Grand Strategies of the Left: The Foreign Policy of Progressive Worldmaking by Van Jackson

Book Review by Geoffrey Roberts

Van Jackson’s Grand Strategies of the Left (2024) delineates three varieties of ‘progressive worldmaking’, each of which aspires to reshape the context that gives rise to traditional security problems in order to achieve a global polity that is less militarised and securitised, and more peaceful, democratic, and egalitarian:

Progressive pragmatism – which prioritises economic equality and anti-authoritarianism as the means to achieve worldwide peace and democracy;

Anti-hegemonism – which emphasises non-interventionism and the robust restraint of American coercive power as the key to world peace; and

Progressive peacemaking – which seeks to ‘wage peace’ through transnational civil society-building as well as traditional diplomacy and state foreign policies

Jackson positions these perspectives as alternatives to mainstream western liberal internationalism, which has become increasingly militaristic and wedded to neoliberal economics.

While much of Jackson’s book is devoted to discussion of demands that American progressives should make on the United States as a potential vehicle for a more peaceful world, the kind of progressive thinking he identifies has a global reach, and a history that long predates the post-cold war era.

Progressive peacemakers have long made the case that peace is – or should be – the prime global value, that cooperative security is the best way to reduce the risks of war, and that the stances of states and societies – even warmongering ones – are not immutable and can be changed radically by political action.

The motto of much peace activism has been Benjamin’s Franklin’s admonition that “there never was a good war or a bad peace”. But, as Jackson notes, the lodestar of global peacemaking is not a negative peace – the mere absence of war – but a stable and sustainable positive peace based on mutual security and military disarmament.

Easier said than done, but during the Soviet-Western cold war, peace movements played a vital role in constraining the nuclear arms race and countering hawkish elements on both sides of the East-West divide. The cold war didn’t remain cold of its own accord. In the absence of the rising global peace discourse promoted by postwar peace movements, the cold war would have been even more dangerous and, perhaps, never-ending.

The original, and most powerful, postwar peace movement was led by the World Peace Council (WPC) – a global network of millions of activists that from the 1940s through to the 1960s had a huge impact on public opinion in countries on both sides of the so-called ‘iron curtain’. The WPC was Soviet-sponsored and its activist base was buttressed by the international communist movement, but its aspiration for a world society based on a regime of peace was wholly authentic and often in tension with Moscow’s narrower geopolitical interests.

The struggle for peace was domestic as well as international and it was the global peace movement, not least its Soviet supporters, that fostered the USSR’s self-identity as a peace-loving state. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine notwithstanding, that benign, peace-loving identity remains an enduring legacy for the foreign policy outlook of the Russian Federation,.

Though demonised as Soviet stooges, WPC leaders valorised their links to the USSR because it provided them with an avenue of state influence to further their peace project. They esteemed people-to-people diplomacy, but also sought to work towards their goals through traditional diplomacy.

While progressive peacemakers do seek solidarity across national boundaries and eschew strict interpretations of the principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states, they tend to be wary of their internationalism being tainted by the manipulations of self-serving state actors.

Arguably, there is no inherent contradiction between the pursuit of universal peace and an emergent multipolar world based on state sovereignty and a balance of power and interests. It all depends on the values and multilateralism of the new order, above all, how seriously states treat the precepts of International Law and the UN Charter.

The character of the peace that ends the Ukraine war will be shaped by battlefield events and the statecraft of the principal participants. The justice and fairness of any negotiated settlement will lie in the eyes of the beholders.

While Jackson’s anti-hegemonist restrainers have been quite visible and even influential during the Ukraine war, especially in the United States, traditional peace activism has been at best marginal, and that isn’t going to change anytime soon. Nor are the hawks who have revelled in the opportunities presented by the Ukraine war going to go away.

Yet never has the threat of atomic warfare been greater. More relevant than ever is the peace movement’s prioritisation of the existential threats of the nuclear age. In the long run the revival of the peacemaking perspective will be vital to counteracting dangerous trends towards the further militarisation of world politics.

From a progressive peacemaking perspective, the sooner the Ukraine war ends the better, even if that entails unpalatable costs and risky compromises. But the peace also has to be durable and a bridge to far-reaching negotiations about common security and arms control.

Van Jackson’s concluding section is entitled ‘A Security Beyond Tragedy’, where he writes:

“Progressives tend to see the tragic view of world politics – consisting of little more than power hoarding, war optimization, and great power status competitions – as tragically self-entrapping. Widening our conception of security, thinking differently about risk, and elevating statecraft to emphasize public policy – not just national security in the conventional sense – promises to narrow the space for tragedy, and possibly change the way the game of global politics is played. Progressive principles are no panacea, and pregnant with dilemmas in practice. But they also provide a basis for beginning to address the root problems plaguing international politics”.