How the world comes undone

Revolution continues to sweep the Arab world but the outcome becomes more and more uncertain. The lead article in today's New York Times deals with Tunisia, Libya, Syria and Egypt, and the emerging obstacles to national unity in each of those countries. Tunisia is threatened by a split between the coastal elite and the more religious interior, which, some speculate, may lead to a military coup. In Egypt the 10% Coptic Christian minority suspects the majority, and vica verca. Libya remains riven by regional divisions, while in Syria, Assad clings to power as the leader of the Alawite Shi'ite minority (while proving that militarized authoritarian states--see the graph, below--can indeed suppress rebellions if they have the will to do so.) A successful revolution needs a measure of national unity, and many in these nations wonder where it will come from. The same problem, of course, is at the heart of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan in which the United States has so unwisely inserted itself.

A great deal of confusion prevails over these issues for many reasons, not least of them the idea behind Francis Fukuyama's The End of History that the world is naturally evolving towards capitalist democracy and that the evolutionary process is at late stage. It was always, really, a Utopian idea, every bit as much as National Socialism or Communism, but with the key difference that natural processes were supposed lead us to the promised land. Yet this has never been the case. Fukuyama assumed away the other key term in developmental equation, legitimate political authority. Because he simply assumed it he did not have to ask where it came from. Had he looked, he would have found a much more complex and much less reassuring story.

Reading the Times story today I was reminded of the French and Russian Revolutions. Both of them were based on ideas of universal equality; both swept away an old order weakened by time, by corruption, and by war. But both led immediately to division, civil war, and the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of people. It took a decade for Napoleon to re-establish stable political authority in France and at least six far more bloody years for Lenin to do the same in the Soviet Union. Those countries, too, lacked any shared sense of national unity, and one had to be imposed, both by governmental success and by violence. And that is often, though not always, the case in the crises that seem to hit modern societies every eighty years.

During the twentieth century the western world (including the Soviet Union) offered the rest of the world a number of models of political authority. In Turkey Kemal Ataturk created a new secular state modeled quite closely, it seems to me, on Napoleonic France. Japan adopted much of the western model even earlier, in the late nineteenth century, and easily resumed it after 1945. Independent India established a parliamentary democracy that has endured, with only one brief interruption, to this day. Meanwhile Communism provided an extraordinarily effective tool for the mobilization and seizure of political power in China, in Cuba, and in Vietnam. It has not however been able to survive more than one saeculum anywhere, and I would suggest that with the possible exceptions of Hezbollah and Hamas there are today no revolutionary movements nearly as well organized as Lenin's, or Mao's, or Ho's.

Does the West today offer a useful model for the third world, including the Muslim world? Unfortunately I must answer that question with a resounding "no."

The European Union, in my opinion, represents today the most highly developed civilization in human history. States that warred for centuries have surrendered large parts of their national sovereignty and created a single economy. Most of them use a single currency. Their governments have established some form of national health care and put a very high priority on infrastructure. Increasingly they are focusing on energy conservation. They too may face problems in the near future relating to national unity, thanks to their large Muslim populations. In addition, nationalism in Eastern Europe--one of the most destructive forces of the twentieth century--is re-emerging in several countries, including one of the most advanced, Hungary. But the Europeans surrendered so much national autonomy because they had lived through the worst of what nationalism can do. Their example cannot be immediately replicated anywhere else.

As for the United States, we have been engaged for about thirty years in a two-pronged assault on the very idea of political authority which has now paralyzed our government in the face of an economic crisis. The Republican Party since Reagan has embraced the idea that government is "the problem," and the strategy of "starving the beast" has now worked, leaving Washington with nothing to do but arguing about what to cut, since tax increases have been ruled out. Even Newt Gingrich, one of the stalwarts of the revolution, realized briefly two weeks ago that it had gone too far, although he was quickly brought back into line. But at the same time, the Left, such as it is, has also rejected political authority, based on the idea, now 45 years old, that those who exercise power are almost inevitably wicked, especially if they happen to be white males. Today's Times also includes a review of a collection of essays, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, which seems to be a compendium of newer-style history of the revolutionary period, written by another practitioner, Mary Beth Norton. None of the 22 essays in the book deal with a signer of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, a fact of which I am sure its editors are blushing with pride. They include Abigail Adams and Tom Paine, a number of American Indian leaders (many of which actually opposed the revolution), the rebels in Shays' and the Whiskey rebellions, and a number of very obscure folks who evidently held economic or social views that have become much more fashionable today. One such is Herman Husband, who dreamed of a new Jerusalem west of the Appalachians and whom his chronicler thinks "deserves to be remembered in the first rank of the heroes of American democracy." (Reviewer Mary Beth Norton dissents because Husband paid no attention to the rights of Indians, slaves, or women.) That actually is a good example of what a hero is to a Boomer or Boomer-trained academic: some one who held the right views, just as they have, by their own lights, for the last 40 years or so. Earlier generations thought that heroes, of whatever race or sex, did things like writing Constitutions, raising armies, fighting battles, making revolutions, and running governments. But Boomers in their youth became accustomed to thinking of those tasks as some one else's job, one unworthy of serious interest--and that goes for both the left and the right. In another interesting example of this trend, the Times also reports this morning that an education reform movement is sweeping the country--but it isn't the work of federal or state governments, but rather of Bill Gates, one of the more benevolent billionaires our new tax structure has created.

And thus Boomers are now proving themselves utterly incapable of dealing with the most fundamental task of government, passing a budget. Gen Xer Barack Obama, meanwhile, seems to feel very little urgency about the problem either--he is confident that he can make his peace with whatever outcome emerges, blessing it with a few typically eloquent words. Only in 1861, 1933 and 1940, I would argue, has the United States been so much in need of effective leadership as it is today--and I can assure you as a historian that we do not have leadership of comparable quality available.

The U.S. and the Middle East

For the last 40 years I have been a thorough skeptic about the wisdom of American intervention in the politics of other nations, especially in the Third World. I was one of those identified by my friend Andrew Bacevich in his last book, such as retired Marine Corps Commandant and Senator J. William Fulbright, who re-evaluated the assumptions of US foreign policy as a result of the Vietnam War, and it took some time to realize how exceptional we were. (There were a few others, such as George F. Kennan, who didn't have to re-evaluate because they had been skeptical already.) With the optimism of youth, I assumed that many other Americans, particularly in my own generation, had reached the same conclusion. I was wrong. While one can, with some difficulty, distinguish between liberal and conservative interventionists within our foreign policy and political elites, non-interventionists are nearly extinct. I am increasingly concerned by this because I don't see how anything but non-intervention can have disastrous results around the Muslim World today.

So far during the last decade we have removed and attempted to replace governments in two large Moslem nations, Afghanistan, where we have really had very little political success, and Iraq, where a government is barely functioning and significant tensions persist. More recently we have encouraged the fall of governments in Tunisia and Egypt, while saying nothing about revolts in Jordan, Syria, Yemen and Bahrain--where our ally Saudi Arabia has moved in troops to quiet things down. Last but hardly least, we have bombed Libyan government forces for two weeks to halt their advance against the rebels. I gave the Administration the benefit of the doubt about that decision last week because it seemed to be working fairly well, at least in the short run. This week things look murkier. The rebels have lost ground despite the bombing, but on the other hand, prominent officials are defecting from Qaddafi's regime. It has become clear that while the decision to bomb Libya probably originated in the White House with help from Samantha Power and was endorsed by the State Department, it got essentially no support at the Department of Defense, where Secretary Gates has made his dislike for the campaign and his eagerness to get the United States out of it as soon as possible well known.

Let me try, sitting here on the fly, to list factors militating in favor of, or against, intervention.

1. The government of the United States in principle dislikes authoritarianism and supports democracy.

2. American Presidents like to bring home the scalps of well-known anti-American dictators.

3. The government of the United States is supporting various authoritarian governments who are actively engaged against Islamic militants.

4. The government of the United States desperately wants to improve its standing among Arab public opinion.

5. Parts of the government of the United States believe in intervention to stop war crimes and massacres.

6. One part--the Department of Defense--has no more resources for major involvements anywhere, and the government in general obviously doesn't want to commit itself to a losing side in a civil war.

And thus, so far, we are supporting, in effect, the governments of Yemen, Bahrain (now occupied by Saudis, and Jordan, because they stand, respectively, in the way of Al Queda operations in Yemen, another Iran-sponsored Shi'ite victory in Bahrain, and Palestinian control of Jordan. On the other hand, we took the initiative to encourage or demand changes of government in Tunisia and Egypt because their leaders seemed in any case to be doomed and their people were obviously united against them. It is not in the least clear, however, that those decisions are going to pay off for us. Today's New York Times includes a very disturbing story about agitation by militants for a conservative Islamic state in Egypt--including one of Anwar Sadat's assassins, whom the government just released from prison after 30 years. The Army meanwhile is showing no eagerness to surrender power there. We will have more difficult choices to make.

Now it seems to me that in Libya, the Administration, in the first instance, allowed itself to be carried away by what had happened on either side of that unhappy land. Muammar Qaddafi had grown much closer to the West in the last decade, paying reparations for the Lockerbie airplane bombing, striking new oil deals with the British, renouncing his nuclear program under Bush II, and sending his son to meet the current Secretary of State. But when rebel outbreaks occurred in much (not all) of the country, it seemed his time had come. When he seemed ready and willing to fight back, the humanitarian impulse took over. Now suddenly we are involved in what may become a very long and indecisive civil war. That decision was evidently reached without any real consultation at the highest levels of the government, and certainly without any agreement on the basic questions of exactly what we were trying to do, how we hoped to get it, and what our next move would be if we could not. There is now talk of a cease-fire, which would probably be one of the more desirable possible outcomes now.

Meanwhile, I cannot escape the feeling that the White House enjoys these foreign crises because the President has become relatively helpless at home. Yes, the drop in unemployment was welcome news, even though it remains catastrophically high, but the Republican House will surely block any new Democratic initiatives, and the President is going to have to give in to at least $30 billion of discretionary spending cuts, on paper at least. The President remains so under-exposed in the media that I am beginning to wonder if White House pollsters have concluded that exposure is bad for his poll numbers. Our involvement in the turmoil in the Middle East gives an illusion of activity. Our goals, however, are so contradictory that it's extremely unlikely that anything good will come of it.

It looks increasingly impossible that the old order in the Middle East can be propped up much longer. It is gone in Tunisia and Egypt and it is apparently shaky in Syria, Jordan, Yemen (where there has never been much order to speak of anyway), and perhaps in other Gulf states too. It also seems clear that militant Islamists make up one of the more committed political forces in many of those countries and will probably strengthen themselves as a result of any further revolutions, as they already have in Egypt.

What might the President say?

"Two hundred and forty years ago, the United States introduced modern democracy to the world. The ideals of 1776 rapidly spread across the Atlantic and touched off new revolutions, but their progress remained slow and uneven for well over a century. Even in Europe and parts of the Americas, democracy has often been in retreat during the last two centuries. We all rejoiced in 1990-1 when Communism collapsed and new democracies emerged in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, but we must recognize that some have been far more durable and successful than others.

"Now the Muslim world is struggling to realize new aspirations for popular rule. Democracy is hardly unknown there--Turkey has lived under democracy for most of the last century, and many other nations have some democratic institutions. Yet the spread of democracy there, as in Europe, South America, Asia, and indeed virtually the whole world, is likely to be an uneven and incomplete process for a very long time. We wish the peoples of the Muslim world well in their quest for better institutions. We shall not presume to tell them what forms of government they should adopt, or how quickly. Meanwhile, we hope that all governments, however chosen, will respect their peoples' fundamental rights and behave as responsible members of the international community. We also hope that today's revolutionaries will pay due attention to the great non-violent revolutions of the twentieth century, those of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., that they may lead their countrymen into new territory without great bloodshed.

"The western world no longer dreams of imposing its institutions around the globe--and many areas of the world are uneasy about the western model. Our task here at home is to rebuild our own economy and society, not only for our own sake, but once again to provide a hopeful example to others, as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy managed to do in the middle of the last century. We shall continue to try to lead by example as we watch other peoples in other lands grapple with the questions that have been the source both of conflict and achievement over the last three centuries."

I no longer expect to hear words like that from any President.

P.S. (updated Sunday.) I regret to note that I did not mention one sentence from the President's address on Libya that had jumped out at me at the time:

"Yes, this change will make the world more complicated for a time. Progress will be uneven, and change will come differently to different countries. There are places, like Egypt, where this change will inspire us and raise our hopes. And then there will be places, like Iran, where change is fiercely suppressed. The dark forces of civil conflict and sectarian war will have to be averted, and difficult political and economic concerns will have to be addressed.

That reminded me of Freud's advice on dream interpretation: it's the thing you don't understand, that doesn't seem to belong in the dream, that is significant. Why did the President bring Iran into this discussion? Today's New York Times, in the Week in Review, supplies the answer: the decision to bomb Libya was designed partly to put the fear of American action into the Iranians. We shall be tempted to intervene if there is another outbreak of violence there.