by Mark Steyn
What of U.S. diplomacy as an element of national power? At the dawn of the American era, after the Second World War, Washington chose not to be an active promoter of America’s values, America’s ideas, America’s voice, but instead opted to be what Michael Mandelbaum called an ordnungsmacht—an “order maker.” In the interests of economic order, the United States set up a network of international bodies—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. In the interests of geopolitical order, it created transnational institutions in which the non-imperial hegemon was so self-deprecating it artificially inflated everybody else’s ideas and values and voices. In recent years, for example, I can find only one example of a senior UN figure having the guts to call a member state a “totalitarian regime.” It was the former secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali in 2004, and he was talking about America.
The organization’s more artful critics agree that yes, the UN’s in a terrible state, what with the Oil-for-Fraud and the Congolese child-sex racket and the flop response to genocide in Darfur and the tsunami, but that’s all the more reason why America needs to be able to build consensus for much-needed reforms. The problem with that seductive line is that most of the proposed reforms are likely to make things worse. For most of its leading members, the organization is not a reflection of geopolitical reality but a substitute for it. The UN is no longer a latter-day Congress of Vienna, a permanent talking-shop for the world’s powers, but instead an alternative power in and of itself—a sort of ersatz superpower intended to counter the real one. Look at the eighty-five yes-or-no votes America made in the General Assembly in 2003:
The Arab League members voted against the U.S. position 88.7 percent of the time.
The ASEAN members voted against the U.S. position 84.5 percent of the time.
The Islamic Conference members voted against the U.S. position 84.1 percent of the time.
The African members voted against the U.S. position 83.8 percent of the time.
The Non-Aligned Movement members voted against the U.S. position 82.7 percent of the time.
And European Union members voted against the U.S. position 54.5 percent of the time.
Yay! Go, Europe, America’s steadfast 45 percent friends! You can take the view of the European elites that this is proof of America’s isolation and that the United States now needs to issue a “Declaration of Interdependence” with the world. Or you can be like the proud mom in Irving Berlin’s Great War marching song: “They Were All Out of Step but Jim.” But what the figures really demonstrate is that the logic of the post–Cold War UN is to be institutionally anti-American.
Washington could seize on the embarrassments of the Kofi Annan regime and lean hard on Turtle Bay to reform this and reorganize that and reinvent the other and, if they threw their full diplomatic muscle behind it, they might get those anti-U.S. votes down to—what, a tad over 80 percent? And along the way they’d find that they’d “reformed” a corrupt dysfunctional sclerotic anti-American club into a lean mean effectively functioning anti-American club. Which is, if they’re honest, what most reformers mean by “reform.”
Economic Power
The Sufi theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, regarded by many as the greatest Muslim after Mohammed, died a millennium ago but his words on the conduct of dhimmis—non-Muslims in Muslim society—seem pertinent today: “The dhimmi is obliged not to mention Allah or His Apostle…. Jews, Christians, and Majians must pay the jizya.”
The jizya is the poll tax paid by non-Muslims to their Muslim betters. One cause of the lack of economic innovation in the Islamic world is that they’ve always placed the main funding burden of society on infidels. This goes back to Mohammed’s day. If you take a bunch of warring Arab tribes and unite them as one umma under Allah, one drawback is that you close off a prime source of revenue—fighting each other and then stealing each other’s stuff. That’s why the Prophet, while hardly in a position to deny Islam to those who wished to sign up, was relatively relaxed about the presence of non-Muslim peoples within Muslim lands: they were a revenue stream. If one looks at their comparative dissemination patterns, Christianity spread by acquiring believers and then land; Islam spread by acquiring land and then believers. When Islam conquered infidel territory, it set in motion a massive transfer of wealth, enacting punitive taxation to transfer money from non-believers to Muslims—or from the productive part of the economy to the non-productive. It was, in its way, a prototype welfare society. When admirers talk up Islam and the great innovations and rich culture of its heyday, they forget that even at its height Muslims were never more than a minority in the Muslim world, and they were in large part living off the energy of others. That’s still a useful rule of thumb: if you take the least worst Muslim societies, the reason for their dynamism often lies with whichever group they share the turf with—the Chinese in Malaysia, for example.
But eventually almost all Muslim societies tend toward the economically moribund, if only because an ever-shrinking infidel base eventually wises up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills. In other parts of the world, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s in part what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all-Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe—in search of new infidels from which to extract the jizya. As engines of growth, the Muslim world and the European Union suffer a similar flaw: both encourage defections to the non-productive segment of the economy.
But the Muslim world has effortlessly extended the concept of jizya worldwide. If you’re on the receiving end, it’s possible to see the American, European, and Israeli subsidies of the Palestinian Authority as a form of jizya. Or even the billions of dollars Washington has lavished on Egypt, to such little effect (other than Mohammed Atta coming through the window). Not to mention every twenty bucks you put in the gas tank. The telegram has been replaced by the e-mail and the victrola has yielded to the CD player, but, aside from losing the rumble seat and adding a few cupholders, the automobile is essentially unchanged from a century ago. If you can’t sell the country on the need for new energy sources when your present ones are funding your enemies, when can you?
Yet, five years on from September 11 and after a torrent of information on Saudi funding of the jihad, America had changed its policy to Riyadh only to this degree: we’re lavishing even more dough on them than we did before.
The oil revenue collected by the House of Saud not only buys off their subjects but buys up other countries’ subjects around the world. Americans are paying for the rope that will hang them.
Information Power
The fifth element of national power—“information”—speaks for itself, incessantly: the New York Times, CNN, Hollywood, the universities, Michael Moore…—i.e., quagmire, Islamophobia, BUSH LIED!!!!!, “exit strategy.”
In World War Two, the sands of Iwo Jima were the main event, and rounding up enemy sympathizers in Michigan was the sideshow. One can argue that this time around the priorities are reversed—that bombing Baby Assad out of the presidential palace in Damascus is a more marginal battlefield than turning back the tide of Islamist support in Europe and elsewhere. America and a select few other countries have demonstrated they can just about summon the “war will” on the battlefield. On the cultural front, where this war in the end will be won, there’s little evidence of any kind of will. If you look at the United Kingdom and the impunity with which imams like Abu Hamza incite treason, it requires a perverse genius on the part of Tony Blair to have found the political courage to fight an unpopular war on a distant shore but not the political courage to wage it closer to home, where it would have commanded far more support. That’s the sad lesson of July 7: Her Majesty’s forces can police southern Iraq more effectively than southern England.
If this were World W
ar One, with their fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western Civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default. An army is only one weapon a civilization wields, and the weapon of last resort, too. But when you add up those elements of national power—military, judicial, diplomatic, economic, informational—it’s hard not to conclude that (as was said of the British after the fall of Singapore) at least four of those five guns are pointing in the wrong direction. The point of the media is to speak truth to (domestic) power, the point of transnationalism is to constrain American power, the point of law is to upgrade the defendant—and the upshot of economic power in a time of plenty is that every time you gas up you’re funding an enemy who’s flusher than he’s been since the fall of Constantinople. Meanwhile, we fight the symptoms—the terror plots—but not the cause: the ideology. The self-imposed constraints of this war—legalistic, multilateral, politically correct—are clearer every day. “Know your enemy,” they say. They know us very well. Do we know them at all?
THE FAINTHEARTED HYPERPOWER
In 2003, Tony Blair spoke to the United States Congress. “As Britain knows,” he said, “all predominant power seems for a time invincible but, in fact, it is transient. The question is: what do you leave behind?”
An excellent question. Today, three-sevenths of the G-7 major economies are nations of British descent. Of the twenty economies with the highest GDP per capita, no fewer than eleven are current or former realms of Her Britannic Majesty. And if you protest that most of those are pinprick colonial tax havens—Bermuda, the Caymans—okay, eliminate all territories with populations lower than twenty million and the top four is an Anglosphere sweep: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. The key regional players in almost every corner of the globe are British-derived—South Africa, India—and, even among the lesser players, as a general rule you’re better off for having been exposed to British rule than not: try doing business in Indonesia rather than Malaysia, or Haiti rather than St. Lucia.
And of course the pre-eminent power of the age derives its political character from eighteenth-century British subjects who took English ideas a little further than the mother country was willing to go. As for the allegedly inevitable superpower of the coming century, if China ever does achieve that status, it will be because the People’s Republic learned more from British Hong Kong than Hong Kong ever did from the Little Red Book. Sir John Cowperthwaite, the colony’s transformative financial secretary in the sixties, can stake a better claim as the father of modern China than Chairman Mao, and, if Beijing weren’t so twitchy about these things, his would be the face they’d plaster over all the banners in Tiananmen Square.
I point out the obvious because an Englishman never would. “While some nations suffer from folie de grandeur,” wrote President Bush’s former speechwriter David Frum a year or two back, “the British seem uniquely disposed to bad-mouth themselves.” In the late sixties, Sir Richard Turnbull, high commissioner of Aden, remarked bleakly to Defense Secretary Denis Healey that the British Empire would be remembered for only two things—“the popularization of Association Football [soccer] and the term ‘fuck off.’” Instead of their bizarre cultural self-flagellation, the British might usefully deploy the latter formulation toward those kinky Eurofetishists who think the future lies in liquidating English law, custom, and parliamentary democracy within the conglomeration of failed nation states that make up the European Union.
Britain was never an unrivaled colossus, even at its zenith. Yet today, in language, law, politics, business, and the wider culture, there is simply nothing comparable in scale or endurance to the Britannic inheritance.
We now live in the American moment. And, even if nobody’s planning on leaving, the “what do you leave behind?” question is worth asking. How does America want to use its moment? What does it wish to bequeath the world?
Even to present the question in those terms feels vaguely un-American. The United States has an unmatched dominance that the British never enjoyed and that is historically unprecedented. Yet it remains a paradox: the non-imperial superpower. For good or ill, the American people don’t have an imperialist bone in their body—as we saw, in fact, in post-liberation Iraq.
A week before the president’s inaugural address in January 2005, I picked up the Village Voice for the first time in years. Couldn’t resist the cover story: “The Eve of Destruction: George W. Bush’s Four-Year Plan to Wreck the World.”
If only. It’s so easy to raise expectations at the beginning of a new presidential term. In the wake of September 11, the administration pledged itself to a long-overdue reversal of decades of misguided foreign policy that the Second Inaugural made explicit: Bush committed America to spreading freedom through the Muslim world—or, as a skeptical friend of mine phrased it, we’re going to shove liberty down their throats whether they want it or not. It was presented as a kind of lo-carb, organic, environmentally friendly version of “the white man’s burden.”
But no country has ever seemed more burdened by it. It’s America’s world; she just doesn’t want to live in it.
Almost as soon as American troops entered Iraq, Senate Democrats demanded to know what the “exit strategy” was. “Exit strategy” is a phrase that might have been designed as a textbook definition of lack of will. In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter’s easier. Just say, whoa, we’re the world’s dominant power but we can’t handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don’t mind we’d just as soon get off at the next stop. Taking your ball and going home is a seductive argument in a paradoxical superpower whose inclinations on the Right have a strong isolationist streak and on the Left a strong transnational streak—which is isolationism with a sappy face and biennial black-tie banquets in EU capitals. Transnationalism means poseur solutions—the Kyotification of foreign policy.
For a serious power, the correct answer to “What’s the exit strategy?” is: there isn’t one, and there shouldn’t be one, and it’s a dumb expression. The more polite response came in the president’s second inaugural speech: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.”
If you want an example of “exit strategy” thinking, look no further than the southern “border.” A century ago, American policy in Mexico was all exit and no strategy. That week’s president-for-life gets out of hand? Go in, whack him, exit, and let the locals figure out who gets to be the new bad guy. If the new guy gets out of hand, go back, whack him, and exit again. The result of that stunted policy is that three-quarters of Mexico’s population is now living in California and Arizona—and, as fine upstanding members of the Undocumented American community, they’ve got no exit strategy at all. Judging from the placards brandished at the Million Mexican Marches held across the United States in 2006 (“Honkies, Why Don’t You Take Your Asses Back to Europe?”) many of them feel it’s the Documented Americans who ought to be planning on an exit.
By contrast, the British went in to India without an exit strategy, stayed for generations, and midwifed the world’s most populous democracy and a key U.S. ally in the years ahead. Which looks like the smarter approach now? Those American conservatives—the realpolitik crowd—who scorn “nation-building” ought to reflect on what the Indian subcontinent would look like if the British had been similarly skeptical: today, it might well be another Araby—a crazy quilt of authoritarian sultanates, Hindu and Muslim, punctuated by thug dictatorships following Baath-type local variations on Fascism and Marxism. It would be a profoundly unstable region with a swollen uneducated citizenry of little use for call centers or tech support. Any American who’s found himself at three in the morning talking to Suresh or Rajiv in customer service will
appreciate the benefits of an Indian education. He can thank Lord Macaulay and his famous 1835 government memo on the subject for that: London dispatched generations of English, Scots, and Irish schoolma’ams and masters to obscure outposts of empire because they thought that by introducing them to Shakespeare and the Magna Carta and Sir Isaac Newton they were effectively giving their colonial subjects a passport to the modern world.
Failed states destabilize their neighbors, and Americans don’t have to pore over maps of West Africa to figure that out. Insofar as four of the September 11 killers obtained the picture ID with which they boarded their flights that morning through the support network for “undocumented” workers, it’s not unreasonable to argue that, if you’re looking for really deep “root causes” for what happened that day, you could easily start with America’s failure to nation-build in Mexico. And the problem with “exit strategy” fetishization is that these days everywhere’s Mexico—literally, in the sense that the September 11 killers were part of the Undocumented American community, and more figuratively in the sense that if you’ve got a few hundred bucks and an ATM card you can come to America and blow it up. Everyone lives next door now.
The United States, almost in inverse proportion to its economic and military might, is culturally isolated. I know, I know—you’ve read a thousand articles about America’s “cultural imperialism.” And that’s fine if you mean you can fly around the world and eat at McDonald’s, dress at the Gap, listen to Hilary Duff, and go see Charlie’s Angels 3 or Dude, Where’s My Car? 7 pretty much anywhere on the planet. But so what? The Merry Widow was both a blockbuster sensation on Broadway and Hitler’s favorite operetta. If I sent my profile in to the average computer dating agency, they’d fix me up with Saddam Hussein: he and I have the same favorite singer (Frank Sinatra) and favorite candy (Britain’s Quality Street toffees). It’s not enough. You can easily like American pop culture without liking America: in London, the broadsheet newspapers that devote most space to U.S. cultural trends—the Guardian, the Independent—are the most vehemently anti-American. Then again, if you despise America’s trash pop culture, it’ll make you despise America even more. Thus Jean-Pierre Chevènement, former French foreign minister, and his celebrated assertion that the United States is dedicated to “the organized cretinization of our people”—a claim that’s a lot more persuasive if you’ve never had the misfortune to sit through a weekend of French TV. In 2002, there was a shoot-out in a French town hall by some left-wing eco-loon, and one of the country’s presidential candidates, Alain Madelin, deplored it as an “American-style by-product.” One Frenchman kills eight other Frenchman and somehow it’s proof of America’s malign cultural influence.