Cold War

Niebuhr realized that an overweening faith in the powers of human rationality was a severely misplaced and perpetual threat which has reemerged in 2022 America. 

Gorbachev was different from all his predecessors. He knew how cruel the Soviet system was.

The United States are not prepared for a cold war with China over Taiwan, yet to avoid it, America needs to start acting as if they were already upon them, and learn from the last one.

Some America First Republicans are nearly indistinguishable from the standard fare retreaters we were served from the “Blame America First” leftists of the Cold War.

When in 1967 the University of Virginia recruited Professor Norman A. Graebner from the University of Illinois to teach diplomatic history, a huge row ensued.

The economic aid which is required could not be a matter of pure generosity. Nations as nations are incapable of such generosity.

“The people of Munich were informed by proclamation of the city administration that the requisition of private homes for army housing was to be carried through, and to a greater extent than had been hitherto feared.”

From 1945 to 1947 as the United States and Soviet Union moved toward the Cold War, Christian realists writing for Reinhold Niebuhr’s journal, Christianity and Crisis, responded to global dilemmas. Here are five impressions of those articles, along with lessons for today.

At the end of Reinhold Niebuhr’s travels across Western Europe in 1947, he spent a week at the Ecumenical Institute, a facility near Geneva. He was hopeful of how this project would bless the church life of the world, and he offered observations about discussions there about communism, church-state relations, Christian political parties, and more.