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The Prudent Cold Warrior

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 September 2012

Russell F. Sizemore
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Abstract

Reinhold Niebuhr's Cold War stance was a middle ground between the harsh amorality of the realists and the overly hopeful liberal view. His liberal realism “endorsed constructive and seemingly altruistic measures because of his interpretation of the threat posed by communism and because of his philosophy of power.” After developing this stance in regards to Russia-U.S. relations, Niebuhr applied it to China. Sizemore explicates Niebuhr's Chinese position to provide a skeptical criticism of Reagan's Central American policies.

Type
Articles
Information
Ethics & International Affairs , Volume 2 , March 1988 , pp. 199 - 217
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1988

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References

1 Ernest Lefever, for example, speaks warmly of the “mature” Niebuhr, between the idealism and radicalism of youth, and the debilitating illness and dovishness of old age. He offers Niebuhr as a model for neoconservatives, the “liberals mugged by reality.”Google Scholar

2 Niebuhr's critique of Marx was strong even in his 1930s work, Moral Man and Immoral Society. His 1953 article, “Why is Communism So Evil?” was more heated but made many of the same points. Even through the late 1940s Niebuhr often wrote of the continuing relevance of Marx for Christian ethics and led an organization called the Fellowship of Socialist Christians. His 1944 volume still commended the socialization of wealth as one method for making economic power morally responsible, and his 1952 volume often read as a diatribe against laissez-faire capitalism.Google Scholar

3 Niebuhr consistently denounced the United States' tendency to ally itself with the more conservative factions of European politics and its idolization of free enterprise. He argued that such reactionary stances gave additional ammunition to communist propaganda. With a typical debater's reversal, Niebuhr took the Marxian critique of Western capitalism seriously and used it, backhandedly, to exhort America to correct itself, so as to prove the critique falseGoogle Scholar.

4 “The Two Dimensions of the Struggle,” Christianity and Crisis 11:9 (May 28, 1951)Google Scholar.

5 For Niebuhr's enthusiasm for positive measures, his celebration of the Marshall Plan, and his arguments for the mixed motives of morally wise statesmen, see the “Editorial Notes” in Christianity and Crisis 7:13 (July 21, 1947)Google ScholarPubMed and 8:2 (February 16, 1948); “America's Wealth and the World's Poverty,” Christianity and Society 12:4 (Autumn 1947)Google Scholar; and “The Marshall Plan,” Christianity and Society 7:17 (October 13, 1947)Google Scholar.

6 Consider this characteristically two-sided exhortation: “The idealists must learn that nothing but a preponderance of power in the non-Communist world can preserve the peace. And the realists must learn that the power, of which we require a preponderance, consists of the unity and the moral and economic health of our world. We must not relax our military defenses. But they must remain subordinate to our main purpose.”“A Protest Against a Dilemma's Two Horns,” World Politics 2:3 (April 1950)Google Scholar.

7 Ibid.Google Scholar

8 “Editorial Notes,” Christianity and Crisis 10:1 (February 6, 1950)Google ScholarPubMed.

9 “A Protest Against a Dilemma's Two Horns,”op. cit., p. 340Google Scholar.

10 Niebuhr's emphasis on ideology also carried some more problematic qualities. It tended to suggest a Manichean struggle between pure good and pure evil, even as so much of the rest of Niebuhr's thought rejected such ideas. It also minimized any common interest the adversaries might share, which could serve as a basis for negotiationsGoogle Scholar.

11 Christianity and Society 14:1 (Summer 1949)Google ScholarPubMed. See also Christianity and Society, 14:3 (Summer 1949)Google ScholarPubMed and “Streaks of Dawn in the Night,” Christianity and Crisis 9:21 (December 12, 1949)Google Scholar.

12 Even the most sympathetic reading of Niebuhr's work during this period must acknowledge that at times his fixation on the mythic qualities of the cold war presented detailed analysis, giving rise to strong bipolar orientationGoogle Scholar.

13 See for example, “Communism in China,” Christianity and Society 15:1 (Winter 1950)Google Scholar; “Should We Be Consistent?” Christianity and Crisis (February 6, 1950)Google Scholar; “Our Position in Asia,” Christianity and Society 15:3 (Summer 1950)Google Scholar; and “The Conditions of Our Survival,” The Virginia Quarterly 26:4 (Autumn 1950)Google Scholar.

14 “The Conditions of Our Survival,” The Virginia Quarterly 26:4 (Autumn 1950) p. 483Google Scholar.

15 Niebuhr savaged conservatives in American politics at every opportunity, particularly on domestic matters. Three pieces devoted specifically to conservative failures in foreign policy during this particular period were “American Conservatism and the World Crisis: A Study in Vacillation,” The Yale Review 40:3 (March 1951)Google Scholar; “The Republican Split on Foreign Policy,” The New Leader 35:19 (May 12, 1952)Google Scholar; and an essay from his 1953 collection, Christian, Realism and Political Problems, “The Foreign Policy of American Liberalism and Conservatism.”

16 “Streaks of Dawn in the Night,”op. cit.Google Scholar

17 For sources of Niebuhr's critique of American conservatives' foreign policy, and political philosophy generally, see the references in note 15, aboveGoogle Scholar.

18 “Should We Be Consistent?” Christianity and Crisis 10:1 (February 6, 1950)Google Scholar.

19 See Niebuhr's exchange with Carr, Albert in The Nation 171:17 (October 21, 1950) and 171:20 (November 11, 1950)Google Scholar.

20 The main impact of his pessimism was not support for dictators, but the freedom to call them what they wereGoogle Scholar.

21 An outstanding analysis of Niebuhr's views and his relation to the other giants of realism on the notion of national interest and the way the wise statesman defines it may be found in Robert C. Good's, “The National Interest and Political Realism, Niebuhr's ‘Debate’ with Kennan and Morgenthau,”Journal of Politics 22:4 (November 1960).Google Scholar

22 “The Twilight of Internationalism,”Foreign Policy (Winter 1985–1986)Google Scholar.

23 “Morality and the Reagan Doctrine,” The New Republic 195:10 (September 8, 1986)Google Scholar, and “The Poverty of Realism,” The New Republic 194:7 (February 17, 1986)Google Scholar.

24 Hughes traced precisely these trends in the history of internationalism's decline; Krauthammer is at work trying to regain the “moral high ground” for them. See the articles listed above and “The Multilateral Fallacy,” The New Republic 193:24 (December 9, 1985)Google Scholar, and his most recent piece, “Let it Sink: Why the U.S. Should Bail Out of the U.N.,” The New Republic 197:8 (August 24, 1987)Google Scholar.

25 See “American Power and World Responsibility,” Christianity and Crisis (April 5, 1943)Google Scholar. This was also Niebuhr's concluding warning in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (New York: Macmillan, 1977)Google ScholarPubMed, written in 1944.

26 For an idea of what a more discriminating approach would look like in practice, See Solarz, Stephen J., “When to Intervene,” Foreign Policy (Summer 1986)Google Scholar. For a similar critique of the Reagan Doctrine with attention to prudence and with the linkage of prudence to morality in the form of world order goals, see Rosenfeld, Stephen S., “The Guns of July,” Foreign Affairs 64:4 (Spring 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.