Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Part I

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Autocracies are Aiming at the West: The World is a Dangerous Place for the U.S., and It Isn’t Getting Any Safer

It’s a responsibility of Christians to come to terms with what the world means. And by that phrase, I do not mean just what’s in the world around us, but the global picture, what does it mean? Now, I want to make clear that this is not something that is a frontline responsibility for Christian families as they’re raising children and for people in various industries and vocations, and professions for young people going to school today. It isn’t necessary that you have a full grasp of international affairs before you go about your day. But it is the case that Christians given a responsibility in a world in which frankly, what happens around the globe can impact our world very quickly. There is at least the responsibility to try to understand what’s going on.

Now, one of the big issues is a process of political change around the world, and there are many people who think, well, that kind of political change has to move very slowly, and there’s wisdom in that except when there are exceptions, in other words, yeah, political change around the world comes very slowly until it comes very, very quickly. Now, when Americans were looking at what they thought was the new world picture with the big win of democracy at the end of the 20th century, America could look around the world and see many satisfying developments. The aftermath of World War II after the fall of the Soviet Union had basically moved decisively into Western favor. That is to say, much more in alignment with the goals of the United States of America. The demise of the Soviet Union itself was certainly the best news in terms of global politics when it comes to human freedom and human liberty around the world.

And it was read at the time rather infamously and somewhat embarrassingly now as if the world was moving inexorably in the direction of freedom, that the world was moving without doubt in the direction of democratic self-government. That the world was moving beyond question towards a greater embrace of human freedom and human dignity. But as you know, the 21st century just hasn’t turned out that way. But as you think about just the 21st century and the fact that it hasn’t turned out as we thought, we need to recognize it not only has not turned out like many Western optimists thought, it’s turned out to be worse than many people who were even pessimist in the 20th century feared, just consider two nations. Let’s just think of Iran and North Korea. They were both considered malevolent malign agents on the world scene back in the 20th century. But the fact is they’re much more dangerous, not less dangerous, much more dangerous now in the 21st century, so much so that the United States is moving naval assets and backing up allies such as Israel against the perpetual threat coming from Iran.

And then you have North Korea as you look at the end of the 20th century, it was again a very negative, very dangerous regime. One of the most classically communist regimes, one of the most murderous regimes, but now it’s a regime that undoubtedly has the capacity of at least some nuclear weapons. And so we’ve gone from bad to worse, and that’s just North Korea and Iran.

Think also about China and Russia. So here we’re talking about unquestioned world powers. When you look at China, you recognize that at the end of the 20th century, the United States thought that because of economic interests, you had communism in retreat, even in communist China, and you had people who were declaring the inevitable victory of market economics. And with that political freedom just hasn’t happened, hasn’t happened at all. Instead, we have a newly, if less ideological, Marxism there in the Communist project in China, we have something that’s even more communist in one sense and even more totalitarian and repressive. And when you’re looking at China right now, you recognize they have taken western technologies and turned them into a totalitarian vision beyond almost anything we could have imagined. There were many in the West who thought, you know the internet as it becomes ubiquitous around the world, the World Wide Web is going to liberalize China. China’s going to find itself having to adopt more democratic measures simply because the Internet’s going to force it. What did China do? It came up with its own internet and with its own blocking software. And so you have many people in China who have no idea whatsoever what’s going on in the rest of the world, it’s all filtered through the Communist party authority there in China.

When it comes to Russia, let’s just say two words, Vladimir Putin. And so here you are looking at someone who in the beginning of his political career, after the shakeup of the Soviet Union, even though he was a former KGB agent, you had people in the West who kept talking about how Vladimir Putin was going to be the great democratic leader, the great liberalizing leader, liberalizing in this sense, meaning western liberty of Russia, and it didn’t turn out that way at all. It turns out instead that Vladimir Putin’s heroes are more like Peter the Great and look at the autocratic and totalitarian leaders of the past.

And so those are just four countries. We talked about Iran, North Korea, we’ve talked about Russia, we’ve talked about China, but we also have to talk about some other nations such as, well, you have many Arab nations that would be involved in this to some extent, but you’d also have nations like Turkey, which is increasingly moving in a different direction than let’s just say Western democratic neighbors and allies in recent years.

Well, the Wall Street Journal recently ran a major article with the headline, “Autocracies Joined to Attack West’s Values.” And so Yaroslav Trofimov in this article talks about the fact that the United States now has ideological enemies, and it’s not just the United States, it’s also our European allies, and you would include also in this, Australia and New Zealand and other countries that have democratic self-government. You have the West, and that means in particular the United States as the leading nation of the West. You have the West now being confronted by the threat of autocracies that quite frankly, now have technologies and political power and even military power far beyond the fears of most people in the states back at the end of the 20th century.

So welcome to the 21st century, just about a quarter of a century into it is turning out to be not the new era of international peace. It’s turning out to be an even more dangerous epoch than the last decades of the 20th century.

Now, for Christians, this turns out to be two things. Number one, yes, it’s a disappointment. We would rather the world be a more peaceful place. On the other hand, it is also a demonstration of the basic Christian truth that sin is present in every age of the world and sin will, as scripture says, seize the opportunity and sin is seizing a lot of opportunities on the world scene these days. Trofimov begins this article by saying, “The coalescing partnership of autocracies led by China and Russia will impose strategic choices on Western democracies no matter who wins the US presidential election.” Trofimov very quickly also throws in Iran and North Korea. We understand why, and the big question is he’s raising are when it comes to America’s military base, even our ability to project power and defend American interests, and for that matter, even our industry and high technology firms to produce armaments, if we’re giving them away this fast and transferring them to places like Iran, if we’re having to give so much material and technological support to Israel, what’s that going to mean for the future of America’s defense of say, well, the United States of America? Clearly these are issues.

Another troubling and problematic issue that comes up is the fact that it’s taking Americans less time to develop technologies these days, that’s good news. But it’s taking American industry longer to produce anything these days in terms of thinking of a backlog of the need for armaments, etc. But that’s not the main interest I have here in this. The main interest I have in this is, well, it’s the use of the word autocracy. The headline, “Autocracies Joined to Attack West’s” Values, or the first paragraph, the coalescing partnership of autocracies. Now that’s talking about anti-democratic government. It is talking about those that are well literally autocratic. And so you are looking at a tight circle of power in which you have the exercise of that power by a very tight clique, a very tight group that replaces any kind of democratic self-government. It is basically extra-constitutional, and it is the rise of what would otherwise be called dictatorships in a classic sense, going back to the 20th century.

But here’s what’s interesting. You have Russia and China mentioned here, and you’ll notice it doesn’t say that the threat is a communist threat. Isn’t that interesting? Because someone my age is going to listen to this and say, that’s what’s new. If you were living in the 20th century, you would expect that if you hear the words Russia and China and you hear those two countries, you’re going to hear about a communist threat. That’s not even what is really dealt with in this article. Instead, it’s an autocratic threat. So that tells us how the world has changed. The threatening power of China and Russia these days are not mainly ideological at all. It’s not like Karl Marx is laughing off somewhere. It’s not the triumph of Marxism. It is the threat of autocracy. It’s the threat of totalitarianism. It is the threat of this kind of dictatorial government or a one-party rule. That’s exactly what is represented in the threat these days. From not the Soviet Union, but of course Russia. And in China, you still have the Communist party in power, but it’s really more about the power than the communist part. It’s really more about absolute totalitarian control in a one-party state. That state’s identity is not these days so important. It’s the totalitarian part that turns out to be important.

Now, in terms of a theological worldview, I just want to remind you that the grave danger of totalitarianism from a biblical perspective is not that it’s inefficient. Totalitarianism can often be, well, very efficient. It’s rather that in a totalitarian system, you have the opportunity for human depravity, human sinfulness to show up in a nearly total way. You give somebody total power, well, guess what? They just might be evil and they just might give themselves over to evil totally. And you look throughout history, you have people who are identified by throne titles like Ivan the Terrible, and you know what he was? Well, he was terrible. And you look at this and you recognize the great risk of say, a monarchy is not that you would have a good king. The great danger is you have a bad king. And as a matter of fact, the founders of the American experiment, they were not automatically anti-monarchial. They were just anti the monarchy they had experienced.

And so you could arguably say what they did was to, when it comes to the American presidency, define an office that was well, rather monarchial in at least some powers and representation. But the system of election, meaning that presidents had to submit themselves for election every four years and eventually, as the 20th century unfolded, and with a new constitutional amendment that could only serve two terms in office, that meant that even though the presidency was incredibly powerful, and indeed in some governmental sense over time, certainly more powerful than a British monarch, the fact is you’re talking about four years in office and then you’re talking about submission to another election, or you’re talking about two terms in office. And guess what? You’re a former president, and that doesn’t mean the next president is better, but you know what it does mean the next president’s not you.

Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the Republican Chair of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs put it this way, speaking about the dictatorial leaders of those four countries, “These four dictators, Putin, Xi, the Iranian Ayatollahs and Kim Jong Un are all in this together in an unholy alliance, which reminds me of my father’s war, World War II.”

Now, what’s thrown into the equation with that statement is the fact that we’re not just talking about four autocracies. And again, as we look around the world, there’s more than four, but these four are now in a unique cooperation, something that is new in world history, something that didn’t exist a decade ago, something that in one sense, didn’t exist five years ago. This is a new thing, and this is where Americans and American Christians need to pay attention. Because as we’re looking at the world picture, the world picture is not only growing darker when it comes to how you have these autocracies gaining power and authority and a new assertiveness and aggressiveness. No, it’s not just that. It is that they are working together. So Vladimir Putin is now doing business in cooperation with the Iranian Ayatollahs, and you have China under the Communist party, and you have North Korea. They’ve had a tense relationship. Both are Marxist in their orientation, at least classically, but China’s always worried about North Korea and its volatility.

But on the other hand, you know what? You now have Russia and North Korea working in some kind of relationship with some kind of armaments from both Iran and North Korea showing up in Russia and its war against Ukraine. That’s a new picture.

Another acknowledgement in this Wall Street Journal article coming from American military strategists is that the United States is stretched. It’s stretched a very great deal militarily and in terms of foreign policy and American influence, and American reach we’re rather stretched these days. You have American forces backing up Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean. You have American forces there in the Persian Gulf because of the very live threat from Yemen, which is undergirded by Iran. You have American interests in the Pacific, given the new assertiveness of China. China actually trying to grab territory. But not only that, it is also trying to intimidate nations away from their own territory in the Pacific. And quite honestly, the United States is aware of the fact that China would like to block off much of the Pacific, even trade routes from easy access by Americans.

China’s view is that the Pacific is something like a Chinese lake that’s incompatible with the United States. It’s incompatible with our economic system. It’s incompatible with our understanding of the world. But all that to say, you go back to the end of the 20th century, there was this very humanistic optimism that things are going our way. Communism is in recession, it’s falling apart. The Soviet Union has broken up. Things are moving in our direction. This is the end of history and our understanding of democratic self-government, our affirmation of human dignity is the end of history. And yet it hasn’t turned out that way. And quite honestly, it was sheer American hubris and utopianism to think that it might happen. The world is not a less dangerous place than it was in the 20th century, or at least at the end of the 20th century. It’s actually a more dangerous place, and the United States doesn’t have fewer enemies than the US had at the end of the 20th century. It has a greater number of enemies, but we also are looking at the fact that the United States is shifting some of its policies on many issues. And quite honestly, you are looking at the fact that the United States itself is asking very basic questions, including the question of America’s role in the larger world that’s beyond something that’s just interesting. That has to do with changing the way life goes for Americans.

Part II

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Totalitarian Population Control Loses a Battle Against Creation Order: China Faces Tragic Gender Imbalance in Aftermath of One-Child Policy

But next, I want to talk about China in a different sense because one of the most important Christian worldview principles we can always keep in mind is that we need to keep taking issues back to the most fundamental level. And that fundamental level is often creation order. And this is where many Evangelical Christians, indeed, many Protestant Christians just not used to this because when the world was acting more Christian, when the morality around us was more generally Christian or Christian agreeable, you didn’t have to think in these terms all the time. But when you have a society that doesn’t know the difference between a boy and a girl, guess what? Creation order turns out to be really, really important. Well, okay, sometimes reminders of creation order and the cost of defying or violating subverting creation order, they come to mind. The Economist of London, I often point out, is one of the most influential periodicals in the world. It’s a periodical that has a great deal of influence in the highest reaches of American and European international government and politics and finance. The Economist, just a matter of a couple of weeks ago, published an article with a headline, “China Develops, a Divorced Dating Scene.”

Now as this comes as a report from one province in China, and the headline is: “China Develops, a Divorced Dating Scene,” or a dating scene among the divorced, you might look at that and say, “Why in the world would that be a full-page article in the Economist? Why would the Economist care?” Well, the Economist understands something that Christians need to understand at a deeper level than the Economist, and that is that culture is a reflection of something deeper than culture. So the Economist runs an article like this because it’s a picture of a sociological development in China, and it goes, this just might tell us something about the world. Well, Christians need to look at this and say, “This surely does tell us something about the world, but it tells us not only something about China, it tells us something about creation order, and it tells us something about what happens when you deny creation order.”

Well, okay, the headline was “China Develops a Divorced Dating Scene.” Well, here’s the bottom line, in China, under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, but perhaps arguably even more so just given the historic nature of the Chinese understanding of life, and the Chinese understanding of culture, there has been a reluctance to talk openly about divorce at all. And so you have kind of an official policy that some things just aren’t discussed, and even where divorce is legally possible, having some kind of public acknowledgement of the fact that divorced people are trying to come up with a way of meeting one another, men and women in order to get married. Well, the government has not liked that, but now there is something of a divorced dating scene that is developing because why? Ask yourself the question. Is it because of some kind of social liberalism in China? No, not really. It’s because of the growing numbers of divorced people. And so all of a sudden you have a lot of divorced people, a lot of middle-aged, divorced people, a lot of even younger, divorced people, and they’re looking for some kind of romantic, say, new life. And so they’re basically representing this great political class that the Chinese government’s acknowledging, I guess we’re going to have to let them talk about it. They’re going to have to be free to come up with some kind of dating scene.

So that’s the first part, but that’s not even the most important part of this article when it comes to worldview. I’m going to read you a section here. This is the brief section of this article, and it’s about why the problem of marriage among older adults, or say even middle-aged adults in China is such a problem. And I’m just going to read this to you and you’ll understand what I mean when I say the creation order issue is even more glaring than they know. “Overall, China has 37 million more men than women. In rural regions with many bachelors even a woman divorced more than once…Remains very popular as someone to marry.” Then listen to this line. “As for uneducated never married, men who never left impoverished home villages…Many will die alone.” It’s a very sad picture. It’s a sad picture of the fact that there’s an imbalance of adult men and adult women, and it’s not a small imbalance. We’re talking about at least 37 million more adult men than women, 37 million. So that’s more than say 10% of the American population. There are just not enough women for the men.

We asked the question, well, why? What happens? Some kind of virus, some kind of accident? No, it was the one-child-only policy that the Chinese Communist Party put into effect from the 1970s until just a matter of a few years ago in which they said married couples could have only one child. And given the long-standing Chinese commitment to the priority of males over females and of boys over girls, you had a lot of baby girls who were aborted. You had a lot of baby girls who never came to life. You have a missing generation, not only of children in terms of the one-child-only policy you have in particular a missing generation of women.

But the other point I want to make here, I just want us to think about this. This wasn’t a natural occurrence. We’re not talking about China here by some kind of natural disaster showing up with 37 million men who don’t have wives and are never going to have wives mathematically speaking, this is not something that happened by nature. No, this is a political decision by the communist regime there in China. It was a Draconian position by a totalitarian state determined to address the problem of overpopulation. Now, here’s another lesson about totalitarianism. When a totalitarian government says, “Here’s a problem, we’re going to fix it.” They most often, even with totalitarian power, get it wrong. And that’s because if you are a totalitarian power, you don’t have any kind of checks and balances and there’s no method of correction, the party just keeps the toxic policy in place. And before you know it, you have all these millions of men who are never going to be married. And here the economist points out, this is leading to a very interesting change in the dating scene among adults in China. And I look at this and say, “This is an absolute rebellion against creation order.” And guess what happens? Absolute immeasurable, human tragedy.

Part III

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Christian Realism and Nuclear Threats: Biden Administration’s Alarm on China as Nuclear Threat Becomes More Clear

But finally, before we leave this today, as we think about the threat of autocracy around the world, and we think about challenges that Christians understand with a unique theological insight as we look around the world, I want to point out that as we think about evil around the world, there was a breaking story in the Western media just days ago saying that the Biden administration had quietly affirmed the fact that a secret nuclear strategy undertaken by the United States had assigned a great threat status to China in a way that was fundamentally new in American foreign policy and American defense planning. As a matter of fact, as the New York Times says, “President Biden approved in March a highly classified nuclear strategic plan for the United States that for the first time reorients America’s deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal.”

And so you had an MIT nuclear strategist who is close to the Pentagon, and this kind of statement is not made by accident. When someone’s identified this way and speaks on the record in these terms, that means basically the greatest likelihood is this person is speaking with the authorization quietly of the administration to make this kind of statement. And by the way, the other interesting thing is that the administration didn’t come out and say this is wrong. So here’s the statement, “The President recently issued updated nuclear weapons employment guidance to account for multiple nuclear armed adversaries…And in particular, the significant increase in the size and diversity of China’s nuclear arsenal.”

So America’s official nuclear strategy is now having to take an increased interest in the threat coming from China. And of course you have the autocracies now working together. And the very same national security expert made the comment that, “The need to deter Russia, the PRC is the people’s Republic of China and North Korea simultaneously,” is increasingly the problem.

You can add Iran to that. And of course, Iran threatens also to become a nuclear power, and you recognize that even as the United States was telling itself over and over again and our allies joined with us in many ways, at the end of the 20th century, we have won this great ideological conflict, this great ideological battle with communism. The world is going our way. You don’t hear that anymore. And that turned out to be a misreading of history, that very same man Vipin Narang who is identified as an MIT nuclear strategist, that’s the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He made a very interesting statement near the close of the article when he said, and I quote, “It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be.” That’s exactly right. That’s a statement that is often definitive of what is called Christian realism.

So it’s not just realism saying, the world’s real, we better come to terms with it. It’s the Christian realism that says, we have a particular responsibility to understand the world in terms of realism. It’s a realism that’s not only realistic in terms of world power and the conflict of ideologies, it’s also realistic in terms of the understanding of human beings. Here’s the theological part and why it is the human beings often intend so much evil rather than good.

So I’m just saying that when it comes to Mr. Narang’s comment here from MIT, Christians understand it even more emphatically perhaps than he and his colleagues. I repeat it. “It is our responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be.” And then he went on to say, “It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.” Just think about that. So many absolutely humanistic, optimistic Americans declared that history had come to an end. Now we are warned it might just have been a very dangerous intermission. Of course, on the other side of it, here’s the big headline, the intermission just might be over.