To Build the World, Build the Strategy: Toward a Progressive US Foreign Policy

Editor’s Note: The New Visions for Grand Strategy Project brought scholars from across the political and ideological spectrum to discuss what the future has in store for the United States in the world. The editors of this series sought to foster a lively debate about America’s global role and strategic futures. Each author in this collection speaks for himself or herself alone, and their views do not reflect the official positions of the Henry L. Stimson Center, or of their own employers. Jennifer Lind is an associate professor of Government at Dartmouth College.

By Emma Ashford, Senior Fellow, New Visions for Grand Strategy Project

Progressivism is having a moment. Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani stunned many observers by defeating longtime politico Andrew Cuomo in the 2025 New York City Democratic primary election.¹ The extent of human death and suffering caused by Israel’s war in Gaza propelled many Americans into greater political activism. Angered by the Biden administration’s support for Israel, progressives rebelled in the 2024 election and cost the Democrats votes in swing states, notably in Michigan.² Previously, progressive candidates such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders attracted large followings in the 2016 election campaign.

Growing interest in the progressive cause is occurring amidst revived debates about U.S. grand strategy. Liberal internationalists are decrying Trump administration policies and arguing for a return to the longtime U.S. strategy of “global leadership.”³ Realists (of varying persuasions) argue that changes in the balance of power necessitate a change in U.S. grand strategy.⁴ As realists and liberal internationalists dominate the debate, progressive voices — outside the realist and liberal traditions — are much quieter and tend to emphasize domestic rather than foreign policy.

This chapter seeks to encourage debate about progressive grand strategy. The author writes as an outsider to progressivism but as a supporter of a richer debate that takes seriously and wants to encourage greater engagement with progressive views. American debates about grand strategy will be much stronger if they include progressive critiques, and U.S. national security policy will be the better for it. Progressive thinkers are correct to lament that the influential communities in U.S. foreign policy debates have generally not welcomed them to the table. Yet another reason for the marginalization of progressive ideas is that they remain underdeveloped, so they tend to be dismissed as utopian. To exert greater influence in foreign policy debates, progressives have significant intellectual work to do.

This paper develops these ideas in four sections. (1) First, I lay out the progressive vision: describing its focus on addressing structural inequality at home and across the world. (2) Second, I explain why progressive ideas may be particularly appealing at this moment. (3) Third, I argue that progressives — in contrast to the richly developed intellectual worlds of realists and liberals — need to flesh out their vision and explain how Americans might come to embrace the progressive agenda. (4) Finally, to encourage such a debate, (4) I outline a few key gaps and tensions in the progressive worldview.

The Progressive Worldview

A progressive foreign policy stands out from other U.S. grand strategic options for reframing the way people think about security and for the ambitious nature of its goals. Van Jackson, the author of Grand Strategies of the Left, writes that progressives hold a different vision of the “security” that grand strategy is supposed to advance: “’Security’ does not refer to power position or national survival directly; it relates to greater peace, participatory democracy, and equality.”⁵ Indeed, progressives are not merely concerned with maximizing the national security of the United States, but with striving for a much more audacious goal of “worldbuilding”/“worldmaking:” creating a more just and equal global society.⁶

In contrast to the realist and liberal traditions, progressive foreign policy is not based on rationalist theories about how the world works, but rather on constructivist and critical theory. The tradition, which is informed by theories about normative change and transnational activism, draws on critical and Marxist arguments about the destructiveness of capitalism, hegemony, and imperialism. Sometimes, progressive ideas overlap with those of the realist or liberal traditions. For example, liberals and progressives view authoritarianism as the source of many of the world’s ills; liberal and progressive views might also overlap in calling for encouraging economic development or a “responsibility to protect” victims of human rights abuses (even with military force).⁷ Nonetheless, progressive critiques of capitalism, economic development, and economic growth — emphasizing dependency theory or advocating “degrowth”— diverge from liberal thinking.⁸ Progressives and “restrainers” (whose grand strategy rests on assumptions from realism) share concerns about a military-industrial complex and the overmilitarization of U.S. foreign policy. But progressives reject the realist concepts (e.g., unitary actors, regional hegemony, and so forth) on which the restraint strategy is based.⁹

Progressives argue that the core U.S. national security problem — at home and abroad — is structural inequality: “any system of social relations that inherently privileges some people over others.”¹⁰ Any areas afflicted by structural inequality, progressives argue, feature violence, inefficiencies, weakness of the rule of law, and injustice. Structural inequality also inhibits solutions to common problems.

To date, U.S. progressives have overwhelmingly focused on domestic inequality and how to remedy it. According to progressives, neoliberal policies pertaining to trade, taxation, and intergenerational wealth have enabled elites to obtain and secure gains at the expense of most Americans — and elites used these gains to rig the system in favor of their own interests.¹¹ Progressives thus favor investment in health care, education, and infrastructure to rectify deep structural inequality that in their view harms the American people and lays at the root of society’s ills.

Combating structural inequality at the global level constitutes the core of progressive foreign policy thought. In contrast to liberals and realists, progressives assess that the primary security problem in international politics is not rivalry among countries. By contrast, progressives view conflict as rooted in structural inequality at different levels, and by addressing it they seek “to reshape the very context that gives rise to traditional security problems.”¹²

Progressives identify various causes of structural inequality. They blame authoritarian regimes, whose institutions benefit the minority at the expense of the majority and blame the United States for supporting authoritarian governments around the world. Progressives criticize multilateral institutions for a system of global governance that underrepresents the voices of the Global South and for a global economy that disproportionately benefits the wealthy North.

Progressives also see structural inequality as causing and inhibiting solutions to, what they see as the most serious security threat in the world today: climate change. They argue that rich countries grew rich by abusing the people of the Global South, by seizing its wealth, and by wrecking the climate through industrialization. Today, climate change disproportionately affects poorer countries in the Global South. Most of these countries are located in low latitudes and will experience the physical effects most severely and, as victims of colonization, they lack the wealth and technology required to mitigate the effects of climate change. Addressing the climate crisis requires addressing structural inequality: reforming multilateral institutions so they will better represent the interests of the Global South and will better address the climate change issue.

Progressives want to reform several areas that they argue contribute to profound global inequality: U.S. military dominance, unequal political power and influence, and authoritarianism.

US Military Dominance

First, progressives decry the unequal distribution of power in the world caused by U.S. global political and military dominance. America’s political, economic, and military jockeying for dominance divides the world into camps, antagonizing other countries and encouraging a 19th-century spheres of influence mentality that undermines cooperative solutions to global problems.¹³ Progressives thus want the United States to abandon its pursuit of global dominance. As Jeffrey Friedman, a professor at Dartmouth College, notes, this view contrasts with liberal internationalism, which sees U.S. leadership as facilitating — not inhibiting— collective action on global challenges.¹⁴

Progressives argue that ending U.S. military dominance requires refashioning U.S. security alliances, which (as advocates of global leadership argue in the positive) sustain U.S. global power and influence. Progressives criticize U.S. alliances as negotiated among nonrepresentative elites to benefit them rather than the national interest. That is, in authoritarian countries the alliances help keep dictators in power, and in democracies U.S. alliances encourage policies that benefit special interests and global elites rather than everyday citizens. In the United States itself, the highly militarized U.S. foreign policy is a product of a nonrepresentative foreign policy elites and enriches powerful interests such as oil companies and arms manufacturers.¹⁵ “On a good day, the national security state neglects the little guy, and siphons resources that might make his life better,” writes Jackson. “On a bad day, it makes the little guy cannon fodder, and usually for reasons that are strategically dubious.”¹⁶

Progressives want to downsize America’s massive military in terms of personnel, global infrastructure, and spending. “De-emphasizing the military components of American diplomacy could also allow the United States to devote more time and resources to tackling nonmilitary problems such as combating climate change and fighting corruption.”¹⁷ Furthermore, in their view, downsizing the military will help the United States address structural inequality at home. Progressives assess that the huge military required for maintaining US global dominance harms American democracy and imposes high costs on the American people. Savings from a smaller military posture — gleaned from decreased military spending, from less military support for allies and authoritarian countries, and from not fighting costly wars — could be used to benefit the American people.

Unequal Global Power and Influence

Beyond the disproportionately powerful United States, progressives see structural inequality in the Global North’s political and military dominance over the Global South. Institutions such as the United Nations Security Council, the IMF, the World Bank, and so on were created by the countries of the Global North, which manage these institutions to advance their own interests. The Global North obtained this dominant position illegitimately by seizing the wealth of the Global South and through industrialization that destroyed the climate.

Progressives urge the United States to support comprehensive institutional reform of global institutions in an effort to democratize global governance away from the current inequitable system.¹⁸ In their view, such institutions should be reformed to elevate the voice and interests of the Global South. The goal, argues Matt Duss, the executive vice president at the Center for International Policy, is “a rules-based order, but for real this time.”¹⁹ Furthermore, the United States should support an effort to address the massive wealth inequality that helps sustain the Global North’s dominance. Washington should strive “to improve outcomes for the global working class. These proposals typically involve substantial increases in US foreign aid, devoting large-scale expenditures to ‘jump-start’ global collaboration in fighting climate change, and accepting greater refugee resettlement.”²⁰

Authoritarianism

Progressives also decry authoritarian governments as a key cause of structural inequality around the world. “On one side we have the forces of oligarchy, authoritarianism, greed and kleptocracy,” said Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) in a 2024 speech. “On the other side we have a movement which strives to strengthen democracy and economic, social, racial, and environmental justice. And it is vitally important that the United States comes down on the right side of this struggle — the moral side.”²¹ Autocratic regimes promote inequality — both political and economic — by empowering a narrow “selectorate” that dictators enrich at the expense of the majority. Such elites enjoy access to “rents” (i.e., regime-provided revenue opportunities) in exchange for their support, which creates extreme income inequality.²² Authoritarian governments also stay in power through repression and violence that progressives decry as unacceptable violations of human rights. Moreover, authoritarianism contributes to instability and war because dictators fan nationalism to cultivate public support and distract the public from internal problems. Examples include the nationalism and violence associated with President Vladimir Putin’s Russia and in China’s threat toward Taiwan.

Progressives charge the United States as being complicit in maintaining this form of structural inequality. U.S. military operations and alliances often benefit governments “whose politics feature substantial levels of political exclusion or repression.”²³ These include Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other oil monarchies in the Persian Gulf — even liberal states such as Japan and Israel.²⁴ Recently, progressives’ support for Palestinians and their strong criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza encapsulate progressives’ opposition to realpolitik, their focus on human rights, and their assessment that international politics must be reformed from a system in which the strong prey on the weak—in which Washington supports the strong.

Progressives thus urge Washington to cease its support for authoritarian governments. “The United States remains the main patron and armorer of some of the worst authoritarian regimes in the world,” argues Matt Duss. “The first thing we can do if we’re actually serious about defending democracy is stop providing arms and giving political and diplomatic cover to abusive, undemocratic regimes.”²⁵ And of course, progressives argue that Americans must mobilize to support a strong democracy at home.

In short, progressives offer the most ambitious worldview of any grand strategies: a project that Jackson calls “worldbuilding.” Through U.S. demilitarization, reparations to exploited countries, institutional reform, and other policies, progressives seek a wholesale redistribution of power from Global North to Global South.

A Moment of Progressive Opportunity

The influence of the progressive wing within the Democratic Party has ebbed and flowed over time, scoring both important victories as well as frustrating failures. With the Democratic Party in disarray following the 2024 elections, the current moment may seem an unlikely time for a progressive surge. However, several trends — in American politics as well as globally — create an opportune moment for progressives to develop and promote their worldview.

First, there’s the Donald Trump factor. Since the start of his second term, Trump has implemented numerous policies that directly challenge key liberal positions and values. On “Day One” Trump withdrew the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate, and since then he has pursued policies that have horrified liberals: weakening environmental protections, slashing U.S. overseas aid, ramping up deportations, pressuring universities, and attempting to smash “diversity, equity, and inclusion” efforts at universities and other institutions. Worst of all, liberals see Trump as hostile to democracy itself: implementing policies that they argue create democratic backsliding in the United States.²⁶ For all of these reasons, Democrats are calling for countering Trump with a compelling alternative leader. Because many people criticize the Democratic Party leadership as lacking vision and energy, and because many observers see progressive candidates as having new ideas and increased momentum, this represents an important opportunity for the progressive wing to assume greater leadership — including foreign policy leadership — within the Democratic party.²⁷

Second, the continuing tragedy in Gaza has mobilized progressives, in particular younger voters and people of color, to demand changes in the Democratic Party’s foreign policy.²⁸ Since Israel’s military campaign began in response to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Gaza health officials estimate that more than 38,000 Palestinians — including many women and children — have been killed.²⁹ Over a million people have been displaced, and the physical devastation has been catastrophic. Despite widespread outcry in the United States and condemnation of the U.S. position overseas, the Biden administration (and subsequently the Trump administration) continued to provide military aid and diplomatic cover to Israel, including weapons transfers and the repeated use of the U.S. veto to block United Nations (UN) ceasefire resolutions. For progressives, Biden administration policy diverged starkly from the Democrats’ stated commitment to human rights. The crisis galvanized grassroots movements and deepened demands for a fundamental rethinking of U.S. policy in the Middle East — offering the progressive left a powerful rallying point and a chance to reshape the party’s foreign policy agenda.

Third, progressive foreign policy is likely to have increasing appeal because, of its focus on an issue of growing concern: climate change. Climate change is intensifying rapidly, visibly affecting ecosystems, human health, refugee flows, and global economic and political stability. Average global temperatures are rising, and extreme weather events — such as heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes—are becoming more frequent and devastating. American voters are increasingly alarmed by the effects of climate change.³⁰ A record-high 48% of Americans now view global warming as “a serious threat” to their way of life — the highest share since Gallup began asking about climate in 1997.³¹ Out of all the contending grand strategies, only progressivism prioritizes the climate threat. Indeed, the other U.S. strategies (restraint the only possible exception) would engage in security competition with China, thus undermining progress on climate by stymying cooperation between the planet’s two largest carbon emitters. Progressivism is thus likely to have growing appeal as Americans view climate change as an increasingly pressing threat.

Blocking progress on climate is not the only cost of alternative grand strategies; progressivism might have broad appeal because of the high — potentially catastrophic — costs of great power competition with China. With the exception of some (not all) restrainers and America Firsters,³² the progressive strategy is distinctive in that it would keep the United States out of a costly security competition or even a war with China. War with China could inflict high casualties on the U.S. military and, given the risks of escalation, result in Chinese nuclear strikes on American cities. Even in the absence of war, mobilization against China would be costly. The United States would need to mobilize sufficient military power for an extremely difficult war (100 miles off the coast of a military superpower, thousands of miles from the U.S. homeland). Furthermore, there are economic, technological, and diplomatic costs associated with the US-led technology export control regime aimed at reducing Chinese military power.³³

A lack of allied balancing in Asia also raises the costs of a U.S. balancing effort: suggesting that a strategy aimed at containing China will not enjoy much regional support. Asian allies have hardly balanced in response to China’s rise; increases in Japanese and Taiwanese defense spending have been very recent and restrained. South Korea is a U.S. treaty ally but has not been willing to discuss whether Seoul would assist in Taiwan’s defense or would allow U.S. base usage in the event of a war.³⁴ Whether or not these countries will ever increase their balancing efforts remains to be seen.

Though a regional counter-China coalition has not taken shape, the Biden era shows that regional countries responded positively to U.S. leadership in areas more aligned with progressive goals. During the Biden era, East Asian countries welcomed the administration’s “latticework” of “minilateral” engagement. Such efforts focused on initiatives pertained to the environment, fisheries and coast guard activities, disaster relief, public health, and infrastructure.

For all of these reasons — the state of American politics today, rising worries about a climate crisis, the nature of superpower competition with China — the progressive message is likely to be increasingly compelling.

Constructing a Strategy

Although progressive voices are gaining traction in U.S. debates — particularly regarding domestic policy — progressives remain on the fringe of grand strategy debates. Many observers argue that progressivism falls short of a clear and workable strategy, with many unaddressed tensions and gaps that make it ill-suited for the real world. Daniel Bessner, a professor at the University of Washington, laments that in national security debates, “the left is either silent or confused.”³⁵Senior Fellow at the Stimson CenterEmma Ashford describes progressives as having a “mostly vibes-based view of US foreign policy.” Ashford notes that progressives “have a clear picture of the world as they want it to be; they have almost no agreement on how to get there.”³⁶

The prominent schools of grand strategic thinking in the United States — realist and liberal internationalist — resting on hundreds of years of their respective intellectual traditions, developed and empirically tested an extensive theoretical architecture on which arguments about grand strategy could rest. Realist and liberal scholars developed arguments about how international politics operates; scholars created a common language and conceptual universe, which they could use to engage in lively intra-paradigm debates (for example, among realist “restrainers” versus “prioritizers”).³⁷ Scholars in these traditions disseminated foundational ideas for which policymakers could reach, trained generations of students, and built communities and networks — both within universities and think tanks and between civil society and the policy world.

Advocates of a progressive foreign policy need to make similar efforts to develop and persuasively communicate their grand strategic vision. To be sure, progressives are correct in arguing that some of their community’s marginalization stems from the fact that people “who depart from the consensus view have largely been kept out of the State Department, the Pentagon and other parts of the government.”³⁸ However, progressives have significant intellectual work and institutional creation to do before they can expect a receptive audience to their calls for a stunning departure in U.S. foreign policy.

Key Gaps and Tensions

As progressive thinkers and political leaders develop their vision, they need to grapple with a few glaring gaps and tensions in their worldview. To be sure, all grand strategies suffer from logical or practical problems; progressivism is just another example of a foreign policy approach fraught with contradictions and tough trade-offs. The following sections highlight four tensions in need of clarification and debate.

Getting There

Unlike other grand strategies, the progressive grand strategy lacks a clear and compelling theory of transition — from today’s flawed world toward the more just and equitable world that progressives envision. Despite advocating an unprecedented, dramatic turn in U.S. policy, progressives have not persuasively explained why and how such a turn would occur. Rather, political theorists are holding insular, meta-theoretical conversations about moving from what they call “ideal theory” to “non-ideal theory.”³⁹ Progressive scholars are focusing not on the mechanics but the ethics of transition: for example, how to protect displaced workers and other vulnerable communities as the fossil fuel industry declines.⁴⁰ But critics of the strategy want to know why such changes would occur in the first place.

One path through which progressives envision change is evolutionary: a process of persuasion that occurs in an environment of intensifying crisis. As the climate crisis worsens, the logic goes, progressives will find increasingly receptive voters. Once in office, progressive leaders could pass legislation and sign international agreements to promote the progressive agenda. For example, Thomas Piketty, a French economist — who advocates a global wealth registry and tax — argues that such a tax would attract growing support amidst worsening inequality and continued climate havoc.⁴¹

But this vision leaves a lot of questions — and seems out of step with current politics in the United States. Progressives favor redistributing wealth from the United States and the rest of the Global North to poor countries in the Global South. As the United States and other wealthy countries face populist backlashes after years of policies to support a “liberal international order,” publics seem less and less likely to move even further down the globalist continuum toward progressivism. After decades of an interventionist and highly militarized grand strategy, the zeitgeist in the United States — which Donald Trump twice campaigned on — is that the U.S. government has elevated the interests of a global elite over the interests of ordinary Americans for too long. Trump’s “America First” slogan is a nationalist policy in rhetoric and in substance — the opposite of cosmopolitanism. “America First” voters — people who feel strapped and neglected — want wealth redistributed to them and their communities, not away from them. Progressives have yet to explain how such voters would embrace a policy that redistributes their hard-earned dollars to strangers in other countries.

Many progressives are indeed skeptical that an evolutionary transition is possible, particularly due to entrenched interests. Scholars lament that “the fossil fuel industry and the world’s largest producers of oil and gas will resist any real cuts to production with everything they have.” Capitalist societies will resist change because “the goals of the imperialists are money and power, capital and control. The climate movement can no longer proceed as if our goal is persuading such governments to act.”⁴² The other path, some progressives argue, is revolution.

Revolution is coming, write Kai Heron, a lecturer at the University of Lancaster, and Jodi Dean, a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges: “from the mass migration of people fleeing floods, fires, and droughts, rioting for food, shelter, and energy, and seizing what is rightfully theirs. It will result from armed, indignant, and racist reactionaries fed up with government ‘overreach’ and willing to take power into their own hands in the name of self—defense.”⁴³ A “general crisis of hegemony,” predicts The New School Professor Nancy Fraser, will destabilize elite coalitions and create opportunities for “counter-hegemonic blocs” to pass sweeping reforms: for example, a global wealth tax.⁴⁴ Progressive leaders must prepare for revolution now, argue Heron and Dean, in “crisis-as-opportunity” logic, by building coalitions across rural, Indigenous, working-class, and Global South communities.

The revolutionary story is not only alarming but unpersuasive. Why, for example, would growing political instability prompt a shift toward more progressive politics? Is it not as or more plausible that amid national turmoil the public would embrace more conservative policies — favoring politicians who promise a return to law-and-order: curtailing immigration and strengthening border security. Furthermore, progressives believe that only through revolution will their vision be realized. If progressive policies are truly good for the American people, why won’t voters embrace them without the need for national catastrophe? This raises the uncomfortable possibility that — at least from the standpoint of an American household — perhaps progressivism does not, in fact, seek to benefit Americans more than other people. Indeed, because of its emphasis on climate mitigation and wealth redistribution, it seems to elevate the interests of other people at Americans’ expense.

This point returns us to progressives’ redefinition of “security,” which they frame not as U.S. national security but as human security. In the rationalist tradition, grand strategies seek to create national security and national prosperity; they lay out how a state “can best ‘cause’ security for itself”; they aim for the “preservation and enhancement of the nation’s long-term best interests”; they provide a “logic that helps states navigate a complex and dangerous world.”⁴⁵ If progressivism is not aimed at enhancing the national interest — but instead subordinates it to cosmopolitan goals — perhaps it is not a grand strategy at all.

“Democratizing” vs. “Liberalizing” the Order

The progressive agenda advocates an increasingly expansive advancement of human rights. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights emphasized political freedoms such as speech, assembly, religion, and protection from torture. Since then, liberals and progressives have expanded the human rights agenda to encompass the rights of women, Indigenous peoples, LGBTQ+ persons, and others.

But progressives face a serious, unacknowledged tension between their efforts to promote liberal values and their efforts to democratize the international order. Progressives want to both advance liberalism and human rights while making the order more democratic — by reducing great power influence in international institutions and conferring a greater voice to smaller, weaker, and poorer countries in the Global South. However, a tension lies in the fact that many countries in the Global South do not share progressive values. Promoting such countries into positions of greater global influence could thus democratize world politics — in the sense of representation — but make the character of world politics less liberal: thus undermining progressives’ own agenda.

Ongoing debate among human rights scholars about universalism versus cultural relativism highlights many differences in the conception of human rights around the world.⁴⁶ For example, many cultures do not support the Western conception of political or human rights for women. In the Global South, many leaders claiming to represent Islam support gender-based violence. Afghanistan’s Taliban leader said, “You may call it a violation of women’s rights when we publicly stone or flog them for committing adultery because they conflict with your democratic principles… [But] I represent Allah, and you represent Satan.”⁴⁷ Similarly, the World Health Organization reports that female genital mutilation (FGM) is practiced in 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Today, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) website describes FGM “a violation of the human rights of girls and women.”⁴⁸ But if those 30 countries gained greater influence at the WHO, they would probably forbid such discussions: just as greater Chinese influence at the WHO curtailed investigations into the causes of Covid-19.⁴⁹

Furthermore, in stark contrast to the progressive community in the United States and other liberal countries, many cultures continue to view the LGBTQ+ community as deviant and oppose greater rights for people in those communities. Some liberal governments within the Global South “would like to promote progressive agendas on gender issues and LGBTQ rights at the UN, but they run into opposition from more conservative G-77 members, including many Muslim-majority states.”⁵⁰ Empowering countries with such views to have greater influence in world politics would in many respects thus erode — not advance — the human rights dear to progressives. Progressives struggle to resolve this tension.

The Rise of an Autocratic Regional Hegemon

Progressives also lack a compelling response to the threat to their own values posed by China: an authoritarian superpower and aspiring regional hegemon. They blame the current security competition on the United States, arguing that China built up its military in response to U.S. hegemony. The best course for Washington in its relations with China, they argue, is conciliation. Van Jackson recommends “carrots over sticks. Reassurances. A whole package of policies and signals meant to convey not a willingness to nuke the world but rather our conditionally benign intentions. Including showing that we prioritize war prevention over war preparation.”⁵¹

This view commendably encourages self-reflection among Americans about how the rivalry came to be. However, it casts China as a scared deer in the headlights rather than viewing it as a superpower with an agenda. Many other observers (and indeed Xi himself) argue that Beijing intends to “reunify” lost territories; toward this end China is relying on a variety of economic, military, and gray-zone tools.⁵² Blaming China’s military rise and increased use of force on the United States neglects to consider Beijing’s agency and revisionist goals.⁵³

Progressives argue that U.S. hegemony is the root of many ills in the world and call for reduced U.S. political influence (i.e., the diffusion of power to other states) and US demilitarization. But as flawed as U.S. leadership is, ceding that leadership would enable powerful, ambitious authoritarian countries to assert agendas that progressives oppose. “The retreat of the United States will in no way create a more progressive world,” Georgetown University Professor Dan Nexon warns. “After all, the main rival suppliers of international order combine various degrees of imperialism, authoritarianism, and capitalisms marked by strong kleptocratic tendencies.”⁵⁴

Absent U.S. leadership and balancing in East Asia, Chinese intentions and current regional trends suggest eventual Chinese regional dominance. Chinese regional hegemony would threaten many progressive values and goals for world politics. To be sure, progressives might celebrate the improved health and security of the Chinese people that has accompanied China’s economic rise, and they might support Chinese efforts to support similar self-improvement in developing countries. But progressives decry other Chinese policies. China’s economic growth occurred along with environmental devastation; at home the Chinese Communist Party rules through authoritarian repression and persecutes minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang. In its takeover of Hong Kong, China smashed a more liberal society and seeks to do the same as it “reunifies” with Taiwan: extinguishing the freedoms of 23 million people in a thriving democracy.

For the long term, progressives have an answer to problems of authoritarianism. They argue that authoritarians are propped up by the United States and other countries, and that authoritarianism thrives amidst the global inequality of the world system. Thus progressives expect that in the long run, democracy will spread as global inequality decreases. They believe that as international institutions reform they will grow more capable of tackling the challenges posed by authoritarian countries. Taking this (highly questionable) logic at face value, however, still leaves progressives with the immediate problem of an ascendant authoritarian hegemon that, as it grew more influential because of declining American influence, would harm progressive values. By encouraging a policy of U.S. military drawdown and foreign policy restraint, progressives would create a situation in which China would be likely to obtain regional hegemony — thus Beijing would be empowered to form a regional and perhaps international order that, ironically, would undermine progressive goals.

Conclusion

The shift in the balance of power away from U.S. primacy and the backlash to three decades of a “global leadership” strategy, offers an opportune moment for a national security debate in the United States. Progressives have much to offer such a debate. Unlike every other strategy, the progressive agenda prioritizes a security issue of growing concern: climate change. A progressive strategy also satisfies the need for greater fiscal restraint, and — compared to nearly all other national security strategies — would keep the United States out of a costly and potentially devastating security competition or even war with China.

As the American national security conversation evolves, progressive thinkers — in academia, think tanks, and in the policy world — have more intellectual work and institution-building to do before they can expect the American public to more fully embrace their vision. As Friedman incisively puts it, “Implementing the progressive vision would involve absorbing short-term costs in pursuit of benefits that have no historical precedent, and whose theoretical foundations are underdeveloped.”⁵⁵ To translate this intriguing vision into policy, progressives should lay out a plausible route to “worldbuilding” that translates to kitchen-table politics, convince skeptics that a “democratized” world could also be a more liberal world, and reassure people that authoritarian countries would in fact be weakened — rather than strengthened — by a U.S. drawdown and military restraint.

Notes

1
Alexis Grenell and Arash Azizi, “Zohran Mamdani’s Lesson for the Left,” Atlantic, July 8, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/07/zohran-mamdani-brad-lander-progressives/683446/
2
Andrea Shalal, “Kamala Harris’ Michigan Loss Highlights Democrats’ Weak Spots,” Reuters, November 10, 2024, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/harris-michigan-loss-highlights-democrats-many-weak-spots-2024-11-10/
3
See, for example, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph Nye, “The End of the Long American Century,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2025); Kori Schake, “Dispensable Nation,” Foreign Affairs, (July/August 2025).
4
Elbridge A. Colby, The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021); Jennifer Lind and Daryl G. Press, “Strategies of Prioritization: American Foreign Policy After Primacy,” Foreign Affairs 104, no. 4 (2025), https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/strategies-prioritization-lind-press
5
Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left, (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 15.
6
On these terms see Ashford, First Among Equals: US Foreign Policy in a Multipolar World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025); Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left.
7
Gareth Evans, The Responsibility to Protect: Ending Mass Atrocity Crimes Once and For All, (Brookings Institution Press, 2009); Alexandra Cosima Budabin, “Progressive at Home and Regressive Abroad: When Liberal Social Movements Confront Mass Atrocity with Calls for Military Force,” in Handbook of Progressive Politics, 372–87, 2025. doi:10.4337/9781800880641.00031.
8
On dependency theory see Ted C. Lewellen, Dependency and Development: An Introduction to the Third World (Westport, CT: Bloomsbury Academic, 1995); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967). On “degrowth” see Jason Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World, (London: Penguin Random House, 2020); Serge Latouche, Farewell to Growth, (Cambridge, Great Britain: Polity, 2009).
9
On different variants of progressive foreign policy, see Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009002080; Emma Ashford, First Among Equals; Jeffrey A. Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy: A Synthesis and Critique,” Journal of Global Security Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2023): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1093/jogss/ogac032.
10
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy.”
11
On America’s increasingly “extractive institutions” and how this undermines democracy see Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown Publishing, 2012).
12
Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left, 2.
13
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy,” 6.
14
Ibid.
15
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy”; on America’s nonrepresentative “monoculture,” see Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left.
16
Van Jackson, “Biography,” https://www.vanjackson.org/biography
17
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy.”
18
On IMF reform, see Michael Franczak and Olúfémi O Táíwò, “Here’s How to Repay Developing Nations for Colonialism – and Fight the Climate Crisis,” Guardian, January 14, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/14/heres-how-to-repay-developing-nations-for-colonialism-and-fight-the-climate-crisis
19
Matt Duss, “Progressives Can’t Afford to Spend the Next 4 Years Just Playing Defense,” Nation, December 17, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/trump-policies-progressive-response/
20
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy,” 6.
21
“Bernie Sanders: ‘The International Billionaire Class is Making Out Like Bandits,’” Nation, February 8, 2024, https://www.thenation.com/article/world/bernie-sanders-speech-center-for-international-policy/
22
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita et al., The Logic of Political Survival (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith, The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics (PublicAffairs, 2011).
23
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy.”
24
On the US military presence in Okinawa as neocolonialism, see Hidefumi Nishiyama, “Decolonizing Knowledge of and from Okinawa,” Critical Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (2022): 552–73. doi:10.1080/14672715.2022.2136098
25
Interview in Patrick Iber, “Beyond the Blob,” Dissent Magazine, Summer 2022, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/beyond-the-blob/
26
Claire Jones and Christopher Grimes, “Large Protests across US against Donald Trump’s ‘Authoritarian’ Policies,” Financial Times, June 14, 2025, https://www.ft.com/content/d18ca511-c0a4-4a42-a6b9-55e583145092; Frank Langfitt, “Hundreds of Scholars Say U.S. is Swiftly Heading Toward Authoritarianism,” NPR.org, April 22, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/04/22/nx-s1-5340753/trump-democracy-authoritarianism-competive-survey-political-scientist
27
Sara Pequeño, “Why Can’t Democrats Take Advantage of All This Obvious Republican Failure?” USA Today, May 31, 2025, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2025/05/31/trump-tariffs-economy-democrats-failing-response/83922742007/; Richard Hargy, “What Have the Democrats Achieved in Trump’s First 100 Days?” Conversation, April 28, 2025, https://theconversation.com/what-have-the-democrats-achieved-in-trumps-first-100-days-255139
28
Public opinion among people of color has shown greater condemnation of U.S. policy in the Middle East; see, for example, Christopher Shell, “Most Black Americans Want a More Active U.S. Role in Ending the War in Gaza and Protecting Palestinian Lives,” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, April 25, 2024), https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/04/most-black-americans-want-a-more-active-us-role-in-ending-the-war-in-gaza-and-protecting-palestinian-lives?lang=en
29
Gaza Ministry of Health estimates have been deemed “roughly accurate” by U.S. intelligence officials. See Nancy Youssef and Jared Maslin, “U.S. Officials Have Growing Confidence in Death Toll Reports from Gaza,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-officials-have-growing-confidence-in-death-toll-reports-from-gaza-b3b5183a
30
Amrith Ramkumar, “Climate Change’s $150 Billion Hit to the US Economy,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2023, https://www.wsj.com/science/environment/climate-change-us-economy-c9fbda96
31
Brendan Rascius, “Record—High Share of Americans Now Consider Global Warming to be a Major Concern, Poll Reveals,” Phys.org, April 17, 2025, https://phys.org/news/2025-04-high-americans-global-major-poll.html. Views are highly polarized, with Gallup reporting that 90% of Democrats versus 28% of Republicans worry about climate change “a great deal/a fair amount.” https://news.gallup.com/poll/355427/americans-concerned-global-warming.aspx
32
On different versions of foreign policy restraint, see Miranda Priebe et al., “Competing Visions of Restraint,” International Security 49, no. 2 (2024): 135–69, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00498; Emma Ashford, First Among Equals.
33
Jennifer Lind and Michael Mastanduno, “Hard Then, Harder Now: CoCom’s Lessons and the Challenge of Crafting Effective Export Controls Against China,” Texas National Security Review (Fall 2025).
34
Andrew Yeo and Hanna Foreman, “Is South Korea Ready to Define Its Role in a Taiwan Strait Contingency?” (Brookings, March 28, 2025), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/is-south-korea-ready-to-define-its-role-in-a-taiwan-strait-contingency/#:~:text=Although%20South%20Korea%20has%20often,concrete%20discussions%20related%20to%20Taiwan; Denny Roy, “South Korea Will Stay Out of a Taiwan Strait War,” The Diplomat, March 21, 2023.
35
Daniel Bessner, “What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think About the South China Sea?” New York Times, September 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/17/opinion/democratic—party-cortez-foreign-policy.html.
36
Emma Ashford, “What is Progressive Foreign Policy, and Does it Work?,” Global Asia 19, no, 2 (June 2024), https://globalasia.org/v19no2/book/what-is-progressive-foreign-policy-and-does-it-work_emma-ashford; Ashford, First Among Equals, 50.
37
Colby, The Strategy of Denial; Priebe et al., “Competing Visions”; Lind and Press, “Strategies of Prioritization.”
38
Bessner, “What Does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Think”; Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left.
39
Laura Valentini, “Ideal vs. Non-ideal theory: a Conceptual Map,” Philosophy Compass 7, no. 9 (2012): 654-664; Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009); Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
40
See, for example, Xinxin Wang and Kevin Lo, “Just Transition: A Conceptual Review,” Energy Research and Social Science, vol. 82, 2021.
41
Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020).
42
Kai Heron and Jodi Dean, “Climate Leninism and Revolutionary Transition,” Spectre Journal, 2022
43
Heron and Dean, “Climate Leninism.”
44
Nancy Fraser, “Climates of Capital: For a Trans-Environmentalism,” Critical Times 3, no. 1 (2020): 304–326, https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478—8187751; Nancy Fraser, “Cannibal Capitalism.” New Left Review 126 (November–December 2020): 5–44, https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii126/articles/nancy-fraser-cannibal-capitalism
45
Definitions of grand strategy from (respectively), Barry R. Posen, The Sources of Military Doctrine: France, Britain, and Germany Between the World Wars (Cornell University Press, 1984), 13; Paul Kennedy, Grand Strategies in War and Peace (Yale University Press, 1991), 5; Hal Brands, What Good is Grand Strategy? (Cornell University Press, 2014), 3.
46
R. P. Churchill, Human Rights and Global Diversity, (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2016); J. Donnelly, “Cultural relativism and universal human rights,” in International law of human rights (Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge, 2017), 173–192.
47
Ruchi Kumar, “Taliban Affirms that Stoning will be Punishment for Adulterers—Especially Women,” NPR.org, May 8, 2024, https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2024/05/08/1242306960/taliban-affirms-that-stoning-will-be-punishment-for-adulterers-especially-women
48
“Female Genital Mutilation,” World Health Organization, February 5, 2024, https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/female-genital-mutilation
49
Hinnerk Feldwisch-Drentrup, “How WHO Became China’s Coronavirus Accomplice,” Foreign Policy, April 2, 2020, https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/04/02/china-coronavirus-who-health-soft-power/
50
Comfort Ero, “The Trouble with ‘The Global South: What the West Gets Wrong About the Rest,’” Foreign Affairs, April 1, 2024, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/trouble-global-south
51
Van Jackson, “On Washington’s China Fetish,” Duck of Minerva blog, January 31, 2023, https://www.duckofminerva.com/2023/01/on-washingtons-china-fetish.html.
52
Doshi, The Long Game; Mastro, Upstart; Alison A. Kaufman, “The ‘Century of Humiliation,’ Then and Now: Chinese Perceptions of the International Order,” Pacific Focus, 25 (2010): 1-33
53
On Chinese revisionism, see Michael J. Mazarr, Timothy R. Heath, and Astrid Stuth Cevallos, China and the International Order (Rand Corporation, 2018); Sheena Chestnut Greitens, Isaac Kardon, and Cameron Waltz, “A New World Cop on the Beat? China’s Internal Security Outreach under the Global Security Initiative,” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, July 2025); Malin Oud, “Harmonic Convergence: China and the Right to Development.” In An Emerging China-Centric Order: China’s Vision for a New World Order in Practice, edited by Nadège Rolland, 85–100. Seattle, WA: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2020.
54
Daniel H. Nexon, “Toward a Neo-Progressive Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, September 4, 2018. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2018-09-04/toward-neo-progressive-foreign-policy
55
Friedman, “Progressive Grand Strategy,” p. 9.