An American Conscience: The Reinhold Niebuhr Story

by Jeremy L. Sabella

The two variants relevant to the present discussion are theological realism, as exemplified by Christian realism, and what Niebuhr called a “too consistent political realism”2 — what we might refer to as ultrarealism. Scholar David Halberstam coined the term “ultrarealism” to describe the approach to world politics that came into vogue under the Kennedy administration and shaped US foreign policy through the end of the Vietnam War. Historian Peter Beinart observes that the ultrarealists “started with the reasonable insight that evil would never be eradicated and that the currency of world affairs would always be power — and forgot that there are limits to these truths as well.”