Keen On

“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 to do that.” — Daniel Bessner Co-host of the American Prestige podcast Daniel Bessner is a bit of a bomb thrower. Which is why he’s a regular on the show. 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 two most cherished assumptions about the Cold War. The first is that rather than an inevitable clash of civilisations, the Cold War was an American choice. Stalin, Bessner argues, would have made a deal with FDR. It was the insecure, anti-communist Truman who triggered the Cold War by defining the Soviet Union as an illegitimate (what today we would call a “terrorist”) state. Bessner’s second bomb is that the people who shaped Cold War liberalism and sustained it for decades — from Truman’s a