ABSTRACT
Five years on from 9/11, and especially since the 2003 start of the war in Iraq, what I resent most is that a surprising number of writers and thinkers have raised the Cold War analogy to the status of faith. Liberal hawk philosopher prince Paul Berman, for one, has in his books Terror and Liberalism (2003) and Power and the Idealists (2005) consolidated his unapologetic Cold War liberalism for a post-Cold War era. In Berman’s words, “[t]he war between liberalism and Islamism mirrored perfectly, in [its war of ideas], the earlier wars between liberalism and other forms of totalitarianism.” And: “Today the totalitarian danger has not yet lost its sting, and there is no wisdom in claiming otherwise. The literature and language of the mid-twentieth century speak to us about danger of that sort. That is the thesis of my book [Terror and Liberalism].” Given all this, it is interesting to note that man-of-the-left Berman warmly reviewed in the New York Times ex-neocon but still man-of-the-right Francis Fukuyama’s America at the Crossroads (2006)—as did, for that matter, America Right or Wrong author Anatol Lieven (in The National Interest), who in 2004 polemicized against liberal hawks like Berman! Lieven writes that his new book (co-authored with the Heritage Foundation’s John Hulsman), not unlike Fukuyama’s, will try to steer a path between neoconservatism and liberal hawkishness in the interest of “returning to the best traditions of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, advocat[ing] generous aid for the development of key allies-and not only development but equitable development.” Who would have thought such a more-or-less synchronization of views possible even a few years ago? But there’s more.
