Michael Lind argues that we have "a serious philosophical disagreement" between proponents of 1945 Postwar liberal internationalism, which envisioned an international order based on a "loose concert or concerts of nonaggressive, but not necessarily democratic, great powers," and the Cold War model of liberal internationalism, which is "an attempt to universalize the norms of NATO and the EU."

Let's start with the history. I take it that Lind's postwar model refers to the UN, with the provision for the P-5 members of the Security Council, three of which were democracies and two, Russia and China, were not. That was indeed Franklin Roosevelt's vision of the "four policemen (+ France); he was realist enough, rightly, to recognize that you could not have an international order unless all the great powers signed on. But that was only one plank of the postwar liberal order, as John Ikenberry and many others have argued. The others, were NATO, the Marshall Plan to get Europe back on its feet as a group of democracies rather than watch various European states turn community, and the EU to keep it as a strong economic and political entity. That was the US strategy throughout the Cold War - in keeping with the second half of Kennan's containment strategy, which was to strengthen the West until the Soviet Union collapsed from within. So I honestly don't know how Lind is distinguishing between a "postwar" and a "Cold War" model here.

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I agree with Fareed that about the use of fear-mongering on the right and occasionally the left for domestic political purposes. And I agree that by a number of measures we are actually much better off than in many previous eras. But in his list of threats he betrays his realist roots, and thus misses some of the most important reasons for worrying about the current international environment. When Fareed lists usual suspects, he starts with terrorism, but the rest of the list - rogue states, Iran, North Korea, a revanchist Russia, an expansionist China - is completely state-centric. It's a Bismarckian tableau - who is up, who is down, who needs reassurance, who bears watching. He then throws in, slightly tongue in cheek, two economic threats - Indian outsourcing and Mexican immigration. But he completely ignores many of the threats I would put at the top of my list - nuclear proliferation, global epidemics, and climate change. In the case of both global epidemics and climate change, we face the direct threats of disease, flooding, drought, desertification, etc, but also the secondary security threats of profound domestic dislocations, causing government collapse, refugee flows, border wars, and conflict that appears to be ethnic in nature but that is in large part driven by resource scarcity (Darfur is a partial example).

The tertiary effects are even more worrisome.

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