For years, popular leftist political commentator and streamer Ian Kochinsky, better known online as Vaush, has been one of the only voices on the left spending significant time outlining how the left should govern on foreign policy.
He is a vocal supporter of NATO and a positive role for America in the world, which has garnered him some ire from more “tankie-aligned” crowds on the left, who are deferential to “anti-imperialist forces,” like Russia, China, Venezuela, North Korea, and Iran, or even terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the FARC, many of which also have very troubling records, though they may, in practice though not on principle, be opposed to American imperialism and authoritarianism.
He agrees that abuses and bad systems of all stripes, whether imperialist or nominally anti-imperialist, should be opposed by the left. “The left needs to have principles and fight them, no matter if it sometimes means opposing what supposedly anti-imperialist actors do, or defending American power in the world for good things,” he added in a recent stream.
As a leftist who has worked in the foreign policy space for some time (and even spent some time within the so-called security state), I deeply believe this is a conversation the left needs to have, if it wants to actually maintain a narrative, propose a positive vision, and win.
In a new political era, one where streamers dictate the outlines of policy debates, like Hasan Piker has done with aggressive political strategy and canvassing, or Adam Mockler has done with confronting paid MAGA dullards on television, the Democrats’ main signal-setter on foreign policy should be Vaush.
I sat down with Vaush to flesh out what a leftist governing vision on foreign policy could look like.
Joseph Bouchard: Why does the left not have a good foreign policy? We have no money, no power, and we are fractionalized, but how do we turn that around to create good outcomes?
Vaush: I think one of the big problems that we’ve had is that a lot of our positions are advocacies for abstemiousness. We don’t have a positive foreign policy position. We have a negative one. We ask America to not do this and not do that, don’t intervene, don’t wage this war. And for the most part, I agree with those. But it’s important to have a positive case too. Sometimes it makes me think that if the left as a collective had control over the United States, the State Department might as well shut its doors. What are our policies? What are our principles? What do we prioritize?
I think that to an extent, the cynicism is warranted. I think especially over the past couple of years, NATO has demonstrated that it doesn’t work. Not only is it not an effective vehicle for fighting for freedom, subservient as it is to US interests, but many of the people leading it have extremely strong chauvinist biases. Some of the stuff that NATO leadership has been saying, particularly about Israel and Palestine, makes you wonder how committed they are to their universal principles of democracy. Likewise for UN involvement.
Of course, many have fairly criticized the UN for being an instrument of US power, and often that is the case because we veto everything we don’t like. But this, of course, is like half of the answer. So everything that exists is corrupt and beholden to the existing people in power. Yes, this is true. But what next? You know, what happens if Bernie had won? What happens if the leftists get everything they want domestically? What’s step two? Do you allow the United States to remain a kind of socialist bubble state where we take care of our own people? But if you’re outside the United States, the only thing we can promise you is non-interventionism. That seems a little bit of a worst-case scenario. Surely we can do more than that.
Joseph Bouchard: What do we do about the tankies? How do we deal with people like, say Hasan Piker, Glenn Greenwald, or John Kiriakou, who might be correct on certain things, like US intelligence power or opposing foreign wars, but are still too deferential to bad actors and policies (and conspiracy-brained reactionarism)?
Vaush: I think that sometimes people are acting in good faith and sometimes they’re not. There are people who are weirdly deferential to Russia when it comes to their unjust fascist war of expansion against Ukraine, and I think that sometimes that is naivete. They view Ukraine as an extension of the US’s political body, which is to a certain extent, true, but in the same way, the feeding of millions of people through us foreign aid was an extension of the US political body, and when you take it away, all you get are millions of dead children. So the argument that something is American doesn’t always mean that it’s bad, and the fact that lefties tend to default to that answer, I think, does marginalize them in many of the conversations that people might otherwise want to have about foreign aid.
“America bad” is a useful heuristic in some circumstances, but it doesn’t tell the voter what you want to do. It only tells them what you don’t want or, I guess, what you’re opposed to. It tells them your morals, not really your principles or your initiatives. There are people who act in bad faith, of course. And I, in my opinion, think it’s relatively easy to separate between these groups, even if the former is in good faith. People often listen to the latter.
There are lots of leftists, I think, who are weird on the subject of Ukraine. But if you sat them down and were like, look, it’s bad that Russia is bombing these people, right? They would go, yeah! They wouldn’t dig their feet into the sand and argue in favor of Russia’s conquest. I think that a lot of people are very rightfully cynical of what we just said about conditioning foreign aid behind, say, acceptance of homosexual marriage (I had mentioned the Conservative Party of Canada wanting to condition foreign aid on acceptance of Canadian liberal values like homosexual marriage). This is, of course, something that could be weaponized, used selectively. Why are we sanctioning Cuba? Oh, because they, I don’t know, because they won’t accept this meandering trivial social policy that we’re forcing on them, and then if they accept that, it’s going to be another one. I understand it’s good to be cynical. Unfortunately, I think that, like this, is another symptom of a politics of divestment, where, because we are cynical, we don’t want to get involved at all. It’s like a purity test.
We don’t want to make a positive case for any kind of foreign policy, because that means that we’re morally responsible for its outcome. And sometimes the outcome might be less than perfect. It might even be bad. Sometimes things just don’t pan out the way you want. And I don’t think any Twitter leftist wants to be the one to stand up and say, “yes, I’m willing to accept the possibility that the US government will abuse this policy,” because everyone around them would go, “Oh, couldn’t you have seen that coming?” Of course, that was going to happen when you know, maybe, maybe not, don’t really know. Yeah, I think that it ultimately comes back to that. It just comes back to an unwillingness to shoulder the burden of positive advocacy.
Joseph Bouchard: Is the principled left internationalism proposed by people like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ro Khanna, and so on, sufficient? What core principles should the left focus on?
Vaush: Leftists don’t talk much about foreign aid, which is a shame. And foreign aid is, of course, an instrument of US soft power. There’s no getting around that. But it’s also good to say that, Elon Musk through DOGE, canceling our foreign aid means that an estimated 9 or maybe even as many as 14 million people are dying around the world by 2030. If we agree that that foreign aid is good, why not support more foreign aid? Why not foreign aid with better conditions? Why not more aggressive foreign aid that’s tied not to the economic liberalization of countries, but social liberalization? The IMF, for example, has tied favorable loans and deals to countries that liberalize in the sense of opening up their companies or countries to foreign investment or their natural resources to exploitation. What about foreign aid conditioned on, say, the legalization of homosexual marriage?
It sounds trite, I think, but it’s not. It would make a real difference. There are a lot of countries for whom just a little bit of US foreign aid could make a very real difference. And if that’s a push, it would be an unambiguous good. I would love to see the left start to advocate for those sorts of things.
Joseph Bouchard: The right is so good at uniting behind certain policies and defending them no matter what. We have not defended NATO, the UN, pulling out of Afghanistan, USAID, the JCPOA, and other principled leftist policies as much as we should. How do we defend it, politically? Is there an era of the US being good at foreign policy?
Vaush: People in the United States have grown distrustful of the United Nations from the framework of us being the victims of UN overreach, which is insane, but that is the line that’s been effective. And it shows you how effectively Republicans have been able to control the conversation when it comes to foreign policy by being the loudest voices in the room. The Democrats don’t positively advocate for the UN the same way that Republicans negatively engage with it. Democrats aren’t as interested in constructing a narrative. So to that extent, I would actually say that the failure to build a better world, or to reason out how you build a better world, isn’t just a left of Democrats problem. It’s a left of center problem. It’s like liberals have given up on the universalism of these principles. They’re no longer arguing in favor of them. They’re only arguing that changes made to them are bad, and those are two very different things. We need to argue for them.
I don’t know, it feels like the best era of leftist foreign policy would really just be returning to a different era of abstemiousness. You go back to the 1960s and 70s. It was, don’t do the Vietnam War. You go back to the 1980s, to the 1990s, it was against Reaganism, you know, the IMF and World Bank growing in power, with the post fall of the Soviet Union, right? You have the Shock Doctrine across former Soviet Europe, and our involvement there and our rape of their economies, it always feels like we’re angry that something is happening. I do wish we were a bit more aggressive in proposing something positive happen.
Joseph Bouchard: How do we ensure that US foreign policy can mean something genuinely good? It seems that, under this current foreign policy direction, the US will soon be completely isolated from the rest of the world, and only rely on quid pro quo autocratic partnerships.
Vaush: It’s worth noting that soon, maybe this has already happened, we will be the pariah states, not China. More countries, I believe, right now, if you average out all the countries in the world, weighted by population, more trust China as their primary trading partner than us, which a lot of that is Trump. But these are trends that existed before Trump as well. With China’s sort of rising relevance, I have always been a big advocate, and maybe this is the more liberal side of me, I think. But I really do think that free trade and free communication do a lot to open these countries up socially and by free trade, of course, I don’t mean a complete lack of business regulation. I just mean a willingness to engage with each other’s markets. Even the liberals amongst us often shy away from this. Biden, for example, put a very, very heavy tariff on Chinese electric vehicles because our own domestic production just can’t compete with them in quality per price. And this is an aggressive action, right? And it does nothing to incentivize China or its people to think favorably of us.
I’ve always believed that if you just level with these countries and give them the opportunities that we have in this country that we offer to our own citizens, many of them would just make the choice to stay with us. Ukraine, for example, right? Yanukovych, you know, of course, infamously, leading to Euromaidan, tried to, against the wishes of the Ukrainian people, push them into a trading partnership with Russia that would have ostracized them from the EU the people rebelled against that and. Since then, Ukraine has only aligned further with the West, something that people didn’t necessarily expect after the downfall of the Soviet Union. Cuba would practically be the 51st state if we could just get over ourselves and treat them like a normal country. I wouldn’t want us to just treat them normally. I think at this point they’re entitled to substantial reparations for what we’ve done. Enormous, enormous reparations.
But that aside, these pariah states needn’t be so adversarial; if you just engage with people normally, I really do think they will liberalize. There’s no need to. We know sanctions don’t work. It doesn’t take down authoritarian leaders, and it doesn’t really make the citizenry of that country hate their leadership anymore. Just makes people suffer. We should be a shining city on the hill. That was the original promise of America, I think that for a time, and to a limited extent, we did offer that to many people, especially Europeans, looking for work around the turn of the previous century. And there’s an aesthetic there and an ideology that I think is very respectable. Offer people good, what good you can do, and they will respect you for it. And we have completely abandoned this. Democrat and Republican, we have succumbed to this clamoring xenophobic idea of “there’s only so many slices of the pie to go around” attitude with regard to trade and immigration. I think that in the long run, it has kind of secured our diminishing in the eyes of the world, not just because of Trump, but because we don’t treat the world like an extended part of our national community anymore to the extent that we ever did. We need to. It’s important, more so than ever before.
Joseph Bouchard: How should the left approach pariah states and actors, like Venezuela, Iran, Palestine, Hamas, and others?
Vaush: Not to sound like I’m hand wringing, but there is an argument, I think, for both sides here. Take, for example, the United States government’s war of sanction and such against Cuba is not only unjustifiable, but barbarous, and it’s been going on for so long, and for no reason. We are undoubtedly in the wrong there, however, the Cuban government, despite its nominal leftist ideology, has not done a good job delivering for its people, even if it weren’t for the sanctions that would remain the case. They have been ineffective and corrupt, and I think that you can feel those criticisms without legitimizing what the United States is doing. Because clearly the sanctions haven’t improved things for the Cubans. Maybe if they had, we could be having that conversation, but they just haven’t. So they seem to me like entirely separate issues.
I want people to be able to escape that, I would call it, Manichean campus dichotomy, the idea that if you’re against one, you must be in favor of the other, or if you’re in favor of one, you must be against the other. We’re talking about nation states here, rarely is one side unambiguously good. I support Iran’s right to defend itself against American and Israeli strikes. Iran and its government remains, in many respects, quite bad. I just don’t think it’s difficult to parse this, but in order to parse it, you have to take this seriously. You’re not always going to get that overwhelming satisfaction of a good guy versus a bad guy, but that’s the simplistic moralistic framework through which conservatives typically view the world, certainly the primeval leftist thinkers, Marx, or whatever. They weren’t thinking that way. Marx wasn’t waking up every day and going, this is the good country and this is the bad country. It’s just simplistic, but it’s easy and it’s okay, even if there are problems with both sides, to root for a winner and for a loser, but you always have to hope for more.
For instance, right now, with Iran and Israel, I am so opposed to what we are doing in the Middle East that I am actively rooting for Iran to beat us back there. This doesn’t really have much to do with my positions on foreign policy, so much as my belief that Israeli and American war mongers in the Middle East could end the world; that’s perhaps a bit of an overstatement, but it’s potentially very, very bad. We need to learn that it’s bad to touch the hot kettle. We need to take our hand off the stove, and maybe in the future, we can hope for a better outcome, but right now, just not keeping our hand on the stove, I really think, is the best case scenario.
North Korea might never come over because they are so ideologically and economically aligned against the idea of internationalism. Russia is tough because they’re aware of the fact that their economy would implode were it not for their positioning as a petrostate, and they maintain that in large part by freezing their economy and their foreign relations exactly where they are. The Ukraine war, of course, has contributed to increasing natural gas and oil prices, which Russia has profited from. They didn’t really start to hurt from the war until Ukraine started targeting their petrochemical facilities and refineries, which, you hit them where it hurts. You hit them at the wallet. That’s what matters the most. I think they had arrogantly assumed that Ukraine and the United States wouldn’t go that far if you provide the incentives in the long run, I do think you will see benefits.
Joseph: What happened in Russia? It, at one point, could have been a member of NATO! We even tried, but perhaps we set about these conditions with the War on Terror and propping up Yeltsin and the Shock Doctrine. The tensions in Russia and Eurasia are certainly not without our own faults and bad interventions.
Vaush: North Korea was so long ago, but what happened in Russia was by no means a foregone conclusion. There was a window of time where Russia was even interested in joining NATO. I don’t think the United States and the West at large is necessarily at fault for the rise of Vladimir Putin and everything that he represents. I do think that we demonstrated a tremendous lack of good sportsmanship and stewardship over the Russian people and their economy after the end of the Cold War, we very much acted like sore winners in a lot of respects, and it led to social and political problems that have reverberated to this day. It’s very evident, I think, in a lot of non Russian former Soviet Bloc countries, where you had this shift from Soviet totalitarianism into very ineffectual democracy, where all of the choices on the ballot are just holdovers from the Soviet administration, and then, grindingly, they’re pushed into being, at least ideally, in some cases, a halfway functional democracy. And a lot of the people in those countries are, they think very bitterly of us for sort of facilitating that, and not doing more to press them, to incentivize and encourage a proper functioning democracy earlier. It’s, it’s complicated, you know, I don’t, I don’t think we’re entirely at fault, but we could have done a better job. We always have an opportunity to create better outcomes.
Joseph Bouchard: Yes, it seems we can actually achieve our goals, but certain actors would not like to see it that way, and will impede all attempts (as they have already done, I am sure). What organs of power do we need to dismantle or get out of our way to actually achieve our foreign policy goals? Should we dismantle the CIA? Get dark money out of politics? Reform the UN Security Council? Get pro-war ideologues out of the deep state? For instance, the CIA might never let a socialist Cuba ever exist, simply out of humiliation.
Vaush: Yes.
Joseph Bouchard: What is the most effective avenue for foreign policy change? What should we all do to influence positive outcomes? Should we get a foreign policy career? Do street protests? Donate more money? Participate in elections? Join counter-balancing forces at the international level? How do we get power and then use it effectively?
Vaush: Of course, I advocate for people voting and participating and running for office and so on. I think that people on the left should be a little bit more optimistic about the potential for US foreign engagement to be positive and constructive. We need to be positive. You need to advocate positively for things just as hard as the bad guys rally against them. You know, are we waking up and championing the post office? Do I wake up and I go, “thank God for the USPS.” No. You know, no matter rain, sleet or snow, they’re always there with the package. Well, if you don’t, they (the Republicans) will target USPS. They will dismantle it. They will defund it, and pretty soon, FedEx and UPS will be the only way to get packages across. You’ll be paying $16 to get a letter sent to Memaw across the state.
You know, you have to be active and present for every battle, even if they seem trite or trivial, or if you’re fighting for, you know, a partial win at most. We can do more. So often, we frame foreign policy as a give and take, you know, mutually exclusive deals or benefits. We benefit, they hurt, but we could invest equitably and mutually in countries around the world to achieve mutually desirable ends, a big one that we’ve left on the table for ages that to me, seems like a no brainer.
We should be putting up money to help subsidize the construction of solar energy in developing countries that need it most. Not only would this be economically beneficial for us, because we could use it to kick some favorable subsidies and contracts to us, solar manufacturers, an industry I would love to see some more subsidies towards, but we would be benefiting those countries also. They might think more favorably of us in the future. We might be willing to or they might be willing to engage with us in future trade deals. Their newly energized country might provide ripe opportunities for investment that otherwise wouldn’t have been on the table. All of these potentials carry within them a chance at exploitation, but also a chance of bettering the world. And if we steer the ship, we get to decide, but we can’t steer the ship until we’re brave enough to take hold of the wheel.
Joseph Bouchard: Thank you.
This blueprint for the left on foreign policy comes at a particularly dire moment, one that pushes beyond knee-jerk reactionary anti-imperialism no matter the context, and one that highlights a positive vision for the left to lead on the world stage. Following that blueprint could help the left not only oppose bad foreign policy, but build a better world following leftist internationalist principles.
