Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition

Divide and Conquer

"This is a book about ideas." So says Robert Merry in the acknowledgements to Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition, his ambitious new work that combines history, sociology, and political theory to argue for a paradigm shift in U.S. foreign policy. Merry, currently the president and publisher of Congressional Quarterly, has covered Washington for The Wall Street Journal and is the author of a double biography of Joseph and Stuart Alsop. In Sands of Empire, Merry argues that the fundamental fissure in the study of contemporary geopolitics is not between left and right; rather, it is between those who subscribe to the ideal of progress versus those who are committed to the primacy of culture. Merry's book is learned and persuasive, and his culture-versus-progress paradigm is a valuable hermeneutic for understanding global politics. But while Merry's critique of the "progress" school is powerful, his failure to engage with the shortcomings of the "culture" school, of which he is a member, leads him to some troubling conclusions.

The so-called "School of Progress," Merry writes, is at once "universal and defined by Western institutions." First articulated by European Enlightenment thinkers such as Fredrich Hegel, the progress school finds its most prominent contemporary advocates in Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Friedman, and -- dare I say it -- the editors of The New Republic and The Weekly Standard. Put simply, adherents of this view believe that societies are organic and constantly evolving. The first civilization to mature into modernity (and now, post-modernity) was the Anglo-Saxon West. Over the last century, the West triumphed through three titanic internal struggles (against Prussian militarism, German/Italian/Spanish fascism, and Russian Communism) to see its values of individualism, political freedom, separation of church and state, civil liberties, and women's rights become the world's dominant ideology -- one which, according to the progress school, is the ultimate destiny of all civilizations.

In opposition to this idea stands the cultural view of history, first articulated in the nineteenth century by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee and, more recently, by Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington. This school of thought maintains that the world is composed of distinct civilizations, each with its own political systems, values, cultures, and traditions. Civilizations may wax and wane in power and influence but no civilization is inherently superior to any other, nor does any particular civilization encompass universal values. This is the school to which author Merry faithfully and uncritically subscribes. This stance leads him to policy conclusions that will confound liberals and conservatives alike.

Merry is an ardent foe of the neoconservative foreign policy of George W. Bush, rooted as it is in utopian idea that the world can be remade along American lines. He excoriates the thinking that led to the invasion of Iraq, denigrating it as the product of a "world outlook and political idealism that are alluring [and] comforting [but also] false and highly dangerous." And he argues that the Iraqi misadventure has exacerbated Muslim antipathy to the West, not assuaged it.

However, about the ultimate nature of the current struggle, Merry does not mince words. He rejects the formulation positing a civil war within Islamic civilization between extremists and modernizers. Rather, he says, "[t]he enemy is Islam, particularly its Middle Eastern core." He then takes readers on a tour of the cultural traits of the Islamic foe, which he argues are "not malleable [because] they are etched in the cultural consciousness of ... Muslims." Included in Merry's catalogue of unalterables: "tribal sensibilities; the emotional power of shame; the imperative of redressing any dishonoring events at all costs ... the inferiority of women ... hostility to outsiders," and so on, ad nauseam.

Merry may be correct that, because of Islam's lack of historic separation of religion from state, and its deep conviction in the superiority of its revelation, "modernity poses a greater crisis in the world of Islam than it does in any other civilization -- and hence unleashes greater frustrations." But he never explains why Islamic civilization is essentially and unalterably illiberal; after all, Western civilization experienced cataclysmic struggles between its liberal and illiberal variants. Why couldn't the same be true of Islam?

Further, Merry's analysis leads him to dubious policy prescriptions. If the quest to liberalize the Arab world is a fool's errand, how should the United States and its allies wage this "war against Islam"? Merry's answer: Limit immigration from Muslim countries, pursue rapprochement with Europe for the sake of Western unity, and enlist Russia and China in the fight against Islam. Most importantly, we should ally ourselves with the region's "strongman dictators, corrupt royal families [and] military bureaucrats" who are fighting Islamic fundamentalism. That is, the United States should pursue the very Middle East policies that brought us September 11 in the first place.

Merry may fall on the wrong side of the progress-culture debate; yet his paradigm provides a helpful way of framing the foreign policy discussion at a time when traditional left-right labels have become muddled -- with liberals opposing the liberation of a totalitarian society and conservatives supporting a vast, costly experiment in social engineering. TNR readers looking for a sobering critique of this magazine's stance on major foreign policy questions should look no further.

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