by Tony Judt
If Gaddis does not pursue these thoughts it is probably because he is not much troubled by them. To judge from what he has to say about the past, he is unlikely to lose sleep over presidential abuses of power in the present or future. Indeed, Gaddis admonishes Americans for placing restrictions on their elected rulers. Describing what he clearly sees as the regrettable overreaction to Watergate and Vietnam in the 1970s, he writes: “The United States Congress was passing laws—always blunt instruments—to constrain the use of United States military and intelligence capabilities. It was as if the nation had become its own worst enemy.” Retrospectively frustrated by such constraints, Gaddis admires the boldness and vision of President George W. Bush. A keen supporter of the recent Iraq war, Gaddis in 2004 even published a guide for the use of American policymakers, showing how preemptive and preventive war making has an honorable place in American history and is to be encouraged—where appropriate—as part of an ongoing project of benevolent interventionism.19
Thus, while it may seem tempting to dismiss John Lewis Gaddis’s history of the cold war as a naively self-congratulatory account that leaves out much of what makes its subject interesting and of continuing relevance, that would be a mistake. Gaddis’s version is perfectly adapted for contemporary America: an anxious country curiously detached from its own past as well as from the rest of the world and hungry for “a fireside fairytale with a happy ending.”20 The Cold War: A New History is likely to be widely read in the U.S.: both as history and, in the admiring words of a blurb on the dust jacket, for the “lessons” it can teach us in how to “deal with new threats.” That is a depressing thought.
This decidedly unsympathetic review of John Gaddis’s popular new history of the cold war appeared in the New York Review of Books in March 2006. Gaddis, understandably enough, took umbrage at my lack of enthusiasm for his latest and most commercially successful account of the cold war decades; but the fact remains that his book contributes significantly to widespread misunderstanding and ignorance in the U.S. concerning the nature of the cold war, the way it ended, and its troubling, unfinished legacies at home and abroad.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XXI
1 See my essay “Why the Cold War Worked,” New York Review of Books, October 9, 1997. Gaddis’s many books include The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Russia, the Soviet Union and the United States: An Interpretive History (Knopf, 1978); Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982); The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); The United States and the End of the Cold War: Implications, Reconsiderations, Provocations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2 Huge increases in the Pentagon budget during Reagan’s first term led the KGB and GRU—Soviet military intelligence—to mount the biggest intelligence operation of the cold war in an effort to penetrate Washington’s (nonexistent) plans for a nuclear attack. See Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 392-393.
3 Except insofar as these are in languages Gaddis does not read. But thanks to the publications of the invaluable Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, even this is no longer an insuperable impediment, as Gaddis himself generously acknowledges.
4 For an alternative viewpoint, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
5 Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way: The KGB and the Battle for the Third World (New York: Basic Books, 2005), foreword, xxvi.
6 Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta, Act IV, scene i.
7 And wrong, too. Under Margaret Thatcher the British Conservative Party’s share of the vote went down at every election she contested after 1979. The reason Thatcher won anyway was because Labour’s vote fell even further. The “masses” didn’t switch to Thatcher; they just stopped voting.
8 Here, as elsewhere, Gaddis’s account flattens out interesting undulations in the historical record. Thus Tito’s break with Stalin was more than just a revolt against “Cominform orthodoxy.” Tito himself was very orthodox, ideologically speaking. Indeed, he was “more Catholic than the Pope,” which was just what Stalin held against him. On this subject Gaddis’s Yale colleague Ivo Banac has written a very interesting book, With Stalin Against Tito: Cominformist Splits in Yugoslav Communism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). Curiously, it does not figure in Gaddis’s bibliography.
9 It is true that Gorbachev’s view of the Soviet system shifted sharply after 1986. But he was a convinced Communist and remained one. What changed his perspective was not George Shultz’s private lectures on the virtues of capitalism (as both Shultz and, less forgivably, Gaddis appear to believe) but the catastrophe of Chernobyl and its aftermath.
10 See Markus Wolf, Man Without a Face: The Autobiography of Communism’s Greatest Spymaster (New York: Times Books, 1997); also Andrew and Mitrokhin, The World Was Going Our Way, 489.
11 One illustration among many: Moses Finley, whom I knew at Cambridge University, came to Great Britain in 1954 from Rutgers University in New Jersey. He had been fired by Rutgers in December 1952—for invoking the Fifth Amendment when called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities the previous March—and was unable to get another post in the U.S. He settled in Cambridge, became a British citizen, succeeded to the Chair of Ancient History in 1970, and died in 1986 as Professor Sir Moses Finley CBE, the most influential ancient historian of his time. I don’t believe anyone in Cambridge ever asked Finley whether he was then or had ever been a Communist.
12 See Reinhold Wagnleitner, Coca-Colonization and the Cold War: The Cultural Mission of the United States in Austria after the Second World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 136-139.
13 For a corrective, see Thomas Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003). This important book is missing from Gaddis’s bibliography.
14 The literature on the cultural history of the cold war is unusually rich. Among many works, see Abbott Gleason, Totalitarianism: The Inner History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Sadly, Gaddis—whose bibliography contains ten entries under his own name—could not find room for either of these books.
15 For a recent description of the trajectory of that generation, from street fighting to government ministries, and its heritage in contemporary interventionism undertaken in the name of liberal ideals, see Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and Its Aftermath (Brooklyn, NY: Soft Skull Press, 2005). This is an important story, but Power and the Idealists would be a much better book if Berman had resisted the temptation to trace back his own fervently ideological support for the recent Iraq war into the mental and political world of seventies-era German activists. (For an instance of the rather desperate lengths to which Berman goes to link Iraqi Baathists and al-Qaeda, in a chapter ostensibly devoted to Joschka Fischer and German foreign policy, see, e.g., pp. 124-125.)
16 Martha Ritter, “Echoes from the Age of Relevance,” Harvard Magazine, July-August 1981, 10; quoted in David L. Schalk, War and The Ivory Tower: Algeria and Vietnam (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005; first published in 1991).
17 Gaddis’s historically foreshortened understanding of détente and its sources probably results from his dependence in these matters upon Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), written by his former student Jeremi Suri. This is a stimulating and original study but one in which imaginative global interpretation occasionally substitutes f
or detailed local knowledge.
18 For a levelheaded discussion of what happens when a proactive superpower offers to “remake everyone else’s world,” see Ghassan Salamé, Quand l’Amérique refait le monde (Paris: Fayard, 2005), notably “Conclusion,” 519-547.
19 Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).
20 The phrase is David Caute’s, from his review of The Cold War: A New History in The Spectator, January 14, 2006.
CHAPTER XXII
The Silence of the Lambs: On the Strange Death of Liberal America
Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about recent reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?
It wasn’t always so. Back on October 26, 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for Liberalism. Headed “A Reaffirmation of Principle,” it openly rebuked then-President Ronald Reagan for deriding “the dreaded L-word” and treating “liberals” and “liberalism” as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are “timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.”
The advertisement was signed by sixty-three prominent intellectuals, writers, and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, John Kenneth Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Irving Howe, and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories—the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren—were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral center of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dare not speak its name. And those who style themselves “liberal intellectuals” are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favors, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely subsumed by an admirable cohort of muckraking investigative journalists—notably Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing, and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.
The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary USA can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the sixties generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born, in most cases, many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the thirties above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal center in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government, and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a long-standing commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.
This process was well under way before September 11, 2001—and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy “triangulations” must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the mainstream liberal center—e.g., the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times itself—fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.
Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguished the worldview of George Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neoconservative allies is that they do not look upon the “War on Terror,” or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the reestablishment of American martial dominance. They see them rather as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their cold war liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided. As before, we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: They are at war with “Islamo-Fascism.”
Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker, and other liberal journals and hitherto better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic Fascism (itself a newly minted term of art), publishing a book on the subject (Terror & Liberalism, 2003) just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake with The Good Fight: Why Liberals—and only Liberals—Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again (2006), where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the war on terror and the early cold war. Neither author had hitherto evinced any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.
But like Christopher Hitchens and other erstwhile left-liberal pundits now expert in “Islamo-Fascism,” Beinart and Berman and their ilk really are familiar—and comfortable—with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. A world thus divided is familiar to them from their parents’ time; in some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism, when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s “fight” (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles, and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal foe whose ideas we can study, theorize, and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, just like its twentieth-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy vs. Totalitarianism, Freedom vs. Fascism, Them vs. Us.
To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticizing Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture, and above all the sheer ineptitude of the President’s war in Iraq. But here, too, the cold war offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism; so intellectual supporters of the Iraq war—among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick, and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment—have focused their regrets not upon the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but rather on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving “preventive war” a bad name.
In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq war—readers may recall the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanding that France be voted “off the island” (i.e., out of the UN Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war—are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. Thus the same Friedman now (August 16, 2006) sneers at “anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in.” To be sure, Friedman’s portentous, Pulitzer-
winning pieties are always carefully road tested for middle-brow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.
Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he “didn’t realize” (!) how detrimental American actions would be to “the struggle” but insists notwithstanding that anyone who won’t stand up to “Global Jihad” just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq war of failing “to take the wider global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously at all.” The only people qualified to speak in this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of—indeed because of—your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: “You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.”
It is thus particularly ironically that the “Clinton generation” of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their “toughmindedness,” in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old Left. For these same “tough” new liberals in fact reproduce some of that old Left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mix of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention an exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformations at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-traveling predecessors across the cold war ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the “useful idiots” of the War on Terror.
