On Presidents, Popes, and the Parlous State of International Affairs These Days
Donald Trump stated his case for finishing the fight against the Islamic Republic of Iran: it is the case for Americans and all others who share our preference for free societies. While the excesses, boasts, threats, and barstool style irritate listeners who expect a manner more solemn and steady from the American president, he made it with brevity and clarity: Iran’s aggressive, tyrannous regime must reform or be removed. Since the former is unlikely, the president was in effect saying the U.S. and its allies, such as they are, must succeed in effecting the latter.
The Islamic Republic, ruling Iran since 1979, is a horrible and monstrous regime that cannot be trusted and certainly must never have a nuclear arsenal. It was “right at the doorstep” of having such a capability. His argument rested on half a century of evidence of the Iranians’ intentions, and his confidence in our military’s ability to thwart them.
Do you want to try to live with monsters armed with monstrous weapons?
Ensuring security is the fundamental role of any government. In this case, it is not difficult to see that the president of the U.S. chose prudence and decided to disarm a fanatical adversary, rather than seek an arms control treaty or offer a bribe. Past presidents tried that without effect.
The question is: do you want to try to live with monsters armed with monstrous weapons?
America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy, Mr. Trump might have said — had he John Quincy Adams’ gift for classical oratory. He has his own way of stating his position.
This sometimes leads to a sense of blustering incoherence, so time must be given to observe what the president does. Misunderstanding can also befall coherent and rhetorically faultless speakers like John Quincy Adams. Isolationists who quote Adams without reading him miss the theme of the speech that remains today as profound and practical a statement of American foreign policy as it was on July 4, 1821, when the great diplomat and future president explained that while we could not bring freedom to other nations, we could give them the gift of showing that it could be attained.
Adams believed and explained that we could not avoid involvement with the world. When attacked or challenged in our essential interests, such as the freedom of the seas, we should strike back, with diplomacy when possible, with arms when necessary. However, we should understand that our best foreign policy lies in adhering to our founding principles. They serve as a magnet and a model to other nations.
Democracy dies in mutism, but it can also suffer from cacophony.
Mr. Trump did not delve into the means and purposes of foreign policy because his purpose was to assure the American people that he knows what he is doing with regard to the immediate crisis with Iran, and his war policy is working. He is quite justified here, because there has been a great deal of noise from the chattering classes with the object of demonstrating that the administration’s policy is incoherent and reckless. Democracy dies in mutism, but it can also suffer from cacophony. If the opposition party and the media place bringing down the government rather than beating a regime that has vowed to destroy our nation, and indeed our civilization, it is unfortunate, but Mr. Trump’s job is to defend the U.S.A.
Thus, it was not the president’s purpose on this occasion to respond to the cliches and catch-phrases about days after and regime changes and nation building or rebuilding or anything else. Winning the war and restoring some order in the Gulf is the first order of business, just as, at a crime scene, the police are entrusted with stopping the malefactors, leaving for later questions of punishment or rehabilitation. Or even reconciliation and redemption.
Mr. Trump sees that it is futile and distracting to discuss an eventual rebuilding of Iran (politically and otherwise); for the moment, he is focused on the remnants of the ruling regime over there with the aim of demolishing it or crippling it to a point where it cannot threaten us.
Mental, moral transformation will follow, we hope. For 50 years, the Islamic Republic has made killing Americans a policy goal, directly or through proxies. It also ravaged an ancient Oriental civilization and made life miserable for its heirs, the people of Iran. Defending Americans and American interests from the Islamic Republic’s death cultists and theocratic tyrants is a way to help the people of Iran, and Adams would have approved, as he would have agreed it is up to them to seize the chance to reclaim their country and its culture, which includes the intellectual and spiritual riches of the Shiite religious branch of Islam.
Shiism considers itself the truest faith and intellectual system. All faiths have their fanatics, but neither Shiism nor any other religion forces its believers to be at war with other faiths and systems; it does so only when captured by hate-crazed lunatics, as the president might put it. Nor is a powerful faith bound to produce the totalitarian politics of the Islamic republic.
You can feel yours is the true faith without feeling obligated to impose it on others, unless you want to be at war all the time. But history teaches that this is easier said than done.
The head of the Catholic Church, Leo XIV, finds himself fortuitously in a position to pick up where Mr. Trump left off and address this question. He will be in Africa for a few weeks this month, bringing joy and courage to the faithful in sub-Saharan countries, among the fastest growing in the world for both Catholicism and nonconforming Christian sects.
However, his first stop is Algeria, where he will meet with government and religious leaders to discuss interfaith dialogue. Without denying that the Church engaged in interfaith dialogue in centuries past by means of crusades and inquisitions and wars of religion, he could point out that that was then and now is now, and two-way streets as well as fences make better neighbors.
Algeria is a Sunni Muslim country where Shiism is suspect, and Catholicism is regulated by a Ministry of Cults that also sends out talking points to the state-regulated mosques. Protestantism survives in catacombs, and Judaism (while we are on the subject of religion) is all but eradicated. In short, there is little official tolerance for heretics or unbelievers, though the ordinary Algerian is more often than not quite tolerant and welcoming.
The pope’s Algeria schedule includes a visit to Hippo, now Annaba, the home of Augustine (Leo XIV belongs to the order bearing the saint’s name), and it is not beyond credible that the meetings on interfaith dialogue were added by the hosts for PR, seeing as how they blame many of their problems not on their own system of government but on Western hostility and prefer to play the aggressed victim.
Now it is true the French colonial system (1830-1962) began with a brutal conquest and remained to the end unjust and oppressive, with deception and discrimination and humiliation the lot of the indigenous Muslim, Arabic, Berber, and Jewish communities, though there were arrangements, exceptions, and other forms of live-and-let-live.
Never enough, of course, and never with sufficient tact and sincerity, and the end was appalling, a seven-year war of terror, inter-communal and even intra-communal massacres that reached into France and left traumas and scars that are still being played out in the politics of both countries.
Not the least consequence of the French colonial experience and the independence war that ended it was that it wrecked what had been a land of surprisingly successful cohabitation among peoples of different backgrounds during the centuries that followed the eight century Arab conquest. The victorious “liberation” produced a state that felt it had to impose rigid conformity in religion and everything else to maintain national unity. Yet experience shows that a state that must resort to tyrannical repression to maintain its unity is on its way to failure. The American founders knew this; it is why they saw freedom of religion as essential to a durable constitutional order.
France recovered; Algeria took off economically (not without guilt-laden but also not disinterested French help, notably with regard to the need for energy that could be extracted in the Sahara). Politically, however, the “revolution” in Algeria turned out to be a grim example of single-party, police-state, uniform-thinking, no-opposition — especially from the Berbers who did not see why “Arab” should be the new nation’s only identity, nor Islam its only religion.
Many Berbers were and are Christian; in certain regions, notably the mountainous Kabylie north of Algiers, they are the majority (overall, perhaps a majority all across North Africa is in some form or another of Berber ancestry). The Algiers regime alternately makes it easier to repress dissent by outlawing separatist platforms (which Kabyle-based political and communal organizations have — peacefully — espoused), which gives them an additional legal weapon against Christians.
Without getting tangled up in tribal and ethnic grudges — though as a Chicagoan, Robert Cardinal Prevost could tell the Algerians some interesting stories in this area — the bishop of Rome could point out, and perhaps ought to, with all his tact and generosity, that freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, in short, freedom, never hurt a country or a society, except maybe America’s. So, my infidel brothers (hahah, just kidding, Mr Tyrrell and I are from Chicago too), consider what a huge boost to world peace you will make by setting an example! Why, even those crazies in Iran — whom you unwisely supported unconditionally as you did Hamas against Israel, which frankly was not very nice considering all the Jews gave your country in everything from medicine to music to translations of the Koran and much else, until you pretty much forced them out — even those boys might pay attention.
And you know, interfaith hooha, peace at last between Islam and Christendom, Judeo-Christendom, brother! (May I call you brother?) Why that might win you a Nobel prize — the American guy might even be happy to share. And even if it falls short, it is worth the old college try on Leo’s part. In the context of the parlous state of international affairs these days, it could even be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:
The Australian Open and the Politics of Words
The Berber War Cry for Freedom
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