For many decades, practitioners and scholars of foreign policy used to refer to “the West,” but today, for the most part, they don’t. What happened to the idea of “the West”? Michael Kimmage, a professor of history at Catholic University, wrote The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy to trace the rise and decline of this concept from the late nineteenth century through the present day. In this podcast discussion, Kimmage discusses the idea of the West — as a geopolitical and cultural concept rather than a geographic place. He analyzes how it developed intellectually, with the widespread adoption of neoclassical architecture and Western Civilization curricula in American universities, and geopolitically as the U.S. rose to global leadership after World War II and during the Cold War. Kimmage also addresses critiques of the West (and its legacy of racism and imperialism) as advanced by critics like W. E. B. Du Bois and Edward Said. He argues that the concept of “the West,” despite its flaws, still matters, and explains why he’s concerned about the tendency to erase or discard the Western tradition entirely rather than engaging with it critically.
Michael Kimmage further relates his experience of serving as director of the Kennan Institute, a program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was liquidated in January 2025 by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or DOGE), and the consequences of the government cutting itself off from international exchange and expertise in the development of U.S. foreign policy. He also expresses his belief that institutionalists — the people who believe in the value of institutions and operate in them — have to do a better job of explaining and justifying what they do: “If the population feels that these institutions are elitist and out of touch and misguided and unnecessary, then it doesn’t matter how much somebody like me values them, it’s not going to work.”
Transcript
Michael Kimmage: One of the great richnesses of this topic is that subjective set of attitudes, and therefore intellectually the battle over what the West is, which is the most exciting part of the whole story of the West. It’s an argument. It’s not a thing, it’s not a dogma, it’s not an etiquette. It’s an argument.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to the Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m delighted to be joined today by Michael Kimmage. He is a professor in the Department of History and Anthropology at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He also previously has been a visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin, the University of Vilnius, and the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich. From 2014 to 2017, he was a member of the Office of Policy Planning at the U.S. State Department, where he was responsible for the Russia-Ukraine portfolio.
He’s a specialist in the history of the Cold War, the diplomatic and intellectual history of the United States in the twentieth century, and post-Soviet U.S.-Russian relations. He is the author of numerous books including, most recently, Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2024. He has also translated and brought to publication the classic 1959 German-language travelogue by Wolfgang Koeppen, the English language title of which is Journey Through America. And he also has served as the Director of the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Welcome, Michael!
Michael Kimmage: Great to be with you, Geoff.
Geoff Kabaservice: Listeners won’t be able to see this, but you look tan. I’m assuming this is from your recent trip to Greece?
Michael Kimmage: That is very true. I think, having written a book titled The Abandonment of the West, there’s little alternative than to go and vacation at a place like Greece and to ponder the non-abandonment of the West.
Geoff Kabaservice: I am glad that you maintain integrity of trademark. Michael, you are listed on the Catholic University website as “Ordinary Professor of History.” I know very well that this is standard academic terminology, but it still strikes me as unjust because you are, in all ways, an extraordinary professor of history. You have remarkable range and depth of scholarship. And your approach to both history and current events is creative, eclectic, heterodox — and you also possess a lot of good common sense. You and I have many interests in common. And I’ve enjoyed running into you over the years at various academic, historical, and foreign policy-related gatherings in D.C. as well as in Berlin when you were the Richard C. Holbrooke Fellow at the American Academy. That was fun.
Michael Kimmage: Yes, that’s true. I think of you, Geoff, as somebody whose interests very much crisscross with my own. And from different angles, we seem often to be coming at the same story — and not just over the last twelve months or the last two years, but I think now, at this point, over many years. So it’s a pleasure to be speaking with you today.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would say our interests have crisscrossed for decades without knowing it. I’d particularly like to talk to you today, Michael, about your 2020 book, The Abandonment of the West: The History of an Idea in American Foreign Policy. Like I said, that was published in 2020. Gosh, I’m now trying to remember who the publisher is — Basic Books. That book seems to me to have even more relevance now than when it was first published five years ago.
But I feel I have to ask you first about the drama or perhaps tragedy of your time as director of the Kennan Institute. So let me set the stage. The Kennan Institute is the oldest and largest regional program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which was/is a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan think tank dedicated to research and policy discussions on global issues. It was established by a bipartisan act of Congress in 1968.
The Center, as of earlier this year, was housed in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center just off the National Mall here in D.C. And the Kennan Institute was founded in 1974 as a division of the Center, thanks in part to the initiative of George Kennan, one of the most famous American diplomats of the twentieth century, who was probably best known as an originator and advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War.
The institute was named technically not for Kennan but for his namesake, who was a nineteenth-century explorer of Russia and Siberia. And the institute, according to its website, is “the premier U.S. center for advanced research on Eurasia, and is committed to improving American understanding of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and the surrounding region through research and exchange.”
You had been associated with the Wilson Center for a long time and on the Advisory Board of the Kennan Institute since 2017. You began your job as the director of the Kennan Institute on January 13th, 2025. A week later, Donald Trump was inaugurated for the second time, and he quickly fired several of the Center’s board members — including at least one member, Brian Hook, whom he had appointed himself. In mid-March, the administration issued an executive order calling for the reduction of the Wilson Center and other “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the President has determined are unnecessary.” And the administration soon ordered the gutting of those agencies to their statutory minimum.
On the last day of March of this year, emissaries from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency paid a visit to the Wilson Center, and the next day, its president and CEO, former Republican U.S. Representative Mark Green, resigned. Two days later, almost all the Wilson Center employees were fired and had to vacate the building within a few hours, in a rushed exit that included being cut off from access to their work email.
You have spoken about the human toll of these firings, which took place at more or less the same time as the terminations of thousands of other federal employees at institutions including USAID, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the Voice of America. But you also wrote a piece in Liberties magazine in May of this year focusing on the symbolism of the Wilson Center’s vacated library.
You wrote that “After April 3, one could still enter the building with permission. The abandoned center’s library was the first American ruin I have seen, or it was the first modern American ruin. It recalled Pompeii in its imagery of life interrupted, though not in its scale. There were trollies with random unreturned library books, study carrels with books and no fellows, and the thirty thousand books that had been there before (tended, catalogued, cared for) were now orphaned.”
I realize that you are somewhat limited in what you can say about this whole experience even several months later. But what can you tell me about even specifically the abandonment of the library and what this episode may tell us about the present political and cultural moment in which we find ourselves?
Michael Kimmage: Well, one thing I begin with in the piece in Liberties, which I still will stick to — but in answering your question, Geoff, I think will also kind of betray — is that I don’t like this notion of turning what happened to the Wilson Center library into a grand metaphor and even into a grand symbol, although it’s irresistible in some ways. I don’t know in the end what it symbolizes. Something, surely. But in some ways what touched me the most about being there, perhaps because I wasn’t in an administrative role at the time, was just the sheer abandonment of the books themselves — literally these books. And of course when you see that, you think with astonishment that it takes decades to build up a library collection like that, and resources, and attention, and care. And within an incredibly short period of time, all of that can be just invalidated or turned on its head.
And so the fate of the books… I’m happy to say that the vast majority of the books have been rescued, and a home has been found for them, and readers will be found for them in the future. So it’s not a kind of utter disaster. But it’s still, to me, breathtaking that something like that could happen in the center of Washington, D.C. in peacetime and without a civil war in our midst. It’s still remarkable and baffling.
Two more things… One, I’m still trying to understand the motives of the actors. In the Liberties piece, I attribute to them, debatably, a kind of radical indifference. I don’t think that there was a meeting in the Department of Government Efficiency, or the Office of Management and Budget, or wherever the decisions were actually made, about closing down (in its old form) the Wilson Center. I don’t think that they sat around and said, “Let’s create all these problems for the Wilson Center library.” I don’t think that there was a motive there to do harm to a collection of this kind.
And yet, these are institutions that are caretakers of many things. And you might imagine that in winding them down, or redefining them, or making substantive changes — which is, of course, well within the rights of the Executive Branch to do — you might imagine that there would be a conversation about assets and collections. You know, many of these institutions house different kinds of treasures. And clearly, that’s a conversation that didn’t take place. And so that radical indifference really continues to surprise me.
I would say, without making it into a symbol maybe more than a fact of governance, I don’t think that there’s that radical indifference across the board with the Trump administration. But you do see elements of it in other actions that they’ve taken, such as the way in which they very precipitously fired people at the National Institutes of Health. There too, projects were interrupted, projects that you would imagine for any administration would be of value to the American people. That stuff was also done with, I think, a hefty dose of indifference. And in the ongoing war between the Trump administration and several American universities — there’s a lot to say about that that deserves a conversation unto itself — but there’s, again, a kind of indifference about the collateral damage. So the foreign Ph.D. student who has accepted (or has been accepted) now has a hard time getting a visa to come and study in the United States — a modest example of some of the things that are in jeopardy at the moment.
And so, there, I think, we have a window into something. But I want to understand that better. I want to read more. I want to see books about all of this, and see who the actual people were who made these decisions and sort of think about that. And there’s a kind of callousness — not towards books but also towards human beings in all of this.
And so we can have the ideological conversation about what’s happening, and the political conversation, and the institutional conversation about how it happened. But why it was that employees of the federal government, who in my view were not betraying any mission that they had signed onto or oath that they had sworn — why they were treated as semi-criminal or part of some problem and had to be fired so rapidly?
And in the case of people unlike myself — I was just there for a few months — you had people who had worked for decades at the Wilson Center, who deserved a retirement party and a proper end to their career, who were fired in summary fashion with no explanation given. And it was all done in the way that was calculated — not indifferently calculated, but consciously calculated — to cause psychological distress and all of that. So there too I think there’s something to ponder through a government that, at least in this phase, was sort of at war with itself. And why it was, I have a few explanations, but they’re not very good. And when I think back on it, I’m saddened of course by all of this, but more than anything just baffled.
Geoff Kabaservice: I do have strong feelings that the closure of the Wilson Center and the Kennan Institute was a symbol of sorts. I remember that one of the twentieth-century intellectuals you wrote about in The Abandonment of the West was Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish philosopher who for many years taught the Great Books tradition at the University of Chicago. He wrote extensively about scholarship as a bulwark of civilization against barbarism. And the indifference displayed by DOGE and the administration to the value of scholarship, learning, institutions, and cultural inheritances does feel an awful lot to me like an act of barbarism.
But I also agree with you that indifference was probably the principal motivation behind the dismantling of the Wilson Center, and that this is reflected in a broader indifference when it comes to foreign policy and decision-making to the value of expertise and learning from history as well as the value of what Joseph Nye called “soft power,” part of which entails the cultivation of international goodwill through fellowships, scholarly exchanges, projects, and cultural as well as political and economic engagement with the outside world. I could even argue right now that actually China is a greater practitioner of soft power through its Belt and Road initiative as well as other cultural as well as political/economic exchanges.
Michael Kimmage: All of that, of course, resonates. I mean, the United States is different from some cultures. We’re both familiar with Germany, where the federal government of Germany plays a much more prominent role in the funding of universities and even the management of universities. And so there’s a dimension of American scholarly life and academic life that’s more difficult to touch, or perhaps even untouchable, for the federal government, and that’s something to consider at the moment. And there are lots of ways in which the work of the Wilson Center can be carried on outside of the government. The Wilson Center, interestingly, was seventy percent privately-funded, thirty percent government-funded. So if financial efficiency was the cause, it’s a very curious decision indeed, because it wasn’t particularly expensive to the U.S. Government.
But it also means that that seventy percent of private funding in the future, I think, will find its way toward scholarly purposes. And that’s a small silver lining in this rather catastrophic story. But your question is about the government’s commitment to these things, and that is a huge feature of American life going back to the middle of the twentieth century and perhaps earlier.
And so what you see, in addition to the books that will not be written, or the symposia that will not be had and the conversations that won’t take place — because the Wilson Center, among other institutions, was a hive of that kind of activity — you also have a government that is going to cut itself off from that kind of discourse — which presumably, for the figures in the Trump administration who made the decision to do all of this, is a good thing. They were funding work that was in their eyes either irrelevant or perhaps actively harmful in some form or fashion. It was a kind of liberal internationalism that the American taxpayer didn’t sign onto and is no longer the mood of the moment, and there’s just no reason to support those projects. I think that that would be their definition of what the Wilson Center did and their definition of the problem that they were addressing.
But the government is going to cut itself off, and continues to do so since the spring of 2025 in various ways: people at the CIA who have been deprived of security clearances recently, and many people who you could describe as kind of in the expert analysis business in the government who have lost their jobs, or have a harder time now doing their jobs. You’re going to see a drying up of a certain kind of discourse within the government: a more critical discourse, probably a more neutral discourse, one that’s less dictated by the immediate concerns of government. And that is going to be over time, I think, a very substantial loss. Somebody like George Kennan, who I think was truly committed to that line of inquiry — had he not been, he wouldn’t have been as involved as he was in the creation of the Kennan Institute — I think he would be tearing his hair out. He was not a man who had a lot of hair to tear out, but what hair he had, he would’ve torn out to contemplate that.
And of course, as your question indicates, when you have international places of scholarship — when you have the left-wing journalist from Germany who’s maybe skeptical about American power and about the United States and comes for three months and has a nice experience at a place like the Wilson Center and engages in critical discussion perhaps with policymakers, perhaps with regular citizens — I think that that does build a unique kind of goodwill. It doesn’t mean that that journalist is going to sign on to American policy X or Y, but he or she might develop a more nuanced or richer relationship to the United States than would otherwise be the case. And so all of that has just been amputated in a very rapid way. So those figures may still come to the U.S. — if they wish to, if they can get a visa, if it’s on their agenda — but they’re going to be probably at a private university at this point or a think tank, and their contact with government is going to diminish.
So this organism, this kind of tissue of relationships that was there — it’s not completely gone, but it’s dramatically diminished. And I suspect — because the impact of a place like the Wilson Center is not over the course of a few months or even a few years, it’s really over the course of decades — that ten years from now we’ll look back and we’ll sense that amputation and just be startled by its scope and intensity.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree. And to pick up on something that you’d said earlier, I think what we’re seeing right now is a broad forgetting of many of the lessons that were learned in the immediate post-World War II era, which led the government to set up institutions like the Wilson Center. And this is a theme to which we’ll return.
But I was struck by a comment that you made, in a recent interview with Andrew Keene, that one of the lessons you’ve taken away from this episode is that institutionalists — the people who believe in the value of institutions and operate in them — have to do a better job of explaining and justifying what they do. You said that “If the population feels that these institutions are elitist and out of touch and misguided and unnecessary, then it doesn’t matter how much somebody like me values them, it’s not going to work.”
Michael Kimmage: Well, that is true. I’ll stand by those words and those phrases. I’m not sure, when I listen to myself speak at that moment, that the American electorate got the choice to weigh in on these issues in 2024. Because I don’t think… I mean, there was some discussion of Project 2025, and that’s I think loosely where the closure or the reduction of the Wilson Center comes from. But I don’t think a lot of this was put before the electorate coherently, and it’s a set of many other issues that people were voting on in 2024. So we’ll see, in a sense, if some of this gets restored in the future.
Maybe it will just seem like a moment of intoxication and error and a blip, but that’s kind of hard to say at the moment and hard to predict. I think that there is a very complicated discussion to be had about the relationship between taxpayer money, institutions in Washington, D.C., and the intellectual life of the city. And I don’t think that this conversation — much as I’m completely committed to things like the Fulbright Scholarship and institutions like USAID, and foreign aid; all of those things seem like goods to me and I’m happy that we did them to the extent that we did before the spring of 2025 — but it can’t just be a romantic or a nostalgic conversation about those things.
Capital cities in all countries have a tendency to float free from the population. Capital cities that have the wealth that Washington, D.C. commands face additional temptations. And I think it probably is the case that, going back maybe to the creation of the Council on Foreign Relations 110 years ago, that there’s something of an establishment foreign policy elite that came into being. That initially was largely corporate lawyers and people from the private sector, but especially with the Cold War, it got access to all kinds of funding, and then it became something of a self-perpetuating caste.
And the best version of 2024 I can give, as an election, is that that caste was challenged, in a sense, by the election. There was a candidate there who was willing to go against certain foreign policy orthodoxies and to be critical of them, and that resonated with the American population. And then in what seems to me also an act of retribution, but also of reconstitution, the government really began to rethink how tax money was used and to which sources it was going.
So I think that there’s every need for that caste — which I don’t think was some vicious blob responsible for huge errors; it was a complicated, varied entity with lots of good qualities and a few bad qualities — but I think when it comes to thinking about this in the future, it’s really important to rethink one’s relationship to the American population. We need to realize that if we were to use taxpayer money to fund fellowships, there’s a public dimension to that, and there’s a need to take those ideas and conversations out beyond the Beltway, or to take in elements from beyond the Beltway into the conversation.
At the Wilson Center, I think that there was nobody who was sympathetic to what you could describe as MAGA foreign policy who was on the payroll. I think that’s a fair point to make. Is that reflective of the American population? It isn’t. Is that a problem? It is. Now, did DOGE come in saying, “We want to reform this and get a better Wilson Center”? No. They just root-and-branch knocked it out, which is I think a huge mistake.
But I don’t think, in our own recounting of ourselves and our own image of ourselves, and our own plans for ourselves, people who belong to — let’s just say it directly — a kind of elite foreign policy conversation in Washington, I don’t think we can just go on as we did in the past. We have to do it better. And we have to listen to a message that is out there and is being projected toward us, which is one part conspiracy theory and one part campaign rhetoric and one part reality about a somewhat out-of-touch educated American elite. We need to listen to that, we need to think about it, think it over, and we need to respond. So that’s one of the lessons that has to be drawn from this experience. It cannot just be a lament. It has to be something else.
Geoff Kabaservice: One of the shared interests we’ve had over the course of our careers is an interest in establishments. And I completely agree with you that establishments have to be almost constantly reforming themselves in order to prevent themselves from hardening into a caste. And that means taking in new ideas and new constituencies and being willing to challenge their viewpoint. And clearly that has not been done across a wide range of American institutions which are largely associated with the left at this point. But typically what you see from populists is that they like to smash more than they like to reform, and they’re not very good at reform. So I’m afraid that’s possibly what we’re seeing now.
Michael Kimmage: I think that that’s entirely true. And I don’t think, when we’re talking about foreign policy institutions — let’s just stick with the Wilson Center because that’s our topic — I don’t think “left” is at all the issue. I don’t think that the Wilson Center was in any sense a kind of left institution. It really was truly either bipartisan or non-partisan, as it would say in its founding documents and was true of the institution itself. But I think that that’s insufficient. It’s of course necessary for a taxpayer-funded institution to be non-partisan, or certainly advisable, but it’s not the whole story.
You know, the question is: How valuable were we making ourselves to the general population? And also, even without having to agree with certain elements of the MAGA revolution, how sensitive were we to the concerns that were clearly percolating up in the population not just in 2016 but before then, but dramatically in 2016 and then again dramatically in 2024? One could write a wonderful novel about a group of people with perceptive ideas about the outside world who are really trained, and skilled, and wonderful at thinking about the outside world, but who are kind of obtuse about the country in which they live. I’ll put myself in that category, even though I’ve studied U.S. history and I try to engage.
But in some ways, the more time I spend on foreign policy, the less capable I become of understanding the country that I live in. And so in that sense — without crediting anything that DOGE did as valuable, because I don’t think it was — there’s a reckoning that’s going on now that hopefully will be useful. Let’s go as far as we can with that reckoning, because in effect, DOGE has given us the opportunity for that reckoning. Let’s be sure not to miss it.
Geoff Kabaservice: We shall see. Michael, I always ask the people who come on this podcast to tell me something about themselves in terms of where they come from, where they went to school, what their influences were. So what can you tell me?
Michael Kimmage: Well, let me take what’s the core influence in almost all of the work I’ve done, and it’s a trip that I took with my family. I think it was in 1984. I was about twelve years old at the time. My family has varied Eastern European roots. So it was something of a family visit that we took in the summer of that year, entering Eastern Europe from Vienna. That’s now a commuter train ride from Vienna to Bratislava, but then it was going from Planet Earth to Planet Mars, or Planet Mars to Planet Earth. And then a few weeks of travel in Czechoslovakia and Poland. And it just left this enormous impression on me. It was exciting in a way to see something that was so different from what I was familiar with. It was scary, because those societies were police states in ways that were completely undeniable, even to a kid traveling there. And in some ways when you left — and I think this was an experience that people commonly had when they left the East Bloc, Westerners who left the East Bloc — you had this feeling of relief that you could breathe freely again. But you also saw the place where you were from through new eyes.
So I’m quite sure that my decision later to study history as an undergrad and a grad student came from my own sense, after that trip, that the United States is a historical creation, that it’s unusual too, and its institutions and its past need to be studied to get to that unusual nature. But my basic obsession really is going back and forth, and I love doing it. I love going to the East and then back to the West, and from the West back to the East.
Russian-Soviet history I find really beguiling. I can never get enough of it. And I am deeply, deeply interested in the U.S.-Russian relationship — really as a relationship, not just as two poles or two entities, but as two powers that constitute each other and this pattern of paranoia and engagement and interconnection. It never fails to interest me. But I think it really comes from the twelve-year-old boy who is just starstruck by the world around him and what it was to have so categorically at that time a border, a division, a wall.
And of course I could speak to the 1990s when I was a college student and Europe opened up and it felt like it was this fully open and available terrain. But I feel like I came into my own as a commentator on international affairs when Russia annexed Crimea, and we’re back again in a way in that world of division and contest and war. Not that I liked that world at all; I very much wish we were back in the 1990s. But that’s what I feel, and so actually that’s my space. I suspect that Vladimir Putin is going to give me that space for a long time to come to work with. So it’s bad for the world, but in the sense for the work that I try to do, there’s a homeness in it for me. I feel at home with those divisions.
Geoff Kabaservice:
I too remember my first visit to Leningrad, as it was then, in the former Soviet Union, and that feeling of being Alice going through the looking glass, going into the society by which the United States had defined itself against its so many ways and seeing so much that was both familiar and unfamiliar in that strange new world. Did you grow up speaking any language other than English?
Michael Kimmage: Not really. I mean, my dad taught my brother and me Russian, in an academic way through textbooks, when we were kids. So we had that in the house, but it’s not like it was a bilingual household. But I would say… This was a small town in upstate New York, which was at the periphery of everything. But it was the Cold War moment and there was an Air Force base there. It used to brag, I think very improbably, about being number three on the Soviet Union’s hit list in the event of a nuclear war; Plattsburgh, New York would be destroyed after, I guess, New York and Washington. I think that that was self-inflation. But the Cold War was very much in the air. And there were lots of people coming through because there was a university there; they were coming through from the Soviet Union.
So that world too was present around us, the world of the Cold War. And of course this is the time of the documentary film The Day After — or I guess it was a film film — and Reagan, Gorbachev, and eventually the fall of the Berlin Wall. So geopolitics around us confirmed the centrality of this experience of the Cold War. It was really inescapable. In this town — it’s just the image that I’ll always retain of it — there was an Air Force base and there was a huge bomber that they had just on grass outside the Air Force base, some kind of decoration for the town. And when Christmastime would come, they would put a big Santa Claus on top of the bomber. And so you get this image of Christmas on the one hand, and American power on the other, and a very seamless merger of the two. I don’t know if they still do it. I doubt it. I hope not! But that’s to me the iconic image of this Cold War childhood.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ll never think of Rudolph in the same way again. Why did you choose to go to Oberlin College in Ohio?
Michael Kimmage: I went there because of the music. I’m an amateur pianist and it was really attractive to me to be in the presence of all that music. And it was a good decision, in that respect and others, because it’s a town of 5,000 and there are endless concerts and they cost nothing. So if you’re a music fan, you just wander from one to the other and it’s a musical utopia. I also think there’s still a strong sense that the arts matter, and you don’t have to have that debate; they’re understood to be central, including graphic arts and theater and literature. And it’s a place that just expressed the organic importance of the arts in addition to what you would normally get at a liberal arts college. So I followed the music.
Geoff Kabaservice: For all that people tend to talk about Oberlin through an ideological lens, it’s often forgotten that its conservatory is really one of the best in the Midwest if not the entire United States. Tell me about your senior thesis.
Michael Kimmage: So my senior thesis… I recently leafed through it. And I had expected to be very arrogant toward the senior thesis, and to really look down on and condescend to the author of that senior thesis. And I was a bit surprised, or very surprised, that that author is really me. And in some ways the stuff I’ve done since writing that senior thesis is kind of a footnote to what occurred haphazardly in my senior year of college. So for the senior thesis, I pulled from an offhand quote of Isaiah Berlin in his book Russian Thinkers, his book of essays, where he noted that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852. And at the same time, A Sportsman’s Sketches, the sort of Russian Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was also published in 1852 by Ivan Turgenev. A Sportsman’s Sketches is among the first works of Russian literature to really foreground the life of the peasantry and peasants as characters. And it was read by Alexander II, and it plays a role in the emancipation of the serfs roughly a decade after the book was published.
And so I did a Russian-American comparison of these two books and tried to explore… The argument of the thesis is that there’s a different moral political language in these two countries. The moral political language of the United States derives in part from American Protestantism, and it’s hortatory and it’s a call to action. Whereas, in the case of nineteenth-century Russia, it was much more an aristocratic mold of thinking. And there was an aesthetic, ethical appeal that’s made in Turgenev but not hortatory; it’s something different.
And so I was comparing these two different moral languages. And what just startled me about it is that I wrote a piece in 2014, a month or so after the annexation of Crimea, for The New Republic in which, in a way, everything I know about this conflict is expressed in that piece. And the core argument of that piece is that the United States and Russia have very different moral-political languages, and they can’t see eye-to-eye, and they can’t get the other to adopt their own language. And so they get mired in this endless circle and cycle of conflict. And we’re finding that, interestingly, even with Trump, who’s not in the hortatory Protestant tradition of telling other people what to do or how to live — he’s somehow from a different tradition — and yet even he can’t get out of this cycle and this trap. So all the clues, strangely, I found to the work I do now, I found all of the clues in that senior thesis.
Geoff Kabaservice: So you were pretty early studying Russia’s relation to Europe and the United States’ relation to Europe, and I assume you carried this on at Oxford as a British Marshall Scholar as well as at Harvard. However, I was interested that you told me once that you thought about studying English at Oxford rather than history. And I believe your Ph.D. at Harvard was in American Studies rather than history proper — am I correct about that?
Michael Kimmage: That’s true. Literature has always been really the muse. It’s what I like most. I just have reservations — it’s not about politics and it’s not about academia, really — but I have reservations about doing literature as a professional pursuit. I feel like my dream would be to live in Greenwich Village in 1922 and have a great apartment and talk about literature in the evenings with people around cafe tables or at a cheap Italian restaurant, which I think is more believable in the 1920s than it would be in the 2020s for Greenwich Village. And that’s why I love literature most in that context. I don’t do too much of it formally, but I’ve always been drawn to literature and to write about it, and I still do here and there.
But I’ve come to believe, Geoff, that literature is the best path to the study of international affairs. And I try to impress this on students who are at policy schools and who want to come to D.C. and work in policy, which for whatever reason is such a strong strain in our intellectual culture. If you have that ambition, you’re kind of a technocrat. So you’re supposed to get a law degree or study econometrics or nuclear weapons or something like that, which is all well and good. But I think literature is much better — much, much better — for diplomacy and international affairs.
Actually, George Kennan is a great example of this, because he was completely obsessed with literature and wanted to form a publishing house in a part of his career. But literature teaches the close observation of things. Literature teaches you what a narrative is, and international affairs is almost always based around narrative. And the currency of diplomats to a fault — it’s an occupational hazard — but the currency of diplomats is words. And if you’re going to be engaged in the work of words, literature is where you want to begin.
So in the strange directions that my own career has taken or my studies have taken me, literature is the leitmotif, and it’s the gift I think that gives everything else. I love trying to find ways of relating international affairs to literature. And to me it intrinsically works. I mean, the last thing that I published is a piece on Trump and Putin in Alaska, and I actually went back and read the Hans Christian Andersen story about the emperor having no clothes, which is a brief little wonderful story and a true work of literature, in the sense that it has depth and this internal resonance. And I think that there’s a lot there to explain what just happened between Trump and Putin and between Trump and the Europeans in the last couple of weeks.
I’m glad that I didn’t sign on formally to study literature, because I think I would’ve lost my love of it if it was my bread and butter. But it’s always there. It’s never not there. And I think it maybe even still is, in some strange way, the primary focus.
Geoff Kabaservice: And of course your first book, The Conservative Turn, was about Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, both of whom were important political figures but also quite important literary figures. And you then, if I’m remembering correctly, went on to write the book In History’s Grip, which is about Philip Roth’s Newark trilogy. So there were literary undercurrents even in your political writings.
Michael Kimmage: Absolutely, Lionel Trilling above all, because Lionel Trilling is among the most important anti-communist intellectuals of the 1940s and ‘50s, and lots of developments swirl around him: the growth of neoconservatism, liberal anti-communism, etc. You can tell the story of the Cold War through Trilling. But Trilling is amazing because he never wrote about politics — never wrote about an election, to my knowledge, never wrote about a piece of policy, would never have commentated on the news or on international affairs. There’s none of that in his essays. He writes about F. Scott Fitzgerald or he writes about Henry James or he writes about Jane Austen. And yet somehow, through the magic of his essays and the magic of his prose, he’s always saying these fascinating things about politics.
I just adore that about Trilling. He was, to his fingertips, a literary scholar and intellectual, and yet he’s somehow this political figure. I can’t think of too many similar examples in American history. But I feel like Trilling just paves the way. That’s how you do it. You can write these elliptical essays and really address yourself to literature, and at the same time do so much else. It’s fabulous. There’s nobody in the present moment I can think of who does something, anything remotely like that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m not comparing Vladimir Putin to Lionel Trilling at all, but I can’t help but notice that you went into the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning in 2014. This was in the wake of Russia having, early in 2014, first invaded the Crimean peninsula, which was then part of Ukraine, and then annexed the Crimean peninsula. And Vladimir Putin gave a speech, I think it was in December of that year, where he said something along the lines of, “Sometimes I think maybe it would be better for our bear” — the metaphor for the Russian Republic — “to sit quietly, not to chase around the forest after piglets, just to sit eating berries and honey instead. And maybe they” — by which he meant America and its allies — “will leave it in peace. But they will not, because they will always try to put the bear on a chain. And as soon as they succeeded in doing so, they will tear out his fangs and his claws, and then the bear will become a stuffed bear.”
So anyway, it was quite a vivid outburst, which is why I still remember it. But you were present at the moment, so to speak, when Vladimir Putin was not just retaking office after the experiment of having sort of passed on some level of the power of the presidency to Dmitry Medvedev, but also when he really began to remake Russia in the image of Soviet great power status and starting to resist the dominance of the West, the United States and its allies. And that seems to be an important moment in your career as well, and in informing your writing on the abandonment of the West.
Michael Kimmage: That’s all very true. I got to the State Department in December of 2014, the very end of December — so after the annexation of Crimea and the dramatic events of the spring and summer of 2014, the Russian incursion into Eastern Ukraine and the first round of diplomacy, which was in September of 2014. So I got to the State Department after all of that. I loved the experience. I worked with wonderful colleagues and it was a great time to be there. John Kerry was a remarkable Secretary of State to work for. We could debate how it all worked out policy-wise, but he was just very interested in the work that we did and very appreciative, and that was all terrific.
But I would say — I’ll just speak for myself here, I wouldn’t want to impugn my colleagues — I kind of got everything wrong in those two years. I didn’t know what I was doing bureaucratically; that’s what you would expect of an academic, and it’s not really like the State Department needs more bureaucratic operators. But I got the bigger questions wrong. I didn’t see that 2014 was really such a big transition. I think I signed on to the State Department analysis of the situation: that with sanctions and transatlantic cooperation, over time Russia will realize the error of its ways and is likely to moderate, come back into the European fold, and figure out some probably imperfect solution to whatever the problem was between Russia and Ukraine.
That was really wrong. That was a really deep misreading of Putin, of Russia — perhaps of Ukraine as well, because if you assume a moderation of the Russian position, maybe you assume that Ukraine would moderate and sue for peace more than it did back in 2014. And I feel like I misunderstood the question of Russia, I misunderstood the question of Europe, and I misunderstood finally the question of the United States. Because I presumed, as I think most of my colleagues did, that the U.S. had far more power in the situation than ended up being the case. I mean, that’s the Obama bet in 2014, 2015: that you so much are going to want to be a part of our Western world that you’ll meet our terms — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but the day after. Because isn’t it so wonderful to meet the terms of all that we have to offer? Our wealth, our power, our prestige. That was deeply, deeply wrong.
Geoff Kabaservice: In June of 2017, though, you wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post entitled “It’s time to take the idea of the West back from the populists.” And you already did peg Putin as a populist who was upholding the banner of nationalism. But you also saw that at the same time he was posing as a defender of Western civilization, of Europe’s Christian heritage, of the white race against immigrants and globalists and post-nationalist elites. So that dimension of your thinking was clearly going on at that point too.
Michael Kimmage: For sure. I don’t think I was particularly naive about who Putin was, and that he is deeply cynical, and there’s an aggressiveness there and that the Western civ stuff is really phony. I think all of that was pretty clear to me then. But I wasn’t able to put the pieces together. And I was also convinced… The point fascinates me now, all of it… When Angela Merkel said, I think it was in 2015 — because then there was a debate about sending lethal military assistance to Ukraine… Angela Merkel comes to Washington, and around that time in the spring of 2015 she says, “There’s no military solution to the problem in Ukraine.” And what she means by that is that Germany is not going to send troops, and Russia’s a nuclear power, and you can’t really reverse that calculus with military effort.
And I completely believed that. I thought, “Yes, that makes sense. There’s not a military solution to this crisis, and so we need to figure out whatever the diplomatic solution is.” And now I’m amazed by my own foolishness in that regard. You could say, “The war doesn’t matter to us, it’s too far away, Ukraine is not an ally, we don’t have a dog in that fight, et cetera, et cetera, and so let the chips fall where they may. It’s unfortunate, but it’s just not our concern.” You can say that. But you can’t say, with a war, that there’s no military means to resolving it.
So the larger point I want to make is that I made a lot of mistakes. I think my colleagues did as well across the State Department. I’m very eager now to understand what the nature of those mistakes was, what the assumptions were, why is it that those mistakes were made, how was information processed in a way to get a faulty set of assumptions, and how could one do it better.
I know how hard it is, and because I was there in the midst of it, I have a lot of empathy — maybe for myself, but hopefully more for my colleagues about the difficulty of the enterprise. To get another country right, to peer into the future: all of that is immensely difficult. But we didn’t do it as well as we could. That’s more the story of Collisions, which I’m sure we’ll get to. It is to try to get the story right, not in a mea culpa way, but just analytically to go back to 2014 and figure things out. But I feel very fortunate in the sense that the State Department, in those two years, gave me the problem. And I have that problem now for the rest of my working life: to reflect on and to think about and to write about, and hopefully to gain something from, to learn something from the inevitable mistakes of the work we were doing at that time.
Geoff Kabaservice: The Abandonment of the West had the bad fortune to come out in spring of 2020, just as the pandemic was shutting down America and most people were too frazzled to read serious books. But I was immensely impressed with it at the time, and I still am. I would agree with the characterization of the book that I’ve seen that it’s “the first broad-based intellectual history of the West.” And more than that, I would say that it’s a book that draws on your great and eclectic abilities as a historian of foreign policy, as an intellectual historian, and even as a cultural historian, as well as your own experience at the State Department. And the idea of this concept of the West also made me think that in my own research I used to routinely see references to “the West” in politicians’ speeches, just like I used to routinely see references to university courses on Western civilization and even American civilization. And nowadays, I rarely see either of those, at least so far as the mainstream is concerned.
Michael Kimmage:
Yes, and that’s where the book truly begins. And I guess it does reflect a bit my time at the State Department, where we would have been embarrassed to speak about “the West.” It would have felt old-fashioned and it would have felt chauvinistic. Although — and I quote some of this in the book itself — it’s not that Barack Obama, the president at the time, it’s not that he avoided the term. I think in one of the last speeches he gives, he goes to Athens and speaks about democracy and the West. You can find it here and there, but it wasn’t really the spirit of the Obama administration. It was not an anti-Western spirit, of course; it was more liberal international order, norms, etiquettes, institutions of a fairly universal nature, maybe transatlantic up to a point. But if transatlantic, better to say that. And at that moment, and for I think a distinct set of purposes, the West had really gone into the background.
And like you Geoff, I have my whole life been reading books about the rise of the West. And sometimes it’s textbooky stuff, and sometimes it’s the Spengler mode about decline and the loss of this category. I remember as a kid in the 1980s, a lot of the culture wars were already beginning. And it’s not that I was reading Allan Bloom as a kid, but it was in the air: the West, the post-West, is the West succeeding? Of course, as you grow up in the Cold War, you can’t avoid the West because that was one of the cardinal categories of the Cold War. There was an East, and of course there was a West.
So yes, I felt like it was in my blood somehow and very much in my set of interests — and yet it wasn’t there anymore. And so I wanted to figure out that part of the story. Why would it be that people would be bashful to use a term like the West? And that’s one line of inquiry in The Abandonment of the West.
But equally interesting, of course, is the way that people do use the term when it comes about. And there are two things to say about the West, one good and one bad. The bad thing is that it’s nearly impossible to pin down. Even in a single author, there’s an instability of meaning with something like “the West” because it’s so broad, because it could be about the eighteenth century or the fourth century or the twentieth century. And different cultures — there’s not a country out there that doesn’t have some notion of the West. Russia first and foremost has been debating the West vociferously for a good two hundred years. But there too you have all these subjectivities that enter into it. And so it’s kind of mind-boggling, to the extent that you almost feel that you shouldn’t write a book about this because it’s too much like nailing Jell-O to the wall. I still haven’t gotten away from that, and I still worry about all the meanings that I didn’t cover and the ones that I elided and conflated and all of that. It’s the misery of working on this topic.
But the other point is the glory of working on this topic. There’s nothing that more effectively unites the intellectual and the geopolitical — at least in the twentieth century and maybe also in the twenty-first — nothing that does that better than the West. And it’s there. The historian in me is just delighted that it’s there. You go to John F. Kennedy and some of his speeches, and you find it. Harry Truman, all over the place. Dwight Eisenhower more than I would’ve expected, speaks a language of Western civilization. Ronald Reagan used the term very frequently. And then of course you go into the pages of Foreign Affairs, and those foreign affairs debates and discussions in the twentieth century, and the West is ceaselessly a topic. You go to Huntington and The Clash of Civilizations and there’s chapter after chapter about the West. And you go to Fukuyama’s End of History — these two blockbuster books in the 1990s — and it’s a meditation about the West.
So the sources are irresistible. But to me, the West is a unifying principle that takes ideas and links them to geopolitics, and geopolitics to ideas. That’s perfect because that’s what most interests me, and so the West allows me to write about that historically. But then — as I’m sure we’ll get into in a moment — it’s like it never dies. The West is a zombie. It keeps coming back. It’s not killable. It’s a mushroom — it rains and it sprouts up again. And it’s a bit different from how it was ten years ago. But we have a lot to say, I’m sure (or should have a lot to say) about the West at the present moment, because it’s pretty ubiquitous in the Trump administration too and in its language and its references and in its policy imagination.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would say it’s one of the good kind of zombies, actually. At the risk of squeezing your rather intricate thesis into a juice press, the organization of your book is that while there have been many different conceptions of what the West means, the particular definition of the West in American foreign policy that you follow in your book is what you call “the West embedded in a Euro-American narrative of self-government and liberty, a history of liberty, a project of building liberty, a future-oriented heritage of liberty.” And you go on to say that the story of the West in American foreign policy is a drama in four historical acts beginning in 1893, which was the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair. So I guess first: Why that particular definition of the West? And then why begin the story in 1893?
Michael Kimmage: Well, Geoff, you know as a fellow historian of the United States, when in doubt begin with the Chicago World’s Fair. You can’t really go wrong.
Geoff Kabaservice: That’s right. Always a great idea.
Michael Kimmage: Every strand of American history seems somehow to run through that remarkable moment and that remarkable event. I think it’s a perfect event for the book because it’s the 401st anniversary celebration of the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. That was the pretext for the fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a place where a certain kind of Beaux-Arts neoclassical architecture was born in the United States (or at least popularized) and then it becomes the template for the redesign of Washington, D.C. in the early first decade of the twentieth century. And so in a way, neoclassical Washington, about which I have a lot to say in that book, emerges from the Chicago World’s Fair.
But it’s also this moment of optimistic self-definition for the United States as a Western power. And it’s the moment when the U.S. is clearly emerging on the international stage as a superpower. It is not the case in 1895 or 1900 that you have American presidents speaking so somberly about the West and in great detail — they weren’t. It was a discursive mode that was just coming into being in the 1880s and the 1890s. But the pieces of the puzzle are starting to assemble themselves.
That is, I think, why it really matters to go back to 1893. I think if you begin the story in 1945, it’s tempting, but then you would just miss so much. And what I try to do in the book — I hope this is the right answer to your question — is to trace two separate storylines. There’s an intellectual storyline when it comes to the West, and there’s a diplomatic or geopolitical storyline. And they intersect most directly from 1930 to 1960, roughly.
You have universities that adopt self-consciously Western civilization curricula. Columbia does it first, and then it goes to University of Chicago, and then it spreads all over the United States. You have universities that go on a binge of neoclassical and neo-gothic architectural construction in the 1920s and 1930s — Yale, your alma mater, and Duke on the neo-gothic side, and then Columbia and many others more on the neoclassical side. And so there’s this huge commitment to the West in American intellectual culture — universities, but also beyond universities and very robust. The culminating point of that for me is publication in 1963 of William McNeill’s book The Rise of the West. He was a University of Chicago professor who wrote this really celebratory book — a good celebratory book; it’s not a piece of propaganda at all, it’s a wonderful book — that celebrates the United States as part of the cycles of Western history, in a way of Western mishaps and crimes at times, but really of achievements and accomplishments that were more what McNeill had in mind.
And then the other storyline, the diplomatic-geopolitical one, is of the U.S. adopting a pro-West position at the latest by 1945, at the end of the Second World War, and then creation of the NATO alliance and things that we think of as typically the Western orientation in American foreign policy. And so it intrigues me that you have these two storylines that intersect, and that’s the middle part of the book. And then they begin to diverge in the 1960s and 1970s.
And so I try to tell those two big stories, the story of intersection and the story of divergence, and also to begin speculating about what those two things mean. What does it mean to have an intellectual culture that intersects with a big foreign policy push? And what does it mean to have a foreign policy push that’s still there in the ’60s and ’70s but changing? And then the intellectual line just goes in this very different direction.
Geoff Kabaservice: It seems to me that 1893 is a great time to begin this story, not only because of the Chicago World’s Fair but also because “the West” in the American imagination can mean the Western frontier. And in 1892, historian Frederick Jackson Turner had given a famous address where he declared the frontier in effect to be closed. So this is a moment when America is thinking about the other sense of the West and turning away from its own westward expansion, cultivating its European connections — including its inheritance, I suppose you would say, of the culture of Greece and Rome.
Michael Kimmage: To just jump in, I’d point out that the University of California at Berkeley names itself after the poem that is written by — I think his name is pronounced “Barkley,” Bishop Berkeley — his poem “Westward the Course of Empire.” And there are of course many good different readings of that poem, but it’s exactly what you’re describing: a civilizational sun that rises first in Greece, and then travels over to the UK, and then at a certain point jumps to the New World, and then in the American vein goes from the East Coast to the West Coast. The founders of the University of California at Berkeley were enthralled by that vision of continual westwardness, and California was the crest of the wave.
Geoff Kabaservice: It’s a great connection. I also was interested to note that it’s around the early 1890s that the United States first becomes a colonial power, with its military and imperial activities in the Philippines and other areas. And also you had a fascinating point in your book, which is that until 1892, European countries did not even have ambassadors in Washington because there wasn’t enough to discuss of a diplomatic nature.
Michael Kimmage: Right, and let me take those two points in turn. There’s a very different book that could be written about the West, that has been written about the West, which is the story of the West as a history of racism and empire. And I hope I contend enough with that in the book — as I should. I have to leave that to my readers. I mean, I do get into Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and James Baldwin, Edward Said, and a host of other thinkers who are very, very critical about the integration of the United States into a Western narrative.
It’s not the book that I first and foremost was writing with The Abandonment of the West, in part because I felt like, especially in academia, that’s the book that everybody has already read, so it doesn’t necessarily need to be rewritten. And I wanted to take things in a somewhat different direction. But all of this does of course of combine. And there too, you just get the challenge of a concept that’s so multifaceted, so enormous and present in so many important intellectual texts from William McNeill to Edward Said’s Orientalism to Fukuyama’s The End of History.
So going back to your question about why define the West as self-government in liberty… I think it’s a plausible way of defining how many makers of American foreign policy have thought about the West. But it also in effect allows me to tell the story that I wish to tell in the book. It’s a choice, in other words.
But yes, the U.S. in the 1890s was very far from a transatlantic Western power. 1898, the war that puts the United States in the position to have colonies in the Philippines and elsewhere, is a war against Spain. Twice the United States is going to go to war against Germany in the first half of the twentieth century. And it’s really not until the late 1940s that you can think of anything resembling a transatlantic alliance. Before that, it’s an international power system that Europe dictates and governs. The U.S. is pushing into it, but in a very contentious and contested way, where often it’s the European powers that are the enemy. So you can’t get to the story of a geopolitical West until you get to the early Cold War. But the bits and pieces, the fragments that are getting synthesized and put into place before 1945, all of those take us back to the 1890s if not earlier.
It’s just so intriguing to me, the “when” of Columbia’s decision to create the Western Civ curriculum. In part, it’s about the First World War, that the administrators felt that students needed to understand what the war was about and so they put Western civilization into the story in that context. But it was also the decline of Greek and Latin. In the nineteenth century, you would have had to have mastered those languages to study at a university. That came to feel cumbersome, and so alumni were upset that this was being phased out at Columbia. They wanted something put in its place, and so Western Civ and the Great Books curriculum was the substitution. And to me, an amusing and almost ironic story is that it’s the loss of the West in the eyes of the alumni that compelled the creation of the West as a curricular project.
Geoff Kabaservice: Again, just to cite a funny statistic… From 1890 to 1915, you note, more American high school students studied Latin than all other foreign languages combined.
Michael Kimmage: Amazing, yes, in a country that’s in a way so far from Europe and so far from classical antiquity. It’s just astonishing.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’ll also add that among the other critics of the Western concept that you mentioned — or I guess would say ambivalent critics — was W. E. B. Du Bois, who on the one hand had studied at Harvard and I believe also in Berlin, and welcomed the classics as a great equalizer, with his famous quote about “Shakespeare welcomes me.” But then also, by the end of his life, he was so critical of the United States and its hypocrisy toward liberty and the ideal of liberty that he expatriated himself to Ghana.
Michael Kimmage: Yes, Du Bois — his life runs through this entire story. And I think, Geoff, you’ve outlined the key point. The Souls of Black Folk is a text that discovers the African American vernacular and celebrates it. And simultaneously — and I don’t think Du Bois, when he published this book, saw this as a contradiction — it’s a book that very much upholds everybody’s access to the great works of Western culture. But it’s not ambiguous, it really is Western culture: “I sit down with Aristotle, I sit down with Shakespeare and these great figures…” And that for Du Bois is emancipatory. And that’s of course one way of thinking about this, and takes you halfway toward the notion of the West as liberty and self-government.
But then precisely because there is this geopolitical component about which I think Du Bois was always very skeptical, not a great fan of U.S. involvement in the First World War, very skeptical — more than skeptical — about the legacy of slavery and segregation, et cetera. But by the 1930s and ’40s, Du Bois is just not convinced that the U.S. is what it says it is on the global stage. And so a country that defines itself as committed to liberty and self-government, but at the same time has segregation practiced in the capital city, has something of a problem according to Du Bois. And so Du Bois ends up almost on the other side of the Cold War. There’s the photograph of him with Chairman Mao, and he runs into problems with the State Department because of his communist affiliation. And I think that he just is completely horrified by what the United States is geopolitically in the 1940s.
And that problem is not just an American problem for Du Bois, it’s a problem about the West and what the United States has done. It has mapped itself onto the Western legacy of empire and racial discrimination and all of those things. But it’s, I think, remarkable in Du Bois’ career that the tapestry has so many different threads. And I don’t think Du Bois up until his death, I don’t think that he would’ve changed his views on Shakespeare and Aristotle and the canonical West or the curricular West. I don’t think he ever rejected that because of the geopolitics. But it didn’t, as in the case of many white Americans, that love affair with Shakespeare and Aristotle didn’t incline him towards support of the United States and the Cold War or united support of U.S. power.
That’s one of the great richnesses of this topic, that subjective set of attitudes and therefore intellectually the battle over what the West is, which is the most exciting part of the whole story of the West. It’s an argument. It’s not a thing, it’s not a dogma, it’s not an etiquette. It’s an argument.
Geoff Kabaservice: Let me return to a point I raised earlier about the forgetting of the lessons of World War II. I think the lessons of World War II were actually brought home to the American people, not least to the GIs of the Greatest Generation, by the fact that they were participating in this lethal worldwide conflagration. To descend to a bit of low culture, there’s a scene in the series Band of Brothers where it’s after Nazi Germany’s defeat and this bunch of American GIs in their Jeep are going by a group of defeated Nazi prisoners who are in a horse-drawn conveyance, a broken-down old wooden cart. And this so incenses one of the GIs that he gets up and starts yelling at them: “Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses halfway across the world, interrupting our lives — for what? You ignorant, servile scum! What the eff are we doing here?”
The answer, to the average GI for a long time, to what we were doing there in this war was that we had failed to pay attention to the rest of the world during the isolationism of the ’20s and ’30s, when the rise of these dictatorships could have been headed off. We were now here paying the price for our own indifference and isolation from the world. What other lessons do you think the policymakers and the leaders of the United States took from the World War II experience?
Michael Kimmage: Yes indeed, the way that the world will come to you if you don’t come to the world in some sense… That strong feeling of failure I think that somebody like George Kennan had: We ended up in this terrible position in the Second World War because we somehow failed and needed to do it better.
I asked a question in the book… I just recall this at the moment and don’t really have a decent way of empirically answering it; I can answer it with a hunch. But I asked the question about the difference in response to World War I, World War II for Americans, if Western civilization, all these curricula, all these courses, this large-scale institutional commitment to studying the West, if that doesn’t make a pretty big difference between the American attitude toward the first World War and the American attitude toward the Second World War. This of course would be on a pretty elite level.
But I think the very fact that there is a West in the mind of Americans in the ’20s, ’30s, and early ’40s allows for the construction of a Western European alliance, which includes Germany. And you can have mixed feelings about this, because in some ways the Germans got off the hook because they were a Western country. But it is the culture, the country of Bach, Beethoven, fill in the blank with Germany. You can’t write the story of the West without writing about Germany. You can’t write Germany out of the story of the West. And I think that there was a flexibility to that concept that I’m not sure Americans had in 1919, although the U.S. wasn’t quite as zealous about forcing reparations on Germany in 1919 as the Brits were and the French were. But still, I wonder if there wasn’t something there that had been acquired in seminar rooms and in books and in the world of learning that doesn’t compute in 1945 as the future foundation of NATO. So unlearning the mistakes of the past, to be sure. Maybe thinking differently about Europe might be another aspect of it.
But I think you could also factor in something else — again quite intangible, it would be impossible to measure this empirically — but the self-confidence of the United States in 1945. We could look at all the things that are bad about this merger of the intellectual West with the geopolitical West, and Du Bois gets us there. It can be arrogant. You can miss your own prejudices. You can have an inflated view of yourself. But the other side of the coin is that there’s a real self-confidence in 1945 that we’re a part of something good: This Western trajectory is desirable, and American leadership within the West is therefore a very good thing. That’s not going to survive the Vietnam War intact, but it’s certainly there in 1945, that kind of self-confidence.
And here I think the pivotal figure, as much as we would want to reflect on George Kennan and Dean Acheson and George Marshall and Harry Truman, but the key figure for me is Dwight Eisenhower because he combines these different worlds. He’s president, of all places, of Columbia University after the second World War. He’s the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. And then he becomes a two-term American president — in part because, as you would know better than I, Geoff, because he doesn’t like the isolationism of the Republican Party. He wants to see the Republicans put forward an internationalist, pro-Western candidate in 1952.
And so I think Eisenhower unites a lot of this, again, into a self-confident view of U.S. leadership of the West. I don’t think that you feel that at all in 1919 or 1920 or 1921. It’s something very different. Of course, the U.S. was not as powerful then, and Woodrow Wilson I don’t think was as good at articulating some of these things as Truman/Eisenhower were. But you also don’t have a West to act on as much in 1920 as you do in 1945. And so I think a careful reading of various Eisenhower biographies really gets you very deeply into this subject. He’s, to me, the connecting link. You could almost do the whole project that I tried to do as a project about Eisenhower.
Geoff Kabaservice: As a longtime Eisenhower stan, I would love to see that project. But your book, Michael, like many other accounts of the twentieth century, sees the bend in the arc and the beginning of the downfall, so to speak, coming in the 1960s. And it’s in that decade that the harshest critique of the West from the likes of W. E. B. Du Bois becomes the conventional wisdom. And this is when you get essentially the view that the Western tradition is wrong because of its racism, its imperialism, its colonialism, its Orientalism — to use the title of the very influential book by Edward Said that came out in 1978. There’s a sense that because of America’s crimes in Vietnam, it can no longer be associated with this rhetoric about Western civilization.
Something very interesting about your book is that you concede the justice of this critique: many of these critics of the West are right, or they’re correct in their indictment of its history of racism and sexism and the violence of colonialism and imperialism. But you also believe that proponents of the West were correct in seeing the need to defeat fascism and communism, and also to promote the spread of liberty. And I think you said at various points that while the West is a freighted concept, it’s still better than the alternatives.
Michael Kimmage: Right. There’s a normative component to the book in the conclusion where I try to think forward from exactly this problem. And certainly I’m trying to square a circle in all of this. And it’s a hard thing to do, I’ll acknowledge, and I don’t know if I fully persuade myself on all points here. But let me try to answer in two parts, the first about the 1960s and then maybe what I would want us to take from the problem that the 1960s traces for us.
I think when James Baldwin writes these great essays, it’s really the ’50s more than the ’60s when these essays come out. But the one I love the most, “Stranger in the Village,” is an essay of James Baldwin that he writes about spending three or four months in a Swiss village and the way that he was treated, and a sense of alienation that he has. Western civilization is this thing there that belongs to other people, and it’s used in a way to isolate and exclude him from a certain kind of contemporary life.
When you read that essay, it’s impossible, I think, not to be deeply, deeply persuaded by it or affected by it. And I don’t find the critique that W. E. B. Du Bois puts forward of empire and the political economy of the West and structures of prejudice and exploitation — I don’t find it false or unconvincing. And I think it was essential also that all of this be said, because too often in the first half of the twentieth century it was not said. And there was a kind of cardboard West that was created from the very idealized notions of classical antiquity and the Enlightenment that could be spun. And there’s something just thin or perhaps even hollow about it.
What I’m not willing to do is to say that the James Baldwin/Du Bois/Said take, which I think has a lot to offer, is the end of the story or anywhere close to the totality of the story. It’s just a bigger story than that. And this is a truism — it’s banal to put it this way, but there’s a good and a bad, and there’s a positive and a negative, and there’s a good West and a bad West. There are wonderful things that the West has brought the modern world, and there are terrible things, and it’s our job to get into those complexities. And it’s not that Du Bois and Baldwin and Said don’t, but I don’t end up where they do with their almost categorical skepticism.
And the 1960s is a decade in which all of this was just fought over. Edward Said’s book comes out in 1978, as you know, and it’s not like Said thinks the argument has been won by 1978. It’s still all highly contested. But going back to the very first part of our conversation, there is a certain spirit in the ‘60s that’s not about debate and reform and finding the best path forward, but there’s a certain disruptiveness that was there: “And so let’s take out the teaching of X, Y or Z Western figure and we’ll improve our situation by not studying person X.”
And that I think is a very unfortunate legacy of the ’60s. It’s not about removing the West from curricula. It’s about how you do it and what you combine it with that which I think is the right conclusion to draw. And if we just take the line from then to now… What was it on Twitter that I’ve seen bandied about in the last couple of weeks? That it’s more common now to assign Judith Butler than to assign Aristotle at American universities. That’s just so disheartening. So in a sense, the removal that could follow from certain extreme critiques of the West is something that I’m trying to push against in the book.
But in terms of the normative component, just to tack on another answer to your question, the reason that we want the West as part of the picture is that it’s there in the past. It’s a part of a tradition. It doesn’t mean that we have to be beholden to the tradition and do it as it was done forty or fifty years ago and just do rewrites of William MacNeil’s The Rise of the West — although it’s a really phenomenal book. But it’s imprudent, it’s unwise to cut yourself off from all of these traditions. They’re there. They’re very much a part of the historical record. And there are certain remarkable achievements. I would say that the creation of the NATO alliance is a great achievement. Would it have been really doable in the late 1940s if there was no sense or no notion of the West? I don’t think so. And so we want to be aware of those connections.
And with people in D.C, it’s not an argument you need to win. Most D.C policy types, at least until 2016 or until 2024, were very pro-NATO, very pro-transatlantic relationship. But of course in academia, there’s very much an argument to be had. So I had these multiple audiences in mind, and maybe the book comes out as a bit cacophonous in that respect. But we want that tradition to be there and we want to make the most of it. And we want to move forward with a deep awareness and I think also a deep respect for that tradition of engagement with Western culture and engagement with ideas. There’s so much to be taken from that. There’s so much inspiration to be gained.
And here’s a word I use in the conclusion of the book… If we get rid of all of this, the past will become illegible to us. We will not be able to read figures from Thomas Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman and know what they were about. And that too would be, I think, very unfortunate. And to know what they were about, you do have to know something of the West broadly construed.
Geoff Kabaservice: We’re also in a moment where not only has the left rejected the West and its legacy at the universities, but the right in a curious way is reclaiming while also simultaneously rejecting the legacy of the West.
Michael Kimmage: Right.
Geoff Kabaservice: And you trace in your book these kind of despairing conservative figures, from Oswald Spengler with his Decline of the West in 1918, through Whitaker Chambers with his book Witness in 1952, through James Burnham in 1964 with The Suicide of the West, all of whom see the West falling prey to liberals destroying it from within by not upholding the proper elements of the Western tradition. And this comes filtering down to the Trumpists and alt-righters of today through figures like Sam Francis, who was very much taking his cues from Jim Burnham.
And these people have a curious attitude towards Europe, for example. They see Europe as the ancestral home of the United States and the United States as being a continuation of that civilization — but they despise Europe. And so I think someone like JD Vance basically believes that Europe has betrayed its own heritage and civilization, and therefore the United States is left almost by default as the defender of the West.
And it seems to me that you are taking on them at the same time that you’re also cautioning the people on the left to not throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to our Western legacy, particularly our legacies of idealism and liberalism.
Michael Kimmage: Yes, that’s exactly it. That’s exactly the point of the book. And I’m not, I think, picking too many fights in the tone of the book. It’s sort of mild-mannered, I would say, in the way that I usually prefer to write. But certainly I’m rejecting the view on the left that we’re better off without careful study of the West and we just need to be in some entirely different paradigm, and simultaneously rejecting this notion on the right that we would all be better off if we would create the illiberal West and do so in a way that’s going to jeopardize the transatlantic relationship. And it’s just astonishing to me… I hadn’t really thought about it until we’ve had this conversation, Geoff, but it’s astonishing to me in a way how current that particular set of polarities happens to be.
And I would add also Chris Rufo as a contemporary voice on this because he speaks extensively about Western civilization. To the degree that he has a positive vision of American universities, it’s that they should be teaching Western civilization, and there are many people in his orbit who use exactly that term. And that’s having real-life policy consequences and decisions of the Trump administration and their approach. Although, interestingly, anti-Semitism has been the more public flashpoint, I think Western civilization is a crucial something to write about. So a point just to leave from the ones that you made in your question… It’s not that this is all that new. You know, Spengler I find kind of unreadable…
Geoff Kabaservice: Many have.
Michael Kimmage: I wish I knew what exactly Henry Kissinger derived from that. I mention in the book when Henry Kissinger tried to get Nixon to read Spengler’s Decline of the West. History doesn’t record whether Tricky Dick read the book or not. Something tells me that he may not have read the book.
But jumping a little bit past Spengler… I think Burnham and Chambers are really, really important. It’s “the enemy within.” For them, of course, it was the communist/anti-communist matrix. And Chambers felt that liberalism was the gate through which communists would enter the American citadel, and Alger Hiss is the preeminent symbol of that for Chambers: on the outside a kind of impeccable American liberal, on the inside a communist revolutionary. And so Chambers really drives that point home.
But for Burnham, I think it’s… His book, The Suicide of the West, a 1964 book, is something that we should all read and reread. First of all, it’s a really well-written book. It’s not trivial or slight; it’s very thought-provoking. And for Burnham, it’s liberal internationalism that Burnham can’t stand. Liberal internationalism deprives us of our own idea of nation. Liberal internationalism is bland, it’s cosmopolitan, it’s elitist, it’s a kind of enervating force within the American body politic.
And it’s quite clear to me that Pat Buchanan took up that book and those ideas, consciously or unconsciously — probably consciously — and without Burnham’s subtlety and without Burnham’s nuance put them into all these polemical texts of the 1990s. I think The Death of the West is one of the titles of the book that Pat Buchanan put out. And what Pat Buchanan adds to this is the question of immigration, which is not on the mind of James Burnham. After all, 1964 is one year before Lyndon Johnson alters American immigration policy, and so maybe Burnham at that point was sort of happy with the immigration status quo. But Buchanan wasn’t in the 1990s, and so he merges these things: a kind of unpleasant liberal elite on the one hand, this cosmopolitan liberal internationalism on the other, and migration that’s also eating away at the soul of America, the soul of the United States.
And you know, this stuff is just percolating everywhere at the moment: certainly in the Vice President’s office, at times in the Oval Office, although there I think things are a little bit more chaotic and confusing. And definitely in the Trump administration’s battles with universities, the old issues are being made new.
And it’s anybody’s guess whether the transatlantic relationship will be where it was a year ago by 2028. I think you can make a case for that. But you’re entirely right that the Vance speech at the Munich Security Conference in February of 2025 certainly changed the way that Europeans look at the United States, and there’s a strong sense of alienation in Europe that follows directly from that speech. I don’t know if it changed a lot the way Americans look at Europe. But it’s a very Buchananite or Burnhamite speech that Vance gave. I wonder if he himself hasn’t gone back to some of those texts in the fashioning of his phrases and statements.
Geoff Kabaservice: I wouldn’t be surprised. I wish we had more time to talk about your book published last year, Collisions: The Origins of the War in Ukraine and the New Global Instability. But I did want to ask you about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected the way you look back on The Abandonment of the West.
And let me quote from two columns by George Will in the Washington Post that mentioned you and your work. The first was from January 26th, 2022, which was less than a month before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. And he wrote that Russia’s animus against Ukraine was “animated by the latter’s desire to associate with the European Union because they saw in it the transatlantic ideal of universal human rights protected by sovereign nations’ commitment to the rule of law.” And he said Ukraine was “looking toward the West, away from Putin’s ethno-religious blood-and-soil notion of nationhood toward the community of nations of shared enlightenment values. For the West to look away from Ukraine would be an apostasy foreshadowing a dark future.”
And the other George Will column was from just about a month ago, and of course three and a half years into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Will begins, “The West urgently needs a definition of the West. Without this, it cannot understand itself or current and future challenges” — and, he continues, it can’t save Ukraine.
So can you tell us how the invasion of Ukraine has changed your thinking, if it has, or what other points you feel it may underscore more strongly that you were making in The Abandonment of the West?
Michael Kimmage: My thoughts about this are a bit contradictory. I’m not crazy about the way that some Ukrainians use the notion of the West in this conflict. I think it’s not for me to tell Ukrainians how to think about their foreign policy, but for U.S foreign policy, the last thing I would want are stark civilizational binaries. In general, the more you yawk about civilization when you’re questioning foreign policy, the more inclined you are to descend into barbarism yourself. I think the National Socialists provide a great example of that, because they spoke endlessly about “kultur” and those kinds of things and did nothing to embody it.
So I don’t like the reading of this conflict as Asia versus the West, with Russia figured as Asia. And I don’t like this conflict as a kind of grand civilizational mission for the West. I think that the West should have a civilizational mission, and I think that that should be felt in the books that we read and the art galleries that we go to and the vigorous debates and conversations we have about politics and culture and social order. If you can find a satisfactory West there, that’s sufficient and well and good. I don’t think you’re going to find civilization on any battlefield.
So I think we have to be cautious there about, first of all, stigmatizing Russians as barbarians, which Mark Rutte and others have kind of indulged in the last couple of weeks, and they should do better. At the same time, you don’t want to flatter yourself as being on the side of the hobbits and categorically against the orcs and the enemies. That’s just to me not productive and runs a lot of risks internally.
On the other hand, I don’t think my book could have envisioned in some ways how effective — I’m sure not all of your listeners will agree with this point — but how effective the Biden administration was in response to the Russian invasion of 2022. I think Biden was able to get together a strong transatlantic coalition through diplomacy and through his person. And I think that there is a West at work in that. Cooperating toward the aim of a peaceful, sovereign, independent Ukraine is a wonderful mission for the West, and I think that that was successful for the years of Biden’s presidency.
But I would also want to add as a part of the narrative that the reason Zelensky succeeds in part in 2022… There are many reasons, but the reason he succeeds in part is that there is an election in 2019 in Ukraine. It’s not perfect. Ukraine doesn’t have great checks and balances. Ukraine is not a model democracy by any means, not today and not five years ago and not ten years ago. But it has elections, it has political pluralism, and there is a legitimacy that Zelensky has that, for example, Putin does not have. Putin has become a dictator.
So if we are to tell the story of liberty and self-government, it does matter that Ukraine has at least three-quarters of what you would want to have in that regard. And it does matter that there is a kind of sympathy that runs from Berlin to Kiev, Washington to Kiev, London to Kiev, et cetera, that is about liberty and self-government. And you can overdo the point, and there is self-interest and there are security concerns, and sometimes people look the other way and don’t speak enough about reform in Ukraine or maybe hold Zelensky to account — although Zelensky tried to do something about corruption a few weeks ago and he got kind of smacked down effectively by Europe, and maybe by Europe and the United States. But that bond of affinity takes us back.
And this is how I conclude the book, Collisions, with the speech in Congress of Lajos Kossuth — I don’t know exactly how to pronounce his name, but the Hungarian freedom fighter from 1848; and the speech that Václav Havel gives in the Houses of Congress in the early 1990s; and a speech that Zelensky himself gives in December of 2022 after the first eight, nine months of the war, where, again, liberty and self-government is invoked, and I think sincerely invoked, as an important part of this confrontation.
I don’t think I could envision any of that when I published the book in 2020, The Abandonment of the West. But there it is. And so there too is a kind of living version of this story. I don’t share a lot of the Trump administration’s positions on the war. I have concerns about the transatlantic alliance. I certainly have concerns about Ukraine as it withstands the terrible onslaughts, including in the last twenty-four hours, on its capital city and elsewhere in the country. But I’m not all that pessimistic about this part of things. We’ve seen a lot of transatlantic cooperation in the last couple of years. We’ve seen Ukraine hold onto its liberty and its self-government. We’ve also seen many people in the United States and in Europe be reminded that these are not just abstract concerns, but liberty and self-government are things that are very real, and if not in effect fought for internationally will probably lapse into some kind of remission.
So if anything, I would want to close our conversation on that note, as opposed to the very commonly held and worthwhile worries that many of us have about the democratic integrity and the foreign policy bona fides of the Trump administration. There is a story to be told, an optimistic story to be told about the West that I really couldn’t have imagined in 2020. And there it is right before our eyes at the present moment.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, let me make one more point then, Michael, which is that a few months ago you wrote an op-ed in the New York Times where you conceded that Russia has had battlefield successes, and it hasn’t been isolated in terms of embargoes against trade with it and being cut off from the world. But you point out that Russia has always needed the West and benefited from contact with it. And now because of an unnecessary war, Mr. Putin has lost it for good, and that this in fact is a grievous setback that could take generations to undo. You say it is “Mr. Putin’s choice and Russia’s tragedy.”
And I think that underscores what you’re saying, which is that the West is a positive good with an immensely productive legacy as well as a contribution to a brighter future, and we cut ourselves off from that legacy at our peril.
Michael Kimmage: Exactly. And let me try to go full circle in this conversation and take it back to the figure of Ivan Turgenev, who is one of the famous Westernizers in nineteenth-century Russia. There’s a debate in nineteenth-century Russia, a Slavophile/Westernizer debate. And were I Russian, or maybe as a foreigner sort of looking in, I have the predictable inclination to say that Russia thrives not when it is Western or is asked to become Western, but thrives when it has a living set of contacts with the West. Turgenev used to go very often to Paris, in part because of an unsuccessful love affair. But he went to Paris, and he would have dinner with Flaubert and Henry James and many others. And can you argue that that made his literature poorer? To the contrary, he drew in all these extraordinary things and brought them into the Russian literary tradition. Tolstoy wouldn’t be Tolstoy if he had not read Rousseau and Dickens and many others. Even Dostoevsky, who’s not a Westernizer in Russia, is deeply influenced by Goethe and Schiller and really all the great modern European writers. That’s of course just literature. There’s also technology and the world of education and commerce and all of that. It would be much better for Russia to have a living relationship to the West.
And the tragedy is really astonishing to behold. I think that this is the most senseless war I can imagine for Russia. It’s a criminal war vis-a-vis Ukraine, but it’s a senseless war for Russia. What are they going to gain even if they “win”? They’ll occupy a strip of land in Ukraine which will be under constant stress, has been reduced to rubble. You know, it’s not going to bring anything to Russia. You could put a Russian flag over it and call it a victory, but that for the sake of — what is it now, a million deaths and casualties and more counting? And so for nothing, they’ve cut themselves off from the West when they really didn’t have to.
And Putin’s rhetoric in this regard … I mean, Putin begins as actually a pro-Western modernizer. He’s sort of known as “the German in Russia” in 2000 because he had lived in Germany and speaks German, sort of admires German order and all of that. But you get that Putin who’s really gone and what you have now is a reactionary, profoundly illiberal and profoundly anti-Western Putin, who associates the West with what he doesn’t like about its gender and sexuality policies and all of that. It’s so incredibly reductive and false. And it’s reductive and false for Russia itself, which is just in so many ways a contributor to Western culture and also a beneficiary.
So this is the worst of Berlin Walls that I can imagine, or this is the worst of Iron Curtains — because ironically, the Soviet Union, for all of its exclusions and all the ways in which it was closed, was constantly taking in Western influences, maybe because it extended all the way to cities like Berlin and Budapest and Prague.
And really to come full circle in terms of the answer to the question you gave about influences… You know, this is a burlesque version of Western culture and Western civ. But when we went to Czechoslovakia with my family back in 1984, the relatives that we visited in provincial Slovakia had these bunny ears on their TV and they were getting Dallas and Dynasty and Falcon Crest — these kind of schlocky shows from the 1980s and sort of taking that in. And for them, that was a sort of Western ideal. So that was even sort of accessible in the 1980s. And I feel like Russia at the moment is vastly more cut off.
So yes, one fails to criticize the West at one’s grave peril, but one fails to see its marvels at an equally grave peril. And unfortunately, Putin is absolutely in that latter category now and he’s dragging Russia along with him.
Geoff Kabaservice: Well, Michael Kimmage, thank you so much for talking with me today. I think we’ve given listeners ample testimony as to why it is that we tend to close down restaurants around us when we do meet up to talk. And thank you so much for your wise and balanced scholarship that has done so much to inform my thinking and that of so many others.
Michael Kimmage: And Geoff, thank you so much for your interest and for your wonderful questions. It’s a joy to feel the conversation continuing.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to the Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington D.C.