This year, the prestigious Carlyle Lectures at the University of Oxford were given by Samuel Moyn, and his subject was Cold War liberalism. It was a case of intellectual history being ahead of its time. Moyn’s lectures are only a few weeks old, but his characters have since left the lectern to run amok in opinion pieces, like wax figures escaped from Madame Tussauds. Isaiah Berlin teaches us to see the pattern in the Russian carpet; Hannah Arendt had warned us against Russian expansionism and the revisionist uses of history; Judith Shklar had cautioned us against liberalism’s lack of self-confidence. We were warned, and yet we didn’t listen.

The Russian aggression in Ukraine has triggered a revival of Cold War liberalism the way a reflex hammer triggers a patellar reaction. One loses count of the op-eds arguing that we are back to the post–World War II years. Notions such as the “free world,” the “West,” and the “empire of evil” have been retrieved from their formaldehyde jars. The Cold War is the new intellectual compass that will help us navigate a world that is once again pitting democracies against totalitarianism.

The knee-jerk response comes complete with all the Cold War paraphernalia, starting with an enemy bent on world domination. Vladimir Putin’s intention to reconstitute the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire is taken for granted. Ukraine has been reduced to a piece from a vintage 1960s domino set: if it falls, Russian tanks will inexorably steamroll through Poland and show up at the Brandenburg Gate. It does not matter if they have been stuck for two weeks in a traffic jam in the outskirts of Kiev before turning back. Nothing short of a global alliance of democracies will ward off the totalitarian threat.