How to Make a Progressive Foreign Policy Actually Work
Most of the Democrats running for president have been reluctant to outline any detailed foreign-policy vision. That’s understandable given how domestic issues tend to dominate presidential primaries, and how difficult and nuanced the answers are to today’s most pressing national-security challenges. The few who have tread into the foreign-policy debate have been criticized for offering plans that are too similar to Obama’s values-based pragmatism, and also for being naive isolationists who fail to recognize the threat to our interests posed by the rise of global spheres of influence due to American retrenchment.
The Brookings Institution’s Thomas Wright, in a recent Atlantic essay, presented several of these concerns with the emerging outlines of a new, progressive foreign policy. I don’t speak for any of the Democratic candidates for president, nor do I have intimate knowledge of their foreign-policy priorities. But from my seat on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, I can see a distinct lane for progressive Democrats to occupy when discussing the future role of America in the world. And although Wright and others make some substantive points, I think their criticisms, in some ways, reflect a failure of imagination that leads them to underestimate the power of a new, progressive approach to reset America’s role in the world.
Of course, the test of any Democratic presidential candidate’s foreign-policy ideas should not be “How different are they from Obama’s?” Democrats running in 2020 shouldn’t be shy to pine for a return to the basics of Obama’s foreign policy, which led America to actively defend democracy and human rights abroad, invest in nuclear and climate diplomacy, nurture allies, and improve its reputation in nearly every corner of the world. Obama left a lot of work undone, but his basic philosophy of global engagement is a foundation that should be built upon, not torn down.
[Thomas Wright: The problem at the core of progressive foreign policy]
But there are also ways that the next Democratic president can thoughtfully pivot
