Reinhold Niebuhr was a perceptive critic of the American spirit, if not downright prophetic. The Irony of American History, which he wrote in 1952, was his attempt to make sense of the United States’ rise to global power in the early Cold War. He warned that Americans were caught in deep ironies, situations in which our virtues, ideals, and self-images were at risk of turning into sources of danger or even vice if we came to trust them too much.

He observed that Americans like to imagine themselves as uniquely virtuous, pragmatic, and freedom loving, standing apart from Old World empires. Yet he insisted that U.S. expansion, economic power, and racial injustice plainly showed how we are implicated in the same mix of power, pride, and wickedness as those we considered ourselves better than.

He warned that the still-young Cold War was pitting two rival worldviews that both claimed to know the “end of history” and to possess a roadmap for controlling it. He condemned communist tyranny but also cautioned that American liberalism, when convinced of its own innocence and destiny, could also justify extreme measures, but do it in the name of freedom.

For Niebuhr, American power is deeply ironic: in trying to secure freedom, we rely on weapons, including nuclear arms, that threaten humanity, and in claiming to champion self-determination, we often intervene in ways that look imperial.

If only he could see us now.

BOOK: The Irony of American History

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