The free world, in other words, was a noble lie. It helped us imagine the world we wanted to live in, and it helped American presidents, from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, articulate important truths.
By Michael IGNATIEFF
Anyone old enough to remember the Cold War will also recall an imaginary place called “the free world.” It was where Westerners believed they lived, while Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Chinese lived behind barbed wire. The description was partly true, in the sense that there was barbed wire and there was some freedom outside the communist world. But the story as a whole was a lie.
Moreover, the free world included the Shah’s Iran, Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, and Francisco Franco’s Spain. These countries were not free at all, but because they were anti-communist, they were admitted to the club. Meanwhile, the club’s leader, the United States, regularly proclaimed how free it was, even though its black citizens were denied the right to vote in the American South until 1965. The free world, in other words, was a noble lie. It helped us imagine the world we wanted to live in, and it helped American presidents from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan articulate important truths. They told us that the Berlin Wall was a moral abomination, not a fact of life we would simply have to accept, and they were right.
The free world helped the best people on “our” side forge bonds of solidarity with the best people on “the other side,” from Soviet dissidents and Polish Solidarity heroes to those behind Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia.
When Václav Havel said he wanted Czechoslovakia to become a “normal” country, he was referring to the ordinary, everyday freedoms enjoyed on the other side of the barbed wire. In the 1970s and 1980s, the people of Portugal, Spain, and Greece knew that the free world was a lie because NATO and the Americans had conspired with their regimes to deny them freedom.
When they overthrew those tyrants, they did so in part to join the free world that had been promised to them but denied them. In the same way, the Taiwanese, South Koreans, and Filipinos who overthrew their U.S.-backed tyrants turned the ideological joke played on them into something serious. And when the Berlin Wall finally fell in 1989, the free world no longer seemed like a distant dream. The people themselves, with tears streaming down their faces as they climbed through the cracks, suddenly made it a reality. Those euphoric days are now a distant memory. Today we mourn an unusually long funeral. The death of the free world began not long after 1989. The peoples of the Balkans wanted to join it, but when the opportunity presented itself in the 1990s, their nationalist elites gave them a mixture of ethnic majority rule and ethnic cleansing of minorities.
Similarly, Russian elites in the early 1990s used the chaotic collapse of the Soviet empire to enrich themselves. Democracy died in chaos, institutional disintegration, and widespread corruption. When Vladimir Putin came to power, he extinguished the flame of freedom. A quarter of a century later, he is throwing young Russians into the furnace of war to prevent Ukraine from joining the free world. As these democratic projects failed and gave way to chaos or tyranny, American presidents—from George H.W. Bush to Joe Biden—and their European allies continued to act as if they believed they were leading the free world.
American rhetoric led many Iraqis and Afghans to believe that, with outside help, they too could join the free world. But that dream ended with the collapse of order in Iraq and America’s chaotic abandonment of Afghanistan. Now, the free world is on its deathbed, with an American president delivering its fatal blow.
Today, there is hardly a tyrant or autocrat alive that Donald Trump does not praise, nor an American ally that he does not try to blackmail. He boasts of his friendship with the hated tyrant of North Korea while downplaying U.S. military exercises with America’s once-democratic ally in South Korea. He openly despises the leader of a democratic Ukraine fighting for its life, even denying it missile defenses that would protect its civilian population from nighttime attacks. If this political vandalism were the work of a single man, we might imagine a safe return to the ideals of the free world sometime after 2028. But the reality is grimmer than that. The idea that America should protect free peoples is so degraded in American public opinion that Trump’s flagrant betrayal of allies elicits almost no outrage from Congress or voters. The midterm elections in November will be decided by gas prices, not by America’s betrayal of the ideals that should have guided its foreign policy since World War II. Where does that leave middle powers like Canada and the Europeans?
They still support freedom beyond their borders and are maintaining their commitment to Ukraine as America pulls back. But their top priority now must be ensuring their own survival in a world of unprincipled predators.
When allies no longer share a common identity as part of the free world, the only question that remains is who will triumph and who will succumb. Canada is the first American ally to learn this uncomfortable truth. Prime Minister Mark Carney withdrew from trade negotiations with the Trump administration, rather than succumb by aligning Canada’s foreign economic policy with that of the United States. Europeans have praised Canada’s courage, but courage is sometimes simply the ability to recognize reality. In this new reality, every country is for itself. Each must protect its core industries from foreign competition while investing vast state resources in the infrastructure needed to remain globally competitive. All forms of dependence can be used as weapons, and so all dependencies on supply chains and resources are weak points.
Trump has killed the free world for the sake of a protectionist fix that will accelerate, not halt, America’s imperial decline. Europe, Canada, and the democracies of Africa, Asia, and Latin America are what remains of the old ideal. They bear the burden of keeping it alive. During the Cold War, a similar challenge enabled us to imagine a better world. It can do so again, by reminding us that we share values – freedom and democracy – not just economic interests.