Cold War

Two Christian schools of thought might support covert operations and espionage: the just war tradition and a kind of “dirty hands” moralism. The dirty hands view says all those in political power must unavoidably resort to evil for the common good. The just war tradition has a different approach.

We have heard much in recent years about Washington’s “Pacific pivot” aimed at deterring Chinese adventurism in the South China Sea and the “reassurance initiative” aimed at deterring Russian revisionism in Eastern Europe. What has received far less attention is Beijing’s pivot to the Americas and Moscow’s revival of Cold War-style intervention in the Western Hemisphere.

The world still requires order, and that still requires sacrifice. Many now believe we can have world order, peace, stability, and prosperity on the cheap. We can coast merely on soft power (Democrats) or by promoting national interests (Republicans) without the hard work and heavy lifting required to actually maintain that order, whether through diplomacy or hard power.

Turning our backs on NATO will result in an uncertain future wrought with war and conflict that will cost America far more in the end.

America and NATO’s interests in the Arctic—which include territorial integrity, sovereignty, resource exploration and development, trade, and freedom of navigation—are under threat because of Russia’s actions.

There is no nation in which we can place total faith.

Michael Doran’s book shows how the Eisenhower administration made several mistakes in the Middle East, and today policymakers can learn from them.

Headlines stressed French President Macron’s purportedly implied critique of Trump in his address to the United States Congress last week. But more significant is its continuity with the historical American-French friendship, however sometimes bumpy. Macron noted his speech was on the fifty-eighth anniversary of his predecessor President Charles de Gaulle’s 1960 address to the US Congress.

The foreign policies of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt represent an intersection between two different Protestant worldviews.