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?

There’s a few different things that are going on. The first is that the Democratic Party for decades has accepted a bipartisan consensus about how to think about the US in the world, which is a variant of Cold War nationalism. This is the idea that US interests are the world’s interests because the US is committed to freedom and equality from the founding, and for this reason, it has a special responsibility on the global stage as the first nation among equals.

This justifies a continuous exercise of international police power as well as the idea that for the US, international legal constraints aren’t binding. The US can move in and out of what the law might require because ultimately it is an exceptional country, engaged in the exceptional work of backstopping the post-war order. That’s a view that from Obama to Bush was shared.

The second big issue is that following World War II in the early days of the Cold War, the Left and the labor movement accepted a cleaving of domestic and foreign politics. In this cleavage, foreign policy is left to this bipartisan consensus and domestic policy concerns what would be viewed as bread-and-butter issues about the material improvement of citizens.

That’s had a significant effect on the life of the country; on how foreign policy is not understood as something that’s about the everyday material experience and needs of working people.

Barack Obama was an interesting case because he campaigned and came into office as something of an antiwar candidate. He did not leave office in the same way. How do you read what happened to him?

It’s a remarkable indication of the limited effect of even massive political organizing in actually redirecting foreign policy and the orientation of the state. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the reason why Obama was elected was not just because of the financial crisis and the particularity of his own charismatic personality, but because he was the antiwar candidate.

That’s the thing that differentiated him from Clinton, and it’s certainly true that he planned at the beginning of his first term to close Guantanamo, which was a massive eyesore for the country. But it’s also the case that what he did almost immediately was to turn over foreign policy to the hawks. You’d think that if you beat Clinton because you’re the antiwar candidate, Clinton wouldn’t then become Secretary of State, and you wouldn’t give a senior position to Joe Biden, who was one of the most vociferous defenders of the war and of truly terrible policies like carving up Iraq into mini sectarian states.

Or have somebody like Samantha Power as such a central foreign policy decision-maker. That’s an indication of the extent to which Obama, at the end of the day, accepted the baseline principles of Cold War American imperialism and primacy. It’s not a surprise then that many of the practical policies looked quite similar to those of the Bush years, like with the use of drone strikes.

The way I read Obama’s critique [of American foreign policy during his 2008 campaign] is really as debate internal to the American foreign policy establishment. You can see this internal debate in books like Ronan Farrow’s calling for a greater focus on diplomacy. There’s clearly a debate that exists within the foreign policy establishment about what you might think of as soft versus hard power. It’s about the extent to which there should be more investment in the State Department and diplomatic efforts, less of a focus on the hard edge of the defense establishment.

But that disagreement — where I think Obama was coming from — is a disagreement that is not about the ends. It’s not about the ends of the state; such as whether or not the US should have a basic right to intervene in internal politics of foreign states, whether it should have this international police power. The disagreement is about means and whether or not those ends are best served by slightly different means. Chase Madar’s review of Farrow’s book makes this point beautifully.

My own view is that, yes, we should absolutely invest in diplomacy. We should be suspicious of some of the hawkishness and aggressiveness that the Obama administration faced. But if you’re just giving more money to diplomats, yet they’re trained within the same overarching vision of what US power does, you’re not going to see ultimate shifts in the underlying policies. Over time, you’ll still end up generating condition that reproduce the same cycles of interventionism.