World Order

by Henry Kissinger

chrysalis

dar al-Islam,

dar al-harb,

the believer might fulfill jihad “by his heart; his tongue; his hands; or by the sword.”

the Christian world had originated a distinction between “the things which are Caesar’s” and “the things that are God’s,” permitting an eventual evolution toward pluralistic, secular-based foreign policies within a state-based international system,

in the early centuries of Muslim history, “Islamic legal rulings stipulate that a treaty cannot be forever, since it must be immediately void should the Muslims become capable of fighting them.”

Because in this view the domestic principles of an Islamic state were divinely ordained, non-Muslim political entities were illegitimate; they could never be accepted by Muslim states as truly equal counterparts. A peaceful world order depended on the ability to forge and expand a unitary Islamic entity, not on an equilibrium of competing parts.

father-in-law

One of his many father-in-laws.

A minority believed that the matter should not have been put to a vote, which implied human fallibility, and that power should have passed automatically to the Prophet’s closest blood relation, his cousin Ali—an instrumental early convert to Islam and heroic warrior whom Muhammad was held to have personally selected.

Who were his sons and daughters? Why weren’t they considered?

Battles at Poitiers and Tours in France in 732 ended an unbroken string of advances by Arab and North African Muslim forces.

littoral

The Ottomans refused to accept the European states as either legitimate or equal. This was not simply a matter of Islamic doctrine; it reflected as well a judgment about the reality of power relations, for the Ottoman Empire was territorially larger than all of the Western European states combined and for many decades militarily stronger than any conceivable coalition of them.

formal Ottoman documents afforded European monarchs a protocol rank below the Sultan, the ruler of the Ottoman Empire; it was equivalent to his vizier, or chief minister. By the same token, the European ambassadors permitted by the Ottomans to reside in Constantinople were cast in the status of supplicants. Compacts negotiated with these envoys were drafted not as bilateral treaties but as unilateral and freely revocable grants of privilege by a magnanimous Sultan.

Suleiman, viewing Habsburg power as the principal obstacle to Ottoman ambitions in Eastern Europe, responded favorably, though he treated France’s King Francis I as an unmistakably junior partner. He did not agree to an alliance, which would have implied moral equality; instead, he bestowed his support as a unilateral act from on high:

Playing by the same rules, the Habsburgs leapfrogged the Ottomans to solicit an alliance with the Shia Safavid Dynasty in Persia. Geopolitical imperatives, for a time at least, overrode ideology.

tutelage.

Each of these entities contained multiple sectarian and ethnic groups, some of which had a history of conflict with each other. This allowed the mandating power to rule in part by manipulating tensions, in the process laying the foundation for later wars and civil wars.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the more or less feudal and monarchical governments in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya were overthrown by their military leaders, who proceeded to establish secular governance.

bellicosity.

A sense of common national destiny developed as a substitute for the Islamic vision.

The military, monarchical, and other autocratic governments in the Middle East treated dissent as sedition, leaving little space for the development of civil society or pluralistic cultures—a lacuna that would haunt the region into the twenty-first century.

the eventual common basis of policy for the military rulers was the state and a nationalism that was, for the most part, coterminous with established borders. Within this context, they sought to exploit the rivalry of the Cold War powers to enhance their own influence. From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the Soviet Union was their vehicle to pressure the United States.

in most cases economies remained traditionally patriarchal and focused on single industries run by technocrats. The overriding impetus was national interest, as the regimes conceived it, not political or religious ideology.

In 1973–74, this alignment shifted. Convinced that the Soviet Union could supply arms but not diplomatic progress toward recovering the Sinai Peninsula from Israeli occupation (Israel had taken the peninsula during 1967’s Six-Day War), Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat switched sides. Henceforth Egypt would operate as a de facto American ally; its security would be based on American, rather than Soviet, weapons. Syria and Algeria moved to a position more equidistant between the two sides in the Cold War. The regional role of the Soviet Union was severely reduced.

By the end of the 1970s, Middle East crises began to look more and more like the Balkan crises of the nineteenth century—an effort by secondary states to manipulate the rivalries of dominant powers on behalf of their own national objectives.

the abrupt end of the Cold War weakened their bargaining position and made them more politically dispensable. They had not learned how, in the absence of a foreign enemy or international crisis, to mobilize populations that increasingly regarded the state not as an end in itself but as having an obligation to improve their well-being.

Radical groups promised to replace the existing system in the Middle East with a religiously based Middle East order

In violent conflict with each other, they were united in their commitment to dismantle the existing regional order and rebuild it as a divinely inspired system.

Hassan al-Banna,

phantasm.”

al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived.

order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world.

Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance.

The democratization approach could not remedy the vacuum looming in pursuit of its objectives; the strategic approach was handicapped by the rigidity of available institutions.

In power, the Islamist government concentrated on institutionalizing its authority by looking the other way while its supporters mounted a campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents. The military’s decision to oust this government and declare a new start to the political process was, in the end, welcomed even among the now marginalized, secular democratic element.

For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however, the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the benefits of liberal reform.

Western tradition requires support for democratic institutions and free elections. No American president who ignores this ingrained aspect of the American moral enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people.

If order cannot be achieved by consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanizing cost, from the experience of chaos.

extirpation.

Will diplomatic recognition of Israel bring an end to the media, governmental, and educational campaign in Arab countries that presents Israel as an illegitimate, imperialist, almost criminal interloper in the region? What Arab government, wracked by pressures ignited in the Arab Spring, will be willing and able to publicly endorse and guarantee a peace that accepts Israel’s existence by a precise set of operational commitments? That, rather than the label given to the State of Israel, will determine the prospects of peace.

The consequences of the religious and political conflict described in this chapter present themselves as seemingly distinct issues. In fact, they represent an underlying quest for a new definition of political and international legitimacy.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a traditional Arab-Islamic realm: both a tribal monarchy and an Islamic theocracy. Two leading families, united in mutual support since the eighteenth century, form the core of its governance. The political hierarchy is headed by a monarch of the Al Saud family, who serves as the head of a complex network of tribal relationships based on ancient ties of mutual loyalty and obligation and controls the kingdom’s internal and foreign affairs. The religious hierarchy is headed by the Grand Mufti and the Council of Senior Scholars, drawn largely from the Aal al-Shaykh family. The King endeavors to bridge the gap between these two branches of power by fulfilling the role of “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques” (Mecca and Medina),

the great strategic error of the Saudi dynasty was to suppose, from roughly the 1960s until 2003, that it could support and even manipulate radical Islamism abroad without threatening its own position at home. The outbreak of a serious, sustained al-Qaeda insurgency in the kingdom in 2003 revealed the fatal flaw in this strategy,

It has attempted to co-opt radically resurgent Islamist universalism by a tenuous amalgam of modern statehood and Westphalian international relations grafted onto the practice of Wahhabism,

American military actions to oust the odious dictatorships in Iraq and Libya, accompanied by U.S. political pressures to bring about “the transformation of the Greater Middle East”; and the resurgence of Sunni-Shia rivalry, most devastatingly during the Iraq War and the Syrian conflict. In each of these, the parallel interests of Saudi Arabia and the United States have proved difficult to distill.

To Saudi Arabia, the conflict with Iran is existential. It involves the survival of the monarchy, the legitimacy of the state, and indeed the future of Islam. To the extent that Iran continues to emerge as a potentially dominant power, Saudi Arabia at a minimum will seek to enhance its own power position to maintain the balance. Given the elemental issues involved, verbal reassurances will not suffice.

To the extent that Saudi Arabia judges America to be withdrawing from the region, it may well seek a regional order involving another outside power, perhaps China, India, or even Russia.

The conflict in Syria and Iraq and the surrounding areas has thus become the symbol of an ominous new trend: the disintegration of statehood into tribal and sectarian units, some of them cutting across existing borders, in violent conflict with each other or manipulated by competing outside factions, observing no common rules other than the law of superior force—what

The existing central government may prove unwilling or unable to reestablish authority over border regions or non-state entities

Some states as presently constituted may not be governable in full except through methods of governance or social cohesion that Americans reject as illegitimate.