If there was one word that Cold War liberals almost invariably used to characterize their outlook, it was “tragic.” That Reason, the purported agent of human liberation, had instead spawned concentration camps; that the United States, with the noblest of intentions, wound up again and again allied with unsavory right-wing dictatorships; that this peace-loving nation should find itself forced to drop so many and such lethal bombs on so many noncombatants throughout the twentieth century—bombing them into “a nobler, higher liberty,” as Berlin might have said (but didn’t): These regrettable facts fell into the category of “tragic irony.” Those who could not perceive the tragedy—leftists, usually—were derided as naïve or doctrinaire.
“Tragic irony” was not entirely a dodge. It was meant to counter a style of thinking that one might call Jacobin: a tendency to think about politics schematically, with too much reliance on abstractions and too much readiness to assign people to categories (like class), which thereafter determine their treatment, and too little allowance for contingency and individuality. There was also a tendency in this style of thought to appeal to historical inevitability, usually to justify sacrifices by the masses. The Bolsheviks had done these things to a fault—a monstrous fault—and the Cold War liberals’ revulsion was justified. Not justified, however, was their implacable condemnation of any and all radical criticism or action.
Moyn’s critique of the Cold War liberals is acute and judicious. But they seem to me liable to another, even more damaging critique: The Cold War liberals simply had no idea what the Cold War was about. They believed it was a mortal combat between democracy and totalitarianism, between freedom and slavery, and most elementally, between good and evil. But it was nothing of the sort.
The actual Cold War, rather than the grand clash of metaphysical systems imagined by the Cold War liberals, was a tacit, mutually advantageous arrangement between the superpowers to represent each other as a supreme threat, a tireless aggressor, an evil empire, in order to induce their own populations to bear the moral and material costs of imposing their different forms of hegemony in their respective domains. U.S. support for numerous repressive and violent regimes engaged in crushing restive populations could hardly be justified to the American public honestly, i.e., as support for a favorable investment climate. So Americans were instructed that the international Communist crusade was threatening yet another helpless country vital to the defense of the Free World—no matter what that country’s population might want. The Soviets, likewise, portrayed their interventions in Eastern Europe as the defense of socialism against cunning and unscrupulous agents of capitalist counterrevolution, when what was really at stake was, in the first place, to prevent the Russian population from becoming infected with democratic ideas from the satellite countries, and in the second place, to secure a buffer against invasion from the West, which had nearly destroyed Russia three times in a century and a half. (Then as now, NATO made the Russians extremely nervous.)