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.

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.

The Mosfilm war movies collection greatly enhances understanding of the political psychology of contemporary Russian external aggression, especially the otherwise almost inexplicable official framing of the Ukrainian invasion

“Unless we accept the Russian view of the nature of man, we cannot work with the USSR to a common end for human society.”

John F. Kennedy never flinched, but he showed his mettle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was his finest hour. Will this one be ours?

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

In 1961, Lee Edwards wrote from Germany, “If the United States and its allies do not stand firm, the concentration camp will soon add another two million inmates who presently live in West Berlin.”

Shoup’s actions during Christmastime 1955 offer an un-planned, un-staged snapshot of a political system and world view strikingly different from that of Lenin, Stalin, and Xi—a system founded on the freedom to believe in God or Santa or not, to believe in the meaning of Christmas or not, to believe in Immanuel or not.

“We have,” said an exuberant campaign orator in the recent campaign, “the moral leadership of the world. The whole world trusts in our devotion to freedom and expects us to save mankind from totalitarianism.” That is how we see ourselves, at least in our more complacent moods. The world does not see us as we see ourselves.