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The end of progress

By THOMAS ALAN SCHWARTZ
Published September 11, 2005

SANDS OF EMPIRE:

Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy,

and the Hazards of Global Ambition

By Robert Merry

Simon & Schuster, $26, 320 pp

Reviewed by THOMAS ALAN SCHWARTZ

This is a provocative and disturbing book. It is also a deeply pessimistic view of current American foreign policy, a view that will likely find more adherents if the insurgency in Iraq continues unabated.

Robert Merry, the president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, argues with much of the conventional wisdom about American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, especially American intervention in the Balkan wars in the 1990s. Advocating a return to the "conservative interventionism" that helped the United States prevail in its struggle with the Soviet Union, Merry decisively rejects President Bush's "Crusader State," with its goal of promoting democracy and freedom in the Middle East as the answer to Islamic terrorism. To Merry, "missionary democracy in the Middle East . . . likely would foster fundamentalist and anti-American regimes in that strategically important region."

Merry's central argument is based on his view that the "great fault line" in American thinking about foreign policy reflects two fundamental and opposing Western views of history: the "idea of progress" and its counterpart, "the cyclical view of history." Merry is a firm believer in the cyclical view of history, along with its corollary, the importance of culture and the "clash of civilizations," a perspective most often connected with Harvard professor Samuel Huntington.

To Merry, the United States, as leader of the Western nations, finds itself in a conflict of civilizations, and the "enemy is Islam, particularly its Middle Eastern core." Bush and other Americans may deny this reality, preferring to see the enemy as "evildoers" not reflective of Islam as a whole. But Merry insists that we are deluding ourselves if we don't recognize the fundamental roots of this conflict in the cultural divide between the Christian West and the world of Islam.

Merry spends the first part of his book discussing the historical roots of the idea of progress, and the degree to which many intellectuals and other leaders have been seduced by its appeal. This idea, that history that follows a linear path from the more primitive to the more enlightened, encourages utopian visions and hopeful idealisms, most notably Woodrow Wilson's belief that American-style democracy should be encouraged and promoted around the world. Unfortunately, in Merry's view, these idealisms encounter the powerful and immutable force of rival cultures and worldviews that thwart such visions. Merry is especially harsh in discussing the modern-day Wilsonians, the "neoconservatives," whose "particular intellectual temperament . . . shuns complexity, tactical adjustment, and the role of patience in geopolitical maneuverings . . . (and is) highly dangerous in a post-Cold War era characterized by brutal and persistent cultural and civilizational clashes."

Merry's book is at its best in his criticism of those American leaders, including the president, who have exaggerated conceptions of America's power to change the world. He reminds us with a multitude of examples of the limits on that power. Merry wants a "realist" foreign policy dedicated to the defense of only the most vital American interests, and the reinvigoration of the Western alliance that was so badly damaged by the Iraq war. He also stresses the need for creative diplomacy in dealing with the international crises of the post-9/11 world, citing with approval Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger's famous opening to China and arguing that a similar type of boldness should be considered with Iran.

The book is more problematic in some of its other claims. Are we really at war with Islam? Yes, it is clear that there is a great deal of anti-Americanism in the Middle East, and that there is support for Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Islamic world. But recent events, particularly the London bombings, make it clear that there is a substantial constituency within Islam that is deeply offended by terrorism, and there were several fatwas issued opposing such terrorist actions.

If Islam is not a monolith, we also have less reason to fear Muslims in the United States. Merry's general pessimism leads him to think it "naive" that Islamic immigrants to the United States can be assimilated as other immigrants in our history have been. In one of the more unfortunate passages in the book, Merry urges that public policy aim at "holding down Muslim population growth at a time when America and the West are locked in a civilizational war with global Islamist radicalism." Some reviewers have used this passage to accuse Merry of racism. This charge is grossly unfair, but Merry's sweeping generalizations about Muslims and the Islamic world leave him open to such attacks.

The book is on even shakier ground when it recounts the events in Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Merry is determined to fit the civil wars in that country into Huntington's clash of civilizations, in particular exaggerating the responsibility of the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians for much of the conflict. His pro-Serbian stance leads Merry to some distortions. In discussing President Bill Clinton's authorization of Operation Deliberate Force, a NATO air campaign, he downplays the role that the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica had in forcing the reluctant president's hand.

Merry does not acknowledge that Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic's downfall, brought about by the NATO air campaign of 1999, has brought greater stability and relative peace to the Balkans. His claim that "radical Muslims" now use Bosnia as a recruiting ground for operations in the Middle East is unsubstantiated.

This book is a useful corrective to the "arrogance of power" that can infect American leaders. But Merry's advocacy of a "realist" foreign policy is, to put it bluntly, unrealistic. American foreign policy is the product of a democratic and pluralistic system that draws no real or effective boundary between foreign and domestic politics. U.S. foreign policy can never be devoid of America's political values such as democracy, tolerance and human rights. During the Cold War, with the overarching threat of a nuclear-armed Soviet Union, some of those values could be considered secondary to the physical survival of the country. But in the absence of such an existential threat, it is no surprise that Americans seek to project their values and beliefs outward, even to culturally foreign areas like the Middle East.

Iraq, like Vietnam, may ultimately make us more careful in the future, but it is unlikely to prevent this missionary diplomacy from seizing hold again. The real challenge for future leaders will come in restoring the proper balance between the values and beliefs Americans want their country to represent and defend, and the real sacrifice in lives and treasure they are prepared to make to accomplish these goals.

- Thomas A. Schwartz is a professor of history at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. He is the author of Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (2003), and is completing a biography of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

[Last modified September 9, 2005, 12:02:58]