I've long thought that we needed a Serenity Prayer for our Foreign Policy. As it turns out, the author of that prayer was one of the moral forces/grandfather to 20th century thoughts to include containment.

Y'all might find this of interest.

Finding Niebuhr

The Serenity Prayer was penned by Reinhold Niebuhr, the most influential American theologian of the 20th Century. Originally a German-American socialist and pacifist who spent his youth striving for social justice for factory workers of Detroit’s auto plants, Niebuhr in his middle years became a liberal interventionist.

He advocated armed American intervention to defeat the evil of Nazi Germany. In his silver years, he also provided the philosophical and moral bedrock of America’s containment policy against the Soviet Union. As such, the Calvinist evangelical preacher helped to articulate the meaning of our nation’s new-found political, economic, and social power in the mid-20th Century.

For a generation of Cold Warriors, Niebuhr became a trusted counsel, explaining to them just war theory, the meaning of freedom and the need for social justice, both here and abroad.

A key architect of the Truman Doctrine, American diplomat George Kennan rightly proclaimed Niebuhr “the Father of us all.” The Rev. Martin Luther King wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail that Niebuhr’s gift to us was the terse reminder that ultimately “groups are more immoral than individuals.”