Mary Habeck (professor at Johns Hopkins University) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity & National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.

Thank you. As Mark mentioned, I did indeed just completely rewrite my talk. I have two separate talks here that I could give. You’ll be happy to hear I’m only going to do one of them, and the one that I’m going to do is really in response to this concept of Christian realism put forward by Walter Russell Mead and some of the ways of thinking about our engagement in the world that might flow from this very rich and I think very deep concept that he proposed just this morning.

One of the first things he began talking about is that there are Christian treasures and tools that we need to sort of dig out in order to use when thinking about our engagement with the rest of the world in foreign policy in particular and when it comes to projecting power. By projecting power, what I mean is the use of force in order to attain specific foreign policy goals. So it can be everything from sanctions, boycotts, organized boycotts, to the actual use of military force in order to achieve specific policy ends.

So it could be anything from the sanctions that have been put upon Russia in order to get it to do certain things that we’d like it to do. It could be also projecting power in order to protect the commons, as the Navy does by just showing the flag in oceans around the world. But it can also be things like our engagement in Afghanistan or in the Iraq war. So this is a broad range of things that could be understood as projecting power, and when it comes to something like this, what we really want is to do obviously the right thing.

But the problem is defining first of all what is right and what is wrong, and the second problem is determining whether what we’re proposing as a policy is in fact right or wrong. Behind a lot of the problems that we have in this, there are two actually big problems that have just been raised by what I said. One of them is the fact that American society no longer agrees upon the same norms and values. There are in fact multiple groups in American society that are proposing different norms and values for our society to follow, and we call it political correctness, but in fact it should be called moral correctness because what is being proposed through political correctness is not some new policies per se or politics per se. It’s really not on a political level, it’s really about what should our norms be that define the public square, especially in the United States.

And because of this elite in some ways disagreement, but a disagreement that goes right through all of society, we no longer agree on certain basic principles of what constitutes right and wrong. Now as Christians, we do have a common set of norms and values, but even here there are serious disagreements about what is Christ-like, what is right or wrong in specific circumstances. There are plenty of Christians who believe that a woman’s right to choose is something that Christ would have supported, for instance, and you could go along each one of the controversial issues that we’re dealing with in domestic policy and you can say exactly the same thing about foreign policy, that people are arguing very strenuously about what constitutes right and wrong.

But that’s one particular discussion that I’m actually going to set aside and just raise it as the problem that I see is the most troubling strategic problem confronting the United States today when it comes to foreign policy is elite and societal disagreement over what constitutes right and wrong. The second problem, however, over right and wrong is how do we determine what’s the correct thing to do in any circumstance? Wouldn’t it be great if we had all, you know, eight balls you just kind of flipped it around and it gave you “this is the right thing to do in this circumstance”? But that’s really what we’re looking for. We’re all attempting to figure out what’s the correct thing to do in our own lives but also and more importantly when we’re projecting power because when you project power, you’re talking about issues of life and death. You’re talking about blood and treasure and you don’t want to make the kinds of mistakes that many of us believe were made, for instance, over the Iraq war or the kinds of mistakes who were made in the 1930s, to give two examples of acting precipitously in one case that many people believe was the mistake that was made, or in the case of the other one, not acting soon enough.

So how do you determine whether you’re in the 1930s or whether the new situation you’re confronting is in fact the Iraq war, over which there’s a lot of debate whether we should have engaged at all? In fact, there’s a lot of other arguments that people are having right now. They show these elite disagreements throughout our society. People make an argument that we shouldn’t be projecting power at all. We have enough problems of our own, shouldn’t we be trying to solve our own problems? That’s a great argument, except that when if we ever solved all of our problems and if you wait until we fix everything, guess what? We’ll do nothing. Because if you have to be perfect in order to engage with the world, if you just made a great argument for isolationism.

Other people say we only make matters worse when we intervene, especially militarily. You know, you go off there and you engage with our military forces and we always make matters worse. Well, that’s true for a lot of things we’ve done recently, but one can also say, you know, this engaging militarily is why we don’t have Nazis any longer. Engaging militarily is why the Japanese Empire as it was organized during the 1920s and 30s is not dominating the Pacific world. So there are times in fact when most everybody would agree that military engagement did not in fact by us, did not in fact make things worse.

Others say, well, what about the UN or other international institutions? Isn’t that the right choice if you’re going to use military force in particular? Is it better to get everybody in agreement, there’s many people in agreement as possible before you go off engage? But the fact that you must in fact have everybody in agreement before you can engage with the UN suggests again that you’re making a great argument for doing nothing at all because the UN actually approved only three projections of power so far in its entire existence. Most people know about Korea, most people know about the Gulf War, which is by the way one of the reasons that those two are sort of linked in a lot of people’s minds about the projection of power. But the third one is of course the engagement in the Congo or the UN approved going in to try to solve the problems of decolonization there in the early 1960s. But that’s it.

Think of how many other problems there have been around the world that would have been great to have the UN or international institution or somebody engaged in a way that would have brought peace and security, but in fact nothing was done and countries decided to engage unilaterally out of to impose their own solution and for their own national security ends. And the results in many cases was disastrous for the rest of the world or for the countries that were affected. So for instance, the Soviet decision to invade Afghanistan during their Soviet during their civil war, a unilateral decision. Wouldn’t have been great if the UN could have been engaged there? But what are the chances you could have gotten everybody to agree on something like that?

And finally, a lot of people say, why should we have to be the one just to pay in blood and treasure? Can’t everybody else fix their own problems? Really, is it our responsibility? Why, why does it have to be the U.S. that they’re ready calls on whenever there’s a problem? Are we really, do we have to be the world’s policemen? Can’t we just say, “Are you guys, somebody else do this”? The problem with that is we actually tried that after 2011. If you take a look at violence throughout the world but especially in the Middle East, the U.S. decided to pivot towards Asia, which you saw is the violence in fact got far, far worse when the U.S. did not engage than it did when the U.S. did engage.

More people have been killed, far more people have been killed in Syria than were killed in Iraq during the American engagement there. And more people have been radicalized in Syria than were radicalized by the Iraq war by a huge percentage, magnitudes more than that. When we chose not to engage, a lot of bad actors chose to engage and they impose their own vision. So by withdrawing, we actually empowered Russia to fix the problem. We actually empowered Iran to fix the problem themselves through our choice of not engaging.

Not doing things sounds like the safe bet. It sounds like that’s what we should do, but in fact in the specific example from just 2011 through the present, we can see that our choice not to engage, not to project power in fact led to far more deaths, destruction, and the empowerment of far more bad people than our decision to engage in the Iraq war. So we have two examples right before us of engagement and not engagement, both of which seem to have led to very bad results. So how do we tell when and how, where to engage?

I am not going to give you the absolute answer, but what I can do is, à la Walter Russell Mead, hopefully give us some Christianly ways of thinking about this problem that might be helpful when we confront these kinds of decisions, whether we’re the policymakers, the ones who are making those sorts of really tough decisions, or we are simply citizens trying to vote for or support the right policies and people.

So first of all, most of those arguments that I just put forward to you, then we should be dealing with our own problems, we make matters worse, we intervene, why should we pay for this? A lot of that is based on two troubling deficiencies from a Christian perspective: deficiencies of love and deficiencies of truth. And those two deficiencies, I think, need to be dealt with in order for us to be able to make wise decisions. But at the same time, engagement also has its false God in its temptations, temptations and false god of pride that we can fix things, that we know best, that we can do it all ourselves, right? And we don’t need to have other people telling us how to do it. We’ll just go in there and there we fixed it, we can walk away from it.

But pride, as we all know, is at the heart of the fall and of the original sin that again Walter Russell Mead reminded us a so poignantly during his talk. So the rejection of pride is just as important if we’re going to understand well how we should be interacting in the world. So I would argue in fact that all three of these things are vital. None of them is independent of the others. We need love, we need truth, and we need humility working together in ourselves and our collective lives to know how and when we should project power. That is, in order to have wisdom, and it’s wisdom we above all else must have when considering the use of power.

So what does love demand? Well, that’s easy to say and impossible to do. Treat others as we would be treated, right? No, that whole golden rule thing, so easy to say while living it out in a personalized, let alone, and living it out in the life of a nation is, what does that even mean? Right? How do you find truth? By pursuing it despite hopes and fears, by pursuing it despite our hopes and fears. And how do we mitigate our pride? Through constant mindfulness, repentance, and thankfulness.

So where do we get wisdom? We can either purchase it with blood and treasure because you do get a sort of wisdom by making constant mistakes, right? So we can either purchase it with blood and treasure or we can be given it by the constant demand and by following what love demands, by pursuing truth and by mitigating our pride, since pride makes the other three impossible, makes wisdom impossible, makes love impossible, makes truth impossible. You have to really begin there.

So what do I mean by mindfulness? By mindfulness I mean being aware of what love, truth, wisdom say about ourselves all the time. Okay, that we are dust, that we’re broken, but we are beloved. So dust compared to the universe, who are we really? You know, a hundred years you live, 150 years, I’ll give you a thousand years he live as long as Methuselah. The universe is what, latest estimates, twenty-five billion years old, right? Yeah, what’s a thousand years compared to twenty-five billion years? And not only that, but you’ve seen those pictures of what the universe looks like, what the earth looked, well you don’t even have to say the earth, what the whole Milky Way with its hundreds of millions of stars looks like in comparison to the rest of the universe. Who are we compared to the universe, even if you don’t believe in God? Compared to the universe, we’re dust.

Right, so the beginning I think of humility is our place in the universe. Even if you take God, you subtract God from it, we’re dust. But secondly, we’re broken. The whole problem of sin, right? Of the fact that we can’t do things right, that we constantly, if we do or we don’t do, we get it wrong, right? That the original sin based on pride makes it impossible for us to do everything perfectly right. And in fact it makes it impossible to do anything perfectly right. But we’re beloved. We have to constantly remember that as well, that we’ve been as Christians adopted as children of God, that we are beloved, that there is also a common love for all humanity. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son. So that’s our place in the universe. That’s our place in the eyes of God, and I think that’s where true humility begins.

Then mindfulness is also about admitting every day we could be wrong. It sounds really easy to say as well, but all we have to do is think about situations where we’ve been in, we’ve gotten into serious arguments over foreign policy over the projection of power sometimes where it’s been really difficult to admit maybe I was wrong. Right? Maybe I should have backed down there. But the important thing about being able to admit that you’re wrong is then the ability to learn and change, and the ability to learn is deeply built in to the Christian life. Our life is supposed to be one of constant maturing, of going from being infants, babies to children all the way up to full-grown adults, and that entails learning and growing. And the only way you can do that is by being able to learn and grow, and that comes from being able to admit you don’t know everything and you could be wrong.

And finally, gratitude. So remember we didn’t make ourselves or our lives and therefore any successes we have are not because we are self-made men and women. It’s because of what has been done for with us around us. That’s what we need to remember in order to have the proper humility and understand our place in the world.

So how do these issues then affect foreign policy? This issue of pride obviously has a tremendous input, but how does love specifically, what do we do in order to express God’s love in the world? How do we get work through our pride? How do we work in pursuit of the truth when it comes to foreign policy in particular? Well, as I said, love plus the pursuit of truth plus as little pride as possible equals wisdom that’s given rather than purchased.

So love, when it’s expressed out into the real world, requires us to truly understand others by putting ourselves in their position and seeing things through their eyes. Alright, but this does not imply excusing behavior. Like a Sister Joy is one of the wisest people I know. She has three children and she’s constantly telling these stories about their antics. But the thing that struck me was in a conversation we were talking about her son and the problems she was having with him always having an excuse for why he had done bad things to his sister. So he would come into the room where this, the sisters as usual crying in the other room, comes in my sister says, “Okay Sam, what happened?” It’s like, “Well, she stole my truck and and I hit her in response. She deserved it.” Right? And my sister would say, “Sam, that is a great explanation, but it’s not a good excuse.”

The difference between an explanation and excuse has been seriously helpful when it comes to loving others on a foreign policy stage. We want to understand why people are doing things. We want to have an explanation for what they’re up to, but we don’t want to excuse bad behavior. There’s a tremendous difference between those two things. So how then do we understand? How then do we do it?

It must come through engagement. You cannot understand just by standing back and hoping somehow it’ll float to you through CNN or any other news. So you have to engage with the people that you want to understand and therefore love. This includes, depending on the circumstances and overall global situation, engagement through the projection of power. Projection of power is one way of engaging with people. Did we really understand the situation in Afghanistan until we had boots on the ground, the Taliban were on the run, and you could actually go into villages and talk to people? Because it turned out without the projection of power, you could not actually understand what was going on in Afghanistan. You could sort of get some views from a distance, but really to see what was happening on the ground, really to love, you had to actually project power first.

Let’s consider Afghanistan then in the 1990s when we were pretty unaware of what was going on there. How do we learn to understand without having boots on the ground? We believed the Taliban were evil. They mistreated women, they were mistreating minorities, they were carrying on an awful lot of violence. They had all these bad people with camps every which way all over the place. They were, in fact, bad men. But did this require us therefore to intervene in some serious way? Does it require us, because of their bad behavior, to intervene? Does love require that from us?

In every situation where you’re confronting these kinds of bad men – there’s bad men all over the entire world – how do we determine without having our boots on the ground to understand what’s truly going on? We didn’t see that al-Qaeda was planning on carrying out an attack against the United States that would kill over 3,000 people. We didn’t understand that at all. But does that then, in retrospect, mean we should have said we must go in there? Is it a requirement of us to go in there and deal with this, a requirement of love?

Love is, in other words, just one piece of it. Because we had lacked the wisdom to be able to understand, yes, this is required of us in this particular situation, or no, it’s not required. We had various concepts, ideas about what they were up to, but we had no real wisdom or knowledge about what was going on in there. I remember having conversations with people about this very issue when I was struggling with understanding, because the Taliban in the 1990s can be put in the place of about a hundred different situations today. Are we required by love to intervene in every single one of them?

I had a situation in 2015 when I was asked to participate in a strategic group that was talking about what should we be preparing ourselves for in the future. Where will we be projecting power in the future, and therefore how should we organize ourselves for this? I said to people, in 2000, could we have understood that the correct way to organize the United States military was by studying tribes in Afghanistan? Would we have understood that that was even going to be important back then? The answer was, of course, no. There was no way we could have known that. So 15 years from now, we cannot tell what, in retrospect, will have been the Taliban of today.

So how do we truly understand and know what we’re supposed to do? Well, we need more love. Love is absolutely vital, love is absolutely necessary. Without understanding things through other people’s eyes, without catching what they’re thinking and how they’re thinking about things, we cannot even begin. First pride, then love. First pride, then love. But love only takes us part of the way. There’s something else we have to do. As Walter Russell Mead said, count the cost, be prepared to pay the price of engagement. That’s also a very sound and wise thing to have said.

All right, but how do we know that? Okay, pride – getting rid of pride or well, mitigating pride and working on love gets us partially there. What else can help us? Well, how about truth? Truth must be pursued; however, it does not come to us. It is something that we must desire and we have to go after. The battle is separating reality from our hopes and our fears, and we have a lot of those.

Some people are mostly motivated by hope and some people are mostly motivated by fear. What do we do about that? Well, let me give you a couple examples of where hopes and fears made a tremendous difference in the policy decisions that people made and made it very difficult to understand what reality is. So the Iraq war is a great one. A lot of people had fears of WMD, that this was something that the terrorists would use against us, that Iraq possessed them and we had to go in there in order to deal with this feared weapon.

Others had hopes, however, that there could be a better place for Iraq if we engaged with them, if we projected power. So I had conversations with those who are now called the neocons back before they became defined to something completely different for what they saw themselves as in 2001-2002. They actually had a lot of hopes for Iraq that it could become the kind of place that a lot of Eastern Europe had become with the ending of tyranny there, that it could become the kind of place that Germany had after you got rid of Nazism or like Japan after you got rid of the Japanese Empire.

They were in fact wholly motivated by hope, but their hopes were predicated upon a false reality, a reality that came from people who were telling them what their hopes wanted to hear. And they eagerly listened to these people and believed it. In the same way, those who had the fears of WMD heard this news about WMD from very trustworthy sources, but they wanted to believe it as well and they eagerly held onto it as the way to understand what we should do about the situation.

Both of those hopes and fears, in fact, people were selectively listening to truth in order to hear what they wanted to hear. There were other truths that people could have told them. For instance, the intelligence has these flaws to it and therefore your fears of WMD might not be right, or that the guys you’re listening to haven’t been in Iraq since 1990 and therefore might not really understand what’s happened to the country in their viewing of 13 years.

So how do we mitigate the problem of our own hopes and fears preventing us from seeing reality or the truth? Well, again, mindfulness helps. Being aware that we’re being mostly motivated by hopes or mostly being motivated by fears and that we are selectively sometimes listening to facts in order to filter out those things that don’t fit in with what we want to hear. Mindfulness, humility is also important here, obviously. It’s important throughout this entire process that I need to learn, I need to understand, and I need most importantly to be pursuing it through other people and listening to those people, really listening to those people who disagree profoundly with you.

Not so you’ll agree with them 100%, but so you’ll be able to weigh what they’re saying against your own hopes or fears and see where you might benefit from listening and understanding through other people. So that includes loving other people enough to really listen to them and really understand things through their eyes, not just abroad but in our own country as well. And again, the terrible role of pride here has to be constantly guarded against. I’m reminded of CS Lewis who said that as a final resort, as a final last stand, pride will have us being proud of our own humility. And that’s something we always have to be on guard against, constantly, because it will come back to haunt us.

All of these can lead to wisdom. It’s not like a magic formula, but pointers along the way to help us whenever we find ourselves with difficult decisions. But there’s another ingredient needed here, and again I was reminded of this by Walter Russell Mead. So I did, I’ve really revoked things in response to listening to what he had to say about this, and that is prayer. God’s promise is that he will freely give wisdom to anybody who asks. In fact, there’s this great set of verses that’s talking about, you know, just believe and don’t doubt and you’ll get what you asked for.

Most people take this as a kind of broad statement about “I need a new car, I believe, I believe, I believe” and somehow if you just don’t doubt, you don’t leave, or a car will appear. I used to believe that when I was a kid anyway. Didn’t work. But actually, what it is talking about is wisdom. It’s a very specific promise. It specifically says ask wisdom from the Lord and don’t doubt and you’ll actually give it to you freely. So prayer, I think, is for us Christians the necessary ingredient. And how will we know then if it’s really wisdom from God? Well, he actually gives us a definition of it in a later verse.

Wisdom from God is first of all pure. It does not ask us to sin. It is pure, peace-loving, every other solution except for going to war, considerate of the other people, submissive, listening in humility to what other people have to say, full of mercy, impartial and sincere. None of this is easy. All this requires a lifetime of determined pursuit of humility and of learning, change, and growth. We all make mistakes, but we all must continue to engage and to learn and grow.

Thank you. My question is, and I’m sure I missed this at the beginning, but I presume that the injunction to love is not the same for a state and to the individual. So what exactly is the way which a state is supposed to love?

This is actually I had a whole section on that. So this is about us as individual policymakers or decision makers and how we should live our lives. This isn’t about institutions. It’s not about states. It’s not about whole political groups. It’s about the individual, which is the level at which Christ and the Bible, especially the New Testament, nearly entirely engages.

After being in office, I realized the importance of personality and how underplayed it is in current social science theories. All we have to do though is look at the difference in the policies of Bush versus Obama in order to understand that personality can make a huge difference at the very top. But what might not be as clear is that many of the changes in policy within administrations are about individuals or group of individuals pushing policies that they then convince a specific president to go along with.

So let me give you a great example. During the Reagan administration’s first term, realists were at the fore and they pushed a policy of confrontation and of power in order to force the Soviet Union to do what we believed they needed to do. His second administration, however, was dominated by the neocons, and the neocons pushed democratization. This long-term solution to the problems we were confronting in the rest of the world explains why Indonesia, the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and a lot of countries of Central America turned towards democracy. Because with the support and help of the United States, they understood that this is something that could, should, might be done.

Very different policies, very different sorts of outcomes. Why were they pushed? Why were they adopted? Because individuals made persuasive arguments to an individual, the president. We’ve decided to do it. So after being in office, the power of the individual and power of personality and of also the policy preferences of the president, what they wish to do, cannot be understated in my opinion.

Hi, Carl if Gallivan, retired Special Agent US Customs Service. I was a 911 responder. My question reference and ideal lives are met, and if you could please address the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a tactic that’s employed, has been for centuries. I’ll call it false flag terrorism. The idea that Allied interests will periodically perpetrate events even upon their own populations in order to justify then attacking a preferred enemy on whom the event is blamed.

Yeah, so let me give you a great example of that. The decision by Putin, well first of all, the elevation of Putin to head of the KGB and then beyond that to President occurred because of a specific terrorist attack. A terrorist attack that many people in Russia believed had been in fact committed by the security services. So the Chechens were blamed for the 1999 blowing up of a whole series of apartment buildings, and all of the people who put this forward as a proposition were in fact rounded up and some of them imprisoned. And four of the five had mysterious accidents and died.

So many people have thought that this was something done by policymakers and the security services in order to get somebody they wanted in power and then to give him the ability to do whatever he wanted to and achieve genuine elsewhere. On the other hand, most conspiracy theories turn out to be in fact false. So my grandmother, God bless her soul, was a Pearl Harbor truther. She believed that the Democrats had carried out Pearl Harbor, and FDR specifically, in order to force us into Europe and another European war.

She was not alone. There were hundreds of thousands of Pearl Harbor truthers long before 9/11. Because if you look back at that time period, every single war had been started by Democrats up to that point, actually all the way through to Reagan. Every single war was started by Democrats. So it fit. They liked wars, who knows why, and death and destruction. They want to inveigle us in all these foreign adventures. So it turns out probably that’s false, though, right? Just like the 9/11 truthers. It’s wrong. Most conspiracy theories are.

My Russian friends love conspiracy theories. Most of them are wrong. I’ll still, you know, can remember what are the best ones of those from my friends, and that was the, you know, heading up the metro escalators one day. As soon as I start thinking about Moscow, my brain goes into Russian. And I heard two, it broke down in the middle. Those escalators, they make the ones in Woodley Park and etc. look tiny. They were built as bomb shelters, so they’re really super deep, right? And all of these elderly women carrying all these bags, these babushki, were just so upset. But what did they say about it? They said it didn’t break down enough. They did it on purpose in order to make us suffer.

So there were conspiracy theories about everything. About why there was only Turkish tea available to purchase in the food stores. Why Turkish tea was left, the bread was gone, everything else is gone, but Turkish tea was left. Why? Because it’s been irradiated in Chernobyl, so nobody was gonna eat that. Conspiracy theories everywhere. I have a huge tendency to, on the face of it, question things that just sound too good to be true.

Thank you so much. My name is Jehan ding. I’m from South Sudan. The projection of power in relations to global institutions like the UN, you reflected into presence of UN in Congo. South Sudan, as some of you might know, had been going through civil war decades before independence. And 2011 did not survive. By 2013, another conflict. Recently, September 12, 2018, the sign of peace agreement. The president, all the rebel groups came in. But UN is my question to you. When you’re talking about projection of power and also integrating humility, love, and prayer, whereby other institutions like the UN actually wanted to be able to settle there forever. Some of the rebel groups or the opposition was suggesting trusteeship of the government, which means for the next 10-15 years there is no government. UN rules. And because the nation of South Sudan is a very wealthy nation, what does UN do to South Sudan will be worse than what they did in the Congo. What do we do when people like us who are supposed are called to standing the gap in prayer and to make a difference as citizens?

So first of all, just you know, the sort of outline of a methodology that I put forward here would suggest that people should be listening more to people like you. The decision makers ought to be gathering their truth, their information, their facts about the reality from people like you who are on the ground. And my impression is that people who think about a situation like the Sudan either have a hope to be able to engage and to be able to do something to help, or they have fears that if we do that, then we’ll be sucked into a million other places. And therefore, they tend to seek out those people who will support either their hopes or their fears.

Those who have the fears especially probably wouldn’t want to talk to people like you, whereas those who have the hopes might prioritize your story over other people’s stories about what should be done. So my argument would be that both sides, whether you have hopes or fears about that, need to be listening to those that they normally would not listen to. So it makes sense to tell my story my way, right?