“If God died in the nineteenth century, ideology died in the twenty-first. Could you actually imagine people dying for communism or for liberal democracy? That actually happened. Now you would be considered an idiot or a fool.” — Daniel Bessner

Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Today, he has a bomb in each hand. As the co-editor of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, Bessner has taken a scythe to America’s most cherished assumptions about the Cold War. First: the Cold War was an American choice. Stalin would have made a deal with FDR. It was the insecure, anti-communist Truman who triggered it. Second: the Cold War liberals who shaped and sustained American empire — from Truman’s attorney general to McNamara to the Berlin-Arendt intellectual elite — weren’t really defenders of democracy.

Bessner traces liberalism’s fear of the masses back to Constant and de Staël. From the beginning, liberals thought elites needed to tame the masses and govern in their name. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism, built the military-industrial American state, and destroyed the left — purging communists from government and unions years before McCarthy finished the job. The result: a world in which the only available ideologies are capitalism and a top-down liberalism that has stopped delivering on its promises.

How to chart an American foreign policy between MAGA and Cold War liberalism? Bessner reminds us of John Quincy Adams’s advice: not going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” The United States should stop throwing bombs overseas, the bomb-throwing Bessner suggests. That would be the most American thing to do.

Five Takeaways

• The Cold War Was an American Choice. Stalin wanted a deal with FDR. It was Truman who made the Cold War happen. Twenty million people died — mostly in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa — as a result of that choice.

• Liberalism Has Always Feared the Masses. From Constant and de Staël to McNamara. Elites governing in the name of the masses. The Cold War liberals institutionalised that skepticism and built the modern American state around it. They purged the left years before McCarthy finished the job.

• Ideology Died in the Twenty-First Century. Fukuyama was right that liberalism would be the last ideology — wrong that everywhere would become liberal. When every country is capitalist, you no longer need the liberalism. Cold War liberalism is a zombie ideology. It sells books to wealthy anti-Trump readers. It has no mass constituency.

• Goes Not Abroad in Search of Monsters. John Quincy Adams’ founding principle of restraint. Eliminate the global basing posture. Slash military spending. Stop meddling. The US hasn’t faced an existential threat since 1812. Trump’s Iran war is not Cold War liberalism — just pure power extraction — but it’s not an improvement.

• Mutual Ruin. Marx’s first page: either a dialectical transcendence of the old system, or the mutual ruin of the contending classes. Capitalism has reached the point where there are no real profits — hence financialisation, hence AI. No political-economic alternative in sight. Mutual ruin. He knows which one it feels like.

About the Guest

Daniel Bessner is Professor of American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington and co-editor of Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency (Cambridge University Press, 2026).

References

Cold War Liberalism: Power in a Time of Emergency, ed. Daniel Bessner and Michael Brenes (Cambridge University Press, 2026)

Chapters:

00:00:31 Was American global hegemony inevitable? The contingency argument
00:02:08 What is Cold War liberalism — and why it’s not a misnomer
00:03:36 The Democrats purged the left before McCarthy finished the job
00:05:12 Joe Kennedy Sr., JFK, and the generational shift to internationalism
00:07:06 The mythology of the Cold War: twenty million dead, mostly not in Europe
00:10:49 Stalin would have made a deal: the Cold War as an American choice
00:12:13 Liberalism’s original fear: Constant, de Staël, and the terror of the masses
00:15:08 How Cold War liberals normalized the center and destroyed the left
00:17:16 The confusion of the present: ideas without legitimacy, no alternative
00:19:14 Is Bessner a liberal? The answer: a socialist skeptic of the Democratic Party
00:20:41 Cold War liberalism as zombie ideology: Snyder, Applebaum, and wealthy readers
00:22:34 Ukraine, Gaza, and the problem with trusting American military power
00:23:16 China and the death of ideology: if God died in the 19th century...
00:26:00 Authoritarian capitalism and the era of mutual ruin
00:27:56 Iran, the Gramscian interregnum, and pure power politics
00:29:59 The alternative: John Quincy Adams, restraint, and Yankee go home
00:32:13 The left in the Democratic Party: confusion, no institutional base
00:34:39 What comes next: mutual ruin or tran