A Foreign Policy for the Left

November 6, 2017
Walzer (Just and Unjust Wars) insightfully analyzes why the American left has “never gotten a good grip on foreign policy or on security policy” and offers a path forward for “socialists, social-democrats, and left-leaning liberals” to develop principled positions. His critiques are grounded in the observation that, overall, the left has not succeeded in realizing its aims. Underlying his arguments is a plea for acknowledgment that a country’s responsibilities toward the leaders and citizens of other nations are complex and irreducible to a sound bite or tweet, and so ethical leftists must be able to simultaneously support and criticize—for example, they must be able to advocate for movements of national liberation while condemning acts of terror ostensibly committed to further them. His insistence on not pulling punches, as when he notes that the left was responsible for the most bloodshed in the 20th century, will gain him a hearing among open-minded centrists and rightists. But his readership is his colleagues on the left, whom he calls to task for being reluctant to condemn Islamist terror, reflexively anti-Israel, and unthinkingly opposed to the use of force. This essential, jargon-free volume issues clear-eyed prescriptions for drawing necessary moral distinctions in a complicated world.