Butterfield did not offer us Christian apologetics, but he did offer a Christian understanding of history far more appealing than Lewis’s dismissal of the project.     

What we can gain from the origins of the Great War is that strategic ambiguity played a role in bringing on that cataclysm.

Recognizing the place for a genuine religious hope born of faith and for an enthusiasm for realization of social and ethical gains in any historical situation, Christianity will nevertheless, when true to itself, set its face against utopianism or popular brands of optimism.

A look at the history of Iran-Russia relations demonstrates the same pattern of Russian regimes exploiting Iranian resources. Most evidently, tsarist Russia obstructed the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–07, and the Soviet Union attempted to create a satellite state in the Azerbaijan province of Iran.

At the end of Reinhold Niebuhr’s travels across Western Europe in 1947, he spent a week at the Ecumenical Institute, a facility near Geneva. He was hopeful of how this project would bless the church life of the world, and he offered observations about discussions there about communism, church-state relations, Christian political parties, and more.

In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.

Now what is here symbolized has been the most fundamental idea in our American democracy. Ours is a government by discussion.

Brands offers seven key lessons for his readers about what he terms a “twilight struggle,” a period of high-stakes competition between great powers that occurs between the darkness of war and daylight of peace.

Over the centuries, the neutrality of some countries has provided many benefits, including for international law and global diplomacy.