Interview with Vaush: A Positive Foreign Policy Vision for a Post-Liberal Future

CounterPunch Exclusives

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........

© CounterPunch

visit website