Cold War

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.

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.

This remembrance helps develop a confident, enduring Christian hope that is more than wishful thinking and leads to real-world action.

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.”

Christians should not allow themselves to be swept along on the tides of popular resentment and feeling, but should plant their feet firmly on the rock of fact and of Christian love. Only thus will the truth be discerned amidst the babels of conflicting opinions.

“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.

We are in a battle with despair these days. One cannot but regret interpretations which weigh the struggle on the side of defeat, especially when one’s own judgment is that such interpretations leave out great areas of fact which give one the right to cherish hope.