Cold War liberalism: an attempt to reconcile the liberal project with the traumas of the 20th century.

Par Nathan Guez

We are inspired by the concept of Cold War liberalism—cautious and vigilant—which stands in contrast to the triumphalist liberalism of the post-1989 era. But first, let’s return to these terms. “Liberal” is a catch-all word. Can you revisit this school of thought?

Since liberalism is in a state of crisis now, it’s led to an explosion of interest in the history of liberalism. Part of the reason for the exploration is to try to determine, what is it about liberalism in terms of its origins that might explain why it’s struggling today? Are there different versions of liberalism that could provide an alternative model of liberalism to the one collapsing? There isn’t just one liberalism, there is a family of liberalisms. Historians look at the thought of John Locke and Hobbes, and they trace it back to a kind of social contract tradition. Another option is to see liberalism as a response to Jacobin excesses and a path toward industrial society. And then there’s also the kind of laissez-faire liberalism that emerges with the Industrial Revolution. It’s indebted to an Adam Smith idea of an invisible hand, which operates best when people are allowed to essentially pursue their self-interest.

Now, how do you position the Cold War liberalism in this ideological family?

Cold War liberalism is very particular. I should first say, like the word neoconservativism, the people who used this term meant it negatively, it was used as an insult term. In the U.S., members of the New Left criticized how liberalism had become entangled with the Cold War security state, particularly through universities. They saw this as a betrayal of the progressive ideals of the New Deal. So a lot of liberals in the United States were anti-war. Cold War liberals said that it was a dangerous doctrine. We have to somehow be able to come up with a way to reconcile liberalism with violence. They were willing to essentially embrace the welfare state insofar as a welfare state was needed to prevent the working class from becoming attracted to radical leftist doctrines like Marxism. So in other words, it’s more of a doctrine that is like containment. The term, though, like neoconservativism, it kind of stuck, and it moved away from just being considered a negative idea, and some people just began to identify as Cold War liberals. It’s like liberals who called themselves NATO intellectuals. There’s been a revival of Cold War liberalism with the rise of Russia then China.

But on the flip side, Cold War liberalism, for its defenders, has nothing to do with all that stuff that I just told you. For its defenders, Cold War liberalism is a doctrine of political moderation. And it’s essentially trying to create the conditions for political consensus. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote The Vital Center. How can we prevent something like fascism and communism from rising again? We have to create some kind of vital center that meets enough interest on all sides of the political spectrum so as to prevent these huge divisions that create dysfunction. That's another reason why Cold War liberalism has seen a revival in the U.S. and even in France. The use of a "cordon sanitaire" against the far right in the 2024 elections is a typical Cold War liberal move. In the U.S., Cold War liberals argued for moving away from polarizing issues like defunding the police, trans athletes, or "woke" debates—topics that energize conservatives but hinder building broad consensus.

Who are the main thinkers of Cold War Liberalism?

There are these heroes of Cold War liberalism, usually four are mentioned: Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. It’s Isaiah Berlin in the UK. And in France, it’s Raymond Aron. It’s usually highly elite, people who are close to the government. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. was an advisor to John F. Kennedy.

Aron, of course wrote for the Figaro and he was in regular correspondence with de Gaulle, and essentially every French president, until he died. They were not concerned with gender issues, supportive of radical racial theories or Third Worldism.

But you can see why their ideals are appealing today, both for foreign policy reasons and both for domestic reasons. They provide something of a solution, whereas their critics think that they’re not willing to take risks.

What is the difference between optimistic liberalism (tied to progress and the welfare state) and Cold War liberalism (centered on fear and the defense of democracy)?

This idea of fear is associated with Harvard political theorist named Judith Shklar and her politics of fear. According to her, liberal democracies, because of their values, openness to dialogue, parliamentary ways of dealing with coming to political solutions, they’re fragile. And they can be undermined very easily, both internally and externally. She had the rise of national socialism in mind, as well as what happened to her family in Eastern Europe under the communists. It’s just this idea that liberalism has many enemies, and you have to build a muscular liberalism. And this isn’t the more 19th century idealistic conception, which contains utopian elements and might be associated with a weak view of history. There might be some setbacks and there might be some challenges, but ultimately history is progressive. Things should be getting better and better. And the world wars kind of did away with that way of thinking. I think what happened was that some just completely moved away from that and relied on this idea that liberalism has to be vigilant. It can’t be naive. It has to be realist. Belnever, Aaron, are also considered realist. Which is interesting because the realists have a kind of skeptical or negative view of human nature. How do you reconcile that with the kind of liberalism that emerged from the Enlightenment? They had to move liberalism away from a lot of Enlightenment thoughts, especially because they also thought the Enlightenment gave birth to radical leftist doctrines like Marxism. Now, if liberalism is fragile, it is so because there’s always the capacity for it to be attacked. And that means it presumes perpetual enemies.

The flaw of the "end of history" idea: conflict cannot be overcome by markets, human rights promotion, or war.

Did Cold War liberals believe that democracy would ultimately triumph?

The reality is that even if one enemy is defeated, there will always be another enemy on the horizon. And the way that the story is narrated in the 90s, liberals naively thought that they had overcome all of them. However, you can never do that. In some ways, it’s a very Schmittian way of thinking that there will always be a distinction between friends and enemies and it can never be overcome. Aron was influenced by this view. But he actually thought that you could enter into diplomacy. Even if wars broke out, there was a way of doing wars that didn’t have to become total wars. He tied liberalism around the reality of containment. If you’re a containment theorist, then you’re thinking, well, we always have to contain the enemy, meaning that there’s always an enemy. That doesn’t mean we have to launch a war. It could mean that there’s cultural diplomacy. Aron himself really got into this and maybe the best book he ever wrote was a book on Clausewitz in the 1970s. Aron himself really engaged deeply with this topic, and perhaps the best book he ever wrote was his 1970s work on Clausewitz. He argued that, although Clausewitz was often linked to the German tradition of realpolitik, he was actually influenced by Enlightenment thought. Clausewitz developed ways to

mitigate the potential for total war, effectively inventing a kind of Clausewitzian framework for the Cold War. I mention this mainly to illustrate the idea of an enemy that can never be fully overcome.

I’m curious about who are now the key figures of the new Cold War liberals compared to the past.

Anne Applebaum is a very famous and notable writer. She writes on essentially Russian history, but she is a regular contributor to the Atlantic magazine. None of these intellectuals would call themselves Cold War liberals. It’s just that they fit the description of what I said. Concerned by enemies, you know, security state. There are people who truly admire 20th century Cold War liberals and are actively promoting their ideas. Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia, wrote about Aron. In France, Bernard Henri Levy is not really a Cold War liberal. Many Cold War liberals, being realists, were wary of an overly zealous approach to promoting or defending human rights in liberal-leaning countries around the world. They thought this could create more problems than it solved. It’s better to have a political order in these places rather than to try to implement Western ideas. And BHL is someone who wants to do just that. He goes all over the world defending the rights of Ukrainians, with the white shirt. As you probably are aware, Raymond Aron, wrote a damning review of his work in the 70s.

If Cold War liberals thought in terms of friends and enemies, did they adopt a neoconservative reasoning that involved spreading liberal democracy around the world, including by force?

I’ve written about why Aron towards the end of his life said a lot of positive things about Margaret Thatcher. He also supported Reagan’s presidency. He liked Reagan’s anti-communism. He essentially thought that wide swaths of the American political establishment in the Democratic Party were no longer taking communism very seriously. Aron totally believed that the communists, especially in the last years of his life, were renewing a program of conquering the world. That’s not to say he became a neocon.

Now what Aron never liked was, and this is where he’s different than the American neoconservatives, the idea of rollback. This was the policy alternative to containment that emerged, you know, on the account of the Korean War. In other words, the American military has the capability—not just to hold back the enemy, but to decisively defeat them and eliminate these radical ideologies.

Aron thought that was dangerous. You have to remember that George H.W. Bush was not really a neocon. When they invaded Kuwait, when they pushed back Iraq, they didn’t go in and take over Iraq, right? The neocons hawks thought that was a mistake. It was under George W. Bush, his son, that the neocons kind of triumphed.

The relevance of Cold War liberalism today.

Do you think that Biden was a Cold War liberal?

As regards to Biden, I would say it’s an interesting question insofar as the first year of his presidency seemed to be moving in a new direction for the Democratic Party. You had this this massive infrastructure plan. He was definitely doing something new. Nevertheless, his own party sabotaged the Build Back Better initiative. The most progressive elements, they refused to sign off on. But from the start of the war in Ukraine until the end of his term, he became much more of a Cold War president.

And then of course the Gaza-Israel war, kind of moved it. It’s a little bit different since it’s so regional, but I think it kind of became the traditional, more of the norm, the way that it was handled, right? The backlash against Cold War liberals during the Vietnam era reappeared during recent student protests—the largest since the 1960s. That moment marked the decline of Cold War liberalism and a shift under Nixon, much like what happened with Trump. The second half of his presidency could be seen through that same lens.

In Le spectateur engagé, Raymond Aron called for Europe to become strategically autonomous, arguing that America was ultimately pursuing its own interests. In light of recent events, was Aron ahead of his time?

Aron said that because he feared that the United States was moving in the direction of isolationism. The Nixon administration accommodates with China and embraces a post-politic. West Germany was entering more and more into formal relationships with East Germany, and there was the concern that essentially this would extend the hegemony of the Soviet Union further into the West. He actually thought that maybe the Americans would totally leave. He did make some comments as to Europeans having to come up with their own plan and their own order. In the back of his mind, he was hoping for change and for the Americans to better understand their relationship with the Europeans. And that is why he so was into Reagan, because Reagan was totally committed to NATO. I believe those matters gradually fade away during the last three years of his life. It really was just under the, it was really just in the mid-1970s. He was really disappointed in the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But there are some moments there, I think, that are relative, relevant, because Aron did express feelings that the United States was abandoning Europe.

Coming from the United States and holding progressive convictions, what led you to work on Raymond Aron?

When I was living in Germany, the first time I was able to visit Paris, I fell in love with the city immediately. And I thought to myself, was there anyone in France that I can study that’s conversant with German philosophy but really interested in politics? There’s just no one greater than Aron.

His whole understanding of the relationship between the past and the present. Also how can you be an engaged spectator given the complexity of our world? You mentioned how the world’s changing and people are using anachronistic ways of thinking about what’s happening right now that doesn’t seem to explain China, doesn’t seem to explain these epochal changes in the United States. Aron dedicated his life to understanding these changes. I’m more on the left than he was. Everyone has disagreements. But in terms of this core thing, I have the highest admiration for him.