Why are progressives often critical of US foreign policy and the national security state? What would a statecraft that pulls ideas from the American left look like? Grand Strategies of the Left brings the progressive worldview into conversation with security studies and foreign policy practice. It argues that American progressives think durable security will only come by prioritizing the interconnected conditions of peace, democracy, and equality. By conceiving of grand strategy as worldmaking, progressives see multiple ways of using foreign policy to make a more just and stable world. US statecraft – including defense policy – should be retooled not for primacy, endless power accumulation, or a political status quo that privileges elites, but rather to shape the context that gives rise to perpetual insecurity. Progressive worldmaking has its own risks and dilemmas but expands how we imagine what the world is and could be.

What is Green politics? Ecological thinking can be understood very narrowly, and quite broadly, even in its political manifestations. Like other political ideologies and perspectives, it has things to say across the whole gamut of issues facing society and though there are elements of feminism, pacifism and anarchism in Green political theory, it has its own identity and intellectual heritage and, I argue, a coherent set of critiques, visions and strategies for achieving them in global politics. Despite some of the core areas of consensus around which most Greens would converge, there is a wide spectrum of positions that sit under the broad umbrella of Green politics and many tensions and areas of disagreement amongst them. The term covers a spectrum of sometimes competing perspectives over values, politics and strategy. Here I provide a brief typology of different strands of Green political thinking.