Realism

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.

HBO’s The Final Year traverses the globe, from Africa to the Arctic, Havana to Hanoi, but it is in Syria where the cockfight personified by Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes climaxes. Indeed, President Obama claims that “on no other issue was there such a split” between them.

China is ready to challenge American global leadership and the liberal international order itself. In Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap?, Graham Allison argues that a war between the two great powers is a scarily real possibility that needs our attention.

In this article, originally published in Christianity and Crisis on April 19, 1943, F. Ernest Johnson illuminates the twin wartime concerns of brutality and cynicism. Johnson illustrates the importance of maintaining public morality; losing compassion for the enemy will scuttle the peace and instigate the next war, while ignoring social influence in determining personal ethics invariably corrodes society on a more insidious level. To paraphrase John 17: 14-19, we must be in the world, but not of it.

While realists and liberal internationalists typically argue about whether the goal of foreign policy should be to achieve pragmatic objectives or to support our fundamental beliefs about the value of human lives, adherents to either school likely would agree that working to end the scourge of the North Korean slave trade meets the threshold for action.

With his novel concept of sovereign obligation in A World in Disarray, Richard Haass makes an important advance in the search for peace in a disoriented world. But its advances fall short, unable to grasp the essential moral quality of world order.