The Author of Liberty: Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy

John B. Judis in Dissent

Reinhold Niebuhr, who described himself as a "Christian realist," makes a similar point in analyzing America's entry into World War I. Rejecting critics who charged that "making the world safe for democracy" was "moral cant," Niebuhr wrote: "For the fact is that every nation is caught in the moral paradox of refusing to go to war unless it can be proved that the national interest is imperiled, and of continuing in the war only by proving that something much more than national interest is at stake."