Craig R. Myers
This past June, a young Ukrainian pastor lamented to me how a Republican presidential victory would end US military aid to his embattled nation. Examining this led me back to Reinhold Niebuhr, a Reformed Protestant minister from Missouri. Applying Niebuhr to current events is tricky. He sought American victory in World War II and the Cold War, but opposed US involvement in Vietnam. Yet, based on Niebuhr’s significant contribution to International Relations scholarship, I believe he would support arming Ukraine. Niebuhr argued that turning the other cheek is a Christian response to personal mistreatment, but turning a blind eye when an innocent nation is brutalized is not. Salvation would come from outside history, he wrote, but until then there is no law over nations, only between them.
An aggressive state can only be stopped by other nations, Niebuhr argued in the 1932 book that largely introduced his IR philosophy – Moral Man and Immoral Society:
The selfishness of human communities must be regarded as an inevitability. Where it is inordinate it can be checked only by competing assertions of interest; and these can be effective only if coercive methods are added to moral and rational persuasion.
Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria was the catalyst for Niebuhr’s worldview. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was similarly preemptive and brutal. Japan’s pretense was protecting Japanese in Manchuria and guarding against Western cultural and geopolitical encroachment. Putin has offered similar justifications for his invasion. The League of Nations and Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing war could not stop the Japanese. Likewise, neither the United Nations nor the 1994 Budapest Memorandum – in which Russia committed to respect Ukraine’s territory if it gave up nuclear weapons – could dissuade Putin.
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