Have Catholics Lost the Will to Fight?

I n his worthwhile newsletter, Joshua Treviño is worried that American Catholic conservatives have fallen short of the example of their forebears. They’ve lost their fight.

The source of Treviño’s worry is the presence of several Catholic conservatives in the names of signatories to a letter arguing that the United States should seek a ceasefire and negotiated settlement for Ukraine, by keeping lines of diplomacy open, and disavowing the goal of regime change in Russia.

In the opinion of the author, they aren’t hawkish enough on Russia. Treviño writes, “If you were a right-of-center Catholic about a generation back, it was overwhelmingly probable that you favored the liberation of oppressed nations, their defense against aggression, and American action toward those ends.” He cites Catholic-conservative support for Polish and Hungarian dissenters and liberation movements. He posits there is a “discontinuity” and confesses, “There is no doubt an evolutionary element to it that I’m missing.” Catholics of the last generation “were tremendously in favor of engagement in the world.”

He ventures one idea, which is that, in 2022, Russian aggression is falling mostly on Orthodox Christians, and not on the Ukrainian Catholics who are concentrated in Ukraine’s West, whereas in the Cold War, religious co-belligerency brought American Catholics to the side of Poles, Slovaks, Hungarians, and so many others. This is dangerously close to the accusation of bigotry.

Of course, there are figures that span the generations. Patrick J. Buchanan was as stout a Cold Warrior as could be found. He was behind not just American support of internal Soviet Catholic dissidents, but was also perhaps the lead advocate in the Nixon White House of Operation Nickel Grass, the strategic airlift that saved Israel in the Yom Kippur war, another Cold War proxy battle.

Buchanan’s foreign policy changed at the end of the Cold War partly for a reason so obvious it is a surprise that it goes unmentioned: Moscow ceased to be communist. It is no longer possessed by an ideology that demands universal revolution and compulsory atheism. Stalin genuinely believed the entire destiny of man was communism. Putin’s Russia is not possessed by this demoniacal universal mission. In the view of Buchanan, it was only communism’s universal ambition that could justify America’s departure from its more humble, small-r republican foreign-policy traditions.

If religious solidarity is a factor shaping the attitudes of young conservative Catholics, it naturally militates against naïve American intervention. For the younger generation of conservative Catholics, euphemisms like “engagement in the world” and grand missions to bring “an end to evil” were used by our hawkish peers to justify interventions in the Islamic world: overtly in Iraq and Libya, more covertly in Syria. Support for the Arab Spring and regime change was supposed to bring about liberal-democratic regimes. The result — a foreseeable one — was the near extinction of Middle Eastern Christians.

The Chaldean Christian community in Iraq is practically annihilated, a reduction of nearly 90 percent. U.S. aid to the Iraqi government we created was distributed according to laws that discriminated against Christians. American-sponsored moderate rebels expelled 90 percent of the Christians in the city of Homs. At one point, three-quarters of Syria’s Christians fled in fear. A Christian shopkeeper in Maaloula expressed the reality in a quote to the BBC: “Tell the EU and the Americans that we sent you Saint Paul 2,000 years ago to take you from the darkness, and you sent us terrorists to kill us.”

Catholics also might have noticed that Western military power expressed in NATO is no longer the chilly, conservative military alliance it was during the Cold War. It is something else. One recent sign was that the American State Department threatened to relocate NATO matériel and resources out of Poland to retaliate against the government’s restricting speech that blamed the Holocaust on the Polish nation. It occasioned the question: Were NATO’s resources in Poland there for a military reason, or for the purpose of enforcing political discipline on Polish democracy? (Then-chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel sensibly responded to the Polish law by acknowledging it was the German state that perpetrated the Holocaust, not the Polish state that Germany had driven into exile.)

America’s “engaged” policy-makers talked a big game about democracy in Afghanistan, but our practice was to pay medieval warlords to do our bidding outside of Kabul. Meanwhile, in the capital, we lavishly funded organizations that tried to invent Dari and Pashto words for terms like “gender” and “gender equality.” If you’re wondering why there seems to be an increase in noisome political correctness in the United States, it’s likely because we’ve brought our PC police home from their deployment in conflicts abroad. They’re nation-building at home now.

There are good reasons to be skeptical about the promiscuous use of military power. All the great empires were wrecked in wars engaged on the periphery of their reign — a lesson republics should take seriously. But, for conservative Catholics specifically, the last two decades have shown that U.S. engagement has birthed chaos, persecution, and extremism. By your fruits, you shall know them.