If the West seems unlikely to serve as a unifying ideal in the future, then what should we make of its role in the past? If it sets aside the values of liberty and self-government, which Americans have often seen as evidence of their superiority over Europe rather than as signs of a shared transatlantic heritage, then what remains of the West in the history of American foreign affairs? Kimmage himself points to the period “between 1945 and 1963” as the “heyday” of the transatlantic West and notes that “the presidents who spoke most often and most glowingly about the West were the Cold War presidents.”  

Yet it was not the West that they claimed to lead. During the crucial period when the United States assumed long-term commitments across the globe, the primary focus of American foreign policy was the leadership of the “Free World.” As Harry Truman declared on May 9, 1950: “All our international policies, taken together, form a program designed to strengthen and unite the free world in its resistance to the spread of communism.” Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, American presidents and policymakers invoked the Free World far more frequently than the West in both public statements and classified documents, while major statements of U.S. strategy routinely claimed that strengthening and defending the Free World was the country’s primary aim.  

Although the Free World became a key foreign policy category after the onset of the Cold War, the idea’s roots extend at least as far back as the early twentieth century. In fact, the concept’s arc in U.S. foreign affairs follows more or less the same pattern as Kimmage’s account of the West in American culture—a rise and fall stretching roughly from World War I to the 1970s. In the case of the Free World, it was Woodrow Wilson who first formulated many of the concept’s key postulates. In arguing for a declaration of war against the Central Powers, Wilson drew a stark line between democracies and autocracies and insisted that the very “existence of autocratic governments” constituted a “menace […] to peace and freedom” all over the globe. Only the elimination of such naturally aggressive governments, he argued, would make “the world itself at last free.”  

A similar logic came to the fore during World War II. In the two years before the United States formally aligned with the Allies, Roosevelt repeatedly told the American public that technology had made the world small and interconnected, that a threat to peace anywhere endangered peace everywhere, and that the Nazis aimed to spread slavery across the world. Frank Capra’s 1942 Oscar-winning film Prelude to War illustrated the point, opening with an image of two spheres side by side, one white, the other black, one the “free world,” the other the “slave world.” The opposition between the two worlds was total: “One must die, one must live.” 

Like Wilson, Roosevelt assumed that the elimination of freedom’s existential foe would create the conditions for a more peaceful and cooperative world. But whereas Wilson’s League of Nations treaty had failed to earn the approval of Congress, Roosevelt’s efforts to establish a postwar international organization received the full support of the Republican party and the American public. By the end of the war, many Americans had embraced the slogan of “One World,” a phrase popularized by the former Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie in his 1943 bestseller by the same name. Although the world government that some desired never came close to fruition, the international institutions that eventually emerged from the war took a more or less unitary globe for granted.  

The onset of the Cold War put an end to the promise of global cooperation, and Willkie’s “One World” once again became two. NSC 68, submitted to the president on April 14, 1950, proposed to make this global binary the basis of American grand strategy. The document described a zero-sum conflict between a “free world” and “slave society,” declared “a defeat of free institutions anywhere” to be “a defeat everywhere,” and concluded by calling on the United States to build up “the political, economic, and military strength of the free world.” The outbreak of the Korean War a few months later transformed this outlook into orthodoxy. Finally, the passage of the 1951 Mutual Security Act institutionalized a Free World foreign policy, combining all of the country’s aid efforts into a single program with the express purpose of building up the “defenses of the free world” as a whole and for the long haul. 

For the rest of the 1950s and into the 1960s, American perceptions of the Cold War and U.S. leadership remained inextricably tied to the notion of the Free World. Throughout this period, the concept was characterized by three peculiar qualities. First, its existence was taken for granted. Although the phrase “free world” had hardly appeared in print before the late 1940s, almost no one noticed its novelty when it finally entered the political lexicon. Unlike the “cold war,” another neologism from the same period, whose sudden appearance and essential strangeness struck Americans from the start, the Free World seemed to be a natural category. Hardly anyone defined the Cold War because its meaning seemed a mystery; almost no one defined the Free World because its meaning seemed self-evident. As a proper noun naming an enduring entity, the Free World was indeed new. But much of the logic underpinning the concept had long been familiar in U.S. foreign affairs. 

The Free World’s second key quality was its fixed geography. During World War II, Capra’s black and white “worlds” had existed as metaphors and symbolic abstractions, indeterminate in time and space; the Free World of the 1950s, on the other hand, occupied specific territory on a single globe. Because of the geographical consolidation of the Communist bloc, American policymakers could, and did, divide the entire globe into two distinct and mutually exclusive areas. This made the zero-sum relationship between the two “worlds” starkly apparent and required a readiness to defend the entire length of the Free World’s frontiers. It also permitted the government to generate specific figures regarding the Free World’s population and material resources

The final, and perhaps most troublesome, characteristic of the Free World was that its champions defined it in negative terms. For American policymakers, the Free World was always identical to “the non-communist world.” It was only after circumscribing a pathological zone characterized by freedom’s total absence that the leftover areas acquired apparent coherence. On the rare occasions when the U.S. government defined the Free World, it always did so indirectly, by listing the countries that it excluded. The non-communist nations that made up the Free World became members by default. Any further distinctions or commonalities among them remained strictly secondary. Apparent rejections of Free World membership, by India’s Jawaharlal Nehru for example, might cause consternation, but, until the 1960s at least, did not produce any real revision of the category. 

The U.S. government recognized the potential weakness of Free World solidarity and made a concerted effort to fill the concept with positive content, spending considerable resources on official and unofficial propaganda programs across the globe. The material thus disseminated derived much of its inspiration from the story of Western civilization, the tradition of the Enlightenment, and the tenets of Christianity, but American officials deliberately diluted these sources in order to make the product suitable for global consumption. Invocations of a vague and all-encompassing spirituality, for example, tended to replace Christianity as the opposite of Communist atheism. More minor tweaks were also possible, as evidenced by a 1952 U.S. Information Agency pamphlet entitled “The March of Freedom,” which added sections on the Babylonian Hammurabi, and the Indian Asoka to an otherwise traditional Western narrative focusing on Greece and Rome, the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence. 

The nominal Free World was not convinced. In 1952, the State Department distributed a questionnaire entitled “Key Words in American and Free World Propaganda” to 157 posts abroad, proposing forty-two positive keywords “to be applied to the United States and the free world” and fourteen negative keywords “to be applied to communist imperialism.” The results indicated no “universally effective propaganda terms” across different regions. The various members of the Free World, it seemed, shared no easily identifiable ideals. At the same time, American conservatives such as James Burnham and Whittaker Chambers believed that the thin universalism of Cold War liberalism represented a betrayal of Western Christian civilization. They were right in the sense that the United States had not chosen to champion a positively defined West. The Free World the country had actually committed to lead represented a quite different construction—one ultimately based on a presumed absence of Kremlin control rather than any real commonality of culture or values.  

Over the course of the 1960s, the concept of the Free World gradually lost purchase as the problems it addressed became less pressing and the tensions it produced grew more pronounced. The institutionalization of the United States’ global commitments and the routinization of the Soviet-American rivalry made the Free World less essential as a mobilizing concept. Meanwhile, the Vietnam War lessened the appetite for U.S. global leadership both domestically and in Europe and served to discredit the automatic defense of the Free World’s frontiers. Just as significantly, the countercultural movement called the Free World’s freedom into question, relocating the main threat from Soviet totalitarianism to domestic institutions—from George Orwell’s Big Brother to Ken Kesey’s Big Nurse. Finally, many of the post-colonial states opted for freedom as national sovereignty over freedom as anti-communist solidarity, eventually forcing the former champions of the Free World to recognize a separate Third World, effectively blurring the lines of the original binary.