Realism, Reconsidered (Reinhold Neibuhr)

It seems that Mr. Neibuhr's views are becoming fashionable again. Pity they ever went out of fashion. they should be required reading before taking an oath of office.

The Bush years are a fine time to rediscover the place of self-criticism in patriotism, the corruption of nationalism by self-love. And yet the liberal construction of Niebuhr's idea disturbs me. A connection is angrily made between the heartlessness of much of Bush's domestic policy and the thoughtlessness of much of Bush's foreign policy, to the effect that we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place. Our power is neutralized by our imperfection. Now, whatever one's opinion of the Iraq war, this was not Niebuhr's view of the relation of morality to force. More generally, it is an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. So I do not see what bearing the reform of Congress or the repeal of the tax cut will have upon the objectives and the methods of our struggle against Islamism. Green yourselves all you want, they will still wish to kill you. When I hear liberals synchronizing all things, I am reminded not of Reinhold Niebuhr but of his very opposite among the intellectuals of his time, the charismatic and repulsive Simone Weil. She wrote in 1939 that France's colonial possessions could disqualify it from the fight against the Third Reich, because "there must not be a single genuine lover of freedom in the whole world who can have a valid reason for hating France." In 1939! Weil hated totalitarianism, but she loved purity. Niebuhr insisted that in politics purity is a sin. The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. Policy is not the work of monists. The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.

Realism, reconsidered