So short on the heels of the Democratic convention, a friend just sent me this from the Wall Street Journal, a significant article from Robert Kagan, a conservative commentator http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122005366593885103.html I don't know if Dr. Kagan is a believer or not, but he has articulately expressed the difference between those who would today call themselves "realists," the loyal opposition to "neocons," in foreign policy issues as wide and varied as "Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea." As I read his article, I couldn't help thinking, "this is a question of anthropology," something, I would add, that the Bible speaks a good deal about.

I do not intend to endorse the neocon view uncritically here, certainly, but Kagan speaks in the tradition of an older view, that of Russell Kirk, and before him Sir Edmund Burke, in ways that seem ancient history and perhaps even unrecognizeable in conservative political circles today.


Dr. Kagan points out what ought be no surprise to anyone well-read in history: modern liberals share little in foreign policy with those they quote from past years. Dean Acheson of Truman's administration would have nothing to do with the UN and the opinion of the rogue nations of the world: "As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of 'people who could not face the truth about human nature' and 'preferred to preserve their illusions intact,' writes Dr. Kagan.

That's just what we who have been broken by the fall do. We don't want to face the truth about what God says we are really like, we prefer to keep our illusions intact, and so we project a world that is little impacted by sin. We think that "enlightened" nations should naturally live in peace and harmony and certainly never invade Georgia. We hold hands and sing with everyone, "Let there be peace on earth . . . ."Not that these old liberals would have any more positive view of America than does today's reiteration, but today's liberals are quoting people who, if they were alive today, would disagree with them on the fundamentals.

The theory that talks with antagonistic nations are the way to start is born out neither by history nor the Bible. All the well-known "successful" talks came, not as an incentive to change, but because those at the table had self-interested motives that led them to the table. As Joshua Muravchik has reiterated in his September article in commentary magazine, the dramatic 1972 Richard Nixon trip to China was not a catalyst to change, but the consequence of change as China sought ways to counter a stronger and antagonistic Soviet Union and to increase it's own oil independence. Consider modern (and forgotten) examples of diplomacy when self-interest was not engaged: Johnson with Alexei Kosygin in 1967 (Czechoslovakia's "Prague Spring" is crushed by Soviets the next year), Nixon with Brezhnev in 1972 (SALT I--a year later the Soviets were found to have armed Egypt and Syria for their surprise attack on Israel), Carter and Brezhnev in 1979 (the new SALT agreement--a few months later, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan).

Every counter-biblical ideology has found its center in its understanding of what man is (basically good) and what salvation is (enlightened thinking or hard work or what others think). Those who founded this country, in the main, agreed that, because people (and we might add here, nations) are self-interested and self-motivated, there need to be constraints and checks that prevent them from having too much control over others.

And, frankly, I can't be sure (I don't know) if President Saakashvili, for all his New York savoir-faire, is any better as the leader of a country. He, too, is a sinner. Those who look for oversimplified solutions for foreign policy end up finding simple identifications of enemies to demonize, and share common ground with those who would identify evil as the property of "that person over there." Those who look, in the phrase of former President Bush, for a "new world order," will always be disappointed when they find it ends up looking remarkably like the old world order. What ought we have learned from our twentieth century experience?

Dr. Kagan: After all, had mankind truly progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding. Our modern, supposedly enlightened era produced the greatest of horrors -- the massive aggressions, the "total wars," the famines and the genocides -- and the perpetrators of these horrors were among the world's most advanced and enlightened nations. Recognition of this terrible reality -- that modernity had produced not greater good but only worse forms of evil -- was a staple of philosophical discussion in the 20th century. It was the great problem that Mr. Niebuhr wrestled with and which led him to conclude that for moral men to do good, they would sometimes have to play by the same rules as immoral men -- and yes, he believed he could tell the difference. What reason was there to imagine that after 1989 humankind was suddenly on the cusp of a brand-new order?

There still remains one answer for those who trust what the Bible says about anthropology. We are broken. Marvelous and broken. And in need of restoration. And no party, no government, no leader but Jesus Christ can fix what is so tragically broken about us. We are just that broken. Always worse than we think. Hard work can't fix us. What someone else thinks about us can't fix us. Only a strong Jesus, whose followers were not Young Republicans (think of the apostle Paul in Rome) or shouters of slogans like "Change we can believe in" or "Country first" (both of which slogans scare me more than a little bit). But day by day, the strong Jesus is winning people to Himself as the Unconquerable Sun and Lord and Savior (all titles once used by world leaders in the past who now, unlike Jesus, have no power at all--it had always been borrowed from Him).

Christians are given no other way to change society than to be ambassadors of this Jesus, lower-level functionaries whose value depends on faithfully delivering the words of their Monarch, and not their own. Broken, weak, humble things through which His light shines, not because they are obnoxious and obstreperous and self-consumed, but because they look like Him and, because they trust the strength of their Savior to preserve them, live with a gentle fearlessness that I have not yet seen, nor expect to, in our nation's politics, and for that matter, often find wanting in myself. Who shall save me from this body of sin? But thanks be to God Who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.