God, Realism and the Limits of Power

Ivan Plis

Politics,

Realism and religion both acknowledge the limits and dangers of humanity's violent tendencies.

Last week, The American Conservative hosted a half-day conference on foreign policy “Realism & Restraint,” together with George Washington University’s political science department and the Charles Koch Institute. One of its panels was dedicated entirely to “What Religion Means for U.S. Foreign Policy”: a timely recognition of religion’s role in the global anarchy of 2015.

Realists believe war can be a necessary evil in the defense of core interests; Abrahamic religion affirms that God and morality constrain the legitimacy of violence. At the same time, some say that religious motives blind actors to their true self-interest, threatening to overshadow and prolong deadly and intractable wars.

Damon Linker concentrated in his remarks on the specter of just war theory. The centuries-old Catholic framework for assessing military action has haunted American foreign policy over the past fifteen years—becoming, for Linker, “a moral, theological and intellectual fraud” as exercised by the Washington establishment. America’s “default setting,” Linker said, is simply “to careen toward conflict,” and a thoughtful bureaucrat is far likelier to invoke jus in bello (the rules for proper conduct in battle) than jus ad bellum (the stringent standards for going to war in the first place).

“Americans are already too ready to believe in their own righteousness,” Linker claimed. “They certainly don’t need theologians telling them their good intentions entitle them… to appoint themselves the world’s benevolent despot.”

Panelist Samuel Goldman, of George Washington University, traced that attitude back to America’s own founding, tracing the explicit ties between early American Puritanism and latter-day Christian Zionism. Seventeenth-century Massachusetts preachers Peter Bulkley and Increase Mather linked American settlers’ piety to the eventual fulfillment of God’s covenants, made with both the Jews and the Gentiles.

The same spirit later imbued twentieth-century Protestant theologians who transfigured the U.S.’ founding theologies into a moral obligation to support a Jewish state. According to Goldman, the ugliness of the Vietnam War broke that spirit in mainline Protestantism—and revived it for evangelicals and fundamentalists.