Cold War

In late winter and early spring 1947, Reinhold Niebuhr visited Europe and wrote short editorials for Christianity and Crisis as he traveled. In the following correspondences, the first coming from Scotland and the second coming from somewhere in the United Kingdom, he offers brief reflections on different current events.

We are told that a policy of firmness must inevitably lead to war, while conciliation could guarantee peace. In the Nazi days this was called appeasement.

The present need is to deter China and Russia. This is why a “cold war” and a “just war” response is necessary.

This week the editors discuss the Ukraine-Russia crisis, an article by Mark Royce comparing the Soviet threat during the Cold War and the current China challenge, and a book review of Tracy McKenzie’s We the Fallen People.

Soviet Russia demonstrated enormously greater fighting ability than has Red China, and yet even that temporarily invincible totalitarian regime is no more.

With Ukraine languishing outside the safety of the NATO alliance, the consensus seems to be that there is little the alliance can do as Putin enforces his latter-day Brezhnev Doctrine. That consensus view is wrong.

Someone like me who once lived in a totalitarian society finds it surprising and troubling that so many American churches have defined their mission as “to work for peace and justice in our world” but have neglected the defense of freedom as an essential part of their public ministry.

It would be hard to hold this belief and to live up to it, but it may be that only through some such holy act of imagination can we, in all humility, hope to possess the sober serenity called for in these days.

After a tumultuous start to the post-World War II era and before the Cold War fully commenced, the board of supervisors of Christianity and Crisis issued a joint statement in December 1946 that tried to explain a Christian approach to international issues.