How American Progressives Think About Asian Security

Democrats running for the 2020 U.S. presidential nomination implicitly accept – or at least have not rejected – the premise that the United States’ fate is linked to that of the broader Indo-Pacific in some manner. None give any indication that they seek to revolutionize or entirely overturn the U.S. approach to Asia. Yet the candidates hold partly contrasting philosophies about foreign policy and America’s role in the world, and have said little about how they might secure U.S. interests in the region.

The foreign policy differences among the candidates, as well as their areas of consensus, matter because while Asia is unlikely to weigh heavily on the outcome of the 2020 election (barring a crisis or war), the inverse is not true. The election is likely to have significant repercussions for Asian security. The United States’ influence across the region, its myriad commitments, and ample military presence mean that dramatic regional shifts could follow from even modest changes in U.S. policy.

But what changes are conceivable, and why? That requires unpacking the diversity of philosophies about foreign policy that exist among America’s self-described political progressives.

Progressive Schools of Foreign Policy Thought

Liberal internationalism has dominated the foreign policy of the Democratic Party for more than a generation. It represents the pursuit of liberal values abroad – democracy promotion, human rights, free trade, and the legitimacy of international institutions – but it does so through the effective hegemonic leadership of the United States. Liberal internationalists favor multilateralism and economic interdependence, but center both on a United States whose prominence requires not just a forward military presence in Asia, but military superiority over all potential adversaries and the sustainment of the United States’ system of bilateral alliances. In this view, a stable rules-based international order exists because the strongest power in the international system participates in international institutions and allows itself to be restrained by international norms and commitments.

But for the first time since the end of the Cold War, default liberal internationalism faces intellectually coherent challenges from the left. Progressive internationalism, best embodied in the foreign policy platforms of Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, would reform U.S. foreign policy to better align it with democratic values. This school of progressive foreign policy thought seeks to elevate the strategic importance of some “liberal” elements of liberal internationalism – specifically democracy promotion and human rights protections – but without perpetual military superiority and with deep skepticism about the merits of military interventions abroad. It rejects the realist imperative for alliances of convenience with autocratic nations, and seeks above all to reduce global inequality and transnational corruption because they are key underlying causes of so much insecurity in the world.

An alternative to progressive internationalism, grounded in an admixture of anti-imperial and realpolitik reasoning, has also emerged. This strand of progressive thought sees U.S. foreign policy itself as among the chief causes of global insecurity. In this view, if the United States was more restrained in the use of force abroad, abandoned military superiority, and maintained fewer security commitments, the United States would be safer and the world more stable. This more critical perspective, which The Nation magazine editor Katrina vanden Heuvel has described as “progressive realism,” would, for reasons of pragmatism, be open to accommodating some extraterritorial demands of autocrats. As Atlantic writer Peter Beinart has argued, progressive foreign policy should not contest China and Russia in their creation of geopolitical spheres of influence that violate the freedoms of smaller states that would fall in their respective orbits. Opposing Chinese or Russian expansion would risk more harm to more people than simply using adroit diplomacy to come to mutual understandings about how the world might be ordered.

While this school of progressive thought has traditionally had little presence in Washington, it has found representation in the voices of some new members of Congress like Representatives Rohit Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. To remedy their historical absence from conversations about national security, in 2019 some progressive realists formed a new think tank called the Quincy Institute, in partnership with academic realists and political libertarians. Their goal: Curbing American military power and promoting “responsible statecraft.”

A fourth school of progressive foreign policy, which might be described as neo-pacifist, is explicitly nonviolent in its orientation and is best expressed in the grassroots anti-war movements from Vietnam to Iraq. It shares with progressive internationalism and progressive realism a skepticism about the merits of military power, but on primarily moral rather than strategic grounds. And while neo-pacifism has historically had little elite representation, its boosters include recent presidential candidates Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Marianne Williamson, as well as grassroots peace-building organizations like Win Without War and Code Pink.

The differences among these progressive camps are a matter of degree, not kind. They prefer multilateralism and institutions to raw power politics. They all seek to promote democracy, albeit in different ways. And, with the exception of liberal internationalism, they share skepticism about the efficacy of the threat and use of military force. But their competing outlooks nevertheless translate into a number of uncertainties for Asia policy.

The Asian Security Agenda

The field of 2020 democratic presidential candidates has echoed parts of each of these four schools of thought, though few align fully with a single idealized school. Understanding what makes these camps different helps us anticipate how U.S. Asia policy could change even though candidates have weighed in only selectively (and tentatively) on discrete issues. Looking at the contemporary Asian security agenda, we see some areas of clear consensus, some potential disagreements, and some key questions about defense strategy that have so far gone unanswered entirely.

China Policy

Competition with China will persist beyond the Trump presidency no matter what type of progressivism prevails in the Democratic Party. The imperial character of Chinese foreign policy is a problem for every type of progressive, and the major Democratic candidates have all indicated that they consider China a strategic concern. The potential for China to end up with a favorable balance of power in its geographic backyard presents a challenge for U.S. defense policy no matter who serves as president. And to the extent China’s foreign policy ambitions are expansionist – circumscribing the laws or self-determination of other polities – all but the progressive realists believe in taking resistance action. Even Williamson, a conscientious peace-building candidate, when asked about China, took a sobering stance, telling the Council on Foreign Relations “China’s treatment of the Uyghurs and Hong Kong reflect their aggressive drive for domination and their disdain for human rights and democracy.” China’s hostility to democracy at home and abroad makes it extremely difficult not to compete with China.

Where progressives diverge most is on how, and how comprehensively, to compete. The dominant view of liberal internationalists in Washington now sees China as deliberately circumventing and undermining the institutions and arrangements comprising the “liberal international order.” China poses a threat not just because it exploits economic interdependence to coerce others, not just because of rampant intellectual property (IP) theft that undermines U.S. technological advantages, and not just because China is demonstrably hostile to open societies. China is also a threat because its growing military power challenges what liberal internationalists believe is the prerequisite for the international order – U.S. military superiority.

But liberal internationalists have historically taken a more hopeful view of U.S.-China relations and one candidate in the 2020 race has hinted at retaining that perspective. Candidate Andrew Yang commented in a speech at Harvard University on February 15, 2019, that “I think China’s being set up as an antagonist by the U.S.,” and that he is already a “cult hero in China,” suggesting China likes him because he takes a positive sum view that eschews competition. Yang’s comments harken to a pre-2016 liberal internationalist belief in the hope of Chinese political reform and the belief that economic interdependence imposes what political scientist Erik Gartzke has called a “capitalist peace.” Yet even Yang has recognized that China’s IP theft and other economic practices work at cross-purposes with U.S. interests and violate international law.

Progressive realism shares Yang’s reluctance to confront China, but for strategic rather than economic reasons. Progressive realists’ antagonism toward policies that risk engendering future military commitments lead them to prefer a modus vivendi with China that largely rejects the premise of U.S. strategic competition. Progressive realism supports, at a minimum, de facto abandonment of Hong Kong, constraining arms sales to Taiwan, and ending freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea. Arrangements like these, and perhaps others, are how spheres of influence work – strategic bargains based on mutual understandings, but at the expense of smaller states and societies.

Most candidates, however, have been far from sanguine about China. Senator Warren has been the most vocal in channeling progressive internationalism’s myriad concerns. As she wrote for Foreign Policy on October 3, 2019, “China’s economic policies undercut American workers. Its military ambitions and coercive diplomacy threaten peace in Asia and beyond. Its repression at home, including its treatment of the Uighur minority, and attacks on norms abroad risk eroding liberal values around the world.” Candidates Pete Buttigieg, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and Beto O’Rourke have all mentioned one or more of these aspects of how China threatens democracy.

And while no candidates have spoken about the transnational corruption that China’s foreign policy promotes, the facts suggest even greater confrontation to come: China has established a track record of using bilateral political and economic deals with small states on its geographic periphery – from Kyrgyzstan to Mongolia, and Cambodia to Nepal – to weaken democratic governance, censor public debates, and enrich political elites at the expense of the civil societies they govern. Chinese foreign policy has engaged in a legal but corrupt pattern of enriching autocrats and exacerbating global inequality. For progressive internationalists and neo-pacifists in particular, this cannot stand, but their preference for the tools of diplomacy and civil society mean that competition with China will be more political than military.

Hub-and-Spoke Alliances

All progressives would seek to reform the “hub-and-spoke” bilateral structure into something less imperial and more democratic. Even liberal internationalism, the approach least likely to alter the traditional U.S. alliance system, sought to diversify U.S. alliances away from a hub-and-spoke structure and toward multilateral networks during the Obama administration. Seeking to multilateralize bilateral alliance interaction is to be expected by any progressive approach.

But alliances present two possible cleavages among Democrats – whether allies are primarily a strategic asset or a strategic risk, and the importance of the ally’s political character.

Liberal internationalism is unique in seeing all five U.S. alliances – Australia, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Thailand – as an essential asset. A Joe Biden presidency would, in all likelihood, restore Obama-era alliance dynamics, but starting from the depths of whatever credibility deficit might have accrued during the Trump presidency. Progressive realists, by contrast, tend to see allies as a strategic liability. Even if allies are necessary to maintain a balance of power among competitive states, that benefit would be weighed against the proportion of the burden carried by the client state and the risk of the United States getting dragged into unwanted conflict.

The democratic vs. authoritarian character of the ally also matters for progressive internationalists and neo-pacifists. Sanders and Warren, in particular, have emphasized the importance of alliances as one of many potential forms of solidarity with the democratic world. All else being equal, this puts Australia, Japan, and South Korea in good stead. But they have also stressed that partnering with autocrats – even for strategic reasons – has both morally corroded U.S. leadership abroad and done great harm to the populations being deprived of rights by our aid to their oppressors. The moral imperative becomes the strategic imperative when partnerships with dictators gives rise to conditions that produce civil wars, ethnic conflicts, and revolutions.

The greatest alliance shift that a progressive might usher in is distancing the United States from the Philippines. The United States enjoys a positive relationship with the Philippines and derives the strategic benefit of U.S. bases there – which aids in counterterrorism efforts and helps the United States balance China in Southeast Asia. But those benefits do not justify furnishing arms and extending commitments to the Philippines’ President Rodrigo Duterte, who threatens journalists and sanctions extrajudicial killings while remaining mercurial about whether he’ll unilaterally start a war with or utterly capitulate to China. Even if a pro-alliance liberal internationalist were to win the White House, there is reason to expect some parts of the Democratic Party to seek U.S. disentanglement from the Philippines. For instance, Andom Ghebreghiorgis, the democratic challenger to Representative Eliot Engel, is running on a platform of anti-militarist, anti-imperial foreign policy that explicitly puts the Philippines in the same category as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The progressive internationalist, progressive realist, and neo-pacifist perspectives all align with Ghebreghiorgis’s position.

North Korea

Progressives tend to have similar views about North Korea. They deplore the Kim regime’s human rights abuses, but uniformly favor a diplomatic – not military – approach to Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons. All have also expressed fatalism about the inability to denuclearize North Korea. Their small differences come into play on presidential summits, sanctions, and a declaration ending the Korean War.

All the candidates have decried Trump’s meetings as failing to produce more than a photo op, though Sanders would also meet with Kim Jong Un without preconditions. Warren and Buttigieg have suggested their willingness to meet with Kim if it credibly advanced the goal of nuclear stability. Biden, Harris, and O’Rourke have intimated skepticism about the value of a Kim Jong Un meeting, but even they have not ruled out the possibility. Because all the candidates support diplomacy, the level and mode will primarily depend on how they expect different configurations of diplomacy to produce results.

The related question of sanctions relief to North Korea could surface some modest disagreements as well. With the exception of Williamson, who has publicly stated that sanctions do not work so should be relieved early on in a diplomatic process, nobody has endorsed granting unilateral, unreciprocated sanctions relief. Most candidates – including Buttigieg, Harris, Sanders, and Warren – have charted a middle course, willing to grant some reversible or partial sanctions relief as long as they have confidence North Korea will in turn grant nuclear concessions of some kind.

The decision of when to declare an end to the Korean War transcends progressive schools of thought. Sanders and Williamson – who typify progressive internationalism and neo-pacifism respectively – have previously supported ending the Korean War. The caucus of new progressive Democrats in the House of Representatives, including Ted Lieu and Rohit Khanna, who frequently echo the talking points of progressive realism, have also backed an end-of-war declaration. Notably, nobody has opposed the idea of ending the Korean War. But for other candidates – specifically Biden, Harris, Warren, Buttigieg, and O’Rourke – such a decision would depend on a number of factors, including whether threat perceptions and progress in nuclear negotiations warranted it, whether South Korea wanted it, and whether the American public had strong feelings about it either way.

Defense Lacuna

Defense policy is the one area where the candidates notionally appear most united and yet have also been the most silent. Skepticism about the threat and use of force abounds in the zeitgeist of the Democratic Party. Three of the four schools of progressive thought – all but liberal internationalism – demand a reduction in defense spending as part of a rejection of military superiority. Yet no presidential candidate has defined the Pentagon’s roles and missions, force structure requirements, strategic concepts, force posture plans, or even use of force standards.

Reticence on defense is understandable. For progressives, making explicit decisions about defense policy risks alienating the Democratic base during the primary nomination and narrows future maneuvering room in a general election. An anti-militarist sensibility among progressives makes specifying any kind of positive function for defense seem like a compromise of values. And any promises about slashing defense will have to reckon with the reality that the military services and Congress have many ways to ensure the Pentagon remains both well-funded and central to U.S. foreign policy. Put simply, defense thinking and decision-making is terrain that does not generally favor progressives.

Yet Asia is the theater that most affects, and is most affected by, defense policy and strategy. Conflict scenarios involving China and North Korea have long been the biggest drivers of defense spending because they play an outsized role in generating force structure and basing requirements. Ultimately two major questions on which progressives disagree will be hugely consequential for the future of defense in Asia: How important is military superiority or a balance of power with China? And how acceptable are sphere-of-influence arrangements whereby the United States accommodates Chinese de facto control of certain parts of Asia?

Thinking Differently

Progressive thinking about foreign policy generally is likely to impact U.S. Asia policy in other ways not well captured by simply running through the checklist of Asian security issues.

Rejecting the Capitalist Peace

All progressives, save liberal internationalists, are uncomfortable with linking regional stability to the prevalence of regional free trade. Many policy elites – in Asia and in Washington – attribute the absence of great-power wars in Asia to economic interdependence. Not so for progressive internationalists, progressive realists, and neo-pacifists, all of whom opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership. These progressives wish to condition international trade on substantial labor and environmental protections as well as anti-corruption measures. Similarly, while all candidates criticize the folly of Trump’s trade war with China, only staunch liberal internationalists like Biden, O’Rourke, and Yang have opposed tariffs on China. Other major candidates – including Harris, Sanders, and Warren – have indicated that tariffs, and industrial policy more generally, would be a tool of U.S. statecraft toward China.

Peace-Building

We might also expect progressive U.S. Asia policy to invest in civil society-building to an unprecedented degree. Initiatives like development aid, dispute mediation, poverty alleviation, peacekeeping, and election monitoring have long been part of the U.S. foreign policy toolkit, but always on the periphery of strategy. Progressive internationalists and neo-pacifists in particular tend to take these tools more seriously, and would deploy them accordingly. In places like Myanmar these types of tools could determine not only whether ethnic civil war persists, but also whether the country decides to pursue nuclear weapons again. Much of the non-traditional Asian security agenda – from maritime piracy to nuclear weapons proliferation – deals with proximate sources of insecurity.

The progressive internationalist and neo-pacifist emphasis on civil society-building and global inequality is partly an attempt to address the underlying causes of conflict. This is one of the ways in which a progressive realist agenda might differ from other progressives. Although progressive realists also support various forms of peace-building, one cannot realistically deploy democracy-building and anti-corruption measures in societies whose fates have been de facto bargained away to Beijing.

Multilateralism

It is also highly likely that progressives would re-center the Asian security order on a combination of regional institutions, multi-track diplomacy, and arms control regimes. One of the unheralded differences between the Asia policies of Trump and Obama is that the former privileges military power above all else while the latter buttressed military power with multilateralism and institutionalized cooperation. Liberal internationalists would likely revert back to Obama’s formula; other forms of progressive thought would do the same, but with a declining emphasis on the role of the military. It would amount to a transformation of mindset and narrative about the United States’ role even more than it would be a change in U.S. actions across the region.

There is no single way to capture how progressive politics could impact Asia policy, because there is no single way that progressives think about security and the United States’ role in the world. No matter what strand of progressive thinking comes to prominence, U.S. Asia policy will look and feel different than what the Trump administration has pursued. But don’t necessarily expect a return to the Asia policy of Democrats past.