sceptical outlook upon the dynamics of world politics. The onset of atomic weapons
and with it the spectre of thermonuclear destruction appeared to preclude the future
possibility of limited warfare at the same time that it raised the stakes in the emergent
formation of two great power blocs. As a consequence, American liberalism evolved
into a Cold War position that sought to establish an identity which could be
differentiated from the hawks of nationalist conservatism and from the remnants of
the socialist-popular front axis of the 1930s. Liberal anxiety over being politically
outflanked and over its forms of governance being disrupted by outbursts of populist
insurgency led to the renowned hybrid of Cold War liberalism; namely an intense
and sustained posture geared to ideational and strategic confrontation coexisting
alongside a domestic agenda of measured internal critique and domestic reform.
Some elements of US liberalism believed that this stance was conspicuously
inconsistent with its domestic agenda, and represented a form of political over-
compensation in order to pre-empt charges of liberal elitism and covert complicity
in anti-Americanism. But in the main, the liberal persuasion became strongly
associated with a concerted anti-communism and with a willingness to compete
against the international reach of communism. Liberalism became noted for its
hostility to those forces that were deemed to threaten the United States’ national
interests, its global position and its central role in organizing the international system.
To many, this represented an agreeable and even vital centrist position that
suggested a mature response to contemporary circumstances. Hartz remained
unconvinced by the relationship between on the one hand an indigenous liberalism
that professed the existence of universal properties and, on the other, the equally
vibrant notion of national exceptionalism based upon the very same indigenous
liberalism. It is noteworthy that Hartz’s critique was as much directed towards Cold
War liberals as it was towards their tormentors on the right and the left. Beneath
the veneer of liberal optimism in the United States, Hartz detected a note of
pessimism because of America’s almost congenital inability to adjust itself to a global
position. As a consequence, it remained at the mercy of an inherent instability due
to the problematic nature of its ingrown liberal ethos when it had to confront the
outside world. In effect, it could not be assumed that American liberalism had arrived
at a full reconciliation with the notion that engagement in international politics was
a binding fact of global life rather than a choice motivated by moral conviction.
Meeting the world halfway
The extent to which Man, the State and War was designed with this liberal
predicament in mind is a matter that is open to debate. It might be argued that
Waltz’s metier lay with the properties of high theory rather than with the cross-
currents of contemporary American liberalism. However, a proposition of equal or
greater weight might plausibly assert that he was not only conscious of the relevance
of his position in relation to the more nuanced disputes between himself and other
post-war realists like Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau over the United
States’ strategic posture in the world, but recognized the significance of these debates
Waltz and the process of Cold War adjustment 45