It is childish to demand the real world conform to one’s fancy; it is childlike to learn about the real world by playing in an imaginary one. Both the idealist and the cynical realist are childish. The Christian realist, by contrast, should be childlike.

In “The Education of an Idealist,” Samantha Power comes across as a compassionate person with generous impulses. These attributes cannot by themselves determine policy on the question of humanitarian interventions.

Idealists argue China’s increasing power will not result in a hegemonic war with the US. They are dead wrong.

Do not be too hard on politicians who struggle with and differ on their answers to these questions about the COVID-19 and the lockdowns. These are very hard things, and there is no indisputable right answer.

Beginning in 1940, Reinhold Niebuhr made the case for a sober, realistic, and morally grounded US involvement overseas, out of the central admission that whatever America’s own faults, a punctilious detachment from world affairs might very well result in the triumph of greater imbalances and injustices

Neither active idealism (a massive humanitarian intervention) nor defensive realism (an anticommunist security strategy) quite comes to grips with the Marshall Plan’s rationale. Americans would not have been so committed to spending these large, sacrificial sums except that their own core beliefs, values, and institutions were at risk.

Many Christian elites will not like Donald Trump’s United Nations speech this week, whose key phrase was “we reject the ideology of globalism and accept the doctrine of patriotism.”

Most Christians, including most evangelicals, have been falling over themselves to denounce Jeff Sessions. But the way this immigration debate is carried out too often mirrors the political debate.

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