fFor the influential American theologian and political theorist Reinhold Niebuhr, who described himself as a “socialist Christian,” September 1938, the month of the Munich Agreement, was the moment when he left his radical pacifism behind. Shortly before, he had sharply criticized Roosevelt’s rearmament, claiming that the best way to avoid war is not to prepare for one. But now, under the impression of the German and Japanese policies of conquest, he decided that inaction could bring about an even greater disaster, and accused modern pacifism of failing to recognize the “tragic elements” that existed in social reality.
The point of his criticism, however, was that he also found the same kind of denial of reality in the opposite attitude, into which pacifism easily changes when the framework conditions change: the belief that history can be controlled by force of arms, i.e. destroy evil and enforce the good. Both are based on the same basic error about human nature: that one should only act when the good guys are always good and the bad guys are always bad. In 1940 he wrote: “Self-righteousness or inaction are the alternatives of secular moralism”, which he identified as the common denominator of the only apparently contrary positions. At the beginning of the Cold War, Niebuhr observed in his major work, The Irony of American History: “Our idealists are divided into those who renounce the responsibilities of power to preserve the purity of our souls and those who are willing to accept any ambiguity to conceal good and evil in our actions.” Although Niebuhr considered the use of military force in certain cases to be unavoidable on moral grounds, he also opposed war as a means of achieving moral ends. It is no coincidence that Presidential candidate Barack Obama named Niebuhr as his favorite philosopher after Bush’s attack on Iraq.