“The Shah Always Falls”

European imperialism is still hard to assess with a cold eye. We’re too close to it. When we look at the question in a few centuries, I suspect we’ll decide that the imperial powers did some good things, a lot of bad things, and many indifferent things. But in our time they’ve long since outlived their usefulness. They probably started to do so by the eighteenth century, certainly by the nineteenth and absolutely by the twentieth. The United States seems almost like an organic response to the problem of empire. If you look at our wars, even before we were a nation—for example, the series of conflicts leading up to the French and Indian War—we were fighting empires while being a part of one. We were under British suzerainty fighting against the French Empire.

The clash of civilizations is a great thesis, but it does not describe a new phenomenon. The history of the eastern Mediterranean in the twelfth century B.c. is the clash of civilizations, and so are the imperial wars of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century the French and Indian War is crucial, and the colonial militia is decisive. On the Plains of Abraham, we prove that modern empires can fall. We show that it’s possible. Well, we fight the greatest empire of that age, the British Empire, twice, once to kick it out, and once to confirm it’s got to stay out. Our next war is against the Mexican Empire. The first phase of our struggle against empires climaxes with the Civil War, when we destroy the imperial legacies of human bondage and a landed aristocracy. That first phase ends with Seward’s purchase of Alaska, and it roughly defines American territory as we know it, except for Hawaii.

In 1898 phase two kicks in, and America starts looking outward. Nowadays we underestimate the Spanish-American War because we assume that important wars are bloody. This one wasn’t bloody, but it was the first time a non-European power destroyed a European empire. The Spanish Empire was decrepit, archaic, and bankrupt, but it was an empire, and we reached out and broke it, and we began becoming a new form of empire in the process. The Japanese saw that the Europeans didn’t all gang up on the Americans for destroying a European empire, so a half-dozen years later they took on the other decrepit empire in the Far East, the empire of the czars, and destroyed part of it. In the First World War we were fighting alongside empires but also against them, and we destroyed the decrepit Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires and the upstart Second Reich. In the Second World War we destroyed the Italian empire, the Japanese empire, and the German Third Reich. By the end of the Cold War we’d destroyed the last great surviving European empire, the Soviet incarnation of the Russian Empire of the czars, and in some respects become an empire ourselves, although a new kind.

This process was layered and complex. In Indochina we were an anti-imperial power fighting imperial wars against anti-imperialists backed by imperial powers. Communism was an imperial force, the last great wave of European imperialism. But at the same time, the Vietnamese and Cambodians were fighting their own anti-imperial struggle against us. By the nineties we’d directly or indirectly been involved in the destruction of almost every European empire. Even the Dutch in Indonesia had to leave back in 1949 because America basically said, “You’ve got to go home.” The Belgians pretty much withered on their own. The Portuguese mostly withered on their own too, but sad to say, we apparently gave Indonesia a green light to kick them out of East Timor, which we came to regret less than a quarter of a century later. Finally, in the course of restructuring empires we’ve gotten a legacy of behaving like a new sort of imperial power. I want us to continue to be this new sort of enlightened imperial power. It’s the moral, right, and wise thing to do.

I don’t see China as an empire. It’s got some imperial possessions, but it’s not an empire in the European sense. I think the greatest threat to the Chinese is internal fissuring. There might be a period of warring states. There have been such periods throughout Chinese history. Whether we’ll see a division between the rich east coast and the poor interior, whether we will see a Chinese democracy or a renewal of dictatorship, perhaps of a grotesque and monstrous form, nobody knows. China is the great wild card for the twenty-first century. It’s important that we avoid the American arrogance of imagining we can have a decisive effect on a power like China. We’re not even going to have a decisive effect on Indonesia, but if we engage there, we can make a difference. With China, we’re playing on the margins. Patience is the one great virtue Americans lack. It’s true in our personal lives, it’s true in our consumer habits, and it’s certainly true in geostrategy.

I believe that perhaps our greatest advantage is a tradition that grew up over centuries, that we inherited from England. This is our tradition of openness to new information, of respect for empirical data, and of resistance to theoretical constructs other than those generated within the scientific community. Theoretical constructs did fantastic damage to Europe in the twentieth century, and much of the rest of the world lives in a fantasy land. They do not have our ingrained, hard-learned ability to separate fact from fiction. We have our myths, but we’re not paralyzed by them, and we question them. There are many ways you can divide the world, but I think one of the more useful ways is between factualizing societies and mythologizing societies. Listen to our enemies’ rhetoric. They’re in love with their myths of themselves, both old myths and relatively recent ones, and they’re myths of self-justification.

The other crucial American advantage is the fact that over the past 150 years American women have fought their way into the workplace and the educational system. This means that today America operates on a wartime basis every single day in terms of our utilization of human capital. Rosie the Riveter is in the boardroom, she’s on campus, she’s flying jets off carriers. The numbers aren’t hard to understand. This is grade-school math. Because of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, because of Susan B. Anthony—and the Pankhursts in England—the American economy is booming. Greenspan’s done a good job, but it was really the feminists who put us over the top.

Look at our tremendous openness to the utilization of human capital, the multiple revolutions that have occurred in our lifetimes and are still developing, the opening of our society to women, to minorities, to old people. Traditionally the role of old people in societies has been to consume resources, mind the kids, and die. Yes, they’re romanticized as imparting wisdom, but in fact they’re drooling in the soup. In America today they’re healthier and they’re active. My father-in-law is one of my heroes. A former marine, a Korean War vet, a workingman, he worked hard all his life, built a good life for himself and his family. His wife worked too. Now he’s formally retired, but he works with Habitat for Humanity, he drives a volunteer ambulance, and he still works part-time for his company when it needs him. He’s about 70 and still contributing. This is happening at a time when in Europe if you lose your job at age 50, you’re probably not going to get another one.

Having gone out and seen much of the world—more than 50 countries—I find it clear that some cultures are better structured than others for success in the postmodern world. I’m most pessimistic about the Arab heartlands of Islam. I think the Indonesians have a fighting chance. Persia may surprise us all and turn out to be the first modern market economy and democracy in that part of the world. The average Iranian desperately wants to re-embrace the West and America in particular. So I’m hopeful about Iran—Persian civilization is amazingly robust—and I’m hopeful about Turkey.

In countries where there’s a struggle going on for the soul and future of Islam, the jury’s still out. I’m actually increasingly optimistic. But I do believe the last couple of centuries demonstrate that cultures that oppress women, that don’t have freedom of information, that don’t value secular education, that have one dominant religion that infects the state and has power over the state, and whose basic unit of social organization is a clan, tribe, or extended family are just not going to compete with the West and especially with the United States. So I’m extremely pessimistic about the old Islamic heartland.

I personally feel that we’ve made a grotesque mistake aligning ourselves with the most oppressive of the Arabs, with the Arab world’s Beverly Hillbillies. Other Arabs built Damascus, Córdoba, Baghdad, Cairo. The Saudis never built anything. The fact that they came into their oil wealth was a disaster, not for us but for the Arab world, because it gave these malevolent hicks raw economic power over the populations of poor Islamic states, such as Egypt. The line about Al Qaeda that’s absolutely true is that Saudis supplied the money and Egyptians supplied the brains. So Saudi money, spent to support their gro tesquely repressive version of one of the world’s great religions, has been a disaster for the Arab world.

Freedom of information originates in two things, the movable type printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The latter benefits everybody, irrespective of his or her religion, because it breaks down the idea of there being just one path to the truth. The printing press makes the Reformation possible, because suddenly the one true church can no longer contain heretical movements. Information travels faster than it can be suppressed. And the Protestant Reformation is the seminal event in the rise of the West. It opens the door for the last great Western religion, the secular religion of science. Without that fissure, without that breakdown in the one path to the truth, you can’t have science.

In Islam the historical symmetry is chilling. Within 10 years of Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, a prince, astronomer, mathematician, and poet, Ulûgh Beg of Samarqand, built a great observatory. He was a genius, their Galileo, but the mullahs murdered him, and I take that moment as the point at which it all started calcifying. There are myriad factors in the Islamic decline, but the decline itself has been irreversible. Muslims never turn it around; they never have their reformation that breaks down the one true path. You’re either Sunni or Shiah, or perhaps a Sufi offshoot cult. And the reason Indonesia has a chance is that it’s never signed up for one path.

Any dictator or regime happy to take on the U.S. military in conventional war is an idiot, but there are always idiots. Wiser enemies will take an asymmetrical tack. The operation on September 11, detestable though it was, was brilliantly executed: complex, well imagined, and amazingly well conducted. They did seriously underestimate our strength and our response, so the lesson all around is never to underestimate your opponents. This lesson is broadly applicable. Radical regimes or nonstate entities can take imaginative, incisive, asymmetrical approaches, but we also have to worry about opposing major powers. It’s not even constructive to name names.

Jealousy is a powerful human emotion. Hatred is a tremendous emotional release. Blame is cathartic. At this time in history, the United States is humane, free, rich, and powerful. The Arab Islamic world is just the opposite. Our success is infuriating to people who value their own culture, who love their traditions even though they no longer work, and who look at our enormous success with inchoate envy.

Ten years ago, when I tried to talk about the role of religious belief and the power of religion, it was not considered a serious strategic factor. People talked about economics and demographics, about political structures and development theory. Since September 11, people are perfectly happy to talk about religion. In the future we’ll get around to recognizing the neuroses, if not psychoses, that are far too prevalent within the Arabian heartland of the Islamic world. I believe that a primeval terror of female sexuality is a significant strategic factor, one we’ve failed to examine. Males in these traditional cultures see the pictures of Pamela Anderson or replay Sharon Stone movies, and they want a piece of the action. But they don’t want their daughters and wives to turn into Pamela Anderson, or Britney Spears, or, for that matter, Emmylou Harris. They’re mesmerized by the sexual component in our culture, which our media grossly exaggerate and which they misread.

They don’t understand that most Americans lead surprisingly moral lives, that we work, we go to church, and we’re not constantly lascivious. We have a good time when we’re in college and when we’re young; then we mostly get it out of our systems. But that doesn’t work in a culture that sees female virginity as the ultimate good to be traded to your familial or clan advantage. We’ve outgrown that view, although it took us a long time. In the West the great revolution of the twentieth century was the birth control pill. The transition from women as property to women as full participants in society has been the greatest revolution in human history, and its reverberations will be felt for centuries. Repressive cultures are horrified by it because it calls into question their most fundamental biological, sociological, and religious ideas. However, the oppression of women anywhere is not only a human rights violation, it’s a suicide pact with the future.

I’m a great believer in America and the American dream, but in my case it took about five generations. I’m descended from coal miners on both sides. Before me, my people coughed up their lungs, went hungry during strikes, and lived in company houses with 12 to 15 people in two tiny bedrooms until tuberculosis reduced the body count. So it took America a long time. We worked long and hard, and we suffered and struggled and fought our internal battles and fell by the wayside and died in civil wars. The Gilded Age wasn’t very gilded for most Americans. People from developing countries see only the wealth, not the long struggle to create that wealth, and they make the comforting assumption that Americans are rich because they have stolen it.

I wish more people read old books, especially some of those that are now allegedly discredited. Weber’s Protestant ethic has been dismissed by revisionists. Maybe we should partially rehabilitate it, because work ethics matter, and not every culture has one. Another writer who’s due for a bit of rehabilitation is Sigmund Freud, because terror of female sexuality is a real and crippling phenomenon. And William James. Read The Varieties of Religious Experience, and you’ll get closer to Al Qaeda than you will with any of those instant books on Osama bin Laden. Another one is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. It’s the best single volume in any language on the roots of religious fanaticism. If you look at my strategic writings—for want of a better term—they’re clearly influenced by experience and direct observation but also by reading. Any observation without reading is almost as bad as reading without observation. When we think about the evidence that’s available for formulating American grand strategy in the years to come, the study of history is most of what we’ve got.