fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

The Student Of “Historical Flux”

“I think we are just at the beginning of great historical flux, and I think it’s even much more dramatic and much more profound than I thought in 2000,” Rice says, when I mention an article she published that year in Foreign Affairs, laying out her vision of a global democratic future guaranteed by the […]

“I think we are just at the beginning of great historical flux, and I think it’s even much more dramatic and much more profound than I thought in 2000,” Rice says, when I mention an article she published that year in Foreign Affairs, laying out her vision of a global democratic future guaranteed by the United States. Most articles about foreign policy are op-ed pieces masquerading as political philosophy, and Rice’s is no exception. But it does describe a coherent view of the world that places a great deal of emphasis on the determined exercise of military and diplomatic power and has little in common with the humble, neo-isolationist platform on which George W. Bush ran for president. The world as Rice understands it is both a welcoming and a dangerous place, in which America plays a special role. The sunny and scary parts of her worldview are woven tightly together.

“There has been a triumph of the broad institutional consensus about what it takes to be effective and prosperous or successful,” Rice says, pointing to the interest that all states share in obtaining access to markets and ensuring domestic stability. Unlike Donald Rumsfeld’s finger- wagging, Rat Pack–era version of realpolitik, or Dick Cheney’s paranoia about mushroom clouds and sleeper cells, Rice’s views are the kind of optimistic stuff that mothers might wish their children were being taught in school. Threats to the emerging global order of liberal states come from what Rice calls “transnational forces,” “violent extremists,” or sometimes “terrorists,” locutions that share in common a studied avoidance of the word “Islam.”

“When we liberated Mazar-i-Sharif in Afghanistan, we found Nigerians and Chinese and Malay and American people who essentially deny nationality in favor of a philosophy—a violent extremist philosophy to which they are committed,” she says. “It reminds me in some ways of the way that ‘Workers of the world, unite!’—Karl Marx,” she adds helpfully “—was a slogan that meant that an American worker had more in common with a German worker than an American worker would have with the American leadership.” When she is thinking hard about something, she furrows her wide brow and scrunches up her mouth in an unselfconscious way that suggests a schoolgirl determined to ace a test. ~David Samuels, The Atlantic

Is it supposed to reassure us that the transnational nature of Islam and the power of religion to unite various peoples were new ideas to the then-National Security Advisor in 2001 that she could only understand in terms of international communism? 

By the way, I think everyone reading The Atlantic knows what “workers of the world, unite!” meant, but it’s interesting to watch her tell us what it means.  The difference between that slogan and the transnationalism of Islam is that Marx’s theorising about the loyalties of workers around the world consistently failed to be demonstrated in the real world, because time and again nationalism proved to be more powerful than the draw of international socialism and even the “successful” communist revolutions were fueled by nationalist drives for anti-imperialist independence.  When push came to shove in WWI, French, British and German labourers dutifully lined up and slaughtered each other.  Communists were rarely, if ever, able to exploit class conflict in Western industrialised societies, where the communist message was supposedly going to take off like wildfire, and generally succeeded only in late-modernising societies or alongside national independence movements.   This is one reason why Prof. Lukacs regards nationalism as a far more potent and potentially destructive force.

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here