Peace

We should seek a summit meeting with Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelenskyy at Torgau in Germany. We need a negotiated end to the current war in Ukraine.

I appreciate Michael McKoy’s recent “What Does Pacifism Have to Say About Ukraine?” But I remain unimpressed by the pacifist view.

Pacifism argues that the only means of breaking the cycles of violence is to recognize the short-term and long-term devastation of war, examine the decisions and dynamics that perpetuate these cycles, and make the tough decisions necessary to reject violence and ensure peace.

This week the editors discuss Alan Dowd’s suggestion for offering Putin an off-ramp, Mike Watson’s article about the value of America’s empire of nations, and Mark Tooley’s comparison of Christian realism with cynicism and idealism.

President Roosevelt first enunciated the Four Freedoms in an evening session with his speechwriters. He made them the peroration of his message to Congress and wove them into the Atlantic Charter and the United Nations Charter. They have constituted the basis of American foreign policy ever since. Now is the time to reaffirm them.

Today, after Russia has completely abjured socialist ideals, leftist “peace” movements promote Russian foreign policy narratives. What, then, motivates them?

“Prevention of war lies primarily in cultivation of the bases of peace.” This sentence taken from the report of the preparatory commission of UNESCO.

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.

Melissa Florer-Bixler is angry, and she wants her fellow Mennonites to get angry, too. At least, that is the professed premise of her book, “How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace.”