INTERESTS ARE FOR THOSE WITHOUT MORALS:

An American Foreign Policy That Both Realists and Idealists Should Fall in Love With (ROBERT WRIGHT, 7/16/06, NY Times)

[I]t’s now possible to build a foreign policy paradigm that comes close to squaring the circle — reconciling the humanitarian aims of idealists with the powerful logic of realists. And adopting this paradigm could make the chaos of the last week less common in the future.

Every paradigm needs a name, and the best name for this one is progressive realism. The label has a nice ring (Who is against progress?) and it aptly suggests bipartisan appeal. This is a realism that could attract many liberals and a progressivism that could attract some conservatives.

With such crossover potential, this paradigm might even help Democrats win a presidential election. But Democrats can embrace it only if they’re willing to annoy an interest group or two and also reject a premise common in Democratic policy circles lately: that the key to a winning foreign policy is to recalibrate the party’s manhood — just take boilerplate liberal foreign policy and add a testosterone patch. Even if that prescription did help win an election, it wouldn’t succeed in protecting America. [...]

Progressive realism begins with a cardinal doctrine of traditional realism: the purpose of American foreign policy is to serve American interests. [...]

There is a principle here that goes beyond arms control: the national interest can be served by constraints on America’s behavior when they constrain other nations as well. This logic covers the spectrum of international governance, from global warming (we’ll cut carbon dioxide emissions if you will) to war (we’ll refrain from it if you will).

This doesn’t mean joining the deepest devotees of international law and vowing never to fight a war that lacks backing by the United Nations Security Council. But it does mean that, in the case of Iraq, ignoring the Security Council and international opinion had excessive costs: (1) eroding the norm against invasions not justified by self-defense or imminent threat; (2) throwing away a golden post-9/11 opportunity to strengthen the United Nations’ power as a weapons inspector. The last message we needed to send is the one President Bush sent: countries that succumb to pressure to admit weapons inspectors will be invaded anyway. Peacefully blunting the threats posed by nuclear technologies in North Korea and Iran would be tricky in any event, but this message has made it trickier. (Ever wonder why Iran wants “security guarantees”?)

The administration’s misjudgment in Iraq highlights the distinction — sometimes glossed over by neoconservatives — between transparency and regime change. Had we held off on invasion, demanding in return that United Nations inspections be expanded and extended, we could have rendered Iraq transparent, confirming that it posed no near-term threat. Regime change wasn’t essential. [...]

The slaughter in Darfur, though a humanitarian crisis, is also a security issue, given how hospitable collapsed states can be to terrorists. But if addressing the Darfur problem will indeed help thwart terrorism internationally, then the costs of the mission should be shared.

President Bush’s belated diplomatic involvement in Darfur suggests growing enlightenment, but sluggish ad hoc multilateralism isn’t enough. We need multilateral structures capable of decisively forceful intervention and nation building — ideally under the auspices of the United Nations, which has more global legitimacy than other candidates. America should lead in building these structures and thereafter contribute its share, but only its share. To some extent, the nurturing of international institutions and solid international law is simple thrift.

And the accounting rules are subtle. [...]

Of course, resources aren’t infinite, and the world has lots of problems. But focusing on national interest helps focus resources. Notwithstanding last week’s carnage in the Middle East, more people have been dying in Sri Lanka’s civil war than in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. But given the threat of anti-American Islamist terrorism, forging a lasting two-state solution in the Middle East is a higher priority than bringing lasting peace to Sri Lanka.

This sounds harsh, but it is only acknowledgment of something often left unsaid: a nation’s foreign policy will always favor the interests of its citizens and so fall short of moral perfection. We can at least be thankful that history, by intertwining the fates of peoples, is bringing national interest closer to moral ideals.

The obvious problem for Mr. Wright is that the moral ideals that America seeks to vindicate are Judeo-Christian and that means that it will never be the "purpose of American foreign policy...to serve American interests." Interests can not be squared with morals. For instance, the Realists are uniformly hostile to Israel because it would serve our "interests" to remove that irritant from the Middle East. American foreign policy, hoever, is and always has been pro-Israel for exclusively moral reasons. Likewise, it couldn't matter less to our "interests" how many Jews a Hitler kills, how many Shi'ites and Kurds a Saddam kills, how many blacks in Darfur the Arabs kill, how badly Haiti is run, etc... We intervene -- over and over and over again, in situations with virtually no strategic implications -- because it is morally right, even when it is directly against our own interests.

Our foreign policy in no way approaches moral perfection, but it is morally motivated and an argument against that historical truth is unrealistic.

MORE:
The Prophet and the Evangelist: The public "conversation" of Reinhold Niebuhr and Billy Graham. (Andrew S. Finstuen, July/August 2006, Books & Culture)

In 1948, the well-known neo-orthodox1 theologian Reinhold Niebuhr appeared on the cover of Time magazine's 25th anniversary edition. Niebuhr's stern visage was accompanied by the original sin-inspired caption: "Man's story is not a success story." Six years later, a portrait of evangelist Billy Graham stared directly out at Time's readers. A Garden of Eden scene, complete with a naked Eve and a menacing serpent coiled around the tree of knowledge, provided the backdrop.

Their respective cover appearances were more than mere happenstance. These two giants of American Protestantism revitalized the doctrine of original sin in the post-World War II era. Their interpretations of sin differed: Niebuhr focused on the complexities of individual and social sin, while Graham focused almost exclusively on individual sin. Indeed, Niebuhr had little patience for what he referred to as Graham's "pietistic individualism," which asserted that the solution to the world's problems was individual regeneration. Despite this theological divide, Niebuhr saw great potential in the ministry of Graham, and he poked and prodded the evangelist in several mid-Fifties articles aimed in part at helping Graham realize his potential as a prophetic leader within American Protestantism. For a brief moment, then, these two leading Christian personalities were not so much polarized from one another as typically imagined but rather in "conversation" with one another. And to a large degree, ministers and some lay believers of the day followed the conversation closely, appreciating each thinker for his respective gifts to the community of the faithful.

Yet few scholars have recognized this basic point of contact in the thought of Niebuhr and Graham, however distinct their interpretations of sin, nor have they given careful consideration to the space they shared within the mid-century public sphere. As the two most recognizable faces of postwar Protestantism (Paul Tillich and Norman Vincent Peale were the others), Niebuhr and Graham's thought was often juxtaposed in popular periodicals. In 1955, McCall's asked the nation's religious leaders, "Is our religious revival real?" Graham and Niebuhr joined a handful of other respondents by expressing suspicion of the "revival." The thrust of their reservations had a similar tone. Graham announced, "God is interested in the quality of converts, not quantity." Niebuhr also questioned the "quality" of the surging church-going population. He wondered whether "this generation is not expressing its desire to believe in something," though perhaps unwilling "to be committed to a God who can be known only through repentance."

This was not an isolated incident. Both figures voiced their concerns about the depth of the revival frequently, doing so again alongside one another in a Newsweek article in 1955. That same year, The Reader's Digest printed Graham and Niebuhr's reflections, one after the other, on the prospect of world peace. Both were hopeful but not unrealistic; they each cited the corruption of human nature as the biggest obstacle to any lasting peace. [...]

[G]raham startled the Protestant world with his admission in 1958 that he had read "nearly everything Mr. Niebuhr has written." Graham apparently meant what he said. As late as the 1980s, Graham claimed: "Look, I need some more Reinhold Niebuhrs in my life. I would say Reinhold Niebuhr was a great contributor to me. He helped me work through some of my problems."

Niebuhr never went quite so far as to profess any Grahamian influence on his work, but he never ceased praising Graham for his sincerity, integrity, and certain aspects of his evangelism. Niebuhr noted in a 1955 New Republic article, for instance, that Graham's "fundamentalist version of the Christian faith . . . expresses some of the central themes of the Christian faith. He demands that men be confronted with God in Christ; and hopes that this confrontation will lead to conversion." (We should note in passing that even as Niebuhr characterized Graham thus, fundamentalists were denouncing the evangelist.) Niebuhr also consistently distinguished Graham from the "success cult" of Norman Vincent Peale. Graham, Niebuhr thought, had something of the prophet in him in comparison with Peale. [...]

To his credit, Graham tackled the race problem in Life magazine seven weeks after Niebuhr's "Proposal." The article, one of the more substantive pieces Graham ever produced for popular consumption, ran for six pages, brooking no compromise with racism and segregation. A companion article—no doubt encouraged by Graham—featured a dialogue regarding the problem of integration among some leading evangelical Protestants, including Graham's father-in-law, L. Nelson Bell. Both articles denounced racism as unbiblical, though the latter article advocated a gradualist approach to desegregation.

Graham's article opened with overtones of deflection as well. He painted the problem of discrimination on a broader North American and worldwide canvas. The Dutch, the English, New Englanders, and, of course, Southerners shared in the shame and sin of American slavery and racism. At the same time, he stated the problem frankly: "We have sown flagrant human injustice and we have reaped a harvest of racial strife."

Niebuhr read the article and judged it, not surprisingly, incomplete. The editors of Christian Century commissioned a rebuttal from Niebuhr, but he declined. Although he contended "he [Graham] did not answer my challenge in his Life article," Niebuhr felt strongly that it would be inappropriate to challenge him again, "since many of the readers will not have seen Life and will not know whether he answered adequately or not." Niebuhr's negative assessment bespoke a stubborn pride. Graham had risen to his counterpart's "proposal" but Niebuhr refused to see it.

Graham had directly addressed the essence of Niebuhr's charge against his ministry. Niebuhr had accused Graham, despite his "enlightened" attitude on the issue of race, of ignoring the Christian "demand of love" that transcended "racial boundaries." For Niebuhr, it was not enough to condemn racial prejudice. The Christian must recognize his complicity in the corporate sin of racism, repent, and pursue a "whole-souled effort to give the Negro neighbor his full due as man and brother."28 Graham answered Niebuhr point by point with a thesis statement fully attentive to the intricacy of social sin, the temptation to complacency, and the need for honest contrition:

It is fashionable in some circles to tolerate current evils because of their tremendous complexity and the knotty problems involved in any attempt to improve the state of affairs. We and our fathers have made the situation what it is. In the midst of this tangled web it is more than ever our responsibility to weave a pattern of justice—and more than justice: the principle of the Golden Rule, the spirit of neighbor-love, and the experience of redemptive love and forgiveness.

The article continued with an unequivocal refutation of biblical arguments for racism. Any arguments maintaining that Jesus "never specifically denounced slavery" were "silly," since Jesus regarded any violation of "neighbor-love" a sin. Graham also disputed other scriptural defenses of racial difference, for example the curse of Ham, concluding: "There may be reasons that men give for practicing racial discrimination, but let's not make the mistake of pleading the Bible to defend it." In perhaps unspoken deference to Niebuhr, he further recognized the social obligations of Christians and the importance of combating the collective evil of segregation. The gospel of "pietistic individualism" that Niebuhr so reacted against remained, but Graham insisted that individual regeneration could not be separated from social regeneration. "The pulpit does only half its job," wrote Graham, when it "neglects the 'power' for social reconstruction peculiar to the Christian religion."

Graham, like Niebuhr, also paid homage to secular advances in race relations that outdistanced any Christian efforts at reconciliation. This "tragedy of 20th Century Christianity" notwithstanding, Graham maintained that "true neighbor-love" was only possible through Christianity, more specifically through individual salvation from sin. For Graham, one had to begin with the individual. An unrepentant person—whether Christian or non-Christian—could not possibly conjure the humility necessary to embark successfully on such an important social problem. The openness of a "twice born" Christian toward his "Negro" brother exceeded that of both the secular individual and the uncommitted "Christian." The truly penitent understood the abundant sin of individual and corporate life through confrontation with God.

In short, the judged should not judge one another. But Graham anticipated the Niebuhrian critique of this undo sanctification of the Christian, arguing that even the "twice born" fell short of this Christian ideal. Graham summarized his position powerfully:

The church, if it aims to be the true church, dares not segregate the message of good racial relations from the message of regeneration, for the human race is sinful—and man as sinner is prone to desert God and Neighbor alike. When he receives Christ as his Saviour being regenerated by the Holy Spirit he finds a power that turns the social patterns upside down. The twice-born man may not live up to his possibilities—and it is sad he falls so far short—but he has the possibilities and potentialities of Christ, and we had better not neglect this tremendous fact in our preaching and teaching.

In this instance, Graham was the prophetic equal of Niebuhr. Niebuhr devoted his career to extolling the ultimate superiority of the Christian perspective against other "schemes of meaning." In other words, he believed that individual Christians working together had the best chance of enacting the love principle, however inadequately, here on earth and of achieving the closest approximation of peaceful coexistence with the neighbor. Graham's view of the church, if only for a moment, matched Niebuhr's conceptualization of the duties of the Christian life.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2006 8:56 AM