Liberalism Reloaded

The embrace of The Sleepwalkers by some Western European leaders came against the backdrop of rising tensions with Russia, culminating in the latter’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Its impact has stretched into this decade. Speaking privately with journalists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reached for the book to give imprimatur to his caution in the months following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Clark himself gave an interview to The Guardian from Berlin on the back of such reports. His intervention included a valuable two-pronged corrective which showed how the European moment was not analogous to that of a century or so earlier. On the one hand, with regard to how this new invasion had occurred, Vladimir Putin was evidently the sole immediate agent, rendering the situation devoid of 1914’s multipolar complexity and multivalent culpability. On the other, the appeasement analogies so beloved of hawks across Western capitals were bunk, for Putin was clearly no Hitler.

What about the pertinence of the somnambulance metaphor for the return of tank-and-artillery warfare to the continent? Before Russia’s ‘special military operation’ to the east, Clark looked with approval on the book’s warm reception among sections of the European elite, since they had ‘tended to use its arguments, along with the term “sleepwalkers”, as a means of arguing for caution and circumspection in international relations’. But now, in Germany at least, the sleepwalker trope had become too successful. Rather than felling the barriers to a Fourth Reich by expunging the country’s residual war guilt, as critics had professed to fear, the book helped to foster an excess of restraint. ‘I don’t think there is any risk now of sleepwalking,’ Clark said. ‘Now everyone is wide awake because Putin has woken us all up.’

If generalised, would this not entail dispensing with prudence and its metaphors altogether at an hour of maximum need? Never mind that the Americans laid the ground for conflict by knowingly crossing the hard red lines of the Russian elite; their blitheness — if not blindness — in the face of escalatory risks once war had broken out hardly suggested that the risk of sleepwalking had disappeared. Last September, the then-CIA director Bill Burns told an audience in London that ‘[T]here was a moment in the fall of 2022 when I think there was a genuine risk of potential use of tactical nuclear weapons…. I never thought we should be unnecessarily intimidated by that.’ In virtually the same breath, he added that nobody should take the risks of escalation lightly.

Consider, too, Biden’s insistence, as American tanks poured into Ukraine, that there was ‘no offensive threat to Russia’. Sleepwalking? Perhaps, perhaps not. Something approximating Schroeder’s ‘eyes wide shut’ would be closer to the mark. If Burns and his peers in the American national security apparatus were indeed wide awake while pondering the prospect of nuclear escalation unperturbed, are we meant to be reassured? Back in Europe, liberal cheerleading for German rearmament — on familiar ‘preventive’ pretexts — just as the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party creeps closer to power, likewise hardly suggests an outbreak of wide-awakeness.

In Disputing Disaster, Perry Anderson undertakes a rare genuine peer critique, sizing up his differences with Clark. Foremost among these is a claim that the effect of contingency’s exalted role in The Sleepwalkers ‘is to occlude the logic of empire’. In Anderson’s view, Clark sticks ‘too closely to the actions of individuals, and the train of events which ensued from them’, and so risks getting lost in the thickets of the moment, wooed by the ‘illusion of immediacy’.

In the historiographical field at hand, the disagreement of consequence is over the Great War’s inevitability. Clark finds an emphasis on contingency ‘hugely inspiring’, hinting that disaster might have been avoided. Anderson is unmoved, assured that a conflagration was preprogrammed. Yet, when boiled down, the two great historians are not wildly far apart methodologically. For Anderson, there is a freedom to act within historically conditioned structures, while for Clark short-range decisions and immediate layers of causation incarnate ‘structural features and path dependencies of various kinds’.

In the wake of 24 February 2022, we have been smothered in the West by a cynical insistence on the primacy of immediacy. If this was an illusion, it was a wilful one. All roads lead to — and from — Putin’s decision for war. Before Trump’s return, at least, any suggestion otherwise was verboten; any hint to the contrary akin to treachery. In the most pathetic proximate example, any reference to longer-term causes or shared responsibility in creating the conditions for war was ruled incompatible with membership of Keir Starmer’s parliamentary Labour Party.

In this context (which walks and talks rather like chauvinist wagon-circling, anticipating a new century of great power rivalry), insisting on the why rather than merely the how of the precipitants of war takes on a renewed importance. With Ukraine now likely to be bounced into settling on far worse terms than might have been possible three years ago, the much-maligned projection of international relations theorist John Mearsheimer is worth recalling: ‘The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get wrecked.’ The Taiwanese surely stand to glean more from such warnings — reflecting on the bleak Ukrainian path from Bucharest to the Oval Office — than can be offered by the liberal public sport of Putin demonology.

Peace Through Strength

In Clark’s reckoning, ‘remote and categorial causes’ — among them nationalism, finance, and imperialism — can only ‘be made to carry real explanatory weight if they can be seen to have shaped the decisions that… made war break out’. Anderson’s retort is roughly that decision-makers are often unaware of forces governing the conditions in which they decide. He approves of the historian Keith Wilson’s judgement that there was ultimately bound to be war in Europe because ‘no Great Power, no regime, no body of ministers, was prepared to curb its imperial inclinations, tendencies or pretensions’.

This points to a crucial dimension of the character of imperialism and the logic of empire as causal factors. They bridge the why and the how of war, uniting the remote with the immediate and the structural with the contingent. In one sense, then, Clark was right to suggest — in a recent review of Disputing Disaster for the London Review of Books — that it was a mistake ‘to think of “structures” as hard and unyielding and events as soft and malleable’, and to point out that the inverse can pertain. Yet when it comes to war and peace, the hardness of events is often precisely a function of their structural lineaments. Ideologies of empire and the strategic frames of reference derived from them are not necessarily remote; they can take on immediate causal force.

Take the spectre of American war with Iran. In June 2019, a year after unilateral US withdrawal from the nuclear deal, the military had been ‘cocked and loaded’ for a major strike on the country, which the Pentagon anticipated would kill around 150 people. Trump called it off at the last minute, reportedly talked down by Tucker Carlson. In recent weeks, the US president has declared on social media that if leaders in Tehran do not agree to a deal, ‘there will be bombing… the likes of which they have never seen before’. Simultaneously, American B-2 warplanes have been relocated to Diego Garcia, poised to strike in West Asia. What drives this toying with a war which could make Iraq and Afghanistan look like minor inconveniences? Trump’s ‘peace through strength’ maxim aside, the aggressive posture towards Iran is underpinned by the same strategic conception — in which American and Israeli interests are reflexively understood to be indistinguishable — that has governed the US approach in the region for decades.

Washington’s strategy in the Middle East remains, as Anderson argued almost two decades ago, unable to be formulated ‘according to a rational calculus of national interest’. Imperialism, then, does indeed help to explain fanatical US backing for Israel, support for its genocide in Gaza, and belligerence toward its enemies — but not when understood, as so often on the Left, as a remote, automatic force, a black-box category requiring no further explanation. Rather, we have here American decision-makers following, with eyes wide open, an internally coherent (if particular and distorted) logic of empire, but with eyes firmly closed to the broader consequences: blowback and self-defeat, distraction and overstretch, perhaps even disaster. Recall Schroeder: eyes wide shut.

Actually Existing Left Liberals?

In a 2021 book of essays, Clark suggested that we begin to apply ‘to the task of avoiding war the long-term pragmatic reasoning we associate with “strategy”’. The abolition of war, he concurred with Pope Francis, remains ‘the ultimate and most deeply worthy goal of human beings’. In and amongst the scholarly stakes of the Clark–Anderson exchange there lies a question of some political import: namely what kind of relationship is possible between actually existing left liberals and socialists.

While many among the former are just as revulsed by genocide, warmongering, and ecological breakdown as their more left-wing counterparts, they tend to stop short of the anti-systemic solutions insisted upon by the latter. We surely already possess a common recognition that our rulers are walking us into catastrophe. That might be extended into a shared understanding: that the sleepiness of elites is rooted in the senility of the structures they bear. Only then, by subordinating those structures to the rationalising force of the popular will, might we produce rulers whose eyes are truly wide open.