It’s Tuesday, May 31st, 2022.
I’m Albert Mohler, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.
Part I
What Does Victory in War Mean?: A Voice from the Past Argues for Realism when Looking at Russia’s War with Ukraine
Some absolutely massive worldview dimensions of big foreign policy stories having to do primarily with Russia and China, and we’re going to be looking over the course of the last several decades to understand some of those most basic issues and why they’re playing out right now in a big way in the headlines. Of course, the immediate reason for all the headlines related to Russia is Russia’s now weeks-long invasion of Ukraine, and we’ve reached the point where the big question is where is this going to end and when is it going to end.
Now, the background to that’s easy to understand. Vladimir Putin was obviously very confident to the fact that the overwhelming power of Russia’s military would simply crush Ukraine, that the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, would fall, that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, will be toppled from power, and Ukraine would, according to Putin’s vision, once again become part of Mother Russia, the frontier of Russia there in its Western side. But that didn’t happen. Kyiv held. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is still the president of Ukraine. Ukraine and its people have been fighting back heroically, and Russia have been losing ground, certainly in northern and in central Ukraine.
The most intense fighting right now is going on in the east, in the region known as the Donbos, and there are more Russian speakers there. It is of course, closer to Russia, and Russia appears to be trying to gain as much of it as possible, and in particular, to gain a so-called land bridge between Crimea. Now, that had been a part of Ukraine, and of course it includes precious ports on the Black Sea, and back in 2014, Russian forces under Vladimir Putin simply went into the Crimean Peninsula and claimed it for Russia. More on that in just a moment, but it is clear that Russia now wants a land bridge between the territories in the north and the Crimean Peninsula in the south, and so that appears to be the most important military goal right now of Vladimir Putin, but then again, that assumes that Vladimir Putin is a rational character and that we are able to read his intentions.
He is clearly back on his heels. The Russian military has been shown to be anything but invincible, and a couple of military dimensions that turned out to be really interesting, for one thing, it turns out that a massive land army like Russia’s very traditional army is actually at a significant disadvantage, given modern high technology weapons, including drones, and we have seen Russian forces take humiliating losses, including the losses of the lives of several of their generals, simply because these drones are so effective. The other thing we have seen is that similar forms of high tech warfare have been very, very successful against a surface Navy, in this case, the Russian Navy losing its missile cruiser that was the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet.
But let’s get back to where we started here. The big question right now is how this ends, and the interesting catalyst to the most recent headlines is someone who is almost a hundred years old and still very much alive, Henry Kissinger, who was secretary of state of the United States back in the 1970s. He was secretary of state having been formerly National Security Advisor to then President Richard Nixon. He was also secretary of state to Nixon’s successor, President Gerald Ford. We’re talking about service as United States secretary of state long before most Americans alive today were even born. Henry Kissinger was one of the most foremost intellectual architects of foreign policy in the 20th century. He was most closely associated with what was known as realism. Henry Kissinger said, “We simply have to look at the world as it is.”
Now, foreign policy realism mirrored other forms of realism, including a theological movement towards realism that included a reaffirmation of a very strong doctrine of human sinfulness that was necessary to make the world make sense. Henry Kissinger called for realism in American foreign policy and particularly at the high watermark of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Union. Henry Kissinger’s point was simply this, we have to be realistic and understand that the United States is not going to eliminate the Soviet Union as a threat. We are locked into an international battle of ideological as well as military conflict, and realism means that America had better establish its foreign policy upon an understanding that we do live in a bipolar world, a world say separated between Moscow and Washington, and both sides, both forces, the East and the West are going to have to make realistic determinations about what is acceptable policy.
And this was really an innovation during the time say of the Nixon administration, and it was also something out of step with Republican foreign policy in the 1990s because the realism of Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon had largely been discarded. Even though it was really a bipartisan fact of foreign policy in the United States, it had largely been discarded by a new form of idealism, largely associated with the presidency of George W. Bush and the American invasions under President Bush of both Afghanistan, arguably defensive, and Iraq, very clearly about regime change and nation building.
But, frankly, a very large percentage of Americans wasn’t yet born during that time in the 1990s and into the first decade of the 21st century, and yet Henry Kissinger catapulted himself back onto the headlines just in the last several days, and he did so by speaking in Davos, Switzerland, making clear by his understanding of the world that the war between Russia and Ukraine, and yes, we should call it the Russian invasion of Ukraine, will eventually come to an end one way or another by negotiation, and in that negotiation will be some transfer of territory. That’s a brilliant display of Henry Kissinger’s realism. Right or wrong, he’s simply saying, “Look, these are the facts. These are the facts on the ground. They’re not the facts that Vladimir Putin wanted. They are not the facts that Volodymyr Zelenskyy wanted, but they are nonetheless the facts on the ground.”
Vladimir Putin made no direct response to Henry Kissinger, but Volodymyr Zelenskyy did, suggesting that Kissinger was just sounding like the appeasers back in 1938 associated with Munich and basically a policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. But Henry Kissinger is no appeaser. He’s a realist. That’s a very different thing, and it’s interesting to note that with or without Henry Kissinger’s point, the front page of The New York Times over the weekend included the headline, US and its Allies Can’t Agree on Defining Victory in Ukraine. Now, that’s an interesting way for the headline to be put. There is the assumption here that, one way or another, Ukraine and its allies, including the United States, won’t be satisfied without being able to use the word victory in some sense, but there again, realism helps us to ask some fundamental questions such as what does victory in war often or even usually mean.
Well, you would think that victory would mean something like the score in an athletic endeavor, in something like a football game. You can tell who won by just looking at the score. Sometimes the score when it comes to something as horrible as war ends up being a map, a map of the world, a map of contested territory. It was shaded this way before the war. It’s shaded this way in terms of allegiance and identity after the war, territory lost and territory gained. But it’s also important for Christians to realize that sometimes war, even a righteous war, simply doesn’t end with anything that can be, well, authentically termed victory.
One of the most interesting examples of that was World War I. Of course, it was known as The Great War at the time. It was often even declared to be the war to end all wars, a motto associated with the presidential leadership of Woodrow Wilson, but the fact is, of course, World War I is now known as World War I because it was followed so quickly by world War II. Not only was it not the war to end all wars, in many ways, it was a war that gave birth to other wars.
But what’s the point here? The point is that even though the United States, Britain, France and other allies won world War I, they didn’t get a surrender of Nazi Germany. Instead, what they got was an armistice. It was an armistice that ended World War I, and an armistice is not a surrender, it is a cessation of active hostility. In other words, World War I never actually ended, or arguably, it didn’t end until the Treaty of Versailles sometime later. Actually, of course, it didn’t end at all which is why the enemy powers lined up in World War I and in World War II are hauntingly similar, and most importantly, look at the role of Germany in both of those cataclysmic conflicts.
It was the lack of a clear victory, and for that matter, a surrendered enemy in World War I that led the victors in World War II to be absolutely determined that Germany must surrender in that war with what was defined as an unconditional surrender, a principle, by the way, America and its allies also held in effect in the Pacific theater. What was required of Japan was an unconditional surrender, just like the unconditional surrender demanded of Nazi Germany. You can understand in the 20th century why the United States and its allies demanded an unconditional surrender. It is because this was a second world war, fought largely over some of the same issues with some of the same enemy nations and over the same big questions. The United States and its allies were not willing for there to be a World War III.
But when you look at the course of war and warfare over human history, the fact is that there are no clear endings to many wars, that part of the horror of war is often that it doesn’t end in any way that is actually morally satisfying, even when an aggressor state is defeated because war, being a conflict between nations and involving all kinds of factors, and of course, people on the ground and in command, politicians, as well as military leaders, the reality is it is a very dreadful process, and it often ends in what can only be described as a somewhat dreadful end.
A part of the confusion over the situation is the language that’s been used by basically everyone in a leadership position. Vladimir Putin has made statements about demanding nothing less than unconditional victory against Ukraine. He didn’t get that, and by now it’s pretty obvious he’s not going to get that. How’s he going to explain what Russia does say get out of this war? But you also have Volodymyr Zelenskyy who at one point had simply talked about defending Ukraine against Russia, but now appears to be claiming that his goal was nothing less than a complete Russian retreat and no forfeiture of Ukrainian territory whatsoever. Does that also include Crimea? Are we going back to 2014?
Part II
Contain, Constrain, Combat? The Strategy of the United States in the Fight Against World Communism
There have been Americans who’ve made very confusing statements and it starts at the top. President Joe Biden, who is a very gaff-prone American politician, sometimes by the way, that’s defined as a politician telling the truth, whether he is telling the truth about national policy or not, at times, he has said such things as that Vladimir Putin can’t be allowed to remain in power. That’s a military goal, but the United States is not an active military participant, but President Biden has also, even as he has given enthusiastic support to both President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians, he has not been abundantly clear about what America’s specific goals are and what are the limits to American involvement, other than what he has said by making very clear that American troops will not fight Russian troops on Ukrainian territory. But he’s also made conflicting statements about whether or not Ukraine might get some fairly long range missiles, again, in escalation of the war and what would be an acceptable end to the war to Americans.
Well, the White House, and we can understand this, has said that’s really up to the Ukrainians and President Zelenskyy, but that’s true only to a point because at this point, even the Ukrainians are largely fighting with American weaponry and with the support of other Western allies. Other decision-makers are going to be involved in this as well. The American secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, also said something that had to be walked back in recent days when he said that at least one American goal was for the Russian military power to be degraded by this war to an extent that it would never be able to try a similar kind of effort or invasion again. That’s not normally the kind of thing that American secretaries of defense say out loud, but Secretary Austin said it out loud.
The New York Times article summarizes the current lack of agreement with these words, “After three months of remarkable unity in response to the Russian invasion, resulting in a flow of lethal weapons into Ukrainian hands and a broad array of financial sanctions that almost no one expected, least of all Mr. Putin, the emerging fissures are about what to do next.” And as The Times says, “The emerging fissures about that question are notable.” It’s also interesting that The Times’ article summarizes by saying, “At their heart lies a fundamental debate about whether the three-decade long project to integrate Russia should end.” Well, integrate Russia with what? Integrate Russia with the West.
Now, that gets us to the second big issue, and this one is also just fascinating, and this has to do with how exactly do you look at a nation like Russia, or as we shall see, at a nation like China and say to what extent can such a nation, which is operating by an ideology and by a political system that’s antithetical to that of the West and to the United States, to what degree can such a nation be integrated with the West and with Western institutions. This takes us back to a problem that also emerged just last week, at least in terms of public debate, and that is what is America’s current foreign policy towards not in this case, Russia, but China.
Now, if you were to go back to the 20th century and say, “Russia,” and say, “China,” what would come to the mind of most Americans in the second half of the 20th century would be the Cold War where Russia, more specifically the Soviet Union and China are the two great communist powers, and by the way, they were allied together only to a very limited extent early in the communist experience of China. Pretty quickly, Russia and China became communist adversaries or at least communist competitors. But nonetheless, in the great battle of the age, it was the communist on one side and it was the Western allied nations committed to freedom and to constitutional self-government on the other side.
So, where are we now? Well, where we are right now when it comes to China is that the American secretary of state is now making a very public series of statements about the new American policy towards Chin, and the big word that is being used is constrain. Again, a headline In The New York Times, to constrain China, US aims to shape the strategic environment, Blinken says. In this case, it’s the secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and as secretaries of state of the United States are wont to do, he is describing America’s foreign policy goals when it comes to a major challenge. In this case, the challenger is China, but even as Russia is a challenge and China is a challenge, the word constrain comes up with both, but so does another word which is barely under the surface, and it turned out to be one of the most important words in American foreign policy history. That word is not constrain, but contain.
The word contain was expanded into containment, and that was the main American foreign policy during the Cold War when it came to the Soviet Union, most importantly, but also to China, containment of communism. If you go back to 1946, the year after the end of World War II, the big question is which competitor ideology is going to win Western, democratic ideals or communist ideology. We can look back at it and say, “Well, communism really never posed that much of a challenge to the West,” and yet that’s wrong. Communism collapsed in the sense that the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, but communism as an ideology was, and to some degree still is, a major deadly competitor to what is known as the Western democratic ideology, the idea of constitutional self-government established upon liberty.
Containment was a word that was basically used to summarize an argument that was made by an American diplomat who had been stationed in Moscow. His name was George Kennan. Kennan would become one of the most famous architects of American foreign policy. In 1946 during the Truman administration, even as the American president was trying to figure out what the actual goals of Russia were, the Soviet Union, and how exactly Americanist allies should respond, George Kennan wrote what became famous as the Long Telegram. He wrote it in 1946, and he sent it under conditions of utmost top secrecy to the American president and to the state department. It became known as the long telegram because it was long and it was a telegram. The author of the telegram was known for a matter of years simply as “X.”
Kennan had received permission by James Forrestal, who was the US Secretary of the Navy, to publish that long telegram or a version of it, the very theory of containment in the journal known as foreign affairs, and when it appeared, it was recognized as having the ring of authority in American foreign policy. It began to explain to people both outside and inside the American administration and the American diplomatic core the posture that the United States was going to take when it came to the threat of world communism, and it comes down to that word containment. The United States recognized that it was not willing to enter immediately into something like a World War III in 1946 against the Soviet Union this time. They recognized that the United States and its people and the allies and their people were unwilling, and for that matter, unable to come up with something like a third world war against communism.
Now, what changed almost immediately after that in the rise of the nuclear age was that both sides, the Soviet Union and the United States ended up with massive nuclear weaponry that also made a World War III unthinkable, but if it’s not going to be settled by say war, in which the case there’s going to be a victory of the Soviet Union or a victory of the United States, then how should American foreign policy be directed towards the Soviet Union. Kennan’s idea was containment. You simply contain it. We don’t want communism to spread any further. The United States would not try to destroy the Soviet Union, but it would seek to contain its influence elsewhere, and that’s why the United States and our allies got into wars in places all over the world, including Vietnam, was the policy of containment right or wrong. Well, in one sense, it might have been neither right nor wrong, but still somewhat necessary. Again, it comes down to a certain understanding of realism.
There have been Americans who’ve made very confusing statements and it starts at the top. President Joe Biden, who is a very gaff-prone American politician, sometimes by the way, that’s defined as a politician telling the truth, whether he is telling the truth about national policy or not, at times, he has said such things as that Vladimir Putin can’t be allowed to remain in power. That’s a military goal, but the United States is not an active military participant, but President Biden has also, even as he has given enthusiastic support to both President Zelenskyy and the Ukrainians, he has not been abundantly clear about what America’s specific goals are and what are the limits to American involvement, other than what he has said by making very clear that American troops will not fight Russian troops on Ukrainian territory. But he’s also made conflicting statements about whether or not Ukraine might get some fairly long range missiles, again, in escalation of the war and what would be an acceptable end to the war to Americans.
Well, the White House, and we can understand this, has said that’s really up to the Ukrainians and President Zelenskyy, but that’s true only to a point because at this point, even the Ukrainians are largely fighting with American weaponry and with the support of other Western allies. Other decision-makers are going to be involved in this as well. The American secretary of defense, Lloyd Austin, also said something that had to be walked back in recent days when he said that at least one American goal was for the Russian military power to be degraded by this war to an extent that it would never be able to try a similar kind of effort or invasion again. That’s not normally the kind of thing that American secretaries of defense say out loud, but Secretary Austin said it out loud.
The New York Times article summarizes the current lack of agreement with these words, “After three months of remarkable unity in response to the Russian invasion, resulting in a flow of lethal weapons into Ukrainian hands and a broad array of financial sanctions that almost no one expected, least of all Mr. Putin, the emerging fissures are about what to do next.” And as The Times says, “The emerging fissures about that question are notable.” It’s also interesting that The Times’ article summarizes by saying, “At their heart lies a fundamental debate about whether the three-decade long project to integrate Russia should end.” Well, integrate Russia with what? Integrate Russia with the West.
Now, that gets us to the second big issue, and this one is also just fascinating, and this has to do with how exactly do you look at a nation like Russia, or as we shall see, at a nation like China and say to what extent can such a nation, which is operating by an ideology and by a political system that’s antithetical to that of the West and to the United States, to what degree can such a nation be integrated with the West and with Western institutions. This takes us back to a problem that also emerged just last week, at least in terms of public debate, and that is what is America’s current foreign policy towards not in this case, Russia, but China.
Now, if you were to go back to the 20th century and say, “Russia,” and say, “China,” what would come to the mind of most Americans in the second half of the 20th century would be the Cold War where Russia, more specifically the Soviet Union and China are the two great communist powers, and by the way, they were allied together only to a very limited extent early in the communist experience of China. Pretty quickly, Russia and China became communist adversaries or at least communist competitors. But nonetheless, in the great battle of the age, it was the communist on one side and it was the Western allied nations committed to freedom and to constitutional self-government on the other side.
So, where are we now? Well, where we are right now when it comes to China is that the American secretary of state is now making a very public series of statements about the new American policy towards Chin, and the big word that is being used is constrain. Again, a headline In The New York Times, to constrain China, US aims to shape the strategic environment, Blinken says. In this case, it’s the secretary of state, Anthony Blinken, and as secretaries of state of the United States are wont to do, he is describing America’s foreign policy goals when it comes to a major challenge. In this case, the challenger is China, but even as Russia is a challenge and China is a challenge, the word constrain comes up with both, but so does another word which is barely under the surface, and it turned out to be one of the most important words in American foreign policy history. That word is not constrain, but contain.
The word contain was expanded into containment, and that was the main American foreign policy during the Cold War when it came to the Soviet Union, most importantly, but also to China, containment of communism. If you go back to 1946, the year after the end of World War II, the big question is which competitor ideology is going to win Western, democratic ideals or communist ideology. We can look back at it and say, “Well, communism really never posed that much of a challenge to the West,” and yet that’s wrong. Communism collapsed in the sense that the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, but communism as an ideology was, and to some degree still is, a major deadly competitor to what is known as the Western democratic ideology, to what is known as the Western democratic ideology, the idea of constitutional self-government established upon liberty.
Containment was a word that was basically used to summarize an argument that was made by an American diplomat who had been stationed in Moscow. His name was George Kennan. Kennan would become one of the most famous architects of American foreign policy. In 1946 during the Truman administration, even as the American president was trying to figure out what the actual goals of Russia were, the Soviet Union, and how exactly Americanist allies should respond, George Kennan wrote what became famous as the Long Telegram. He wrote it in 1946, and he sent it under conditions of utmost top secrecy to the American president and to the state department. It became known as the long telegram because it was long and it was a telegram. The author of the telegram was known for a matter of years simply as “X.”
Kennan had received permission by James Forrestal, who was the US Secretary of the Navy, to publish that long telegram or a version of it, the very theory of containment in the journal known as foreign affairs, and when it appeared, it was recognized as having the ring of authority in American foreign policy. It began to explain to people both outside and inside the American administration and the American diplomatic core the posture that the United States was going to take when it came to the threat of world communism, and it comes down to that word containment. The United States recognized that it was not willing to enter immediately into something like a World War III in 1946 against the Soviet Union this time. They recognized that the United States and its people and the allies and their people were unwilling, and for that matter, unable to come up with something like a third world war against communism.
Now, what changed almost immediately after that in the rise of the nuclear age was that both sides, the Soviet Union and the United States ended up with massive nuclear weaponry that also made a World War III unthinkable, but if it’s not going to be settled by say war, in which the case there’s going to be a victory of the Soviet Union or a victory of the United States, then how should American foreign policy be directed towards the Soviet Union. Kennan’s idea was containment. You simply contain it. We don’t want communism to spread any further. The United States would not try to destroy the Soviet Union, but it would seek to contain its influence elsewhere, and that’s why the United States and our allies got into wars in places all over the world, including Vietnam, was the policy of containment right or wrong. Well, in one sense, it might have been neither right nor wrong, but still somewhat necessary. Again, it comes down to a certain understanding of realism.
Part III
The Continuous Clash of Worldviews in a Fallen World: The Vexing Challenge of Containing Sin
The big point I want us to consider is that with the breakup of the Soviet Union, Western nations said, “Hey, Russia’s joining us. Russia’s going to join Western institutions. Russia’s going to become just like one of us,” but that didn’t happen, and one of the Christian worldview principles that helps us to understand that is the fact that culture really does matter, and when you’re looking at Russian culture, at least the culture that produces a Vladimir Putin, you’re looking at a culture that’s incompatible with those very Western institutions that thought back in the 1990s or say 20 years ago that Russia was going to join the West. That didn’t happen.
So, what’s really interesting right now is that what you hear coming from the foreign policy establishment is that once again the United States and our allies are going to have to look at Russia with something like a policy of containment, to try to contain Russia and its ambitions, and at the very same time, the new official foreign policy undertaken by the Biden administration is to constrain China which, when you look at how it’s defined, means containment all over again.
We live in a dangerous world and we live in a world in which those dangers are real and so are options for those who would defend liberty and would defend the dignity of life and would defend the integrity of nations. We’re living in a situation in which enemies are going to continue. Some of them, we know by name. Adversary states, such as Russia and China, representing not only rival military ambitions, but frankly, radically different and antagonistic worldviews to the worldview of the United States and of Western democratic nations. We really are looking at a continuing clash of worldviews.
Here’s the big issue for Christians. Of all people, we are those who cannot and must not be surprised by this. In a fallen world, we have to expect a battle of worldviews, a battle over ideologies. It is naivete, and as we have seen, a dangerous naivete to believe that all of those worldview differences can somehow be consumed merely by some form of global institutional loyalty. No, that doesn’t work, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is proof of it. China’s misbehavior and China’s territorial ambitions are proof of it. The crackdown when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party is proof of it, and the autocracy of Vladimir Putin also is proof once again.
But finally, Christians understand something else, and this is based in our biblical understanding of sin, and that is that even as say God’s common grace is a way of restraining sin, the reality is that in a fallen world, sin is extremely difficult, extravagantly expensive to contain. You can build prisons to try to contain it. You can build navies and armies to try to contain it, and by the way, to some degree, all of those things are necessary, but in reality, containing sin turns out to be an extremely difficult endeavor. But then again, in a fallen world, we have to understand, realistically, the alternatives. The alternative to not attempting to contain sin is not containing it, giving it free reign. Sometimes in politics and in world affairs, all you’re left with is the least worst option. Containment may not turn out to be the best option, but in a very dangerous world, it certainly isn’t the worst.
Thanks for listening to The Briefing.
For more information, go to my website at albertmuller.com. You can follow me on Twitter by going to twitter.com/albertmohler. For information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu. For informational on Boyce College, just go to boycecollege.com.
I’ll meet you again tomorrow for The Briefing.
