Reviving Progressive Foreign Policy

James M. Goldgeier, Jonathan Kirshner

Global Governance, United States

A blueprint for the next Democratic president.

Anyone following this year’s presidential campaign would likely conclude that the twin hallmarks of a progressive foreign policy are withdrawal and disengagement, that American power is not capable of playing a productive role in the world, and that the international economy is a malevolent entity from which we need protection. These claims are exactly wrong—and they are not progressive.

In the 1920s and into the 1930s, withdrawal and disengagement were as American as apple pie, broadly held sentiments that turned out to be catastrophically wrong. Protectionism could not save us from the Great Depression—it only made that disaster worse. Isolationism did not make us safe; it allowed mortal dangers to rise unchecked and ultimately threaten our country and our way of life.

It was Democrats, starting with Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman (initially over the bitter opposition of still instinctively insular Republicans) who championed the engaged, U.S.-led, liberal international order—a set of arrangements, understandings and policy dispositions that, despite real blemishes, was associated with an era of unprecedented international political stability and economic growth.