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    Kennan’s Second Thoughts

    by

    Article published September 1979

    This article was written in response to an interview with George F. Kennan published in U. S. News and World Report. Kennan was then attached to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton University, after his distinguished career in the United States State Department. The Carter Administration had continued the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, more or less as designed by President Nixon, continued by President Ford, and implemented under both of those administrations by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. The argument against détente was gaining traction, however, and the policy would be jettisoned in the subsequent administration of President Reagan. Kennan’s interview was intended to answer the critics of détente.

    George F. Kennan is rivalled only by Henry Kissinger as the most influential scholar-diplomat of postwar America. In his seminal article, “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” published in 1947, he warned that the Soviet tendency to dangle the bauble of cooperation before wishful American eyes was a tactic, not an offer, unworthy of “gleeful announcements that `the Soviets have changed.'” He proposed the policy of “containment,” whereby the West would apply “counterforce as a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,” counterforce that was to be “political,” not military. Indeed, in 1947 the Soviet Union did not pose a military threat to the United States, so the `militaristic’ interpretation of the Kennan article, widely made at the time, was incorrect. Whether the article itself was incorrect in its “political” (that is, diplomatic) approach to the Soviet Union is a question for thoughtful historians.

    Today the relevant question is the one Mr. Kennan raises in his most recent interview: is a policy of military containment, as advocated by the critics of U. S.-Soviet détente, mistaken and dangerous? His answer is that such a policy is indeed dangerous, that we must avoid war and try to “break out of the straitjacket of military rivalry and to strike through to a more constructive and hopeful vision.” Detente’s critics are “alarmists.”

    They are alarmists, he contends, for several reasons. The Soviet nion has no purpose for which to fight a war, and countries do not fight without reason. Marxist ideology predicts the triumph of communism by means of “the action of the proletariat and of right-thinking people within the countries themselves”–“an action in which the Soviet armed forces help,” but only help. And there are practical reasons, Kennan says, for the Soviets to avoid war: the Chines threat being the most important, but also the danger of unrest in eastern and central Europe and within the Soviet Union itself. Soviet leadership is “very conservative,” “composed very largely of people quite advanced in age,” with “many problems to solve at home (most of them economic, some “spiritual”), ruling subjects who “feel very strongly” opposed to any prospect of a Third World War.

    American statesmen, Kennan argues, should contribute to an “environment” which includes “incentives to move” in the direction of better relations, so that Soviet rulers of today and tomorrow are not forced into continued military escalation. This is especially important because “life is better than death.” “Countries do survive all sorts of vicissitudes short of annihilation. They survive occupation, they survive being satellites, and eventually people get their own independence again… I would say, `Rather red than dead'”–better a subject under a communist regime than killed in a war over communism.

    Rarely have the assumptions that underlie détente received such precise expression. In this Kennan has out-Kissingered Kissinger. Such a precise expression deserves an equally precise refutation.

    The argument that Marxist ideology precludes military triumph over its enemies, that military action must be the handmaiden of revolutionary class struggle is, at least, novel. Characteristically, the détentists contend that the Soviets have abandoned Marxism for nationalism. Perhaps seeing such an abandonment, if real, would make the Soviet Union as dangerous as “before,” Kennan avoids it like the intellectual plague it is. But instead of the plague he succumbs to the pox, for the Soviets never hesitated to impose their revolution on such countries as Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia (both in 1948 and in 1968 under Premier Brezhnev’s “conservative” leadership). If yours is “the country of the Revolution,” if your people, and especially your leaders, embody the vanguard of the international proletariat, you can easily justify a war of `liberation’ based, if not on actual indigenous sentiment, then on the `objective’ interests of oppressed people.

    The practical reasons for avoiding war which Kennan imputes to the Soviet leadership might be convincing if they were not based on his failure to account for the advance of modern technology. Domestic unrest and `pacifism’ in the Soviet Union, the danger o European and/or Chinese attack–all of these will eventually come to nothing as Soviet military technology progressively widens the gulf between rulers and ruled, between major power and secondary powers. The Soviet-style mass revolution based on the 19th-century barricades and the power of `the people’ is today impossible in extended and technologically advanced dictatorships. A ruler without humanitarian scruple, whether of the `Left’ or the `Right,’ can easily crush such movements long before they gain momentum. As for China and Europe, the former will never equal the Soviets’ technological prowess unless it contrives to skip all intermediate stages–an unlikely trick. Meanwhile, Western Europe lacks the political will and the political unity to match the Soviets step for step, and Eastern Europe is already broken. Only the United States can equal, perhaps surpass, the Soviet Union in the invention and deployment of the weapons that will eventually render nuclear missiles as obsolete and the barricades and pickaxes of the 19th century. In assuming that nuclear weapons are `the ultimate weapon,’ Kennan reveals himself as hopeless reactionary.

    Finally, there is the moral argument. Life is indeed better than death if that life is not lived under tyranny. The ideology of Marxism and the genuinely revolutionary technological means that it will soon possess makes Kennan’s naïve pronouncement on “time softening these things” a symptom of a peculiar disease caused by the twin viruses of cowardice and complacency. His “more constructive and hopeful vision” is a fever-dream mistaken for a prophecy.

    The ongoing technological revolution will bestow even more extraordinary power upon those who control the machines. The victory of the Soviet Union at this crucial juncture of world history–a victory for which every statement and every action of the Soviet leadership prepares–would end the brief life of political liberty on earth.

    2016 NOTE: This article was one of several written in collaboration with Professor Paul Eidelberg, who was then teaching at Bar Ilan University in Israel.  As in any such collaboration, some articles were written mostly by him, some mostly by me, and some by both.  The articles posted here are the ones I wrote, with editing by him.

    The article fails to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet empire, some ten years later. But that occurred after Reagan ended the policy of détente and began to apply pressure to the Soviets in collaboration with U. S. allies–perhaps most notably the Saudis, who lowered oil prices at exactly the time when the Soviets desperately needed oil revenues. That weakened the Kremlin’s grip on Central Europe and led to exactly the kind of popular uprisings that I didn’t foresee when American foreign policy was trending in the opposite direction

    The Crisis of Islamic Civilization

    by

    Ali A. Allawi: The Crisis of Islamic Civilization. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.

     

    Retired, near the end of his life, Charles de Gaulle wondered about history, “what Rome called Fortune.” He said to his friend André Malraux, “No historian has attempted to analyze the most singular element of History: the moment when the current passes. For us or against us.” Rome rose, declined, fell, but what “gives a soul to a people” (or any army, the general added)? What disorients that soul, inducing it to lose its way? A statesman or a military leader can rally his people, but there are “limits to action,” as even the Caesars and Napoleon learned.

    In France de Gaulle had seen the current shift more than once. He also saw a larger current, in the world. “There remains but one generation separating the West from the entry of the Third World onto the scene.” Malraux replied, “It is the end of empires,” but de Gaulle said, “Not only of empires. Gandhi, Churchill, Stalin, Nehru, even Kennedy, it is the funeral cortege of a civilization.” Malraux speculated that the West might be replaced by Mao–some combination of communism and nationalism–and “to some degree by Nasser”–that is, by Arab or perhaps more generally Third-World nationalism. De Gaulle offered a correction: “Mao, oui. L’Islam, peut-être.” Arab nationalism, so visible at the end of 1969, would not shift the current or guide it. But Islam–dismissed, disparaged religiosity–might do so. As an army officer de Gaulle had known Syria in the early 1930s, writing to his wife that we French, with our mission civilisatrice, “haven’t made much of an impression here.” Had he sensed the bedrock beneath the course of events even then?

    Ali A. Allawi also finds that bedrock, albeit much eroded. A Sufi Muslim who returned to his native Iraq after Americans deposed one of the Middle East’s last remaining Nasserites, Saddam Hussein, he found there not liberation but sectarian murder and corruption. After servicing as Minister of Defense and Minister of Finance in the new government, he retreated to an academic appointment at Princeton University, giving himself to time to think about his country and his religion. Like de Gaulle, Allawi wants to understand how and why the current passes–specifically with respect to the decline of “the spirit of Islam”–and how that decline might be reversed. He attends not simply to Islam as a set of religious beliefs but as a distinct civilization, a mode and order of civility. Fundamentally and more generally, “can a modern society, with all it complexities, institutions, and tensions, be built on the vision of the divine?”

    In the forty years since de Gaulle and Malraux conversed, Islamic observance has increased worldwide, and what is called political Islam has gone from the once-obscure writings of Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini and Pakistan’s Syed Abdl A’ala Mawdudi into practice with real regimes. But Islamic civilization has been ruinously undermined, “undergoing a monumental crisis.” By “political” Allawi means what Machiavelli means: the acquisition of men and things in an exhibition of virtuosity in commanding. By “civilization” he means a sense of balance, of proportion, between “the individual and the collective” and “between worldliness and otherworldliness.” He means something like what Aristotle means by political rule: not command but reciprocity in rule, ruling and being ruled–the way of a husband and wife, not of parent and child, much less of master and slave.

    The modern West lacks genuine civilization, he argues, overemphasizing individuality in the pursuit of worldly success, effective acquisition; much of the modern East (Japan and China leading the way) now pursues such success as well, albeit corporately not individualistically. In this pursuit, West and East conjure such impersonal and therefore uncivilized forces as markets and technologies. West and East succumb to a moral relativism that renders their conquests empty. (As Malraux asked de Gaulle, “Why conquer the moon, if only to commit suicide there?)

    In response, Muslims pay but also tyrannize and terrorize one another, failing to integrate their inner, devout lives with their public conduct. Although “dozens of nation-states… claim, in one way or another, to be guided by Islam,” Allawi sees “few signs that anything like this has been taking place.” He insists nonetheless that only Islam, among the religions, might go beyond a mere critique of modernity and reestablish civilization or genuine politics without sacrificing the intellectual advances of modernity, most notably the discoveries of modern science. He does not go so far to deem this likely. Considering the Muslims of the 18th and 19th centuries, the first to collide with the modern West, he writes, “No wonder many thought they had been abandoned by God.”

    “Nearly always coeval with rule by Muslims over Muslims”–and, it might be added, rule of Muslims over non-Muslims–Islamic civilization advanced for a millennium after Muhammad’s founding. It did so, Muslims believed, by divine right and divine aid, morally and politically. “The bedrock of any Islamic sensibility must be the textual certainty of the Quran as the unaltered and unalterable word of God.” With respect to morality, the Quran teaches that “there are no human virtues as such,” only divine gifts endowed to individual souls, who should cultivate those gifts by observing Islamic law, the Sharia. The Sharia finds support in Islamic politics. “The specifically Islamic form of political life” consists of several elements. First of these has been empire, but empire of the pre-modern, non-statist, decentralized sort–“a relatively loose, non-institutional affair, mainly connected with generating revenue for the needs of the ruler and the functioning of the government” by means of tribute. Governmental functions include the administration of Sharia law (“the Islamic political world is infused by the sacred”) and of military defense as well as military “expansion and conquest.” The characteristic Muslim regime has been kingship, undergirded by a society of tribes and other kinship associations, which Allawi calls “key to a personal rule that avoided the arbitrariness of modern absolutism and tyranny.

    Muslims underestimated the modern West, assuming they had little or nothing to learn from proponents of imperfect religions. As for Western adherents to the new irreligion, Machiavellianism, Muslims correctly judged the modern state to be un-Islamic, against the Ummah, the body of believers. Surely God would favor Islam against such institutionalized atheism.

    Nor did all Muslims recline in complacency. Allawi recounts the recommendation of the Algerian Emir Abd el-Qadir, a contemporary of Tocquevile, who proposed to filter Western technology through the existing network of Sufi civic associations and guilds–all governed under Sharia law. For awhile, Abd-el-Qadir remained confident, invoking “the power of Islam” derived from “the grace of the One and Only God.” But with Islamic strength pitted against Machiavellian strength, and with the strength of Islam unaccountably faltering, Abd-el-Qadir surrendered; “when it was impossible for me any longer to doubt that God for inscrutable reasons had withdrawn from me, I decided to withdraw from the world.”

    This reclusion opened Sufism to the riposte Machiavelli aims against Christians, an argument Allawi calls “astonishing”: “that it was the spiritual dimension of Islam, distorted by the Sufi orders, that led to the decay and decrepitude of Muslim countries and opened them to foreign exploitation and conquest.” For their part, Western imperialists encouraged such quietism wherever they found it; the original moderns and the modernist critics of Islam within Muslim countries concurred in identifying the source of Muslim weakness as Muslim spirituality.

    The Egyptian monarchy was the first regime effectually to subordinate Islam to modernity, including nationalism and statism, a project seen most dramatically in Turkey under the regime of Kemal Ataturk. ‘Political’ Islam stood up even earlier, in the 18th century, in “the uncompromising and literalist monotheism” of Muhammad ib Ad-Wahhab, who allied with the then-obscure House of Saud. Under the pressure of these two forces, modernism and Islamism–to which Allawi adds a third, Western imperialism–“by the end of the nineteenth century, the territorial, cultural, and psychological unit of Islamic civilization had been torn apart.” The dichotomy between modernizing secularists and self-described fundamentalist reformers of Islam–both severed from Islam’s spiritual roots–guaranteed Muslims’ political imbecility from then more or less until now.

    Allawi provides an informative, melancholy survey of some lonely figures who opposed boith secularism and the non-spiritual, merely legalistic and often militaristic forms of Islam. These men include Muhammad Iqbal, “the great poet of modern Islam,” a defender of Sufi spirituality as “the realization of God’s absolute uniqueness through the uniqueness of the individual”: Badiuzzaman Said Nursi, a Kurdish scholar in Turkey who upheld Abd-el-Qadir’s civil-associational strategy against satism; and the Algerian scholar Malek Bennabik who attempted to explain Islam’s decline in Gibbon-like terms (minus the atheism) as a complacent triumphalism leading to the absorption of foreign spiritual toxins.

    Israel’s stupefying victory over Arab armies in 1967 fatally discredited the nationalist and socialist modernizing regimes that directed those armies. The enrichment of the oil-rich Saudis {and thereby the Wahhabis) in the 1970s, along with the Iranian revolution of 1979 brought ‘political’ Islam to power in core Muslim states. Too little, too late, Allawi argues. Any scriptural literalism depends upon an understanding of the relevant language, but the Arabic language, the language of the Quran, has lost much of its original meaning, as many words have taken on definitions adapted to the concepts of modernity. For example, in modern Arab deen means religion; in Quranic Arabic it means “the indebtedness of the created to the Creator,” a debt discharged by following the ways of life–the regime–of God as revealed in “Islam or the unsullied revealed religions,” Judaism and Christianity. The schools in which Muslims now learn Arabic teem with modern notions–secularism, historicism–far removed from Islamic learning.

    As for the madrassas, the schools controlled by clerics, insofar as they teach `political’ Islam they too lack spirituality, contenting themselves with an “entirely Sharia-defined” legalist-literalist Islam, the Islam of the Wahhabits and their offshoots the Salafists, who “radicalize Sunni Islam by weakening its connections with the classical schools of law.” The classical schools of law had been moderate, restrained, and subtle in their decisions, and allowed for considerable leeway in their implantation,” being sensitive to circumstances of place and of peoples. The rigidity of contemporary Islamic legalism yields a rigidity and at times outright fanaticism of practice, a Muslim procrusteanism that amputates all too many arms and legs. “The death knell for Islamic law is sounding. All its vitality, originality and appositeness fade away, which turns it into a massive manual with rulings often drawn from the shoddy scholarship of bigoted clerics and Islamic activists with little jurisprudential training.”

    Allawi defends an Islamic politics that accommodates the variety of sects within Islam as well as resident non-Muslims. He points to the eleventh-century theologian Abu Hamid Muhammad ib Muhammad al Ghazali, who argued along lines familiar to readers of Hugo Grotius and some Orthodox Jewish scholars. For these thinkers, the solution to the religio-political question requires no endorsement of a natural right to worship peacefully but rather an acknowledgment of a shared core of beliefs, small in number but indispensable to the health of human souls and societies alike: within Islam, this is the conviction that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his Messenger. This Islamic liberalism, so to speak, allowed Shi’a Muslims to hold high offices under the Abbasid Caliphate, much to the astonishment of today’s Wahhabis and Salafists Allawi adapts a phrase coined by a none-too-pious political thinker to make this point: “The closing of the Islamic mind, at least in this respect, is very much a modern phenomenon.”

    Had Muslims glimpsed the Enlightenment’s glare from a distance they might have conducted themselves along a Tocquevillian path from monarchy and tribalism to some more republican form of self-rule. But “the nurturing of Islam’s political culture into the modern period was thwarted by the violent disruption of Islamic civilization by European powers.” Had this not happened, Islam could have produced, on “its own impetus,” its own “version of checks and balances on rulers and its own system of rights and duties, compatible with its own legacy.” This legacy stems from “a short but decisive Quranic verse (Quran 42: 38), demanding that consultation should be the basis of any system of authority”: The Muslims’ “communal business is to be transacted in consultation among themselves.” Allawi prefers an expansive reading of the term “themselves,” maintaining that it refers to “the entire community”–“in effect” “the entire population,” and not merely tribal elders or even adult males. So interpreted, this verse would form the foundation of a genuinely political life in Muslim communities, a foundation upon which a republican regime might have been constructed in a measured way, over time, perhaps along the lines enfranchisement widened under the British constitution in the 19th century.

    Would such a politics, a “civilized” politics, include non-Muslims in the ruling body of the regime? Allawi does not explicitly say if “accommodation” entails shared rule. He inclines to wave away non-Muslim reservations concerning such matters. To associate Islam “with fanaticism and violence” has become a “deeply rooted” habit “in the psyche of Westerners.” But, he asserts, in places like Southeast Asia Muslim conquests were not really conquests at all, for the most part, but voluntary conversions “prompted by the example of Muslim merchants.” Dhimmitude–the subordination of non-Muslim minorities in majority-Muslim regimes–was primarily an attempt to protect those minorities.

    Protect them from whom? This description of peaceable and accommodating Islamic rule might be more reassuring, were it quite believable. From its beginning, Islam comes to sight as a fighting faith. It combines the military conquest and civil rule seen in ancient Israel with the universality of Christianity; Islam has always had imperial ambitions. Like the experienced merchant he was, Muhammad never hesitated to negotiate his way to the next expansion, whenever possible, but neither did he shrink from the use of force, especially in the last decade of his life. His successors shrank from it even less.

    Today, Allawi writes, “the issue is whether Muslims want to create and dwell in a civilizational space which grows out of their own beliefs without disrupting the world of others.” Indeed so: but would Muhammad approve? And if he would approve strategically and for now, would he deem `live and let live’ a Godly policy after such a civilization were achieved?

    Allawi’s testimony itself gives pause. Although “the idea of human rights can be traced both to biblical sources and to the notion of a natural which would be separate from divine revelation,” modern natural rights derive from western convention, “tradition.” Such modern “ideals” as liberalism, democracy, and secularism, if adopted by Islam, would destroy its “separate civilizational space.” For example, Article 18 of  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights guarantees not only the right to choose your religion but to “change it”–a violation of Islamic law, which allows conversion to Islam but never from Islam. Impossible to reconcile with natural right, ancient or modern, this means that Muslims must insist that what’s ours is ours and what’s yours is–negotiable.

    Allawi further assures his readers that Islam, alone among the major religions, rules no major state–no “core state,” in Samuel Huntington’s terminology–and therefore portends no new empire. Perhaps so, but has that not made terrorism–a technique intended to cause the centralized modern state to ‘de-center’ and collapse–all the more attractive to some self-described Muslims? The destruction of the World Trade Center, the attack on the Pentagon, the intended attack on the White House: none of these could make America collapse, but were they not rather costly in blood and treasure? No matter: “Islamist groups, when they succeed in achieving power, are soon bogged down in the minutiae of governing and remaining in power.” Well, yes–decisions, decisions. Shall it be ten stripes or fifteen for this heretic? A mullah’s work is never done. Although Allawi wants sharply to distinguish classical Islamic rule from modern Islamist tyranny, these categories do rather bleed together at times, despite his best efforts.

    And so we learn, “the war against terror was really a war against Islam itself, reinforcing its `outsider’ status in the constellation of states and civilizations.” If so, then why has the West refrained from assaulting Muslim-ruled countries that have not (a) launched attacks against the West; (b) sheltered their co-religionists who launched such attacks; or (c) invaded neighboring countries?

    Such criticisms should not detract too much from what Allawi does well, and that’s a lot. He strikes me as a successor to the sober and moderate Muslim scholars he admires and writes about with such feeling. In deploring the attempt by modern liberalism to `privatize’ religion, to reduce religion’s authority in public life, and at the same time insisting that Muslims govern themselves justly and civilly, has he not, through his very virtues, effectively `privatized’ himself? Can his form of Islam, whether the true Islam or not, ever find a home–except in exile? Despite his longings, is he finally most nearly at home only in the natural-rights republic, where George Washington welcomed Catholic, Jew, and Quaker so long as they “demeaned themselves as good citizens”?

    Machiavelli and the Shah

    by

    Op-Ed article, 1979

     

    Commentators agree that the Shah lost Iran, with help from his enemies, right and left. They agree that the Shah’s loss may be America’s loss. They agree that the Shah and America misread the feelings of the Iranian people, that both underestimated popular resentment of despotism, of administrative blundering of ruling-class self-indulgence. They agree that the Shah alienated almost every significant Iranian group: Muslims, Marxists, bourgeoisie, intelligentsia, even segments of the army and the secret police.

    They overlook one thing. They overlook the fact that the Shah, far from being too Machiavellian for his own good, wasn’t Machiavellian enough.

    A clarification before I go on: I am not one of Machiavelli’s romantic admirers. I do not imagine that the Florentine was `really’ a democrat, or a `great Italian patriot,’ beneath that reputation as a cynic. No, Machiavelli advised tyrants as well as republicans, and his idea of republicanism should not delight the world’s humanitarians. By any decent standard, Machiavelli was a vicious man.

    Nevertheless (to deploy a Machiavellian locution), vicious men can teach us useful things, especially if they combine cleverness with their brutality. Machiavelli is the one political philosopher who pushes cleverness to the point of genius. Consider, then, the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth chapters of the First Book of the Discourses. And think of them in terms of the Shah’s efforts to modernize a tradition-bound country.

    Obviously, a ruler can attempt to modernize either rapidly or gradually. The Shah desired to modernize rapidly. To do so, one must use force; democratic meandering takes time. Machiavelli recommends that a non-republican ruler “organize the government entirely anew,” appointing new governors with new powers, making the poor rich, destroying old cities and building new ones, transferring inhabitants “from one place to another,” so that no rank, grade, honor, or material reward is seen to come from anyone but the prince himself.

    The twentieth century has suffered a number of rulers like that. Lenin, Stalin, and Mao imposed modernization `from above,’ with force. Each murdered millions of people, smashed religious opposition, orchestrated a Terror. Machiavelli hastens to write that “these means are cruel and destructive of all civilized life, and neither Christian nor even human, and should be avoided by everyone.” In other places he seems more permissive.

    Indeed, the Shah was brutal. But he did not rival the aforementioned butchers; according to his enemies, he murdered thousands, not millions. We needn’t guess what Lenin, Stalin, or Mao would have done in Iran in 1978, when Muslims and others rebelled. We know they had the means to prevent such uprisings from reaching a point dangerous to themselves; we know they had the will to use those means.

    Machiavelli discusses another way to reform a country. He who would liberalize a traditional society should take care to preserve the outer forms of life, the beloved customs of the people. “For the great majority of mankind are satisfied with appearances, as though they were realities, and are often more influenced by the things that seem than by those that are.” Therefore, “as all novelties excite the minds of men, it is important to retain in such innovations as much as possible the previously existing forms.” This applies especially to religious customs; in another chapter, Machiavelli recommends “as a general rule” that “in changing a religion the invitations should be much stronger than the penalties,” for a religion may be changed quietly not by shocking the soul of the believer but by causing him to become indifferent. In Europe, with the help of Machiavelli and his somewhat gentler philosophic successors, economic life gradually replace Christian life. In India, Nehru encouraged modernity, letting nuclear reactors coexist, for the time being, with sacred cows. (His daughter got too heavy-handed, and suffered because of it). Iran might have modernized peacefully too, had the Shah acted prudently.

    But the Shah foolishly outlawed the traditional dress of Muslim women, replaced the Islamic calendar with one celebrating himself, and tried to change other popular customs–all while making gestures toward liberalization. Such forms should be the last things the gradualist replaces; let them become empty of content and the people themselves will agitate for their removal. One can thereby influence popular consent without overt coercion. Specifically, the successful modernizer introduces economic changes gradually, allowing the desire for comfortable self-preservation and material acquisition, the principal motives of `economic man,’ to moderate the religious ardor of his people. It is true that Islam, a much more militant and political religion than Christianity or Hinduism, presents difficulties in this regard; however, in view f the partial secularization of most Islamic regimes, one needn’t regard the difficulties as insuperable.

    Machiavelli complains that many rulers “know neither how to be entirely good nor entirely bad.” They do not reform gradually and prudently; they do no tyrannize thoroughly Like the Shah, they try to liberalize and tyrannize simultaneously, with disaster as their reward. Their people resist the carrot, spurn the stick and leave the world pondering who the ass really is.

    As Americans, we are committed to being “entirely good,” not “entirely bad.” (Cynics claim that that is our asininity). We want our dictatorial allies to liberalize their regimes as they modernize, and leave the mass murder to such tyrannically-backed tyrannies as Vietnam and Cambodia. After Iran, we see that a mere campaign for human rights, backed by economic prodding, won’t do. The Soviets run schools in which young men learn how to overthrow repressive regimes and institute `proletarian’ tyranny. Our despotic allies, too old for school, nevertheless need sound political advice, along with our preferred (by us) and coveted (by them) technical assistance. We can begin by reminding them of Machiavelli’s less vicious side.

    A fundamental question remains: being “entirely good” by Machiavellian standards has nothing to do with goodness according to any religion worthy of the name. Whether one kills a religion by smashing it or seducing it, the religion in its original form is just as dead. Modernizing–devitalizing religious feeling by appealing to economic feeling–destroys one of the ways by which people orient themselves in the world, replacing it with activity that seem to satisfy human nature. America shows that a balance of sorts is negotiable, with laws both protecting and limiting religion in modernity. As usual, America is an exception. The Iranian crisis, clearly understood, forces us to confront ourselves and the world we want to influence.

     

    2016 NOTE: This article never saw the light of day, although I sent it to a couple of publications whose editors in their wisdom ignored it. It’s hard to blame them, although it actually holds up fairly well, some 37 years later. Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, had been a U. S. ally against Soviet allies during the Cold War.  In 1978-79 a revolutionary conflict was orchestrated by a coalition of his numerous enemies, who had formed a new version of the sort of coalition called the “Popular Front” in the 1930s. As was often the case, after the common enemy was removed, the elements of the coalition turned on one another and the strongest faction prevailed–in Iran’s case, the Shi’a clerical oligarchy headed by the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The phrase “a mere campaign for human rights” refers to the policy of the Carter Administration in the United States (1977-1981), which made much of human rights and too little of America’s geopolitical necessities.