This Advent season, I found myself watching American news from a small town in Spain. It was not a setting one associates with geopolitical reflection. A quiet café, the low hum of conversation, the smell of coffee, yet the images on the television commanded attention.
The segment began with Venezuela’s deepening crisis, followed by footage of its president meeting with Russian and Chinese leaders, seeking diplomatic and economic backing. Then came scenes from the United States’ southern border. Overcrowded facilities, tense confrontations, families in distress. One clip lingered: a U.S. immigration officer wearing a Santa costume while participating in an arrest. The images moved quickly, but the juxtaposition stayed with me.
Outside the Spanish café, Christmas looked very different. Families walked together through narrow streets adorned with lights. Children gathered near Nativity scenes. Churches were open throughout the day, their doors less guarded than they have become in many American cities. The contrast between what I was seeing on the TV screen and what I was witnessing in front of me was stark and instructive.
Watching the U.S. from abroad creates a particular kind of moral distance. It does not eliminate loyalty or concern, but it softens defensiveness. From that vantage point, the question is no longer whether America is right or wrong in any single policy debate, but whether the nation still understands its role in a world facing shared and increasingly interconnected challenges.
One of those challenges appeared later in the broadcast. The images were from northern Europe, where glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. Scientists have documented this trend extensively, noting that global glacier loss has increased dramatically over the past two decades, contributing to sea level rise and climate instability. In several countries, artists and civic leaders have responded not only with protest, but with public memorials, funerals for glaciers, and installations designed to provoke reflection rather than outrage.
The message was not anti-American. It was not partisan. It was moral.
Climate change, migration, and global instability are not separate crises. They are interconnected expressions of the same underlying reality, that the world is changing faster than our political institutions and moral imaginations have adapted. As environmental conditions deteriorate, people move. As people move, borders harden. As borders harden, fear becomes political currency.
The Church’s tradition has long resisted this fragmentation. Catholic social teaching insists that care for the environment, care for the poor, and care for social institutions cannot be separated. Pope Francis articulated this vision clearly, emphasizing that human dignity and ecological responsibility rise or fall together. Migration, in this framework, is not merely a legal problem to be managed but a human reality to be understood. People do not leave their homes lightly. They move when the conditions of life—economic, political, or environmental—become untenable.
Pope Francis greets immigrants at the port in Lampedusa, Italy, in July 8, 2013. (Catholic News Service/L’Osservatore Romano)
To Europeans, America’s response to these realities appears conflicted. On one hand, the U.S. remains unmatched in its capacity for innovation, humanitarian response, and global leadership. On the other, it often appears consumed by internal conflict, investing enormous resources in deterrence, enforcement, and symbolic displays of toughness rather than coordinated international solutions.
This tension is especially visible at the border. Reasonable people can disagree about immigration policy, enforcement mechanisms, and legal frameworks. But the images that travel globally—families separated, children detained, moments of cruelty framed as spectacle—do not communicate strength. They communicate fear. And fear is a poor foundation for leadership.
Christmas offers a counter narrative, one deeply embedded in Christian theology and practice. The central story of the Incarnation is not one of power asserting itself, but of vulnerability embraced. A child born into displacement. A family fleeing political violence. A God who enters history not as a ruler, but as a refugee.
This is not sentimental theology. It is politically disruptive theology. It challenges nations, especially powerful ones, to ask whether their policies reflect a commitment to human dignity or merely to control. It invites a reassessment of what security actually means in an interdependent world.
My professional life has been spent in public service education, working with students and practitioners who confront these tensions daily. Emergency managers, policy analysts, nonprofit leaders, public administrators, and the like. They understand that complex problems do not yield to simple solutions, and that leadership in moments of uncertainty requires humility, collaboration, and moral clarity.
From that perspective, what troubles me most about America’s current posture is not any single policy choice, but a narrowing of imagination. Rather than rallying global partners to address displacement, food insecurity, and democratic backsliding, America too often appears reactive, focused on short-term political wins rather than long-term stewardship.
Earlier this year, a U.S. operation resulted in the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia, both of whom face longstanding drug trafficking charges in America. Whatever one’s view of the Maduro regime or the legitimacy of those charges, it is undeniable the manner of this intervention has sent shockwaves well beyond Caracas.
Within days, the leaders of Spain, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Uruguay issued a rare joint statement rejecting the U.S. military action. They warned that it violated the basic principles of international law—particularly the prohibition on the use of force and the respect for territorial sovereignty enshrined in the United Nations Charter. They cautioned that such actions constitute a dangerous precedent that threatens peace and regional security and poses significant risks to civilian populations.
Their statement did not defend authoritarianism, nor did it excuse corruption or repression. Instead, it articulated a deeper concern that even justified outrage, when translated into unilateral military action, can erode the fragile norms that prevent global disorder. The signatories reaffirmed that Venezuela’s crisis must be resolved through dialogue and in accordance with the will of the Venezuelan people, without external coercion and in adherence to international law.
To Europeans, this reaction was striking not for its anti-Americanism, but for its moral clarity. It reflected a widespread unease that the world’s most powerful democracy is increasingly willing to substitute force for coordination, and immediacy for legitimacy. The concern is not merely legal, but ethical. When rules are bent by those who once championed them, the entire system weakens.
United States invades Venezuela, Black Catholics react
President Donald Trump ordered the airstrikes and the abduction of embattled President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, following months of buildup.
Seen through the lens of the Christmas season, this moment carries particular weight. The Christian tradition insists that power must always be accountable to justice, and that ends do not sanctify means. The call is not for passivity in the face of injustice, but for action that strengthens rather than fractures the moral architecture of the international community.
If America’s leadership is to remain credible in an era of cascading global crises—including climate instability, mass migration, and democratic erosion—it must be exercised with restraint as well as resolve, with humility as well as strength. The world is not asking the United States to abandon its principles. It is asking whether it still believes they apply universally, even when it is inconvenient.
Europe, for all its flaws, currently feels more comfortable speaking the language of shared responsibility. The Christmas season amplifies this sensibility. The emphasis is less on dominance and more on continuity, on what kind of world is being handed to those children walking past nativity scenes, their future still unwritten.
The question Christmas poses, especially when viewed from afar, is not whether America should lead, but how. Will leadership be defined by coercion or by coordination, by fear or by faith, by the protection of privilege or the cultivation of the common good?
Catholic social teaching does not demand open borders or naïve idealism. It does, however, demand honesty about interdependence and a commitment to the dignity of every person. It asks nations to measure success not only by economic output or enforcement statistics, but by whether their actions contribute to peace, sustainability, and human flourishing.
In this light, the images on the television screen at the Spanish café were not merely news stories. They were a mirror. And Christmas, quietly unfolding outside, offered a reminder that the deepest forms of renewal rarely begin with spectacle. Instead, they begin with reflection, repentance, and a willingness to imagine a different way forward.
Perhaps that is what the world is asking of America: not to retreat from its responsibilities, nor to assert them through force alone, but to reclaim a form of leadership worthy of its professed values and capable of meeting a shared future with courage and compassion.
Malcolm K. Oliver, Ph.D., MPA, is dean of the John S. Watson School of Public Service at Thomas Edison State University in New Jersey. His work focuses on public service leadership, ethics, and the formation of institutions committed to human dignity, the common good, and responsible stewardship.
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