Real Progressive Realism

Britain’s new foreign secretary says he’s a “progressive realist.” Don’t be fooled.

Note: An adapted version of this essay was published in the Washington Post.

“Progressive realism,” according to the Wikipedia article about it, is “a foreign policy paradigm largely made popular by Robert Wright.” That’s me! So in principle I should have been gratified by the recent Foreign Affairs essay “The Case for Progressive Realism,” written by the British politician David Lammy. And I should be close to ecstatic now that Lammy, thanks to the Labour Party’s victory in this week’s election, is slated to be Britain’s new foreign secretary.

Yet I’m not feeling festive. It turns out that Lammy’s version of progressive realism isn’t mine. Which, by itself, is OK; the world is full of policy prescriptions that aren’t mine, and many of them work out well. But I don’t think Lammy’s version of progressive realism will work out well.

In a sense, it’s already demonstrated that. Lammy depicts his foreign policy vision as new, but it’s pretty much the same vision that has long guided his party and comparable western parties, including the Democratic Party in America. And this vision is, in critical respects, not very different from the neoconservatism that has dominated Republican foreign policy for most of the past few decades. Lammy’s progressive realism is one of the several variants of Blobthink that have together played such a big role in creating the mess we’re in.

To put a finer point on that mess: We live in a world with a coalescing cold war and raging hot wars, a world with little respect for international law and with eroding international norms. And this has two very bad consequences, one of them immediate and one that will be a slower burn:

1. Extreme volatility. There are two conflicts—in Ukraine and in the Middle East—that are just a miscalculation or two away from becoming regional conflagrations and drawing US troops into them. And one of those wars would put two nuclear superpowers in direct conflict for the first time in world history. Meanwhile, a war in the Pacific between nuclear powers is also becoming thinkable as US-China tensions simmer.

2. Descent toward chaos. Growing international disarray leaves the world too divided to effectively confront momentous planetary challenges that demand a coordinated international approach. These challenges include, famously, mitigating climate change and, less famously, (1) preventing conflict in an increasingly militarized outer space (conflict that, by depriving nations of real-time satellite-based monitoring of an adversary’s military, could induce panic that leads to nuclear war); (2) preventing the various kinds of turbulence and mass suffering that the ungoverned development of artificial intelligence could bring (an especially daunting challenge if that development proceeds in a cold war environment); (3) preventing an unprecedentedly lethal pandemic of the kind that under-regulated biotechnology could bring—whether the cause is an accidental lab leak or the intentional deployment of a bioweapon.

As the world gets more mired in conflict and tension, and the attendant neglect of these issues moves the planet closer to catastrophe, David Lammy is telling us to keep doing what we’ve been doing but to start calling it progressive realism.

To be fair: Lammy’s variant of Blobthink is less pernicious than some other major variants, as I’ll explain. Still, it isn’t the cure for what ails us. And real progressive realism, I believe, is. 

A lot has happened in the world since I first outlined progressive realism 18 years ago in a New York Times essay, and I’ve refined my conception of it accordingly (as reflected in, for example, a shorter 2020 Washington Post op-ed). But the critical contrasts between mainstream foreign policy thinking and true progressive realism remain, and Lammy’s exercise in mainstream foreign policy thinking nicely highlights them.

By “realism,” Lammy seems to mean just “being realistic.” He writes that “when progressives act realistically and practically, they change the world.” To him realism is “a politics based on respect for facts.”

I join Lammy in opposing policies based on respect for fictions. And so would everyone else involved in foreign policy discourse. So “realism” in Lammy’s sense of the word isn’t very helpful in defining a distinctive ideology.

But the word “realism” also denotes an international relations paradigm: a view of how the world works and corresponding ideas about how foreign policy should be conducted. There are different schools of realist thought, with somewhat different models of how the world works and correspondingly different policy inclinations. But there’s one policy principle that is common to pretty much all varieties of realism, and it distinguishes true progressive realism from Lammy’s version and for that matter from all mainstream schools of liberal foreign policy as well as from neoconservatism. It’s a principle that some people find offputting, even immoral, upon first encountering it—a reaction that, I think, reflects an incomplete understanding of its implications. 

That principle is this: You take nations as they are.

From a realist’s perspective, statecraft is about crafting relations with other states, not crafting the character of other states. Realists favor holding nations accountable for their behavior toward other nations but aren’t big on holding them accountable for their internal affairs. So a realist foreign policy doesn’t prioritize democracy promotion or human rights promotion. And realists are especially averse to the coercive promotion of these things—using such levers as invasion or bombing or economic sanctions.

That doesn’t mean realists are heartless. Many realists (including me) believe that these forms of coercion rarely work and often backfire, harming their supposed beneficiaries. Cuba, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Syria—these and other countries are full of people the US is supposedly trying to help with sanctions that are actually hurting them.

Even less coercive attempts to shape internal politics can backfire. The protest movement that led to Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution of 2014 had the explicit support of, and indirect funding from, the US government. When this movement culminated in the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected president, and his replacement by a leader less sympathetic to Russia, Vladimir Putin responded by seizing Crimea and adopting a more belligerent stance toward Ukraine generally; within months Russia was supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine. This reaction put the region on the path toward a war that has devastated the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian nation and raised the prospect of a wider war, even a nuclear war.

Russia, not the US, is responsible for breaking the rules here; it violated international law by seizing Crimea and by invading Ukraine in 2022. But the Maidan revolution, and the western role in bringing it about, made these transgressions more likely. The Sevastopol naval base in Crimea houses Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, and Putin’s faith in the long-term lease that entitled Russia to that base no doubt waned after the revolution. After all, he now faced a Ukrainian regime that—as he saw it—had been installed by a western-backed coup and was hostile to Russia’s interests. And prospects weren’t brightened, from his point of view, by the fact that NATO, under pressure from George W. Bush, had six years earlier vowed to eventually make Ukraine a member.

Regardless of how justified Putin was in seeing America’s Ukraine policy as threatening, it should have been obvious to US policymakers that he would find it threatening. And a cardinal principle of realism is that—as one of its founding thinkers, Hans Morgenthau, put it—good strategy requires a “respectful understanding” of all relevant perspectives. “The political actor,” Morgenthau wrote, “must put himself into the other man’s shoes, look at the world and judge it as he does.”

The US foreign policy establishment isn’t totally devoid of people who can do that. In 2008 the Bush administration’s ambassador to Moscow, William Burns, warned in an email to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that pursuing NATO membership for Ukraine “will create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.” He wrote, “In more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests.”

Burns’s perspective failed to permeate the Bush administration, and it doesn’t seem to have permeated David Lammy. Here is the only reference, in Lammy’s Foreign Affairs essay, to a western policy that encouraged Putin to seize Crimea: “The fact that the United States did not police its red line against the use of chemical weapons in Syria… emboldened Russian President Vladimir Putin.” This is classic Blobthink: When adversaries do bad things, the two possible causes are the intrinsic badness of the adversary and the failure of the West to be tougher. Western diplomatic missteps, in contrast, have a way of eluding the foreign policy establishment’s collective memory and for that matter its initial awareness.   

The US policy that so antagonized Putin—supporting a revolution that seemed to move Ukraine closer to membership in both the European Union and NATO—was cast by American leaders as part of an effort to draw Ukraine securely into the world of liberal democracies. That framing made it harder for Americans to understand why Putin would view the policy as a strategic threat to Russia. In that sense, democracy promotion is doubly dangerous; as substantive policy it can backfire, and as rhetorical framing it can blind us to the likely backfiring. But, this double danger notwithstanding, Lammy is doubling down. He says that a big part of the progressive realist’s mission is to “defend democracy.”

Here he echoes President Biden (in keeping with the British foreign policy tradition of adopting bad American role models; Google “George Bush Tony Blair Iraq War.”). Defending democracy has become central to the framing of Biden’s foreign policy. He speaks of a global, Manichaean struggle between “democracy and autocracy.”

This framing can become a self-fulfilling prophecy—as, for example, when the sanctioning of autocratic nations drives them into closer linkage with one another, reinforcing the western perception that they represent a monolithic, ideologically motivated threat, a perception that can then lead to more sanctions, still closer linkage, and so on; or when American denunciations of illiberal government (in China, say) arouse defensive nationalist sentiment, rallying citizens around their leader and strengthening an autocratic regime. 

These kinds of dynamics, along with other factors, have been moving the world toward Cold War II, with China playing the lead nemesis role that the Soviet Union played in Cold War I. A progressive realist—unlike some other kinds of realists, and some other kinds of progressives—believes that the world can’t afford to sink into another cold war, and that the current momentum in that direction must be firmly opposed.

This position doesn’t reflect just the longstanding progressive emphasis on international cooperation. It also draws on the belief that this emphasis makes more sense than ever—and that it will make even more sense in the future. Climate change and the several issues cited above as grounds for global cooperation—threats from biotech, AI, space weapons—have something in common: They are all products of technological development, and they all make relations among the planet’s nations more non-zero-sum; they confront nations, increasingly, with a choice between cooperating to achieve win-win outcomes and failing to cooperate,  thus risking lose-lose outcomes. (I argued in my 2000 book Nonzero that this growing “non-zero-sumness” among nations is inherent in technological evolution, and I think the subsequent quarter century of technological evolution supports that thesis.) 

Though international cooperation that falls short of global scope can help address these non-zero-sum challenges, truly global governance will in some cases be required. Whether or not the Covid pandemic began with the accidental release of a genetically engineered virus, the next pandemic could begin that way—or, for that matter, via intentional release. The number of countries in which this kind of genetic engineering could happen is already large, and it grows as biotechnology develops. So the scope of international biotech regulation must ultimately reach the planetary level.

Artificial intelligence and some other technologies will eventually have this same property: their massively destructive misuse will be able to originate in any country, so no country will be safe unless all countries are part of a common regulatory system.   

Viewed in this light, Lammy’s advocacy of international governance—“progressive realists must establish global guardrails for technology with the widest possible coalition of countries”—isn’t, in the long run, ambitious enough. Still, he does recognize that China must be part of that coalition: “No grouping of states can address the global threats of the climate crisis, pandemics, and artificial intelligence unless it cooperates with Beijing… It is in everyone’s interest that China’s relationship with the West endure and evolve.”

So Lammy, to his credit, is against a full-on cold war. He envisions a United Kingdom that “simultaneously challenges, competes against, and cooperates with China as appropriate.”

This is the same formula that the Biden administration espouses for US-China relations, and it sounds fine in principle. But in the current political climate, with prevailing winds opposing extensive US-China cooperation, following this formula requires clarity of vision and steadfast focus. And one problem with the “autocracy versus democracy” framing of US-China relations is that it tends to produce blurry analysis. 

Consider this passage from Lammy’s Foreign Affairs piece:      

The broad consensus that economic globalization would inevitably breed liberal democratic values proved false. Instead, democracies have become more economically dependent on authoritarian states, with the share of world trade between democracies declining from 74 percent in 1998 to 47 percent in 2022. China provides a particularly stark case in point. The country was admitted into the World Trade Organization in 2001 under the hope that political reforms would follow economic ones. But the state became more repressive as the economy opened up.

The rise of China—which now has the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity—has ended the era of US hegemony. The world is shaped by competition between Beijing and Washington. Beijing challenges the US-led order in nearly every domain, from developing the technologies and green supply chains of the future to sourcing and processing critical raw materials. But the competition is especially fierce when it comes to security. The Chinese navy has the greatest number of warships in the world.

Some questions:

1) What exactly is the connection between the first paragraph, about China’s internal politics, and the second paragraph, about its external conduct? Is Lammy saying the broader “challenge to the US-led order” is happening because China is authoritarian, notwithstanding the fact that, historically, rising powers, including such liberal democracies as the US, have done what China is doing now—tried to expand their economic and military power and exercise it over a wider realm? Or is he just saying that this challenge to US leadership is bad because China is authoritarian? And why exactly would that be? Does he fear that China will use its power to convert other nations to authoritarian autocracy—even though the evidence for this common claim is thin, and China’s foreign policy has, if anything, been less ideologically driven than America’s?

2) What is so bad about “democracies becoming more economically dependent upon autocracies”? After all, you could just as well say that autocracies have become more dependent on democracies, since trade is reciprocal. If this trade ended, China would suffer from losing its export market just as the countries it exports to would suffer from losing access to inexpensive Chinese goods. Doesn’t this interdependence have virtues, since it may discourage conflict? Isn’t it more valuable than interdependence among western democracies, since they’re unlikely to go to war with one another anyway?

A true progressive realist would replace Lammy’s recitation of vague, and vaguely connected, anxieties with a single question about China, a question not about its internal affairs but about its conduct toward other nations. Namely: Will China play by the rules? Will it refrain from invading sovereign nations and violating their territorial rights, as the UN Charter requires? Will it honor the treaties it has signed? Will it cooperate with other nations to solve the growing number of non-zero-sum problems the world faces?

It’s by no means clear that the answer to all these questions is yes. There are grounds for worrying, in particular, that China’s regional assertiveness will lead to military conflict. But conflating concerns about China’s conduct toward other nations with qualms about China’s internal governance just complicates the tasks of (1) thinking clearly about these concerns and (2) doing something about them. The US government’s various public condemnations of China’s domestic policies, and the various economic sanctions aimed at changing those policies, are worse than ineffectual. They (1) expend finite political capital that could be better used trying to shape China’s external behavior; and (2) strengthen Xi Jinping’s grassroots support among the many Chinese nationalists who are sick of America lecturing their government—and this support gives Xi more domestic political fuel for his regional military assertiveness, which is seen by many Chinese as a way of resisting western hegemony.

I share Lammy’s disappointment that economic globalization hasn’t had a more enduringly liberalizing effect in countries like China. In my original presentation of progressive realism in 2006, I put some hope in this effect and cited it as a reason that neoconservatives should quit trying to bring liberal democracy to nations at the barrel of a gun. I also welcomed the effect because free-market democracies are more transparent than authoritarian states—and a clear view of what’s going on inside other nations, I said, would become more important as, for example, the evolution of biotechnology made bioweapons a bigger threat.

If I were re-writing that piece now, I’d emphasize that, while this kind of organic impetus toward liberalization and transparency would be nice, its failure to transpire wouldn’t be grounds for reconsidering a policy of economic engagement. After all, economic interdependence can still make war more costly and therefore discourage it, and economic engagement always affords more transparency than the alternative, whether or not the countries in question are free-market democracies.

Moreover, economic engagement can facilitate a different and increasingly critical kind of transparency. A relationship of stable interdependence can pave the way for regimens of transborder monitoring—monitoring of biotech labs and, in the future, of other kinds of facilities—that will have to play a growing role in international governance.

It should go without saying that building effective global governance requires fostering respect for international law. Many American foreign policy elites profess to support this goal—at least, they espouse its rough equivalent, the upholding of the “rules-based international order.” But if they really want to help uphold that order, they need to do two things: (1) Recognize that, as the Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman recently put it, “in large parts of the world, America’s claim to be upholding the rules-based international order is treated with derision.” (2) Recognize that this derision is well founded. (For example: the US troops that are now in Syria without the Syrian government’s permission violate the UN Charter, since the Security Council didn’t authorize their deployment.) If the world’s most powerful nation wants to strengthen the norm of complying with international law, it will have to do a better job of modeling that norm.

It’s not clear that Lammy appreciates this fact. When he attributes Putin’s 2014 seizing of Crimea to America’s failure to enforce a red line in Syria in 2013, he renders the moral of the story this way: Putin “concluded that the West no longer had the stomach to defend the rules-based order.”

It may seem petty to indict Lammy for this misdemeanor: calling on the West to defend the “rules-based order” without conveying a sense of irony. And God knows he’s not alone in doing that. But the other people doing it aren’t calling themselves progressive realists and so aren’t obliged by their self-description to evince that core value of realism, cognitive empathy. It’s hard to claim you’re following Morgenthau’s dictum to cultivate a “respectful understanding” of all relevant perspectives if you show no awareness that (a) much of the world justifiably finds American preaching about the rules-based order laughable; and (b) Putin has long been in this camp, and in fact was in it long before 2013. In 2007, before Putin first broke the most basic of the rules by committing transborder aggression, he complained to an audience of American and European officials in Munich about the US having broken that rule—and warned that if “disdain for international law” continued (which it did), all hell could break loose.

The progressive realism I’m advocating is a radical ideology. It holds that the rule of law needs to move from the level of the nation-state to the level of the planet—and that this transition needs to start soon; we have to build global governance before the technologically-based threats it could control overwhelm us and render the project hopeless. Hence the call for America to transform its conduct and even its self-conception—for it to quit invoking the “rules” selectively and opportunistically, and quit sermonizing about how other societies should organize themselves, and start tempering its narcissistic sense of exceptionalism with some humility and self-awareness. 

This agenda will strike most people in the foreign policy community as hopelessly—if you’ll pardon the expression—unrealistic. But very few of these people are conversant in the implications of technological evolution. For example: How many of them have heard of the “Kessler Effect”? That’s a hypothetical but, as outer space gets more crowded, increasingly plausible chain reaction that could be set off by the destruction of a single satellite: the debris would smash other satellites, whose debris would smash other satellites, and so on, until much of the world’s reconnaissance and communications infrastructure was inoperative—at which point various kinds of freakouts by suddenly blinded nuclear-armed nations might ensue.

So I’d ask anyone who dismisses calls for global governance (complete with global respect for international law) as naive to do the following: Study up on the drift of technological evolution and then either (1) argue persuasively that technology isn’t creating the threats I and many other observers (including Lammy) worry about or (2) come up with a plausible and less radical plan for controlling them. 

Realists are famous for focusing on national interest, and this emphasis has led some people to equate realism with unilateralism. Indeed, Lammy, in his informal taxonomy of progressive realism, assigns its support of international governance to the “progressive,” not the “realist,” part of the family tree. But that’s misleading.

It’s true, of course, that particular approaches to international governance can be distinctively progressive. A progressive realist, for example, may want international institutions to facilitate the transborder collaboration of labor unions, especially in the shaping of trade agreements. (Mexican and US labor unions have a shared interest in raising the floor on wages in Mexican auto factories—and, actually, the version of the North American trade agreement that took effect in 2020 has a provision that could have that effect on a modest scale.) And a progressive realist may pay particular attention to the impact of international governance on the global South, in keeping with the left’s concern about the plight of the less privileged and less powerful. 

Still, it’s important to understand that, generically, international governance has strong realist logic, grounded in national interest. Increasingly non-zero-sum dynamics among nations make it harder for nations to pursue their interests unless that pursuit is mediated by institutions of international governance. If nations want to reduce the damage they suffer from climate change, and be safe from massively lethal pandemics, and from the fallout caused by a military attack in outer space, and from the destabilizing chaos of ungoverned AI, they’ll have to address these risks in concert with other nations; national policy alone won’t serve the national interest.

Of course, not all realists buy this logic. Many conservative realists are deeply skeptical of international governance. And some realists—such as John Mearsheimer, the world’s most famous contemporary realist—are China hawks, and believe that America’s confrontation of China shouldn’t be constrained by adherence to international law.

But one person who did accord this logic some respect was Hans Morgenthau. In his foundational realist text Politics Among Nations, he recognized that realism’s manifestation could change as the world changed. World peace could require radical constraints on national sovereignty, he said, and the nation-state might decline in significance as “larger units” rose. Indeed, he allowed, government of planetary scope might be required if nations were to be secure from “the means of destruction which modern technology has put in their hands.” Since Morgenthau made that allusion to nuclear weapons, modern technology has put more means of destruction in our hands. And it’s in the nature of technological evolution for that trend to continue. 

Image by Nikita Petrov.