“Social Democracy at Home Requires Anti-Imperialism Abroad”
An internationalist, anti-imperialist vision has been all but abandoned by the Left. We need to rebuild that vision.
Plane taking off from the American aircraft carrier ‘Constellation’ in the Gulf of Tonkin, Vietnam, November, 1968.Terry Fincher / Getty
The Left has made huge gains in discussing domestic policies like Medicare for All in recent years, but we haven’t figured out how to make a strong internationalist, anti-imperialist foreign policy just as central to the new leftist political agenda. Aziz Rana, a professor at Cornell University’s School of Law, has been wrestling with this quandary in recent years — why leftists are afraid to talk about foreign policy, and why they shouldn’t be.
Rana spoke with Doug Henwood on this question for his podcast Behind the News. You can listen to Behind the News on Jacobin Radio by subscribing here.
Doug Henwood
We’ve seen a surprising incursion of social-democratic politics into the US discourse, but we haven’t seen that much progress on thinking about the rest of the world. What do you think is the problem? Why is there so little in the way of a left internationalism?
Aziz Rana
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