Whew. this is a bit of a long one. I’m definitely saving it after this is done. Also BTW, I’m not as new as my post count would indicate - I switched names from David, God of Frogs.
The War on Terror is an epic struggle, akin to the Cold War. Our adversary, like then, has a distinctly anti-market (with their prohibitions on usery) and even anti-democratic ideology, making it difficult to reason with on even a basic level. Still, they are very entrenched – most Muslim populations are more radical than their unelected rulers – meaning that this problem will not be going away soon. In fact, the main difference between now and then is that now the power is dispersed among various religious figures, instead of heavily concentrated in one regime. In other words, the threat is from the right, rather than the left – but it’s otherwise almost exactly analogous.
Previous approaches to this war have not drawn this historical connection out vary far. The conventional response from the left is to bring out divisions within Islam in the hopes of provoking change from within – but this won’t work any more than pointing out the differences between Leninist and Maoist communism would have brought down the Soviet Union. Neoconservatives have looked to promote democracy in the Middle East – but their approach lacks any sort of endgame to make people vote the way we actually want them to, analogous to Keenan’s plan to make the Soviet Union to collapse as it did. Both of these approaches draw heavily from our experiences in the Cold War, but we can get even further by drawing from some of its more subtle lessons.
The reason why it took so long during the Cold War to convince the world of our moral superiority over the USSR was that we did indeed have something to learn from Communism. Here at home, the Cold War gave political impetus to the civil rights movement of the 60’s, and kept the gap in the distribution of wealth from growing too wide. One has to recognize that political Islam does at least appear to have some aspects that are superior to our Western rationalism – their use of charity to help run a society, but also its ability to take a hard line when necessary – and we need to show that we can use democracy to achieve those same ends.
The guiding principles here are variants of the guiding principles of the Cold War – containment and mutually assured destruction. In this case, there is no direct MAD, because no terrorist group is going to get their hands on the multitude of bombs the USSR had. On the other hand, those bombs they do manage to acquire, they are almost certain to use. We need to have an official policy that a nuclear attack will be met by a nuclear attack – even lacking completely verifiable intelligence on the source, as will probably be the case. Since it will probably be the Muslim world that will bear the brunt of such an attack, any potential nuclear terrorist will know that Muslim popular opinion will turn against them instantly. Hopefully we will never have to use this policy, but only by stating it in advance will it have any kind of deterrent effect.
Containment, in contrast to during the Cold War, will actually be a relatively peaceful exercise. Since this is mostly a matter of ‘soft power,’ we will need to surround the Islamic world on all sides. The way to do this is by encouraging global free markets and political collaboration. For the US, in the short to medium term, this will probably mean closer ties to China. While we should still press for democracy, and make it clear that we will not get into any Asian land wars, we should also welcome them as a diplomatic partner – perhaps even taking the place of Europe, whose strategic importance has waned since the end of the Cold War.
With only a few exceptions, our foreign policy during the War on Terror can be taken as an analouge to Cold War policies. Microfinance, for instance, is a unique product of democracy and free markets. It is not entirely a free-market affair – it needs charitable ‘subsidies’ to establish itself before it becomes profitable – but once it does, it brings the free market to large numbers of people who have never experienced it before. The World Bank, and the other ‘Bretton Woods’ institutions, were established as gargantuan free-market entities to challenge the totalitarian rule of the communist USSR. Nowadays, since the threat comes from below, it is important that we establish free-market institutions that work on the individual level.
Foreign aid is often seen as the antithesis of democracy – it’s almost a given that a politician can win support by cutting aid budgets. The best way to get around that is to offer the aid in-kind, as a kind of consulting service, rather than as direct goods. For instance, Africa is a region that has a fair amount of natural resources, yet tends to squander it due to incompetent management and political infighting.
This is obviously a centuries-old problem, and we probably will not be able to abolish it, but one historically recent opportunity for sub-Saharan Africa is their relationship with China. Chinese investors have been putting money into African real estate, and China is interested in securing Africa’s oil resources for its growing energy demand. This represents a bargaining chip that may come in handy in the future – a unified African leadership could threaten China’s holdings in exchange for some sort of protection, both economic and military.
It is important to keep ideas like this one flowing, which is why it’s in the government’s interest to promote the think tank ‘industry.’ During the Cold War, we funded the Voice of America, to challenge the lies the USSR was built on. However, nowadays, the issue isn’t the availability of the news, but its accessibility. The free exchange of ideas is one of the hallmarks of democracy, and if we fund ‘ideas factories’ like these, it represents a wager that our ideas will prove superior to those of a religiously oriented society.
Christian sub-Saharan Africa is just one front in political Islam’s war with the world, which as they see it includes struggles against Hindus, Buddhists, communist atheism, and Judaism. In India, they are actually doing just about everything they need to be doing – they are a functioning secular democracy. In fact, they’re so stable that we don’t particularly need to be offering them incentives to stay that way. Bush’s recent nuclear deal with them (if it goes through, assuming it wasn’t just a domestic political ploy) serves no purpose, and can only increase the chances that nuclear weapons get into the hands of terrorists.
Buddhists in Thailand are another point of friction with the Muslim world. Fundamentalist Buddhism may seem like a contradiction to western ears, but it does exist - to the point where the leaders of some Buddhist countries will actually get elements of their policy from astrologers. This obviously is no better than any other kind of fundamentalism, and has to stop. A book I recently ran across called The Tao of Democracy (disregarding the fact that Taoism isn’t quite Buddhism, and that the authors are nutcases) nevertheless points to how we can ‘market’ these ideas to this part of the world.
Europe (as well as Russia) may be going too far in the secular direction, to where they end up actually discriminating against religion. While they probably handled last year’s cartoon crisis about as well as they could have, France’s laws against wearing head scarves are symbolic and counterproductive. Britain’s laws against free speech are even worse – the use of force doesn’t help us except directly in response to force, or unless there is good reason to think that it would directly prevent the use of force. Some of the above applies to the US too.
Finally, the Israeli-Palestinian situation is not as complicated as it is often made out to be. While of course the Palestinians are at fault for lots of things, Israel hasn’t been doing all it can either to prevent Palestinian violence, for instance by taking a hard line on settlements. We had reason to support Israel during Cold War as an anti-communist ally, but now, their mistakes don’t just affect them – they also come back to hurt us. We need to cut off our aid to them, which I honestly don’t really understand in the first place, and consider even tougher measures if necessary. We should also not unduly punish the Palestinian people for their votes in a democratic election – our campaign to promote democracy in general is more important than the outcome in one particular country. We need to put pressure on both sides until they start to act more peaceful towards each other, or else the situation risks spiraling more out of control than it has already.
The only region where I’d recommend not applying this Cold-War type philosophy is Latin America. (I’ve mostly left out Asia, because this part of the world tends to have strong, functional, state structures, and while these aren’t the ideal way to run things, they do take care of the terrorism problem themselves.) Terrorists have made somewhat of a showing in South and Central America, but only as strategic allies – they have never tried very hard to justify themselves, and they will probably never have the support of much of the population at large.
Unlike Europe, which had military control over its colonies, when the Monroe Doctrine made Latin America our colony, our control was implicit – and it therefore never ended definitively as with the rest of the world. We are still in the process of letting them go, and the reason that free trade keeps having detrimental effects in that part of the world is that it weakens our colonial grip. Taking too hard a line here could risk blowback in a war that has nothing to do with this, just as supporting Bin Laden during the Cold War turned out not to be in our interests for the War on Terror.
We also will not be able to tackle the Chinese democracy problem directly anytime soon, but this is another area where encouraging China’s relationship with Africa will help. The Chinese government has skillfully kept itself in power, despite sporadic opposition, by making the various opposition groups mistakenly think their disputes are with the government instead of each other. The missing piece of a revolution is political education for the peasants. Being made into pawns, despite the obvious drawbacks, will provide a valuable lesson in politics that they can then take back to the mainland, to scare the regime into opening up.
All of these ideas benefit their respective parts of the world, but they also benefit us. Africa’s relationship with China protects them, helps the Chinese, and for us, it draws enemy fire to a harder target. This is the principle that democracy is founded upon - the rational pursuit of self-interest - at its best. In a sense, while the Cold War was won by standing down and assuaging Soviet fears, this one will be won by playing out their every conspiracy theory. It’s in our interests to make sure the whole world, other than the Muslim world, becomes economically and politically successful, because only as the hard-line Mullahs and other Muslim opinion leaders become more shrill do they start to lose their credibility and be replaced by equally respected moderate leaders – and can we say that we’ve actually won the War on Terror.