Reading The Limits of Power, Andrew J Bacevich, a book about America”s tendency to assume that it is able to tell the rest of the world how to be and how to run their governments.  Following the end of the cold war, the US embarked on a foreign policy course he calls ”soft empire.”  The 9/11 attacks only solidified this tendency.   

I was interested in mention of the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who warned against and predicted this course because of America’s over-confidence in its powers and its arrogance on the world stage in the post-war years.  I have heard of Niebuhr but never knew much about him.  A lot of the things he seems to have explored I have been thinking in the last few years, and it’s also something articulated by Greg Boyd, who talks from a Christian standpoint about equating the Christian faith with nationalism (a different but related issue).  

Niebuhr was quite influential in the time period 1930-1960.  Wikepedia says:   

In 1952, Niebuhr published The Irony of American History, in which he shared the various struggles (political, ideological, moral and religious) in which he participated. His writings reflect a penetrating criticism of the social gospel liberalism of his youth and his search for alternatives.  For a while he tried to integrate various elements of Marxism and Christianity. Both his political experience and his deepening Christian values, however, caused him to abandon the work in favor of an ideology he called Christian Realism. Its views combined elements of the Augustinianism of the Reformation with his own hard-won political wisdom. His concepts were crystallized in the Gifford Lectures of Edinburgh University in 1940 as The Nature and Destiny of Man, which is his magnum opus. In it he comes near a systematic presentation of his theology.

So I might have to run out and read a couple of his books.  It always knocks me out to find guys like this saying things that 50 years later I hear about and they sound like they were talking last week.