growing capability of rival powers means an attempt by Washington to play global culture-maker abroad will inevitably see backlash and possibly even a diplomatic counterattack by its rivals. Russia seems to be attempting already to set it up as a kind of counter-culture warrior to American conceptions of international human rights. It is no longer the 1950s and the United States is no longer half of the world’s economic and industrial output. 

The idea that such institutions under these conditions will always be a net benefit for progressive causes is an assumption that the U.S. share of global power will always be favorable, as there is no other power with broadly similar values who carries anywhere near as much weight on the world stage. It also assumes that there will never be a time where other powers are innovative and the U.S. is reactionary.

The authors then move on an argument that states that the U.S. should oppose imperialism in general and from revisionist powers in particular, rightly stating that anti-imperialism “is a pillar of leftist and progressive thought.”. Drawing from the past experience of progressive opposition to the old European empires of old, the Foreign Affairs piece interestingly connects these stances to the present. “Retrenchment cannot resolve this tension between, on one hand, opposing war and, on the other, defending egalitarianism and resisting imperialism.” But the tension appears to me to be that of the authors themselves, who conflate resistance to Russian goals in Ukraine with some entirely unrelated conflicts where the invasive power may be the United States itself.

“A similar tension arises in Syria policy. Some progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Becca Balint, have joined isolationist Republicans in calling on Washington to bring home the 900 U.S. troops still deployed in Syria. These troops work alongside the Syrian Democratic Forces, a predominantly Kurdish alliance of rebel groups opposed to the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, helping combat the remnants of the Islamic State, or ISIS. The SDF was a crucial ally in the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS; it governs parts of northeast Syria as a de facto state with a constitution-like charter that reflects a commitment to democracy, human rights, and gender equality.”

By the author’s own logic, any intervention in the Syrian Civil War should be seen as an unmitigated disaster. U.S. support for various rebel movements disproportionately benefited jihadist networks with eliminationist goals towards many minority groups in the country. As Jake Sullivan himself once put it, “Al Qaeda is on our side in Syria.” The fact that one of the largest and most expensive arm and equip programs in CIA history ended up with a covert invasion of a sovereign nation which resulted in parts of the country being ruled by Islamist rebels to this day is hardly absolved by the existence of a Kurdish political experiment elsewhere. U.S. forces in the east of the country, meanwhile, are used as target practice by Iranian militias. A bit of realism here would go a long way, with the understanding that as a land-locked faction surrounded by larger and inevitably hostile societies, the Kurds would at best represent a left- equivalent to the U.S.-Israeli security relationship. To keep such a deployment would be an unsustainable and perpetual security commitment that would poison U.S. relations throughout the region and eventually invite the possibility for another embarrassing failure.

To bolster this focus on long discredited Samantha Power-style humanitarianism, the authors list other past interventions that they believe the foreign policy could have made better through intervention. “There have also been countless humanitarian crises, such as Rwanda in 1994, in Srebrenica in 1995, and in Sri Lanka in 2009, in which the United States failed to intervene- and where even a modest military intervention would likely have reduced suffering without exacerbating violence.” These examples are interesting, as both Rwanda and Sri Lanka are far more peaceful and stable today than they were at the times of these proposed interventions, and in the case of Bosnia, foreign involvement in the conflict did eventually happen and seems to have frozen it into a perpetual tinderbox that could reignite at any time. Just as strong a case could be made that intervention has a negative consequence on such civil wars as letting them play out. It is at best a mixed record.

There is an economic element to critique with the argument as well. The authors state that “Retrenchment from global markets, such as withdrawing from trade agreements or international economic institutions, can likewise create vacuums for bad actors to exploit.” The concern by many progressives here is not simply that TPP offered few protections for domestic labor and would be a giveaway to massive corporations (though it was that, too), but that such trade deals themselves often disadvantage smaller nations and leave them more vulnerable to multinational corporations. Smaller nations require economic sovereignty as much as territorial sovereignty in order to best secure self-governance. Once again, the progressive bona-fides of multinational institutions cannot be assumed to be perpetual, and if progressives seek to differentiate themselves from their more centrist rivals, they must keep in mind this danger.

Additionally, progressive spending priorities innately clash with the inevitably ballooning defense budget under an interventionist agenda. Both a desire to see greater social spending at home combined with the necessary funds to defend the commitments proposed by the authors would likely be an unsustainable debt burden in the long run.

Historically, nations do not develop along a linear path. A variety of governing arrangements and development models pepper the record, and the assumptions of liberal interventionists, ironically, often end up replicating the very Victorian empires the authors rightly condemn. The British imperialists saw themselves as a force of progress and civilization, uplifting all of mankind with a universal model. They left us with a disproportionate share of the world’s intractable conflict zones as their legacy. The mainstream position in the foreign policy community today, be it left, right, or center, seems to be to advocate for the United States to be the unintentional successor to this values-centric world view, now wearing the cloak of liberation. But only a sober calculation of interest can suffice in a dangerous and polycentric world where the rightness of one’s cause is subjective, and power is split between nations with divergent interests and experiences.

Progressives have an unfortunate tendency to ignore that many causes once viewed as progressive in the past either were rejected upon further scrutiny or merged with other worldviews to create unrecognizable coalitions which would come to be thought of as divergent from their original intentions. This would almost certainly be the fate of a ‘progressive foreign policy’ under present day conditions. The rhetoric of international liberation would inevitably become assimilated onto similar policies– such as the Iraq and Libya wars– that the authors oppose. Policymakers living today are no more the protagonists of history than any other group of the past, and so must be aware of the dangerous waters their ideological predecessors have often entered.

Using one’s domestic political views as a framework for a foreign policy grand strategy, be those values progressive or anything else, always risks running up against the fact that there is no international sovereign to appeal to like there is in domestic politics. Multipolar systems are not just divisions of power blocs, they are also divisions for a multiplicity of values and systems to which claims to universal morality can no longer apply. Projects of world transformation are the luxuries of hegemony and the faster these schemes are dropped the easier it will become to increase the efficacy of diplomacy and retain resources for causes where they are well and truly needed. If progressives become the champion of an interventionist garrison state they will find it more difficult to practice a beneficial civil society at home and seek a modus vivendi with other powers abroad.