Stuck on the Left with You: The Limits of Partisanship in US Foreign Policy

Abstract

Van Jackson’s “Left of Liberal Internationalism” is a wonderfully clear effort to construct an intellectual scaffolding around the various forms of progressive thinking on foreign policy. This kind of exercise is valuable, as policy-relevant battles about US foreign policy typically take place in disparate venues and media: speeches, panels, magazines, and even across social media; this makes it difficult to build a comprehensive picture of how America’s major political parties are evolving on foreign policy over time. And while similar studies have been done in the past, particularly on the varieties of conservative foreign policy found in the Republican Party,1 Jackson’s article is the first to really explore the increasingly influential progressive wing of the Democratic Party in the context of foreign policy. Likewise, the article does a service in translating often-quixotic political debates over foreign policy into more scholarly language and concepts, allowing researchers to better situate these emerging debates in the canon of existing grand strategic debates.2 Even as an active participant in the policy debates over US foreign policy,3 I found Jackson’s article to be extremely helpful in clearly delineating the different arguments within the progressive movement, outlining how far debate has come, and showing where it still needs progress. With that in mind, however, I think the