John Hulsman and I decided to write Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World for two reasons. First, of course, we had become completely infuriated by the grotesque and appallingly dangerous blunders of the Bush administration, and exasperated with the failure of the Democratic establishment to put up any effective opposition.

More particularly, though, we were appalled by the way in which the so-called liberal hawks –Peter Beinart and the crowd around the New Republic, Will Marshall and those associated with the Progressive Policy Institute and the “Truman Project” – had misappropriated the names and records of our own philosophical and political heroes: Reinhold Niebuhr and Americans for Democratic Action; George Kennan and the creators of containment; and the Truman administration in general.

Our hope is to bring out the fact that the actual records of Niebuhr, the ADA and the Truman administration are very different from the way that they have been portrayed recently, and point towards a far more rigorous opposition to the Bush administration than that practiced by the present Democrat establishment.

The distortions are most obviously evidenced by the fact that Truman, backed by the ADA and followed by Eisenhower, rejected the idea of preventive war – even when the US had a virtual monopoly, and yet seemed to be facing a future Soviet threat greater by orders of magnitude than anything that confronts the US in the Muslim world.

Secondly, Niebuhr, Kennan, and the more intelligent members of the ADA were always careful to draw a distinction between different kinds of Left-wing movement and state. Within Europe, their strategy for defeating Soviet Communist expansionism was largely based on alliances with the “non-Communist Left.”

Outside Europe, they pointed out that the motivations and the strength of Communist movements in Asia and Africa were very different from those in Europe. In Eastern Europe, Communism was allied with Soviet imperialism, and the West represented a liberating force. In China, Vietnam and elsewhere, Communist movements drew much of their support from anti-colonial nationalism – and were enormously strengthened thereby.

Niebuhr was writing this already almost 20 years before the US stumbled into Vietnam, a war that he and Kennan – like Hans Morgenthau, our third philosophical inspiration – all opposed. It is not difficult to imagine what these people would have made of the intellectually fatuous and politically disastrous notion of “Islamofascism”, so beloved of both neo-cons and liberal hawks, which lumps every Muslim enemy or critic of the West into one pot and treats them as one undifferentiated enemy mass.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the liberal hawks who draw inspiration from Niebuhr the leader of American liberals against Fascist and Communist totalitarianism – which is not of course wrong in itself – have tended completely to forget that in his book The Irony of American History and elsewhere, Niebuhr was also one of the most incisive and eloquent critics of American national messianism, and the aggression, rigidity and moralizing hysteria to which it could give rise.

Or as Morgenthau wrote in the same vein, “The light-hearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is the very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets warned rulers and ruled.” These are words that the Bush administration and the Democrat establishment appear never to have read. They have certainly not understood them.