I was eighteen years old and just starting my second year of college on September 11, 2001. After the initial shock of the terrorist attacks passed, a horrifying realization set in: George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld — the worst possible people in the worst possible situation — were at the helm of the American military machine. The attendant sense of powerlessness was at times overwhelming. It was compounded by the fact that, despite our best efforts, a worldwide movement against war in Iraq was not enough to prevent it.

The years after 2003 were the most disorienting and demoralizing time in my political life, and the war’s twentieth anniversary brought up a welter of emotions for me: anger at its perpetrators, fondness for my old friends with whom I protested, and a profound sense of gratitude at the progress the US left has made since that dark time.

There is one big area, however, where socialists seem stuck in a state of arrested development: our sense of what we would do with American power in the world if we found ourselves in possession of it. We were so far from power for so long that it seemed pointless to give much thought to it. Discussions of international affairs only seemed to invite the most divisive quarrels, precisely because it was the thing we could do the least about. The recent growth of the Left — namely, the fact that a democratic socialist ran two realistic campaigns for president — means that this isn’t a parlor game anymore. Yet we lack a coherent internationalist vision fit for our times and are still trapped within the terms of old debates. This was very clear to me while revisiting the post-9/11 arguments of two prominent voices from that time: Noam Chomsky and Michael Walzer.