NT Wright: “We can’t be the world’s policeman”, but we can’t do nothing

From Rwanda and the Balkans to Afghanistan and Iraq, N.T. Wright and Mike Bird ask what went wrong when the West tried to act as global policeman. 

N.T. Wright opens by placing today’s dilemmas in a moral formation shaped by the twentieth century’s atrocities. “As a child of the forties and fifties,” he says, he grew up hearing “again and again that the Holocaust had happened… and we must never let that happen again.” That “moral imperative” helps explain why many Western leaders felt compelled to intervene when confronted by ethnic cleansing in the 1990s.

Mike Bird frames the context bluntly: the West saw itself as “the guys in the white hat” — stepping in where “there is evil… genocide… totalitarian violence.” But the pair insist that moral urgency can slide into dangerous certainty.

The temptation of moral superiority

N.T. Wright names the core danger: “the idea of being global policemen,” he says, is bound up with “the danger that we can stop it as though… we are the squeaky clean ones who never make any mistakes.”

For Wright, that moral posture is not a minor flaw; it can become the engine of catastrophe. He warns that when nations believe they represent “the enlightenment,” they assume “we’re the ones who know what’s good and right and true” and others are “poor benighted people… and it’s our job to go and show them.” The result? “Europeans and Americans fall flat on their head faces when they try to do that.”

He ties this to the darker irony of modern history: the very “enlightened” nations that believed they had the moral authority to reorder the world also produced wars of staggering violence. The lesson, he argues, is not withdrawal from responsibility, but a deep suspicion of self-righteous power.

Defence, pacifism, and the uneasy middle ground

N.T. Wright is careful not to collapse into an easy pacifism. In one of the most vivid moments of the episode, he reaches for a domestic analogy:

“Just as I have a lock on my front door… and I want to protect [my family] from potential dangers… if somebody did break in… I don’t think it’ll be enough to say, ‘I have said my prayers.’”

He continues: “Something in me revolts at that, and I would want to defend… and whether that involves… punching the guy on the nose… I hope I would have the courage… though I would pray that I would never be in that position.”

From there he draws a principle about states: “The reason why countries have armies is primarily because we want a lock on our front door. We do not want dangerous and violent people barging in and… letting them just take over.”

Bird resonates with the tension, especially as someone who has served in the Army. “It’s one of the things you do wrestle with,” he says, describing how hard it is to discern which conflicts are just, and which interventions unravel into new tragedies.

Bird identifies the two sayings that pull him in opposite directions. On one hand, Edmund Burke: “the triumph of evil is when good men do nothing.” On the other: “better the devil you know.” Iraq, he notes, became the painful proof that removing a dictator can unleash horrors you didn’t foresee: “the removal of Saddam Hussein led to the fragmentation… effectively civil war… [and] it became a hotbed… not just for Al-Qaeda… but… ISIS.”

Iraq as the cautionary tale

Bird admits he once thought regime change might be justified: “Surely getting rid of a dictator… is going to be a good thing.” But he calls the outcome plainly: “It did not go well… it was on a false premise… weapons of mass destruction, which we’ve still never found.”

Wright goes further, arguing the Iraq logic was morally and politically compromised from the start and rooted in a specific posture of power. “We very easily get very muddled here,” he says, and “out of that mud… it’s all messianic.”

He adds a pointed diagnosis of Blair-era certainty: “I don’t think Tony Blair resisted that temptation… to think… it’s our job to go and sort it out.”

That’s why Wright rejects both extremes he often sees among Christians: “we tend to lurch either into… ‘we’d much rather be pacifist, thank you very much’… or we become chaplains to the military… and let them get on with their job.” The “wise middle ground,” he says, is rarely explored, and urgently needed.

The church’s calling: peace without naivety

If the episode has a headline, it’s this: N.T. Wright thinks Christians need a better theological imagination than either triumphalist interventionism or shrugging disengagement.

He returns repeatedly to Scripture, especially Psalm 2: “Why do the nations furiously rage together…?” He says he finds himself “lying awake at night praying Psalm 2,” because it names the reality of violent power while also insisting God’s purposes are not thwarted.

Wright also points to Jesus before Pilate as a crucial anchor. Jesus’ line matters, he suggests, because it recognises what “the world normally does”: “If I was the ordinary kind of king, my servants would fight… In other words, fighting is what the world normally does.”

But Jesus also reframes what power is for, and that changes what the church should sound like in an age of conflict. “Part of it must be,” Wright argues, “that the church has to speak peace… and has to lead the way… peacemaking… and peacemaking is tough.”

Bird agrees that neat answers won’t do. On war, intervention, Ukraine, Gaza, Iran “you’ve got to be willing to live with moral ambiguity,” he says. The task is to pursue the good without repeating the mistakes of the past.

Wright ends where he wants the church to begin: not with slogans, but with prayer, Scripture, and a serious vocation. Christians, he says, must “go back to Jesus as the one who… declared that he was coming to bring peace.”

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