Where Are The Real Niebuhrians?

Admittedly depressed by recent American setbacks in Iraq, New York Times in-house neoconservative David Brooks rediscovered the Christian scholar Reinhold Niebuhr in his op-ed column of May eleventh. It was a bit strange that he should have forgotten him in the first place, for it was Brooks who in the Atlantic Monthly of September 2002 (and even earlier in the Weekly Standard in November of 2001) recommended resuscitating the sagacious political theologian to guide American foreign policy through the morally hazardous wilds of the War on Terror. Here, Brooks reasoned, was a grand thinker who forcefully argued for the necessity of confronting evil yet warned against an idealistic infatuation with our own virtue, the sort of grim and realistic resolution worthy of deep consideration in the face of a viral new threat. As Brooks wrote in the Atlantic Monthly: “Niebuhr’s great foe was idealism. American idealism, he believed, comes in two forms: the idealism of noninterventionists, who are embarrassed by power, and the idealism of imperialists, who disguise power as virtue.”

But Brooks seemed to have shied away from Niebuhr’s more careful, multilateral prescriptions for foreign engagements and suspicion of American idealism when he read the work of his former editor, William Kristol, who cowrote The War over Iraqwith Lawrence Kaplan. Critiquing those realists who cautioned against “idealism” in foreign policy, Kristol and Kaplan note:

Early on in the Cold War, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr complained that “we are still inclined to pretend that our power is exercised by a peculiarly virtuous nation”… What realists feared was not so much the mechanics of American democracy at home—although they often had reservations about that, too—but rather what they perceived to be a messianic impulse that could lead America to upset the balance of power between it and the Soviet Union.

While this is not quite accurate,[1] Brooks still endorsed his editor’s work in a blurb on the back cover: “The reader finishes the book appalled at Saddam’s cruelty, furious at the feckless way American administrations have responded to the Iraqi menace, resolved that this time things must be different.” By signing on to the war effort with his fellow neoconservatives, Brooks seems to have elided Niebuhr’s profound concern over America’s “messianic consciousness”; the idealistic desire to expand the franchise of “universal values” throughout the world with our newfound power of military might. As per Brooks’s recommendations, it is worthwhile to ponder what Niebuhr would have contributed to the debate leading to the war in Iraq, especially given his following caveats from the book The Irony of American History:

We were, as a matter of fact, always vague, as the whole liberal culture...