Review of ‘Liberalism as a Way of Life’ by Alexandre Lefebvre

Alexandre Lefebvre’s Liberalism as a Way of Life belongs to the school of Anglo-American political philosophy whose defining figure was Harvard’s John Rawls, author of A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism. The Rawls school views the pursuit of justice as the cornerstone of a liberal society. But Lefebvre’s insightful account is also something of a departure, an original and at times exciting contribution to our understanding of liberalism—in the classical as opposed to the partisan political sense.

A professor at the University of Sydney, Lefebvre describes himself as a “liberal all the way down.” For him, as for Rawls, in deciding on laws and social arrangements that can perpetuate a just society, we must place ourselves behind a “veil of ignorance” in “the original position” of a member without attributes of such a society—that is, without knowledge of one’s place in it, whether one is rich or poor, favorably endowed with genetic and environmental gifts or encumbered by their absence. From this position, Rawls argues, reasonable people—knowing nothing about where they would fall in such a society—would write its rules in such a way as to favor the least advantaged among them, because once the veil is lifted, they could find they occupy exactly the least advantaged position.

No society has ever been created from such a premise, of course, and from a certain angle, it could look as if Rawls was rejecting all claims of justice on behalf of societies—or nation-states—that fail his test of putting the least advantaged first. Thus, one could read Rawls—and many did—as calling for radical reform and repudiating the legitimacy of states organized according to other priorities. But that’s not how Rawls saw it. His liberal theory of justice didn’t encompass a corresponding theory of injustice, according to which all societies reflecting deviations from reasonable conclusions behind the veil of ignorance were so disconnected from justice as to warrant condemnation. He thought they could improve.

In any event, Lefebvre notes, Rawls himself became somewhat dissatisfied with A Theory of Justice—notwithstanding its colossal success in his field and its standing as perhaps the most influential work of political philosophy of our time ever since its publication in 1971—on the grounds that it was “unrealistic.” So he turned to another question in his later work, Political Liberalism (1993). “How is it possible,” Rawls asked, “for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?”

The answer is that competing but reasonable “comprehensive doctrines” at work among people could yield to a “liberal political conception” in which big-picture doctrines would be respected insofar as they were reasonable. For Rawls, a comprehensive doctrine is anything that spells out the details of how to live a good life: as an Orthodox Jew, say, or an Opus Dei Catholic, or a Communist, or a cultivator of Aristotelian virtue. Political liberalism would never seek that status of a “comprehensive doctrine,” but it could be the organizing and limiting principle according to which adherents of various doctrines could live in a stable society of free and equal citizens.

Lefebvre writes about Rawls’s evolution as a thinker very well. But his distinctive achievement is to note that nowadays Rawls needs turning around. That’s because, he says, “decade by decade, year by year, and day by day, liberal ideals and sensibilities have spread to every nook and cranny of the background culture of liberal democracies.” Further, “so ubiquitous is liberalism that it has performed that special trick of disappearance achieved only by omnipresence: to have become invisible by infiltrating everything.” Lefebvre’s conclusion: “Love it or hate it, we all swim—we positively marinate—in liberal waters. And here is my critique: the firewall that political liberalism draws between comprehensive doctrines and a liberal political conception obscures this changed landscape.” Lefebvre doesn’t quite say that liberalism has become a “comprehensive doctrine,” indeed the defining comprehensive doctrine, of modern democracies. But he ought to have.

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It is true that liberalism offers no single formula for how to live a good life of the sort that once characterized states and their gods or ideologies. In that sense, it is not “comprehensive,” leaving to individual judgment or conscience many important questions about how to live. But liberalism does include at least one doctrinal element that overrides any and all presumptions of any and all comprehensive doctrines that might contradict it. That is the “reasonableness standard.” Liberals insist that adherents of comprehensive doctrines, whether they count themselves liberal or not, be “reasonable” in their adherence. Indeed, the word is central to Rawls’s research question—so much so that one could say he slipped his answer into the question itself. An unreasonable “comprehensive doctrine”—that is, a coercive or violent doctrine—cannot be part of a “just and stable society of free and equal citizens.” It is up to these contending comprehensive doctrines, almost all of which have historical associations with coercion and violent propagation, to modify themselves as necessary to become “reasonable.” Whether their adherents profess allegiance or opposition to a liberal political conception, their behavior must conform to it, or there will be adverse consequences for them.

Lefebvre has the acuity to see that, generally speaking, the behavior of individuals and organized groups in modern democratic societies is liberalism-compliant. He addresses his book mainly to those who identify themselves as through-and-through liberals in the sense of both the Rawls of A Theory of Justice and the Rawls of Political Liberalism— people who are, if not “liberals all the way down” like himself, then most of the way. Unfortunately, this nudges him into two related observational errors. As Peter Berkowitz notes, Lefebvre is too stingy in recognizing the genuineness of the liberalism of people who, for whatever reason, don’t identify themselves as liberals. As an exercise, Lefebvre would like liberals to imagine themselves in the “original position” when thinking about the fair distribution of social goods. That might be sufficient for a certain subset of liberals of the left-progressive sort, but if those were the only people practicing “liberalism as a way of life,” there would be no book to write about a society imbued with liberalism. The point is that most conservatives, most Orthodox and other Jews, most devout conservative and liberal Catholics, most evangelical Protestants, and many other non-progressives in Western societies, are nevertheless practicing liberals in daily life. They follow their “comprehensive doctrines” in a reasonable way—which is to say, within the overriding noncoercive liberal comprehensive doctrine. Although it may be tough for those steeped in the ways of Anglo-American political philosophy to accept, even the vast majority of Trump supporters are functionally liberal—not those who stormed the Capitol or those who think storming capitols is a good idea, but most everyone else. It may also be tough for people who spend their lives theorizing politics to accept that many Americans and other denizens of modern society don’t care very much about politics at all, and that’s fine.

His second observational miscue lies in his characterization of the gap between liberalism as the pursuit of justice or fairness and the actuality of the liberal world we live in. Rawlsian justice is what “liberals all the way down” want; but “liberaldom,” in Lefebvre’s coinage, is what we (all of us, whether we want it or not) actually have. The liberalism of liberaldom falls far short of what sweet reason would yield behind the veil of ignorance. In his own characterization, Lefebvre’s liberaldom is to liberalism as Kierkegaard’s “Christendom” is to Christianity—a complacent world in which we are all failures unable to live up to our professed ideals. In his view, liberals in liberaldom have much to answer for. He admits that he and his wife “spend a lot of money to send our daughter to private school” for the additional opportunity it provides, even though that might betray the egalitarianism required by Rawls’s conception of justice. “Now it’s your turn” to start your self-help program by making your own necessary admissions, he admonishes his liberal readers.

That is refreshingly honest, even though what such admissions really serve to illuminate is a key problem with Rawls’s approach to the pursuit of justice—which is that we will always strive to do more for those we love and who are in our own personal care, and that there is nothing unjust or immoral in that. Lefebvre is accordingly a little too hard on himself and on liberalism as we live it.

This article was originally published on October 15, 2024 in Commentary

Review of ‘Liberalism Against Itself’ by Samuel Moyn

Samuel Moyn was born in 1972, which was, in its way, perfect timing. There can be no doubting his youthful precocity; his writing bears traces of it to this day. But even a precocious child of the 1970s and ’80s couldn’t have had much in the way of direct contact with the social and political upheaval that gripped the United States and the West in the 1960s and 1970s—to say nothing of the real-time controversies and choices in the aftermath of the Second World War.

The world emerged from that war horrified not only by its devastation but also by the stark realization of just how awful were the possibilities of man’s inhumanity to man. True, the right side won. But the war itself, the Holocaust, the rapid dissolution of a wartime alliance with the Soviet Union into a Cold War in which the Soviet side pursued a totalitarian form of global ideological and political dominion—all this left serious people wondering whether the horror of mid-20th-century Europe was past, or merely prologue to something worse. The Soviet Union, having established its dominance in Central and Eastern Europe at the end of the war, sent dissidents to the Gulag at home, smashed an uprising in Hungary in 1956, put missiles in Cuba in 1962, and crushed the Prague Spring in 1968.

Moyn, now the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, knows this history—as history. But he was about seven years old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Marxist Sandinistas came to power in Nicaragua, and the revolutionary regime of Ayatollah Khomeini took American diplomats hostage in Iran. Did he get to stay up late in the last year of the Carter administration to watch ABC’s America Held Hostage at 11:30 Eastern? I don’t know. What I do know is that by the time Moyn got to college, the Berlin Wall had fallen. And by the time he graduated, Germany was reunited—a geopolitical fact that troubled the sleep only of those on the Soviet side of the wartime alliance that had defeated German fascism less than half a century before. Also during Moyn’s college years, the Warsaw Pact dissolved, the Soviet Union broke up, and the Baltic states and Ukraine (among other former Soviet Socialist Republics) became independent.

Now, if you lived through much or any of what transpired en route to the amazing collapse of the Soviet Union, you might have said something along the lines of “Whew, close call.” Or even, “Thank God.” But if, like the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, you missed all that and only read about it later, you can simply take as a given the victory of freedom, democracy, the West, whatever. That’s what happened, after all. And without a glimmer of gratitude or even apparent awareness of what you’re doing, you can move on to your self-admiring excoriation of the supposed intellectual and moral failings of those who took the side of freedom, democracy, the West, whatever.

Liberalism Against Itself, Moyn’s new book, presents the story of how a group of intellectuals—the “Cold War liberals”—struggled to grasp the situation of the world in the two decades after the Second World War and ended up betraying liberalism and the principles of the Enlightenment in a way that fundamentally narrowed the vision of and ambition for human political action in pursuit of progress.

In Moyn’s estimation, Enlightenment-inspired liberalism has yet to recover from this Cold War betrayal and may never do so. Nor does liberalism necessarily deserve to recover, such were the hideous and unnecessary transfigurations the Cold War liberals wrought. All this took place, by the way, even before the Cold War liberal tendency split and “collapsed” into what Moyn views as the sibling depravities of neoliberalism and neoconservatism. The only real hope is that a new generation of thinkers (oh, I see Samuel Moyn has his hand up) will repudiate the narrow vision of Cold War liberalism and attach us to the Enlightenment’s radical faith in human possibility via politics.

Moyn is well-read. But he is less interested in understanding the thinkers he analyzes than in prosecuting the case against them—or rather, against the Weberian “ideal type,” the “Cold War liberal,” he has dragooned them into representing. Many elements of this ideal type will be familiar to anyone with even passing acquaintance with what intellectuals were arguing about in the postwar period. Yes, it is true, many of the thinkers of the day developed a deep antipathy toward collectivism and a regard for individual liberty as the best of the liberal tradition. Yes, among the Cold War liberals, there developed a philosophical “anti-canon” that generally began with Rousseau and extended through Hegel and Marx into its real-world manifestation in Soviet Communism and, especially, Stalinism.

Yes, the Nazi regime, though drawing on different sources as well, did have “totalitarianism” in common with the Soviet Union, in the view of the Cold War liberals. Yes, the preservation of individual liberty against the danger of this totalitarianism looked to be Job One. Yes, the United States was the locus of resistance. And yes, the Cold War liberals saw this as a struggle between good and evil.

They rejected (though I think it’s fair to say they nevertheless feared) the historicist claim that Communism was the inevitable victor in the contest with democratic capitalism or democratic socialism—more broadly between totalitarianism and the “Free World.” They also rejected the relativist tendency of the strain of historicism incapable of drawing a distinction between good and bad in politics. The West, they believed, really was worth preserving on the merits. And they rejected the view that the human being was perfectible through political or any other means. On the question of whether the human was permanently and inescapably dark, they differed. But they had in mind, above all, preserving whatever good there is in the human.

The Cold War liberals, like every generation of intellectuals before or since, also had the intellectual fashions of their times to contend with, as well as ample personal vanities generally stemming from the conviction, not wrong, that they were smarter than everybody else. Moyn pretty much has the same bias in his own favor, which is not supported by the text he has produced. Indeed, Liberalism Against Itself is a shambles in many, many ways—literary, intellectual, political, and especially moral. It’s organized into chapters featuring the names of (I presume) Moyn’s eccentric short list of leading Cold War liberals: Judith Shklar, Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Hannah Arendt, and Lionel Trilling. In the hands of a deft writer, this approach of connected intellectual profiles can work well—it does in Mark Lilla’s The Reckless Mind, for example. But here, why he chooses these six and not others is murky, and Moyn’s consideration of them spills from chapter to chapter often seemingly on the basis of when something pops into his head. I have edited numerous books, and at around page 25, I found myself grumbling about what a shame it is that nobody edits books anymore. By page 50, I was struck with the harrowing thought that the published version of the book appears after, not absent, heavy editing.

He is a scrutineer of ephemera par excellence. Does it really matter that Hannah Arendt may never have read Judith Shklar’s After Utopia, something Moyn deduces because Arendt’s library contained a copy of the book with no handwritten notations? He includes a reproduction of the typescript contents page of Shklar’s doctoral dissertation, for example. He does so, I think, in an effort to vivify his discussion of how the structure of her dissertation changed from its submission to its publication as After Utopia. There is a kind of filial piety here with regard to Shklar, but in the case of all those subject to his criticism, his scrutiny seems so small-minded that it all but rehabilitates their weaknesses. By the time Moyn is done attacking Lionel Trilling for his embrace of Freud’s dark view of human nature, for example, I was almost ready to give Civilization and Its Discontents a fresh hearing.

But the infamia Moyn pronounces on the Cold War liberals is not, in the main, related to the trivialities that manage to bog down a book of merely 170 pages plus notes and index. Moyn’s indictment is that their fear of the collectivism of Soviet Communism was so exaggerated that they were willing to abandon and attack the more ambitious Enlightenment project of human perfectibility through political action in favor of acquiescence to and defense of an American and Western individualist status quo shot through with injustice.

Let me reframe, as the structuralists say. What this book actually argues, though its author does not know it or want it to be so, is that the Cold War liberals grasped the most pressing moral problem and political challenge of their lifetime with unwavering clarity. They understood that Communism, like Nazism, was evil, and that freedom, which starts with individual liberty, is good in itself, but fragile. They recognized that the ambition on the other side was total—that is, totalitarian—and in hot pursuit of global victory, both ideologically and politically. They sought to thwart this victory as best they could in their area of comparative advantage, the life of the mind. They did so in part by defending the values of individual liberty embodied in the United States and the West but not the Soviet bloc.

Most of them recognized that the actualization of liberty in the West was incomplete, but that its opponents were out to crush it in its entirety. They argued all this out among their intellectual peers while such characters as Dean Acheson and John Foster Dulles were busy elsewhere. And they did all this without knowing whether freedom would persist in the West against a permanent adversary (the optimistic view) or would fall to decadence and a radical onslaught at home or in a nuclear Holocaust.

But Moyn knows how the Cold War turned out, and to him, the outcome seems so obvious that everybody at the time should have been able to see it coming. Facing down an opponent bent on remaking politics into a collectivist enterprise under, say, Stalin’s dictatorship, why stick to a defense of individual liberty against the collective when you could embrace a more positive Rousseauian project of collectively removing the chains in which the human birthright finds itself?

Moyn can imagine no intellectually or morally satisfactory answer to this question. His foray into the writings of his subjects is for the purpose of framing the inadequacy of their stance, not to understand it. Yet there is an answer common to his subjects, one that makes sense in their times and ours. It’s that freedom is often first on the chopping block among those who presume to know and speak in the name of the “general will.” The intellectuals of Cold War liberalism got that right, and their greatest legacy ought to be an awareness of the need to preserve individual freedom while pursuing political improvement, lest the “improvement” take an oppressive, totalitarian, or even genocidal turn. Whatever they got wrong, they were right about that.

A Russian invasion of Ukraine and a Hamas massacre in Israel perhaps serve as a reminder, to those born too late for the last round, that the defense of freedom under attack is a permanent political challenge. Anything resembling progress in politics is contingent on human beings, including intellectuals, rising to the occasion. Surely this should not be beyond the grasp or beneath the amour propre of the Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University.

This article was originally published on January 15, 2024 in Commentary

Values are central to American foreign policy, and there’s no use pretending otherwise

A consistent point of contention in the debate over American foreign policy has to do with the respective roles of American interests and American values. On the center-left in the United States, it’s common practice simply to assert that American interests and values are, if not one and the same, at least in substantial accord. This is also a view significantly held on the center-right. But it has come under challenge in recent times by those on the right who are seeking to clarify and simplify matters by chucking values (viewed as sentimental self-indulgences) out of the debate in favor of strict calculations of national interest. In dueling manifestos released over the past year and a half, “national conservatives” and “freedom conservatives” have laid out contrasting visions for the future of the United States. But though they differ in many ways, both place the advancement of U.S. national interests as the top American priority in its relations with the rest of the world.

Now, the national interest is, of course, something every state pursues by definition. But the course of global events sometimes imposes choices on countries with an inescapable moral or values component—choices that have no less urgency than questions of national interest. One such event was the unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Another was the Hamas massacre of civilians in Israel on October 7. In both cases, opposing sets of values were clearly on display. One set seeks the obliteration of an enemy and is more than willing to attack civilians in pursuit of that end. The other seeks an end to such wanton aggression. Those not directly involved in these conflicts are forced to decide whether to take a side, and if so, which one. This is a values question as much as a question of national interest. Opinion polls show that Americans support Ukraine and Israel rather than Russia and Hamas. Moreover, the situations of Ukraine and Israel, as victims of barbarous attacks, more closely align with American sympathies than those of Russia and Hamas as perpetrators. The question of what practical policy choices and real-world involvement the country should engage in when it comes to these matters is one thing. But the values choices Americans have made—and not just Americans—are inescapably part of the calculation.

Even when we think about American interests, the modifier “American” carries a lot more weight than it would in any other case where we’re simply describing a place on a map. Yes, American interests should be framed around the country to which the interests belong, namely, the United States. But more than just a geographical or sovereign tag, “American” also refers to a set of values that shape what American interests are and how to pursue them.

Contrary to what one typically hears from today’s self-styled “realists,” recognizing both the centrality and usefulness of values in American foreign policy is in no way a new thing, or a post-9/11 fantasy, or confined to starry-eyed liberal internationalists. The great classical realist Hans Morgenthau, who died in 1980, believed that national interests needed to connect to a national purpose and stated that a nation should “pursue its interests for the sake of a transcendent purpose.” Even Morgenthau’s most famous disciple, the realpolitik master Henry Kissinger, closed his 1994 masterwork, Diplomacy, by making the case—surprising, coming from him—that American foreign policy needed to remain grounded in national values and ideals. Kissinger declared that America “must not abandon the ideals which have accounted for its greatness” and that “for America, any association with Realpolitik must take into account the core values of the first society in history to have been explicitly created in the name of liberty.”

For these and others like them, it never was the case that values had no place in American foreign policy. Indeed, as these examples suggest, they believed values were foundational. Rather, the complication involves what our “values” are and, in a world with finite resources and capabilities, how far we can go in trying to spread them to other places and how to weigh that effort against competing priorities. While we may (and do) dispute how policymakers come down on these questions in particular instances, any attempt to avoid or evade these essential questions is preposterous. We can’t decide what to do without thinking about what we should do, and the values we hold will by definition figure in this task.

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So what, then, are the values that the modifier “American” implies? Or to borrow from Morgenthau, what is that “American purpose” to which our interests should be connected? While Morgenthau suggested “equality in freedom,” the truth is that we should look to an even more fundamental element from which equality and freedom both spring—and that is, simply, human dignity. At our nation’s very beginning, the Founding Fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence what would become our nation’s core value proposition: that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” By this, the Founders were expressing the (quite literally) revolutionary idea that each person has an intrinsic dignity, something given to them “by their Creator” rather than another human, and therefore a quality inherent to their very being.

Because this dignity is not bestowed by any other person, it cannot be taken away by any other person. In the view of the Declaration, it belongs inherently and equally to all as a gift from God. Many secular accounts of equal dignity belonging to all human beings have also been proffered over the years, offering those who prefer one a this-worldly ground for ideas about rights. Whether God-given or otherwise, from this equal dignity flows to each person a set of “unalienable rights,” at the core of which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Rather than the state being the force that gives worth and meaning to each person, it is instead the individual that gives purpose to the government, which is here to protect those unalienable rights owed to each because of their equal dignity.

It is particularly telling that the Founders chose to start with this values proposition, and that only after establishing it did they move on to discussions of issues more commonly associated with core interests. Far from seeing values as a liability or an afterthought, our Founders rightly understood that values served as our greatest strength, and that our interests, both personal and political, flow from them, not the other way around.

In doing so, the Founders illuminated a profound but underappreciated truth—that national interests are intricately intertwined with national values. It is not, then, just the United States that must grapple with questions of values. It is that every nation—and every non-state actor with political aspirations—must do so as well. Each such state or actor must define its interests and the methods through which it chooses to pursue them in the context of some values framework. The inclination of many in the foreign-policy establishment to bypass this central fact creates the unfortunate tendency to assume a “moral equivalence” in the pursuit of national interests. They seem to believe that each country is just doing what every other country is doing.

The truth is, not every nation’s values, and thus the interests it chooses to pursue, are of equal moral standing. Some are better than others. While it is not unique to the United States for national values to affect national interests, what is uniquely (or at least distinctively) American is to have the values framework grounded so definitively in the principle of human dignity. And this very particular American values framework is in fact a superior one compared with the values frameworks held by such threatening geopolitical competitors as China, Russia, Iran, and Hamas.

Take for example three principles commonly associated with core national interests—security, freedom, and prosperity, the protection of which are core responsibilities of the state. These principles correspond at the state level to the Declaration’s enumeration of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as rights belonging to individuals.

At an abstract level, all states pursue security, freedom, and prosperity. But what Americans mean by security, freedom, and prosperity is very different from what China’s Xi and Russia’s Putin mean. “Security,” for example, can mean merely the security from the “state of nature” that Hobbes found in a Leviathan state. Or it can mean the security of the citizens of a state against invaders through a strong military capable of deterring or defeating an invader. Security in either or both of these senses is something Putin or Xi would have no difficulty embracing. But security in the sense of a set of rights that inhere in the person and that the state is bound to intervene to protect when someone seeks to violate them—that indeed, the purpose of the state is to protect the security of individuals in exactly this sense—takes us to a richer place, one where Xi and Putin cannot go.

Similarly, “freedom,” which, in international-relation terms, means that a state should be able to pursue its own course without interference in its internal affairs from others. This is a matter of “sovereign right,” and Xi and Putin claim to be leading defenders of this aspect of statehood against meddlesome outsiders. Freedom in this sense is not just a matter of principle; it requires a nation to possess the strength that will prevent outsiders from interfering. The United States would agree. But though we have here reached the limit of what Putin and Xi mean by freedom, we have not exhausted its meaning to the United States as something to preserve. Once again, the United States values freedom as the condition of individual liberty Americans enjoy by right—and which the state has a constitutional obligation to protect. In Xi’s China, ethnic and religious minorities are rounded up and subjected to unthinkable atrocities. In Putin’s Russia, political opponents are poisoned with lethal nerve agents and its citizens are conscripted into a war of aggression. To Hamas, “freedom” appears to be impossible without the destruction of Israel and the elimination of Jews from the Middle East. While it is a truism that all states, including the United States, can improve on their human-rights records, it is simply true that some states have far more improving to do than others.

Even in the narrow sense of sovereign freedom, it is noteworthy that Russia and China demand it for themselves but deny it to their neighbors, whom they seek to dominate. But doesn’t the United States seek, as a global hegemonic power, to do the same, and not just by flexing its muscle, but by enticing others to embrace its values? Perhaps—but not all hegemonic powers have the same values. The substance of these rights regarding American values is distinctive. The United States is of the view that “freedom” is something other states should choose to protect and preserve among their own people, not only in the collective sense of freedom from dominance by others, but in the pursuit of individual liberty free of state control.

Finally, “prosperity.” That the United States, China, and Russia wish to be nationally prosperous is not in question—not least to pay for the security that protects their freedom, whether in a narrow sovereign sense or in the richer American sense. True, Putin has turned out to be rather self-destructive in this regard, inflicting economic misery not only on the mass of the Russian people but also on his “oligarch” elite through sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine. In China’s case, however, one can truly marvel at how much increased economic freedom over several decades has done to improve the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese people (while disproportionately enriching a favored Chinese elite as well, to be sure). So it is that securing the ability to pursue “prosperity” is, once again, not merely a national aim but, aspirationally, also an individual endeavor.

We have entered a new era of great power competition and violent challenge, which once again is at its core a dispute between fundamentally incompatible values frameworks. Rather than seeking refuge in an abstract neutral standpoint that ignores major moral differences, conservatives should unashamedly make the case that American foreign policy should protect and advance American values, and that these are not the same values all other countries—particularly our chief competitors—seek to protect and advance. While the United States has been guilty at times of a flawed application of its values, the values of Xi, Putin, Iran’s leaders, and Hamas are simply fundamentally flawed.

We are better.

This article was originally published on December 15, 2023 in Commentary by Tod Lindberg and Corban Teague

On Will Arbery’s ‘Heroes of the Fourth Turning’

At some point in the life of a new cultural product, that work may escape the time and circumstances of its creation, the initial reaction of audiences to it, and reviews by contemporary critics. It graduates to a higher place, to the standing of a work of art.

Initial impressions do matter. When the premiere of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913 kicked off a fuss in the audience subsequently described as a “near-riot,” there must have been, among those present, at minimum the sense that something new and interesting was joining the world at the ballet that day. As for those who booed, surely even they later boasted of their attendance at the premiere. And of course, Stravinsky’s composition soon thereafter made its transition into a canonical work of musical modernism.

Few new works make that journey. I think Will Arbery’s Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which premiered in 2019, will be one of the few American plays of our time—perhaps the only one—that will enter the literary canon.

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Heroes of the Fourth Turning is set outside a rustic house in rural Wyoming. The house is near Transfiguration College, a very small, very conservative Catholic “great books” school where students “spoke conversational Latin and locked your phone in a safe for four years and rode horses and built igloos and memorized poems while scaling mountains,” as one character recalls to another. Those two—Kevin and Teresa—graduated seven years earlier, along with the cabin’s owner, Justin. Having served as a Marine Corps sniper and been married and divorced before going to Transfiguration to try to resettle his spiritual life, Justin is 10 years older than his fellow alums. The cast of characters is completed by Gina, the newly inaugurated president of Transfiguration, a 64-year-old mother of eight who taught the others, and her youngest daughter, Emily, who is 25. We join them all late at night as the party at Justin’s celebrating the inauguration has largely broken up.

These characters are all faithful and conservative Catholics, and the ostensible subject matter of the play is their struggle to relate to a world around them growing ever more distant from traditional moral teaching—both Catholic precepts and the stern biblical and virtue ethics of the ancient world. Much of the theatergoing audience of our day has had little real-world interaction with people such as these characters—human beings talking, arguing, venting, laughing, crying, and importuning among themselves in accordance with the premises of their Catholic faith.

On this stage, for example, abortion is simply and inarguably murder. The dispute between the characters on the subject is largely over the apportionment of the blame for what one character brands a “modern-day Holocaust.” Justin, the former Marine, describes the modern world as “a system that distracts [young people] from true moral questions and refocuses their attention onto fashionable and facile questions of identity and choice.” He traces the problem to the early-20th-century eugenics movement and the desire of its leader Margaret Sanger “to eliminate anything ‘unclean’ or ‘imperfect,’ including black babies and Down syndrome babies” in favor of “a sterilized world based around state-mandated pleasure and narcissism. These are just facts, look it up y’all.”

For much of the audience, this a laugh line. What’s funny to today’s paying customers is that Justin thinks these are “facts.” Arbery’s real comic point here is that his character is dead right when it comes to the facts about Sanger.

So it is that the play unfolds as a bit of a peep show—a window on an unknown world, yet one that provides the audience a little transgressive thrill. Whether with enthusiasm or disgust, the characters voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Therefore, to most of the audience, they are specimens in a zoo for the deplorable. And that is how the play was mostly reviewed. Some conservative critics embraced it on mirror-image grounds—in support of the way Arbery’s characters defy the manners and mores of the times.

If that’s all there was to Heroes of the Fourth Turning, it would be merely an interesting and well-executed problem play. But there are two additional elements to Heroes. The first makes it art, and the second makes it great art.

Arbery’s title draws on a 1996 book called The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy, by William Strauss and Neil Howe. It’s a crackpot work of pop history and futurism. Strauss and Howe argue that human affairs have forever turned on cycles spanning four generations. The “Fourth Turning” marks the onset of a 20-year “Crisis”—a crucible of existential challenge in which one era comes to an end and a new one begins. Each generation has its characteristic type. The Millennials of this play are called upon to be heroes, like those of the Greatest Generation who fought World War II during the previous period of Crisis. As the character Teresa says with enthusiasm, “there’s a war coming.” She’s a writer and spoiling for a fight with the left, and like most 29-year-olds fervent in ideology—secular or religious, left or right—she has every incentive born of self-importance to exaggerate the stakes. It’s war; she’s a hero.

The action of this plotless play consists of its characters wrestling with their roles in this war. Justin observes that Transfiguration College “makes 99 percent great people”—“Healthy. Happy. Humble. Building families.” But the play is not about them. Those people have already left the party. Those left on stage are the “weird lingerers.” And each, as the college’s name promises, undergoes a transfiguration of a kind.

Teresa’s militancy, very much of our time, is at a far remove from any thought of loving your neighbor, let alone your enemy. In an exchange with Gina, the new president of Transfiguration, Teresa is in fighting mode. “If we don’t collectivize ourselves, we’re going to be exterminated.” Gina, whose prized student Teresa once was, is appalled by this. “Where did I go wrong?” Gina asks. Teresa rebukes her: “You just lost track of the new thinkers.” Gina replies, “I failed you. This is a brutal and stupid way of thinking…. It’s imbecilic. It’s un-Christian…. Look at you, you’re worldly, you’re crude, and you’re weak. You’re one of them.” Whatever righteousness Teresa might once have embodied has transfigured into pure blinding hatred for her ideological enemies.

Another character, Kevin, is attracted to Teresa’s war but suspects he’s too weak for it, girlfriendless and addicted to Internet porn as he is. Teresa agrees. Teresa repeatedly calls Kevin a “soy boy,” a term of derision whose meaning Kevin professes not to know. At last, she defines it for him: “a whiny bitch trapped in the body of a man.” This bit of LGBTQ resonance tips Kevin over the edge. The stage directions tell us Kevin “starts hitting his leg, or something else scary.” He’s drunk but still cogent as he falls into a raging Catholic fantasy of personal damnation: “You all hate how weak I am,” he says. “But in the next kingdom, my weakness will invert, and I’ll be as strong there as I am weak here. And you’ll be the weakest creature, Justin. You’ll stink like the devil… . I’m gonna f— you in hell.” Coming as this does after half a dozen odd remarks by Kevin during the course of the play, Arbery shows us a character tormented by his Catholic view of his own sexuality, as well as the specific character of the “dissolving toxins in my eyes” online and its effect on “this goddamn thing between my legs.” His transfiguration is into rage against himself.

The transfiguration of Emily, Gina’s daughter, comes last. With just herself and Justin remaining on stage, she confesses that she told a lie earlier that night about having awakened one morning to curse God. It turns out it was not Emily who did the cursing. It was “this woman Tiffany—this pregnant woman I counseled in Chicago who ended up getting an abortion anyway.” In a tour de force, Arbery has Emily reenact all the pain and anger this black woman felt in Emily’s office. Emily, transfigured into Tiffany, recites the minutes-long monologue of denunciation that she, Emily, endured: “F— your pity and f— your empathy, you self-righteous c—…. Get the f— out from behind that desk telling me what you think you know about me.” On it goes—“Know that it’s living and still kill it.”

Arbery takes an enormous risk in this scene. If so much as a word of this were off the mark, the result would be disaster. Imagine writing it at all, let alone against the cultural backdrop of the latter half of the second decade of the third millennium. Centuries from now, footnotes to Heroes of the Fourth Turning will have to explain who Steve Bannon was and why Donald Trump kicked off such a fuss. This scene will stand searing on its own.

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But I haven’t yet described how Kevin left the stage, or Justin’s transfiguration—nor have I fully explained my view of the greatness of Arbery’s art here. Therein hangs a tale. I didn’t see Heroes in its initial run at Playwrights Horizons in New York in 2019. During the pandemic, however, I was able to take in an innovative and intelligent semi-staged Zoom production. Last year, I got a ticket to see it at a matinee at the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C. I arrived only to learn that the performance had to be cancelled due to malfunctioning audio equipment. The stage manager informed us that since the sound system is critical to the play’s staging, they could not put it on that day. And in fact, there are three occasions during Heroes when an extraordinarily loud, screeching noise suddenly overwhelms the characters and the dialogue on stage for several seconds before terminating just as abruptly. The audience is likewise surprised and overwhelmed.

The sound effects are key to Arbery’s vision. Back to Justin, the ex-Marine. He has given up on humanity. He doesn’t want to join Teresa’s fight. He hasn’t told anyone yet, but he has decided to enter a monastery to get as far away from a corrupt world as possible. Fifteen minutes or so into the play, with the “weird lingerers” on stage, Justin picks up his guitar and starts to sing an “outsider-country” tune, as he describes it. It’s “Nothin,” by Townes Van Zandt—a strange, haunting evocation of despair. When he gets to the third verse, the stage directions inform us, “Suddenly there’s a horrible screech. It’s so loud. Part machine, part animal. It overwhelms the stage. Everyone covers their ears.” Confusion briefly abounds, except for Justin. When the noise stops, he says, “Uh, that’s my generator. Sorry guys. Sometimes it, uh. Be right back.” He exits to tend to the problem.

After Gina arrives, the screech goes off again—as Gina is lamenting the state of public rage: “All these nauseating movements, all that noise drowning out the discourse”—screech. Justin rushes off again. When it stops, her daughter Emily says, “It’s his generator.” The audience is well aware that significance attaches to the screeching generator, perhaps significance of a symbolic nature. We’re not stupid.

And then it happens one more time. Just after Kevin semi-recovers from hitting bottom comes his final speech. It’s weird, almost a reverie. He recalls the mountain they once climbed as freshmen and camped on overnight, Pingora Peak. While everyone else was asleep, “I saw someone coming down, from higher up the mountain. Carrying the stones. I couldn’t tell if it was a he or a she—it wasn’t either. It was more than one being in one being. They were carrying the stones. The stones had words on them for everything we’ve been missing. There are things we’ve been missing, secret sacraments, forgotten fragments, right? And they were carrying the stones right down to where we were. And I wanted to wake you all up but I couldn’t move. And then they walked right by me, inches away, and I could have reached out and touched them, but I didn’t. They just kept moving.” Kevin says he has never told anyone about this before, and exits.

“The screech of the generator again,” say the stage directions.

Teresa takes her leave as well, leaving Emily and Justin on stage through the fraught Emily/Tiffany transfiguration. Justin then makes a confession to her: “I’ve been telling a lie all night,” he says. Justin describes feeling a “horrible presence” when he moved into the house, “suffocating me.” He had a priest come over to bless the place, which didn’t help.

“And,” he says, “the screech you heard, it isn’t the generator. I don’t know what it is.”

Justin thereby reveals the play’s great secret—one that Arbery has been keeping from us all along. And it’s here that Heroes of the Fourth Turning opens a vista on cultural terra incognita, radical new ground—or perhaps old; perhaps, indeed, eternal.

Was Kevin dreaming or hallucinating on Pingora Peak 10 years before? Or did he actually watch some strange being descend carrying “the stones” into the world? What are the words on the stones? Kevin describes them as “things we’ve been missing.” But for good or ill? Arbery has given Heroes of the Fourth Turning a parabolic structure that requires going back and reassessing the entirety of the play based on what we learn at the end. The play simply doesn’t support a merely “psychologized” or symbolic interpretation of the screech. Several such reassessments are possible.

One is that Arbery is crazy to change the subject with Justin’s revelation at the end. Heroes plays perfectly well as a portrait of religious belief without confronting the audience directly with the problem of God and maybe demonic forces. Yet it’s rather hard to imagine that it occurred to Arbery only near the end of his labors that it wasn’t the generator causing the screech. It’s something he knew from the start and kept from us. Maybe that’s because he wanted to demonstrate his ability to write a play with pitch-perfect secular psychological acuity before laying God and the devil on us. Or maybe he wanted to show how psychology often offers refuge from confronting God-and-devil issues—or perhaps the illusion of refuge.

Another possibility is to revert to uncertainty. Justin doesn’t know what causes the screech, and neither do we, nor Arbery. It’s one for the “cold case” files. For those unmoved to religious belief, “I don’t know” is a perfectly reasonable position to take with regard to the origins of the universe and the place of human beings in it—though I think “we can’t know” more accurately reflects the human condition. But there is an awful lot of apparatus in Heroes to suggest that Arbery isn’t indifferent to the question of whether one should leave matters at “reasonable unbelief” or take the leap of faith. On the contrary, “revelation”—including Justin’s big reveal—seems to have a genuine place here, and not just in the historical/mythopoeic sense of something that took place in the mists of biblical antiquity. I don’t think you write a play whose biggest reveal is that the screech “isn’t the generator” out of indifference to the religious revelation the disclosure could signal.

No, I think Arbery is suggesting that the screech’s source is not the Generator—the power and source of light in the world, at Justin’s place and everywhere. The screech is from something else loose in the world. This is a play that dares to imagine that evil in the oldest sense is a living, active force in competition with all that’s good. And in both imagining it and invoking this struggle, Heroes of the Fourth Turning rises to the artistic empyrean.

This article was originally published on April 15, 2023 in Commentary 

The Hudson Institute’s Tod Lindberg joins The Commentary Magazine Podcast to discuss the question of what kind of world-historical figure Mikhail Gorbachev actually was—a purposeful change agent or fortune’s fool? Also, will Joe Biden suffer or gain from his harsh attacks on Republicans? Give a listen.

This podcast was originally published on August 31, 2022 in The Commentary Magazine Podcast

The unexpected legacy of its resistance

Momentous occasions such as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine often have the effect of reinforcing in commentators and policy analysts the convictions and prescriptions they had previously espoused. In other words, “I favor policy X, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine only reinforces the urgency of adopting policy X.” I recall availing myself of this trope when it came to the question of NATO enlargement and the meaning of 9/11. I averred that the uncertainties of the post-9/11 world made the case for NATO’s embrace of new members even more urgent.

Maybe so—but probably not. I viewed NATO enlargement then as essential to the stability of Central and Eastern Europe and a worthy expression of the shared political values of both current members and those aspiring to join. I still do. In this respect, 9/11 didn’t really make any difference.

I begin with this because Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has provoked a similar response. If you were in favor of Ukraine’s membership in NATO before 2/24, you are likely even more in favor of it now. If you believed Vladimir Putin’s Russia was a menace to its neighbors, including current NATO members such as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania before 2/24/22, that conviction has likely been fortified since Russian armored columns crossed the border into Ukraine. On the other side of the discussion, if you opposed NATO’s post–Cold War enlargement as unduly provocative to Russia, Putin’s contra-NATO explanation for threatening and going to war in Ukraine likely proves to you your own prescience (even if you do not think it justifies Putin’s action).

This time, however, I’m an outlier. My view of the Russia problem (or Putin problem) has changed substantially since 2/24, as has my view of Ukraine. The reason is that the Russia or Putin problem itself changed drastically that day. By launching a war of conquest against a neighbor, Russia not only issued an existential challenge to Ukraine and a strategic challenge to the United States. Putin on that day also returned the question of morality or values to the foreground of international politics. He did so by showing the world in no uncertain terms what a tyrannical aggressor looks like. The place of Ukraine on the world stage likewise changed that day. The country became indisputably and above all else a victim of aggression. Finally, on that day came the challenge of what the United States and others would do in response. On 2/24, it looked as if the liberal international order with the United States as its undisputed leader and champion was cracking up in a way that would prove irreparable. By March 1, it no longer did. Ukraine, in defending itself bravely and credibly against Russian aggression, cast itself in the seemingly preposterous role of the savior of the liberal international order. Though the end is yet unknown, this reinvigoration and remoralization of the West in response to its most direct and bloodiest challenge since 9/11 is the least foreseen development in international politics since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Many conservatives have been highly critical of the supposed failure of the Biden administration to deter Putin’s attack on Ukraine. They claim his administration has projected weakness, with the debacle of the abrupt abandonment of Afghanistan in the summer of 2021 as Exhibit A. Some conservatives and remaining liberal hawks also deem the United States to have been insufficiently supportive of Ukraine as far back as 2008. That was when NATO rebuffed a “Membership Action Plan” for Ukraine and Georgia in favor of a vague declaration that the two Russian neighbors would one day join the alliance.

Those who hold this opinion think the next pivotal moment of weakness came later in that same year, when Russian forces responded to a Georgian provocation by invading and occupying the breakaway Georgian regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia and proclaiming their independence. The response to that incursion, in this view, was too weak to give Russia pause. An emboldened Putin soon thereafter intervened on the side of Bashir al-Assad in the Syrian civil war, with arms sales, the buildup of Russian naval and air bases, and irregular Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group fighting on Assad’s side. By 2012, Russia was providing an out for an intervention-weary Barack Obama over enforcement of the American president’s declared “red line” warning Assad against use of chemical weapons. Russia advanced a proposal to confiscate them, which the United States accepted—as did Assad, knowing that Russian enforcement of this agreement would still leave him amply equipped to continue chemical attacks on his opponents. Again, critics found weakness in the failure to prevent Russia from reestablishing and consolidating a position of influence in the Middle East.

Next, in 2014, came Russia’s hybrid incursion into Ukraine—its takeover and annexation of Crimea and military incursion into Eastern Ukraine, for which Ukraine was entirely unprepared. Though condemnation and Western sanctions followed, and NATO enhanced its visibility in frontline member states such as the Baltics with rotational brigades and other measures, critics deemed these insufficient to check growing Russian restiveness. And then 2021–22 was upon us, with Russia building up a potential invasion force on Ukraine’s border and Putin expressing the view that Ukraine enjoyed no status as a sovereign country but rather was rightly a part of Russia.

The problem with what might be called the “weakness argument” is that it presents the problems as simple, the alternatives as clear, and the results that would have followed from different policy choices as inevitably better. That’s much too easy. The withdrawal from Afghanistan was indeed a disaster, but primarily a humanitarian one. Though militarily unnecessary and therefore foolish (except to those wedded to “endless war” complaints about U.S. engagement abroad), its geostrategic significance is questionable. As for Russia’s Syrian adventurism, the primary problem was Assad, who was responsible for an even larger humanitarian disaster, one that claimed 500,000 lives and displaced 13 million people, roiling regional, European, and American politics. President Obama’s steadfast commitment to do nothing about Assad’s brutality created favorable conditions for Russia to increase its influence, but Syria was not a Russian show.

When it came to Georgia in 2008 and Crimea/Donbas in 2014, the sanctions put in place were neither trivial nor effective. But Georgia and Ukraine are not members of NATO, and it would have been strange had the alliance and the United States treated them as if they were when Russia attacked. Nor was the 2008 rebuff of their desire to join NATO unreasonable. Though many Georgians and Ukrainians do indeed embrace Western values, their populations themselves did not express majority support for joining NATO, which has been a standard benchmark for membership eligibility in the post–Cold War era. Nor did their actual governance as of 2008 and ever since meet reasonable standards of performance for membership. This is to say nothing of the “realist” concern, not irrelevant, of the challenge of actually defending them.

What is more, we now know that the post-2014 response to Russian aggression in Ukraine was not limited to sanctions. The United States military, we can see in retrospect, was hardly idle, instead helping train up the Ukrainian military’s ability to resist a further Russian advance. That the United States did so quietly, so as not to provide a provocation Putin could use as a pretext for further aggression, also seems reasonable.

In short, even on the day before Putin’s move, prevention of a Russian armed attack on Ukraine was a worthy top priority for the United States in Europe but not one worth threatening to go to war with Russia over. The warnings of dire sanctions were entirely appropriate. The Biden administration’s attempt to rattle Putin’s complacency by revealing U.S. intelligence on his war aims and plans in advance was clever and worthy. The promises conveyed to Putin through back channels about the potential economic benefit he might gain from not invading were defensible: He and those under his patronage could have reaped billions from the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal going through—notwithstanding the objection of our Central and Eastern European allies.

The willingness of the Biden administration to rule out U.S. boots on the ground in defense of Ukraine was also appropriate—especially in light of the retrospectively evident fact that American boots were already covertly on the ground in Ukraine, preparing Ukrainians for a fight and setting up channels for U.S. provision of battlefield and other intelligence as well as supply lines for military assistance. Likewise appropriate was the Biden administration’s emphatically ruling out compliance with any of Putin’s pre-war demands on NATO—from future enlargement to force deployments. Presumably, Germany had informed Putin that Berlin’s 2008 opposition to NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine still stood, which meant their accession was as dead on February 23 as Putin professed to wish it. Through that date, Sweden and Finland had made no additional movement toward NATO membership beyond their long-time close cooperation with the alliance and especially its Nordic/Baltic members. The administration’s oft-repeated commitment to defend NATO allies in accordance with Article 5 of the Washington Treaty—that an attack on one is an attack on all—was unwavering.

Nevertheless, Putin’s bluster and military movement around Ukraine were making gains for him—in particular in the divergent perceptions between Western Europe and Eastern Europe over the threat he posed, all in the context of European dependency on Russia for natural gas. Putin was creating or widening fissures in the alliance as of February 23, and he could reasonably have hoped to exploit them further.

Altogether, the weeks prior to February 24 saw a morally respectable effort at carrot-and-stick diplomacy and signaling, without appeasement, whose purpose was to avert a devastating war. It failed.

_____________

Putin attacked. It seems clear that at the highest levels of the U.S. government, the expectation was that the Zelensky government would collapse and Kyiv would fall to the Russians in a matter of days. Certainly this was the consensus expectation in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment. Volodymyr Zelensky’s quip for the ages—“I don’t need a ride, I need ammunition”—was the response of a man who had been offered a ride to safety as lawful head of a government in exile, while a puppet government installed by Moscow would dissolve the Ukrainian state. Yes, Ukrainians were vowing that Ukraine would fight, but their defiant insistence that they could hold Russia off, while inspiring, also seemed like vainglory to many, including me.

It was not just the Ukrainian state on the line, however. Whether the United States chose to acknowledge the broader stakes or not, Putin’s naked aggression against Ukraine constituted a direct challenge to U.S.-led global order and liberal normative aspiration for international politics.

It’s easy to see as much by considering a possible alternative path for the first few days and weeks of the war. Let us suppose that Russia had gained control of Ukrainian airspace, and that its armor and infantry had advanced rapidly west, taking key cities in Ukraine’s east, and rapidly south, taking Kyiv.

Russian forces would have continued across southern Ukraine along the Black Sea coast from Mariupol to Odessa. Reports of war crimes and crimes against humanity would quickly have filtered out, but Russia would have dismissed them as fabrications. What remained of the Ukrainian military would retreat west to mount a last stand to retain Lviv in a landlocked rump Ukrainian state. It would have been to there that Zelensky would have taken the ride—or perhaps to London. In Kyiv, Russia would have installed a puppet government, which would have immediately “negotiated” the reincorporation of Russian-occupied Ukraine as a region of the Russian state. “Denazification” would have proceeded with the summary execution of anyone who has endorsed what Russia has described as the “Nazi” belief in an independent Ukraine.

The West would have imposed sanctions, travel bans, and asset seizures. But a significant strand of opinion would quickly have emerged in Washington, Paris, and Berlin holding that the new facts on the ground Russia had created warranted a major diplomatic initiative to obtain a cease-fire and peace agreement. Military assistance to Ukraine would have ceased in favor of humanitarian assistance. Perhaps 20 million Ukrainians of a pre-invasion population of 43 million would have fled the fighting, becoming either internally displaced or refugees.

Having achieved his battlefield objectives, Putin would then have proposed a sit-down, maybe in Minsk, to discuss postwar arrangements with the United States, Germany, France, and the head of the puppet government he installed in Ukraine. The Western powers would have refused, but talks about the talks would have continued, which some would have described as a positive development under the circumstances. As this process dragged on, Russia would have repeatedly announced and then broken unilateral cease-fires while preparing for the final push to wipe out what was left of the Ukrainian military and government by capturing Lviv. Belarus forces would have crossed the border into Ukraine to assist.

Central and Eastern European NATO allies would have made demands on the alliance for security enhancements, but some Western European members would have demurred on the grounds of their potential to undermine peace talks. Finland and Sweden would have kept a low profile. Putin would have given a speech about persecution of ethnic Russians in the Baltic states. The Biden administration would have faced the reality that Ukraine was lost and blamed Donald Trump. Biden emissaries would then have hastened to Asia to reassure our allies there that our security commitments to them were as strong as ever. Xi Jinping might have offered the services of his foreign minister as mediator in the Minsk talks. And, with Russia’s triumph on the horizon, U.S. intelligence might have seen signs of a potential buildup of an invading force on China’s side of the Taiwan Strait.

In sum, if the first days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine had gone as most expected, they would have marked not only the end of the post–Cold War era, but also almost certainly the collapse of U.S.-led liberal international order as a fact of international politics—and the descent into near-silence of liberal normative aspirations for progress in international politics. What might have begun after these endings is unknowable. But the notion that the world in this all-too-plausible scenario I just sketched would become more peaceful, benevolent, prosperous, and conducive to American interests and the value that we and our friends and allies place on freedom seems fanciful in the extreme.

There are certainly limits to the ability of the United States, rich and powerful as the country is, to shape international politics to Washington’s liking. We often learn about these limits the hard way, by overreaching. The reach of normative aspiration exceeds its grasp. We act in the expectation that it will yield the result we desire but without any assurance. This is a fact about the limits of all types of power as applied to international politics. It is as true of Putin and Xi as it is the United States. Liberalism without the power and the will to perpetuate itself would be only as stable as its challengers are weak.

In the post–Cold War period, for example, and especially following the successful U.S.-led effort in 1991 to reverse Saddam Hussein’s conquest and annexation of Kuwait, many spoke of a new “norm” in international politics: the rejection of changes in national borders by force. But this norm had become an actuality of international politics only to the extent that those in power themselves respected it and, second, that anyone who didn’t could have expected to run into resistance serious enough to put in question the value of attempting to violate it. Putin seems never to have respected such a norm and to have grown contemptuous of the resistance its defenders would mount if he continued to break it. And perhaps he would have been proven correct had his and others’ expectations of a quick Russian victory unfolded more or less as described above. Perhaps NATO would have rallied and the centers of liberal power in the United States, Europe, and Asia would have come together in defense of liberal order or “the West.” Ukraine could in this sense have turned out to be a wake-up call. Yet it seems just as likely, if not more, that Putin’s reconquest of Ukraine would have accelerated the Western or liberal fragmentation and dispiritedness already in evidence February 23.

But the strange symmetry of forecasts between Putin and American foreign-policy analysts on the night of February 23—a defiant Russia mounting a challenge to American-led liberal order that it might or might not withstand—turned out to be wholly neglectful of the decisive element in the clash: Ukraine itself.

_____________

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to Ukrainians, was not a violation of a supposed norm. It was a genuine existential threat to their country in a world in which the term “existential threat” is wildly overused. Here, it applies. Putin sought to wipe Ukraine off the map, ending its existence as an independent state, incorporating its territory into imperial Russia, and killing its leaders and their supporters. It turned out that Ukrainians would not accept this course of Russian action and were willing to fight to stop it. Ukraine was eager and able in 2022 to resist Russia’s war of conquest and aggression, and did so.

Now, Ukraine did not enter this struggle alone. Some day, someone will write a comprehensive history of exactly what the United States was doing with the Ukrainian military between 2014 and 2022, and exactly what form that assistance took once Russian forces crossed the border. In the early going, there were reports of perhaps a dozen Russian generals killed in Ukraine—a shockingly high number. It seemed implausible to me at the time that the Ukrainians could have done this without some help, which U.S. officials subsequently confirmed we had provided. What was the total number of U.S. Special Forces and paramilitary intelligence personnel covertly on the ground in Ukraine on February 25? It seemed pretty clear by early March that the answer to this question was not “zero.”

It also seems likely that the Russian invading force was aware of these non-zero helpers and the problems, such as dead Russian generals, they were helping to cause. This, too, is significant. It set the United States on a path in which we could ramp up assistance to Ukraine without directly provoking a Russian response against us. Once Russia moved out of its “hybrid warfare” mode of aggression of previous years and into invasion mode, something strange and unexpected happened: The United States began to enjoy what we might call “hybrid escalation dominance.”

In the classical formulation, “escalation dominance” means the ability to ratchet up the intensity of the conflict in a fashion your adversary is unable (or unwilling) to counter. If it’s true, as now seems undeniable, that the United States was in this fight from the beginning on at least a provisional basis—that is, subject to a change of course should the fortunes of Ukraine falter—it’s also true that U.S. involvement could ratchet upward with Ukrainian success in ways that Russia could not effectively counter.

This hybrid escalation dominance included the provision of more and more capable weapons systems, more intelligence, and more of the activities that “boots on the ground” can engage in when deployed covertly, whatever those may be. The increasing activity need be announced not at all but can be acknowledged partially and perhaps misleadingly as it continues. The point is that we know we’re there, Russia knows we’re there, we know that Russia knows, and there is no point of demarcation at which Russia can plausibly counter this presence or halt its increase without directly attacking the United States or its allies, when Russia has its hands full attempting and failing to conquer Ukraine.

The stiffness of the Ukrainian resistance also seems to have benefited from the incompetence of the Russian military, both on the battlefield and in its preparations for war. From the early going, this seemed apparent even to the layman. Do you really wage tank warfare by putting your armor into a 40-mile column on a road and pausing it a dozen miles from your stated objective, Kyiv? Where was the infantry? Why couldn’t Russia establish dominance over Ukraine’s airspace? Were we somehow involved?

Whatever was the case, the Russians seemed to have suffered some considerable multiple more killed in action in a few weeks in Ukraine than the United States did in 20 years in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. The war was transparently a disaster for the Russian invading force, with battlefield losses that could not escape comparison with Soviet losses during the Winter War with Finland in 1939–40. The Russian military, in turning out to be not such a formidable fighting force, is now a substantially diminished player in terms of its ability to wage further aggressive war.

Add, as well, some dogs that didn’t bark. What of Russia’s vaunted cyber-warfare capabilities—the ability to do kinetic levels of damage by manipulating electrons from far away? It seems that such Russian capabilities were either exaggerated or have somehow been neutralized. Astoundingly, Russia seems to have had limited intelligence assets and capabilities in place in Ukraine itself at the time of the invasion—or perhaps Ukrainian counterintelligence capabilities were and are more extensive than previously known.

As for Putin’s stated war aims, he achieved none on the timetable he envisioned and has achieved none as of this writing. He will now have to fight to remain in control of areas of Ukraine he once held in “frozen conflict” without significant physical opposition. Rather than emerging with clear title to Crimea or the Donbas—or to all of Ukraine—he has consolidated opposition to any such claims, and the willingness of many ethnic Russians in Ukraine to join ethnic Ukrainians to fight for their country should rebut beyond revival his absurd claims about the nonexistence of Ukraine as a country and Ukrainians as a people.

The attack itself met and exceeded all international criteria for an illegal war of aggression. The invasion provided a moment of moral clarity in being unambiguously wrong. One need not be a partisan of Ukraine in order to view as wrong the Russian attempt to expunge it from the list of nations. The March 2 vote in the United Nations General Assembly to deplore the invasion and demand the withdrawal of all Russian forces passed with 141 votes in favor and 5 against (Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Russia, and Syria). There were 35 abstentions and 12 absences. Some have since sought to depict the support for the resolution as tepid. More noteworthy is the unanimous support among liberal states and the willingness of so few states to take Russia’s side.

Then there was the brutality of the Russian way of war. Ukraine collected evidence of retail war crimes in real time. This is to say nothing of the indiscriminate shelling of civilian targets. Putin’s rhetoric about Ukrainians, from their supposed nonexistence as a distinct ethnicity to the need for “denazification” in the case of anyone who has supported an independent Ukraine, was indeed genocidal. It almost seemed as if Putin kept a copy of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars on his bedside table so he could consult it regularly for guidance on how to launch an unjust war and wage it unjustly. It was revolting to any person of conscience.

As for Putin’s grander strategic aims beyond the conquest and annexation of Ukraine, he has at this writing achieved none, nor is there an obvious path to his achievement of any. NATO, rather than fragmenting under the pressure of the Ukraine invasion, is more unified than ever. Germany has announced a major and previously unimaginable increase in defense spending. A war launched to halt if not roll back the expansion of the alliance has instead pushed two militarily capable and indisputably liberal democracies, Finland and Sweden, to seek membership. Putin’s “no limits” friendship with China now seems to have severe limits, insofar as China has not lifted a finger in support of Putin’s military adventurism beyond buying his oil at a steep discount. Xi Jinping seems every bit as ruthless as before in suppressing democracy activists in Hong Kong, conducting a slow-motion genocide against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, and developing to the fullest the capacities of the surveillance state throughout China. But is he quite as inclined to attack Taiwan now as he would have been had Putin rolled into Kyiv in days and the West splintered in response?

Yes, up close, day by day, minute by minute, much is in doubt. Will the Biden administration and others provide military assistance to Ukraine at a pace sufficient to hold the Russians in check? Is French president Emmanuel Macron playing “good cop” to the American “bad cop,” or is there genuine divergence and Western fragmentation? Will Turkey derail the aspiration of Sweden and Finland to join NATO? Will the Americans in fervent support of the 11 GOP senators who voted against a $40 billion assistance package for Ukraine see their influence increase in the next Congress? Will everything change in the months ahead?

I don’t know. But in failing to achieve any of his objectives for 2/24 or to establish a plausible path to their achievement some months after, Putin has severed the connection between the war he continues to fight and the “continuation of politics” he sought. Moreover, he has done so in a fashion that has reminded the world of what brutal authoritarian rulers sometimes seek to do to their neighbors: conquer them and subjugate them, or if that fails, lay waste to them, killing as many of their people as plausible.

In so doing, he has midwifed the birth of the Ukrainian nation. Ukraine has been independent since 1991. In the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Ukraine received security assurances as to its sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia (in exchange for surrendering its nuclear weapons). In the case of Russia, these assurances became worthless. Ukrainian domestic politics, meanwhile, remained stunted by the inability of its elites to produce a leader worthy of the complexity of the country’s geopolitical position.

But by 2022, Ukraine, with help from the United States and others, had developed something far more effective in support of its sovereignty and independence than words on paper: the will and ability to resist the worst its powerful neighbor was willing to throw at it. And it had elected as its president a former actor who proved literally able to step into the role of a wartime leader and preserve his country’s freedom. The moral example is striking.

In providing it, Zelensky gave the United States and the West writ large a reminder we needed. The world does not consist of states without features. Some of them have governments that oppress their people and crush dissent at home as they seek to bring more territory under their control by unprovoked acts of aggression. Others have governments that promote and secure freedom for their people and seek abroad an “international community” of states like-minded in their willingness to settle their differences peacefully. When the former come up against the latter, the clash is one not only of power but also values.

Ukraine had to prepare and be prepared to fight for its freedom. It did and was. And the moral clarity of the moment galvanized the West to punish the aggressor and assist the victim in its fight.

Clarity over differences in basic values isn’t always as easy to come by as it has proved to be in the case of Russia versus Ukraine. But freedom and small-r republican government are better than oppression and authoritarianism. Trying to save people from atrocities is better than perpetrating atrocities. These are permanent conclusions that will feature in international politics as long as those who uphold them also maintain the power to protect them. That power, whether globally “hegemonic” or as tested just outside Kyiv, does not exist for its own sake but in service to larger political principles.

Putin does not share these values. That’s why he chose this war—and a large part of why he has already lost it.

This article was originally published on August 15, 2022 in Commentary