A New Cold War for a Dying World Order
Reprinted from The Realist Review.
Washington is more united than is often thought. Despite the ruptures with an imagined past that have been said to have been caused by the chaos agent in the White House, the foreign policy consensus (underwritten by the national religion of American exceptionalism) has shown itself to possess a remarkable resiliency in the three and a half decades since the end of the first Cold War (1946-1988). There today exists a broad consensus across the American political spectrum that it is Washington’s duty (to say nothing of its ability – now for the first time being seriously questioned thanks to Trump’s ongoing debacle in Iran) to suit up and take the field in a global fight to defend ‘democracy’ which, as we have been incessantly informed for a decade starting in 2016, is ‘under attack’ (the starting point of the great ‘democracy panic’ is hardly a coincidence). As the progressive standard bearer Bernie Sanders put it back in 2017, “in the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win.”
The architect of the Cold War containment doctrine, George F. Kennan, once observed that “there is nothing in nature more egocentric than the embattled democracy.” And the elected (and, perhaps more importantly, unelected) leaders of our own “embattled democracy” with over 2 million men and women under arms; over 5,000 nuclear warheads; surrounded by 3,000 miles of ocean to the east and 12,000 miles of ocean to the west, is widely thought to remain vulnerable to coercion by an ‘Axis of Authoritarianism’ led by China and Russia – with a supporting (and growing) cast made up of Iran, North Korea, and occasionally, depending on the politics of the analyst, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and certain political parties in Germany, Hungary, Italy, and France.
The prevailing narrative has a shapeshifting quality to it: some days we are informed that the global authoritarian threat is driven by shadowy agents of disinformation employed by the Kremlin; at other times, the threat comes in the form of authoritarian oligarchs and authoritarian kleptocrats. But at all times, our democracy – and the right of our “allies” such as Ukraine to practice democracy – is said to be under threat by the authoritarian axis. This, then, is the narrative, and in Washington, as in America at large, it is the narrative that counts, never mind the substance. As the essayist and president of the Simone Weil Center, Paul Grenier, has elsewhere observed, to the extent that there is a debate over foreign policy in this country, “what we universally observe is the substitution of narrative for reality.” Such preferred narratives “either advance the interests of this or that segment of the power elite, or advance the careers of this or that sector of the national security bureaucracy. That these narratives typically ignore what is true and what is in touch with reality turns out to be of little concern.”
Cold Wars, New and Old
The Cold Wars, both new and old, by which I mean those wars of ’necessity’ waged by Washington on behalf of the Western democracies against, respectively, ‘authoritarianism’ and ‘communism,’ have been, from the first, a project of the American elite dating back to the administration of Harry S. Truman.
On January 31, 1968, at the very moment US troops were under furious assault half a world away in Saigon and Hue, a German academic named Hans Magnus Enzensberger was composing a letter of resignation from his position at Wesleyan University in the rather more congenial environs of Middletown, Connecticut. He had seen enough of America; it was time to move on. Enzensberger felt that “most Americans have no idea of what they and their country look like to the outside world.” And Vietnam was not, as many believed, “an unfortunate accident” made by otherwise well-intentioned men; it was, rather, “the most visible outcome… the bloodiest test case of a coherent international policy which applied to five continents.” It was a project of an American “ruling class” which he considered to be “the most dangerous body of men on earth.” “In one way or another,” wrote Enzensberger, “this class is a threat to anyone who is not part of it… its aim is to establish its political, economic, and military predominance over every other power in the world.”
Same as it ever was.
Yet the difference between 1968 and 2026 is that in decades past large—if not overwhelming – segments of the American left would have signed on to Enzensberger’s brutally frank critique. No longer. Today, progressive ‘thought leaders’ have abandoned these critiques of empire and instead have rallied around the fatuous and dangerous delusion that American democracy is under assault by the insidious forces of global authoritarianism.
As excitement (in certain quarters) grows over the possibility that the 2026 midterms will result in a ‘Blue Wave’ bringing a new generation of progressives to Washington, there is a sense that change is in the offing. It would be wise to temper that enthusiasm, particularly when it comes to matters relating to US foreign policy. Asked to explain his position on the war in Ukraine, the Democratic nominee for US Senate from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, responded that “when we’re talking about taking on Putin and his violation of international law, I do believe we have a responsibility to uphold international law and therefore to support Ukraine in its efforts.”
New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s position on Ukraine differs little from that of either El-Sayed or the late neoconservative senator Lindsey Graham. Speaking at the Munich Security Conference earlier this year, AOC proclaimed that an “age of authoritarianisms” beckoned thanks to the machinations of Trump and Putin. With regard to US support for Ukraine, AOC was affirmative, noting in her view that “We shouldn’t reward imperialism, and I don’t think that we should allow Russia to continue, or any nation, to continue violating a nation’s sovereignty and to continue to be rewarded.” The framing is telling because it allows progressive and liberal supporters of the war in Ukraine to let Washington (especially prior Democratic administrations) off the hook for pursuing the very policies that led to the war in the first place. Nowhere in her critique did she utter the words “NATO expansion.” In AOC’s world, a war waged to prevent a neighboring country from joining a hostile, nuclear-armed military alliance is “imperialism.” Note too her repeated use of the word “reward.” Ending a conflict that has decimated an entire generation of Ukrainian men; resulted in the loss of fully 1/5th of Ukraine’s post-Cold War territory; in the loss of perhaps over half of its population (from 52 million in 1992 to probably under 20 million today); and which continues to wreak havoc on the lives of Ukrainian civilians is spun as a “reward” for Russia.
For prior generations of American liberals and progressives – from E.L. Godkin, Mark Twain, and Jane Addams to Reinhold Niebuhr, Adlai Stevenson, Martin Luther King, Jr., George McGovern, and Paul Wellstone – preventing and ending wars was a foundational ideal. Not now. Instead, one gets the impression that progressive foreign policy “thought leaders” fear nothing so much as the prospect of peace breaking out with Russia; better, then, to keep people distracted with the threat posed by, say, money laundering, than the possibility of nuclear war
Today, AOC and her Koch-funded foreign policy adviser take the position that we must enter into “global alliances” in order “to serve as a hard stop against authoritarian consolidation of power,” which amounts to little more than a recycling of the Obama administration’s modus operandi: Multilateral wars: Good. Unilateral wars: Bad. Or, in AOC’s case, maybe not so bad. After all, AOC regurgitated one of the Trump administration’s various rationales for launching a war on Iran. “Right now,” said AOC in late February 2026, “what the Iranian regime is doing, particularly with respect to protesters, is a horrific slaughter – some estimates have tens of thousands of people now.” The number was around 6,000 at the end of January. And since we’re on the topic of the Middle East, one might as well note that as recently as 2025, AOC voted in favor of funding Israel’s Iron Dome (she reversed course only this past April) and was nowhere to be seen among the tiny handful of members of Congress who spoke out against the genocide in Gaza outside the 2024 DNC in Chicago.
What is too commonly said to be a new progressive foreign policy is neither new nor progressive. It simply seeks dominion through alternative means of coercion, through the instruments of ‘soft power’ such as sanctions, economic and military funding, and propaganda. Today’s progressive foreign policy requires, indeed demands, that other countries follow our lead – socially, politically, economically. It’s “you’re with us or against us” all over again; emulation is required.
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