Meet the Cold War Liberals
[Published in The American Conservative, December 30, 2019]
They see a new Iron Curtain dividing right-wing authoritarianism and the democratic values embodied by American and Euro progressives.
Before Donald Trump’s election, many progressive foreign policy thinkers were simpatico with conservative and centrist realist thinkers. “Progressive realism begins with the cardinal doctrine of traditional realism: The purpose of American foreign policy is to serve American interests,” wrote Robert Wright in The New York Times in 2006. Sherle R. Schwenninger was a founder of the New America Foundation and one of those progressive foreign policy thinkers. “The progressive realist critique…,” he stated, “centered around international law; non-intervention; disarmament; and winding down the worst excesses of the post-9/11 period.”
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The Liberal International Disorder
Foreign policy is only one among many areas where liberal modernity displays its novel understanding of freedom as autonomous will to power. A similar voluntarism dominates everywhere from the boardroom to the bedroom. Still and all, foreign policy as practiced by the United States, especially in recent decades, nonetheless enjoys a special distinction. The chaos engendered by its voluntarist will to power is painfully obvious..
In response, two prominent scholars have recently mounted a critical analysis of America’s drive for hegemony and the relation of this effort to liberalism.
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Michael Lind: The Path from Liberal Internationalism to Civilizational Realism
Editor's Note: This essay by Dr. Boris Mezhuev, a Moscow-based political philosopher at Moscow State University, was translated by the Simone Weil Center. It originally appeared in Russian in Politanalitika (6/25/2017).
Boris Mezhuev takes Lind’s Blocpolitik concept (outlined in an article in The National Interest, June 18, 2017) as the occasion to draw a comparison between Lind’s realist notion of blocs and what he (Mezhuev) calls ‘civilizational centers of gravity’ according to his own political concept of civilizational realism.
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New York, New Jerusalem
Susannah Black writes: What is New York? According to E.B. White, “It is to the nation what the white church is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up…” Others have had different answers. Ayn Rand thought it was “the will of man made visible.” “What other religion do we need?” she asked. It is “appalling, fantastically charmless and elaborately dire,” said Henry James. It’s a beautiful catastrophe, said Le Corbusier. It’s the dirty city, the city of dreams, it’s a hell of a town.
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In Russia, It’s the Realists vs. the Ethno-Nationalists
Dmitry Drobnitsky, in his article “The foreign policy objectives of the party of internal development,” raises a question about the sort of ideological baggage we bring to bear when we talk about reaching a “grand bargain” with the United States.
The possibility of such a deal is increasingly the subject of discussion in Russia. In the West, some fear the very idea, while others see in it the hope of a finding a way out of the impasse in which Russian-American relations currently languish.
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Nikolai Starikov and the Problem of History
People who care about Russia – its culture, its history and traditions, and, most importantly, its people – have had reason to feel fearful and frustrated in recent years. Among other reasons because the media in the United States has gotten into one of its by-now all-too-familiar campaigns of simplification and demonization of a foreign country and its leader. Such campaigns (remember Nicaragua? Iraq? Libya?) usually signal that the US government is getting itself ready for the attack.
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