Welcome to What is To Be Done?

A Substack on US Foreign Policy

Perhaps because I had just returned from a trip to Finland and the Baltics - a trip that included a stint on an overnight train departing from Helsinki station - that when I panicked late last week and set up this Substack as a Twitter alternative, I chose to name it What Is To Be Done? The Burning Questions of U.S. Foreign Policy.

The most famous prior transit of that station, of course, was the infamous journey undertaken by Lenin and his Bolshevik allies in April 1917, which would end in their arrival at St. Petersburg’s Finland Station, Lenin’s famous speech calling for “peace, bread, and land,” and ultimately, in the October Revolution.

I’m certainly no Marxist. And while I might not be first against the wall when the Revolution comes, I suspect that with my own personal mix of European social democratic convictions and free market liberalism, I probably wouldn’t last long either. So why choose this title?

Indeed, though the title of Lenin’s book has always stuck with me,¹ it’s as much the substance of the piece that prompted this choice. In What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement, Lenin not only explores more traditional Marxist topics – the relation of the people to revolution, the notion of class consciousness, etc. – but begins to assess how one would operationalize a Marxist revolution.

It is here that Lenin first advocates his theory of ‘vanguardism,’ the idea that a small subset of intellectuals might be able to educate and organize larger segments of the working class in order to push towards revolution. This was a radical notion at the time among Marxists, who had long assumed that the eventual communist revolution would emerge naturally from the proletarian masses in the course of historical development. Instead, Lenin suggested the potential for political change to advance through education and organization and advocated an all-Russia newspaper that would carry out this function. What Is To Be Done? expresses the radical idea that historically significant policy shifts can be shaped and prepared for, not merely awaited.

My own work focuses on U.S. foreign policy and how U.S. policymakers should respond to a changing world. Though my academic background is in energy politics, Russia, and the Middle East, I spend much of time these days thinking about questions of change and continuity in U.S. foreign policy. The United States faces a rapidly changing world yet has a policy community whose ideas are still in many ways stuck in the bad old days of the unipolar 1990s.

At the same time, there are emerging criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. Some of these come from the progressive anti-war left, some from the emerging nationalist right, and others build on a long tradition of realist opposition to U.S. overextension. But while these critics – myself included – have been relatively successful in their attacks on America’s failures in the war on terror, they have been far less successful in gaining traction when it comes to burden-sharing, alliance politics, or military spending. Meanwhile, the integral politics of this ‘restraint’ coalition are almost as complex as the politics of how it fits into the broader landscape of US foreign policy contestation.

How do elite debates and world events produce new foreign policy consensus? How should we think about the inherently difficult politics of building coalitions in the policy space? Is it possible to hold together coalitions on foreign policy in the face of difficult dilemmas like the war in Ukraine? Is it even possible to build a new bipartisan consensus in foreign policy – one better suited to our era of emerging multipolarity – or are we doomed to spiral into a politicized partisan divide on the issue?

What Is To Be Done? is indeed the burning question of our time on foreign policy; the ways in which we approach the politics of policy change in that space will help to shape the outcomes we see.

For those who aren’t familiar with my prior work, here are a few relevant pieces that bear on this question:

• On the coalitional politics of U.S. foreign policy: Strategies of Restraint, Foreign Affairs

• On the Biden administration’s inability to build a new foreign policy consensus: Why The US Still Can’t Have It All, Just Security

• On the Republican foreign policy establishment: Battlegrounds: The Fight for US foreign Policy, Texas National Security Review

• On realism and US foreign policy: In Praise of Lesser Evils, Foreign Affairs

• On expertise, Trump, and US foreign policy change: Build a Better Blob, Foreign Affairs

• My regular column, It’s Debatable, can be found at Foreign Policy every other week.

So welcome! I expect updates here to be semi-regular, informal and blog-like in nature, at least so long as Twitter survives. But I will use it on a regular basis to keep folks apprised of my work elsewhere, and perhaps more regularly if the bird site does actually die. If you have thoughts, please drop them in the comments or drop me an email in response! One of the things I have always found most valuable on Twitter is the interaction with folks, whether or not I agree with them; I’d like to enjoy the same kind of productive exchange here.

Next up: Field notes from my recent swing through Europe and some thoughts on the energy crisis and American economic statecraft.

1. The title was taken from Victor Chernyshevsky’s novel of the same name, and was itself a conscious homage to an earlier generation of Russian intellectuals.