Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current

Affairs Magazine. Returning to the program today is Van Jackson, Professor of International

Relations at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. He is one of the left's leading foreign policy thinkers.

He's the author, books like Pacific Power Paradox, and most recently,

the new book Grand Strategies of the Left, the Foreign policy of progressive world making available from the

Cambridge University Press.

Van Jackson, thanks for returning to current affairs.

Very excited to be here.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I was delighted when I saw you were putting out this book because this book is the

answer to a question that I have a lot. I critique U.S.

foreign policy quite a bit, but I don't have a coherent theory of what a left alternative

ought to be. And what you've done in this book so nicely is you've taken seriously the question,

okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're anti-war. We know we're anti, we know we don't like war. All right.

We know that we don't, that we think American power does a ton of terrible stuff around the

world. But what are we for? How would we use power? These are very important questions. But I want to start with, the book is called Grand Strategies of the Left. I want to zero in first on the term grand strategy, because in many ways, you know, you kind of begin the book critiquing an academic public policy, think tag discourse that is kind of international relations strategic

thinking. And maybe you could tell us, for people who are not familiar at all with this world

of thought to which this book is a kind of intervention, maybe you could let us know, you know,

what the kind of dominant traditions in this kind of thinking are.

Yes, that's a great way to start.

So, Grand Strategy is a term.

For people on the left, it's musty, it's foreign, it reaches back to some, you know, tradition

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