Vital Interests: Chris, thanks for joining us today on the Vital Interests forum. It is a pleasure to talk with you about your experience in the foreign policy and national security spheres which spans government, academic, and think tank positions. You are now a Senior Fellow and Director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Let’s start with a discussion of an interesting Working Paper you recently posted - The Humility of Restraint: Niebuhr's Insights for a More Grounded Twenty-First-Century American Foreign Policy. It is intriguing that the writings and vision of Reinhold Niebuhr, a founding voice of 20th century international relations theory, would have such relevance for Americans' role in global affairs at the beginning of 2022.

To introduce our readers to Niebuhr, can you give us some background on how he came to be such a major figure in interpreting the motives behind the successes and failures of United States foreign policy.

Chris Chivvis: I think that's a great place to start. Niebuhr is interesting for so many reasons. Especially helpful in understanding what’s going on in our foreign policy today. For me, it was an enormous privilege to have the chance to read deeply in his work. This was during the period when I had just left the intelligence community. One of the things that most drew me to him was the fact that he has such a broad perspective as an intellectual and such a fresh perspective.

Niebuhr is part of the origins of American international relations theory. But he wasn't just an international relations theorist. He was, in fact, primarily a theologian and a social activist, respected by the intellectual left in America which is where he situated himself but also someone who received a lot of accolades from people who were more associated with conservative currents in American foreign policy and political thought.

Given where we are in our nation today with such high levels of polarization and such high levels of acrimony between the left and the right, I think there's something that’s just inherently appealing about a figure who was able to speak in many circumstances to both sides of the conversation.

I think this may be the reason why Niebuhr was one of Barack Obama's favorite thinkers. In fact, Niebuhr’s thinking sort of faded into the background in the later part of the 20th century and then had a revival when Barack Obama made some comments in an interview with David Brooks in which Obama indicated that his approach to foreign policy was in many ways shaped by his reading of the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr.

VI: I find it noteworthy in Niebuhr’s background that he wasn't part of the East Coast elite. He grew up in Detroit and went to a Midwestern College where he was educated to be a Protestant theologian. Also, he was a German-American and spoke fluent German.

In the Interwar years, Niebuhr spent time in Europe and had first-hand experience of what this period was like for the average German and the real hardships imposed on them by the peace treaty. This of course has been attributed to providing the fertile ground from which fascism grew. Can you go into how his background and early experiences helped shape Niebuhr’s outlook?

Chris Chivvis: Yes, great point. I think it's essential. Niebuhr was a second-generation immigrant. His parents had come to the United States from Germany in the late 19th century and they spoke German in his household. His father was also a pastor and so was his brother. Obviously, there was a deep Protestant strain in the culture that they brought with them.

This had an enormous impact on Niebuhr's thought. I think it gave him a certain vantage point from which to look at America in this critical crucible of the Interwar years. Niebuhr was an American by all means, but he also had this ability to step back – both because of his religious training and also as a child of an immigrant family – and view America for all of its good and bad.

I think that was absolutely essential to his ability to do what he did over the course of his career. 

In a more practical sense, the fact that he spoke German gave him sympathy for the German people in the Interwar period. This was important because, when he traveled to Europe in the 1920s, he could directly experience the suffering that the German people were going through by communicating with them in their native language. This gave him a sense of some of the inherent injustices of the post World War I settlement.

By a similar token, in the 1930s, when Niebuhr went to Germany and also had an epistolary relationship with a number of leading German thinkers, he gained much more insight into what was actually taking place in German politics and the extent to which the Nazi regime was crushing all dissent.

As a consequence, he was much further ahead in terms of his own understanding of the threat that Nazi Germany posed to Europe than were many other observers in the United States.

After the defeat of the Nazi regime, Niebuhr’s sympathy for the German people led him to the view that America had to support Germany in its reconstruction.

VI: As a young scholar Niebuhr became quite enamored of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and American idealism about collective security to promote world peace. You mentioned that he even entered a writing competition on Wilson’s vision that was sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment. Can you discuss the significance of this period of Niebuhr’s life?

Chris Chivvis: Yes, at least at the outset, I think you might say that his unconsidered view was pro-Wilsonian during and immediately after World War I. He came from a milieu that was very supportive of Wilson's general philosophy and believed strongly in the Fourteen Points and the idea of the League of Nations.

What happens to him over the course of the 1920s is disillusionment with Wilsonian idealism and a more mature version of his thought in the 1930s that had a much more realist perspective on international relations. Of course, that comes in part from the direct experiences Niebuhr had watching what unfolded in Europe, in Germany, during the 1920s.

That realism is what he expresses in his first major work Moral Man and Immoral Society published in 1932 and constitutes the core of his international relations thinking in the subsequent three or four decades.

VI: As a theologian, as a person coming out of a religious training background, the idea of morality and immorality are prominent in his thinking. What do you think Niebuhr meant when he was talking about the moral consciousness a nation should strive to achieve?

Chris Chivvis: It's an extremely complex and I think very subtle point that he's trying to make. It escapes many readers. He doesn't fully make it in that first work, but let me try to summarize at least how I understand what he's saying about the role of morality in international affairs, because it’s so important for our understanding of what the Biden Administration is doing today. 

Essentially, what Niebuhr is saying is that it is impossible at any one point in time for any nation to grasp what the correct or best moral action may be or what the best, most moral arrangement for the international order may be. This is due to the inherently self-interested nature of nations.

Niebuhr thought individuals can transcend themselves and thus take moral action that is not necessarily in their own self-interest. He thought this was an essential characteristic of human beings. But, he said, when you put human beings together in a society like a nation, the competition of their interests almost ensures that the nation as a whole will never be able to have that same self-transcendence that permits moral activity and moral action in the world.

As a consequence, what we often see as morally desirable actions in international affairs are, in Niebuhr's view, only alternative expressions of our own narrow self-interests. That's an essential Niebuhrian point. 

Again, he's not saying that morality does not matter, that justice does not matter. Those are things that he thinks are important, and that we should strive for, but that we have to be extremely humble in our understanding of our own ability at any point in time to act in international life in ways that are in fact moral. 

This is obviously something which suggests a criticism of current U.S. foreign policy.

VI: So is Niebuhr saying that while morality in international relations is required, it's actually power which really determines how states exert their national interests?

Chris Chivvis: Yes. Absolutely. Especially in those earlier writings amidst the Interwar crisis, he emphasizes that really, the only way that a nation is going to be prevented from taking actions which are unjust or immoral is through an exertion of coercive power. That could mean military power. It might mean economic power. 

He has a fairly broad definition of coercive power and, in fact, uses Mahatma Gandhi, a contemporary example, to demonstrate his argument. Niebuhr says even Gandhi’s use of economic power was coercive and had negative effects for workers in Britain. This was, just to be clear, not a criticism of Gandhi, who was someone who he admired, but he just was adamant that we understand the importance of coercion in getting human beings and states to behave in ways that are just or moral or at least even move in the direction of being just and moral.

VI: Certainly the experience of fighting against fascism in Europe is a defining experience for Niebuhr?

Chris Chivvis: Yes. It was crucial. But even before that, part of Niebuhr’s view on the importance of coercion actually comes out of his broader social consciousness and work as a theologian. 

He was equally, if not more, seized in the 1920s and the 1930s with the circumstances in which the American working class found itself. It was out of watching the struggles and the hardships that the American working class faced in that period, that Niebuhr came to the view that the only way a more just society can be brought about is through an exertion of power.

For him, this was working-class power. It was in that time, in the 1930s, that he was closest to embracing socialist agendas and to communist views although he never actually became a communist himself. 

This basic understanding of the nature of human societies and human life was such an important element in Niebuhr’s decision, which I think was difficult for him, to back FDRs support to Britain's war effort and ultimately his decision to enter the war.

VI: It's interesting that Niebuhr, coming from Detroit, understood what impact unregulated industrialization had on workers. He criticized Henry Ford and assembly line labor as dehumanizing and morally wrong.

Chris Chivvis: That's absolutely right, and, again, this was an essential piece of his outlook and his understanding of how human societies operated.

VI: Niebuhr is often contrasted with John Dewey who was a contemporary political philosopher and social reformer. Dewey believed that scientific reason would ultimately control human nature and generate global economic progress and harmony. Why did Niebuhr question Dewey’s approach?

Chris Chivvis:  It's an important distinction for a number of reasons. This is a debate that continues today. Indeed, one of the things that's most interesting about going back to a figure like Niebuhr, going back to the origins of international relations theory in America, is that you see some of the differences between realist thinking then and realist thinking at least in the academy today.

You put your finger on one of the major ways that Niebuhr is different from today’s neorealist thinkers. This is his skepticism about human reason. It's not that he doesn't believe that we can reason. It's that he puts a much heavier emphasis on the imperfection and the limits of human reason than many academics today would. 

This is important in a number of ways in his thinking. For one, it means that the rationality assumption that underlies a lot of realist thought today is totally out the window. He doesn’t assume that states will behave rationally. In fact, he believes, to the contrary, that states will often behave in ways that are not at all rational. This is because of the complex civilizational, political, and cultural machinery that produces their foreign policies. States are certainly not sitting around assessing their global interests in a scientific way. 

This stands as a really, really important difference from contemporary realists, which has hugely important policy implications.If you believe that states are going to be rational, you may be more cautious in some ways and less cautious in others. For example, when it comes to questions like nuclear proliferation, you may be less concerned than if you believe, like Niebuhr did, that states are prone to all kinds of irrationality. They might use a nuclear weapon just because they’re angry, for example. It's a view that should make people much more worried about the consequences of nuclear proliferation.

The rationality assumption and the difference with Dewey's is fascinating too, because he showed to some degree an affinity with other intellectuals of his time, like Friedrich Hayek. Hayek ultimately had very different policy views from Niebuhr, but basically also believed that human societies, governments, individuals could never design societies in ways that would be just, simply because of the limits of human reason.

This is another reason why Niebuhr is often at odds with John Dewey. Dewey stood for this idea that what was needed to improve society and insure progress in America was education reform and better governance. Those are ideas that are obviously still very much with us today.

Niebuhr basically said it's not that simple. It's not that simple in domestic politics that just more reason will get us where we need to go, and it's certainly not that simple in international affairs. Niebuhr argues that the modern approach to international affairs or the design of international institutions can’t overcome what are essential problems in the human condition - selfishness, self-centeredness, myopia - all these other things that he says are the driving forces behind world history.

VI: Niebuhr applies many of these thoughts and ideas in his pivotal book The Irony of American History published in 1952. A work that Andrew Bacevich states is one of the most important books ever written on US foreign policy. In the book Niebuhr critiqued US power at the start of the Cold War and in the ideological struggle between East and West. Why are Niebuhr's views in this book so significant?

Chris Chivvis: Again, it’s because he has this extraordinary capacity to see both sides of the case in a way that I think is so often missing from our contemporary discussions of global conflicts. I think it’s very healthy. The Irony of American History is certainly his greatest book, and it's where I would recommend anyone who's interested in Niebuhr start off. This is the book that I think most attracted President Obama. It was the starting point for my encounter with Niebuhr’s ideas.

This is the classic critique of American exceptionalism, of the idea that the United States has a God-given role in the world to export its own culture, its own politics, its own views to other countries, and as a corollary of that, the fairly widespread belief that that process of exploring American culture and politics can be frictionless and can be achieved without a great deal of coercion, ideas that Niebuhr basically rejected entirely.

At the same time that he's very critical of America's efforts to remake the world in its own image, he’s even more critical of the Soviet Union. He has a very interesting analysis in The Irony of American History of reasons why, despite the faults and shortcomings of American liberal democracy, these shortcomings are ultimately not as bad as the shortcomings of the Soviet system. 

Niebuhr points out that the Soviet state is driven by a very deep bias in favor of one particular group. That's of course, the working class. The belief that the utopia of the working class can somehow become a utopia for all of mankind becomes a justification for the violence and repression that that particular worldview would ultimately lead to. So he’s both very critical of America but also even more critical of the Soviet Union. I wish there were more people who were able to do the same today.

VI: Niebuhr states that Soviet communism promised a utopia for the working class and liberalism promised a utopia for the bourgeoisie. He didn't have any illusions about what impact capitalism had on democratic ideals but despite their flaws he supported democracies. He saw the real value of democracy was unity with freedom for a diversity of voices, cultures, and ethnicities. So, Niebuhr was a critic of democratic governments but an ardent supporter of democratic societies for the freedoms they offered?

Chris Chivvis: I think that's exactly right. This is an evolution in his thinking in the post-Cold War period because in the 1930s he was more skeptical of liberal democracy because he associated it so closely with liberal capitalism. I think that by the time that he was writing The Irony of American History and certainly in his works after that, he had come to what you might call grudging acceptance of the fact that liberal democracy for all of its faults is still the best system that we have right now.

He really wants Americans to remember that liberal democracy is full of injustices and full of its own faults. These are things which in our recent history have become more and more apparent to a growing number of Americans. This should encourage the United States, I think Niebuhr would say, to adopt an attitude of humility in its own relationship with the rest of the world. Not sure we’re going to be able to do this, though.

VI: A term Niebuhr uses a lot when critiquing the United States is naivete. He claims the Americans were naïve about the world, naïve about themselves, and naïve about what they could accomplish by virtue of their ambitions of global leadership. Let's go into that. Why did Niebuhr talk about that so much?

Chris Chivvis: I think there are historical and philosophical reasons for that. Historically, his read of the history of the United States, you might even call it a Eurocentric view, was that America had never really been forced to take part in serious great power politics prior to World War I. And then its disillusionment with the experience of Wilsonianism had led it to the isolationism of the later 1930s.

When the nation was catapulted into this role of leadership of the West after the WWII, Niebuhr was very worried that, for many reasons, America just lacked the experience, historical experience, to actually deploy its power in ways that would serve not only its own ends but also the needs of justice in the world and ultimately help the United States effectively counter the global ambitions of the Soviet Union.

He was very concerned in particular about the possibility that Americans would get deeply frustrated when the world failed to yield to their designs for a liberal world order. He worried that this frustration with the huge and complex realities of global politics might lead the United States to take rash action, particularly when it came to the use of military force and even nuclear weapons. I think you see a similarly frustrated impulse toward the use of force today in American politics.

VI: Niebuhr wrote that it was critical for Americans to accept that they will never be the masters of their own destiny. Even now isn’t that a very hard message for those formulating American foreign policy to accept?

Chris Chivvis: There's a very important point there that Niebuhr makes frequently. It's interesting because he doesn't believe that the United States should not lead the liberal democratic world. He believes this is the historical destiny of the United States. What he's saying is that it's not going to work out the way that many Americans imagine it's going to work out. Again, so important for managing our expectations about the world today.

Part of the problem is that Americans tend to be naïve about how their proclamations in favor of liberal democracy look to other countries in the world. People who live in other countries come from different backgrounds, cultures, and civilizations for which the rhetoric of the primacy of the American way of ordering the world doesn’t resonate.

Americans are often blind to the fact that those arguments for democracy look to others, like highly self-interested American attempts to enlarge American power in the world, which on some level they are.

VI: In the conduct of foreign policy, Niebuhr advocated for nations to engage in dialogues to understand and accommodate each other’s points of view and national interests. He opposed superpower blocks that were intransigent and hostile. For Niebuhr the art of diplomacy was all about playing for more time because the more time you can interject into international dialogues the better things are because then you have time to think things over, work things out, and arrive at compromises to solve conflicts that would otherwise devolve into the use of force. Isn’t this a key takeaway from Niebuhr’s approach to international relations?

Chris Chivvis: For me, this is one of his most important insights for contemporary US foreign policy, especially when it comes to the American relationship with China. Tensions have heated up so much over the course of the last few years in part due to America's policies, but also obviously thanks to surging Chinese nationalism under President Xi.

I think Niebuhr witnessed a similar dynamic at the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and pleaded for more time to work out fundamental disagreements about how the world would be ordered with these two competing blocks. I think he would make the same plea today.

He would not believe that the conflicts of interest between the United States and China can be resolved necessarily through pure acts of reason but, that over time, the kinds of accommodations that are necessary to keep the peace and avoid what would be a calamitous war for both sides could be worked out.

VI: With great fanfare the Biden administration recently convened a virtual Summit for Democracy where President Biden invited leaders from government, the private sector, and civil society groups from 100 or so other national that the United States recognizes as part of the “democracy club” to participate in sessions to discuss common challenges and affirm an agenda for democratic renewal and face threats to democracy through collective action. Notably China and Russia were not invited.

Biden’s remarks seemed to echo Cold War rhetoric to describe threats to democracies from authoritarian regimes (i.e. China and Russia) as a turning point in history.  What would Niebuhr think of this Biden administration initiative?

Chris Chivvis: I think he would probably view it as a very complicated endeavor. I think that he would be supportive of the desire of the administration to bolster American democracy at home and also abroad, but to a lesser degree. He would, however, be deeply concerned about the state of American politics and the polarization that we're experiencing right now.

Where Niebuhr would probably break from some of the statements that we've seen out of the Biden administration is in the framing that has been given to the challenge in the world today as a standoff between authoritarianism and liberal democracy. I think he would see behind that framing exactly the kind of American exceptionalism that he was constantly warning us against.

Again, it's not that he wouldn't support the United States playing a certain type of leadership role with like-minded countries, but he would see the danger in taking that too far because of the ways in which it could inflame America's relations with Russia and China in particular and really for no benefit.

VI:  As a counter statement to the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy an interesting piece appeared in The National Interest written by the ambassadors of Russia and China to the United States. Joint Article by Chinese and Russian Ambassadors: Respecting People’s Democratic Rights_Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States of America (china-embassy.org)

Titled “Respecting People's Democratic Rights”, the article states that Russia and China are democratic countries representing the will and welfare of their people, just not in the way the United States defines democracy. These ambassadors advocate for a global polycentric architecture based on the rule of law, the United Nations charter, international cooperation and dialogue in the true spirit of multilateralism. They accuse the United States of not participating constructively in world affairs. Wouldn’t Niebuhr accept some of these as valid points?

Chris Chivvis:  First, I think it would be necessary to point out that the views of the leaders of Russia and China are equally, if not more self-interested, than the views of American leaders. This is just the nature of international politics. We shouldn’t be duped.

When they make an argument like that, we should look at it with a great deal of suspicion, just the same way that we look at the leaders of any other country's arguments with suspicion. The idea that Russia and China are democracies by any meaning of the term that would be acceptable in American contemporary discourse is a real stretch, to say the least.

What Niebuhr would say is that we have to remember that, even if democracy is our preferred form of government, it doesn't lay claim to every universal good human beings can experience. That, particularly in the case of China but also potentially even in the case of Russia, there are other human needs that those political systems speak to that democracy often struggles to achieve. 

This is even within the context, again, of insisting that democracy is certainly for the United States and potentially even in a greater scheme of things, a better system but that we must not forget the ways in which those other systems also offer certain universal goods that democracy fails to. The state of our democracy and the many other problems in our society should be a constant reminder of this.

VI: The Biden administration does emphatically state that foreign policy has to be rooted in domestic realities. But isn’t that what the Chinese and Russians argue they are doing when their nationalist foreign policies are serving the public good by bringing prosperity and security to their populations? Chinese and Russian officials are quick to point out that economic inequalities, social injustice, and the callousness of unregulated capitalism makes American-style democracy a questionable model for other nations.

Chris Chivvis: I think that's part of how Niebuhr would probably react to the situation, but I mean, one of the things that I think he would point out has to do not so much with America's relationship with China and Russia, as America's relationship with other parts of the world. I think he would note that it may be difficult for Americans to see why people living in low and middle-income countries in Africa or Asia might find some aspects, especially of the Chinese model, more appealing than the American liberal democratic model.

And that the United States has to gain an almost aesthetic distance about its own culture and civilization in order to understand how the rest of the world is likely to respond to American democracy promotion efforts versus China's offers of concrete development assistance or, frankly, cold hard cash.

VI: Just in terms of the mechanics of international diplomacy, the workings of the State Department and the other government agencies, how would Niebuhr recommend populating key agencies with individuals who understand the importance of handling foreign relations without attitudes of exceptionalism and naivete?

Chris Chivvis: Clearly, he thinks it's very hard. Importantly the question Niebuhr poses to the United States, and frankly to any country, is,“How can a foreign policy be designed in a way that overcomes the negative effects of cultural and civilizational bias and yet, at the same time, has a capacity or an energy for forward motion and action in the world?”

He has no solution for that. He just tells us that this is the challenge, and we have to grapple with it because that's part of being a human being. The only kernel that he offers is that, as he argues in his discussion of the inherent bias of so much of our policymaking in the United States (and he would also apply this to other countries) there are sometimes groups who are able to stand a little bit apart from the fray and be the members of the community, of culture, of the civilization, but at the same time view it from a sufficient degree of distance that they recognize the dilemmas. They see more clearly the dilemmas that their government faces. They see more clearly the good and the bad in the actions and the choices that it has to make.

VI: While It is certainly the case that key government officials are responsible for formulating a country’s foreign policy, there was an interesting statement by Candace Rondeaux about the Summit for Democracy. She said that the democracy summit was challenged conceptually because it was very oriented around the idea that nation-states are the big players in the world, but in today’s reality perhaps nation-states are not the most important or the most powerful actors. She cites how technology companies and other non-government private entities have an enormous impact on the day-to-day operations of the international order.

Chris Chivvis: It is true that obviously there are a lot of other centers of power, but the challenge that we keep coming up against, I think, the one that those who are in favor of the new buzzword “globalism” in foreign policy will come up against, is that, if you want to solve any of the problems in the world today, and you want to do it in a way that has broad support from people around the world, nation-states are still going to be the main channel through which we have to act.

Global corporations obviously are not democratic. If we want to talk about the parts of democracy and our own strong preference for liberal democracy in the world, if you're talking about trying to find solutions between global corporations, there is still not a better path than finding them between albeit very imperfect nation-states.

VI: What you, and Niebuhr, are saying is that enlightened statecraft is vital in all nations for secure world order to be maintained, thereby avoiding disastrous conflicts, and collectively addressing global challenges like climate change. 

Chris Chivvis: Absolutely, although with the recognition of how extraordinarily difficult it is.

VI: Chris, we've come to the end of our time. Thank you for this interesting conversation providing insights on Reinhold Niebuhr’s enduring perspective on the challenges and complexities of formulating an enlightened American foreign in these challenging times.

Chris Chivvis: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.

Chris Chivvis is a senior fellow and director of the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment. He has more than two decades of experience working on U.S. foreign policy and national security challenges.  He most recently served as the U.S. national intelligence officer for Europe.  At Carnegie, Chivvis leads policy-focused research aimed at developing realistic U.S. strategy for an era of great power competition and building a foreign policy that serves the needs of the American people. Chivvis’ experience with U.S. foreign policy spans government, academia, and the think tank world. Before joining the National Intelligence Council, he was the deputy head of the RAND Corporation’s international security program and worked in the Defense Department. He also has held positions at multiple universities and think tanks in the United States and Europe.