Realism

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.

From this moral realism, it is justified to strive for a balance of power to realize a little more justice or a little less injustice.

Just war thinking is moral analysis of military action, not a framework for foreign policy. Acknowledging these limitations helps us to become better just war casuists, and it highlights the need for values-driven strategic thinking in the foreign policy sphere.

Another report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) forecasted the potential consequences of climate change. But even if more voters begin to believe the issue is important, they may still not support the environmentalists’ policies.

“The Good American” is the story of how Robert Gersony, a high school dropout, affected governmental actions to reduce human misery and advance human rights. Because of his success in promoting humanitarian values, Kaplan calls him the US government’s “greatest humanitarian.”

Some idealists may blame the selfishness of wealthy governments and their citizens for COVAX’s failure, but the organizers should have considered mankind’s selfish nature when designing the program.

In this article originally published by Christianity and Crisis on March 18, 1946, Charles W. Gilkey warns Americans not to worry that helping people abroad will make them “suckers.”

“A Christian knows, or ought to know, that an adequate Christian political ethic is not established merely by conceiving the most ideal possible solution for a political problem. He must, in all humility, deal with the realities of human nature, as well as the ideal possibilities.”

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.