Cold War

America cannot orchestrate regime change in Russia.  But we must hope for it and entrust Russia’s future to a just Providence whose patience with wicked rulers is not unlimited.

Living in truth was Václav Havel’s basic answer to the problem of falsehood, one of the defining characteristics of the ideology and regime that ruled Czechoslovakia until 1989.

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.

In the case of Taiwan, however, disproportionate focus on the Cold War can obscure other historical cases, such as Britain’s commitment to Belgium, that provide useful lessons for preventing geopolitical catastrophe.

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.