Strategic Errors: Islam, Russia and Meddling in World Affairs

If the West had noticed this great renaissance, they would have concentrated on the real issues shaking up their societies. Instead, blinded by hubris, the West made a series of strategic errors: intervening in Islamic countries, underestimating Islam as a religion and failing to address the root of the problem when it comes to terrorism. The most unwise intervention was to invade Iraq in March 2003. In theory, Iraq happened because of 9/11. In practice, it was just a demonstration of Western, especially American, hubris and strategic incompetence. To say that this war was a massive act of stupidity is an understatement. It was an act of folly on several counts. The United States invaded Iraq in revenge against the attack by an Islamic militant, Osama bin Laden. Yet in doing so, it removed a strong secular leader who was opposed to Osama bin Laden: Saddam Hussein. The United States also declared that it was worried about Iranian power. By destroying Saddam and the Taliban, America gave Iranian power a major boost. George W. Bush said that the invasion of Iraq was meant to create a strong, stable democracy in Iraq. Instead, with the assistance of the graduates of the leading universities of the world, he created a royal mess. Iraq has now become a textbook example of how not to invade a country. Singapore’s founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, a friend of the United States, noted wryly that even the Japanese had done better in the Second World War.

Iraq was a disaster. What made it worse was that it reinforced the conviction among 1.5 billion Muslims that the loss of Muslim lives did not matter to the West. A fair question that future historians may well address is whether the surge of Islamic terrorist incidents in Western capitals was an indirect consequence of this thoughtless campaign of bombing Islamic societies.

The West makes one fundamental mistake in all its dealings with the Islamic world: it underestimates the religion of Islam. Western analysts survey the Islamic world and see a string of weak societies. They associate the Islamic world with failed states, like Afghanistan and Somalia, or broken states, like Iraq and Syria. Yet even though many Islamic societies are struggling, Islam itself is only growing in strength. Indeed, to put it bluntly, Islam may well be the most dynamic and vibrant religion on Earth. According to Pew Research Center,

[The Muslim population] will grow more than twice as fast as the overall world population between 2015 and 2060 and, in the second half of this century, will likely surpass Christians as the world’s largest religious group. While the world’s population is projected to grow 32 per cent in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70 per cent – from 1.8 billion in 2015 to nearly 3 billion in 2060. In 2015, Muslims made up 24.1 per cent of the global population. Forty-five years later, they are expected to make up more than three-in-ten of the world’s people (31.1 per cent).48

Islam is not just getting more adherents. Muslims are also becoming more religious. Since the Western mind likes to extrapolate Western assumptions into the human condition, it assumes that the modernization and economic development of any society will lead to less religiosity and more secularism. In the Islamic world, the reverse is happening: economic development and education are leading to greater religiosity. Greater numbers of women are wearing the hijab, even in parts of the world where it was rarely worn for centuries, including Central Asia and Southeast Asia. And, as the Islamic world becomes better educated and more religious, it remembers well the millennia of dealing with stronger and militarily superior Western societies. Many young Muslims resent the weakness of Islamic societies vis-à-vis the West. Many of them are therefore seduced by the violent rhetoric of Islamic clerics who point out the indifference of the West to the loss of Muslim lives. The young men who carried out terrorist attacks on 3 June 2017 in London were influenced by the Islamist preacher Musa Jibril, who tweeted: ‘No intervention in Syria for over 2 years b/c those being killed are Muslim! Yet France quickly intervenes to massacre the Mali Muslims!’49

Let me put across a very sensitive point as delicately as possible. In going after a series of individuals who have been inflamed by such Islamist rhetoric, the West is pursuing a strategy as futile as that of cutting off the tip of the iceberg to save the Titanic. Until the iceberg is dealt with, the problem will never be solved. The West should engage in deep reflection on what it has done to the Islamic world for the past two centuries. This historical record will continue to haunt relations between Islam and the West over the next two centuries.

The West’s second major strategic error was to further humiliate the already humiliated Russia. Gorbachev’s unilateral dissolution of the Soviet empire was an unimaginable geopolitical gift to the West, especially America. The Russia that remained was a small shell of the Soviet empire. After winning the Cold War without firing a shot, it would have been wise for the West to heed Churchill’s advice: ‘In victory, magnanimity.’ Instead, the West did the exact opposite. Contrary to the implicit assurances given to Gorbachev and Soviet leaders in 1990,⁵⁰ the West expanded NATO into previous Warsaw Pact countries, including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia. Tom Friedman was dead right when he said, ‘I opposed expanding NATO toward Russia after the Cold War, when Russia was at its most democratic and least threatening. It remains one of the dumbest things we’ve ever done and, of course, laid the groundwork for Putin’s rise.’51 The humiliation of Russia led to an inevitable blowback. The Russian people elected a strongman ruler, Vladimir Putin, to defend Russian national interests strongly.

Putin was elected President in 2000 and re-elected in 2012, and he also served as Prime Minister from 1999 to 2000 and 2008 to 2012. Yet, even while Putin was in office in the 2000s, the West threatened to expand NATO into Ukraine, despite the fact that eminent American statesmen like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski cautioned against it. Speaking of Ukraine, Kissinger said, ‘… I don’t think it’s a law of nature that every state must have the right to be an ally in the framework of NATO.’⁵² Brzezinski said, ‘Russia should be assured credibly that Ukraine will not become a member of NATO.’⁵³ These warnings were ignored. America supported the demonstrations against President Viktor Yanukovych of Ukraine when his regime collapsed in 2014. Putin knew that the next Ukrainian government might push Ukraine into NATO. The result would have been that Crimea, which had been part of Russia from 1783 to 1954, would have been used by NATO against Russia. Putin felt that he simply had no choice but to take back Crimea. Even Gorbachev supported him.⁵⁴

The Crimea episode showed that there is only so much humiliation that any nation can take. It was inevitable that the Russian people would say: enough is enough. Putin’s election reflected the will of the people. They wanted a strongman ruler who could also poke the eyes of the West. He did this by invading Crimea and supporting Assad in Syria. There are no saints in geopolitical games. There is only tit for tat. If the West had shown respect for Russia instead of humiliating it, Putin would not have happened. In the summer of 2017, Putin was vilified by the American media for having interfered in American elections. Such interference is clearly wrong. Yet no American leader asked the obvious question in this 2017 debate: has America interfered in other countries’ elections? Dov Levin of the Institute of Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University has compiled a database documenting that it has – more than 80 times between 1946 and 2000.55 The West is no saint either, though it is regularly in danger of believing itself to be so.

And so to the West’s third error: thoughtless intervention in the internal affairs of several countries. It is not a coincidence that the end of the Cold War saw a flurry of so-called ‘colour’ revolutions. A partial list includes the following: Yugoslavia in 2000 (Bulldozer), Georgia in 2003 (Rose), Ukraine in 2005 (Orange), Iraq in 2005 (Purple), Kyrgyzstan in 2005 (Tulip), Tunisia in 2010 (Jasmine), Egypt in 2011 (Lotus). Many of these colour revolutions were internally generated. However, when they surfaced, the West rushed to support them because in the minds of Western policy-makers, especially American ones, the export of democracy was an inherent good. Hence, they believed that they were living up to the highest moral standards of Western civilization.

Few in the Rest are convinced that the West’s post-Cold War encouragement of democracy abroad represents a moral impulse. Instead, they see this as a last futile attempt to continue the two-century period of Western domination of world history through other means. They also notice the cynical promotion of democracy in adversarial countries like Iraq and Syria and not in friendly countries like Saudi Arabia. Most disastrously, when the intervention turns sour, as in Iraq or in Libya, the West walks away and takes on no moral responsibility for the adverse consequences. One painful truth that cannot be denied is that this thoughtless attempt to ‘export democracy’ has increased, not decreased, human suffering in many countries.

The West has lost its way significantly in the past three decades. It needs to change course. But before formulating a new strategy, the West needs to accept the changed mind-sets of non-Western populations. A resurgent Rest will not wear the same degree of Western intervention as it did in the past. Until the West understands this, it will not understand why it needs a new strategy to remain successful.

One recent major event illustrates how ignorance of history causes misunderstandings between the West and the Rest. When 9/11 happened, most Americans felt they were innocent victims subject to an unprovoked attack. Most thoughtful international observers saw it as an inevitable blowback against the West’s trampling on the Islamic world for several centuries. It was not just Muslims who believed that. One of Latin America’s best novelists, Gabriel García Márquez, asked Americans:

How does it feel now that horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbor’s living room? … Do you know that between 1824 and 1994 your country carried out 73 invasions in countries of Latin America? … For almost a century, your country has been at war with the entire world … How does it feel, Yank, knowing that on September 11th the long war finally reached your home?56

The West must recognize that all of humanity is one. Seven billion people live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. The big problem is that while we have captains and crews taking care of each cabin, we have no captain or crew taking care of the whole boat. We can and should strengthen multilateral institutions of global governance, like the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and the WHO to take care of common global challenges.57

It is unhelpful that America is led by a President who refuses to recognize that we belong to a single human tribe living together on a fragile little planet, the only habitable place within the universe that we know of. If we screw up the only planet we have, we don’t have a planet B to go to. Fortunately, the spread of modern reasoning by the West has made the rest of the world more rational and responsible.

Hence, even though Donald Trump, the leader of the best-educated society on Earth, is today making unwise decisions on climate change and triggering a new nuclear arms race, his kind of ignorance will eventually be overwhelmed by the broader, well-informed human community, which will rebel against such erroneous thinking. The West did the world a favour by sharing its culture of reasoning with the Rest. Now the Rest, after gaining the same access to the best sources of information, will be able to educate the West on the virtues of working together to protect and preserve planet Earth. Just as Donald Trump has pulled America backwards in the battle against climate change, the two most populous nations, China and India, have moved forward instead of blaming the West for creating the climate crisis (which is technically correct). And guess what? The Chinese and Indian people are supporting their governments. With greater access to information, they know that China and India will suffer if climate change worsens. There was no guarantee that China and India would continue to be reasonable on climate change after Trump made America unreasonable. The fact that they are is a clear cause for celebration.