The Cold War’s Moral Nihilism Is the Last Thing We Should Be Copying Today
US support for dictatorships and death squads during the Cold War was a moral catastrophe. Some liberal pundits would now like us to repeat that bloody track record, all in the name of the loftiest principles.
Human remains are seen as a team of international forensics work on their exhumation at the Yancolo hamlet, in Cacaopera, El Salvador, on November 6, 2019. According to authorities, the human remains were from victims of the 1981 El Mozote massacre, carried out by forces of the US-backed Salvadoran government. (Marvin Recinos / AFP via Getty Images)
There was an immediate backlash when the British prime minister Boris Johnson tried to compare Britain’s vote for Brexit in 2016 to the Ukrainian struggle against Vladimir Putin’s invasion. Johnson’s domestic opponents described the comparison as “shameless,” “crass and distasteful,” and “an insult to every Ukrainian.”
Yet Johnson’s self-serving appropriation of the war in Ukraine was almost seemly when set against an article by the Financial Times commentator Janan Ganesh. Ganesh calls for a return to the moral nihilism of US foreign policy during the Cold War as an essential tool with which to confront Putin or China’s leader Xi Jinping.
It’s an especially clear and brazen example of an argument we can expect to hear much more of in the coming months. Instead of taking a clear stand against dictatorships and aggressive wars in general, it uses one set of atrocities to justify support for the perpetrators of equally grisly crimes.
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