Last June, a young Ukrainian pastor lamented to me that a Republican presidential victory would end U.S. military aid to his troubled country. This review brought me back to Reinhold Niebuhr, a Reformed Protestant minister from Missouri. Applying Niebuhr to current events is tricky. He sought American victory in World War II and the Cold War, but opposed American involvement in Vietnam. Yet, given Niebuhr’s significant contribution to scholarship on international relations, I think he would support arming Ukraine. Niebuhr argued that turning the other cheek is a Christian response to personal mistreatment, but turning a blind eye when an innocent nation is brutalized is not. Salvation would come from outside history, he wrote, but until then, there is no law over nations, only between them.
An aggressive state can only be stopped by other nations, Niebuhr argued in the 1932 book that largely presented his philosophy of IR: Moral man and immoral society:
The selfishness of human communities must be considered inevitable. When it is excessive, it can only be controlled by competing assertions of interests; and these can only be effective if coercive methods are added to moral and rational persuasion.
Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was the catalyst for Niebuhr’s worldview. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 was equally preemptive and brutal. Japan claimed to protect the Japanese in Manchuria and guard against Western cultural and geopolitical encroachment. Putin offered similar justifications for his invasion. The League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact prohibiting war could not stop the Japanese. Likewise, neither the United Nations nor the 1994 Budapest Memorandum – in which Russia pledged to respect Ukrainian territory if it renounced nuclear weapons – could deter Putin.
Although some were surprised by Putin’s full-scale invasion, a Moldovan pastor friend told me that this was not the case, because hubris and chauvinism permeated Russian culture so much that it was reflected at its leader. Thus Niebuhr’s “immoral society” was realized. In the years 1944 Children of light and children of darkness Niebuhr explained that while all states act in their own self-interest, there are distinctions. The “Children of Light” recognize that they must be disciplined by a higher law, but the “Children of Darkness” recognize nothing above their own corrupt self-interest. Niebuhr feared that a German and Japanese victory would undermine the higher laws of Christianity and democracy. Today, the victory of Moscow’s Children of Darkness would extinguish the Children of Light in Europe’s second largest country.
In 1991, author Phillip Yancey was part of a delegation of American Christian leaders invited to help the disintegrating Soviet Union find moral footing. In the 2024 book What didn’t workYancey and his co-author John Bernbaum tell the story of how, after initial steps toward capitalism, democracy, and religious freedom, Russia fell back into totalitarianism. In Yancey’s words: “The seeds of democracy are unlikely to survive when the cultural soil is rock-hard and soaked with the blood of its own people.” » Yancey moved his work to Ukraine and discovered a more authentic plurality and fierce independence demonstrated during the mass protests that toppled Moscow-backed governments.
For those who argue that Ukraine is also corrupt, consider Niebuhr’s “non-utopian liberalism.” In a New York Times opinion piece titled “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow”, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (1992) said that Niebuhr had persuaded him:
Original sin provides a far firmer foundation for freedom and self-governance than illusions about human perfectibility… Its warnings against utopianism, messianism, and perfectionism strike a chord today. We cannot play the role of God in history and must strive our best to achieve decency, clarity, and immediate justice in an ambiguous world.
What about Niebuhr’s opposition to Vietnam? He explained in a 1969 interview with The New Republic that he feared that America was in danger of squandering the power and prestige gained during World War II on a nation “incapable of democracy or an integral nation.” . If we help Ukrainians retain their national identity, they will surely have demonstrated, through their pro-democracy movements and excessive efforts in the fight against Russia, that they will retain it.
When it comes to American foreign policy interests, the United States now faces two great power adversaries, China and Russia. The Ukrainians want and can continue to weaken the latter with the weapons we provide them. Based on Niebuhr’s account of his philosophical journey, I believe he would want America to continue arming Ukraine. Because he would not see this as another Vietnam, but as a new Manchuria. Let us consider, in conclusion, this quote from Niebuhr The nation interview (2014), with Putin’s name replaced by Hitler’s:
If Hitler is ultimately defeated, it will be because the crisis awakened in us the desire to preserve a civilization in which justice and freedom are realities, and made us understand that ambiguous methods are necessary to resolve the ambiguities of the ‘history.
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