At the start of the Cold War, American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr addressed critics of his magazine, Christianity and Crisis, who faulted him for taking a hard line against Joseph Stalin’s Russia. Niebuhr recalled that many of America’s domestic critics also believed that Nazi Germany could not be as bad as it seemed because we were not as good as we pretended. In this, he wrote, they failed to see the geopolitical realities staring them in the face.
“America is no shining light of democratic justice,” he wrote in 1947. “But that still does not change the fact that the generous nineteenth century Marxist dream of a universal classless society has changed into a nightmare of Russian tyranny, and that the free peoples of the world hope that they can count on our support in avoiding a new enslavement.”
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