Will the Real Reinhold Niebuhr Please Stand Up? Posted by David Shorr

Despite having been a religion major in college, I won't try to dissect Joseph Loconte's interpretation of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology over in AEI's magazine, The American. But the ways Loconte blatantly contorts President Obama's foreign policy intentions? Well they're like fish in a barrel; I can't resist.

As with every other cheap dig at the new policy, we inevitably have the A word:

Supporters of Obama’s apologetic foreign policy devour Niebuhr’s trenchant analysis of America’s social and political failings. They forget that he repeatedly scorned the tactic of using America’s sins to avoid confronting dangerous ideologies. “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.” [Boldface not in original.]

Here's what I've concluded: if the right wing can't have an actual liberal president who blames America first, they'll make one up. You have to be listening extremely selectively to miss the parts where President Obama's been telling the rest of the world that anti-Americanism is used too often as an excuse and that there's been a lot of free-riding on American hard power over the past 60 years. Would somebody please do a content analysis? How much apologizing has there been, and how much calling on others to help deal with Iran, climate change, Middle East peace, Afghanistan...?

There are just two choices, you see. You can insist that the United States does no wrong, knows better, and gets to tell everyone else what to do. (Done that.) Or you can show a little humility, make reasonable accommodations to the interests of others, and undercut those who argue the US is the source of the problem. Loconte himself notes the pitfalls of arrogance as a general matter and even cops to mistakes having been made in Iraq and Afghanistan. So what's his beef, then?

Ah yes, that other inevitable slam: lack of moral clarity with regard to the malevolence of the governing regimes in other nations:

What might Niebuhr say, for example, about Obama’s fruitless attempts to engage Iran to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon? He probably would caution against oversimplifying the character of the regime or ignoring the unintended consequences of military action. Yet surely Niebuhr would draw attention to Iran’s extensive record of repression, religious extremism, and support for terrorist atrocities. He would be clear about Tehran’s flagrant deception over its nuclear ambitions and its provocative testing of long-range missiles. And there would be frank talk about Iran’s vile anti-Semitism and threats to “wipe Israel off the map.”

This passage contain the shortest distance ever between the phrase "oversimplifying the character of the regime" and an actual oversimplification of the character of a regime. Pardon me, but I think President Obama's clarity about what's at stake with Iran's nuclear program is why he's conducting a diplomatic full-court press to deal with it!!!!   By the way, in the category of unintended consequences, an impressive array of regional experts last summer gave very clear warnings that making too flamboyant a show of Iran's repression would give the oppressors just the pretext they were drooling over.

To be perfectly frank, I'd rather engage in reasoned discourse than snark. But to do that, we'll have to talk about real foreign policy, not all these ridiculous cartoon depictions.

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