Yet even as they celebrate freedom, Americans exempt the object of their veneration from critical examination. In our public discourse, freedom is not so much a word or even a value as an incantation, its very mention enough to stifle doubt and terminate all debate.
...
[Reinhold Niebuhr] entertained few illusions about the nature of man, the possibilities of politics or the pliability of history. Global economic crisis, total war, genocide, totalitarianism, and nuclear arsenals capable of destroying civilization itself -- he viewed all of these with an unblinking eye that allowed no room for hypocrisy, hokum or self-deception. Realism and humility formed the core of his worldview, each infused with a deeply felt Christian sensibility.
Realism in this sense implies an obligation to see the world as it actually is, not as we might like it to be. The enemy of realism is hubris, which in Niebuhr's day, and in our own, finds expression in an outsized confidence in the efficacy of American power as an instrument to reshape the global order.
Humility imposes an obligation of a different sort. It summons Americans to see themselves without blinders. The enemy of humility is sanctimony, which gives rise to the convictions that American values and beliefs are universal and that the nation itself serves providentially assigned purposes. This conviction finds expression in a determination to remake the world in what we imagine to be America's image.
In our own day, realism and humility have proven in short supply. What Niebuhr wrote after World War II proved truer still in the aftermath of the Cold War: Good fortune and a position of apparent preeminence placed the United States "under the most grievous temptations to self-adulation". Americans have given themselves over to those temptations. Hubris and sanctimony have become the paramount expressions of American statecraft.
Page 7, The Limits of Power by Andrew J. Bacevich
