Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR)

Peace with Russia, as in Soviet times, has always been unpalatable but necessary.

For the last several years liberalism has seemed at risk of being added to the endangered ideologies list, perhaps soon…

Though the government cannot make us virtuous, our leaders can challenge us to be better than we often are.  

We were stirred, never shaken, by our real-life James Bond figure. Sir John Wheeler-Bennett was the picture of an English aristocrat, without a hint of stuffiness. So genial, so approachable, we young University of Virginia students were thrilled by each of his lectures on diplomatic history—especially about anything on England and Germany in the interwar period.

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.

With Vladimir Putin’s planned two-day war to topple Ukraine’s democratically elected government now in its third month and Russian casualties piling into the tens of thousands, concerns abound that Putin might take increasingly drastic steps to alter the disastrous situation he faces on the battlefield. To prevent those grim prospects—or at least contain their effects—President Joe Biden should turn to the playbook his predecessors drafted.

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.

The struggle for that free and decent world never ends this side of the parousia.

The surprise attack 80 years ago, although killing over 2000 and sinking much of the fleet, only shocked the dynamo into still greater energy.