What "Realism" Means and Does Not Mean

Regular blog readers will know that I think Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian realism is quite helpful for our times, including, in certain important ways, for Catholic social thought.  In The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier seeks to channel Niebuhr for today's war and terrorism challenges.  He is "confident that Niebuhr would have opposed the war in Iraq," but wants to pinpoint the right ground for opposition and dismiss the wrong ones:

Niebuhr's opposition to the war would have been based, I think, on his principled distaste for Bush's style of nationalism, which he would have regarded as auto-idolatry, and on his insistence that the legitimacy of such an enterprise must be conferred by international institutions. It may be Niebuhr's teachings about the love of country that hold the most stinging rebuke to Bush's jingoism. "We are the most powerful nation on earth," he observed, in a typical passage, in Christianity and Society in 1950. "We are also sufficiently virtuous to be tempted to the assumption that our power is the fruit of our virtue." The president surrendered to that temptation long ago. He is contentedly blind to what Niebuhr, in another essay, called "the immoral elements in all historical success."

I'm pretty certain we could find numerous occasions (though I haven't gotten the cites, I confess) in which the President or other war supporters have effectively asserted that we as a nation are or will be successful because we're "fundamentally good."  The relation between such sentiments and the huge missteps in Iraq is pretty direct: we knew better than other nations whether Saddam was an immediate danger, we knew better than others how to build a successful postwar Iraq, and anyway it would be relatively easy to rebuild because the Iraqis would react positively to our obvious commitment to democracy.  (Peter Beinart's The Good Fight (see here) has a remarkable reference to American policymakers in 2003 worrying that they couldn't bring in the UN to work on reconstruction because Iraqis would fear the economic self-interested motives of nations like France as opposed to America's moral purposes.)

But Wieseltier also knows the other side of the Niebuhrian coin.  There are two other, misguided, forms of opposition to rthe war.  One is what Wieseltier calls "unethical realism": the idea that moral principles play no role in a nation's decisions, which amounts to pure cynicism and just as easily leads to terrible acts.  The other misguided ground is the the position of some war critics that "we have no right to make Iraq a better place until we make America a better place."  This is, Wieseltier says, both an un-Niebuhrian and

an erroneous view of the relation between domestic policy and foreign policy. The one does not, or should not, shape the other. A state that treats its citizens justly sometimes behaves abominably beyond its borders, and a state that treats its citizens unjustly sometimes is a force for good abroad. When we fought Hitler, we were a Jim Crow country. Colonialism was to a large extent the odious project of liberal states. If Bush's foreign policy is scandalous, it cannot be because his environmental policy is scandalous. . . .  The new Niebuhrians should be wary of their own wholeness, and of the satisfaction that comes from the belief that everything is connected to everything else. . . .  The exercise of American power, when it is right, cannot wait upon the attainment of American perfection. America will have to use force against its enemies even if many millions of Americans are without health care.

This seems right but needs a qualification.  The "new Niebuhrians" reference appears to be a jab at Beinart, whose book makes the Niebuhrian critique of the war and unilateralism.  Although Wieseltier is correct that in a sinful world a nation's imperfection does not deprive it of the right to act against a greater evil, I think that Beinart''s point is that prudence (if nothing else) dictates that America engage in some self-criticism and address its own problems if it wants to convince others of its moral standing.  Although we had Jim Crow when we beat Hitler, Mary Dudziak's scholarship (e.g. here) has conversely shown the Cold War importance of Brown v. Board and desegregation in countering the Communist charges of American hypocrisy and winning the "battle for the minds" of disadvantaged nations.  There needs to be a balance between confidence and self-criticism, but we've seen almost none of the latter from the Bush administration.

Tom