The new politics: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offer different paths the coronavirus pandemic.

Does that render Lieven’s book irrelevant? It might, if you took the title too literally and read it first and foremost as a book about climate change. But to do so would be to misunderstand Lieven’s intent.

Lieven’s métier is as a thinker of politics and international relations. He has a wideranging vision. As he tells us in several places in the book, he has reported from across post-Soviet Russia, Washington, DC, Pakistan and the Middle East. He is clearly stirred by the climate emergency. But this book is not really about global warming. Nor is it about energy policy, though Lieven does have strong opinions on the nuclear question. For Lieven the climate crisis serves as a diagnostic test. It poses the question of who we are in political terms. It exposes the antiquated strategic thinking that prioritises a new cold war over the very survival of states in their current form. It reveals the unsustainability of rampant market capitalism. The willingness of economists to discount the future of our progeny is for Lieven the mark of nothing less than the degeneracy of our culture.

The coming distributional struggles compound our political and social divisions. Will we sacrifice our ideological hobbyhorses for the sake of doing whatever it takes to prevent climate catastrophe? The sheer bleakness of the future challenges our capacity for realism. The climate crisis is a test of our character. And Lieven does not like what it reveals.

Lieven strikes a pose beloved of self-proclaimed realists, placing himself between the do-nothing, know-nothing right and the radicals of the climate left. Lieven’s sympathy is with the left, which he thinks grasps the seriousness of the emergency. He agrees that there needs to be a social transformation. But to Lieven’s mind the transformation they envision is unrealistic and their politics are self-defeating. The priority they give to the interest of a rainbow coalition of minorities antagonises the white, male working class. Their support for open borders is an empty cosmopolitanism that is both off-putting and unrealistic in practice.

Lieven is disarmingly frank about his own historical role models. He draws inspiration from those who at the turn of the 19th century already sought to straddle the divide between socialism and conservatism, the likes of George Bernard Shaw, Lord Milner, John Buchan, Harold Mackinder and Rudyard Kipling. For Lieven the task is to “develop a new version of social imperialism, without the imperialism,

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racism, eugenics and militarism”. What this social imperialism will involve is a deliberate effort to rebuild solidarity from the top down, a solidarity founded ultimately on an idea of the nation, not a nation limited by race, but a strong concept of chosen collective solidarity. Lieven’s ideal, as he tells us, is a Democratic Party platform featuring Theodore Roosevelt in rough rider regalia and Eisenhower as the commander of the D-Day landings.

The centrepiece of this militant platform would be the restoration of the nation state. The years he spent in Pakistan taught Lieven hard lessons about how difficult it is for a society to flourish without a strong nation state. He has striking things to say about the intercommunal tensions that afflict the Asian subcontinent. On the national question he thinks that the West has lessons to learn from the imperial notion of citizenship fostered by Vladimir Putin’s Russia – all ethnicities and religions are welcome, so long as they swear loyalty to Russia. And, in the same spirit, he has no time for the ideologues of the new cold war who preach conflict with Putin and Xi Jinping.

virtues. In the meantime, paramilitary formations such as the National Guard have been mobilised to cordon off New York suburbs. The US Army Corps of Engineers, for which Lieven has a soft spot, will most likely be mobilised for a rash of emergency hospital-building. In Britain the lamentably underequipped NHS will most likely have to draw on the military too.

You might imagine that this rather butch version of progressivism was the sole reserve of tweedy professors of international relations. But, in fact, one of the odder features of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Brooklyn radicals is their enthusiasm for the economic history of the Second World War. One of their favourite examples for the productive capacity of state power is Franklin D Roosevelt’s drive in the 1940s to build a giant fleet of bombers with which to lay waste to the cities of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

Returning to the 21st century and to the grounds of reality, we know how the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi reacted to the Green New Deal. She dismissed it as an ill-formed wish

Will we sacrifice our ideological hobbyhorses for the sake of doing whatever it takes to prevent catastrophe?

All of this is pitched as a social (imperialist) version of the Green New Deal. The state has the authority and the tools necessary to direct the change. Furthermore, it is the nation state through which we primarily understand our intergenerational responsibilities. In the name of the nation we must sacrifice ourselves as consumers for the higher good of climate mitigation.

This isn’t a book about pandemics. But if Lieven had seen Covid-19 coming, one imagines he could have written much the same book about our current crisis. The politics of pandemics seem tailormade for him.

The struggle with the virus has been declared a war. In that war we need allies. The last thing the West can afford at present is a clash with Beijing, which seems to have brought its crisis under some kind of control. By contrast, the inability of the US to muster a national response of any degree of coherence is lamentable. Once we have come through the crisis there clearly must be a re-evaluation of state capacity.

Of course, one would wish this to be tied to the reassertion of basic social democratic list, and there was more to Pelosi’s shrug than mere cynicism. She knows the long path between an enthusiastic campaign platform and the passage of a bill not just through Congress but any legislature.

Ocasio-Cortez and her cohorts can legitimately respond that that is not their purpose. They want to act as gadflies, to do for the left what the Tea Party did for the right. And they deserve credit for having transformed the debate in the Democratic Party. But exercising leverage from the margins of politics is not Lieven’s game. His book offers a blueprint for an epochal social and political transformation. For that you need big majorities won repeatedly. The inspiration here is as much Ronald Reagan as Roosevelt. But that raises the question: what is the relationship between Lieven’s neo-Edwardian vision of social imperialism and the actual business of politics in the 21st century?

Lieven scorns what he sees as the identity politics favoured by some parts of the American left. But he never addresses the heterogeneity of the working class today. Giving voice to women, migrants and people of colour is not an abstract indulgence t

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