World Order

by Henry Kissinger

  Qutb, with vast learning and passionate intensity, had declared war on a state of affairs—brashly secular modernity and Muslim disunity, as ratified by the post–World War I territorial settlement in the Middle East—that many Muslims had privately lamented. While most of his contemporaries recoiled from the violent methods he advocated, a core of committed followers—like the vanguard he had envisioned—began to form.

  To a globalized, largely secular world judging itself to have transcended the ideological clashes of “History,” Qutb and his followers’ views long appeared so extreme as to merit no serious attention. In a failure of imagination, many Western elites find revolutionaries’ passions inexplicable and assume that their extreme statements must be metaphorical or advanced merely as bargaining chips. Yet for Islamic fundamentalists, these views represent truths overriding the rules and norms of the Westphalian—or indeed any other—international order. They have been the rallying cry of radicals and jihadists in the Middle East and beyond for decades—echoed by al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban, Iran’s clerical regime, Hizb ut-Tahrir (the Party of Liberation, active in the West and openly advocating the reestablishment of the caliphate in a world dominated by Islam), Nigeria’s Boko Haram, Syria’s extremist militia Jabhat al-Nusrah, and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which erupted in a major military assault in mid-2014. They were the militant doctrine of the Egyptian radicals who assassinated Anwar al-Sadat in 1981, proclaiming the “neglected duty” of jihad and branding their President an apostate for making peace with Israel. They accused him of two heresies: recognizing the legal existence of the Jewish state, and (in their view) thereby agreeing to cede land deemed historically Muslim to a non-Muslim people.

  This body of thought represents an almost total inversion of Westphalian world order. In the purist version of Islamism, the state cannot be the point of departure for an international system because states are secular, hence illegitimate; at best they may achieve a kind of provisional status en route to a religious entity on a larger scale. Noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs cannot serve as a governing principle, because national loyalties represent deviations from the true faith and because jihadists have a duty to transform dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers. Purity, not stability, is the guiding principle of this conception of world order.

  THE ARAB SPRING AND THE SYRIAN CATACLYSM

  For a fleeting moment, the Arab Spring that began in late 2010 raised hopes that the region’s contending forces of autocracy and jihad had been turned irrelevant by a new wave of reform. Upheavals in Tunisia and Egypt were greeted exuberantly by Western political leaders and media as a regional, youth-led revolution on behalf of liberal democratic principles. The United States officially endorsed the protesters’ demands, backing them as undeniable cries for “freedom,” “free and fair elections,” “representative government,” and “genuine democracy,” which should not be permitted to fail. Yet the road to democracy was to be tortuous and anguishing, as became obvious in the aftermath of the collapse of the autocratic regimes.

  Many in the West interpreted the Tahrir Square uprising in Egypt as a vindication of the argument that an alternative to autocracy should have been promoted much earlier. The real problem had been, however, that the United States found it difficult to discover elements from which pluralistic institutions could be composed or leaders committed to their practice. (This is why some drew the line as between civilian and military rule and supported the anything-but-democratic Muslim Brotherhood.)

  America’s democratic aspirations for the region, embraced by administrations of both parties, have led to eloquent expressions of the country’s idealism. But conceptions of security necessities and of democracy promotion have often clashed. Those committed to democratization have found it difficult to discover leaders who recognize the importance of democracy other than as a means to achieve their own dominance. At the same time, the advocates of strategic necessity have not been able to show how the established regimes will ever evolve in a democratic or even reformist manner. The democratization approach could not remedy the vacuum looming in pursuit of its objectives; the strategic approach was handicapped by the rigidity of available institutions.

  The Arab Spring started as a new generation’s uprising for liberal democracy. It was soon shouldered aside, disrupted, or crushed. Exhilaration turned into paralysis. The existing political forces, embedded in the military and in religion in the countryside, proved stronger and better organized than the middle-class element demonstrating for democratic principles in Tahrir Square. In practice, the Arab Spring has exhibited rather than overcome the internal contradictions of the Arab-Islamic world and of the policies designed to resolve them.

  The oft-repeated early slogan of the Arab Spring, “The people want the downfall of the regime,” left open the question of how the people are defined and what will take the place of the supplanted authorities. The original Arab Spring demonstrators’ calls for an open political and economic life have been overwhelmed by a violent contest between military-backed authoritarianism and Islamist ideology.

  In Egypt, the original exultant demonstrators professing values of cosmopolitanism and democracy in Tahrir Square have not turned out to be the revolution’s heirs. Electronic social media facilitate demonstrations capable of toppling regimes, but the ability to enable people to gather in a square differs from building new institutions of state. In the vacuum of authority following the demonstrations’ initial success, factions from the pre-uprising period are often in a position to shape the outcome. The temptation to foster unity by merging nationalism and fundamentalism overwhelmed the original slogans of the uprising.

  Mohammed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood backed by a coalition of even more radical fundamentalist groups, was elected in 2012 to a presidency that the Muslim Brotherhood had pledged in the heady days of the Tahrir Square demonstrations not to seek. In power, the Islamist government concentrated on institutionalizing its authority by looking the other way while its supporters mounted a campaign of intimidation and harassment of women, minorities, and dissidents. The military’s decision to oust this government and declare a new start to the political process was, in the end, welcomed even among the now marginalized, secular democratic element.

  This experience raises the issue of humanitarian foreign policy. It distinguishes itself from traditional foreign policy by criticizing national interest or balance-of-power concepts as lacking a moral dimension. It justifies itself not by overcoming a strategic threat but by removing conditions deemed a violation of universal principles of justice. The values and goals of this style of foreign policy reflect a vital aspect of the American tradition. If practiced as the central operating concept of American strategy, however, they raise their own dilemmas: Does America consider itself obliged to support every popular uprising against any nondemocratic government, including those heretofore considered important in sustaining the international system? Is every demonstration democratic by definition? Is Saudi Arabia an ally only until public demonstrations develop on its territory? Among America’s principal contributions to the Arab Spring was to condemn, oppose, or work to remove governments it judged autocratic, including the government of Egypt, heretofore a valued ally. For some traditionally friendly governments like Saudi Arabia, however, the central message came to be seen as the threat of American abandonment, not the benefits of liberal reform.

  Western tradition requires support for democratic institutions and free elections. No American president who ignores this ingrained aspect of the American moral enterprise can count on the sustained support of the American people. But applied on behalf of parties who identify democracy with a plebiscite on the implementation of religious domination that they then treat as irrevocable, the advocacy of elections may result in only one democratic exercise of them. As a military regime has again been established in Cairo, it reproduces one more time for the United States the as yet unsolved debate
between security interests and the importance of promoting humane and legitimate governance. And it appears also as a question of timing: To what extent should security interests be risked for the outcome of a theoretical evolution? Both elements are important. Neglecting a democratic future—assuming we know how to shape its direction—involves long-term risks. Neglecting the present by ignoring the security element risks immediate catastrophe. The difference between traditionalists and activists hinges on that distinction. The statesman has to balance it each time the issue arises. Events can occur whose consequences—such as genocide—are so horrendous that they tilt the scale toward intervention beyond considerations of strategy. But as a general rule, the most sustainable course will involve a blend of the realism and idealism too often held out in the American debate as incompatible opposites.

  The Syrian revolution at its beginning appeared like a replay of the Egyptian one at Tahrir Square. But while the Egyptian upheaval unified the underlying forces, in Syria age-old tensions broke out to reawaken the millennial conflict between Shia and Sunni. Given the demographic complexity of Syria, the civil war drew in additional ethnic or religious groups, none of which, based on historical experience, was prepared to entrust its fate to the decisions of the others. Outside powers entered the conflict; atrocities proliferated as survivors sheltered in ethnic and sectarian enclaves.

  In the American public debate, the uprising against Bashar al-Assad was dealt with by analogy to the removal of Mubarak and described as a struggle for democracy. Its culmination was expected to be the removal of Assad’s government and its replacement with a democratic, inclusive coalition government. President Obama articulated this position in August 2011, when he publicly called on Assad to “step aside” so that the Syrian people could vindicate their universal rights:

  The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is standing in their way. His calls for dialogue and reform have rung hollow while he is imprisoning, torturing, and slaughtering his own people. We have consistently said that President Assad must lead a democratic transition or get out of the way. He has not led. For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside.

  The statement was expected to mobilize domestic opposition to Assad and lead to international support for his removal.

  This is why the United States pressed for a “political solution” through the United Nations predicated on removing Assad from power and establishing a coalition government. Consternation resulted when other veto-wielding members of the Security Council declined to endorse either this step or military measures, and when the armed opposition that ultimately appeared inside Syria had few elements that could be described as democratic, much less moderate.

  By then the conflict had gone beyond the issue of Assad. For the main actors, the issues were substantially different from the focus of the American debate. The principal Syrian and regional players saw the war as not about democracy but about prevailing. They were interested in democracy only if it installed their own group; none favored a system that did not guarantee its own party’s control of the political system. A war conducted solely to enforce human rights norms and without concern for the geostrategic or georeligious outcome was inconceivable to the overwhelming majority of the contestants. The conflict, as they perceived it, was not between a dictator and the forces of democracy but between Syria’s contending sects and their regional backers. The war, in this view, would decide which of Syria’s major sects would succeed in dominating the others and controlling what remained of the Syrian state. Regional powers poured arms, money, and logistical support into Syria on behalf of their preferred sectarian candidates: Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states for the Sunni groups; Iran supporting Assad via Hezbollah. As the combat approached a stalemate, it turned to increasingly radical groups and tactics, fighting a war of encompassing brutality, oblivious on all sides to human rights.

  The contest, meanwhile, had begun to redraw the political configuration of Syria, perhaps of the region. The Syrian Kurds created an autonomous unit along the Turkish border that may in time merge with the Kurdish autonomous unit in Iraq. The Druze and Christian communities, fearing a repetition of the conduct of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt toward its minorities, have been reluctant to embrace regime change in Syria or have seceded into autonomous communities. The jihadist ISIL set out to build a caliphate in territory seized from Syria and western Iraq, where Damascus and Baghdad proved no longer able to impose their writ.

  The main parties thought themselves in a battle for survival or, in the view of some jihadist forces, a conflict presaging the apocalypse. When the United States declined to tip the balance, they judged that it either had an ulterior motive that it was skillfully concealing—perhaps an ultimate deal with Iran—or was not attuned to the imperatives of the Middle East balance of power. This disagreement culminated in 2013 when Saudi Arabia refused a rotating seat on the UN Security Council—explaining that because the traditional arbiters of order had failed to act, it would pursue its own methods.

  As America called on the world to honor aspirations to democracy and enforce the international legal ban on chemical weapons, other great powers such as Russia and China resisted by invoking the Westphalian principle of noninterference. They had viewed the uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Bahrain, and Syria principally through the lens of their own regional stability and the attitudes of their own restive Muslim populations. Aware that the most skilled and dedicated Sunni fighters were avowed jihadists in league with al-Qaeda (or, in the case of ISIL, disowned by it for tactics that even al-Qaeda considered too extreme), they were wary of an outright victory by Assad’s opponents. China suggested it had no particular stake in the outcome in Syria, except that it be determined by “the Syrian people” and not foreign forces. Russia, a formal ally of Syria, was interested in the continuance of the Assad government and to some extent in Syria’s survival as a unitary state. With an international consensus lacking and the Syrian opposition fractured, an uprising begun on behalf of democratic values degenerated into one of the major humanitarian disasters of the young twenty-first century and into an imploding regional order.

  A working regional or international security system might have averted, or at least contained, the catastrophe. But the perceptions of national interest proved to be too different, and the costs of stabilization too daunting. Massive outside intervention at an early stage might have squelched the contending forces but would have required a long-term, substantial military presence to be sustained. In the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, this was not feasible for the United States, at least not alone. An Iraqi political consensus might have halted the conflict at the Syrian border, but the sectarian impulses of the Baghdad government and its regional affiliates were in the way. Alternatively, the international community could have imposed an arms embargo on Syria and the jihadist militias. That was made impossible by the incompatible aims of the permanent members of the Security Council. If order cannot be achieved by consensus or imposed by force, it will be wrought, at disastrous and dehumanizing cost, from the experience of chaos.

  THE PALESTINIAN ISSUE AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER

  Amidst all these upheavals in the Middle East, a peace process has been going on—sometimes fitfully, occasionally intensely—to bring about an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, which for decades has resulted in an explosive standoff. Four conventional wars and numerous unconventional military engagements have taken place; every Islamist and jihadist group invokes the conflict as a call to arms. Israel’s existence and military prowess have been felt throughout the Arab world as a humiliation. The doctrinal commitment never to give up territory has, for some, turned coexistence with Israel from an acceptance of reality into a denial of faith.

  Few topics have inspired more passion than how to reconcile Israel’s quest for security and identity, the Palestinians’ aspirations toward self-governance, and the neighboring Arab govern
ments’ search for a policy compatible with their perception of their historic and religious imperatives. The parties involved have traveled an anguished road—from rejection and war to halting acceptance of coexistence, mostly on the basis of armistices—toward an uncertain future. Few international issues have occupied such intense concern in the United States or commanded so much of the attention of American presidents.

  A series of issues are involved, each having developed its own extensive literature. The parties have elaborated them in decades of fitful negotiations. These pages deal with only one aspect of them: the conflicting concepts of peaceful order expressed by the negotiators.

  Two generations of Arabs have been raised on the conviction that the State of Israel is an illegitimate usurper of Muslim patrimony. In 1947, the Arab countries rejected a UN plan for a partition of the British mandate in Palestine into separate Arab and Jewish states; they believed themselves in a position to triumph militarily and claim the entire territory. Failure of the attempt to extinguish the newly declared State of Israel did not lead to a political settlement and the opening of state-to-state relations, as happened in most other postcolonial conflicts in Asia and Africa. Instead, it ushered in a protracted period of political rejection and reluctant armistice agreement against the background of radical groups seeking to force Israel into submission through terrorist campaigns.

  Great leaders have attempted to transcend the conceptual aspect of the conflict by negotiating for peace based on Westphalian principles—that is, between peoples organized as sovereign states, each driven by a realistic assessment of its national interests and capabilities, not absolutes of religious imperatives. Anwar al-Sadat of Egypt dared to look beyond this confrontation and make peace with Israel on the basis of Egypt’s national interests in 1979; he paid for his statesmanship with his life, assassinated two years later by radicalized Islamists in the Egyptian military. The same fate befell Yitzhak Rabin, the first Israeli Prime Minister to sign an agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, assassinated by a radical Israeli student fourteen years after Sadat’s death.