In January 1941 America’s president scribbled a very short note to the British prime minister, whose nation was alone against a Nazi occupied Europe, including a then German-aligned Soviet Union. He sent the note via his 1940 Republican presidential opponent, who agreed with FDR about supporting Britain. The note quoted a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:
Dear Churchill
Wendell Wilkie will give you this–He is truly helping to keep politics out over here.
I think this verse applies to you people as it does to us:
“Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.”
As ever yours
Franklin D. Roosevelt
They were only words. But as Churchill once noted, words are the only things that last. And he shared these words on a radio broadcast to the world in one of his most famous speeches. A little more than six weeks later, Congress approved the Lend-Lease Act, unleashing U.S. aid and weapons without charge to Britain, which was nearing insolvency after two years of war.
America is a great nation for many reasons. But three of its greatest moments were the emergency shipments of arms to beleaguered democracies. In 1941 U.S. and Allied ships braved the U-boat infested North Atlantic to succor Britain. In 1973, U.S. aircraft, refused landing rights in Europe, perilously flew arms to Israel when under surprise attack by Egypt and Syria. And in 2022, the U.S., defying Russian threats, accelerated arms shipments to Ukraine as it struggled, like Britain and Israel, against numerically greater invading forces.
All three missions were moral, just, and wise, defending victimized nations against aggressors that were also enemies of America. FDR had described America as the “arsenal of democracy.” Nixon, in 1973, when ordering the emergency arms airlift to Israel, cryptically ordered: “Get everything into the air that can fly.”
Of course, all three missions were widely denounced. In 1941 General Robert Wood of the America First Committee denounced Lend-Lease for prioritizing other nations at the expense of America. The airlift to Israel was denounced for antagonizing Arab oil producers, whose embargo generated gas shortages, recession and contributed to Nixon’s demise. Over the last three years, critics have denounced Ukraine as corrupt and unworthy of U.S. help.
Perhaps opposition to all three can be called “populist” by relying on grievance against perceived elites. In this mindset, the “real” Americans are ignored and exploited by the geopolitical games of the more powerful. And in this mindset, anything sent overseas is, by definition, a subtraction from naïve America, which is always exploited. The riposte across decades is always: Let’s put America first.
But no nation, large or small, can look only inward, ignoring external threats. And no great nation can abjure geopolitical responsibilities that maintain its greatness. Nor can any nation, at its own peril, forget its own national character. From the start, America has defined itself as a beacon of liberty and a friend to the oppressed. Any attempted shift to nakedly cynical transactionalism, focused exclusively on the material at the expense of virtue and spirituality, will deflate our nation. An America that is scornful, sneering, and exploitative would no longer be America.
Christian Realism understands that nations have histories, destinies, and characters that, for better or worse, cannot be easily changed. The United States, founded on the Declaration of Independence, is intrinsically a nation committed to justice and humanity. It may take long excursions away from that path. But its trajectory, short of irretrievable calamity, will always bring it back.
In 1932, the architect of Christian Realism, Reinhold Niebuhr, challenged his theologian brother Richard for advocating passive acceptance of Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in an article called “The Grace of Doing Nothing.” According to Richard:
The inactivity of radical Christianity is not the inactivity of those who call evil good; it is the inaction of those who do not judge their neighbors because they cannot fool themselves into a sense of superior righteousness. It is not the inactivity of a resigned patience, but of a patience that is full of hope, and is based on faith.
Brother Reinhold, emerging from his previous pacifism, countered in “Must We Do Nothing” that such perfectionism, seeing all parties as sinful and therefore counseling inaction, was unacceptable to the suffering:
Love may qualify the social struggle of history but it will never abolish it, and those who make the attempt to bring society under the dominion of perfect love will die on the cross. And those who behold the cross are quite right in seeing it as a revelation of the divine, of what man ought to be but cannot be, at least not so long as he is enmeshed in the processes of history.
And:
It would be better to come to ethical terms with the forces of nature in history, and try to use ethically directed coercion in order that violence may be avoided…In practice, specific and contemporary terms this means that we must try to dissuade Japan from her military venture, but must use coercion to frustrate her designs if necessary, must reduce coercion to a minimum and prevent it from issuing in violence, must engage in constant self-analysis in order to reduce the moral conceit of Japan’s critics and judges to a minimum, and must try in every social situation to maximize the ethical forces and yet not sacrifice the possibility of achieving an ethical goal because we are afraid to use any but purely ethical means.
More simply, the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good. Richard Niebuhr thought America too sinful to judge much less coerce Japan. Reinhold Niebuhr insisted that sinners must still make moral judgements and protect victims even with flawed means and motives.
Reinhold Niebuhr founded Christianity and Crisis magazine in early 1941 to argue for American Christian solidarity with the Allies against the Axis. There can be no doubt that he would favor supporting Ukraine while also appreciating the mixed motives and venalities of all involved parties. But moral complexity does not excuse indifference or withdrawal.
As to recent days, Niebuhr would abhor the deliberate obscuring of moral clarity by denying that Ukraine was invaded or demonizing its democratically elected leader while withholding critique of the actual dictator who launched the war, from which tens of thousands have died. Christian Realism understands that nobody is completely innocent, but some are guiltier than others, often exponentially.
Any negotiated peace for Ukraine will be highly flawed but, we pray, will preserve Ukraine’s liberty. Such peace will not be achieved through pandering to the aggressor or mocking that invader’s victims. (During the Korean peace negotiations, President Eisenhower never publicly condemned South Korea’s president, who could be exasperating, or acclaimed the dictators of North Korea and China.) The current power equation, as in Korea in 1953, will prevent full recompense for Ukraine and full justice against Russia’s tyrant. But with time, hopefully Ukraine can prosper as South Korea has, even as North Korea remains malevolent and dangerous. Ironically, North Korean troops now are Russia’s mercenaries against Ukraine, evincing that yesterday’s failures ricochet to the present. Today’s failures will ricochet into the future.
In the fullness of God’s own time, the tyrannies of Russia and North Korea will meet divine judgement, and their victims will have freedom and decency. There should be no equivocation about where America stands. Even if current officials will not, other Americans, better attuned to our national character, should to Ukraine echo Roosevelt’s wishes to Churchill via Longfellow’s poem:
Sail on, Oh Ship of State!
Sail on, Oh Union strong and great.
Humanity with all its fears
With all the hope of future years
Is hanging breathless on thy fate.
