by Pete Hegseth
The same dynamic exists in America today. Following fifteen years of difficult war with violent Islamists—and sloppy outcomes on the battlefield—the American people are increasingly skeptical of American engagement abroad. A malaise of so-called war-weariness hangs over the American consciousness like a wet blanket, exploited not just by the Coexist Left, but also by modern-day “anti-imperialists” on the right. Right-wing isolationists—led first by Congressman Ron Paul and more subtly by his son, Senator Rand Paul—have seized on the complexity, cost, and many mistakes of our fight against Islamists to reenergize a noisy minority of isolationists (or self-styled “non-interventionists”) inside the conservative spectrum. These isolationists argue that the principle of limited government should automatically translate into a smaller defense capability and a dangerously high threshold for intervention. They argue, like the Coexist Left, that America is largely to blame for many of the threats that face her. And they argue that America can retreat to her shores and restrain her involvement in the world. Oftentimes and unfortunately, their perspective descends into various black-helicopter conspiracy theories, like questioning the origins of the 9/11 attacks, lionizing traitors like Edward Snowden, and accusing defense contractors of instigating war.
More dangerously, they have few serious answers for developments like a surging Islamic State and a rising and increasingly assertive China. They argue against fighting the Islamic State, declaring it cannot be America’s problem, while ignoring the global reach and expansionist abilities of emboldened Islamists. In the case of China, modern isolationists cling to the belief that open markets alone will inevitably induce good outcomes, when history and evidence have shown that collectivist political ideologues have grown adept at leveraging open markets. The attraction of this isolationist “let someone else fight” philosophy is undeniable, but it runs headlong into an increasingly interconnected world where commerce, politics, and yes—military actions, kinetic or cyber—happen on a global scale. Understanding this new modern reality, isolationists have taken to renaming their position “restraint” rather than “isolationism.” It may be a clever phraseology and rebranding—just like liberals renaming themselves “progressives”—but the same old ineffectual ideas underwrite this new label.
Nonetheless, average American citizens and many conservatives remain understandably skeptical of foreign intervention abroad because of how recent wars have turned out. From Iraq to Afghanistan to Libya, it’s admittedly difficult to find the immediate upside from fifteen years of war. But, like support for Teddy Roosevelt’s aggressive policy of policing the Western Hemisphere, this is where both the Coexist Left and isolationist right misread the American public for the long haul. It’s not that average Americans are anti-action, antiwar, or anti-intervention; they are just against ineffectual and half-assed American action. Americans still believe we are a force for good, and that we should win decisively and quickly, even if most Americans have a limited sense of what this notion truly means. To the contrary, most American battlefield victories have been long, complicated, and difficult, and during these messy fights—like today’s fight against Islamism or yesterday’s against the Soviet Union—the public must be reminded of America’s indispensable role as the guarantor of free peoples and be continually rallied to that cause. Instead from both the Coexist Left and isolationist Right today, they are rallied in the opposite direction. “War-weary” Americans have been put in the mood for isolationism by many of their political leaders, from both the Left and the Right, and are pumped full of one of Barack Obama’s favorite lines: “it’s time for nation building at home.”
Unfortunately neither history nor her unknowable next chapter is in the same mood. No amount of American retreat, restraint, or “nation building at home” will prevent foreign threats from gathering on the horizon. In this sense, the overarching geopolitical context of 2016 feels a lot like Teddy Roosevelt’s 1910, with America unsure of her role in the world at the same time the world simmers with the potential for chaos and conflict—as the geopolitical tectonic plates shift. If you had told Teddy Roosevelt or any American in 1910 that in just eight years both the German and Ottoman empires would cease to exist, the Middle East would be carved up and remade, and both France and the United Kingdom would exhaust themselves in self-defense, they would hardly have believed it. Less than a decade after Roosevelt spoke at the Sorbonne, the entire global chessboard was reshuffled—and America emerged as the free world’s leader.
Separated by more than a century, the years 2016 and 1910 are of course worlds apart domestically, internationally, geopolitically, militarily, societally, and economically. But the hearts of men remain the same. My experience as a soldier, advocate, and student of history is that human nature has not changed, and will not change; dangerous ideologies still lurk today—overtly and covertly—inside the hearts of men, ambitions of civilizations, and halls of elite institutions. This is of course one of the oldest ideological dividing lines, with liberals seeing man as inherently good and perfectible and conservatives asserting that man is perpetually fallible and therefore not perfectible. Conservatives are unfortunately correct. We may live in a post-colonial and post-imperial age, but we don’t live in a post-ideological or post-authoritarian age. The threats the free world faces may not currently come in the form of standing armies or fascist dictators, but they still exist—not because of new tactics or forms of terror, but because of dangerous ideologies, ambitious civilizations, and powerful international impulses that are making a strong bid for supremacy in the twenty-first century and beyond.
From the opening chapter of this book, I’ve emphasized the idea that history is not over, that we must remember it and live in it—with clear eyes, conviction, and courage. Every generation grapples with history: its past impacts, current manifestations, and lessons for the future. History can also be tempting, either retrospectively oversimplifying contested outcomes or lulling current practitioners into self-deceptive certainty. We happen to live in one of those self-deceptive periods in history. Many American elites, leftists, libertarians, and complacent conservatives believe that with big threats like Nazism and communism in the dustbin of history, America at the height of its power, and international institutions growing in size and scope, the big questions have mostly been answered. They believe that with wars between major powers seemingly a thing of the past, religious affiliation waning in most corners of the world (except Islamists, of course), and the Internet connecting people in real time, the existential questions of war, peace, and freedom are largely twentieth-century relics—or even nineteenth-century relics, as Secretary of State John Kerry said of military actions by Russian president Vladimir Putin. To this influential cadre of American elites, the twenty-first century will be dominated by topics like climate change, global governance, reparations, and social justice. Except, what if history has other plans?
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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and the subsequent end (or, in retrospect, long pause) of the Cold War reshaped the world’s balance of power. Following a redemptive victory in the 1991 Gulf War, America found itself the undisputed global hegemon, leading a free world—with no discernible global threats—into a new century of limitless potential. The 1990s saw a substantial “peace dividend,” not just in America, but especially throughout Europe, where governments slashed their military capabilities to finance exploding welfare states and outsourced their existential defense to America. With the march of freedom seemingly in perpetual motion, Western elites started to look past the building blocks of the nation-state system; instead cutting defense spending and eroding state sovereignty in favor of an amorphous, but surely benevolent, international order. Entities like the European Union and United Nations seemed the wave of the future; individual countries, large armies, and competing ideologies a thing of the past. For a brief moment, the West took a pause to sing “Imagine” with John Lennon.
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p; That brief moment produced two competing—and compelling—views of the future, each with very different and renewed implications for the world in 2016. In 1989, political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote an essay—and later a book—asking if we’re witnessing “The End of History?” His theory was that “the triumph of the West . . . is evident . . . in the total exhaustion of viable systemic alternatives to Western liberalism . . . marking the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” At the same time, he bemoaned the rise of postmodernism (the idea that all truth is relative and all viewpoints equally valid), believing it threatened to undermine the intellectual underpinnings of the West. Fukuyama caveated his theory, recognizing that other potential ideologies (naming Islam in his original essay) could alter this trajectory—hence the question mark: The End of History?
In response, political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote a 1993 essay—and later a book as well—asking if the world would soon, or eventually, see “A Clash of Civilizations?” His theory was that “nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.” He agreed with Fukuyama that wars between Western nations were over but argued that civilizational conflict would happen at two levels: the micro-level for physical territory along contested borders and civilizations, as well as at the macro-level as “states from different civilizations compete for relative military and economic power, struggle for control of international institutions,” and promote their cultural values. As a result, he saw no such end to history and made a prediction that the next world war would be between civilizations, mostly likely between the West and Islam. Still almost a full decade from 9/11, Huntington also recognized the unknowable—hence the question mark: The Clash of Civilizations?
Two huge questions—End of History? or Clash of Civilizations?—each with multiple corollaries and many shades of gray. They are not new, but cannot be ignored today because when boiled down to their essence, only one can be correct—with huge implications for the future of the free world. At the turn of the twenty-first century, American elites and Western intelligentsia largely internalized Fukuyama’s “End of History” view, planning for a century of increased peace, prosperity, and international cooperation while slashing individual defense budgets. At the same time, they dismissed his warnings about the rise of postmodernism, simultaneously embracing a “coexist” mind-set toward the world. But then history happened. The 9/11 attack revealed a simmering civilizational chasm, and the world—most especially the United States—awoke and was compelled to respond. That response, alongside the simultaneous economic and military rise of China in the new century, proved Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” view increasingly viable. Even Fukuyama walked back his thesis, recognizing that the world’s power balance was ever shifting.
Not only has Western democracy not ushered in the end of history, but the free world is increasingly under siege. The notion that freedom, capitalism, and equality will inevitably prevail has run headlong into the reality that in just the past decade the condition of freedom and civil liberties globally has actually declined. According to a 2015 report from Freedom House, a watchdog organization dedicated to global freedom, “acceptance of democracy as the world’s dominant form of government, and of an international system built on democratic ideals, is under greater threat than at any point in the last 25 years.” Or, put another way, freedom is under greater threat today than at any point since the Cold War ended. From overt examples like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Islamic State’s rise, to more subtle dictatorial developments in places like China and Turkey, world events are sliding in the wrong direction. We got the worst of both worlds from Fukuyama’s thesis—Western leadership that views the march toward freedom as inevitable, but at the same time disputes many of the values that built the West. It’s an unholy mix of unilateral disarmament and postmodernism, the combination of which creates a Western vulnerability that leaves emerging civilizations licking their chops to challenge us.
Huntington, like Fukuyama, saw America and the West in a dominant position—but with a key difference in the outcome. With the West “at an extraordinary peak of power in relation to other civilizations” and able to assert our will militarily, economically, and through international institutions, Huntington posited that the non-Western world would fight back, whereas Fukuyama argued non-Western countries would largely and eventually fall in line. The former—an escalating tug-of-war with proud civilizations—has ensued, a prediction made increasingly true since 9/11, as the United States was forced to assert its military and diplomatic power in the Middle East while attempting to maintain an edge in the Pacific.
The result is a growing “the West versus the Rest” reality that, as Huntington predicted, is being actively stoked in places where Western values like individualism, equality, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, and the separation of church and state are not the cultural norm. Moreover, with many Western societies culturally undermining themselves from within, it has really become “America versus the Rest.” Non-Western civilizations, and the old and new ideologies they advance, pose a very real threat to the free world. The West did not produce these threats and may not even fully recognize them yet, but eventually, the United States—the only leader of the West—will be compelled to confront, or will simply collide with, civilizations with an inherent desire, and growing means, to challenge and supplant freedom.
Whether we like it or not, Fukuyama was wrong about history, and Huntington’s thesis has held true—manifest today in three civilizational threats to America, any of which has the possibility of strangling the free world either slowly or quickly if they are not addressed both strategically and forcefully. Huntington correctly predicted two of today’s threats in his work—the Islamic civilization and Chinese (or Confucian) civilization. From the Islamic State to Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons, the rise of Islamism—both Sunni and Shia versions—is a clear and present danger to America, Europe, and free people everywhere. At the same time, while the United States has been engaged in the Middle East, an increasingly nationalist China has taken full advantage—utilizing long-term economic growth to expand its military power and sphere of influence. In recent years the Chinese have become only bolder, more assertive, and more authoritarian in their advances and are looking for opportunities to test America’s mettle.
The third threat is a civilization that Huntington overlooked, largely because its manifestation had yet to fully cohere in the 1990s. It’s the emerging global civilization. While not a civilization by any conventional definition, it fits all the criteria of one. Forsaking clan, village, region, ethnic group, religion, or nationality, modern globalists—Teddy Roosevelt’s “citizens of the world”—share a cultural identity in that they have no national identity. Globalists share a common language (“internationalese”), history (anti-Western), religion (none), customs (“diversity”), and institutions (UN, nongovernmental organizations, etc.). As Huntington points out, civilizations can be large or small, and while the global civilization is not currently large in size, its influence—through elite media and institutions—is vast. Today, with America’s military disarmament and global disengagement on full display—and with a fellow global citizen in the White House—globalists are aggressively driving their postmodern, post-Western, and post-American worldview. Between violent Islamists, ambitious Chinese autocrats, and dystopian globalists, history is definitely not over for the American civilization.
THE SCOURGE OF ISLAMISM
The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, which effectively created the foundations of the modern nation-state, ended the Thirty Years’ War—a bloody war of religion, pitting Catholics against Protestants across Europe. From that moment forward, in fits and starts, the world’s civil
izations entered—in one form or another, voluntarily or violently—a modern international system that recognized the “state” as the fundamental ingredient. One civilization proudly resisted this development successfully for nearly three hundred years, hewing instead to religious tradition and teachings that see no separation between mosque and state (there is no “give unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” in the Quran). The Islamic civilization, in the form of the Ottoman Empire and its declared form of purist government (the “caliphate”), had a long tradition of self-rule and rejection of the Westphalian system. That is, until the Ottoman Empire sided with Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire in World War I, and following its defeat, it was carved up (purposely, if problematically) into nation-states by the European victors. The modern nation-states of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel were a result of this agreement, generally referred to as the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Islamism and Islamists—defined as those who believe in the complete supremacy and imposition of Islam both violently and nonviolently—view the official end of the Ottoman Empire in 1924 as a catastrophic loss of their divinely ordained form of governance, a unified Islamic caliphate. And they point the finger of blame squarely at Western civilization and Sykes-Picot. Modern Islamist movements, in all of their mostly Sunni manifestations—Saudi Arabian Wahhabi Salafism, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Afghan mujahideen, Palestinian Hamas, global Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and others—seek an end to both the Westphalian international state system and the West. (As does the Shia version, Iran.) The Islamic State, being the most recent and most powerful manifestation of this Islamist thread, has made this point clearly in its justifications and propaganda. They have declared a new caliphate, which is the reason why they attract so many Islamists from across the globe. The Islamic State’s declared leader and caliph, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, said in a rare 2014 speech that, in addition to the religious underpinnings for their self-declared caliphate, the Islamic State’s “blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.” Moreover, an Islamic State strategy document obtained by U.S. intelligence officials in 2015 outlines their goal of uniting all Islamist groups into a unified terror army, especially in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then triggering nuclear Armageddon by attacking India. The Islamic State not only wants to destroy the modern world; they are hell-bent on inducing their apocalyptic and prophetic “end of the world.”