LAST WEEK The Washington Post reported record negative poll ratings for President Bush and growing doubts about his leadership. As the Administration’s authority is daily sapped, the party is engaged in anguished introspection to identify the reasons for its unpopularity.

That’s the Democratic Party, of course. Democrats have still not come to terms with their defeat by an intellectually mediocre and maladroit President, or benefited from his insouciance on the economy and Iraq. Last month Peter Beinart, the editor of America’s premier liberal weekly, The New Republic, gave a cogent explanation: it’s national security, stupid.

Beinart recalled the fractious debates over foreign policy in the late 1940s, when American liberals were divided over whether to define themselves principally as anti-conservative or to put anti-communism at the heart of their programme. He identified a similar cleavage within liberalism now in confronting Islamist terrorism, and concluded: “The fundamental question is again whether the proper prism through which to view this new world is anti-totalitarianism based on the idea that we face another totalitarian foe.”

Beinart is right. American voters seem intuitively to understand that the anti-totalitarian struggle is neither temporary, nor a distraction from bread-and-butter politics, nor the result of Western provocations against the Third World. It is the cause of our generation and it ought also to be an instinctive cause of the British Left. A politics that fails to place national security first cannot serve progressive ends. There is an authentic tradition on the British Left that understands that, and that needs to reassert itself.

The precedents date from the 1930s and 1940s. Having taken a long time to shed its illusions about the power of moral suasion against aggressive dictatorship, the Labour Party served patriotically in the wartime coalition. It then played an essential role in defending democratic parties and trade unions against Soviet expansionism.

The Attlee Government’s support for the Truman Doctrine and its influence in the formation of Nato remain the most important acts in the Labour Party’s history. Clement Attlee and his Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin understood that the totalitarian threat would exist regardless of what policies a left-wing government adopted. That was the nature of Soviet Communism, and Labour rightly allied itself with the US. The party also expelled a parliamentary caucus that explicitly defended Soviet expansionism.

Only in the 1970s was this dominant strain of British social democracy seriously diluted, to be largely abandoned in Labour’s long years of opposition in the 1980s. The older progressive tradition of Attlee and Bevin, Kurt Schumacher in Germany and Harry Truman in the US had maintained that liberalism and social democracy were communism’s worst enemies. Gradually that gave way to the notion that the Cold War was an artificial division born of mistrust rather than a reflection of irrevocable political differences. The height of Labour’s irresponsibility was the election of the veteran nuclear disarmer Michael Foot as leader in 1980.

Foot is now regarded with the universal affection that is the privilege of advanced age, so it is worth recalling his record of political incompetence. Circumlocutory in argument, incoherent in exposition, almost entirely unfamiliar with economics, and — throughout all his tribulations — convinced of his place in history, he has never realised that the critical pasting he received as Labour leader was more restrained than he had any right to expect. To describe Labour’s 1983 general election manifesto as (in Gerald Kaufman’s phrase) the longest suicide note in history is a kindness.

Labour’s defence policy became yet more extreme under Neil Kinnock’s ineffectual leadership. Only when the Cold War was almost ended was Labour’s association with the cause of the peace movement broken, and in language of purest pragmatism.

These earlier debates on the Left contain much that is important for understanding the politics of the Left today. If you see the threat of Islamist terrorism as the result of needless provocation in invading Iraq, or as a long-suppressed cry against Third World poverty, you will tend to see Tony Blair as an aberrant figure on the Left: the creature — witting or not — of an obscurantist and aggressive conservative US administration. As the late Robin Cook maintained: “It seems only too likely that the judgment of history may be that the invasion of Iraq has been the biggest blunder . . . since Suez.”

But Cook was wrong. The cause of regime change is central to progressive politics and entirely consistent with Cook’s own advocacy of foreign policy “with an ethical dimension”. Long before 9/11 Blair had commendably abandoned the conservative “realism” — in practice, feeble and amoral quietism — of the Major Government in Bosnia and elsewhere. So far from following President Bush’s bidding, Blair persuaded Bush to abandon an instinctive aversion to foreign engagements and promote global democracy as our defence against theocratic totalitarianism. For all the failures of postwar planning in Iraq, that strategy is right. It is a far-sighted security policy that accords with recent academic thinking and traditional liberal-democratic internationalism. In tomorrow’s article, I shall explain why.

Anti-Totalitarianism: the Left-Wing Case for a Neoconservative Foreign Policy by Oliver Kamm is published this Friday

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