How liberals won the cold war

There's much to commend in Peter Beinart's essay in The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday, and I'm a little surprised there hasn't been more discussion of it in the blogosphere. Perhaps it got lost in the faux outrage over a protest song, pushed aside by the distraction of watching the disbelieving gasp of journalists confronted with irony, and forgotten amidst the heady celebration of Codpiece Day.

And while I generally share the Left's misgivings about Beinart's obsession with appearing muscular, I thought his essay was a useful reminder that the Soviet Union did not suddenly collapse because Ronald Reagan said, "Boo!," while unveiling his own "Doomsday Machine," but rather the foundation of the Soviet empire was relentlessly weakened in large part through the work of post-war liberal Democrats who for forty years kept the Soviets contained and kept U.S. democracy and culture as a paradigm for Europe.

The liberal story began with a different fear about America. If cold-war conservatives worried that Americans no longer saw their own virtue, cold-war liberals worried that Americans saw only their virtue. The A.D.A.'s most important intellectual — its equivalent of James Burnham — was the tall, German-American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr was a dedicated opponent of communism, but he was concerned that in pursuing a just cause, Americans would lose sight of their own capacity for injustice. "We must take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization," he wrote. "We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect disinterestedness in its exercise nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized." Americans, Niebuhr argued, should not emulate the absolute self-confidence of their enemies. They should not pretend that a country that countenanced McCarthyism and segregation was morally pure. Rather, they should cultivate enough self-doubt to ensure that unlike the Communists', their idealism never degenerated into fanaticism. Open-mindedness, he argued, is not "a virtue of people who don't believe anything. It is a virtue of people who know. . .that their beliefs are not absolutely true."

George Kennan, architect of the Truman administration's early policies toward the Soviet Union, called Niebuhr the "father of us all." And in the first years of the cold war, Niebuhr's emphasis on moral fallibility underlay America's remarkable willingness to restrain its power. In the aftermath of World War II, the United States represented half of the world's G.D.P., and the nations of Western Europe lay militarily and economically prostrate. Yet the Truman administration self-consciously bound America within institutions like NATO, which gave those weaker nations influence over American conduct. "We all have to recognize, no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please." As the historian John Lewis Gaddis has written: "It was not that the Americans lacked the capacity to force their allies into line.. . .What is surprising is how rarely this happened; how much effort the United States put into persuading — quite often even deferring to — its NATO partners."

Kennan believed America's great advantage in the cold war was that the Soviet Union constituted an empire, which held its alliances together by force. By contrast, he argued, if the United States resisted the imperial temptation and built alliances that respected foreign nationalism, those alliances would endure. In 1947, when the Truman administration announced the Marshall Plan to help rebuild postwar Western Europe, he resisted using the aid to recast European economies in America's image. Indeed, his administration assisted socialist parties, recognizing that while they might not always prove ideologically pliant, they represented home-grown bulwarks against Soviet power. As one Truman State Department official put it, America should seek European allies "strong enough to say no both to the Soviet Union and the United States, if our actions should seem so to require."

For conservatives, this willingness to indulge governments that would not bend fully to American principles and American wishes was yet another sign that Americans did not truly believe in the righteousness of their cause. While Kennan saw the Soviet empire as brittle, Burnham envied its lockstep unity and urged America to build its own equivalent. "The reality," he wrote, "is that the only alternative to the communist World Empire is an American Empire, which will be, if not literally worldwide in formal boundaries, capable of exercising decisive world control."

If different views about moral clarity produced different views about American restraint, they also produced different views on how best to defend democracy, at home and abroad. The Marshall Plan's premise was that the survival of European democracy depended on its ability to deliver economic opportunity. In "The Vital Center," his famed 1949 statement of cold-war liberalism, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. compared communism to an intruder trying to enter a house. The American military could keep it from knocking down the door. But if the people inside were sufficiently desperate, they might unlock it from the inside.

Useful history, indeed. But I'm not entirely sure what Beinart means for us to do with it. After all, arguing that Liberals will help America restrain its inner totalitarian does not sound like an effective message point for the coming mid-terms. For while there is much to admire about Adlai Stevenson, the intellectual model of the cold war liberal, he had a habit of losing elections.

Further, while Beinart finds Democrats' "Michael Dukakis strategy" of proclaiming their "competence" a sign of "ideological weakness," at the moment it looks like a pretty good plan, given the alternative of which we're in the midst.