Edited by Andrew Leber

A non-systematically-compiled of thought-provoking left/progressive foreign policy writing and conversations over the course of 2022. No doubt there’s plenty we’ve missed — for a fun end-of-the-year exercise, tell us what we should have included on the platform of your choice (or leave a comment below). See you all on the other side of the calendar!

Continue reading “Polishing Off 2022” →

By Sarah Sklaw

We live in a sanctioned world. Sanctions are a key, if not the key, component of U.S. foreign policy today. The U.S. government maintains embargoes and sanctions on at least twenty five countries, but the U.S. sanctions regime is so complex that the Treasury Department does not publish a complete list of sanctioned countries. Recently, arguments about how the U.S. should respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have coupled questions about arms supplies with heated debates about the most effective use of sanctions to constrain Russia’s war power and Putin’s political control.

Continue reading “How Nicaragua Made Our Modern Foreign Policy” →

By Van Jackson

Neoliberalism — the ideology of the primacy of capital — has been bad for American statecraft. It’s a major reason why we have no economic strategy. And I’m totally a get-out-of-neoliberalism stan. But where we go from here matters. 

The new post-liberal right, for example, also hates neoliberalism, but of course it wants to take us into a future that looks something like the Handmaids Tale. Democrats, on the other hand, see neo-Keynesianism as the horizon of our economic imagination. That may be better than what the right offers, but there are pitfalls in it.  

Continue reading “Escaping the Keynes Versus Neoliberalism Trap” →

By Andrew Leber

Last Friday, the Biden administration made headlines with an executive order (E.O.) concerning $7 billion in Afghan central bank funds held in the United States: aiming to transfer half the amount to a fund for humanitarian aid while keeping the other half frozen in place to face lawsuits against the Taliban by relatives of victims of the 9/11 terrorism attacks. 

Much as the E.O. claims to “address the humanitarian and economic crisis in Afghanistan,” it does so by means that are too slow and slapdash to address the present crisis, while affirming what amounts to theft of sovereign Afghan funds to compensate U.S. citizens. The jarring contrast therein has had the unintended side effect of clashing with the Biden administration’s overriding priority for Afghanistan policy: avoiding the U.S. media cycle at all costs.

Continue reading “Stealing From Afghanistan in Times of Famine” →

By David Sterman

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the United States government embarked on what it framed as a war on terror made up of a number of specific wars that fall under the broader global ambit of the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force. Ever since, Americans have struggled to name and define the peculiar character of this open-ended war. In some cases, this character is evoked via the phrase “endless war.” In other cases, people have adopted the phrase “forever war.” And some commentators have denied that such names convey anything meaningful about the United States’ current use of military force in the first place. As I have contended elsewhere, “endless war” is a phrase that not only conveys meaning but is essential for proper strategic analysis of the United States’ current wars. 

Yet advocates of ending the endless wars should carefully examine the language they use. Specifically, advocates and analysts should be wary of the language of “forever war” and tend towards using “endless war” instead. 

Continue reading “Avoiding the Time Trap” →

by Andrew Leber

Two decades have passed since the terrorist attacks that ultimately took the lives of 2,605 U.S. citizens and 372 citizens of other nationalities at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and on United Airlines Flight 93. This weekend, memorial services across the United States honored the memory of the thousands killed on 9/11, including hundreds of first responders in New York City, and the deaths of thousands of US service-members in the wars that followed.

This weekend also marks a time to reckon with the U.S. foreign policy choices that led to those wars. 

A military campaign against Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan quickly transformed into an expansive project of remaking a country that US officials barely understood and made little effort to understand (as documented at length in the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” series). 

We released the furies and then went home.

Stephen Hadley, Fmr. Deputy National Security Advisor, September 16, 2015

The attacks also set the political calculations and machinations in motion that would culminate in the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. A war of choice sent of thousands of U.S. soldiers to the Persian Gulf, removed Saddam Hussein from power, smashed the capabilities of the Iraqi state, and sparked wave upon wave of violence. 

I saw dozens of bodies piled outside the morgue, covered with blue sheets, rotting in the sun. Relatives of the dead and injured sobbed, but the doctors went stoically about their business. “Today is nothing special,” one told me. “We see catastrophes like this every week.”

That evening, I met a group of [Coalition Provisional Authority] staffers for dinner in the palace [i.e. headquarters of the occupation administration]. They talked about the interim constitution that had just been drafted, with its expansive bill of rights. “It’ll be a model for the Middle East,” one said.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran in Imperial Life in the Emerald City (2006) on the U.S. occupation c. 2003

In the name of preventing deaths from political violence at home, the United States has fueled a generation of political violence abroad–some 46,000 civilian deaths and 69,000 national military and police deaths in Afghanistan, at least 185,000 civilian deaths and at least 45,000 national military and police in Iraq (per estimates from the Costs of War Project). 

US air strikes and drone strikes alone have resulted in anywhere from 22,000 to 48,000 civilian deaths in theaters ranging from Afghanistan to Yemen, per the UK-based organization Airwars. Even a more conservative New America estimate suggests hundreds of civilians killed as part of US drone campaigns in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya.

Emphasizing the decades-long fallout of the 9/11 terror attacks–the death, injury and destruction stirred up thousands of miles away–is a necessary step toward winding down the far-reaching military commitments of the post-9/11 era. Focusing solely on direct US casualties otherwises obscure the ways that the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has been little short of disastrous for Muslim communities from the Afghan countryside to the LA suburbs. Yet it is far from clear that a fragile coalition centered around skepticism of US military force can extend public opposition to large-scale U.S. military deployments to constraining the less-visible “violence management” of the GWOT.

Discussions of the withdrawal from Afghanistan over the course of this year suggest that, at least at present,  there are sharp limits on public and even elite support for any large-scale, “boots-on-the-ground” military venture in the Middle East Despite a clear gap between more pro-war elite opinion and the general US public, the idea of retaining troops in Afghanistan did not command the kind of broad elite consensus that, say, the invasion of Iraq did in 2002-3. No less a hawk than Jennifer Rubin–who once blogged that President Obama’s “sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those… for his fellow citizens”–has come out in force to defend the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

True, this Spring saw political figures such as Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Ro Khanna have emphasized diplomatic engagement with the Taliban and using of foreign aid as a positive incentive (rather than wielding sanctions as a cudgel) to support human rights in Afghanistan. Others have pressed the Biden administration to limit the possibility of future “forever wars” by reigning in an expansive US drone-strike program and enacting stronger Congressional constraints on presidential use-of-force powers writ large.

However, support for the Afghanistan withdrawal has equally reflected a belief in the “smarter” use of US military might. This entails raining death and destruction on terrorist networks (and civilian bystanders) through air wars and drone strikes, while redirecting personnel and material towards more pressing “strategic threats” – namely Russia and China. When Fareed Zakaria frames a US commitment to Afghanistan as “imperial overextension,” it his problem seems to be with the overextension, not the imperial presence. 

At the same time, for all the efforts of conservative “restrainers,” the return of a Republican Presidency would almost certainly undo any efforts toward military “restraint.” Despite talk of “Donald the Dove,” the Trump administration maintained US troop commitments abroad and unleashed unprecedented bombing campaigns in Afghanistan, while seemingly wrecking the Iran nuclear deal for good.

A true test of a US anti-war movement is whether it can build public support for further troop drawdowns beyond mass deployments to these two countries. Thus far, recent shifts in US foreign policy thinking are far from sufficient to secure tangible reductions in Defense spending even in a Democratic-controlled Congress. Should efforts to present “great power competition” as a global threat to the United States gain traction, it is not clear that a coalition counseling restraint could forestall the kind of broad public backing that the Bush administration secured for both the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq.

In reflecting on the Second World War, the Chicago writer Lee Sandlin once wrote of the war’s memory “trailing off into nothingness and doubt,” and of wars ending “when peace permanently wins out.” Our challenge now lies not only in reminding US society of the costs of endless wars, but also in convincing the US public and its leadership that the United States can one day again be at peace.

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Andrew Leber is a PhD Candidate at Harvard University’s Department of Government. Follow him on Twitter at @AndrewMLeber.

By Trevor Hayes

As America’s 20 year long mission in Afghanistan comes to a close, conversations around the long awaited withdrawal of US forces have centered almost entirely around the binary question of maintaining a US troop presence in the country. This binary conversation – one that reduces “engagement” to military presence – demonstrates the tunnel vision of policymakers and commentators over the past 2 decades. 

To acknowledge the consequences of militaristic adventurism and failed state-building, the United States needs to take reparative action to provide justice for the people of Afghanistan. One of the most direct ways it can do so is by expediting visa processing for Afghans who worked with the US occupation and expanding refugee intake for all those affected by the present and coming conflict. This approach, at least when limited to the first group, appears to already be a focus of the Biden administration. But the people of Afghanistan deserve more.

Continue reading “Reparations for Afghanistan: Redefining US “Engagement”” →

By Yong Kwon

Following talks spearheaded by the Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, G20 finance ministers and central bank governors agreed to endorse a global minimum tax for corporations of at least 15%. This is a good start. But it is also important to remember that this effort to prevent corporations from spurning their dues to society is only one component of what needs to be done to ensure that the benefits of a globalized economy are shared more equitably with American workers. 

Continue reading “Global Tax Regime: A Good Start, But We Must Go Further” →

By Elizabeth Beavers

In a recent House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Representative Ilhan Omar asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken an obvious question. She first reflected on the fact that the United States opposes International Criminal Court (ICC) probes into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan and Palestine because such investigations would include examining US and Israeli actions, respectively. She also noted that neither Israel nor the United States have utilized their domestic justice systems to hold their own officials accountable for these atrocities. And so she posed this query: if both domestic and international courts are unavailable to victims of atrocities in Afghanistan and Palestine – whether committed by Hamas, the Taliban, Israel, or the United States – where are those victims supposed to go for justice? 

Continue reading “Ilhan Omar was Right: The Ugly Reality of International “Justice”” →