Joseph Loconte's Blog, page 16

Providence: China’s Frankenstein Monster, Unleashed

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Every once in a while the left-wing elites at The New York Times experience a spasm of moral clarity. “North Korea stains the record of President Obama, who took office promising to make ridding the world of nuclear weapons a priority,” its editors sheepishly admitted this week, following North Korea’s claim to testing a hydrogen bomb. “Its actions are a humiliation for President Xi Jinping of China, North Korea’s only ally, largest trading partner and economic lifeline for food and oil.”

Right on both counts.

North Korea’s belligerence has bedeviled both Republican and Democratic administrations. President Clinton’s naive 1994 treaty to freeze North Korea’s nuclear program merely gave the regime diplomatic cover to develop it. During the Bush administration, North Korea withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and conducted its first nuclear weapons test.

Yet Pyongyang has ratcheted up its aggressive behavior during the Obama years. Here’s a sampling: In 2009 North Korea staged its second illegal nuclear test. In 2010 the regime sank a South Korean warship, in an unprovoked attack, killing 46 seamen. In 2012 the government tested a long-range Taepodong-2 missile; the test failed. Later that year, it announced it had missiles that could hit the U.S. mainland. In 2013 the regime staged its third nuclear test, said to be more powerful than the 2009 test. Later that year, over the course of a weekend, North Korea launched four short-range missiles. In 2014 the regime test-fired two medium-range ballistic missiles for the first time in five years.

The regime’s latest act of nuclear brinkmanship has triggered the predictable round of international criticism. Even White House press secretary Josh Earnest, who has a complicated relationship with the truth, confessed: “The fact that we see provocative acts from North Korea is an indication we are not getting the results we’d like to see yet.”

The Chinese seem increasingly frustrated with North Korean behavior. China “firmly opposes” the nuclear test, according to Hua Chunying, a spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry. “China is steadfast in its position that the Korean Peninsula should be denuclearized and nuclear proliferation should be prevented to maintain peace and stability in Northeast Asia…We strongly urge the DPRK to honor its commitment to denuclearization, and to cease any action that may deteriorate the situation.”

But that’s not going to happen—thanks largely to China, North Korea’s perennial patron.

Beijing continues its role as the geo-political savior of North Korea, providing the regime with much of its food, arms, and energy. According to UNICEF, a quarter of its population—about six million people—do not have enough to eat. Without Chinese support, the economically decrepit North Korea would be pushed over the brink of starvation.

There are deep, historic ties between these two communist states. When, in 1950, North Korea invaded the South (the Republic of Korea), it was driven back by American and U.N. forces. As U.S. troops pushed into North Korea, Beijing came to the rescue: the Chinese launched a massive, surprise offensive that kept the North Korean military alive. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers perished in the Korean War, including the son of Chinese leader Mao Zedong, killed in a U.N. napalm strike and buried in Pyongyang. The leaders in Beijing also crave stability, and have viewed North Korea as a buffer between China and U.S. troops stationed in South Korea and Japan.

But the regime of Kim Jon Un, and his psychotic cult of personality, is anything but stable. China has propped up its Frankenstein monster for nearly seventy years, and can no longer control it.

What force on earth could change North Korea’s behavior, or cause it to give up its nuclear program? Will China finally act to bring the monster to heel? The oracles at The New York Times, in the same editorial, offer this counsel: “China is understandably concerned that really tough economic penalties would cause people to flee North Korea for China,” they write. “But even smaller gestures like preventing Mr. Kim and his friends from importing whiskey and other luxury goods might have an impact.”

No more whiskey and caviar—yes, this will bring the nuclear-armed narcissist to his knees. As suggested above, the editors at the Times exhibited a spasm of moral clarity by chastising the White House and China for their failed policies toward Pyongyang. The thing about spasms, though, is that they don’t last very long.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Christian Realism and US Foreign Policy

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Seventy-five years ago, while America slept, Western Civilization was fighting for its life.

In September of 1940, after occupying and enslaving most of continental Europe in less than a year, Hitler’s Germany turned its gaze north, across the English Channel. Beginning on September 7, the Luftwaffe unleashed a storm of death and destruction on the city of London: the Blitz. The first round of bombing raids lasted fifty-seven consecutive nights. CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow was there: “I’ve seen some horrible sights in this city during these days and nights, but not once have I heard man, woman, or child suggest that Britain should throw in her hand.”

Everyone in Britain, including Prime Minister Winston Churchill, expected a Nazi invasion at any moment. And nearly everyone in the United States, including President Franklin Roosevelt, tried desperately to put Britain’s existential struggle out of their minds. “I’ll say it again, and again,” vowed FDR during his 1940 re-election campaign. “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

We might expect this kind of talk from dissembling politicians, but what about the nation’s Christian leadership: its theologians, pastors, writers, and public intellectuals? The lamentable fact is that most failed to grasp the nature of Hitlerism; they refused to contemplate the practical consequences of a complete Nazi triumph over Europe. Instead, many insisted that the “ethics of Jesus” demanded a U.S. foreign policy of isolationism, pacifism, and national repentance.

“Can military force do much against soul force which folds its arms and bides its day?” asked Albert Palmer, president of the Chicago Theological Seminary. “Without military opposition the Hitlers wither away.” Harry Emerson Fosdick, pastor of New York’s Riverside Baptist Church and one of the most influential preachers of his day, was unmoved by the fate of millions already under Nazi occupation. “I can never use my Christian ministry in the support and sanction of war,” he wrote in January 1941. “My personal judgment is that for the United States to become a belligerent in this conflict would be a colossal and futile disaster.” Charles Clayton Morrison, editor of the prestigious Christian Century, denounced American participation in the conflict as “a war for imperialism,” as hateful a prospect as a Nazi victory. “For the United States to make a fateful decision to enter this war on the mistaken and irrational assumption that it is a war for the preservation of anything good in civilization will be the supreme tragedy of our history.”

By the 1920s and 30s, American Christianity—especially its liberal wing—shared the same mental outlook as that of political progressivism. In politics, both reacted to the cataclysm of the First World War determined to make international peace their supreme goal, whatever the cost. In matters of religion, both embraced a spirit of disbelief and evasion: a reluctance to admit the stubbornness and pervasiveness of human evil.

“In this liberalism there is little understanding of the depth to which human malevolence may sink and the heights to which malignant power may rise,” wrote Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr in Christianity and Power Politics (1940). “Some easy and vapid escape is sought from the terrors and woes of a tragic era.”

This frame of mind has returned with a vengeance in the post-9/11 era, fueled by the costly and inconclusive wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its motive force, though, is a blinkered vision of the Christian gospel that has unwittingly debased the Christian conscience. At the very moment when the political and religious ideals of the West are threatened by new forms of terror and totalitarianism, much of the Protestant Christian church today lacks the intellectual and moral resources to fight back.

Consider the reaction of leading “progressive” Protestant ministers to the 9/11 attacks and the rise of radical Islamic extremism. The Rev. Tony Campolo, the self-described “Prophet of Red Letter Christianity,” has focused his righteous rage on American foreign policy. He compares U.S. military action against Islamic militants to the campaign of beheadings launched by the Islamic State (ISIS) against alleged infidels. “What can we do to stop this cycle of violence?” he asks. His answer: “What if President Bush and President Obama stood together at the rostrum of the U.N. General Assembly and did the biblical thing? What if, on behalf of the American people, they repented of what our nation has done?”

Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Jim Wallis and his Sojourners magazine produced a manifesto called “Confessing Christ in a World of Violence.” A critique of the U.S.-led “war on terror,” the document was signed by scores of theology professors, ethicists and church leaders. Its signatories sought to soften what they called the “crude distinctions” being made between radical Islamic jihad and Western democracy. They thus offered a misappropriation of Solzhenitsyn: “The distinction between good and evil does not run between one nation and another, or one group and another,” the petition read. “It runs straight through every human heart.” More recently, Wallis finds the solution to ISIS barbarism in tackling the “root causes” of terrorism, which are economic and political in nature. “Terrorism is always built on grievances—real and perceived—that are used to recruit for and perpetuate its ideology and violence,” he writes. “So addressing those grievances and correcting course along the way is essential to defeating terrorism.”

Stanley Hauerwas, professor of ethics at Duke University, delivered a jeremiad against the United States, even as human remains were being recovered from Ground Zero. He saw a terrible day of reckoning ahead: “I think that when America isn’t able to rule the world, that people will exact some very strong judgments against America—and I think we will well deserve it.” A look at his latest book, War and the American Difference, suggests that world events have left his views undisturbed. Hauerwas rejects U.S. military action in the Middle East, even to prevent crimes against humanity or genocide. “If the U.S. intervenes, we just reinforce the presumption, which is true, that we’re an imperial power.”

And on it goes. Religious progressives are not mistaken when they discover in the ministry of Jesus a life devoted to the love of neighbor: the unconditional love of God. Nor are they wrong to see in Jesus the quintessential peacemaker: the Prince of Peace. Yet their political vision is based entirely upon the principle of non-violence. Their politics, in all its particulars, is guided by one rule, “the law of love.”

The fatal problem with this view is that historic Christianity—especially Protestant Christianity—has never reduced the gospel to these elements. The cross of Christ cannot be comprehended without an awareness of the depth of human guilt and the power of radical evil. “The gospel is something more than the law of love. The gospel deals with the fact that men violate the law of love,” wrote Niebuhr in “Why the Christian Church is Not Pacifist.” “The gospel presents Christ as the pledge and revelation of God’s mercy which finds man in his rebellion and overcomes his sin.”

Like no other American theologian of the twentieth century, Reinhold Niebuhr exposed the assumptions of progressive Christianity that helped to create a mood of political ambivalence and isolation in an age of global terror. Niebuhr’s political theology—what became known as “Christian realism”—sought a more biblical view of how the Christian citizen can live responsibly within a civilization in crisis. During the 1930s and 40s, through his books, articles, and the magazine he founded and edited, Christianity and Crisis, Niebuhr reminded his generation that Protestant Christianity possessed unique resources to confront the problems and perplexities of the modern age.

We need to recover something of the Christian realism that proved so prescient in an era of theological confusion. As Niebuhr argued, contemporary historical events confirm the Reformation emphasis on the persistence of sin at every level of moral achievement; there is no way to fully escape the corrupting influence of power in any political act. To believe otherwise is to imagine that politics can transcend these earthly realities if only “the ethics of Jesus” would shape our priorities and methods.

No amount of Bible citations, Niebuhr explained, can conceal the humanistic assumptions behind this effort:

We have, in other words, reinterpreted the Christian gospel in terms of the Renaissance faith in man…We have interpreted world history as a gradual ascent to the Kingdom of God which waits for final triumph only upon the willingness of Christians to ‘take Christ seriously.’ There is nothing in Christ’s own teachings…to justify this interpretation of world history. In the whole of the New Testament, Gospels and Epistles alike, there is only one interpretation of world history. That pictures history as moving toward a climax in which both Christ and anti-Christ are revealed.

Progressive Christianity, whatever its merits, bases its politics on a fundamentally flawed understanding of the human predicament. By insisting on political outcomes akin to the vision of life held out in the Sermon on the Mount, it promotes a foreign policy largely detached from political reality.

A foreign policy rooted in Christian realism, by contrast, begins with a sober view of the exercise of power. Enforcing justice, punishing wrongdoing, building democratic institutions—all of this is exceedingly difficult work, a truism as easily forgotten by political conservatives as it is by progressives. One of the most deeply mistaken ideas surrounding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, was that liberal democracies would emerge organically, almost inevitably, out of the ashes of decades of repression and war.

In The Case for Democracy, former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky argued that the democratic revolutions which toppled the Soviet Union depended on three key elements: enslaved people who yearned to be free, leaders outside who believed they could be, and policies that linked the world community to the regime’s treatment of its own people. The book was mandatory reading in the Bush White House. “It will work anywhere around the world,” Sharansky wrote, “including in the Arab world.”

How could that be true? History—especially recent history—reminds us that there is no formula to assure a transformation from tyranny to democratic self-government.

The Protestant tradition, which emerged as a reaction against Catholicism’s doctrine of perfectionism, is well-equipped to defend against this myth of progress. “The political life of man,” wrote Niebuhr, “must constantly steer between the Scylla of anarchy and the Charybdis of tyranny.” It is for good reason that the American Founders, armed with a strong dose of Protestant realism, worried that factions—especially those fueled by sectarian hatreds—would prove fatal to national unity. Thus Madison’s insight in The Federalist: “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Second, the Christian realist insists on an honest assessment of the threats to international peace and security. Let’s take the challenge of radical Islamic jihad. The claims and ambitions of al Qaeda, ISIS, and other terrorist groups cannot be wished away. Unlike the national security documents adopted by the Obama administration, a realistic National Security Strategy would identify the religious sources of the terrorist ideology that threatens the United States and its allies. Evasive and generic references to “terrorists” and “extremists” obscure the nature of the problem.

Even the editors at The New Republic, hardly a source of Christian realist thinking, nevertheless got close to the mark in an editorial shortly after the 9/11 attacks. “No, it was not Islam that took the towers down. But it was not Episcopalianism either,” they wrote. “The terrorists are waging a war of ideas, and the ideas upon which they are acting are ideas in the Islamic tradition…There are those who wish to deny the religious character of Al Qaeda’s violence, so as to transform bin Ladenism into another variety of anti-colonial protest.”

Meanwhile, Protestantism, which has always cared deeply about theology—Luther’s Reformation was, at its core, a spiritual campaign—has the necessary tools to come even closer to the mark. By placing the authority of the Bible above any individual or institution, Protestants are less restrained than other faith traditions in exposing the pretensions of political and religious leaders. They are better equipped to resist political correctness in any form.

For the Christian realist, the horrific acts of barbarism committed in the pursuit of a spiritual utopia are not the result of “grievances” with Western society. Rather, they are the latest expression of an ancient malignancy—the Will to Power—clothed in the robes and symbols of religion. C.S Lewis, in another context, described this will as the “ruthless, sleepless, unsmiling concentration upon self, which is the mark of Hell.” The demonic vision of radical Islam is not a force that can be bribed, appeased, accommodated, contained, or placated into submission. As Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour recently described his objectives in Afghanistan: “the jihad will continue until there is an Islamic system.” Claims of a “peace process,” he said, are merely “the words of the enemies.”

Third, a foreign policy based on Christian realism makes the defense of Western political and religious ideals an overarching priority. Rooted in their understanding of divine grace, Protestant reformers delivered a withering critique of the entire legalistic project that had become “Christendom.” They laid the foundation for our liberal democratic order. Government by consent, the separation of powers, a constitution based on natural rights and human equality, freedom of conscience, free speech, freedom of assembly—all of these achievements are inconceivable without the moral capital and spiritual insights of evangelical Christianity. They are the defining features of American exceptionalism.

Yet religious progressives, when obsessed with America’s shortcomings, lose sight of these accomplishments. They find it hard to make moral distinctions between American democracy and even the most loathsome and oppressive dictatorships. Thus the lament of John Haynes Holmes, a New York City minister and chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union, so typical of liberal theologians in the 1940s: “Our sins have found us out, that’s all,” he concluded. “If Hitler triumphs, it will be as the punishment for our transgressions.”

Here is the spirit of the embittered utopian, alive and well in progressive Christianity. Recall the disturbing refrain of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, President Obama’s ex-favorite pastor, in the wake of the 9/11 attack: “America’s chickens are coming home to roost…God damn America! God damn America!” Niebuhr and his fellow Christian realists would have none of it: “When the mind is not confused by utopian illusions,” he wrote, “it is not difficult to recognize genuine achievements of justice, and to feel under obligation to defend them against the threats of tyranny and the negation of justice.”

A one-time socialist candidate for Congress, Niebuhr was not blind to the deep injustices—economic and racial—in American society. Yet he could no longer abide the morally debased reasoning of his fellow socialists in response to fascist aggression; he resigned from the party. He then turned his mind toward combating the same moral confusion afflicting liberal Protestantism:

We believe the task of defending the rich inheritance of our civilization to be an imperative one, however much we might desire that our social system were more worthy of defense… We do not find it particularly impressive to celebrate one’s sensitive conscience by enlarging upon all the well-known evils of our western world and equating them with the evils of the totalitarian systems. It is just as important for Christians to be discriminating in their judgments, as for them to recognize the element of sin in all their endeavors.

The Christian realist can never equate American democratic values with gospel morality: this opens the door to Christian nationalism, a perversion of the faith. But a posture of cynicism toward the United States and the West is no less a corruption. Social perfection at home is not required before attempting to check aggression and punish injustice abroad.

It is at this point where Christian progressives fail most conspicuously in their stated objective: to demonstrate the love of Christ to their neighbor. Perhaps the most shameful behavior of American Christians during the Second World War was their practical indifference to the millions of victims of Nazism.

From 1938 to 1941, for example, American Protestant groups issued no fewer than 50 statements about how to achieve a just and durable peace. None offered a plan to rescue Jews from the anti-Semitic hatreds unleashed by the Nazis. There was lots of talk about debt relief and economic assistance. Yet barely a handful of these manifestos argued that the defeat of Nazism was essential to international justice.

Their progressive progeny are not hard to identify. Duke’s Stanley Hauerwas speaks for many when he denies the need for a foreign policy that could thwart the depraved ambitions of terrorist groups or rogue regimes. “My only response is I do not have a foreign policy. I have something better—a church constituted by people who would rather die than kill.”

What are we to make of this “theology of love”? The de facto pacifism of progressive Christianity presents us with a conscience insulated from human suffering. It is a conscience content to ignore the neighbor in crisis—whether he’s the Jew marched to the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the Tutsi villagers hacked to death in Rwanda, the girls forced into sexual slavery by Boko Haram, the families hunted down and executed by ISIS, the gays rounded up and tossed from rooftops, or the Syrian refugees facing starvation or extinction because of their faith.

Even secular political leaders at the United Nations have endorsed a doctrine known as the “responsibility to protect” when civilian populations become the object of genocide or crimes against humanity. At the moment when fresh thinking about the Christian just war tradition is desperately needed, religious progressives have abandoned the concept altogether. “Thus the Christian ideal of love has degenerated into a lovelessness which cuts itself off from a sorrowing and suffering world,” wrote Niebuhr. “Love is made to mean not pity and sympathy or responsibility for the weal and woe of others, it becomes merely the abstract and negative perfection of peace in a warring world.”

In this, religious progressives succumb to an old temptation. They allow their hatred of war to blot out all other virtues and obligations. But the historic and orthodox Christian church has never viewed peace—peace at any cost—as the highest good. Such a peace always ends in a preference for tyranny. It always adds to the catalogue of human suffering.

For the person whose life is threatened by violence, servitude, or death, the Christian conscience summons a full range of obligations: empathy, courage, sacrifice, and a determination to protect the neighbor from great evil. Protestants have long appreciated the distinct role of government in helping to carry out the last of these obligations. In his tract aimed at political leaders, On Secular Authority (1523), Martin Luther explained that the sword of the State “is a very great benefit and necessary to the whole world, to preserve peace, to punish sin and to prevent evil.”

A just peace may be the final result of these pursuits, God willing. But if peace is made the supreme goal, if it consumes all other obligations, it becomes an idol—and a snare to the statesman as well as the saint.

Christian realism sets itself squarely against this idol, and against the utopian assumptions that give it life. The post-9/11 era has exposed the resilience of the utopian idea in both politics and religion; it continues to exert a powerful hold on the mind of modern liberalism. Unchecked, it represents a threat to the health and even survival of liberal democracy in America and the West.

Where do we begin in confronting this outlook? We need to recover the wisdom and resolve of those who recognized the supreme malevolence of their own day. Only a handful of religious leaders realized the demons that Nazism had let loose in the world. Few could imagine the sacrifices required to meet them. And fewer still dared to predict the consequences of shrinking back from the duties assigned to America, Great Britain and their allies.

The Christians who did so sought to retrieve a more biblical understanding of the gospel as the foundation for their politics. They argued that the “gentleness” of Jesus was not the full and final revelation of the character of God. They insisted that both the Old and the New Testament took the wrath of God as well as the mercy of God seriously. “The divine mercy, apprehended by Christian faith in the life and death of Christ, is not some simple kindness indifferent to good and evil,” wrote Niebuhr. “The whole point of the Christian doctrine of Atonement is that God cannot be merciful without fulfilling within himself, and on man’s behalf, the requirements of divine justice.”

The biblical answer to the problem of evil in human history, Christ’s death and resurrection, cannot separate justice from mercy. Thus the way of Jesus—what C.S. Lewis once described as “terror and comfort intertwined”—dispels our utopian illusions. His gospel renders as futile our facile efforts to create a society based on “love” while failing to reckon with the negation of love which threatens every human endeavor.

Here there is no place for sentimental Christianity, either in our pulpits or our politics. Here is a road less travelled. And yet along this road lies our best hope: not for the immediate arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but for a greater measure of peace and justice within, and among, the nations of the earth.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: End of the European Project?

This article was originally posted at Providence.

In November 2013, tens of thousands of Ukrainians filled the central square of Kiev to protest President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject an “association agreement” with the European Union. Waving European Union flags, the crowds chanted slogans demanding to be part of the West. As Liudmyla Babych, a saleswoman from Kiev, told The Guardian: “We want to be in Europe.”

There are good reasons to want to be part of the European community. Like no other multi-ethnic region of the world, the Europeans can boast strong commercial ties, free-market economies, a system of international law over the use of force, and a shared commitment to liberal democratic values. A war among the European states is nearly unimaginable, an achievement of great importance to the United States.

Nevertheless, two years after the Ukrainian revolution that eventually ousted its thuggish president, enthusiasm for the European project has reached a new low—even among Europeans.

There are of course the ongoing economic woes: the Greek debt debacle remains unresolved, and most European economies are struggling with high unemployment and low growth rates relative to the United States. The gross domestic product of the 19 countries sharing the euro currency is smaller now than it was before the 2008 economic meltdown.

There is the rise of the Islamic State and terrorist violence that has exposed the vulnerability of Europe’s unprecedented achievement: its open internal borders among its 28-member states. Twice in less than a year, terrorist cells—moving freely across Europe—struck Paris with devastating results. “France is at war,” declared Socialist President François Hollande. The French government is trying to amend the constitution to allow the president to suspend civil liberties without parliamentary approval. Open borders mean a unique openness to Islamist terror.

There is the Syrian civil war, which has created a refugee crisis that has sent shock waves throughout European capitals. From January to October of this year, over 1.2 million migrants entered the European Union illegally. The influx of these individuals, mostly Muslim, is stoking xenophobia, as we well as legitimate worries about the compatibility of Islam with liberal democracy. Although Germany’s Angela Merkel had pledged to open the country to asylum-seekers, a public backlash elicited a promise to “reduce the number of refugees appreciably” before Germany was “overwhelmed in the long run.” Countries such as Hungary and Austria have built fences to keep them out, and most EU states have tightened their border controls.

And, of course, there is Ukraine, which has suffered the Russian takeover of its Crimean Peninsula and remains engaged in a fierce battle with Russian-backed separatists in its eastern region. Although EU states have imposed sanctions on Moscow, they have done nothing to hinder Russian designs in Ukraine. Meanwhile, some European leaders appear eager to cooperate with Vladimir Putin to help resolve the Syrian conflict.

All of these challenges have exposed the fundamental weakness of the entire European project—namely, its inability to muster the political leadership required for effective action. This vulnerability was hinted at in a lengthy essay by Jim Yardley in The New York Times. “Every elected national leader knows there is no political mileage to try to lead on European issues or push for more integration,” Frederick Erixon, director of the European Center for International Political Economy, told the Times. “The European idea is now a rapidly declining trend.”

The fact is that the European Union—with its generous welfare schemes, rejection of nationalist impulses, marginal military expenditures, and pacifist foreign policy—could only work in a world without crises. In other words, it could never succeed in the world as we actually find it. “It might never have been realistic to envision a United States of Europe,” concedes Mr. Yardley. Not realistic at all, in fact—and yet the reasons for its failures still elude liberal elites, especially those in the United States who want America to become more like Europe.

Whether from historical amnesia or ideological blindness, Mr. Yardley appears not to grasp that Europe owes much of its political and economic success to the United States. He notes that the European Union has built a stable and diverse economy, supported by democratic ideals. He explains that Europe prides itself on being a Western superpower “without the bellicosity or laissez-faire hardheartedness of the United States.” Yet Mr. Yardley fails to mention that few of Europe’s achievements would have been possible without American leadership: its moral seriousness, economic dynamism, the success of its democratic institutions, and the projection of its military power.

Robert Kagan, author and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has correctly observed that the United States created—and has sustained—the architecture for international security that made the European project conceivable. “Europe’s rejection of power politics and its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil,” writes Kagan in Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order. “American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important.”

Yet the banality of this conceit has been exposed as never before—in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq, in Paris, and in the ongoing struggle against the fascist barbarism of the Islamic State. A European Union that fails to confront these new realities will be of little help to the United States—or to the liberal democratic order that it claims to represent.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

National Review: War, Refugees, and the Christian Imagination

This article was originally posted at National Review.

How the refugees of the Great War informed the works of two great Christian writers.

Thomas Hardy, in “Poems of War and Patriotism,” described an appalling refugee crisis in the heart of Europe a century ago. They were “pale and full of fear,” and came by the thousands to England’s shores: “From Bruges they came, and Antwerp, and Ostend, / No carillons in their train. Foes of mad mood / Had shattered these to shards amid the gear / Of ravaged roof, and smouldering gable-end.” They were families, mostly from Belgium, caught up in the German advance during the First World War.

As with the Syrian refugee crisis today, their plight touched the conscience of the West. Two of the 20th century’s greatest Christian authors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, encountered firsthand the human suffering of the Great War and enlisted their literary imagination to confront it. Their epic works — tales of valor and sacrifice in a great conflict between Good and Evil — do not evade society’s moral obligations to the victims of war.

In October 1914, the German army entered the Belgian port of Ostend, bringing most of Belgium under German occupation. Soon tens of thousands of refugees were fleeing for Great Britain, which had entered the war to defend Belgian neutrality. Many arrived in the village of Great Bookham, where Lewis was being tutored in the classics before being sent to France to fight for king and country. He wrote to his father: “Everyone at Bookham is engaged in a conspiracy for ‘getting up’ a cottage for Belgian refugees.”

In The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis’s series of children’s books, the hardship and sense of loss endured by those caught up in war are themes woven throughout the works. In Prince Caspian, when the four Pevensie children return to Narnia after a long absence, they learn that the Telmarines rule with an iron fist and have sent the Narnians into hiding and exile. “Never in all these years,” explains Dr. Cornelius, “have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom.”

Serving as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1916, Tolkien encountered many refugees along the Western Front. The images of these destitute families never left him.

Thus in The Lord of the Rings, Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins take flight from their beloved Shire, dependent on the kindness of others as they pursue their great quest to destroy the Ring of Power. “Certainly I have looked for no such friendship as you have shown,” Frodo tells Faramir. “To have found it turns evil to great good.”

We see the desperate inhabitants of Minas Tirith, escaping by wagon train before the battle of Pelennor Fields. We learn about “the Men who had come up the Greenway,” fleeing the forces of Sauron, the Dark Lord. They are refugees “on the move, looking for lands where they could find some peace.” It will not be easy for them to find safe haven: “The Bree-folk were sympathetic, but plainly not very ready to take a large number of strangers into their little land.”

Many Americans today also seem unwilling to accept even a small number of strangers fleeing war-torn Syria and Iraq. The Syrian refugee crisis — over 4 million people have left the country — has set off a debate within America’s churches about how to balance national-security interests with Christian compassion.

Even before the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, some groups began calling for a ban on Muslims trying to enter the United States. “We urge the U.S. to stop Muslim migration,” announced Evangelicals for Biblical Immigration, “until Islamic culture comes peacefully as blessing.” Opinion polls suggest that this view is gaining ground nationally.

Yet for Tolkien and Lewis, their mythic tales — set in the crucible of war — were framed by the Christian themes of rescue and redemption. Lifelong friends who first met at Oxford in the 1920s, they both rejected the moral cynicism and agnosticism of their postwar generation. Their shared literary aim was to recover an older tradition of the epic hero, but to reinterpret the tradition for the modern mind.

Thus the most compelling characters of Middle-earth and Narnia — whether they are hobbits or elves or talking horses — owe a moral debt to the central figure of the Christmas story. In that story, a refugee family from the Middle East must flee to Egypt to escape a vicious and paranoid ruler. The experience would inform the ethics of the Nazarene: “I was a stranger,” Jesus taught his disciples, “and you invited me in.”

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

WNET/Channel 13: Author and Historian Joseph Loconte Discusses the Influence of the First World War on Authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis

This article was originally posted at MetroFocus.

Authors J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis share the distinction of being two of the most important writers of the twentieth century, but they were also close friends, bonded by their shared experiences of the First World War and its aftermath. In his book, A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War, historian Joseph Loconte details the immense influence of the First World War on Tolkien and Lewis and the impact that it had on their respective literary works. Rafael Pi Roman speaks to Loconte about how the two authors’ experiences as soldiers on the Western Front inspired the epic imagery and themes of classic tales like The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Ted Cruz, Realpolitik, and the Future of the Middle East

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Perhaps like no other Republican presidential candidate, Senator Ted Cruz exemplifies the nation’s conflicted conscience over the direction of U.S. foreign policy in the age of terror. Should the United States promote democracy in the Middle East, or should we learn to live with Arab dictatorships, even as we seek to defeat and destroy the Islamic State?

In this week’s Republican presidential candidates’ debate, as well as in a speech last week at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Cruz tries to navigate between isolationism and interventionism. “We will not win by replacing dictators, as unpleasant as they may be,” he says, “with terrorists who want to kill us and destroy America.” Better to live with the devil we know, in other words, than with the demons who might replace him.

This argument was explicitly rejected by the Bush administration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack. In a seminal 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, Mr. Bush condemned as a Faustian bargain decades of U.S. support for thuggish governments in the Muslim world: “Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe—because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.”

Mr. Bush had at least some evidence on his side: fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive states in the world. Another came from Egypt, then ruled by military strongman Hosni Mubarak. Thus, the Bush Doctrine made the promotion of democracy in the Middle East its political lodestar. “As long as freedom does not flourish,” he said, “it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo.”

Mr. Cruz, by contrast, is perfectly willing to accept the status quo. He rejects, he says, “the conventional wisdom that holds that America must always promote democracy at all costs.” It should be pointed out that no Republican president or presidential candidate has ever insisted that democracy should be promoted “at all costs.”

The Texas senator goes on to invoke Ronald Reagan, “the single greatest liberator of human oppression” in history. “He did not do it by forcing democracy on unwilling nations.” This is the language of the left: the rhetoric of false choices that has been a staple of Mr. Obama’s sophomoric speechifying.

None of the Republican contenders for president has suggested “imposing” democracy on anyone. Nor did the United States impose democracy following the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq—it removed brutal and sadistic dictatorships that had imposed themselves on unwilling populations. Muslim leaders in both countries wrote their own constitutions and elected their own leaders, regardless of U.S. preferences.

Mr. Cruz continues: “We do not betray the idea of America by accepting reality.” The reality we are asked to accept, he says, is the genocidal regime of Bashar al-Assad—except Mr. Cruz usually neglects to mention Mr. Assad’s association with genocide. There are, we are told, no better alternatives. “Quite simply,” he concludes, “we do not have a side in the Syrian civil war.”

The Syrian government violently quashes a peaceful democratic protest movement, butchers over 200,000 of its own citizens, unleashes chemical weapons against its civilian population, and creates a refugee crisis that is destabilizing moderate Muslim governments and threatening our European allies—and the United States has no interest in the outcome of this war? The conflict creates safe havens for the Islamic State, invites Russian influence into the region, and is transforming Syria into a political appendage of Iran, a leading exporter of terrorism—and the next American president must remain indifferent to the author of this chaos?

Perhaps Mr. Cruz is right: After four years of U.S. dithering, after the landscape of Syria has become an Islamic jihadist playground, Mr. Assad’s departure might turn the country into a trophy for the Islamic State. Maybe this latest expression of political “realism”—effectively a continuation of President Obama’s Syria policy—is the only choice left to the United States.

But is it? The case for realpolitik has been made before, by both political parties, even in the face of a geo-political and humanitarian crisis of similar magnitude. Recall the response of Secretary of State James Baker, a Republican, when asked whether the United States should help stop ethnic cleansing in the Balkans during the 1990s: “We don’t have a dog in that fight.” It turned out, in the first war among European states since 1945, after thousands killed and millions of refugees made destitute, that America did have a dog in that fight—a fact that President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, discovered almost too late.

“Are the peoples of the Middle East somehow beyond the reach of liberty,” President Bush asked in his 2003 speech. “Are millions of men and women and children condemned by history or culture to live in despotism? Are they alone never to know freedom, and never even to have a choice in the matter?”

For Mr. Cruz and his supporters, the disturbing answer at the moment appears to be yes.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: A Terrorism Speech that Will Live in Infamy

This article was originally posted at Providence.

Barack Obama’s prime-time address to the nation on Sunday—delivered four days after the most deadly terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11—was intended to reassure an anxious nation that America was nevertheless on course to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Instead, the president’s predictably languid, misleading, and often banal remarks have reinforced widespread disapproval of his entire approach to combatting Islamic terrorism.

Let’s consider just a few of Mr. Obama’s claims from his speech following the assault in San Bernardino, California that killed fourteen people and injured twenty-one.

“So far, we have no evidence that the killers were directed by a terrorist organization overseas, or that they were part of a broader conspiracy here at home.”

The statement suggests that Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, were self-taught, self-funded “lone wolves.” Mr. Obama seems determined to convince us that ISIS has been “contained” by his policies, that this was not a Paris-style attack.

But the evidence in hand, and an ounce of common sense, tell us the statement is meaningless. We know that Malik attended a Pakistani school renowned for its militancy. We know she pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi on Facebook just before the assault. We know that Farook spent time in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, hotbeds of Islamic radicalism, and contacted people from at least two terrorist organizations overseas, including the al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front in Syria. We know the couple engaged in target practice, wore tactical vests to the assault, acquired thousands of rounds of ammunition for their rifles and handguns, and converted their home into a virtual “bomb factory”—all the earmarks of an ISIS-funded operation. We know that a large sum of money was reportedly deposited in the couple’s bank account shortly before the attack. And we know that the terrorists tried to destroy their cell phones and laptops, something only members of a larger network of conspirators would bother to do.

The statement is also misleading at a deeper level, as it exposes the president’s inability to grasp the religious character of the threat. ISIS has anointed al Baghdadi as “Caliph Ibrahim,” the only legitimate religious and political authority for the entire Muslim community. Under this vision, all Muslims must swear complete loyalty to him. Refusal equals rebellion, (khuruj), an act deserving death by crucifixion. Under this vision, Muslims everywhere are foot soldiers in an apocalyptic conflict that respects no borders, no norms of civilized nations, no rules of war.

This is the malignancy that Mr. Obama declines to name, or to explain to the American people. Instead, we are told:

“For seven years, I’ve confronted this evolving threat each morning in my intelligence briefing. And since the day I took this office, I’ve authorized U.S. forces to take out terrorists abroad precisely because I know how real the danger is.”

The one thing—the most consequential thing—that Barack Obama has failed to do over the last seven years of his presidency is to actually confront, with intellectual seriousness and moral resolve, the great scourge of radical Islamic jihad. This is the conclusion, put in more diplomatic terms, of his own former defense secretaries, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Thus, in a recent study, “A Global Strategy for Combatting al Qaeda and the Islamic State,” lead author Mary Habeck describes an enemy that is gaining strength, while the United States and its allies mount a defensive—and ineffective—counter-reaction. “American leaders still have not recognized the nature of this war and have a dangerous misconception of the threat,” she writes. “At the same time, our global position is materially worse than it was just three years ago. We have fewer allies, fewer capable partners, fewer forward bases, fewer available resources, and fewer forces to deal with the threat.”

Rather than face these troubling realities in his address, President Obama chose to lecture the American people about their instinct to over-react and to discriminate against their Muslim neighbors:

“Our success won’t depend on tough talk, or abandoning our values, or giving in to fear. That’s what groups like ISIL are hoping for.”

Of course Americans must not abandon their political ideals of equality under the law, religious pluralism, and so on. Donald Trump’s latest tirade about keeping Muslims out of the United States is a symptom of Mr. Trump’s egomania, eager to exploit deep distrust in the president’s capacity to protect the homeland. Mr. Obama’s statement, an exercise in self-evident pabulum, is yet another attempt to change the subject: ISIS doesn’t give a damn about tough talk, or American values, or whether or not we are, by the president’s definition, “giving in to fear.”

What the Islamic fascists are hoping for is precisely what Mr. Obama’s policies have delivered to them: the disintegration of Syria, profound insecurity in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a morbid fear of committing America’s diplomatic and military resources to actually defeating them on the battlefield.

The forces of ISIS have outmaneuvered and fought off a U.S.-led “coalition” of 53 nations, armed with superior weapons, for over 18 months. They have emerged militarily stronger, seized vast resources and strategic territory, committed genocide with impunity, downed a commercial airliner, struck into the heart of Europe, and now terrorized an American city. They continue to attract thousands of fresh recruits to their transcendent cause, because victory against the infidels has become their greatest recruiting tool.

This, as any honest and rational mind knows, is what the barbarians were hoping for.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.

Providence: Syrian Refugees, the Republican Party, and the American President

This article was originally posted at Providence.

If we needed conclusive proof of the degraded condition of America’s political leadership, we have it in the debate over the Syrian refugee crisis.

For the Republican Party and its conservative allies, this is their hour of shame. Last week 27 Republican governors declared that they would not accept any more Syrian refugees into their states. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives, by a vote of 289-137, passed a bill calling for the most stringent vetting process ever established for people fleeing a war-torn nation. Party leaders are repudiating President Obama’s call to accept 10,000 Syrian refugees over the next year. Their rationale is that terrorists will slip in among the new arrivals and carry out a Paris-style attack in the United States.

The Republican Party’s response is a toxic mix of fear, exclusion, ignorance, and irrationality. Although conservatives have good reasons to doubt President Obama’s grasp of America’s national security threats, none of them justify a posture of cynicism and denial toward this human tragedy.

FBI Director James Comey lit the bonfire with his congressional testimony last month, when he warned that background checks on Syrian refugees can be problematic because of the lack of good intelligence in the theater of war. “If someone has never made a ripple in the pond in Syria in a way that would get their identity or their interest reflected in our database, we can query our database until the cows come home,” he said, “but there will be nothing showing up because we have no record of them.”

Despite repeated claims to the contrary, none of the Syrian refugees have been linked to the November 15 Paris attacks. Nevertheless,Republican presidential candidates have seized upon Mr. Comey’s testimony to discourage or bar Syrian refugees from entering the country.

Donald Trump warns of a “Trojan Horse” strategy that would allow terrorists to hide among their number. “This could be one of the great tactical ploys of all time,” he says. Ben Carson compares the threat of militants posing as refugees to a “rabid dog” prowling the neighborhood. “You’re probably going to put your children out of the way,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination, but you’re putting your intellect into motion.”

The intellect is the one human faculty in this debate that is not in motion. Rather, the capacity for reason and moral reflection—the qualities of leadership desperately required at this hour—seems caught in a vice grip of irrationality.

Mr. Comey’s testimony about possible “gaps” in intelligence is accurate—but, taken out of context, badly misleading. Those who are using it to ban all Syrian refugees ignore the singular fact that the United States already has in place the toughest vetting process for refugees in the democratic West—much more discriminating than Europe with its open borders.

Refugees are first screened by the UN High Commission on Refugees, and only a fraction of those are selected for possible entry into the United States. They are then vetted by the National Counterterrorism Center, the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center, the State Department, and Defense Department, and the Department of Homeland Security (involving an extensive, in-person interview). The entire process takes 18 to 24 months.

Barely 1,800 refugees have been allowed into the United States since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, a conflict that has displaced over 11 million people. Most are elderly men, women, and children. Many of them—including Muslims, Yazidis, Christians, and Jews—have been targeted for extinction either by the Syrian regime or the Islamic State. Two percent of the Syrian refugees now in the United States are single men of combat age.

No immigration system is risk-free. To demand such a system would mean shutting down all immigration into the United States—and betraying our deepest political and religious ideals in the process.

Republican leaders and their conservative allies seem prepared to abandon one of the most consequential ideas in history: the belief in American exceptionalism. Since the founding of the republic, Americans have insisted that their national interests must be tempered by their moral and religious interests—by their Judeo-Christian tradition that refuses to separate justice from mercy. They point to this historic commitment to explain the United States as a powerful global advocate for human dignity, democracy, and human rights.

President Obama—and the liberalism in which he lives and moves and has his being—rejects American exceptionalism. This accounts for his refusal to act on behalf of the Syrian people when acting decisively could have averted much of the killing and carnage. This explains why the president has watched, with stoic indifference, the transformation of Syria into a living hell for its people. He has allowed Bashar al-Assad to continue his genocidal campaign. He has declined to establish safe havens for Syrian refugees. For the first three years of the civil war, Mr. Obama, for all his recent moralizing, allowed exactly 30 Syrians per year to enter the United States.

It is hard to think of a president less qualified to lecture the nation about its moral obligations than this one. It is even harder to recall a commander in chief more naïve—even delusional—about the threat of Islamic radicalism.

Yet none of this excuses the hysterical and morally debased response of the Republican Party and its conservative allies. The victims of the Syrian civil war—and there are so many children among them—face a future of despair and destitution. The conflict has created a vortex of human suffering not seen since the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the last time the United States ignored a refugee crisis of this scale was during the administration of another liberal Democrat, Franklin Roosevelt, a master at separating his personal political interests from larger moral concerns. The victims, of course, were the Jews of Europe, trying to escape the fires of the Holocaust.

Yes, it is an hour of shame, an hour when the conscience of a nation has succumbed to a spirit of cowardice and fear. “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,” wrote Emma Lazarus. “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.” As the tempest rages on, America’s lamp is dimming.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the King’s College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-1918.