It’s January of 1941: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt appears before Congress to promote a military aid package for Great Britain, then enduring the darkest days of the Nazi Blitz. In his speech, FDR lays out the case for American financial involvement on behalf of the beleaguered Allies, eleven months before the United States would directly enter the war. The speech is steeped in the language of liberal democracy and self-determination which would come to characterize American participation in global affairs for decades. The Lend-Lease Act, which concretizes the policy FDR had been proposing, is to be passed two months later. Lend-Lease is now considered one of the great historical triumphs of aid provision by a nonbelligerent power—many historians posit that it was this key investment in American security, powered by the strength of Anglo-American ties, that ensured British survival against the Nazi threat and helped guarantee an eventual Allied victory in World War Two. In many ways, FDR’s speech is the ur-text of the American Century, a scriptural distillation of the core precepts which would characterize American supremacy during the long postwar peace. One rhetorical flourish from the speech stood out: Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms.”
The “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, freedom to worship in one’s own way, freedom from fear, and freedom from want—were the fundamental precepts outlined by President Franklin Roosevelt in the State of the Union speech. Despite the nonbelligerent status of the U.S., FDR wanted to make very clear where American sympathies lay. At a dark time when the Nazi takeover of all of Europe seemed not just like a real possibility, but a probability, the Four Freedoms became something akin to the rallying cry of the free world.
Fast forward to June 1966: the early days of the Cultural Revolution in Maoist China (as Michael Palin might say, “and now for something completely different…”). An editorial appears in the People’s Daily, the party newspaper, calling on all revolution-loving Chinese to “sweep away all the cow demons and snake spirits,” one of many curious Chinese terms for the right-deviationist “capitalist-roaders” and “thought criminals” opposing Mao’s goal of continuous revolution. The article alludes to another politically significant quartet: the “Four Olds.”
The “Four Olds” are old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. One of the “war aims” of the Cultural Revolution, it might be said, is to dismantle them. The Four Olds were understood by militant party cadres and zealous Red Guards to be relics of a previous national order. Tang poetry, Buddhist altars, and pre-Mao street names: all were considered symbols of a bygone national culture destined for destruction.
It turns out that stringing together these two ostensibly unrelated conceptual quartets helps to explain a great deal about American foreign policy in March 2025: the literal Four Freedoms of Roosevelt have become the figurative “Four Olds” of Donald Trump. A new wave of anti-historical America-Firsters, as eager to obliterate past precedent as the most enthusiastic of Red Guards, are attempting to dismantle the once-prized, foundational ideals of the “American Century.” Freedom from fear, freedom from want, and freedom of speech and religion for aggressed nations are being treated by Trump and his acolytes like four irrelevant, bygone “olds” to be eradicated. Should Trump continue unopposed to rip out the beating moral heart of American foreign policy, we will witnessing a Cultural Revolution in American foreign policy, one which will have devastating consequences.
The first consequence is a near-term “fire bell in the night” for Ukraine and its sovereignty and security. The second is a long-term moral crisis for the United States and the liberal democratic world. Remaining truly American and abandoning the “Four Freedoms” might be something like remaining a believing, practicing Christian and repudiating every line of the Sermon on the Mount. After all, the “Four Freedoms” are something like the Sermon on the Mount of transatlantic security: they provide the clearest, most-cited distillation of the moral philosophy underpinning the key strategic alliances which have kept Europe and America historically secure from imperial aggression for the past eighty years. The values were enshrined in the Atlantic Charter (signed by FDR and Winston Churchill in August of 1941) which codified self-determination and liberal democracy as Anglo-American values in a wartime context. Crucially, the Four Freedoms were pre-Pearl-Harbor values, deeply held by a majority of Americans (except for a cadre of Lindberghite America Firsters) even in the context of a conflict in which the United States was not yet directly involved. It was the moral anthem of the Lend-Lease era, and has thus been appropriately cited as an apt precedent for the moral and security benefits of American monetary and equipment aid to Ukraine since 2022.
Tonight is a big night for the future of the “Four Freedoms.” Donald Trump is set to give an address before a joint session of Congress on the same dais upon which FDR gave the “Four Freedoms” speech in January 1941. Trump already paused U.S. military aid to Ukraine yesterday and is likely to pick up on the theme again tonight. None of this is new: for his entire political career, Donald Trump has questioned the very underlying logic of the “Four Freedoms.” He has outright denied that there is any positive-sum connection between American goodwill toward aggressed nations and investments in our own national security. He infamously proclaimed that he knew very little about NATO going into his first presidency, and spent much of that first term trying to disrupt the alliance. Trump’s chaotic approach to NATO sometimes yielded results (European allies did increase their percentage-of-GDP defense spending and Trump was right to criticize Germany for the foolhardy tightrope-walk of Nord Stream 2). But while Trump’s skepticism and transactional instincts ironically managed to inject new life into the alliance in the first term, that was very much then, not now. Trump’s first term predated Russia’s Feb. 2022 invasion of Ukraine. To continue to peddle outdated gripes about NATO’s obsolescence has become an apocalyptically unserious project, as the past few weeks have made glaringly obvious. But unless Trump suddenly pivots, it seems like tonight could be the night that Trump reframes the “Four Freedoms” as the “Four Olds” in the very room in which the “Four Freedoms” were first born.
It is obvious why the ideologically purist Red Guards wanted to dismantle pre-communist Chinese culture. But why do Trump and his acolytes feel that the freedom-based world order is old and obsolete? Trump is convinced that the post-WWII world order has hurt the United States—he believes that security guarantees and free trade have allowed allies and enemies alike to take advantage of the U.S., whether through defense free-riding or manipulation of trade agreements. Based, apparently, on his highly rigorous personal bookkeeping of the past eighty years, Trump is convinced that America’s focus on “fundamental freedoms” has always been wrong-headed and misplaced. It’s just bad business, and so it has to go. Trump is convinced that the old order should be relegated to the dustbin of history and replaced with something new and allegedly more tailored to American interests. In this conviction, he sounds an awful lot like Vladimir Putin, who declared in an infamous interview with the Financial Times in 2019 that the “liberal idea has become obsolete.”
Of course, Putin understands quite well that the “liberal idea” is the “Four Freedoms”. The “liberal idea” is a combination of the positive (“freedom to”) civil liberties of social democracy and the negative (“freedom from”) liberties of a world order predicated on resistance to territorial aggression. Not only is the “liberal idea” not obsolete, nor is it, in fact, old: liberal democracy and collective security are much younger than all other alternative concepts in human history. What is “old” is the doctrine that the “strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” What is “old” is Westphalian realpolitik and anarchy in international relations. What is even older is the idea that maps can and should be redrawn through territorial aggression and land invasions. As far as history is concerned, nothing is perhaps older. The “Four Freedoms” are, in fact, what is new. It is new to reject the atavistic statecraft that produced Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, and Putin.
But Trump and his enablers are eager to get rid of this world order. Not particularly historically-minded themselves, they want to upend the order that has governed the world in their lifetimes. It’s all they have ever known, so it’s old to them. But in some subconscious sense, Trump and the revisionists are probably uncomfortable with the newness of the rules-based international order in the context of a much longer, more familiar tradition of might-makes-right statecraft. The America First revisionists would rather return to the plum-pudding realpolitik of the nineteenth century; they would rather sympathize with someone who appreciates the nation-building expansionism of, let’s say, Peter the Great. And ironically a return to this much older tradition requires reclassifying the new order of our time, the liberal one, as old and obsolete.
The campaign against the “Four Olds” during the Cultural Revolution was characterized by messianic zeal. We’re starting to feel the heat of this fervor in the White House now. America’s old (at least, held since 1945) customs (helping the victims of territorial aggression), habits (working together with allies on complex global agreements), culture (the benevolent internationalism of the “indispensable nation”) and thinking (the theory that all this is good for America, too) are going the way of Alderaan.
Trump and Company are in the process of equating the once-indispensable “Four Freedoms” with the designated-for-destruction distinction of the “Four Olds.” Trump has no interest in securing Ukrainian freedom from fear—in fact, he stands next o Putin as the greatest purveyor of fear for Ukrainians in the world. He has no interest in defending Ukrainian freedom of speech or religion (to slightly adapt the concerns of 1941, perhaps language and cultural practice more broadly) in the face of Russification. And he has no interest in Ukrainian freedom from want (the great bulk of international humanitarian aid to Ukraine in the past three years, by the way, has come from USAID). In the spirit of their poster-child Elon Musk the America First Cultural Revolutionaries are feeding the Atlantic Charter into the wood-chipper (or rather the paper-shredder? Or perhaps the chainsaw? Musk’s slash-and-burn metaphors can get a little mixed). Could gone to some great parties, I’m sure, but they’re doing that instead.
It’s unclear how much of the American public would go along with abandonment of the rules-based international order on such a scale: all-out retreat as opposed to marginal retrenchment. But should Trump succeed in this putsch against the world order, future presidents of the United States will cease to become the de facto rulers of the free world. For all the American exceptionalists out there, it might be worth remembering right now that America was not the only signatory to the Atlantic Charter: a fellow by the name of Winston Churchill put his name on the dotted line as well. At that time, as Britain seemed to be single-handedly fighting off Nazi aggression, he was the leader of the free world, not FDR. And while that unofficial title has belonged to the President of the United States since 1945, there is no reason that Donald Trump cannot get himself and his successors fired from the position.
Indeed, shortly after Friday’s already-infamous Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian president Volodomyr Zelensky, it was U.K. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who quickly planned a make-up meeting with Zelensky and a coalition of willing European allies. The outcome of that impromptu summit was Starmer’s announcement of a European-led plan for peace, one which would be presented to the U.S (oh, the ignominy of non-involvement). Perhaps the United Kingdom, though materially not the state it was in 1941, will now assume the vacated office of leader of the free world (ever since it lost its empire, Britain has been famously looking for its “role.” As the country in Europe whose politics are least structurally threatened by the Russia-sympathetic far-right, maybe this is the role and this is the time).
Maybe. Maybe an America First Cultural Revolution will successfully expunge commitment to international freedom and security from our moral code, where it has been etched since at least FDR’s Four Freedoms Speech. Trump has already halted military aid to Ukraine and the country is still reeling from Friday’s shameful scenes of shouting. Maybe we will now be forced to trust Europe (beset with transatlantic equivalents of the same forces driving the MAGA Cultural Revolution) to stop the Four Freedoms from becoming the Four Olds. Maybe this is the “crossroads in history” that Starmer describes.
But the brutal fact of the matter is that the U.S. carries a much bigger geopolitical stick than the United Kingdom, or all of Europe, for that matter. The U.K. and all of its European allies can be committed to the political and economic limit to Ukrainian security and that will still not be enough if its 1941 signing partner decides to tear up the Atlantic Charter. The future of international security depends on the “Four Freedoms” never becoming the “Four Olds.”
By Zachary Partnoy
