This journal is modeled on Christianity & Crisis, which Reinhold Niebuhr founded in 1941 to urge American Protestants to aid the Allies against the Axis. Its theme was that neither morality nor national interest justified continued isolation. That self-imposed isolation was military and economic, including neutrality towards foreign conflicts and high tariffs against foreign products. Niebuhr believed America must both engage and lead.
We are at another point in the U. S. story with strategic and economic withdrawal. New high tariffs are unprecedented since the 1930s, Niebuhr’s era. And the U.S. is pulling back from support for Ukraine and for NATO, possibly from other longtime U.S. allies. Even Canada, our neighbor and longtime traditional friend, an ally in at least five wars, is now tariffed and derided. Denmark, our longtime NATO friend, is threatened with seizure of Greenland. Taiwan is tariffed and mocked, despite its vulnerability to China. Other potential victims of China, such as Vietnam, are tariffed, even though the U.S. has encouraged firms to relocate there from China. Israel is also tariffed. The U.S. may withdraw troops from eastern Europe.
Agencies founded by the Reagan administration, such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the International Republican Institute, to promote pro-American democracy globally are defunded and near closure. The U.S. Institute for Peace, also founded in the Reagan era to mediate international conflicts, has been closed. Agencies like the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, with Radio Free Asia, which extolled American values internationally and helped win the Cold War, are shuttering.
A European friend recently told me that we are in a new reality, with the U.S. is no longer the promoter of democracy and human rights, or the protector of the West. Instead, in the new era, America will be more brutally transactional, focused on its own hemisphere, and its own material benefits, narrowly construed. Realpolitik is replacing American Exceptionalism and American leadership.
I vigorously pushed back to my European friend. Yes, America is passing through a moment of retrenchment. We are withdrawing strategically, economically, and morally. The current position assumes that America has nothing to say to the world. America will now be its own green shade accountant, carefully counting its pennies and nickels, suspiciously engaging others when there is potential narrow material advantage.
But this moment, I insisted, will not endure. It too intrinsically contradicts America’s core identity, shaped across centuries, which is outward looking, idealistic, internationally ambitious, and determined, where possible, to shape the world for the better. America’s ideals and ambitions were baked into our national soul from the very start. They were brought to our shores by religious dissidents who wanted to create a new, godlier society as a model to the world. They were encoded into our founding charters, above all the Declaration of Independence, insisting on equality for all people, and a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” Stanley Hauerwas, the anti-American theologian, once derided July 4 as his least liked holiday because he disdained its effrontery. Who was America to make these sweeping claims that would reshape the world? And yet audacious America has done so across its whole history. Drastically altering its national character at this point would be nearly impossible.
The era to which Niebuhr was reacting resembled our own. America strategically withdrew from the world, which mainly meant Europe, after World War I, having convinced itself that it had been inveigled into war. Even in its 1920s prosperity it obsessed over European debts, unconsciously contributing to German default, facilitating the Nazi ascension. The Depression compounded the myopia, with enormous tariffs enacted ostensibly to “protect” American industry. Instead, the tariffs accelerated the tailspin, as international trade collapsed. As a sea power bounded by two oceans, America was built on international trade. The American Revolution was fought partly over free trade, the War of 1812 even more so. Entrance into World War I was trip wired by German attacks on U.S. trade.
American power and energy are built on international commerce, which reinforces its self-conception as a beacon to the world, economically, politically, and morally. Americans have often been selfish. But they don’t like to think of themselves as so. Puritan idealism across five centuries has suffused our national persona. American international trade accompanies American ideals, supported by American military might. Human rights, democracy, cargo ships crisscrossing the seas with merchandise, and a strong U.S. navy with airpower and overseas military bases are all interlocking ingredients of American identity.
Almost certainly Niebuhr understood this American stew when he called American Protestants to remember what their nation was. They had after all created this national blend of high-minded self-interest and missionary zeal for the kingdom. The isolationists and “America First” of the 1930s imagined America would stay within its hemispheric walls, ignoring the world in flames. Some even imagined the retreat of democracy at home. Perhaps economic and political crises need strong authoritarians.
Niebuhr would have none of this. He was a Christian Realist, and second-generation German, who also understood longstanding American idealism, rooted in its Puritan founding, and amplified by the Second Great Awakening. His realism saw America’s enduring soul, not just its mendacious political fads of that moment.
For Niebuhr, American idealism could be hubristic. But the unabashed pursuit of raw power and self-interest was even more prone to reckless hubris. Ideals, with all their flaws, at least could restrain avaricious ambitions, which typically crash in their lust for unreachable power and riches unmoored from principles. Unsurprisingly, Niebuhr was right. And he was quickly vindicated by Pearl Harbor, only months after launching his magazine, which unleashed American ideals, leadership and power in ways the world had never seen from any other nation.
The current hubris imagines America can stand alone, transacting utilitarian deals, discarding friends in favor of occasional opportunistic trysts, focused inward. This perspective is unsustainable for a great nation that has always styled itself a lighthouse, not a black hole.
Inevitably, America will return to its destiny, looking outward, leading, inspiring, and pursuing enlightened self-interest with a “decent respect to the opinions of mankind.” But as before with such breaks from our national character, many avoidable disasters may ensue, for us and for the world, before America recalls who it really is and always has been.