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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Prevention

There are serious fissures within the American establishment on foreign policy, but everyone – from liberals like Feinstein to neoconservatives to realists – shares the premise that America needs to manage the politics of the Muslim world, by force when necessary, to prevent the emergence of radical regimes. ~Ross Douthat Ross says he isn’t sure […]

There are serious fissures within the American establishment on foreign policy, but everyone – from liberals like Feinstein to neoconservatives to realists – shares the premise that America needs to manage the politics of the Muslim world, by force when necessary, to prevent the emergence of radical regimes. ~Ross Douthat

Ross says he isn’t sure that the premise is wrong.  Let’s assume, for the moment, that this premise is right.  (I don’t really think it is, but I’ll leave that for later.)  If America “needs to manage the politics of the Muslim world…to prevent the rise of radical regimes,” a troublemaker from the fringes of insignificance might ask why it is that the government pursues those policies that have always seemed least likely to “prevent the rise of radical regimes.”  Between the application of the blunt-force trauma of military intervention and the sudden shock of democratisation, is there any way that radicalised politics and radicalised regimes would not be the outcome?  That is, if preventing the emergence of radical regimes is the goal, how much must we redefine “radical” to exclude the emerging regimes already in the region in order to maintain some sense that the goal is still practicable?  Further, are the distinctions between Maliki and Sadr in the argument to which Ross refers credible?  How much of a Shi’ite sectarian and fundamentalist member of a terrorist group (as Maliki was and is) do you have to be before you get labeled “radical”?  If Maliki’s radicalism does not disqualify him, the actual goal of the government would seem to be having a compliant “ally” in Baghdad.  However, if Maliki is also ineffective, he is not of much use as an “ally,” which raises the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?”  Considering how complicit the Maliki government has been in the past in Sadrist activities, it seems bizarre to draw a distinction in which a barely tolerable Maliki allegedly holds the line against undesirable Sadrism.

The same troublemaker might note at this point that a large part of our efforts for decades to control Near Eastern politics to our supposed advantage has had significant radicalising effects in their own right.  It may be that the consensus view that prevention of the emergence of radical regimes and a continued, prominent and military presence in the region are entirely incompatible.  Perhaps we can have constantly contested hegemony or we can have a Near East that lies beyond our control, but which also may be less prone to boil over with radical political movements, but we may not be able to have both.  The establishment seems to think that we must have both.  It seems improbable that we can attempt to maintain the degree of control that the establishment wants while enjoying the lack of radicalism that they would prefer–one entails the other, and, in the end, the latter severely weakens the former.  While this fellow is making all this trouble, the troublemaker could then add that there might be some small connection between the current predicament and the preoccupations of the broad foreign policy consensus in the establishment.  At some point, the establishment should probably come around to a new consensus that managing the internal politics of other countries is, rather like running a command economy, a futile and self-defeating exercise in attempting to plan and organise human behaviour according to this or that model.

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