Friday, October 3, 2014

Lost In Translation

The two minds of Bernard Lewis.

In the course of a distinguished academic career at the University of London and at Princeton, Bernard Lewis has never been afraid to dip his scholarly hands in the muck of current affairs. A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early nineteen-seventies, and a friend to several Israeli Prime Ministers, Lewis has been especially sought after in Washington since September 11th. Karl Rove invited him to speak at the White House. Richard Perle and Dick Cheney are among his admirers. Lewis has championed his friend Ahmad Chalabi for a leading role in Iraq. And his best-selling book “What Went Wrong?,” about the decline of Muslim civilization, is regarded in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamist terrorism. Lewis, in short, is a thoroughly political don, and if anyone can be said to have provided the intellectual muscle for recent United States policy toward the Middle East it would have to be him.

Lewis’s latest book, “From Babel to Dragomans” (Oxford; $28), collects essays written over the past half century, on topics ranging from medieval interpreters (dragomans) and Jews in ancient Persia to what to do with Saddam Hussein. Yet, for a man who inspired the neoconservative firebrands, some of Lewis’s ideas are surprisingly cautious. In 1957, he argued that the West should take as little action as possible in the Middle East, since “we of the West . . . should beware of proposing solutions that, however good, are discredited by the very fact of our having suggested them.” In 1991, he wrote about the “age-old autocratic traditions” in the Arab world, and warned that there is “no guarantee” that efforts to democratize “will succeed, and even if they do, after how long and at what price.” As late as 2002, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, he struck yet another note of prudence. “Democracy is dangerous anywhere,” he said. “We talk sometimes as if democracy were the natural human condition, as if any deviation from it is a crime to be punished or a disease to be cured. That is not true. Democracy, or what we call democracy nowadays, is the parochial custom of the English-speaking peoples for the conduct of their public affairs, which may or may not be suitable for others.”

This is not exactly the stuff that excites readers of the Weekly Standard, or the hotter heads in the Pentagon. There is, however, another Bernard Lewis to be found in this book, a more strident figure who believes not only that the United States was too soft during the Vietnam War but that Middle Eastern dictatorships must be overthrown with force. Negotiating with the ayatollahs of Iran, and with other anti-American autocrats, is useless: “As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people.” As for the immediate consequences of turning such ideals into policies, Lewis, particularly in his more recent writings, is oddly insouciant. He said in 2001 that public opinion in Iraq and Iran was so pro-American that both peoples would rejoice if the United States Army liberated them. A year later, he repeated the message that “if we succeed in overthrowing the regimes of what President Bush has rightly called the ‘Axis of Evil,’ the scenes of rejoicing in their cities would even exceed those that followed the liberation of Kabul.” Most Iraqis did cheer the demise of their tyrant, but Lewis could have offered some words of warning about what might follow the celebrations.

Nor was the fastidious scholar of Middle Eastern subtleties much in evidence when Lewis glibly used the attack on the World Trade Center to advocate a war on Saddam Hussein. In an article written days after the attack, he suggested that seeing the United States go to war with Saddam would be “the dearest wish” of other Arab regimes. Of course, the feelings of most Arab leaders were a little more complicated than that; and the chaos created by the American intervention is now causing almost universal alarm.

Critics of the war in Iraq, such as Rashid Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia, attribute American failures in the Middle East to ignorance, or worse. Khalidi’s latest book, “Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East” (Beacon; $23), is a polemic against European and American interventions in Middle Eastern politics. He is lucid, though somewhat conventional, in his denunciation of European colonialism and American “imperialism.” On current affairs, he is the exact opposite of Bernard Lewis. He states that “virtually all of the thinking that underlay the planning for the Iraq war,” such as the idea “that all Iraqis would welcome their liberators with open arms,” was afflicted by “enthusiastic ignorance and ideological blindness.” The charge of ignorance may be true of Richard Perle or the President himself; it cannot be levelled at Bernard Lewis. Few people in the United States know more about the Ottoman Empire than he does, and few are as steeped in the history of the Middle East. In arguments with ideological opponents—not least a famous 1982 exchange with the late Edward Said, in The New York Review of Books—Lewis has regularly displayed his superior mastery of Islamic history.

There is often a chasm, of course, between scholarly and political acumen. Misguided imperial aggression has regularly been advocated by experts of formidable erudition. Warren Hastings, who was impeached for his misconduct as governor-general of India in the late eighteenth century, had a formidable understanding of the subcontinent’s cultures. Some of the most ferocious proponents of Japanese imperialism in China during the nineteen-thirties were keen scholars of Chinese civilization. Expertise is often beside the point in political arguments. Said’s criticism of “Orientalist” scholars, among whom he counted Lewis, was not that they were ignorant but that they were arrogant and contemptuous of Muslims, and disguised political agendas with scholarship.

It is hard to deny that Lewis has a political agenda. But contemptuous? There is no reason to doubt his sincerity when he wrote, in a widely read essay, “Islam is one of the world’s great religions. Let me be explicit about what I, as a historian of Islam who is not a Muslim, mean by that. Islam has brought comfort and peace of mind to countless millions of men and women. It has given dignity and meaning to drab and impoverished lives. It has taught people of different races to live in brotherhood and people of different creeds to live side by side in reasonable tolerance. It inspired a great civilization in which others besides Muslims lived creative and useful lives and which, by its achievement, enriched the whole world.” These are hardly the words of a blinkered hater of “the Other.” (Oddly, when he reprinted the essay in “From Babel to Dragomans,” he omitted this passage.)

Lewis is at his best when he identifies Western double standards in dealing with the non-Western world. The bien-pensants, he says, are obsessed with Israeli violence against Arabs, while ignoring far worse brutality among the Arabs. Similarly, they denounced General Franco for his authoritarian rule in Spain but were relatively unmoved by Idi Amin’s massacres in Uganda. There are, in Lewis’s view, “two possible explanations of this silence. One is that white victims are so much more important than black victims that five Spaniards count for more than thousands of Ugandans. The other is that higher standards of behavior are expected from a European, even a Spanish fascist government, than from an African ruler. Either of these explanations would indicate a profoundly racist attitude.”

And yet, when it comes to politics, a great scholarly mind, surveying the grand sweep of history from Olympian heights, can sometimes overlook matters closer to earth. Arbitrary colonial borders, coups engineered by British and American secret services, and Western manipulation of local despots, including Saddam Hussein, played some role in creating failed states and tyrannies. Lewis is no less horrified than his critics by the dictatorships that have destroyed civilized life in much of the Middle East. But his writings give the impression that British and French imperialism, United States interventions, and Israeli oppression of Palestinians are simply alibis for the region’s political failings. The real reasons for the Middle Eastern mess, he suggests, are deeper, older, grander.

In a famous Atlantic Monthly article from 1990, reprinted in the current collection, Lewis speaks of “Muslim rage.” The argument encapsulated by the term goes roughly as follows. The clash between Christendom and Islam has been going on since the Muslims conquered Syria, North Africa, and Spain. Muslims, at the height of their glory, in tenth-century Cairo, thirteenth-century Tehran, or sixteenth-century Istanbul, thought of themselves as far superior to the Christians and Jews among them, who were tolerated as second-class citizens. Since then, however, as Lewis puts it, “the Muslim has suffered successive stages of defeat.” Turks reached Vienna in 1683 but got no farther. When the rampant West expanded its empires, European ideas penetrated, dominated, and dislocated the Muslim world. It was deeply humiliating for Muslims to be humbled by inferior Christians and Jews (“Crusaders” and “Zionists,” in modern parlance). Traditional ways, which had produced so much glory in the past, were eroded and often destroyed by ill-considered experiments with Marxism, fascism, and national socialism. Out of political and cultural failure came this Muslim rage, directed against the West, the historical source of humiliation, and out of this rage came the violent attempts to establish a new caliphate through religious revolution. (It was Lewis, not Samuel Huntington, who introduced the phrase “clash of civilizations.”) “In a sense,” Lewis said on C-span after the September 11th attacks, “they’ve been hating us for centuries, and it’s very natural that they should. You have this millennial rivalry between two world religions, and now, from their point of view, the wrong one seems to be winning.”

This broad analysis raises certain questions. First, who exactly is “the Muslim”? The last Islamist revolution was in Iran, but the rage Lewis describes seems to be confined mainly to Arabs. Turkey and Iran can’t really be described as failed states, and the rule of Iran’s mullocracy, now much loathed by most Iranians, arose not from some deep religious rage but, as Lewis acknowledges, from a modern revolutionary movement, supported initially by many Iranians who were not especially religious. There’s something about Lewis’s analysis of Islamic radicalism that reminds one of theories about the Third Reich that draw a straight line from Luther to Hitler.

Lewis claims that the lack of separation between church and state is the basis for Islamist revolutions. But in the non-Arab Muslim world, in places like Indonesia and Malaysia, religious ideologues have so far failed to make much headway. Indeed, more pragmatic Muslims in Indonesia are keen to separate politics from religion. Islamist radicalism is a threat in Pakistan, but this has more to do with a history of authoritarian rule by a small landowning class and military juntas than with any “millennial rivalry between two world religions.” Pakistani political history, in some ways, bears more resemblance to that of Argentina and other parts of Latin America than to that of the Middle East.

Lewis’s fixation on the millennial clash causes him to stretch his points beyond plausibility. He fastens on Yugoslav newspaper reports about young Muslims in Sarajevo plotting to establish an Islamic republic in Bosnia, apparently inspired by Ayatollah Khomeini. Whatever the Belgrade press might have said, however, most Bosnian Muslims were fired up by nationalism; they did not wish to be crushed by the Serbs. To characterize this as Muslim rage is as strange as describing Serb nationalism as Orthodox rage.

Even applied to Arabs, the notion of Muslim rage goes only so far; many political rebellions against Western domination have been secular, and Arab nationalism, or Arabism, though often associated with Islam, is sometimes at odds with it. National consciousness in the Arab world has been slow to grow, because nation-states barely existed in the past, and modern borders were mostly drawn by British and French colonial officers. Islam was one thing that most Arabs, from Syria to the Sudan, had in common, and religion could have been a source of political identification. What Pan-Arabism, some of whose founders were Christians, offered was an alternative, more secular, though not necessarily more democratic form of cohesion. Its failure led to a revival of Islamist dreams. And though Lewis may be right that Western interventions, of a covertly or overtly imperial nature, cannot adequately explain the nature of Muslim rebellions, the toppling by Western agencies of freely elected governments, and the support of dictators, cannot have helped the cause of democratic change.

Lewis identifies two mainstays of Muslim rage. One is the spectacle of infidels ruling over true believers. This, in the eyes of the believers, “is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God’s law.” This account may help explain the revolutionary aspirations of Al Qaeda, but it is not persuasive when Lewis applies it to Uighurs in China or to Kosovars. They rebel in response to social and political oppression, not to blasphemy.

The second mainstay identified by Lewis is a more general one: secular modernity. The war on modernity “is directed against the whole process of change that has taken place in the Islamic world in the past century or more and has transformed the political, economic, social, and even cultural structures of Muslim countries. Islamic fundamentalism has given an aim and a form to the otherwise aimless and formless resentment and anger of the Muslim masses at the forces that have devalued their traditional values and loyalties and, in the final analysis, robbed them of their beliefs, their aspirations, their dignity, and to an increasing extent even their livelihood.”

This certainly makes Muslim rage seem understandable, even justified. But Lewis’s analysis is marred by an odd paradox. For those same angry and humiliated masses are, in Lewis’s view, also deeply attracted to the temptations of the modern world: they all want sex, Nikes, and rock and roll. “Fundamentalist leaders are not mistaken in seeing in Western civilization the greatest challenge to the way of life that they wish to retain or restore for their people,” Lewis writes.

Thus it is not really the masses—who would presumably love to be liberated by the United States—but the fundamentalist leaders who are enraged. So, of course, are some of the Christian fundamentalists waiting for Armageddon on our own television screens. In fact, the war on modernity, often associated with the Jews, or the West, or the United States, goes back centuries. German Romanticism, which later curdled into a murderous ideology, began as a reaction to the French Enlightenment, whose ideals were promoted with armed force by Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Nineteenth-century Slavophiles in Russia resisted the modern ideas of the Westernizers and extolled the Russian soul. German Fascists in the nineteen-thirties denounced “Americanism.” Japanese chauvinists in the forties embraced the idea that Japan was fighting a holy war against the wicked West.

Islamic extremists, it is plausible to conclude, have been drinking from that same poisoned well. Lewis rightly points out that their targets are the secular, corrupt, and oppressive governments in the Arab world, as well as the more enticing symbols of the West. So the question arises of why Lewis promoted a war against an Iraqi regime that was hated by religious extremists. Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party certainly owed much to such old enemies of the liberal West as Stalinism and Nazism. He was also a brute. But he was a basically secular brute, whose will to power was hardly inspired by Muslim rage. In earlier days, he could have been excused for considering himself a friend of the West. Around the time of the Iran-Iraq War, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld certainly gave him that impression.

Why did Bernard Lewis ignore his own counsel that the West should proceed with caution in the Middle East, that democracy cannot be a quick fix, and that our proposed solutions, however good, are “discredited by the very fact of our having suggested them”? Some put it down to Zionism: he is said to be part of the Israeli lobby, and his aim is to make Israel safe. Lewis does not hide that he is sympathetic to Israel, not only because he happens to be Jewish but because he thinks Israel is a relatively civilized, democratic country in a very rough neighborhood. Rather touchingly, Lewis, who has always admired the Ottoman Empire at its best, writes that “the Ottoman heritage is more perfectly preserved in Israel . . . than in any of the other countries of the region.” But then, judging from Lewis’s own writings, I would rather have been a Jewish subject of the Ottoman Empire than an Arab in territories occupied by Israel.

I doubt, in any case, that Zionism quite explains Lewis’s role as a cheerleader for the war in Iraq. Nor does his supposed contempt for the Arab world do so. On the contrary, perhaps he loves it too much. It is a common phenomenon among Western students of the Orient to fall in love with a civilization. Such love often ends in bitter impatience when reality fails to conform to the ideal. The rage, in this instance, is that of the Western scholar. His beloved civilization is sick. And what would be more heartwarming to an old Orientalist than to see the greatest Western democracy cure the benighted Muslim? It is either that or something less charitable: if a final showdown between the great religions is indeed the inevitable result of a millennial clash, then we had better make sure that we win.

Lewis did say, in his Jerusalem Post interview, that he saw “the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and—yes, I will say the word—democratic regime arising in a post-Saddam Iraq.” But, as has become increasingly obvious, an invasion by foreign armies is not the ideal way to bring this about. Here, Rashid Khalidi appears to be more clearheaded when he says that “unwanted foreign military occupation, or even the threat of it, is incompatible with democratization.” Let us hope that he is wrong and Lewis is right. But it looks as though Arabs are crawling through yet another ring of Hell, prompted in part by the zeal of a man who claimed to wish them well. ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/14/lost-in-translation-3?currentPage=all

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/09/islamic-state-religion-peace/

CLIVE S. KESSLER

The Islamic State and ‘Religion of Peace’

As a faith, and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate

Some hours after the arrest on 18 September of fifteen IS sympathizers alleged to be planning violence in Australia, the Attorney-General Senator George Brandis QC, in an interview with Raf Epstein on ABC Radio Melbourne, declared — correctly — that people of the kind arrested constitute only a “tiny minority” within a large and largely law-abiding community. He went on to reject the suggestion that violence, or support for it, is any way “intrinsic” to Islam. Then he went further. “The suggestion that mainstream Islam is anything other than a religion of peace is arrant nonsense,” he insisted.

How convincing is this claim? Can we, in the face of threatened Islamist violence, find reassurance in that assertion?

The truth is that, both as faith and a civilization built upon that faith, Islam over the centuries has displayed many faces, some peaceful and others not. Against the threat of violent Islam in our time, bland and disingenuous assertions of Islam’s essentially peaceful character are inadequate.

The dramatic emergence of the so-called Islamic State in northern Syria and western Iraq (ISIS) and, with it, the foundation, even restoration after a ninety-year hiatus, of a universal Islamic caliphate, brings modern-age militant Islam to a new level. Radical fundamentalist Islam is no longer seeking simply to infiltrate a state, or intimidate a state through terror, or to suborn and then capture and control an existing state. In the bleak borderlands of Syria and Iraq, violent Islamists are now creating a state of their own. And not just any state.

Their task, they claim, is not one of modern institutional innovation but of divinely ordained historical restoration: the restoration of Islam’s worldly sovereignty and universality. They see themselves as erecting the basic framework of a regime and overarching political structure that, they intend, will eventually encompass not only all the world’s Muslims but the entire world. Initially that will be a world of non-Muslims under Muslim governance, but ultimately a world entirely Muslim by faith and in identity and destiny.

This development poses a threat that requires an adequate and effective response.

One thing is clear — or ought to be clear, but in fact is not. No effective response can be grounded upon a misrecognition or misunderstanding of this dramatic threat and its deep, underlying sources.

One common, and all too easy, response is that offered by many Islamic leaders, both religious and political, international as well as local. One typical and widely influential such voice is that of the former Malaysian Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad. “There is no place for violence in Islam. Islam is a religion of peace and some people have wrongly interpreted the religion,” he said in August, when commenting on reports and images of ISIS atrocities and executions.

Islam, “a religion of peace”? Is this a defensible claim? Is it an adequate basis upon which to oppose the ISIS militants and to dissuade disaffected young Muslims, in Australia and elsewhere, from rallying to its call and banner? If Islam is a “religion of peace”, then what kind of peace does it imagine, aspire to and offer—to its adherents, to non-Muslims and to the world at large?

All religious traditions imagine themselves as ultimately universal — mainstream Christianity as much as radical, and also mainstream, Islam. But there is a difference. The Christian imagination was founded upon the brutal political punishment and execution of a man (one of Divine and salvational character) at the hands of a powerful state. The Christian imagination, like the core Jewish imagination from which it grew, was initially “minoritarian”—formed upon a sense of its own “outsider” character and minority status—and, born of this religiously defining act of state violence, deeply “state-distrusting”. That only changed, in the Christian case, with the conversion of Constantine, when suddenly a state-distrusting faith not only acquired a state but became one: surprisingly and paradoxically, by acquiring control of the very Roman state and empire that—in the new faith’s focal experience and formative moment—had crucified its founder Jesus and, thereafter, persecuted so many of his followers.

The case of Islam is different. Its entire founding social imagination, in the Prophet Muhammad’s earlier oppositional experiences in Mecca and then as the leader of a cohesive, religiously defined human community in Madinah, is inherently and intensely political. And that faith not only imagined and formed itself in political terms on this Madinah foundation. Its early history, in the century after the death of its founder, was as a success story, in which it brought the non-Muslim world that it encountered under its management and reorganised its governance to accord with Islamic ideas and requirements. Islam’s early history was a story of political triumph and ascendancy wherever it reached and took hold.

Like human personalities, religions too bear the stamp of their formative moments and the imprint of their defining experiences. And that formative experience provided the historical foundations of the terms in which the standard Islamic religious and social imagination has continued to operate ever since.

The mainstream or majority religious imagination in Islam has always been intensely political. More than simply political, it has been politically “majoritarian”. It assumes a world where Muslims “have the upper hand” because they are the majority, one that is capable of having and imposing its way.

So the conventional Islamic imagination is also “governmentalist”: Islam is both din and daulah, a faith and faith-based way of life and also a political order. It imagines and assumes a world organised upon Islamic principles, one that operates upon the basis of, and maintains, the Islamic social template.

Conventional Islam has always assumed that it can and must “live in the world” on its own terms; that it is entitled to do so; that, in order to realise itself and thrive, it must do so; and that it may insist upon and even, when possible, impose upon others the terms of its own thriving according to its own ultimately sacred, since divinely ordained, sociopolitical template.

Islam is—meaning that conventional Islam imagines and provides—a set of binding arrangements under which Muslims submit totally to Allah, to the transcendental overlordship of God, and where non-Muslims then submit, or accommodate themselves compliantly, to the worldly overlordship of Muslims, to Muslim rule.

When one sets aside its divine dimension, Islam is in mundane terms a religion not of peace but of domination and submission: the submission of all Muslims to Allah, and of other Muslims to those Muslims who claim to exercise the authority of Allah; and of non-Muslims to Muslims, under arrangements that are said to embody the sovereignty of Allah. That is the basis upon which Islam claims to offer social peace and, in the words of its political apologists, to be a “religion of peace”.

Of course, the champions of this vision would prefer to achieve peaceably—without resistance, by genuine or, if need be, dragooned consent—what in the end can only ever be established against serious, if not always overt, resistance. And the militants know it. Unlike the disingenuous and confused and even well-meaning apologists, they know what the achievement of that objective, a humanly “sacralised” objective of what they see as a divine imperative, entails.

Many self-declared moderates are happy to dream or hope otherwise. But they are reluctant to criticise, and openly oppose, those who take the more strenuous view of what actualising this religion of peace may involve. And, to that extent, they too are prepared to go along with the militants, their ideas and agenda. No matter how reluctantly or uncomfortably, they stand “on side” with the champions of militant Islam.

What then is the peace that this “religion of peace” offers?

Peace, yes, its proponents say to the adherents of other faiths, you can have peace and enjoy all the peace that we are prepared to offer—on our terms. But that is our peace, and those terms are our terms. In other words, there is nothing to be negotiated between us, as the majority, and you, who will live among us on our terms, in accordance with the dispensation that we provide. We can assure you that, provided you utter your consent, there is a place for you in our scheme of things—and we will tell you what that place is. And you may enjoy that peace of ours so long as you accept and agree to live within these terms, under those constraints and disabilities.

All that the members of the non-Muslim minority have to do is to say, freely or under whatever situational duress may prevail, that they accept these terms. It is enough that they say it. They don’t really have to mean it. Sincerity of affirmation is not required. It is sufficient that they say it since, once it has been said, sincerely or not, the members of the majority have them where the presuppositions of the Islamic social order require them to be placed. This was the status of thedhimmi, or “protected minorities” in classical Islamic society, under the classical dispensation and social paradigm of Islam.

If by a “religion of peace” one means a religion and an attendant worldly order of hegemonic quietude and obedience, then Islam is a religion of peace—a peace under which Muslims heed God (as they understand God, or are required by their religious authorities to understand these things) and non-Muslims obey worldly Muslim authority (as they are told and required to do).

When apologists, often well-meaning people, retreat into the stock affirmation that Islam is really “a religion of peace”, they are entering a zone of evasion and delusion. Once they offer this assertion or intended exculpation, there is a question to be answered. If Islam is a religion of peace, then where does this violence, this awful penchant for religiously justified violence, come from?

The answer invariably is that there are people who do not really understand Islam. And it is their fault. Whether out of malice or ignorance, these people offer in the name and with the supposed imprimatur of Islam a message of violence that is foreign to Islam, or what the apologists choose to regard as “properly understood Islam”, one that in their view has no roots within the religion or historical traditions of Islam.

As an explanation this is inadequate. More of that in a moment. But first, when proffered as strategy of “counter-radicalisation” among disaffected young Muslims, it is in its own terms doomed. While this approach may imagine it can handle the “ignorant” part by means of “education” and “correct Islamic messaging”, it has no answer for “malice”, for how to deal with and counter its destructive workings.

The question is not, as the apologists offering this approach always suggest, “Who is behind this misappropriation of Islam?” It is not a matter of finding a puppet-master or evil operator who, by misrepresenting the faith, is constantly manipulating good and decent people within the local Muslim community or worldwide ummah.

One must ask, and be brave enough to ask, a different question: What is it, within formal, doctrinal Islam and then, on that (perhaps selective but still identifiable) basis within the Islamic tradition and in Islamic history from which that powerful tradition is “sedimented”, that underpins and drives—and perhaps, as some see it, validates—this kind of gruesome, barbaric action: by Muslims, acting as committed Muslims, and in the name and in the “defence” or “promotion” of Islam?

The interpretation of Islam that is provided by the militants is not the only possible construction of the Islamic inheritance and agenda. And it may not be the preferred version of the moderates and the liberals and of Islam’s well-meaning apologists. But it is a version, and one that can be constructed on grounds that are indisputably internal to Islam, not some external intrusion or imposition implanted by the ignorant or the ill-intentioned.

The militant and fundamentalist versions of Islam are forms or variants that can be “sourced” and derived directly—dare one even say “authentically”?—from Koranic writ, from early formative Islam as recorded in the traditions and practices (hadith and sunnah) of the Prophet in his own lifetime and worldly career, and within historical Islam as it developed on that foundation. The militant version is a reading or construction of direct intellectual lineage and identifiable descent within historical Islam. It has its foundations—genuine, not spurious or fictive or prejudicially confected foundations—in what, from the outset in the Prophet’s own time and career, Islam is and has been in its worldly history and evolution.

Though sourced within mainstream historical Islam, not some dubious or marginal heretical tradition, it may be an extreme reading and, like all such readings of sacred traditions, it may be highly selective in its derivation and character. But, even so, it is a derivation from—and rests upon the reactivation and reanimation of something that, as much as anything else, is part of—that historic tradition.

No amount of selective doctrinaire invoking of an ideologue’s preferred version of “idealised Islam” can undo or alter or erase what, in its worldly career, “actually existing Islam” was and did, what it condoned and how, in consequence, the Islamic faith, in the course of its historical evolution, was shaped by the civilisational vehicle in which it rode through world history. Militant Islam—the Islam which now finds expression in the Islamic State movement and its caliphate—has those doctrinal roots and is built upon that process of historical elaboration, upon those identifiable historical foundations.

It must be recognised for what it is. There is no other way to understand, and still less to counter, the challenge that it represents and poses.

Grappling with this threat is now a key part of all our futures. So all of us—Muslims and non-Muslims alike—are entitled and need to ask a tough question: What is it within Islam as a faith and sacred tradition and then as a historical civilisation upon which the violent militants draw to build their malign outlook, their grim agenda and gruesome political practices? And, if we can identify there the sources of what they do and if those models are accordingly not external to Islam, how can Islam and its defenders possibly and decently disown that informing political inspiration, turn their eyes away or prevaricate about its powerful and empowering provenance?

Until people, including Muslims and notably those who hold positions of public trust and responsibility within the local Muslim community and global ummah, find the courage and basic honesty to begin facing up to this question, the serious analysis will not have begun.

Like its past, the future of Islam too may be either peaceful or violent. The challenge is to ensure that it will be peaceful. And it is Muslims — the broad majority of the Islamic faith community, and nobody else — who alone can and must make that peaceful future. That can only be achieved if mainstream Muslims of good faith, going beyond easy assertions that “Islam is a religion of peace”, publicly recognize and directly repudiate those parts of the Islamic tradition that are anything but peaceful.

How is the “unpeaceful” side of Islam to be rejected? Sacred texts cannot be changed. It is a question of how modern people choose to live with, and understand, their sacred texts. And of how they choose to live with doctrinaire scripturalist authoritarianism. Of their readiness to stand up against narrow scripturalist literalism, the monopoly upon truth that the traditional custodians of that literalism claim, and against the political zealotry that is grounded upon the assertion of that narrow, literalist monopoly.

How can this be done? The process begins not with loud accusatory cries of “Islamophobia!” but with the quiet and honest admission that, yes, there are things in the Islamic tradition that are, or should be, a source of concern to all Muslims of good faith—and if to them then also, and perhaps even more, to their non-Muslim fellow citizens.

It is that narrow, literalist authoritarianism and those worrying features of the Islamic faith tradition that modern Australian Muslims need to distance themselves from and explicitly repudiate. And they will not do so, since they will feel no need or obligation to do so, if our political leaders (such as the Attorney-General in his recently proffered and fashionable bromide) endorse and encourage them in that same intellectually lazy and politically evasive — and historically altogether simplistic — affirmation that “Islam is a religion of peace”.

It simply will not do to ask, disingenuously, “Who, us?! How could it possibly be us? Who is responsible for this deceiving misappropriation and defamation, for this scandal against Islam?” To ask who is “behind all this” and manipulating this situation is not simply inadequate. It is deceptive and dishonest. More, it amounts to wilful self-deception and delusion.

All who wish to “share the world” with others, decently and productively, including with people who have been formed within the faith and civilisation of Islam, have a right to expect that Muslims “of good faith” as fellow citizens will address this question, not dishonourably shirk or “finesse” it. Instead of trying to sweep aside the atrocities committed by Muslim terrorists and militants by not owning up to them, seriously concerned Muslims must instead recognise what it is about Islam that can motivate and condone, or be used to prompt devout adherents towards, such cruelty.

But there are grounds for hope. A young Malay columnist, Zurairi A.R., “The Many Faces of Islam”, writing last month in the Malay Mail Online saw this need and remarked,

“Ultimately, it remains to be seen if the Muslim community can subject itself to such self-scrutiny and self-reflection. Obtaining the answer is perhaps the only way Muslims can avoid more of their devotees following the path stained with blood.”

His is one voice. We need to hear many more.

Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales. He has been studying political Islam, in South-East Asia and globally, since the early 1960s.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2014/09/islamic-state-religion-peace/

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

September/October 2014

ESSAY

Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault

The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin

John J. Mearsheimer

JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER is R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago.

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy.

But this grand scheme went awry in Ukraine. The crisis there shows that realpolitik remains relevant -- and states that ignore it do so at their own peril. U.S. and European leaders blundered in attempting to turn Ukraine into a Western stronghold on Russia’s border. Now that the consequences have been laid bare, it would be an even greater mistake to continue this misbegotten policy.

THE WESTERN AFFRONT

As the Cold War came to a close, Soviet leaders preferred that U.S. forces remain in Europe and NATO stay intact, an arrangement they thought would keep a reunified Germany pacified. But they and their Russian successors did not want NATO to grow any larger and assumed that Western diplomats understood their concerns. The Clinton administration evidently thought otherwise, and in the mid-1990s, it began pushing for NATO to expand.

The first round of enlargement took place in 1999 and brought in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second occurred in 2004; it included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Moscow complained bitterly from the start. During NATO’s 1995 bombing campaign against the Bosnian Serbs, for example, Russian President Boris Yeltsin said, “This is the first sign of what could happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. ... The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.” But the Russians were too weak at the time to derail NATO’s eastward movement -- which, at any rate, did not look so threatening, since none of the new members shared a border with Russia, save for the tiny Baltic countries.

Then NATO began looking further east. At its April 2008 summit in Bucharest, the alliance considered admitting Georgia and Ukraine. The George W. Bush administration supported doing so, but France and Germany opposed the move for fear that it would unduly antagonize Russia. In the end, NATO’s members reached a compromise: the alliance did not begin the formal process leading to membership, but it issued a statement endorsing the aspirations of Georgia and Ukraine and boldly declaring, “These countries will become members of NATO.”

Moscow, however, did not see the outcome as much of a compromise. Alexander Grushko, then Russia’s deputy foreign minister, said, “Georgia’s and Ukraine’s membership in the alliance is a huge strategic mistake which would have most serious consequences for pan-European security.” Putin maintained that admitting those two countries to NATO would represent a “direct threat” to Russia. One Russian newspaper reported that Putin, while speaking with Bush, “very transparently hinted that if Ukraine was accepted into NATO, it would cease to exist.”

Russia’s invasion of Georgia in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, who was deeply committed to bringing his country into NATO, had decided in the summer of 2008 to reincorporate two separatist regions, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. But Putin sought to keep Georgia weak and divided -- and out of NATO. After fighting broke out between the Georgian government and South Ossetian separatists, Russian forces took control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Moscow had made its point. Yet despite this clear warning, NATO never publicly abandoned its goal of bringing Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And NATO expansion continued marching forward, with Albania and Croatia becoming members in 2009.

The EU, too, has been marching eastward. In May 2008, it unveiled its Eastern Partnership initiative, a program to foster prosperity in such countries as Ukraine and integrate them into the EU economy. Not surprisingly, Russian leaders view the plan as hostile to their country’s interests. This past February, before Yanukovych was forced from office, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused the EU of trying to create a “sphere of influence” in eastern Europe. In the eyes of Russian leaders, EU expansion is a stalking horse for NATO expansion.

The West’s final tool for peeling Kiev away from Moscow has been its efforts to spread Western values and promote democracy in Ukraine and other post-Soviet states, a plan that often entails funding pro-Western individuals and organizations. Victoria Nuland, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, estimated in December 2013 that the United States had invested more than $5 billion since 1991 to help Ukraine achieve “the future it deserves.” As part of that effort, the U.S. government has bankrolled the National Endowment for Democracy. The nonprofit foundation has funded more than 60 projects aimed at promoting civil society in Ukraine, and the NED’s president, Carl Gershman, has called that country “the biggest prize.” After Yanukovych won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, the NED decided he was undermining its goals, and so it stepped up its efforts to support the opposition and strengthen the country’s democratic institutions.

When Russian leaders look at Western social engineering in Ukraine, they worry that their country might be next. And such fears are hardly groundless. In September 2013, Gershman wrote in The Washington Post, “Ukraine’s choice to join Europe will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.” He added: “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”

CREATING A CRISIS

The West’s triple package of policies -- NATO enlargement, EU expansion, and democracy promotion -- added fuel to a fire waiting to ignite. The spark came in November 2013, when Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the EU and decided to accept a $15 billion Russian counteroffer instead. That decision gave rise to antigovernment demonstrations that escalated over the following three months and that by mid-February had led to the deaths of some one hundred protesters. Western emissaries hurriedly flew to Kiev to resolve the crisis. On February 21, the government and the opposition struck a deal that allowed Yanukovych to stay in power until new elections were held. But it immediately fell apart, and Yanukovych fled to Russia the next day. The new government in Kiev was pro-Western and anti-Russian to the core, and it contained four high-ranking members who could legitimately be labeled neofascists.

Although the full extent of U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington backed the coup. Nuland and Republican Senator John McCain participated in antigovernment demonstrations, and Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, proclaimed after Yanukovych’s toppling that it was “a day for the history books.” As a leaked telephone recording revealed, Nuland had advocated regime change and wanted the Ukrainian politician Arseniy Yatsenyuk to become prime minister in the new government, which he did. No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.

For Putin, the time to act against Ukraine and the West had arrived. Shortly after February 22, he ordered Russian forces to take Crimea from Ukraine, and soon after that, he incorporated it into Russia. The task proved relatively easy, thanks to the thousands of Russian troops already stationed at a naval base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol. Crimea also made for an easy target since ethnic Russians compose roughly 60 percent of its population. Most of them wanted out of Ukraine.

Next, Putin put massive pressure on the new government in Kiev to discourage it from siding with the West against Moscow, making it clear that he would wreck Ukraine as a functioning state before he would allow it to become a Western stronghold on Russia’s doorstep. Toward that end, he has provided advisers, arms, and diplomatic support to the Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, who are pushing the country toward civil war. He has massed a large army on the Ukrainian border, threatening to invade if the government cracks down on the rebels. And he has sharply raised the price of the natural gas Russia sells to Ukraine and demanded payment for past exports. Putin is playing hardball.

THE DIAGNOSIS

Putin’s actions should be easy to comprehend. A huge expanse of flat land that Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic importance to Russia. No Russian leader would tolerate a military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving into Ukraine. Nor would any Russian leader stand idly by while the West helped install a government there that was determined to integrate Ukraine into the West.

Washington may not like Moscow’s position, but it should understand the logic behind it. This is Geopolitics 101: great powers are always sensitive to potential threats near their home territory. After all, the United States does not tolerate distant great powers deploying military forces anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, much less on its borders. Imagine the outrage in Washington if China built an impressive military alliance and tried to include Canada and Mexico in it. Logic aside, Russian leaders have told their Western counterparts on many occasions that they consider NATO expansion into Georgia and Ukraine unacceptable, along with any effort to turn those countries against Russia -- a message that the 2008 Russian-Georgian war also made crystal clear.

Officials from the United States and its European allies contend that they tried hard to assuage Russian fears and that Moscow should understand that NATO has no designs on Russia. In addition to continually denying that its expansion was aimed at containing Russia, the alliance has never permanently deployed military forces in its new member states. In 2002, it even created a body called the NATO-Russia Council in an effort to foster cooperation. To further mollify Russia, the United States announced in 2009 that it would deploy its new missile defense system on warships in European waters, at least initially, rather than on Czech or Polish territory. But none of these measures worked; the Russians remained steadfastly opposed to NATO enlargement, especially into Georgia and Ukraine. And it is the Russians, not the West, who ultimately get to decide what counts as a threat to them.

To understand why the West, especially the United States, failed to understand that its Ukraine policy was laying the groundwork for a major clash with Russia, one must go back to the mid-1990s, when the Clinton administration began advocating NATO expansion. Pundits advanced a variety of arguments for and against enlargement, but there was no consensus on what to do. Most eastern European émigrés in the United States and their relatives, for example, strongly supported expansion, because they wanted NATO to protect such countries as Hungary and Poland. A few realists also favored the policy because they thought Russia still needed to be contained.

But most realists opposed expansion, in the belief that a declining great power with an aging population and a one-dimensional economy did not in fact need to be contained. And they feared that enlargement would only give Moscow an incentive to cause trouble in eastern Europe. The U.S. diplomat George Kennan articulated this perspective in a 1998 interview, shortly after the U.S. Senate approved the first round of NATO expansion. “I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies,” he said. “I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anyone else.”

Most liberals, on the other hand, favored enlargement, including many key members of the Clinton administration. They believed that the end of the Cold War had fundamentally transformed international politics and that a new, postnational order had replaced the realist logic that used to govern Europe. The United States was not only the “indispensable nation,” as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright put it; it was also a benign hegemon and thus unlikely to be viewed as a threat in Moscow. The aim, in essence, was to make the entire continent look like western Europe.

And so the United States and its allies sought to promote democracy in the countries of eastern Europe, increase economic interdependence among them, and embed them in international institutions. Having won the debate in the United States, liberals had little difficulty convincing their European allies to support NATO enlargement. After all, given the EU’s past achievements, Europeans were even more wedded than Americans to the idea that geopolitics no longer mattered and that an all-inclusive liberal order could maintain peace in Europe.

So thoroughly did liberals come to dominate the discourse about European security during the first decade of this century that even as the alliance adopted an open-door policy of growth, NATO expansion faced little realist opposition. The liberal worldview is now accepted dogma among U.S. officials. In March, for example, President Barack Obama delivered a speech about Ukraine in which he talked repeatedly about “the ideals” that motivate Western policy and how those ideals “have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power.”

Secretary of State John Kerry’s response to the Crimea crisis reflected this same perspective: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth-century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped-up pretext.”

In essence, the two sides have been operating with different playbooks: Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting according to realist dictates, whereas their Western counterparts have been adhering to liberal ideas about international politics. The result is that the United States and its allies unknowingly provoked a major crisis over Ukraine.

BLAME GAME

In that same 1998 interview, Kennan predicted that NATO expansion would provoke a crisis, after which the proponents of expansion would “say that we always told you that is how the Russians are.” As if on cue, most Western officials have portrayed Putin as the real culprit in the Ukraine predicament. In March, according to The New York Times, German Chancellor Angela Merkel implied that Putin was irrational, telling Obama that he was “in another world.” Although Putin no doubt has autocratic tendencies, no evidence supports the charge that he is mentally unbalanced. On the contrary: he is a first-class strategist who should be feared and respected by anyone challenging him on foreign policy.

Other analysts allege, more plausibly, that Putin regrets the demise of the Soviet Union and is determined to reverse it by expanding Russia’s borders. According to this interpretation, Putin, having taken Crimea, is now testing the waters to see if the time is right to conquer Ukraine, or at least its eastern part, and he will eventually behave aggressively toward other countries in Russia’s neighborhood. For some in this camp, Putin represents a modern-day Adolf Hitler, and striking any kind of deal with him would repeat the mistake of Munich. Thus, NATO must admit Georgia and Ukraine to contain Russia before it dominates its neighbors and threatens western Europe.

This argument falls apart on close inspection. If Putin were committed to creating a greater Russia, signs of his intentions would almost certainly have arisen before February 22. But there is virtually no evidence that he was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in Ukraine, before that date. Even Western leaders who supported NATO expansion were not doing so out of a fear that Russia was about to use military force. Putin’s actions in Crimea took them by complete surprise and appear to have been a spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his mind.

Besides, even if it wanted to, Russia lacks the capability to easily conquer and annex eastern Ukraine, much less the entire country. Roughly 15 million people -- one-third of Ukraine’s population -- live between the Dnieper River, which bisects the country, and the Russian border. An overwhelming majority of those people want to remain part of Ukraine and would surely resist a Russian occupation. Furthermore, Russia’s mediocre army, which shows few signs of turning into a modern Wehrmacht, would have little chance of pacifying all of Ukraine. Moscow is also poorly positioned to pay for a costly occupation; its weak economy would suffer even more in the face of the resulting sanctions.

But even if Russia did boast a powerful military machine and an impressive economy, it would still probably prove unable to successfully occupy Ukraine. One need only consider the Soviet and U.S. experiences in Afghanistan, the U.S. experiences in Vietnam and Iraq, and the Russian experience in Chechnya to be reminded that military occupations usually end badly. Putin surely understands that trying to subdue Ukraine would be like swallowing a porcupine. His response to events there has been defensive, not offensive.

A WAY OUT

Given that most Western leaders continue to deny that Putin’s behavior might be motivated by legitimate security concerns, it is unsurprising that they have tried to modify it by doubling down on their existing policies and have punished Russia to deter further aggression. Although Kerry has maintained that “all options are on the table,” neither the United States nor its NATO allies are prepared to use force to defend Ukraine. The West is relying instead on economic sanctions to coerce Russia into ending its support for the insurrection in eastern Ukraine. In July, the United States and the EU put in place their third round of limited sanctions, targeting mainly high-level individuals closely tied to the Russian government and some high-profile banks, energy companies, and defense firms. They also threatened to unleash another, tougher round of sanctions, aimed at whole sectors of the Russian economy.

Such measures will have little effect. Harsh sanctions are likely off the table anyway; western European countries, especially Germany, have resisted imposing them for fear that Russia might retaliate and cause serious economic damage within the EU. But even if the United States could convince its allies to enact tough measures, Putin would probably not alter his decision-making. History shows that countries will absorb enormous amounts of punishment in order to protect their core strategic interests. There is no reason to think Russia represents an exception to this rule.

Western leaders have also clung to the provocative policies that precipitated the crisis in the first place. In April, U.S. Vice President Joseph Biden met with Ukrainian legislators and told them, “This is a second opportunity to make good on the original promise made by the Orange Revolution.” John Brennan, the director of the CIA, did not help things when, that same month, he visited Kiev on a trip the White House said was aimed at improving security cooperation with the Ukrainian government.

The EU, meanwhile, has continued to push its Eastern Partnership. In March, José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission, summarized EU thinking on Ukraine, saying, “We have a debt, a duty of solidarity with that country, and we will work to have them as close as possible to us.” And sure enough, on June 27, the EU and Ukraine signed the economic agreement that Yanukovych had fatefully rejected seven months earlier. Also in June, at a meeting of NATO members’ foreign ministers, it was agreed that the alliance would remain open to new members, although the foreign ministers refrained from mentioning Ukraine by name. “No third country has a veto over NATO enlargement,” announced Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s secretary-general. The foreign ministers also agreed to support various measures to improve Ukraine’s military capabilities in such areas as command and control, logistics, and cyberdefense. Russian leaders have naturally recoiled at these actions; the West’s response to the crisis will only make a bad situation worse.

There is a solution to the crisis in Ukraine, however -- although it would require the West to think about the country in a fundamentally new way. The United States and its allies should abandon their plan to westernize Ukraine and instead aim to make it a neutral buffer between NATO and Russia, akin to Austria’s position during the Cold War. Western leaders should acknowledge that Ukraine matters so much to Putin that they cannot support an anti-Russian regime there. This would not mean that a future Ukrainian government would have to be pro-Russian or anti-NATO. On the contrary, the goal should be a sovereign Ukraine that falls in neither the Russian nor the Western camp.

To achieve this end, the United States and its allies should publicly rule out NATO’s expansion into both Georgia and Ukraine. The West should also help fashion an economic rescue plan for Ukraine funded jointly by the EU, the International Monetary Fund, Russia, and the United States -- a proposal that Moscow should welcome, given its interest in having a prosperous and stable Ukraine on its western flank. And the West should considerably limit its social-engineering efforts inside Ukraine. It is time to put an end to Western support for another Orange Revolution. Nevertheless, U.S. and European leaders should encourage Ukraine to respect minority rights, especially the language rights of its Russian speakers.

Some may argue that changing policy toward Ukraine at this late date would seriously damage U.S. credibility around the world. There would undoubtedly be certain costs, but the costs of continuing a misguided strategy would be much greater. Furthermore, other countries are likely to respect a state that learns from its mistakes and ultimately devises a policy that deals effectively with the problem at hand. That option is clearly open to the United States.

One also hears the claim that Ukraine has the right to determine whom it wants to ally with and the Russians have no right to prevent Kiev from joining the West. This is a dangerous way for Ukraine to think about its foreign policy choices. The sad truth is that might often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into brawls with weaker states. Did Cuba have the right to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union during the Cold War? The United States certainly did not think so, and the Russians think the same way about Ukraine joining the West. It is in Ukraine’s interest to understand these facts of life and tread carefully when dealing with its more powerful neighbor.

Even if one rejects this analysis, however, and believes that Ukraine has the right to petition to join the EU and NATO, the fact remains that the United States and its European allies have the right to reject these requests. There is no reason that the West has to accommodate Ukraine if it is bent on pursuing a wrong-headed foreign policy, especially if its defense is not a vital interest. Indulging the dreams of some Ukrainians is not worth the animosity and strife it will cause, especially for the Ukrainian people.

Of course, some analysts might concede that NATO handled relations with Ukraine poorly and yet still maintain that Russia constitutes an enemy that will only grow more formidable over time -- and that the West therefore has no choice but to continue its present policy. But this viewpoint is badly mistaken. Russia is a declining power, and it will only get weaker with time. Even if Russia were a rising power, moreover, it would still make no sense to incorporate Ukraine into NATO. The reason is simple: the United States and its European allies do not consider Ukraine to be a core strategic interest, as their unwillingness to use military force to come to its aid has proved. It would therefore be the height of folly to create a new NATO member that the other members have no intention of defending. NATO has expanded in the past because liberals assumed the alliance would never have to honor its new security guarantees, but Russia’s recent power play shows that granting Ukraine NATO membership could put Russia and the West on a collision course.

Sticking with the current policy would also complicate Western relations with Moscow on other issues. The United States needs Russia’s assistance to withdraw U.S. equipment from Afghanistan through Russian territory, reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and stabilize the situation in Syria. In fact, Moscow has helped Washington on all three of these issues in the past; in the summer of 2013, it was Putin who pulled Obama’s chestnuts out of the fire by forging the deal under which Syria agreed to relinquish its chemical weapons, thereby avoiding the U.S. military strike that Obama had threatened. The United States will also someday need Russia’s help containing a rising China. Current U.S. policy, however, is only driving Moscow and Beijing closer together.

The United States and its European allies now face a choice on Ukraine. They can continue their current policy, which will exacerbate hostilities with Russia and devastate Ukraine in the process -- a scenario in which everyone would come out a loser. Or they can switch gears and work to create a prosperous but neutral Ukraine, one that does not threaten Russia and allows the West to repair its relations with Moscow. With that approach, all sides would win.

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/print/138884

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