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

Interview of Daniel JENKINS By Nathan GUEZ.

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Par Nathan Guez

Daniel Jenkins is a professor at Westlane University specializing in intellectual history. Influenced by Samuel Moyn, his work focuses on the concept of Cold War liberalism—an intellectual and political framework shaped by thinkers such as Raymond Aron, which went on to significantly influence U.S. foreign policy.

I find the idea of Cold War liberalism—cautious and vigilant—appealing as it stands in contrast to the triumphalist liberalism of the post-1989 era. But before we discuss that, it is necessary to say something about the meaning of “Liberalism,” which is somewhat of a catch-all word. How would you define it?

I think one reason why so many historians are interested in the idea of liberalism is because it now finds itself in a state of crisis given the authoritarian turn that marks the current political age. The logic seems to be that if we can figure out the origins and nature of liberalism, we can use this information to help explain why liberalism is in a state of decline today. Are there, for instance, different versions of liberalism that could provide an alternative model of liberalism to the one that is now collapsing? The fact is that there isn’t just one liberalism, but rather a variety of liberalisms. Historians, for instance, might look at the thought of Locke and Hobbes and trace liberalism back to a kind of social contract tradition. Others might see liberalism as a political alternative to Jacobin excesses that emerged as a response to the French Revolution—focusing, for instance, on Constant or Tocqueville. Still others might associate liberalism with laissez-faire economics, which is often what the word is taken to mean in Western Europe. In other words, it’s hard to boil liberalism down to a simple definition, but this doesn’t mean that these liberalisms do not share a kind of family resemblance.

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

Cold War liberalism is a very particular form of liberalism—some would go so far as to even say it is a departure from much of what characterized liberalism during the 19th century. I should first say that, like the word neoconservatism, the term “Cold War liberalism” was used in a negative or pejorative sense. In the U.S., members of the New Left during the 1960s criticized how liberalism had become entangled with the American Cold War security state. They saw this as a betrayal of the progressive ideals of the New Deal. Of course, the New Left was also responding to the Vietnam War. In other words, they believed that the Democratic Party under Lyndon Johnson had all too easily accommodated itself to the violence of the American military-industrial complex. As such, in their eyes, the progressive elements of the liberal tradition had been abandoned. Instead of a commitment to perpetual peace—an ideal that many 19th-century liberals would have taken for granted—the liberal establishment had come to embrace the inevitability of war. Furthermore, such New Left critics believed that the Cold War transformation of liberalism had a realist and instrumental view of the welfare state, namely, to provide the working class with just enough to get by in order to soften the appeal of a revolutionary political and social alternative.

But on the flip side, Cold War liberalism, for its defenders, has nothing to do with all that. For its advocates, Cold War liberalism is a doctrine of political moderation and value pluralism that essentially tries to create the conditions for political consensus. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.—one of the most well-known American Cold War liberals—wrote The Vital Center, for instance. He believed that there needs to be some kind of vital center that overlaps with interests on all sides of the political spectrum—by which he meant non-revolutionary labor parties and non-reactionary conservative parties—so as to prevent a politically fractured public sphere. 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., for instance, Cold War liberals argued for moving away from polarizing issues like defunding the police, trans athletes, or “woke” debates.

Who are the main thinkers of Cold War Liberalism?

In the U.S., Cold War liberalism is typically associated with the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Its representative in the U.K. is Isaiah Berlin, and in France, it’s Raymond Aron. These intellectuals were all mandarins involved in their respective countries’ leading academic institutions and newspapers, while also maintaining close connections to their governments. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., for instance, was an advisor to John F. Kennedy.

Aron, of course, wrote for Le Figaro and 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 aligned with Third Worldism. They were all thinkers of consensus, which is why some contemporary thinkers believe they are relevant for today’s highly polarized political moment.

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)?

The Cold War liberal idea of the politics of fear is associated with Judith Shklar who taught for years in the government department at Harvard. Leaving aside the question of whether she should be counted as a Cold War liberal, the politics of fear is premised on the idea that liberalism’s long-standing optimistic Enlightenment tradition of moral idealism and optimism regarding human and societal improvement had to be fundamentally rethought for two principal reasons. First, they argued, it proved naïve and politically and morally irresponsible, given a new age of “totalitarian extremes”; liberals would need to toughen up and develop a doctrine of defense given the ruthlessness and fanaticism of National Socialism and Soviet Communism. And second, liberalism’s high idealism and “moral purism” proved incompatible with the growing pluralism and diversity of values that marked modern society. Without moderating itself, liberalism would provoke a permanent and dangerous clash of values and galvanize the very ideological forces that threatened its existence. Cold War liberalism, argues the historian Samuel Moyn, places the fear of the collapse of freedom in tyranny at the center of political thought. Underlying this fear is a profound sense of trauma and anxiety. The end goal of Cold War liberalism is to contain unavoidable conflicts through what its adherents describe as a “politics of moderation.” Such moderation entails the logic of using violence for the purpose of achieving conditions that keep liberals safe—a logic that goes a long way to explain the country’s forever wars.

Did Cold War liberals believe that democracy would ultimately triumph?

The reality, for Cold War liberals, is that even if one enemy is defeated, there will always be another enemy on the horizon. In this sense they disagreed with the triumphalism of the 1990s, in which some liberals naively thought that they had overcome any major political alternative once and for all. Cold War liberals, as they embrace a politics of fear, never embraced such an assumption. Here they come very close to a Schmittian way of thinking—that there will always be a distinction between friends and enemies that can never be overcome. Raymond Aron was influenced by this view, albeit, pace Carl Schmitt, he thought that such political enmity could be mitigated through diplomacy even if it could never be fully overcome.

We can see this in Aron’s embrace of containment theory. If you’re a containment theorist, the presumption is that there is an enemy at the gates that must be contained from entering. That doesn’t mean we have to launch a war that rolls back the perceived enemy, but it does mean, according to this way of thinking, that the enemy must be persistently contained so as to prevent it from advancing.

Much of Aron’s work on Clausewitz from the 1970s attempted to argue for a kind of limited warfare to contain the enemy rather than unlimited warfare that could all too easily lead to an escalation into total war. Interestingly, Aron was in large part reacting to the failures of the American bombing campaign during the Vietnam War, which he believed were a strategic disaster. That said, Aron defended the Vietnam War at the level of containing communism—the problem for him was not the war but the way it was being pursued. Of course, these kinds of neat distinctions raise the question of whether the kind of warfare that Aron imagined was itself too academic. For instance, Aron held to a domino theory about what would happen if South Vietnam fell to the communists—namely, the increased spread of communism—which in hindsight is a judgment that history proved to be totally wrong.

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

I don’t know of anyone who explicitly describes themselves today as being a Cold War liberal. But in terms of a kind of liberalism that gives priority to containing enemies, I would include people like Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, George Packer, Stephen Holmes, etc. In many ways, The Atlantic magazine is the Cold War liberal publication par excellence in the U.S.

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 to conquer the world. That’s not to say he became a neocon, but he certainly was admired by the American neocons, in particular by Midge Decter, Norman Podhoretz, and Irving Kristol.

Where Aron disagreed with the neocons is that he was a critic of rollback and absolutely rejected the idea that the American model of democracy could successfully be transferred to the new states emerging from colonialism.

The relevance of Cold War liberalism today.

Do you think that Biden was a Cold War liberal?

It’s an interesting question insofar as the first year of his presidency seemed to entail moving the Democratic Party in a new direction. There was his massive infrastructure plan, for instance. Nevertheless, his own party sabotaged the Build Back Better initiative, as a few Democratic congress members refused to sign off on its most progressive elements. I would say, however, that from the start of the war in Ukraine until the end of his term, he became much more of a Cold War president—he, of course, also took a Cold War liberal stance on China. And then, of course, there is his handling of the Gaza-Israel war, which, in terms of student reaction, was reminiscent in some ways of the New Left reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s war in Vietnam—to recall, it was this latter context that gave birth to the very notion of Cold War liberalism.

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, in the 1970s, feared that the United States was moving in the direction of isolationism. This was due to the Vietnam debacle, antiwar sentiment in the U.S., the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks, and Jimmy Carter’s emphasis on human rights. I don’t know if Aron was ahead of his time, but it is certainly interesting to revisit his writings of the 1970s that address the American temptation for isolation in light of the Trump administration’s thinking today about NATO.

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 could study who was conversant with German philosophy but also really interested in politics? Of course, Aron became the obvious option.

Leaving aside my politics, after working on Aron’s thought for fifteen years, I am truly impressed with his exceptional ability to reconcile academic thought with contemporary politics and issues. It is my opinion that no other academic was able to achieve this balance in the 20th century in the manner that Raymond Aron did.