Soviet Russia demonstrated enormously greater fighting ability than has Red China, and yet even that temporarily invincible totalitarian regime is no more.

After a tumultuous start to the post-World War II era and before the Cold War fully commenced, the board of supervisors of Christianity and Crisis issued a joint statement in December 1946 that tried to explain a Christian approach to international issues.

In 1961, Lee Edwards wrote from Germany, “If the United States and its allies do not stand firm, the concentration camp will soon add another two million inmates who presently live in West Berlin.”

Shoup’s actions during Christmastime 1955 offer an un-planned, un-staged snapshot of a political system and world view strikingly different from that of Lenin, Stalin, and Xi—a system founded on the freedom to believe in God or Santa or not, to believe in the meaning of Christmas or not, to believe in Immanuel or not.

Christians should not allow themselves to be swept along on the tides of popular resentment and feeling, but should plant their feet firmly on the rock of fact and of Christian love. Only thus will the truth be discerned amidst the babels of conflicting opinions.

“We have,” said an exuberant campaign orator in the recent campaign, “the moral leadership of the world. The whole world trusts in our devotion to freedom and expects us to save mankind from totalitarianism.” That is how we see ourselves, at least in our more complacent moods. The world does not see us as we see ourselves.

“The resistance to Russian expansion in Europe is right. The spectacle of American progressives supporting Wallace in opposing that resistance brings dismay to most European democrats.”

Keynoting a “Beat Dewey” rally at Madison Square Garden on September 12, 1946, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace warned Americans against the Truman administration’s “get tough with Russia” policy. Reinhold Niebuhr responded.

Like so many of our national security institutions, James Bond is an asset that the West hasn’t quite known what to make of since the end of the Cold War.