Neocons, Niebuhr, and National Humility

I think Damon Linker puts well the Niebuhrian demand for national humility (in The New Republic), which I had stated here as well:

Neocons have begun to warm to Barack Obama’s foreign policy vision. What they’ve liked about his recent speeches (at West Point, but far more so in Oslo) is his willingness to defend (against the anti-political pacifism that dominates a segment of elite European opinion) the idea that there can be morally justified wars—and that the war in Afghanistan is one of them. I’m delighted that some on the American right have come around to supporting the president, but they should do so knowing that on one crucially important matter Obama will never satisfy them. That is the issue of American exceptionalism.

For the tradition of Christian realism from which the president’s foreign policy views derive, the United States is all-too-inclined toward what Alexis de Tocqueville aptly described as the “perpetual utterance of self-applause.” Neoconservatism has many facets, but the one that dominates today defines itself primarily by the opposite conviction—namely, that the United States suffers above all from a lack of self-confidence. That’s why neocon essays and editorials so often take the form of pep talks designed to serve as rhetorical standing ovations in our national honor.

For Reinhold Niebuhr, the greatest exponent of Christian realism, this gets things exactly backward—and threatens to encourage the very aspect of America’s national character that most needs to be moderated or restrained. “Every nation has its own form of spiritual pride,” Niebuhr noted in The Irony of American History (1952), and the American version takes the form of the myth that “our nation turned its back upon the vices of Europe and made a new beginning”—a beginning marked by moral purity and the special favor of God. This uniquely American self-understanding has tended to inspire national over-confidence with regard to our virtue.

Niebuhr rightly remarks that Americans nearly always mean well when they act in the world. Our moral perils are thus “not those of conscious malice or the explicit lust for power.” Yet the rules of the world are such that good intentions—even our own—often lead to unintended bad consequences. This is a lesson we seem incapable of learning, or remembering, so eager are we to deny that the actions of even “the best men and nations” are “curious compounds of good and evil.”

Having imagined ourselves standing by God’s side as his trusted lieutenant, we half believe he has granted us wisdom and power comparable to his. But this is folly, a prideful delusion as old as Genesis 3. In Niebuhr’s view America needs regularly self-administered doses of humility.

The point is not that patriots and politicians should abandon their faith that American power can play a positive role in the world. It is that they should act with caution in applying that power. Above all, they need to take the lessons of humility closely to heart and resist the temptation to view themselves as God’s agents in history. To do otherwise—to view their policies as having been personally authored or approved by the divine—is foolishness that will tend to distort their judgment, inspiring the distinctly American over-confidence that Niebuhr warned against so powerfully.

I hope that Linker is right about Obama, but I thought the President was a little too generous with his praise for American security efforts throughout the Cold War in the Nobel Speech, with little acknowledgement of our many mistakes and national sins. One could say, "well, a President can't say that", but if that is the case, then he's not being very Niebuhrian either. You can't have it both ways.