Chapter 9 — After the Berlin Wall
When the Berlin Wall came down in the late autumn of 1989, the cameras recorded jubilation but little understanding. Crowds streamed through Checkpoint Charlie with sledgehammers in hand, and a generation of commentators promptly declared the end of history. Haines, lecturing on these events more than three decades later, was at pains to point out that what had ended was not history but a particular phase of it — and that the phase which followed would demand more of God's allies, not less. The eight lectures that make up Series 7 of Reading Life Through The Principle are an attempt to read the post-Cold-War world theologically: to ask what providence was doing in the rubble of the Soviet empire, what it was asking of Korea and of the West, and why so few of the responsible parties seem to have noticed.
This chapter follows the contours of those lectures. It moves from the meaning of 1989 to Islam and Israel, to the American misadventure in Iraq, to the linguistic peculiarity that gave English its distinctive idea of freedom, and finally to the unfinished business of the Russian and Korean peninsulas. Throughout, Haines's conviction holds: God works in history through human beings who respond to conscience, and the failure to read history correctly is, at root, a failure of conscience.
The meaning of 1989
For Haines, the fall of the Wall was the culmination of a long providential pattern in which God works by stages rather than by sudden intervention. The Cold War was not a sideshow but the climactic confrontation in a centuries-long ideological war, and its conclusion did not end the contest so much as transpose it into a new key.
Therefore, God has worked His providence to restore the heavenly sovereignty by degrees, not overnight, not in one go. It's taken many, many years. He sends prophets and saints to the fallen world to found religions and raise the level of morality, hoping that through this religious transformation, change can also come about — a peaceful social, political, and economic change as well. Sometimes it doesn't always work out like that, and religious people themselves get into wars and fights with each other. He establishes governments with higher standards of goodness which come to oppose and destroy regimes with lower standards of goodness to fulfil the providence of restoration. Therefore, conflicts and wars are unavoidable. It says God establishes governments for the highest standard of goodness. In reality, it's not God that does that; in reality, it's people that do that. But the people that do that are the people who respond to God's calling them through their conscience.
— Day 1, Series 7
The qualification at the end matters. Haines is not a fatalist. He does not believe that God personally engineers the rise and fall of regimes; he believes that God calls, and that those who answer become, by degrees, the instruments through which higher standards displace lower ones. This is why he places so much weight on the Cold War's chosen weapon — not the bomb but the broadcast.
The final war between democracy and communism primarily takes the form of an ideological conflict. We witnessed this during what we call the Cold War, where the democratic world, particularly policymakers in America and Britain, decided to engage in ideological conflict rather than direct military confrontation with the Soviet Union. They utilised various platforms, such as the BBC and the Voice of America, to promote their ideology and challenge communism. This ideological conflict aimed to bring about regime change and the end of evil sovereignty through education and awareness. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, we have indeed seen more conflicts, indicating that the ideological battle is far from over.
— Day 1, Series 7
That last sentence is the hinge of the whole series. The Wall fell, but the ideological battle did not. What followed was not peace but reconfiguration — and the great providential question of the post-1989 era is what shape the brotherhood of free nations is meant to take. Haines's answer is that providence is moving away from empire altogether, toward an order of independent nations united not by an imperial centre but by the universal moral grammar of the Noahide laws. The Cold War's collapse was not the triumph of one empire over another; it was the clearing of ground on which something less centralised and more demanding might be built.
Islam, the West, and the wound of modernity
If the Cold War was the West's internal family quarrel, the longer providential conversation runs between Christendom and the house of Islam. Haines is unsentimental about both sides. He treats the medieval Islamic world not as the West's adversary but as, for several centuries, its superior — a civilisation that for a time discharged providential functions Europe could not.
Islam spread rapidly during Muhammad's time and continued under the first caliphs throughout North Africa and into Spain. The people living in North Africa and Spain were predominantly Christians, including various sects such as Arians and Orthodox Christians. When Islam spread, many Christians did not see it as a new religion but rather as a reforming movement within Christianity, as Muhammad recognised Jesus as the Messiah. This perception contributed to the rapid acceptance of Islam. The Sunni capital became Damascus, and the Islamic empire expanded into Spain until the 11th century, with the Caliphate of Cordoba representing a golden age of culture, science, art, architecture, and philosophy. This period was unmatched in Europe, where there was little to compare in terms of architecture and culture.
— Day 2, Series 7
The point is not to elevate Islam at Christianity's expense but to insist that the present condition of the Muslim world cannot be understood without remembering what it once was. The grievance is not invented; it is a memory of supremacy now lost, and the wound it carries is the wound of modernity itself.
For over a millennium, the Muslim world had maintained a self-understanding of superiority over Jews and Christians. However, the rise of Western Europe brought about a cultural shock, as modernity began to challenge traditional Islamic values. The Muslim world continues to grapple with the extent to which Westernisation accompanies modernity, desiring Western technology while resisting Western values. This tension is particularly evident in contemporary Middle Eastern dynamics.
— Day 2, Series 7
To desire the technology while resisting the values is, in Haines's reading, the structural predicament of every culture that has been forced to receive modernity from outside rather than to produce it from within. It is not solved by lecturing; it is solved, if at all, by patience and by the slow construction of a moral vocabulary that can hold technology and tradition together. That is precisely what providence, in his account, is now asking of the Muslim world — and of the West's diplomacy toward it.
Israel: a homeland made by mandate
Haines's account of Israel is, by the standards of contemporary commentary, almost startlingly legalistic. He neither sentimentalises the state nor concedes the now-fashionable charge that it was founded in conquest. The historical record, he insists, is the opposite: Israel was constituted by the deliberate act of the international community.
In 1920, the League of Nations gave Britain the mandate to administer Palestine and established a Jewish homeland. The Balfour Declaration was issued, which made certain promises towards the Arabs as well. The League of Nations allocated this area to be administered by Britain to establish a Jewish homeland, called Israel. Several important things about this: the Jews didn't invade and conquer Palestine; they didn't drive out the Palestinians living there and take control of that land. This land was actually allocated by the international community, as all the nations of the world that represented the League of Nations agreed that there should be a Jewish homeland established there and that Britain should facilitate this under a mandate. It wasn't a British colony; there was a mandate given to Britain by the League of Nations to administer this land for this particular purpose.
— Day 3, Series 7
There is something biographical in the firmness of this passage: Haines's own family helped found Petah Tikva and served in the police force of Mandate Palestine, and he speaks of the founding not as a partisan but as someone whose relatives carried out the mandate's daily work. Yet his deepest concern in this section is not the foundation but the long failure to settle what came afterwards, and here he turns to the tragedy of Yasser Arafat as a study in the cost of inadequate education.
From Arafat's point of view, it was really difficult for him to negotiate because he realised that if he went too far in reaching a settlement with Israel, which naturally requires compromise on both sides, he felt he would get assassinated as well. So, he could only go so far. That's why education is so important. Leadership means you lead people in a certain direction; you can't go too far ahead of all the people you're supposed to be leading, or they'll kill you. Leadership means education. You have to educate people so they understand what it is you're doing, your vision, and where you want to take them. They need to support you, and the whole community has to move along.
— Day 3, Series 7
The principle here is general: every leader is hostage to the moral horizon of the people who follow. A peace that the public has not been prepared for is a peace that cannot be signed. The lesson applies as much to Western capitals after the Wall fell as it did to Ramallah in the 1990s.
America's idealist temptation: Iraq, the Accords, and the limits of imposing freedom
If the Cold War's end was the great providential opportunity of the late twentieth century, the American invasion of Iraq was, on Haines's reading, its most costly squandering. He locates the error not in malice but in a misplaced idealism — the conviction of a particular American faction that the form of life it loved could be transplanted into soils it did not understand.
The neoconservatives, or 'neo' meaning new conservatives, are a distinct group in America. There are two types of conservatives: the paleo-conservatives, who are old-fashioned, and the neoconservatives, many of whom were former socialists. They realised that socialism was not a viable ideal and shifted their focus to free-market liberal democracy, which they sought to impose on other nations. This idealism is problematic, as it assumes that they know what is best for others better than those people know for themselves. George Bush, an evangelical Christian and a moral person, did not engage in scandals like Clinton or Trump, but the consequences of his policies were disastrous.
— Day 4, Series 7
The distinction between personal morality and providential judgement is one Haines insists on. A virtuous man may set in motion a catastrophic policy; conversely, a man of dubious personal reputation may, by attending to the actual interests of the parties, produce diplomatic fruit. The Abraham Accords are his case in point.
The collapse of Iraq removed a significant barrier against Iranian influence, prompting Arab countries to form coalitions. The Abraham Accords, signed in September 2020 by the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, marked a significant shift in relations between Israel and Arab nations. Other countries, such as Sudan and Morocco, soon followed suit. However, the political landscape shifted again with Biden's election, as he was less supportive of the Accords and sought to revive agreements with Iran. Despite Trump's controversial persona, his foreign policy brought about notable progress in the Middle East, fostering improved relations and economic cooperation between Israel and Arab nations.
Haines's point is not partisan but providential: the Accords were a small recovery of what the Iraq adventure had broken, and any administration that loosened them was, by that act, undoing a piece of the post-Cold-War repair. The new providential demand on the United States, in his telling, is to relinquish the dream of remaking other peoples and to take up the harder work of brokering between them.
Justice, the Family Pledge, and the Esther moment
The fifth lecture takes the argument inward. The Cold War's end exposed the limits of programmes that imagined themselves the engine of history. Haines reads the Book of Esther as the Bible's portrait of providence at its most mature: a story in which God is never named, in which deliverance arrives only because human beings act rightly without the benefit of revelation. The contrast with the utopian temptation is total.
If we see ourselves as the sole responsible agents in human history, it is all too easy to imagine that we have taken God's place. This is a mistake made by many utopians and terrorists who persuade themselves that if only human initiative could be pursued with sufficient energy, the entire fabric of the world can be reformed once and for all, here and now. That was the motivation of the Bolsheviks: to stage a coup d'état with a plan to create an ideal society, an ideal socialist communist society. They aimed to rewrite history and create a new history from year zero.
— Day 5, Series 7
The Esther moment is the opposite of the year-zero moment. It is providence without revelation, conscience without instruction, and the willingness to act in a world that has gone quiet. This is why Haines argues, in the same lecture, that justice belongs in the Family Pledge: because the household is the laboratory in which human beings learn to act rightly when no voice from heaven is telling them what to do.
A Germanic word: freedom as ordered liberty
The sixth lecture turns, characteristically, on a linguistic discovery. Haines's claim is that the English word "freedom" does not exist, in the same sense, in any of the great European tongues — and that its absence shapes the political imaginations of the cultures that lack it.
The person who coined this word was someone called Alfred the Great. He was translating the Book of Psalms into English and couldn't find an English word that conveyed the meaning of the 117th Psalm, which talks about liberty and law. He thought, 'Okay, because he was a good Anglo-Saxon, I'll just take two different words, 'free' and 'dom,' and stick them together to create a new word: freedom.' So, freedom then is ordered liberty. You're free within the law; you have the rule of law. As long as you don't break the law, you can do anything you want. So it's ordered liberty. This means a headwing would be that; that's why the Principle talks about freedom and responsibility. In English, you can't have one without the other, really.
— Day 6, Series 7
The political consequences of this etymological accident are, in Haines's view, immense. The Anglo-Saxon and American traditions take for granted a binding of liberty to law that French liberté and Russian svoboda do not naturally encode. This is why exporting "freedom" without exporting the legal habit beneath it has so often produced disorder rather than democracy — and why the new providential demand on the English-speaking peoples is to teach the grammar of their own word more patiently, by example rather than by imposition.
Russia, NATO, and the broken promise
The seventh lecture is the most painful. Haines speaks as a man who lived through the early-1990s window when Reagan, Bush, Thatcher, Gorbachev and Yeltsin briefly entertained the possibility of a Europe undivided, and he is unsparing about what was done with that window. NATO's quiet expansion to the east, against assurances given at the time of German reunification, set the stage for the Ukrainian catastrophe — though, characteristically, he refuses to absolve Putin of his own duty to act lawfully.
Personally, I think it is very unwise for Ukraine to join NATO or the EU because the country is divided. Half the country wants to be close to Russia, while the other half wants to be close to the EU. The solution is for Ukraine to remain neutral, allowing it to have whatever relationship it wants with Russia without being dominated by Moscow. There is nothing wrong with being neutral; Austria is neutral, and Sweden and Finland were not in NATO until recently. Switzerland has not been in NATO since the Second World War. I believe Ukraine should remain a neutral country, but Zelensky was determined to join NATO, and Washington was encouraging this, especially Biden.
— Day 7, Series 7
Haines's view of Crimea is of a piece with this. The peninsula had been Russian for two centuries; its recovery, he thinks, was a legitimate Russian interest that ought to have been pursued diplomatically through the United Nations rather than by armoured column. The tragedy is double: a Western alliance that broke its word and a Russian leadership that, faced with that broken word, chose the worst available response. Neither side has yet absorbed the lesson.
Korea: the third Israel
The series closes in the Far East, with the providential burden Haines treats as the heaviest of all. Germany was reunified peacefully because it stood on a long Christian foundation that both halves continued to share. Korea, divided in the same providential symmetry, lacks that subsoil.
Looking at the last 400 years, we see that it started in Japan and Germany with Martin Luther and Protestantism, which went west to Britain and America, leading to the British Empire, free market, and liberal democracy, eventually arriving in Korea in 1945. From Germany, we had Karl Marx and communism, which went east to Russia and China, along with fascism and Nazism, bringing state control and totalitarianism. Just as Germany was divided, so too is Korea. Fortunately, there was a peaceful reunification of Germany, largely because of the Christian foundation there. It's hard to imagine a peaceful reunification of Korea due to the very little Christian foundation in the South and none whatsoever in the North.
— Day 8, Series 7
Korea, in Haines's framing, is Christianity's third Israel — the place where the providential drama now centres — and the absence of a deep Christian foundation in the Far East is not an incidental fact but the principal obstacle to peaceful reunification. The demand the new era places on the Korean church, and on the wider community of believers who care about the peninsula, is to do in a generation what took Germany four centuries: to lay the moral subsoil on which a divided people can be rejoined without bloodshed.
Why the world doesn't see what's happening
Across the eight lectures one note recurs: the parties who most need to understand what is happening do not. Newly elected governments arrive ignorant of the agreements their predecessors made. Publics demand peace settlements but kill the leaders who try to make them. Western capitals exported a freedom whose grammar they had ceased to teach at home. Russian leadership, faced with broken promises, chose the worst rather than the lawful remedy. Korean Christians have not yet borne the weight that providence has placed on them.
The blindness, in Haines's diagnosis, is not principally intellectual. It is a failure of conscience, and conscience is precisely the faculty through which God calls. The Cold War ended because enough people, on both sides of the Wall, finally listened. The post-Cold-War order will be built, or fail to be built, on the same condition. Providence has done its part; what remains is the slower, more domestic work of human beings who, like Esther, must act without a voice from heaven telling them when to move.
That is the demand of the era after the Berlin Wall. It is not the end of history. It is the beginning of the part of history in which God has fewer prophets and more witnesses, and in which the brotherhood of independent nations will rise, or fail to rise, on the moral attention of ordinary citizens who have learned to read what is in front of them.
[^1]: Four of the sixteen verbatim passages from Series 7 are not quoted in this chapter: the Day 5 exposition of the rabbis' political philosophy as oscillation between Babel and the judges; the Day 6 account of William the Conqueror's harrying of the north; the Day 7 reflection on post-Soviet optimism and the ignorance of subsequent governments; and the Day 8 observation that Taiwan was the only beneficiary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Each is valuable in its own setting, but the twelve quoted above carry the chapter's providential argument most directly.