Paul Miller (professor of international affairs at Georgetown University and senior fellow at the Atlantic Council) lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.

Well thank you to Mark to Lee and to the folks at Providence and IRD for making this gathering happen. I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of it to share with you all some thoughts on faith and strategic thinking. That’s what happens when Mark sends an email that says, “What’s the title of your talk?” I don’t respond in time, but I do actually mark and a good guess because I do want to share some thoughts on how being a Christian changes the way I think about American foreign policy and the way I would hope and recommend you all should, should you be Christians, to let the Christian worldview affect and shape the way you think about everything in life, particularly about American foreign policy and the way the choices that we can make in how we use our power abroad.

In doing so, I’m gonna use Reinhold Niebuhr as my muse. I’m sure you heard some about him already. You’ll hear another talk about Niebuhr later on this afternoon, so you can skip the conference’s, just go by his books. It’d be easier read “The Irony of American History” and read “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” She’s a great book subtitled “A Vindication of Democracy and a Critique of its Traditional Defense,” which Niebuhr sought to defend democracy on grounds other than the Enlightenment, and that’s, I think, very key. It’s essential to support and defend these norms of an open society and freedom and political accountability, but to do so while avoiding some of the pitfalls of Enlightenment reasoning.

That’s what I seek to do using Niebuhr to talk about International Affairs. I’m drawing from my book, which as Mark noted came out two years ago. The paperback, I’m happy to say, is coming out in a few months. The book itself is an academic, fairly dry work of grand strategy, but embedded within it is a hidden theological argument that the wisest grand strategy for America is also the most just. And I’m happy to have a chance to share the secret with you all, so you all can now read that and understand what I’m really saying. So far, that I’ve seen no other reviewer has picked up on this, so again, I’m delighted to share this aspect of the argument with you.

When thinking about how Christianity affects our views of foreign policy, what Niebuhr starts with is a very clear assertion that our Christian faith should give us a sense of responsibility. A sense of responsibility to use our power well. As he says, “Our sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our own borders is a virtue.” It is a virtue, so we should instinctively extend our Christian love and charity beyond our immediate circle, beyond our family, friends, neighbors, and beyond even our nation. And it should extend, in principle, to the brotherhood of all mankind. He says, “It is a virtue, even though it is partly derived from the prudent understanding of our own interests.” Now, it’s interesting he says, even though in his view, consulting our own interests was sort of a selfish act, and that to him maybe was a black mark against this idea of caring for the broader world community.

I actually think Niebuhr would have been better if he had said, “Because,” instead of “Even though,” so it would have read, “Our sense of responsibility to a world community beyond our borders is a virtue because it is partly derived from a prudent understanding of our own interests.” And that, I think, is a key argument here. We should be instinctively, I think, internationalists in the sense that we should care about what goes on in the world, we should care for other human beings elsewhere in the world, we should care how our power affects other human beings in the world, and we should care because it’s intrinsically good and moral to do so. It’s an extension of Christian love and charity, but also it’s prudent, it’s selfish, it’s good grand strategy to do so. It is actually safest, it’s the best course of action, selfishly considered, for us to care beyond our borders. And that’s the argument I want to unpack.

As I say this, I understand that some of you are probably having two different reactions here. One camp might be thinking, “Well, no doubt, right? We obviously should have some kind of moral foreign policy. We should care for others, we should care for the suffering, we should care for immigrants, we should care for those who are oppressed, we should care for religious freedom around the world. We should strive as Christians to make American foreign policy more moral, right?” So some of you in that camp. Others of you may be in somewhat of an opposite camp and say, “Well, you know, no, that actually makes me quite nervous because that’s the route to sort of crusading idealism, utopianism, and that sort of charity foreign policy as charity is a way of harming America by putting our interests last, and we need to be putting our interest first.” Right? So I understand there may be two reactions.

What I want to suggest is that Niebuhr enables us to speak to both of those concerns and actually come down somewhere in the middle so that we can avoid crusading, we can have a moral and an idealistic foreign policy, and we can avoid the dangers of both sides. Niebuhr does say, again, we should have a responsibility to the broader world community. This is an intrinsic virtue. We should love all mankind, we should be aware of how our actions affect others. This is true in our personal lives, and I hope as Christians, this is totally uncontroversial in our personal lives, in our interactions with other people, in our daily lives. But Niebuhr quite clearly extends this to political behavior, that we should extend this love politically. We should love one another in our political actions, and I think that’s true domestically and internationally.

Niebuhr says, “Men and nations must use their power with the purpose of making it an instrument of justice and a servant of interests broader than their own.” We must use our power as a servant of justice and an instrument of justice and a servant of interests beyond our own selfishness. Is this not a virtue, despite what Iran said? This is not a virtue in our personal lives, and he’s extending this and saying we should not be nationally selfish either. There’s a way of being politically unselfish to other nations. We should use our power for others’ good, he says. He goes on and says, “A preoccupation with our own interests must lead to an illegitimate indifference toward the interests of others.” An illegitimate indifference toward the interests of others. The solution is a concern both for the self and the other. So again, he’s saying quite clearly we should care about other people, other nations around the world.

I understand many of you, this is sort of nodding off, and that’s why Christians involved in foreign policy quite often gravitate toward immediately recognizable moral causes. Let’s fight human trafficking, let’s promote religious freedom, let’s care for the poor, the oppressed, the downtrodden, let’s care for the immigrant, let’s care even for the illegal immigrant, let’s care for anybody, for women and ethnic minorities around the world oppressed by their governments. These causes, I think, they’re all good, they’re all fine. I am going to add a caveat as well as I get further into this talk about where’s the appropriate boundaries for that kind of care, because if you take it too far, you’re making the United States a world government in charge of ameliorating all human suffering. It obviously can’t do that.

The next thing that Niebuhr says is that our sense of responsibility to the world, it’s not just intrinsically good and moral because of our Christian faith, it’s also very prudent. It’s also selfish. Even just consulting our own national interest should lead us to do this, should lead us to be concerned with and responsible for the world community. He makes this argument several ways. One, he says, “A stable order is not possible without introducing instruments of justice into the agreements which are to provide for that order.” In other words, when we are trying to solve a problem, when we strike an international agreement, when we have some kind of regional order or global order, the fairer that order is, the more sustainable it is. If it’s an unfair order, if somebody’s getting our raw end of the deal, if it’s oppressive to some other party, they’re going to be resentful and eventually they will seek to fight back and that will unravel the order that we are trying to provide or uphold.

So when we provide order after World War Two and we’re arranging world order through the UN of the World Bank and NATO and everything. Or more recently, if it’s a post-war Iraq or whatever, the more fair and just the order is that we seek to provide/impose, the more fair it is, the more sustainable and successful it will be. If we want to be successful in providing or imposing order, well, the most successful way to do it is to be just. We should actually have a just, fair order. It’s what Lincoln talked about, he said a just and lasting peace. A just and lasting peace, those things go together pretty well. If you have a just and lasting peace, it will actually last.

So, Niebuhr’s saying that we should be internationalists, both because of our moral responsibility and because of our strategic calculus. Let me share a longer passage instead of trying to unpack this. It’s a bit abstract, but I’m gonna try to step through it slowly to give you the full flavor of what I think Niebuhr is saying. Niebuhr often called himself a Christian realist, a phrase he used quite often. Christian realist. But he actually wrote quite explicitly and clearly against realists without a modifier. And this is what I think a lot of realists today have missed. He actually is very critical of the kind of standard academic or orthodox realism of his day. And I think Niebuhr warns against what he calls a self-defeating realism, of those who are myopically realistic, short-sighted, by seeing only their own interests and failing thereby to do justice to their interests when they are also involved in the interests of others.

So what he’s saying is our national interest oftentimes goes together with other nations’ interests. And when that happens, if we look only at our own, it’s self-defeating. We’re gonna actually miss our own interests. We’re going to fail to achieve our own interests unless we also look at the other nations as well. He warns, a consistent self-interest as the myopically, consistently myopic self-interest on the part of the nation. The United States will work against its interests because it will fail to do justice to the broader and longer interests which are involved with the interests of other nations. If there’s a narrow national loyalty on our part, it will obscure our long-range interests, whether they involve the whole alliance of free nations.

What I think Niebuhr is doing here is offering two different definitions of the national interest. There is a very short-term sense of national interest and a longer-term sense of national interest. We could advocate for our own immediate short-term gain by stiffing the other guy, by lying, cheating, and stealing, by doing whatever we can in the short term to get one up on our adversaries, our opponents, even our allies. Right? By insisting that they pay their fair share, by whatever example you want to come up with, we can pursue our own short-term interest, and it might actually be successful in the short term. But he’s suggesting that there’s another way of conceiving of our national interest, a longer-term way of thinking of our national interest in which investing in relationships with other nations is quite beneficial. Investing in trade relationships, investing in alliance relationships, investing, yes, even in intergovernmental institutions like the UN, like NATO.

This is the difference between, say, for example, a one-time business deal in which you cheat the other guy, and the lifelong business partnership in which you both flourish, a win-win situation. I hate to be that crass, pardon me, but it’s the difference between a one-night stand and a marriage. You could think of either one of those things as being in your “interest”. One of them is very short-term; the other one leads to long-term flourishing. That, I think, is sort of what Niebuhr is getting at, two different ways of thinking about our national interest. And our Christian faith should lead us to that second, longer-term understanding of what our interest is. And that’s what leads us to care about other nations, to understand our national interest is inextricably interwoven with the interests of other like-minded nations around the world.

He talks about the alliance of nations. That’s why, yeah, so that’s the principles of it. Let me just offer a couple of notes of my own how I would apply this. This is why I’ve tended to be fairly critical of the Trump administration’s approach to foreign policy. There are a couple of individual decisions I think that it got right. I think the warnings speech on Afghanistan a year ago was great. Confront Pakistan, great. Sending lethal aid to Ukraine, great. But overall, the ideology of foreign policy embodied by the Trump administration, the nationalist ideology, he just said a few days ago, “I’m a nationalist.” Right? I think that this is a short-term view. When he says “America first,” oftentimes it sounds to me like he’s saying “America only.” That’s the very embodiment of this short-term view that I was getting at. And I think it can be profoundly, it can undermine the United States’ long-term position in the world by pursuing America’s short-term position at the expense of our alliance relationships. My two cents.

Let me offer a second thought on how our Christian faith might shape our thinking towards foreign policy. Because if all you’ve listened to so far is, “Hey, we ought to be idealistic and pursue justice,” well, that does present a possible problem. The problem is how do we avoid crusading, right? If we’re just out for justice and we’re trying to create a world of perfect peace and harmony and justice, that leads to some temptations to be a global crusader, to conquer the world in the name of human rights, to defend the world by conquest. Niebuhr has an answer for this too. And I know that perhaps in the view or concerned about this idea, right? The more idealistic and moralistic your foreign policy is, well, you’re stepping into the realm of utopianism. Niebuhr answers quite clearly that we need to be aware of sin. We need to be aware of human fallibility, human sin. He warned against the “deep layer of Messianic consciousness in the mind of America,” and this should limit what we try to do in the world. This should put pretty clear limits on our moral aspirations.

So while we seek to fight human trafficking and spread religious freedom and so forth, we gotta be careful and we gotta do so in as realistic a way as possible. This is where the realism comes into Christian realism. Niebuhr rightly criticized liberal internationalism, and he was had in mind here the Wilson administration and their followers. He criticized the liberal nationalist for “their fatuous and superficial view of man,” and he excoriated statesmen and guides, again, this is who conjured up all sorts of abstract and absurd plans for the creation of perfect national and international communities. He damned the sentimental softness in a liberal culture that reveals its inability to comprehend the depth of evil to which individuals and communities may sink.

That’s what should cause us to stop ourselves from crusading. We ought to recognize the sin in our own hearts, the very real difficulties of accomplishing stuff in the world. Have you read Clausewitz? You know about the fog and friction of war? This is true. Everything doing stuff is hard, and sin makes it harder. And so we should be very careful in just how zealous we are in our moral crusades. To put it another way, and this is another one of these long abstract quotes, Niebuhr says, “The illusions about the possibility of managing historical destiny from a particular standpoint always involve miscalculations about the power and the wisdom of the managers, the weakness and the manageability of the historical stuff.”

What he’s saying is if we take it upon ourselves to be the managers of history: we’re overestimating ourselves both morally and intellectually, and we’re underestimating the solidity of the world that we’re trying to manage. So we ought to have some humility in how we approach these things. That’s why, even if we want to be idealistic and work for justice and human rights, let’s not pretend that we can accomplish global justice in one generation. That’s not gonna happen. Actually, there are some quite dangerous things that happen if you go down that road.

This should add a caveat to those of us who want to moralize our foreign policy. We cannot solve every problem, we cannot ameliorate all human suffering, and frankly, it is appropriate for the American government to prioritize American lives and American interests in the effort to work for justice, peace, and prosperity. That is absolutely true because it’s our government, it’s our tax dollars. When Paul writes in Romans 13 about God commissioning the government to have a sword, he’s commissioning them—plural, there’s many governments in the world—and the United States government is not commissioned to be the government of the world. We shouldn’t pretend it is, we shouldn’t act like it is.

The United States does have unique responsibilities by dint of our outsized power in the world, and that does give us a sense of responsibility for the broader community of nations. But that does not mean we should give ourselves permission to act as a world government. Let me put it another way: too often, I think Christians gravitate to individual causes—fighting human trafficking, working for religious freedom. I sense, and please don’t take offense at this, because I know some of you have dedicated your lives and careers to these causes—thank you for that, please keep doing it. But here’s a way in which perhaps we need to put it in context and broader perspective.

Too much zealotry for one cause can distort foreign policy. It can turn a particular bureaucracy or bureau into an agent of crusade within the broader bureaucracy, and that can be deeply unhelpful. It can distort foreign policy decision-making, and often it also causes us to ignore the very real and very important day-to-day work of just upkeeping normal order. Quite a lot of the work of foreign policy is just keeping the wheels running, and that is a deeply Christian thing to do. When God made Adam, He put him in the garden and said, “Tend and keep the garden.” That’s good work, that’s the bumper sticker of our vocations—tend and keep the garden of God’s good creation. If we devote all of our efforts to these highly dramatic moralistic crusades, we oftentimes overlook that less glamorous work of just tending and keeping the garden, keeping the wheels running of just doing the normal work of diplomacy and relations among nations. Again, not glamorous, but if you neglect it, it creates some real big problems in the long run.

Let me conclude with just a few notes on the role of ideals in national strategy. If it’s true that we need to be humble and be careful about our own sin, our own weakness, and guard against messianism and utopianism, it may lead us to wonder if it’s worth having ideals at all. Should we just abandon the notion of ideals and idealism and allow ourselves to be a nation among nations, essentially abandon all pretense of exceptionalism and admit that all along we’re just like every other country in the world?

Well, Niebuhr was no stranger to American sins. He wrote quite extensively about the list of things that America got wrong, and I spent a whole chapter in my book relating them all, everything from slavery to manifest destiny to the Mexican War. I mean, look, American foreign policy in the 19th century—it was a matter of driving out Mexicans and Native Americans to make way for slaveholders. That’s not a great track record. But Niebuhr’s response to this is saying that you can only say that America’s hypocritical if you actually started out having ideals in the first place.

And it may be better to be idealistic and hypocritical than to not have ideals at all, because if you don’t have ideals at all, then yes, you truly are just another country. You’re just like every other nation that has ever existed in all of human history—you’re out for power, you’re out for wealth, for prestige and honor, and you will kill, maim, destroy, and conquer in pursuit of those things. That’s human history right there. And if you want to try to be different, you’re going to be a hypocrite because you’re going to fail, you’re going to get it wrong. But at least you’re trying, and perhaps sometimes you may succeed.

Niebuhr says, “Hypocrisy and pretension are the inevitable concomitant of the engagement between morals and politics, but they do not arise where no effort is made to bring the power impulse of politics under the control of conscience.” So it’s good to bring conscience, bring ideals to bear on our political behavior. It’s inevitable that we’re going to be hypocrites because we are sinners, but it’s better to try and fail than not try at all. And that, I think, brings us to my conclusion here, which is that American grand strategy should certainly be marked by ideals, by striving for justice.

And for me, that means investing in the liberal international order because I think that’s the best way to pursue American interests. If you want to put America first, be a globalist. I think the liberal international order is a very effective means of advancing American influence. Liberal order is the outer perimeter of American security. It’s intrinsically good because it creates a world of order, rough justice, and rough equality among nations, and allows nations to flourish and thrive and grow. It also is quite good for America. Can we create a world of perfect peace and justice in our lifetimes? Of course not. Should we try to? Well, we should be very, very cautious in how aggressively we pursue this vision, this dream. It is a dream that drives politics forward. Would you rather stop dreaming? Niebuhr concluded at one point saying, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetimes; therefore, we must be saved by hope.” Thank you.

Hi, I’m Joshua and I’m a grad school grad student at Yale. So, I was curious about your Niebuhrian judgment on the current and last administrations. In one sense, you could say that he’s a Wilsonian liberal multilateralist. On the other hand, he’s somewhat of a pragmatist in recognizing where interests align. He also acknowledges America’s past sins and puts that on an international stage, despite backlash like people disavowing his apology tour. There’s a fight for Obama’s legacy in that sense. He himself said Niebuhr was his favorite theologian, so I’m curious because I’m not convinced you’ve read much of Niebuhr.

Interestingly, Obama gets more airtime in the book; Trump isn’t in it since it was published in 2016. The Obama administration is hard to assess because he spoke like a liberal internationalist but didn’t always act that way. Over eight years, there was an instinct for restraint. Obama exhibited restraint by pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, not intervening in Syria, and his choices regarding Russia post-Ukraine invasion and Iran. His foreign policy’s signature failing was overcorrecting from the Bush record—he did too little in response.

Obama didn’t fully understand the realities of American power and its responsibilities. He seemed to think less action was always the answer. American leadership could have helped in places like Afghanistan and Syria, transitioning from the surge to later years. He started with the right approach but quickly lost faith in his own policies, focusing solely on withdrawal from 2010 onward.

You touched on the growing national trend, particularly within the Christian Church today. Nationalism is an incoherent political ideology because nations don’t actually exist as unified by language or religion. The U.S. has never been unified in that way; ideals are what bind us, not ethnicity or religion. Nationalism can be idolatrous, encouraging us to find fulfillment within a secular political entity. The church should promote unity, not the state. Nationalism often masks political demagoguery and idolatry, so distrust politicians who exploit it.

I’d love to discuss this in more detail during lunchtime.

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