This past June, a young Ukrainian pastor lamented to me how a Republican presidential victory would end US military aid to his embattled nation. Exploring this led me back to Reinhold Niebuhr, a Reformed Protestant pastor from Missouri. Applying Niebuhr to current events is difficult. He sought American victory in World War II and the Cold War, but opposed US involvement in Vietnam. However, based on Niebuhr’s great contribution to International Relations scholarship, I believe 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 victimized is not. Salvation would come out of 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 a 1932 book that largely introduced his IR philosophy – The Moral Person and the Immoral Society:
The selfishness of human societies must be regarded as inevitable. Where it is overwhelming it can only be viewed by asserting competing interests; and these can only work if coercive methods are added to moral and rational findings.
The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 was the catalyst for Niebuhr’s worldview. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was both premeditated and brutal. Japan’s pretense was to protect Japanese in Manchuria and guard against Western cultural and political intrusion. Putin gave similar reasons for his attacks. The League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact prohibiting war could not stop the Japanese. Likewise, the United Nations or the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 – in which Russia committed to respect Ukraine’s territory if it gave up its nuclear weapons – would stop Putin.
While some were surprised by Putin’s full-scale attack, a Moldovan pastor friend told me it wasn’t because the bullying and chauvinism that permeates Russian culture was reflected in its leader. Thus Niebuhr’s “moral society” was achieved. In 1944 Children of Light and Children of Darkness Niebuhr explained that although all states are self-willed rather than different. The “Children of Light” realize that they must be punished by a higher law, but the “Children of Darkness” see nothing more than corrupt selfishness. Niebuhr feared that the conquest of Germany and Japan would undermine the higher principles of Christianity and democracy. Today, the victory of the Children of Darkness in Moscow will extinguish the Children of Light in the second largest nation in Europe.
In 1991, writer Phillip Yancey was on a team of American Christian leaders invited to help the collapsing Soviet Union find a moral foundation. In the book of 2024 What Went WrongYancey and his colleague John Bernbaum recount that after the first steps toward capitalism, democracy, and religious freedom, Russia returned to totalitarianism. In Yancey’s words: “The seed of democracy has little chance of survival when the cultural soil is hard and soaked with the blood of its people.” Yancey transferred his work to Ukraine and found real pluralism and brutal independence demonstrated in mass protests that ousted Moscow-backed governments.
For those who argue that Ukraine is also corrupt, consider Niebuhr’s “non-Utopian freedom”. In a New York Times opinion piece entitled “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr (1992) said that Niebuhr persuaded him:
Original sin provides a stronger foundation for freedom and self-governance than illusions about human perfection… His warnings against utopianism, messianism and perfectionism resonate today. We cannot play God’s role in history, and we must strive as much as possible to achieve dignity, clarity and near justice in a mysterious world.
What about Niebuhr’s opposition to Vietnam? He explained in a 1969 interview with the New Republic that he feared America was in danger of squandering the power and prestige gained in WWII for a nation “incapable of democracy or united nationalism”. If we help the Ukrainian people to preserve their nationality, they have certainly shown through the democratic movement and the overwhelming success in the fight against Russia that they will preserve it.
As for US foreign policy interests, the US now faces two powerful enemies in China and Russia. The Ukrainians are willing and able to continue to weaken the weapons we provide. Based on the record Niebuhr left of his philosophical journey, I believe he would want America to continue arming Ukraine. Because he would not see it as another Vietnam, but as Manchuria again. Consider closing this quote from Niebuhr Nation interview (2014), with Putin’s name instead of Hitler:
If Hitler is defeated in the end it will be because this tragedy has awakened the desire to preserve a civilization where justice and freedom are true, and it has given us the knowledge that obscure methods are necessary for the ambiguity of history.
Further Studies in E-International Relations
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