[Peace-discuss] Obama and Niebuhr?

[Morton K. Brussel]

An interesting reflection on Rheinhold Niebuhr, Obama,  and original  
sin. Clearly, something has changed as a result of the election.  
Maybe not enough, though.

Published on Thursday, November 6, 2008 by The Boston Globe
Evangelical Foreign Policy Is Over

by Andrew J. Bacevich
With Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the evangelical  
moment in US foreign policy has come to an end. The United States  
remains a nation of believers, with Christianity the tradition to  
which most Americans adhere. Yet the religious sensibility informing  
American statecraft will no longer find expression in an urge to  
launch crusades against evil-doers.

Like our current president, Obama is a professed Christian. Yet  
whereas George W. Bush once identified Jesus Christ himself as his  
favorite philosopher, the president-elect is an admirer of Reinhold  
Niebuhr, the renowned Protestant theologian.

Faced with difficult problems, conservative evangelicals ask WWJD:  
What would Jesus do? We are now entering an era in which the occupant  
of the Oval Office will consider a different question: What would  
Reinhold do?

During the middle third of the last century, Niebuhr thought deeply  
about the complexities, moral and otherwise, of international  
politics. Although an eminently quotable writer, his insights do not  
easily reduce to a sound-bite or bumper sticker.

At the root of Niebuhr's thinking lies an appreciation of original  
sin, which he views as indelible and omnipresent. In a fallen world,  
power is necessary, otherwise we lie open to the assaults of the  
predatory. Yet since we too number among the fallen, our own  
professions of innocence and altruism are necessarily suspect. Power,  
wrote Niebuhr, "cannot be wielded without guilt, since it is never  
transcendent over interest." Therefore, any nation wielding great  
power but lacking self-awareness - never an American strong suit -  
poses an imminent risk not only to others but to itself.

Here lies the statesman's dilemma: You're damned if you do and damned  
if you don't. To refrain from resisting evil for fear of violating  
God's laws is irresponsible. Yet for the powerful to pretend to  
interpret God's will qualifies as presumptuous. To avert evil, action  
is imperative; so too is self-restraint. Even worthy causes pursued  
blindly yield morally problematic results.

Niebuhr specialized in precise distinctions. He supported US  
intervention in World War II - and condemned the bombing of Hiroshima  
and Nagasaki that ended that war. After 1945, Niebuhr believed it  
just and necessary to contain the Soviet Union. Yet he forcefully  
opposed US intervention in Vietnam.

The vast claims of Bush's second inaugural - with the president  
discerning history's "visible direction, set by liberty and the  
Author of Liberty" - would have appalled Niebuhr, precisely because  
Bush meant exactly what he said. In international politics, true  
believers are more dangerous than cynics.

Grandiose undertakings produce monstrous byproducts. In the eyes of  
critics, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo show that all of Bush's freedom  
talk is simply a lie. Viewed from a Niebuhrean perspective, they  
become the predictable if illegitimate offspring of Bush's  
convictions. Better to forget utopia, leaving it to God to determine  
history's trajectory.

On the stump, Obama did not sound much like a follower of Niebuhr.  
Campaigns reward not introspection, but simplistic reassurance: "Yes,  
we can!" Yet as the dust now settles, we might hope that the victor  
will sober up and rediscover his Niebuhrean inclinations. Sobriety in  
this case begins with abrogating what Niebuhr called "our dreams of  
managing history," triggered by the end of the Cold War and  
reinforced by Sept. 11. "The course of history," he emphasized,  
"cannot be coerced."

We've tried having a born-again president intent on eliminating evil.  
It didn't work. May our next president acknowledge the possibility  
that, as Niebuhr put it, "the evils against which we contend are  
frequently the fruits of illusions which are similar to our own."  
Facing our present predicament requires that we shed illusions about  
America that would have offended Jesus himself.

Obama has written that he took from reading Niebuhr "the compelling  
idea that there's serious evil in the world" along with the  
conviction that evil's persistence should not be "an excuse for  
cynicism and inaction." Yet Niebuhr also taught him that "we should  
be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things." As  
a point of departure for reformulating US foreign policy, we could do  
a lot worse.


© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company
Andrew J. Bacevich, a professor of history and international  
relations at Boston University, is the author of "The Limits of  
Power: The End of American Exceptionalism ."


Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
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