I subscribe to very few email newsletters, one of which is Robert Wright’s Nonzero Newsletter, one of the most thoughtful and persuasive political newsletters I’ve found. Wright’s essays are almost always longer than I feel I have the patience for, and yet I’m usually glad to have read them.
It was from reading Wright’s newsletter that I discovered that I’m a “progressive realist” when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. If you’re not familiar with that term, I encourage you to look at this article in which Wright defines it. The essay also describes various ways in which President Obama’s foreign policy created a range of problems because it was led by progressive idealists rather than progressive realists, and how the incoming Biden administration is likely to fall into the same trap because many of the same people, like Tony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, Biden’s picks for secretary of state and national security adviser, will be running the show. (The Washington Post ran a somewhat abbreviated version of the article with the pugnacious headline, “Biden’s foreign policy team is full of idealists who keep getting people killed.”)
Very briefly, Wright defines progressive realism as having four characteristics:
- Strategic humility: A healthy respect for the law of unintended consequences — an awareness, in particular, that the best-intentioned military interventions tend to make things worse.
- Cognitive empathy: A “respectful understanding” of all relevant actors and a willingness to put ourselves in their shoes and see the world as they would.
- Anti-Manichaeism: A disinclination to divide the world’s nations into blocs of good and evil.
- Respect for international law: A recognition that addressing global problems requires robust international laws and norms (and that had the United States abided strictly by international law over the past couple of decades, a number of big mistakes — such as the invasion of Iraq and the proxy intervention in Syria — wouldn’t have happened.)
I’m hoping that Biden’s foreign policy team learned some important lessons from the Obama administration’s missteps. Only time will tell.