Niebuhr did not intend for the United States to remain passive in the face of evil. He was neither an isolationist nor a pacifist. Nor was he a utopian. The art of statecraft, in his view, consisted of “finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.” Niebuhr urged policymakers to cultivate “a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved” along with “a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom, and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities.”22 In Washington throughout the decades of the New Order, such modesty and awe proved to
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