Sam Klug: Lippmann’s Clash of Civilizations

Tom Arnold-Forster’s Walter Lippmann: An Intellectual Biography will change the way Walter Lippmann is understood. It makes significant contributions to the history of American liberalism, the histories of journalism and social science, and the history of international thought—not simply because of the wide-ranging career of its subject, but because of the author’s erudition, fluid and exciting narrative, and well-founded belief that a much-covered figure in U.S. intellectual history was ripe for reexamination.

My comments are focused on how Arnold-Forster unsettles the conventional view of Lippmann’s place in the history of international thought, and, in so doing, raises important challenges to the way that history is understood more broadly. Many narratives of the famed Lippmann–Kennan debate about the nature of the Soviet Union and the desirability of containment frame the conflict as a family squabble within the “realist” strain of international thought. In this account, both Kennan and Lippmann understood that power and interests, not ideals, dictate international affairs. Their disagreement hinged on how to understand the nature of Soviet power—with Kennan seeing it as inherently expansionist and in need of containment, and Lippmann seeing it as a “normal” great power with which the United States could negotiate diplomatically. For historians sympathetic to the realist tradition, such as T. J. Jackson Lears, Kennan’s and Lippmann’s later alignment in opposition to the Vietnam War represented the truer essence of their “pragmatic realism” than their earlier disagreement over containment.[1]

Arnold-Forster recasts this debate in several important ways. First, he sheds a light on the imperial origins of Lippmann’s so-called realism. Drawing on the work of Matthew Specter, Arnold-Forster calls Lippmann’s perspective an “imperial realism.”[2] Far from a consistent believer in foreign policy restraint, Lippmann argued that “America should […] behave more like that empire that it actually was” (212). As Arnold-Forster shows, “the imperial origins of Lippmann’s realism” lay not in the Cold War but in his interwar writing: “He framed the world crisis of the 1930s as a crucially imperial crisis” (208). In recent years, diplomatic historians such as Richard Overy and Paul Thomas Chamberlin have emphasized not only that the Second World War was a war of empires, but that the dynamics of the conflict can be understood only through the terms of a specifically imperial rivalry—a conflict of established and emergent empires on both sides.[3] Yet Arnold-Forster demonstrates that this historiographical trend should be seen as a new name for some old ways of thinking, which had their own origin point, or at least an important precursor, in Lippmann.

Second, Arnold-Forster underscores the centrality of civilizationism in both Lippmann’s and Kennan’s thought. Both thinkers, Arnold-Forster writes, “saw US foreign policy as civilizationally significant for the West and in world history,” even if that shared concern led them to different conclusions about the desirability of a global policy of containment of the Soviet Union (230). This civilizational emphasis led Lippman to emphasize that “Soviet power meant Russian imperialism as well as communist ideology” (231). Kennan, too, was invested in the idea that there was supposedly natural proclivity toward expansionism that was continuous across Russian history. To Kennan, this outlook stemmed from the insecurity Soviet rulers felt governing a country that was “relatively archaic in form, fragile and artificial in psychological foundation, unable to stand comparison or contact with political systems of Western countries.”[4] Both Lippmann and Kennan, in other words, understood the Cold War as a grand struggle between not only two powers or two ideologies, but indeed, two civilizations. Lippmann’s rejection of containment was part and parcel of his belief that, as Arnold-Forster puts it, “US foreign policy should protect, and could redeem, Western civilization” (209).

The practical implications of this civilizationism in Lippmann’s foreign policy are what he is most known for. His argument that the United States should prioritize the defense of Western Europe over the projection of power in Africa and Asia led him to oppose the Truman Doctrine, the Korean War, and, later, the Vietnam War, and he is much celebrated in the restraint-oriented foreign policy community today. But Lippmann came to this position, as Arnold-Forster clearly shows, through an investment in “racial-imperial hierarchies” and a belief in a kind of inherent Oriental despotism (231). Even more significantly, Arnold-Forster illustrates the ways this civilizational mentality served as a framework for Lippmann’s understanding of all problems of world order.

This element of Arnold-Forster’s biography opens up an exciting line of scholarly inquiry: What would the intellectual history of American foreign relations look like if we took the persistence of civilizational thinking as our guide? Such a perspective would explode the tired, but still very much in use, tripartite schema of the field of International Relations that conscripts every thinker about world order into the categories of “liberal internationalism,” “realism,” or “constructivism.” It would engender deeper considerations of the multiple uses to which the idea of civilization has been put. As Benjamin A. Coates has written, civilization “has functioned […] as a political language that justified domination on the grounds of universal values.”[5] Yet, in Lippmann’s case, it also functioned as a justification for the critique of American global primacy. The language of civilization both reads difference as backwardness and articulates a universal standard of aspiration against which the conduct of states—including the United States—can be found wanting. Arnold-Forster’s emphasis on civilizationism suggests, among other things, that historians of U.S. foreign relations could learn from the rich scholarship on the “standard of civilization” in international law, which has probed both the ways this standard justified imperialism and the ways anticolonial jurists turned its logic against empire in the age of decolonization.[6]

A civilizational lens would also force intellectual historians to reconsider the roster of canonical thinkers about the role of the United States in the world. In his influential study Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy, historian David Milne placed Lippmann in a genealogy with Alfred Thayer Mahan, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Beard, Kennan, Paul Nitze, Henry Kissinger, and Barack Obama—a cast of characters that fits comfortably with the liberal internationalism/realism binary, despite the author’s emphasis on a different binary of “artistic” and “scientific” approaches to U.S. foreign relations.[7] Arnold-Forster’s book implicitly raises the provocative question of who the characters would be in a story of U.S. international thought that took civilizationism seriously over the longue durée. Besides Lippmann and Kennan, Frederick Jackson Turner, Theodore Roosevelt, Marcus Garvey, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Samuel Huntington, and Niall Ferguson all come to mind—a roster that points to a very different set of ideological coordinates and family resemblances still to be mapped and understood in the history of American international thought.

Arnold-Forster’s critical revision of the place of Walter Lippmann in the history of American international thought also raises key questions that the biography leaves unanswered. First, Arnold-Forster leaves unaddressed the question of whether the “civilizational” strain in Lippmann’s international thought might also have influenced his views, of, for example, urbanism. A few tantalizing moments in the book—such as when Arnold-Forster counterposes Lippmann’s sunny optimism about urban ethnic pluralism with the emphases on segregation and material inequality in St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis—point toward potential connections that are never fully explored. More generally, I wonder if there is any evidence that Lippmann engaged with the work of Black critics of the emergent Cold War in the late 1940s—figures who agreed with his rejection of a policy of global containment but who rejected his civilizational premises, such as, among others, W. E. B. Du Bois or Oliver Cromwell Cox.

Second, I wonder whether what connection should be drawn between Lippmann’s faith in an ideal of Western civilization in the 1940s and 1950s with his growing sense of what Arnold-Forster calls his “fatalism” in the 1970s (267). After the end of the war in Vietnam, the civilizational emphasis in American foreign policymaking arguably increased—in the opposition to the New International Economic Order, at first, and later in the Reagan administration’s growing hostility to world bodies like the UN, which they understood as hopelessly corrupted by the influence of postcolonial states.[8] It is hard to understand how Lippmann squared his desire for America to “confront its imperial hubris and domestic political malaise” (267) with his faith in America as the protector of a broader standard of Western civilization—unless he had abandoned that faith by the end of his life.

[1] T. J. Jackson Lears, “Pragmatic Realism versus the American Century,” in The Short American Century: A Postmortem, ed. Andrew Bacevich (Harvard University Press, 2012), 82–120).

[2] Matthew Specter, The Atlantic Realists: Empire and International Political Thought between Germany and the United States (Stanford University Press, 2022).

[3] Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931–1945 (New York: Penguin, 2021); Paul Thomas Chamberlin, Scorched Earth: A Global History of World War II (Basic Books, 2025).

[4] “The Long Telegram,” from George Kennan in Moscow to the Secretary of State, February 22, 1946, National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/21042-long-telegram-original.

[5] Benjamin A. Coates, “American Presidents and the Ideology of Civilization,” in Ideology in U.S. Foreign Relations: New Histories, ed. Christopher McKnight Nichols and David Milne (Columbia University Press, 2022), 54.

[6] See, among others, Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

[7] David Milne, Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (Macmillan, 2017).

[8] Sean T. Byrnes, Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right (Louisiana State University Press, 2021).