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The Ideological Blindness of Cold War Liberalism

Dr. Daryn Glassbrook - 9/5/2006

A number of prominent liberal pundits have been calling for the Democratic Party to embrace the legacy of Cold War liberals such as Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. as a politically viable alternative to the unilateralist, bellicose tendencies of the Bush Administration and its Congressional allies. Perhaps the leading advocate of this position has been Peter Beinart, columnist and editor-at-large at The New Republic. In the December 13, 2004 issue of TNR, Beinart published an essay, "A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New Liberalism," in which he praises the "militant anti-communism" of liberal institutions and journals of opinion in the post-World War II era and scolds the "Wallacite grassroots" of the present-day, represented by Michael Moore and MoveOn, for not "putting the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe 'Al Quaeda' at the center of their hopes for a better world." Beinart blames Democratic losses in the elections of 2002 and 2004 on their continuing struggle to put forth a "positive vision" and define the terms of debate in the realm of foreign policy.

In 2006, Beinart published 'The Good Fight', a book-length elaboration (and, on the issue of the Iraq War, a partial retraction) of his argument in "A Fighting Faith." Both the essay and the book sparked much healthy debate among liberal pundits over the direction of the Democratic Party. But most of those involved in this debate have chosen to focus on his analysis of recent political developments, while casually accepting his rosy interpretation of the historical consequences of liberal foreign policy in the early decades of the Cold War era.

For example, Michael Tomasky, reviewing The Good Fight in the June 6, 2006 issue of The American Prospect, writes that "[m]ost" of "A Fighting Faith" consists of "intelligent and unexceptionable ruminations on liberalism and foreign policy, with much of which I happen to agree." Tomasky's main objections are to Beinart's misleading representation of the liberal opponents of the Iraq War, and to the lack of clarity in his proposals for rehabilitating the Democratic Party. Similarly, Eric Alterman, in a December 22, 2004 column for The Nation, defends MoveOn from Beinart's attacks but echoes the latter's nostalgia for Cold War liberalism, which "for all its problems, presented Americans with a national security framework sufficient to earn their trust (and thereby, not incidentally, allow liberals to make considerable progress on social justice issues at home)."

While liberal initiatives such as the Marshall Plan and George Kennan's policy of containment may have provided the Democrats with the political leverage to win elections and enact progessive legislation, they certainly did not convince the world of America's good intentions. One of Beinart's most critical mistakes is to set up a simplistic correspondence between the arguments of liberal intellectuals such as Niebuhr and Schlesinger and the policies of the Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations. In "A Fighting Faith," he cites the Marshall Plan and the Peace Corps as political achievements that perfectly embody the principles of Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal organization that included Schlesinger and Niebuhr among its elite members. And in his reply to a Daily Kos review of The Good Fight, Beinart names Niebuhr, "the key liberal intellectual of the early cold war," as the founding father of "[t]he liberal story" which "says it is precisely because we recognize that America is fallible, because we recognize our capacity for injustice and struggle to overcome it, that we defeat our enemies."

No such recognitions of fallibility and injustice were forthcoming in America's dealings with emergent Asian nations and nationalisms in the aftermath of World War II. For the duration of the Cold War, Asia was the principal "Third World" playground over which the two superpowers fought recklessly for bragging rights. The Filipino diplomat Carlos Romulo, President of the Fourth Session of the U.N. General Assembly in 1949-50, complained that his diplomatic efforts on behalf of developing nations were often ineffectual because his American colleague, Secretary Acheson, "was entirely Europe-oriented." In his 1986 memoir, Forty Years: A Third World Soldier at the UN, Romulo expresses regret that the United States, "the first power to give freedom to a former colony - i.e. the Philippines]," squandered any goodwill it had earned from the eveloping nations of Asia after World War II by supporting the French imperial claim to Indochina. The United States rewarded wartime allies such as the Viet Minh and Hukbalahap guerrilla armies by turning on them, providing arms and intelligence support to help colonial and neocolonial regimes crush these insurgencies, which were suspected of having ties to Communism.

Meanwhile, economic arrangements in Asia were manipulated to give enormous leverage to the United States and its new regional ally, Japan. For instance, the Bell Trade Act of 1946 made economic aid to the Philippines contingent upon the granting of favored trade status to American businesses operating there, making it more difficult for Filipinos to compete in the free market and leaving the ecosystem of the archipelego highly vulnerable to unregulated development. The fateful American intervention in the 1954 Geneva Conference negotiations for a unified, independent Vietnam was largely motivated by the desire to provide Japan with a trading partner other than Communist China; no consideration was given to how the Vietnamese people would feel about opening their markets to a nation so recently responsible for a famine that killed millions during its brutal wartime occupation of Vietnam.

The utter callousness of American diplomacy in Asia during the Cold War, for which four Democratic presidents and a Democratic majority in Congress are partly responsible, is what is left out of "the liberal story" that Beinart and others would like to canonize. Nothing could be further from the restraint that Niebuhr urged American policy makers to exercise than the predatory trade agreements, covert military and intelligence operations, environmental destruction, and full-scale warfare that together constitute the lion's share of our role in Asia's recent history. Citing the influence of Cold War liberals such as Kennan and Walter Lippmann in the shaping of American public opinion and foreign policy, the late Edward Said observes, "Few Americans have agonized over places like Haiti or Iraq once the crisis or their country's actual intervention was over ... The relationship between America and its Pacific or Far Eastern interlocutors - China, Japan, Korea, Indochina - is informed by racial prejudice, sudden and relatively unprepared rushes of attention followed by enormous pressure applied thousands of miles away, geographically and intellectually distant from the lives of most Americans." Sadly, the Cold War liberals were no exceptions to this provincial tendency in American society.

Encouraged by the expansion of the welfare state, the gradual progress on civil rights at home, and the successful democratization of Western Europe, outraged by the despotism of the Soviet Union and its satellites, they were willfully ignorant about the local needs and aspirations of postcolonial Asia. Although many of them opposed the escalation of American military forces in Vietnam, they failed to acknowledge how the larger pattern of American intervension in Asia seriously undermined our alleged commitments to universal human rights, democratic values, and the rule of law.

There is much more at stake in the battle over American foreign policy than the prospect of winning national elections. In the twenty-first century, liberals cannot continue to accept freedom, security, and middle-class prosperity at home while billions of people around the world are forced into the most wretched conditions imaginable in order to subsidize our way of life.