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.

Chapter 19 focuses on the political and moral stakes of one of the most contentious questions of the peace conference: on what grounds Germany was to pay reparations and how high the reparation claims of the victors were to be. It not only demonstrates how intricately the indemnity problem was linked with the fundamental question of who bore responsibility for the Great War and all the casualties and destruction it had caused, eventually leading to a clash between western claims of Germany’s “war guilt” and German efforts to refute them. Placing this problem in a transatlantic context, it also emphasises that the reparations conundrum was inseparable from the tectonic changes the war brought in the financial and economic spheres, especially America’s ascent to the status of the world’s pre-eminent economic and financial power and the massive indebtedness of Britain and France to the new “world creditor”. It thus casts fresh light on the question of why it proved impossible to negotiate a “rational” and mutually acceptable reparations settlement in 1919. And it reappraises why only limited advances towards a new financial and economic order and effective postwar reconstruction could be made. Finally, it highlights the far-reaching political consequences this had.

Chapter 18 analyzes his work after his retirement in Rotterdam, in particular, on international governance. The first part of the chapter demonstrates that in response to frustrated attempts to further integrate the international community, Tinbergen became more radical and ambitious. He promoted a global government and international order along the lines of the developments that had taken place at the national level. He became more critical of the short-sightedness of both political leaders and voters and grew more critical of democracy. The second part of the chapter analyzes the underlying perspective of Tinbergen about the fallibility of man and the need for economic order. His view of humans is shaped by his Protestant, in particular, Remonstrant, beliefs, and he believed that (economic) order in the form of rules and institutions was required because humans are flawed. Harmony and peace must be actively constructed. The chapter suggests that next to a deep-seated sense of responsibility there is an element of fear in Tinbergen’s outlook. In his later works these fears and worries come more into the foreground, and he became pessimistic about the future, but he tried to remain hopeful.