For 17 somber minutes, on a cloudless summer morning, it was imaginable that an airliner crashing into the north tower of the World Trade Center could be an accident. But it was unimaginable when a second plane slammed into the south tower, and then a third, into the Pentagon. I recall news anchors on live broadcasts straining for words to describe the carnage, the horror, the devastation. We heard the phrase an “act of war.” The next morning’s New York Times roared, in a banner headline, “U.S. ATTACKED.”

But who had attacked us? The initial answer: the “Bin Laden organization,” or al-Qaeda. This was not fully wrong; the hijackers were al-Qaeda members. They were terrorists, we were told, and they had managed to terrify. This prevailing view of the enemy as a band of terrorists, however, was profoundly wrong. Disastrously wrong.

Who had attacked us? In the aftermath of 9/11, the intellectual and political leadership of the United States failed to understand the enemy. We at ARI demonstrated that America faced an ideological movement, Islamic totalitarianism; that al-Qaeda was one prominent faction of many; and that central to this movement were Islamist regimes that provided inspiration and funding, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The wholesale failure to grasp this reality cannot be explained by ignorance. For some, particularly in the George W. Bush administration, it was active self-deception, a desire not to see; for others, it was an inability to believe that anyone could truly be ideologically driven.

Who had attacked us? The deliberate severing of 9/11 from its animating ideology was so acute, that I remember a time when people spoke of the attacks as akin to natural disasters, rather than the vicious deeds of human beings choosing to act on ideas they believed.

Who had attacked us? For the last twenty-five years, in op-eds, essays, blog posts, TV interviews, on radio, in lectures, at college talks, in podcasts, in books — in every channel, venue and forum open to us — my ARI colleagues and I consistently stressed the fundamental need to understand that enemy, we explained its essentially ideological nature, at length, and what was necessary to defeat it.

Today, as our nation marks a quarter century since 9/11, we reprint an in-depth essay from New Ideal, “Jihadists: Understanding the Enemy,” that illuminates a question that so many, for so long, have deliberately clouded and evaded.

* * *

This essay appears in the newly released ARU Press book Failing to Confront Islamic Totalitarianism: What Went Wrong After 9/11. The book, now in its third expanded edition, features ARI analysis spanning the last 25 years.

Finally, my colleague Onkar Ghate and I will be speaking today about the meaning of 9/11 at an ARI conference in Austin, Texas, and I invite you to join the livestream.

— Elan Journo

Jihadists: Understanding the Nature of the Enemy

Originally published April 16, 2018

At the peak of its strength, the Islamic State (or ISIS)1 not only controlled a large swath of territory — an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom — it also proved itself a formidable global menace. It instigated, directed, and inspired attacks from Brussels to San Bernardino, London to Orlando, Paris to Istanbul, Manchester to Barcelona. Now that ISIS has been practically routed from the territory it had once controlled in Iraq and Syria,2 the natural question is: Will this mean a reduced threat of further attacks?

Perhaps yes, in the near term; but beyond that, no, and we have every reason to expect the problem to persist.

Why? The reason is not just that the Islamic State might linger on, rebuild, or morph and re-emerge in the shape of a new, more deadly faction. That’s entirely imaginable. The Islamic State itself began life around 2003 as a member of the Al Qaeda network, later breaking away and eclipsing its former partner in brutality, territorial conquest, and global reach.

Nor is the problem just that future attacks might look different. Al Qaeda made its mark with the intricate September 11 plot to hijack four passenger jets simultaneously and ram them into buildings. But the Islamic State has recruited people to carry out simpler, often unsophisticated, mass murders using knives, guns, and vehicles to mow down their victims.

The reason that we can expect future attacks is that there’s far more to the problem than these attacks; more than the Islamic State; more than Al Qaeda. In some vague way, many of us sense that. While people often talk loosely about the “terrorist” threat, it doesn’t take much to see that terrorism is a tactic — a means, not an end. And it is a tactic commonly deployed by various groups and organizations (think of the Irish Republican Army, the Basque separatists of ETA, or the Ku Klux Klan), so it’s nowhere near a uniquely distinguishing feature of the problem.

What, then, is this cause? Who is the enemy? We should be able to answer these vital questions. Any rational attempt to deal with this threat must begin with a clear conception of the enemy’s nature and goals. That’s a necessary condition of defining an effective plan for ending the menace. The point holds true in every conflict. Can you imagine America achieving victory in World War II if we had viewed the enemy as “Kamikaze” attacks — the tactic of deploying fighter pilots on suicide missions — rather than imperialist Japan? And yet today, nearly seventeen years since 9/11, we have nothing like clarity on the nature of this enemy.

Notice the semantic breakdancing around the issue of what to call the attackers. For example, after the September 11 attacks, George W. Bush launched a “Global War on Terrorism,” referring to our enemy variously as “terrorists,” “haters,” “evil doers,” and “hijackers” of a noble religion. The Bush administration tried out the term “Islamofascism,” but quickly dropped it. Barack Obama’s team whipsawed between the overly narrow — “Al Qaeda”; then “ISIS” — and the hopelessly broad, favoring the worse than meaningless term “violent extremists.” Donald Trump has at times talked of “Radical Islamic terrorism,” suggesting some ideological features of the menace, though the administration’s own view is less than coherent on that point.

What all this betrays is much more than semantic confusion. It reveals an underlying conceptual failure: a major part of the problem is that we haven’t properly defined the problem. We see some of the enemy’s features, if dimly; we fixate on non-essential or derivative aspects; we play down, ignore, or evade others that are fundamental to it.

That leads to a failure to understand the nature of the enemy. It’s a misconception to view the problem as hinging primarily on the most salient faction — whether that’s Al Qaeda, or ISIS, or a successor group — or on its preferred tactics. To view the problem so narrowly is to miss what’s essential to this enemy, why it predates Al Qaeda and has persisted long after Osama bin Laden’s death, why it will outlast the routing of ISIS, what animates it fundamentally — and, thus, what’s needed to end it.

We urgently need a clear understanding of the enemy, what ideas animate it, and why. Such clarity is an indispensable condition for combating it effectively, a point confirmed by the failures of American Mideast policy over the last two decades. Let us then step back, take a wider perspective, and bring into focus the nature of this foe.

Confronting difficult questions

What’s the point of all the slaughter? What’s the enemy’s end goal? The path to reaching the answers we need is crowded with difficult issues — difficult to untangle, but also difficult emotionally. For example, the killers call themselves jihadists (holy warriors) fighting for the supremacy of Allah’s law on earth. While it may be an uncomfortable thought, we must still confront the question: is religion — specifically Islam — the animating force behind the self-identified jihadists?

For many people, particularly our political and intellectual leaders, the answer is a vehement no. The killers, we hear, have nothing to do with any faith, let alone the Muslim faith. We hear that they distort that religion, which is a religion of peace. But is it true that the killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam? It’s quite obvious that many, many Muslims repudiate the self-styled jihadists, and that they themselves are peaceful, productive individuals. But does it follow that the agenda of such jihadist groups as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State bears no connection to the religion’s commonly recognized teachings?

To ask this question is to risk being accused of prejudice toward Muslims. The worry here is that such a question is meant to imply that the problem is somehow all Muslims. That worry stems from a profound distortion and an actual issue in our culture.

There is real prejudice toward Muslims, often manifesting in the United States as xenophobia. Sometimes it manifests as a kind of racism that considers Muslims — whether from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Indonesia — as interchangeably non-white and somehow constituting a race. There’s no place for racism, xenophobia, or prejudice in any civilized society.

The distortion is that some people blur together race — which is unchosen — and a religious outlook — which is a chosen set of beliefs. Such blurring leads some to feel an unwarranted, collective hostility toward all Muslims. (Partly reacting to that distortion, other people adopt an uncritically positive view of the religion, regarding any analysis of it and of its followers as taboo.) To make sense of the jihadists, however, we must keep the issues of racial identity and religious/ideological outlook sharply differentiated.

Then there’s another line of thinking that tells us that what really animates jihadists is something non-religious. This view holds that, although these self-styled jihadists quote holy texts and pledge their faith to Allah, fundamentally there are other factors that drive them, notably political or economic grievances. For example, observe that jihadist recruitment videos and talking points hammer on American Mideast policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What are we to make of such seemingly non-religious factors?

The answers here are not obvious, but they are attainable.

What I intend to convince you of is that the enemy constitutes an ideological movement rooted in Islam. Let me stress key elements of that claim.

It is an ideological movement: it’s a religious outlook, based on ideas and teachings of Islam, which the followers of the movement choose to embrace. It’s not about anyone’s race, nor is it fundamentally animated by material (political or economic) factors.

It’s crucial to see that it is an ideological movement: despite murderous enmity, sectarian rifts, splintering, and infighting among its constituent regimes, groups, and factions, what unites them — and defines the movement — is their common end. It is the aim of creating a totalitarian society under similar interpretations of Islamic religious law.

It’s an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam

Let’s start by looking at the evidence of what the jihadists themselves believe and act on. Read the notes left behind by the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, a four-page document with minute guidance on how to prepare for martyrdom. Listen to the courtroom testimony of the man who slaughtered Theo van Gogh, a Dutch filmmaker, proudly admitting his crime in the name of Allah. Notice how the Charlie Hebdo attackers — like so many others — screamed “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great!), adding that they were avenging the Prophet Mohammad. Or recall how the shooter at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, described himself as a soldier of Allah, pledging his allegiance to the Islamic State. To these examples we can add many more. The commonality is that they see themselves as fighting in the name of Islam.

These holy warriors have been instructed, inspired, and guided by the intellectual leaders of their movement. Prominent among these intellectual leaders are Abu al-Ala al Mawdudi (1903–1979), Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–1989). Many differences separate these three. Mawdudi and Qutb came out of the Sunni sect of Islam; Khomeini, from the Shiite sect. Their arguments are colored by their local political context and concerns. Mawdudi was an Indo-Pakistani thinker, Qutb helped shape the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and Khomeini became the founder and first “Supreme Leader” of Iran’s theocracy. Despite these and other differences, several fundamental themes unite them.

First, they see the world around them, and especially the political system, as pervaded with corruption and impiety. Unbelief and godlessness abound across the face of the earth. Islamic religious law, or sharia, no longer governs men’s thought and action. Wherever you look, according to Qutb, people’s ideas, habits, traditions, culture, art, and laws reflect an ignorance of Allah’s will.3

Second, they believe that Islamic law, or sharia, must be universal, shaping every facet of society, politics, and the individual’s life. Qutb argued that it was necessary to ensure “that the obedience of all people be for God alone,” everywhere.4 The faithful must establish an Islamic dominion, under divine authority, with the ultimate goal of carrying their faith “throughout the earth to the whole of mankind, as the object of this religion is all humanity and its sphere of action is the whole earth.”5

Third, they hold that it is time for the righteous to solve these problems — the world’s deviation from the true path — by imposing religious law as an all-encompassing, total political-social system. In the words of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that gave rise to Al Qaeda, Hamas, and many other factions, “Islam is the solution.”6 In Khomeini’s political vision, realized in the Iranian regime, it is a cleric — one deeply knowledgeable about (religious) law and justice — who must hold ultimate power within society.7 While Qutb and Mawdudi had their own views of how to structure government, they agreed with Khomeini on the basic solution to the impiety pervading the world: a sharia regime enveloping the totality of human life and society, where religion and the state are one. It is a political system wherein every individual must submit to Allah’s will. A fitting description for this vision is Islamic totalitarianism.

Qutb, Mawdudi, and Khomeini also share the belief that jihad is a means for bringing about a truly just world. The term “jihad” is seen as having two meanings — referring both to personal struggle and to a holy war.8 But what Qutb, Mawdudi, Khomeini, and kindred thinkers call for — and lionize — is the waging of war to expand the dominion of Islam. The Iranian regime was both an embodiment of that totalitarian vision and a self-declared leader in exporting its revolutionary doctrine beyond its own borders. Indeed, the Iranian regime has been not only a galvanizing force for the Islamist movement globally, but also a major leader of it.9

It is this political-ideological vision that underlies the jihadist bombings, massacres, and random-seeming violence. The ultimate point of the attacks and killing is to punish unbelievers, compel us to submit in obedience to Allah’s law, and enforce sharia law, everywhere. That desire for world domination sounds fanciful and unachievable, but what matters here is that it animates the enemy.

Here’s how the Islamic State explained their outlook. Because the statement is particularly clear and emphatic, it’s worth quoting at length:

We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah — whether you realize it or not — by making partners for Him in worship, you blaspheme against Him, claiming that He has a son, you fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers, and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. “There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to their people, ‘Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah. We have rejected you, and there has arisen, between us and you, enmity and hatred forever until you believe in Allah alone’” (Al-Mumtahanah 4). Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you, your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims, or by paying jizyah — for those afforded this option — and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims. Thus, even if you were to stop fighting us, your best-case scenario in a state of war would be that we would suspend our attacks against you — if we deemed it necessary — in order to focus on the closer and more immediate threats, before eventually resuming our campaigns against you. Apart from the option of a temporary truce, this is the only likely scenario that would bring you fleeting respite from our attacks. So in the end, you cannot bring an indefinite halt to our war against you. At most, you could only delay it temporarily. “And fight them until there is no fitnah [paganism] and [until] the religion, all of it, is for Allah” (Al-Baqarah 193).10

When judged by their words and deeds, what motivates the jihadists is their interpretation of Islam.

Nothing to do with Islam?

Nonetheless, many people insist that these killers have nothing to do with the religion of Islam.

Part of what gives that notion some plausibility is that within the global community of more than one billion Muslims, there are indeed differences on how to understand the Koran and the sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad. There are rival sects within Islam, and there are also multiple schools of thought on the body of laws known as sharia. But does the outlook of jihadists have nothing to do with Islam?

That’s the strong claim we hear in many of the post-9/11 speeches of George W. Bush (here, here, and here, to give just three examples). Bush went so far as to describe them as “traitors to their own faith.” The view has persisted. In 2014, after the Islamic State slaughtered an American citizen, President Barack Obama stated that the group’s “actions represent no faith, least of all the Muslim faith.”

The claim that some interpretation of Islam (or another religion) is a departure from, a perversion, or a “hijacking” of the one true faith relies on a dubious assumption. It counts on the assumption that religious dogma — by definition lacking objective, empirical foundation — lends itself to one definitive interpretation. Conflicting and warring sects may each hold that view, but from the vantage point of the outsider, we see that there is no way to answer which is the true version of, say, Christianity or Islam.

To evaluate whether the Islamist movement is deeply rooted in Islam’s teachings and ideas, we need to approach the issue differently. We need to look at whether the movement’s views, agenda, and actions constitute an intelligible interpretation of Islamic books and historic doctrines. Put another way, the question to ask is whether the views and injunctions that jihadists take away from their reading of Islamic texts mesh with the religion’s commonly recognized teachings — or fly in the face of those religious teachings by denying, for instance, mankind’s fundamental duty of submission to religious authority.

The answer we find is that what the leaders of the Islamist movement call for connects to commonly recognized teachings of Islam. Let’s compare three key features of the outlook of Islamic totalitarians with commonly identified teachings of the religion of Islam. Take the Islamist demand for (1) submission to Allah’s law; (2) the universal scope of sharia law; and (3) expanding the dominion of Islam. For an account of Islam’s teachings, let’s consult John L. Esposito’s college textbook, Islam: The Straight Path (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed.). Esposito is a noted scholar of Islam at Georgetown University, and his book is a sympathetic account of the religion.

1. Submission

“Despite the rich diversity in Islamic practice,” writes Esposito, “the Five Pillars of Islam remain the core and common denominator, the five essential and obligatory practices all Muslims accept and follow.”11 From Esposito’s discussion of the Five Pillars, we can observe that the sum of these supreme duties is to effect and demonstrate the believer’s complete submission to authority.

The first pillar is the call upon a Muslim (“one who surrenders”) to proclaim: “There is no god but the God [Allah] and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” With this acknowledgement, writes Esposito, “a person professes his or her faith and becomes a Muslim.”12

The second pillar is to reaffirm this commitment through prayer, five times a day.

The third pillar is the obligation of alms-giving (zakat): “All adult Muslims who are able to do so are obliged to pay a wealth tax annually”; Esposito goes on to explain: “This is not regarded as charity since it is not really voluntary but instead owed, by those who have received their wealth as a trust from God’s bounty, to the poor. The Quran (9:60) and Islamic law stipulate that alms are to be used to support the poor, orphans, and widows, to free slaves and debtors, and to assist in the spread of Islam.”13

The fourth pillar is the annual fast of Ramadan, when Muslims refrain from eating, drinking, and sex, from dawn to dusk, for a month.

The fifth pillar is the duty to make a pilgrimage (the Hajj) to Mecca, incumbent on males.14

What do these obligations add up to? We can see that to practice his religion, the believer is duty bound to bow continually before Allah; reaffirm his submission five times a day; cross oceans and continents in pilgrimage to demonstrate unwavering faith; sacrifice worldly values and efface personal desires in the name of devotion to the supernatural master.

All of this hinges on a belief grounded only on faith. To have faith means to believe without evidence (and despite counter-evidence), to suspend one’s own perception and rational judgment. The faithful individual is required to put the dictates of religious authority above his or her own grasp of facts. He must learn that he is not a sovereign individual; Allah alone is sovereign, and man must bow to religious authority. What this moral code offers is guidance on how one can achieve the ideal of becoming a servant of Allah.

Islam demands the individual’s submission to religious authority. Fundamentally, leaders of the Islamist movement also call for mankind to submit to religious authority. Listen, for example, to Sayyid Qutb:

The theoretical foundation of Islam, in every period of history, has been to witness “La ilaha illa Allah” — “There is no deity except God” — which means to bear witness that the only true deity is God, that He is the Sustainer, that He is the Ruler of the universe, and that He is the Real Sovereign; to believe in Him in one’s heart, to worship Him Alone, and to put into practice His laws. Without this complete acceptance of ‘‘La ilaha illa Allah,” which differentiates the one who says he is a Muslim from a non-Muslim, there cannot be any practical significance to this utterance, nor will it have any weight according to Islamic law. Theoretically, to establish it means that people should devote their entire lives in submission to God, should not decide any affair on their own, but must refer to God’s injunctions concerning it and follow them. We know of God’s guidance through only one source, that is, through the Messenger of God — peace be on him. Thus, in the second part of the Islamic creed, we bear witness “Wa ashhadu anna Muhammadar Rasul Allah” — “And I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of God.”15

If the Five Pillars form the core of Islam, is not Qutb’s one intelligible interpretation of their meaning and application?

2. Universality of Sharia

Islam provides a body of laws, or sharia, derived mainly from the Koran and interpretations of sayings and deeds attributed to Mohammad.16 Esposito explains:

Law in Islam is both universal and egalitarian. The Sharia is believed to be God’s law for the entire Islamic community, indeed for all humankind. In the final analysis, God is the sovereign ruler of the world, head of the human community, and its sole legislator. As a result, Islamic law is as much a system of ethics as it is law, for it is concerned with what a Muslim ought to do or ought not to do. All acts are ethically categorized as: (1) obligatory; (2) recommended; (3) indifferent or permissible; (4) reprehensible but not forbidden; or (5) forbidden. To break the law is a transgression against both society and God, a crime and a sin; the guilty are subject to punishment in this life and the next. The idealism of the law can be seen in the fact that ethical categories such as recommended and reprehensible were not subject to civil penalties. Islamic law is also egalitarian; it transcends regional, family, tribal, and ethnic boundaries. It does not recognize social class or caste differences. All Muslims, Arab and non-Arab, rich and poor, black and white, caliph and craftsman, male and female, are bound by Islamic law as members of a single, transnational community or brotherhood of believers. The belief that Islamic law was a comprehensive social blueprint was reflected in the organization and content of law.17

Notice in Esposito’s description how morality and political life are united (the breaking of religious law is both a sin and a crime).

The Islamists agree that Islam’s embrace must be universal, and that the Koran answers the needs of mankind. For example, Qutb notes that “The distinctive feature of a Muslim community is this: that in all its affairs it is based on worship of God alone.”18 Islamists argue that Muslims and their rulers have strayed from the requirements of piety by adopting man-made laws, which are morally corrupting, instead of recognizing that sovereignty belongs only to Allah.

For the Islamist movement, the universality of Islam means that it must encompass all of a believer’s existence but also the existence of non-believers. It must span all of Allah’s creations. Mawdudi, for example, argued that a sharia regime cannot be limited in its scope: “Its approach is universal and all-embracing. Its sphere of activity is coexistent with the whole of human life.”19 Qutb echoes that theme: Islam, he writes, “addresses itself to the whole of mankind, and its sphere of work is the whole earth. God is the sustainer not merely of the Arabs, nor is His providence limited to those who believe in the faith of Islam. God is the Sustainer of the whole world.”20

3. Expanding the dominion of Allah’s law

The call to fight unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion flows out of Koranic statements, and it is reflected in the example of the Prophet Mohammad, whose actions are widely seen as embodying the true path. For example, the Koran (9:29) states: “Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, [even if they are] of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.”21

And in practice, during the last nine years of his life, Mohammad is “recorded as having participated in at least twenty-seven campaigns and deputized some fifty-nine others — an average of no fewer than nine campaigns annually.”22 Islam’s vast empire grew under the shadow of the sword. Mohammad’s successors marched on.

Fighting unbelievers in order to expand Islam’s earthly dominion is precisely what Islamic totalitarians seek to do. That’s what the Islamic State sought to do, a point evident in the lengthy passage I quoted earlier. Long before the Islamic State eclipsed Al Qaeda, and before both were household names, the Islamist movement’s standard-bearer was, and largely remains, the Iranian regime.

“The Iranian revolution,” declared Ayatollah Khomeini, “is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people. . . . We will export our revolution throughout the world because it is an Islamic revolution. The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”23

Islamists demand total submission to sharia, they believe sharia’s scope to be universal, and their widest aim is to enforce religious tyranny, everywhere. Does that fundamental end, and the idea of fighting to achieve it, fly in the face of Islamic teaching? No. Does the Islamist movement’s interpretation intelligibly flow out of Islam? Yes.

The Islamists constitute an ideological movement deeply rooted in Islam. We should believe jihadists, then, when they tell us that they are Muslims. But while all jihadists are Muslims, it’s plainly false that all Muslims are jihadists. Rather, the Islamist movement is a subset within the community of people who profess the religion of Islam. Clearly, even though all Muslims are expected to accept the Koran, only some — the jihadists — hold and practice their interpretation of Islam as a totalitarian ideological-political cause.

To put this point into even sharper focus, let’s consider two contrasting views which I brought up earlier in this essay. Each in its own way pushes back on the idea that Islamic ideas are fundamental to the nature and aim of this movement. One blurs ideas and race; the other plays down or negates the role of religious ideas and tells us to look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental. Let’s take each of these in turn.

It’s not about heredity; it is a chosen religious-political worldview

It’s true and important that many, many jihadists were born into families and communities that are Muslim. That fact, however, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition of becoming a follower of the Islamist movement. It’s not about genetic lineage (an unchosen group membership); it’s about what is being taught and a recruit’s chosen embrace of a religious-political worldview.

You can see that from the cases of individuals who’ve chosen to join — and from some who reject — the movement. For example, Maajid Nawaz was born in the UK to a Pakistani family. Not particularly religious when he encountered the Islamist movement, he became deeply involved in it and worked for some years as a recruiter for the cause. But he eventually turned his back on the movement and renounced it.24

By contrast, John Walker Lindh was raised in Maryland and in Marin County, California; his father is Catholic and his mother, a follower of Buddhism. Having converted to Islam, he went on to read Islamist materials, and made his way to Afghanistan before 9/11, where he trained at an Al Qaeda camp and took up arms alongside the Taliban.

The Islamic State trumpeted the fact that it attracted converts from Christianity who emigrated to live and fight under its black flag. In the July 2016 issue of its magazine Dabiq, for example, the Islamic State featured one former Christian from Trinidad, another from Finland.

Yet many people today fail to understand that the Islamist movement is an ideological phenomenon — that its followers are fundamentally driven by a set of religious ideas about life, the world, and the good.

No one is born a follower of any religion or ideological cause — whether Islam, Christianity, Judaism, or Marxism. These are belief systems that an individual must come to adopt. An individual may well do so passively, conforming with the flow of the people and culture around them; but it remains the case that they can choose to question that ideological outlook and reject it.

Observe an important implication of this point, which relates to the widespread lack of understanding about the Islamist movement.

Clearly it’s essential that we analyze, discuss, criticize and morally judge this ideological movement, just as we must every ideological movement, secular or supernatural. In doing so, we’re evaluating a set of ideas and the people who choose to embrace them. That’s in sharp contrast with racial, tribal, or xenophobic condemnations of groups of people, which is obviously wrong.

If we recognize this critical distinction, then we should reject the increasingly prevalent idea of “Islamophobia.” This deliberately confusing term seeks to shut down critical analysis of the Islamist movement and its ideas by smearing such discussion as inherently prejudiced against Muslims, or worse.

No one seeking to combat prejudice toward Muslims can honestly believe that that problem can be solved by silencing discussion of the Islamist movement and entrenching the cultural ignorance already besetting this issue.

Fundamentally, it’s religious ideas, not political or economic factors, that animate the Islamist movement

Let’s turn now to a contrasting view that would seem to loosen, if not fully sever, the fundamental causal link between jihadists and their religious worldview. The Islamists quote holy texts, but (on this line of thinking) their ideological outlook is not what ultimately motivates them. Instead, we should look to material factors, such as political or economic issues, as fundamental drivers of the movement.25

What makes this perspective plausible? Consider two salient points: (1) Some followers are poor, and the Islamist ideologues themselves invoke political grievances in their manifestos and in recruitment propaganda. (2) Some followers of the movement seemingly lack deep knowledge of religious ideas.

Certainly, some jihadists, in some parts of the world, come from desperate poverty. Note, however, that many other people around the world face similar, if not worse, circumstances, but few of them become holy warriors. You can also find eager jihadists who are well-educated, raised in middle-class homes in some of the world’s freest, most-advanced countries.26

Islamist tracts, recruitment materials, and propaganda videos do invoke various political grievances. For example, bin Laden’s infamous 1996 “Declaration of Jihad” against America decried the presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. It also emphasized the issue of “Palestine,”27 which has been all over various jihadist propaganda, for years.28 Islamists have leveraged these claims (along with various others) to recruit for their jihad.

But when we take a closer look, it becomes clear that such grievances are effective precisely because of a fundamental religious narrative that frames them. In that story there is a cosmic struggle for a “just” world, one subservient to religious dogma. The crux of that is the striving of the faithful (Islamists) against the unbelievers (impious Muslims, apostates, infidels, atheists; particularly in the West). Within that framework, a great many issues and conflicts can actuate new recruits, who see themselves as part of a global Muslim community (or, “umma”).

Here are some emotional-ideological “buttons” that the Islamists have pushed in order to galvanize, recruit, and draw people into the movement. The fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, during the 1980s, attracted a significant influx of foreign holy warriors (Osama bin Laden among them). The Bosnia conflict, during the 1990s, was another trigger, because Muslims were targeted.29 In his memoir Maajid Nawaz recounts how seeing videos of Muslims being slaughtered in the Bosnia conflict inflamed him. The victims were all strangers to him, but they belonged to a global Muslim community, and Nawaz felt impelled to fight for the redemption of his co-religionists.30 The bond of collective religious solidarity was that strong. During the mid-2010s, the rise of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria proved an even more powerful magnet for international jihadists; one of its themes was the sectarian hostility toward non-Sunnis.

The common factor here is the specifically Islamist narrative that frames the worldview of recruits, manipulating their emotions. They are primed to feel a powerful solidarity with co-religionists throughout the world and to regard anything short of an all-encompassing Islamist regime as a metaphysical injustice that they must fight to rectify.

For example, in the case of the “Palestine” issue, the basic concern of Islamists is not any political grievance about Israeli borders, land-use policy, or alleged oppression of particular individuals.31 They demand not freedom and prosperity for Palestinians (or anyone else), but submission: Islamists seek to enslave the world — including Palestine — under Allah’s laws. Only conquering Israel and raising the flag of Islamic totalitarianism over Palestine and Jerusalem could satisfy them.32

The same applies to their framing of American foreign policy in the Middle East. The removal of American troops from the region would not pacify the Islamists, nor the cessation of American military strikes in Muslim lands, nor the halting of American backing for some of the region’s dictators. U.S Mideast policy is riddled with serious problems (which I’ve written about at length), but there’s no version of American policy in the region, and no genuine problems we might rectify, that Islamists would regard as unproblematic. Their basic objection is that we’re unbelievers, everything we do is an affront, and, in the end, it is they who should dominate, everywhere, in the name of religious totalitarianism.

Consider how the Islamic State explained this point in its magazine Dabiq. Among the reasons for hating and fighting to overthrow the West’s secular, liberal societies, the article lists American foreign policy, but stresses how that is a derivative factor.

What’s important to understand here is that although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred, this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us, vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you because our primary reason for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay jizyah and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt, we would stop fighting you then as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who enter into a covenant with us, but we would not stop hating you. What’s equally if not more important to understand is that we fight you, not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation in the Hereafter, freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires as well as those of your clergy and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your Creator alone and following His messenger.33

What, then, are we to make of the fact that some followers of the Islamist movement appear to lack substantive knowledge of religious doctrine? One anecdote that’s taken to illustrate the point: before setting out for the battlefront in Syria, two British would-be jihadists ordered copies of Islam For Dummies and The Koran for Dummies.

Leaving anecdotes to one side, researchers have found that recruits certainly have varied profiles. Peter Neumann and his colleagues at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College, London, found that recruits bound for the Islamic State fell into three broad categories: “defenders” who were devout and seeking to protect co-religionists; “seekers” attracted to the jihadist counterculture, which met their “need for identity, community, power and a feeling of masculinity”; and “hangers-on” who join because the leader of their social circle decided to.34

Should we be surprised if some, many, or most of the tens of thousands of recruits who flocked to join the Islamic State were drawn by the desire for a pseudo self-esteem as heroes for the cause, a source of religiously endorsed self-worth and identity? Should we be surprised that for some the appeal lies in the opportunity to live out a video-game fantasy where they actually get to murder people? None of that should be surprising; it makes sense that such abhorrent specimens of humanity would gravitate to a movement seeking domination.

More broadly, it’s a feature of ideological movements that they tend to attract people of varying levels of understanding, from the ardently committed to those whose understanding of the cause is shallow. Was every last warrior for communism a theoretician, or deeply versed in Marxism, or qualified to interpret the sacred theory of dialectical materialism? Clearly, no. What defines the Islamist movement is its over-arching ideological-political end.

Why it matters that we grasp the enemy’s ideological character

If we are to develop anything like a sensible policy response to the Islamist threat, we need to begin by conceptualizing it as an ideological movement. This has at least two major implications.

First, we need to take a wide-angle perspective. There are many Islamist groups, factions, organizations, regimes. Among them, there are differences over doctrine, sect, tactics, even strategic priorities. And they fight among themselves, a lot, and brutally. For example, Saudi Arabia is hostile to the Islamic State, and both revile Iran. They jockey over who is more pious, and who will dominate where. Yet what unites all of them — along with the Muslim Brotherhood, Hezbollah, Hamas, Boko Haram, and still others — is their common ideological goal.

Second, a crucial feature of this movement is that particular regimes — notably Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, and above all, Iran — are central to it.35 The Iranian regime has been the movement’s spearhead, galvanizing the Islamist cause.

The Muslim Brotherhood, a foundational group in the movement, started in Egypt in the 1920s, but accomplished little. What supercharged the jihadist cause was the 1979 Iranian revolution. That shockwave brought to power in Tehran an Islamic totalitarian regime determined to export its ideological revolution. Iran was such an inspiration because it made the Islamist cause seem achievable. Iran armed, trained, and funded Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. It has backed insurgent groups in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in its own way, the Saudi regime has nourished the Islamist cause. The Saudis invested millions of dollars setting up religious schools, distributing books, and proselytizing across the globe for its preferred strain of Islamic totalitarianism. Saudi money funds various jihadist groups, including the Taliban.

And the Gulf states, for their part, have bankrolled their favored jihadist factions. Qatar, for example, is a backer of Hamas.36

Absent the inspiration and material backing of these regimes; absent the galvanizing spectacle of real-life, functioning Islamist regimes such as in Iran and elsewhere; the jihadist cause would have amounted to little more than a bunch of seething pamphleteers and ineffectual revolutionaries. Such regimes make the ideal actuating the jihadists appear righteous, potent, practical.

With that understanding, we can define a policy response that directs the full range of our diplomatic and military resources toward eliminating these regimes. Without that understanding? Take a look at the confused mess that has been our Mideast policy for upwards of two decades.

Prior to September 11, American policy was prone to a fragmented, myopic outlook. The 9/11 attacks came as a surprise, but they should not have. Islamists had tried to bring down the Twin Towers before, in 1993, using a truck bomb. Nor was that the only jihadist attack prior to 9/11; in my book Winning the Unwinnable War, I describe how the road to 9/11 was punctuated by an escalating sequence of violent attacks. Our policymakers and leaders viewed the threat as a series of crises, to be dealt with in the moment, without wider, ideological context. There were many dots, and we recognized each as a problem, but we failed to connect those many dots to see the bigger picture: the common ideas animating the Islamist movement.

Earlier, I pointed out how George W. Bush continually insisted that jihadists were motivated by something other than religious ideas. Bush’s perspective denied the common denominator uniting the Islamist movement. This was a factor in his evasion of the fundamental centrality of Iran and Saudi Arabia to the movement. Despite some of Bush’s rhetoric about going after those who harbor and support the “terrorists,” recall that Iran and Saudi Arabia were not merely omitted from the “Global War on Terrorism”; Saudi Arabia was affirmed a loyal ally, and, eventually, Bush sought to engage Iran in diplomatic negotiations. After scattering the jihadists in Afghanistan, the focal point of Bush’s response became Iraq — a regime that had little to do with the Islamist cause.37

The Obama administration, vowing to avoid Bush’s failures, reverted to a kind of hyper narrow conception of the threat (our enemy is Al Qaeda! no, it’s ISIS!). This conception was drained of ideological substance; a person becomes a “violent extremist,” we were told, mainly because of political grievances and economic privation.38 By playing down the role of ideas, by viewing the problem as consisting of many disparate groups, factions, regimes, rather than a movement united by an ideological outlook, Obama’s policy saw no contradiction in seeking to combat “terrorists” while also engaging leading regimes within the movement, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Trump administration has no coherent view of the problem. Trump has at times used the term “Radical Islamic terrorism,” but he has also implied that the problem is in some sense all Muslims (for example, recall the openness to creating a Muslim registry). Furthermore, he’s put great emphasis on the fact that certain attackers were “outsiders” — that they did not share his (or, in his view, “our”) Anglo-Saxon identity (notice Trump’s repeated emphasis on the fact that some attackers were immigrants or the American-born children of immigrants).39 This blurring of ideas and racial identity obscures the crucial fact that we’re dealing with an ideological movement, one that individuals must come to embrace by choice (rather than belong to through heredity). Among other things, this means that those who adopt and advance this ideology can — and must — be evaluated morally. But notice that, like his predecessors, Trump is not only willing to (re)negotiate with Iran, but is also friendly with Saudi Arabia.

From these sketches of how we’ve approached the problem, you see that by putting out of focus the nature and goals of the Islamists, we end up with inconsistent, short-term, immoral, and, in the end, ineffectual policy. And it is our persistent failure to confront Islamic totalitarianism that helps explain the durable appeal of this cause. That’s reflected not only in the masses who flocked to live under the Islamic State, but also in the ability of that group and of Al Qaeda to actuate independent, so-called lone-wolf jihadists to carry out attacks on their own initiative. Central to that phenomenon is the appeal of furthering a cause that the jihadists continue to see as viable.

For many years now, our approach to the problem has been deeply flawed. We had no clear idea of the nature of the problem, and we persuaded ourselves of explanations that were worse than superficial, fixating on non-essential features.

But it’s well within our capability to end this menace. Any sensible response to the jihadist threat requires that we confront not only the salient factions but also, and especially, the regimes at its forefront.

To formulate a workable plan for achieving that goal, we must start by grasping clearly the nature of our enemy.

TG wrote (in a much longer post) on my Forum:

Post #121616 Harry wrote:

Hormones can’t produce beliefs.

I agree, but they can produce feelings (broadly understood), which are not beliefs, unlike a person’s grasp of them.

Yes, and these feelings are bodily sensations, such as what you feel in your arm when you raise it, what you feel in regard to a certain food being in your mouth (liver–yum or yucch?). What you feel when you accidentally hit your thumb with a hammer.

These bodily sensations are determined by physiology, including brain physiology.

Now, what about your “feelings” about your sexual identity? Can the inherited structure of the brain, plus peripheral nerves and sense receptors, determine your liking or disliking being the gender you are? No. “I feel I am a woman” is not like “I feel pain because I struck my thumb with the hammer.”

Feelings (actually emotions) about one’s sexual nature are not bodily sensations. They are products of conclusions about: 1. oneself and 2. what it is to be a man or a woman.

The conclusions about both get formed, and automatized, very early in life–certainly well before age 5.

It is beliefs about oneself and about what masculinity and femininity are that produce “gender dysphoria.”

What is the evidence for this?

There is no sensory receptor corresponding to feeling feminine or feeling masculine. How could there be?

Compare: the hammer is a physical, concrete object out there in reality, and the free nerve endings mediating pain are in your thumb. The physical action of the hammer on the thumb produces neural firings in the C-fibers.

What would the equivalent be for feeling womanly?

“Feminine” and “masculine” are huge abstractions, not objects pushing or pulling on other objects (sense receptors) in the body.

What convictions does a rational transgender person lack? What beliefs about masculinity and femininity would cause them to become transgender?

There’s no need to answer such questions. You don’t have to have a theory of what does cause, say, feeling one was born in the wrong century, in order to know that that emotional response is not a bodily sensation.

Now let me make the best case I can for the other side. I don’t believe the following, but I can’t say it’s absolutely ruled out.

One former HBLer opined that men have “curve detectors” that cause arousal feelings when they see a woman’s curvaceous body. Suppose that were true, which would mean it’s physically wired in.

Although we know of no visual stimuli that are pre-wired to produce emotional responses (if you know of one, tell us), we do know that all animals have this. I’m pretty sure even chimps do. The male stickleback fish, for instance, goes crazy when he sees the red spot of the female in heat–or even a red dot painted on a rectangular piece of wood about the size and shape of the female.

So, for the moment, assume that some woman has the curve-detectors, so that she is, animal-like, turned on by seeing the curvy female shape. What might that do to her sense of her sexual identity?

Probably nothing. She might just note: “That’s a sexy woman, I can understand men being attracted to her,” and pass on to other non-sexual subjects of thought.

But that’s my guess at what a confidently feminine woman would feel if–which is hard to even entertain–genetically determined attraction to shapes exists.

There’s a big gap between the (utterly hypothetical) tingle one would get in looking at male bodies and female bodies to some such conclusion as, “I was born in the wrong body.”

Jeffrey Simpson, one of Canada’s greatest columnists and commentators, liked to speak of various types of Canadians as living in a “dream palace.” The sort-of separatist-sort-of-not Bloc Québécois party, for instance, defined “the dream-palace nature of Quebec politics,” allowing Quebec voters to express “dissatisfaction without requiring a commitment to support secession.”

Years later, he wrote a similar piece about the “dream palace” seducing much of the aboriginal rights establishment in Canada — the fantasy that Indigenous communities are basically autonomous nations-in-waiting. Alas, wrote Simpson, “to imagine that isolated communities of a thousand or so people can be vibrant and self-sustaining, capable of discharging the panoply of responsibilities of ‘sovereignty,’ is to live within the dream palace of memory.”

Reading some of the Canadian commentary in the press and social media about our recent trade dispute with the United States — what Prime Minister Carney grandly calls a “war” but the Trump administration insists is just “putting additional fees on foreign goods made by foreign workers in foreign countries” — brought to mind another “dream palace” in which many 21^st Century Canadians reside.

In this dream palace, the United States is not, and has never been, a friend to Canada. It is an imperialist enemy, a ravenous exploiter that takes and conquers and returns nothing of value. It is a country of awful, repulsive people who think and act dramatically differently from ourselves; alien, exotic foreigners with whom we have little to nothing in common. British Columbia’s premier David Eby erected a big sign on the US-Canada border: “Welcome to British Columbia, Canada. Strong, proud, and will NEVER be the 51st state. Sorry!” – the large “sorry” an ostentatious nod to the idea that Canadians, even at our most chauvinistic, are defined by compliments of politeness that we give ourselves.

In the dream palace, Canada’s historic relationship with the United States is that of an abusive husband and beaten spouse, an empire and colony, a master and slave. The prospect of less trade with America — maybe even no trade with America? — is emancipatory and exciting, while imposing counter-tariffs on American goods is empowering and righteous. Who needs their crap anyway! In this flattering reality, Canada holds extraordinary economic leverage over the United States, meaning a divorce from their orbit will not only help us achieve long-denied dreams of independent development and autonomy, but do profound damage to the bad guys in the process.

In the dream palace, Canada breaks the chains of the United States and immediately elopes with a new, more caring partner. Perhaps we join the European Union, whose members we imagine ourselves to be more like anyway. Spanish retirement here we come! Or perhaps we form the core of a reconstituted British empire — CANZUK — with our cousins in Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain, under the winsome smile of King Charles III, who loves us so very much.

In this dreamy atmosphere, Prime Minister Carney (who is likely seduced by fantasies of his own that he’ll be rewarded for his anti-American statesmanship with an appointment as head of NATO, or maybe the European Central Bank) becomes a kind of Churchillian leader whose courage and wisdom in fighting the perpetual enemy is not to be questioned, because in times of war questions are for Quislings. Liberal Americans, for whom Carney is purely a symbol whose actions bear no consequence on their lives, celebrate the “defiance” of this impressive foreign leader and praise him for having more courage than themselves, inflating the ego of both the prime minister and those who voted for him.

Dream palace Canada is a place untethered from the economic realities of a country inescapably dependent — for reasons of geography, but also simple self-interest — on the United States for the prosperity and standard of living Canadians take for granted. It is similarly unmoored from the cultural realities of Canada, in which everything that makes Canadian life easy, enjoyable, or cool comes as a result of technology and entertainment forged from American dreams, ideas, and assumptions. To live in the dream palace is to deny the fundamentally American character of Canada, which we have been taught to consider humiliating and subordinate, and imagine that casting off Americanism will allow us to become a truer version of ourselves, a people defined only by what is good. It is the naive dream of a vain and spoiled child.

It is obvious why many Canadians want to live in the dream palace. It is dangerous that Prime Minister Carney has built his political project around encouraging us to fill its gingerbread halls.

[This is an edited version of a talk I delivered in July of 2025, shortly after the U.S. launched massive attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites.]

The big news in foreign policy is that President Trump ordered the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. No doubt, some of you are wondering how to evaluate that decision. Does it represent a dramatic change in our policy? Does it reflect a new, more assertive foreign policy, one that is no longer reluctant to use massive force to defend American interests? 

To answer that, we have to start with the fundamentals of this subject. And requires an understanding of the fact that both domestic policy and foreign policy are implementations of exactly the same principle.

At first thought you might assume that the two are very different. After all, a proper domestic policy calls for laissez-faire—which means a government that stays out of people’s lives. A proper foreign policy, on the other hand, calls for a government that acts forcefully to protect us. So the first seems to constrain the power of government, while the second unleashes it.

But no—the two are the same.

The principle of individual rights sets the guideline for both. And that principle imposes two imperatives on government: refrain from initiating force, and embrace the use of retaliatory force. These are the two, equally vital elements of a political system designed to protect individual rights.

Domestically, these imperatives mean: leave innocent people alone—and use the police and the courts to act in retaliation against those who violate rights. Internationally, they mean: refrain from interfering with other nations—and use the military to exercise retaliatory force if and when they threaten us.

The concept of individual rights is a selfish one. It declares that everyone has a right to his life, his liberty and the pursuit of his happiness. And just as the principle of self-interest guides one’s personal life, so too one’s political life. The government’s job is to enable individuals to pursue their self-interest—to allow them to act on their own judgment—by protecting them against initiated force.

When it comes to foreign policy, the government’s function is to selfishly defend the nation’s interests. And this is where people flounder in formulating a proper policy. They are unable to define the nation’s interests. For example, here is our State Department’s official description of its basic mission: “To protect and promote U.S. security, prosperity, and democratic values and shape an international environment in which all Americans can thrive.”Can that vague statement of floating abstractions provide any actual guidance to the architects of our foreign policy? All it does is endorse an unprincipled, seat-of-the-pants approach to every concrete situation that arises.

What, then, constitutes America’s self-interest? A nation’s interests consist of the interests of its individual inhabitants. And in the political realm, there is one fundamental interest we all have: freedom.

An individual pursues his self-interest by judging what actions are necessary to advance his own life. But to do so, he must be free to follow his judgment. A slave is not living his life, but the life demanded by his master. The moral value of freedom is simultaneously the practical value of freedom—the value that, politically, defines the self-interest of each individual, and thus of the nation.

While the government defends our freedom at home mainly by protecting us against criminals, it does the same internationally by protecting us against criminal-states. Its job is to keep us safe from any threats of force coming from abroad. (Obviously, this does not mean we have to wait for enemy missiles actually to be launched onto U.S. soil. Any more than the police, when confronting a man aiming his gun at a victim, need to wait until the weapon is fired. If there is objective evidence of a foreign threat against us, our government must act to negate that threat.)

This fundamental interest subsumes the many narrower interests a foreign policy may pursue—from establishing a strong military to forging international alliances. Every aspect of our foreign policy must be a form of safeguarding the rights of Americans.

A proper criminal code protects people not only by directing the police in making arrests, by guiding the courts in conducting trials, etc., but also by deterring crime. If a society demonstrates that it regards criminal activity with the utmost gravity and is prepared to employ the full power of its criminal justice system, without hesitation and without mercy, malefactors will think twice before breaking the law.

In the field of foreign affairs, deterring the initiation of force against us is obviously even more important. A rational foreign policy minimizes the possibility of war—not as its primary goal, but as a consequence of its vigorous defense of liberty. It prevents war by conveying to America’s an­tagonists the credible warning that any aggression on their part will be met with overwhelming force. It informs our enemies of our certainty in the rightness of our political values—and our rejection of any doctrine invoked by criminal-states to justify their coercive behavior against us. It informs our enemies that America’s commitment to upholding its interests is unyielding.

When freedom is the fundamental interest that nations are pursuing, there are no conflicts of interest. A free country’s self-interest is not attained at the expense of other nations. Just as, in a free market, an individual’s wealth is not gained by the impoverishment of his neighbor, so too the freedom of one nation is not gained by the enslavement of another.

It is not an act of altruism for America to recognize the rights of the citizens of other nations and to refrain from attacking them. Rather, the recognition of rights is precisely the principle upon which our own self-interest rests. A free country’s interests lie in not being subject to initiated force—and, for the same reason, it lies in not subjecting others to such force. A free country has no need, and no desire, for conquest. It grows prosperous by production and trade, not by coercion and oppression. A free country’s pursuit of its self-interest entails no sacrifice—neither of itself to others, nor of others to itself.

But just establishing that the fundamental interest government ought to defend is its citizens’ freedom, is not enough. The planners of our foreign policy need more specific guidelines in order to identify the means by which this purpose is to be achieved. What they need are instructions on how to practice the virtue that underlies all aspects of a proper foreign policy: justice.

JUSTICE IN FOREIGN POLICY

Nations, like individuals, must be objectively evaluated before they can be dealt with. This is the process of justice, which is the basic means by which our foreign policy protects the value of freedom. We must recognize other nations for what they actually are in order to know how to act toward them. We must know whether they are essentially allies or enemies of America—i.e., allies or enemies of liberty.

The opposite of justice is diplomacy—or, rather, diplomacy as it is practiced in modern times, when U.S. officials simply refuse to identify a dictatorship as a dictatorship, and instead label it a “strategic competitor” with which we must maintain cordial relations. But justice does not permit such egalitarianism. Justice demands that a cordial rela­tionship be maintained only with a nation that deserves it. This implies certain requirements on the part of our policymakers. Among them are the following:

 (1) Pronounce moral judgment. Our State Department should scrupulously judge the world’s governments by the standard of a commitment to individual rights—and should make its conclusions public. A harmoni­ous relationship with all nations is not a goal of foreign policy. To the contrary, it is incompatiblewith America’s fundamental goal. We only undermine our freedom when we welcome, or are neutral toward, its destroyers. We should praise those who share our values and condemn those who do not—and act accordingly. We should make public a list of countries we regard as supportive of freedom and those we regard as hostile to freedom. This achieves the very practical purpose of telling the world that we take our ideals seriously enough to regard our enemies as . . . enemies. (And “enemies” refers to those who would use physical force against us, not those who compete with us economically.)

It is when our antagonists are led to think that their crimes will be tolerated by us—when they see that we operate on the expedient premise that our interests are divorced from our moral values—when they see that our standard response to any foreign entity that presents a physical danger to us is conciliation and compromise—when they see how reluctant we are to judge our enemies and to take the actions required by that judgment–it is then that our enemies grow militarily stronger and psychologically bolder.

It is by being willing to openly judge other countries that we express our loyalty to the value of liberty.

(2) Do not compromise principles. Any compromise between the defenders of freedom and those who actively seek to extinguish it only strengthens the latter at the expense of the former. To compromise one’s principles is to surrender the end in a deluded pursuit of the means. There are no beneficial “deals” to be made with those who are dedicated to our obliteration. Any alleged values to be gained through amicable relations with them—peace, trade, etc.—are as meaningless as the “peace” or “trade” that exists in a concentration camp.

There is no “happy medium” between a foreign policy of self-interest and one of self-sacrifice. The basic alternative in foreign policy is either self-protection or self-endangerment. Any attempt to combine the two opposites serves only to dilute the poison one is ingesting, with the result being simply a protracted, rather than an immediate, demise.

(3) Renounce appeasement. Appeasement is a particularly self-destructive form of compromise. It is the pretense that there are no enemies out there, only potential allies willing to be bought off, and ready to announce that their interests suddenly coincide with those of their bribers. So Hitler is bought off with Czechoslovakia, on the premise that somehow it will no longer be in his “interests” to enslave Poland or the rest of Europe. Just as it is assumed that the “interests” of the Hamas and Hezbollah jihadists, once they are given autocratic reign over some territory, will somehow no longer include the butchering of Israeli babies and the cleansing of all Jewish blood from “Greater Palestine.”

The truth, though, is that there is no possibility of an equal exchange with those who can offer nothing but a promise—a meaningless promise—to refrain from aggression.

Appeasement is a pathetic strategy when used by a schoolboy to deal with the class bully; it is an absurd act of . . . self-emasculation when practiced by the world’s superpower. The choice to be a criminal, or a dictator, is a choice about moralvalues—and being showered with money will not persuade the recipient that his choice is wrong. It will not keep him from both taking your payment and engaging in his brutality, to the extent he feels he can get away with it. The only reliable allies are those that do not need to be bought—i.e., those that share our moral and political principles. The appeaser declares that a killer pointing a gun at you actually agrees with your basic ends; he differs only in his choice of the means by which to earn a living. So—the appeaser says—there must be a mutually beneficial deal, some inducement you can offer him, that will make him choose a peaceful life and keep him from killing you.

The only way to protect oneself from such physical threats, is by responding with overwhelming retaliatory force. Protection cannot be achieved by speaking softly and carrying a big carrot.

 (4) Do not sanction our destroyers. The sustaining of any widespread tyranny—from communism to Islamic terrorism—is not possible without the moral sanction of its victims. It was because so many in the West viewed communism as a “noble theory” that the Soviet Union was not boycotted economically and shunned politically. Because the Soviet Union was treated as a civilized country, rather than as a brutal slaughterhouse, it was able to obtain from the West the means of fending off starvation and of procuring a military arsenal that endangered the world for so long.

Similar moral concessions on the part of the victims have led to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism. We are often urged to avoid judging the guilty parties, especially the governments that support them, strictly by Western standards. We are told to empathize with those who are struggling for “self-determination,” or with those who need to demonstrate solidarity with their Muslim brothers in their fight against so-called Western imperialism.

But if we hold freedom as an objective political value, we cannot tolerate those who are acting to eradicate it. We dare not say, “Well, their standards may be different from ours, but we must accept a diversity of viewpoints.” We must treat them as an unqualified evil. Yet every time such destroyers are politely invited to a State Department cocktail party—or are permitted by us to preside over the Human Rights Commission at the United Nations—America is granting them the imprimatur of a moral sanction.

TODAY’S POLITICS

The threats against America have been growing only because we have abandoned the principles that undergird a free, and secure, society. It’s time to try adopting them.

Let’s see how they apply to current politics.

We have today Donald Trump proclaiming—as part of his promise to “Make America Great Again”—a policy of “America First.” Many believe that this is a policy of firmly defending America’s interests. But is it?

The essential characteristic of America—the characteristic that truly makes, or made, America great, is its embrace of individual freedom. That is the moral principle on which the country was founded and is what constitutes America’s basic interest. That interest cannot be safeguarded by leaders who see no moral distinction between free countries and dictatorships—it cannot be safeguarded by leaders who are openly envious of the political power wielded by foreign autocrats.

Nor can it be safeguarded through a foreign policy that interprets “America first” as requiring further government restrictions over voluntary dealings between people.

When people deal with one another, their self-interest—authentic, rational self-interest—requires that they trade. Each offers value for value. On this basis, there is no duplicity and no victimization; there is only honest, mutually beneficial exchange. Trade rests on, and reinforces, the idea that people’s trueinterests are not in conflict.

A foreign policy based on self-interest, therefore, embraces free trade. It allows everyone to seek out the best products at the lowest prices, wherever the source. Whether you choose to buy from someone across the street or from across the ocean, both parties gain. That’s what voluntary trade means.

This is categorically different from Trump’s outlook.

Trump cannot conceive of trade as being mutually beneficial. Instead, he believes that one party’s gain comes only through another’s loss. His ideal is the conniving wheeler-dealer, master of the “art of the deal,” who manages to put one over on his partner. His view of human interaction is that one must be either victimizer or victim, predator or prey. He thinks, for example, that Americans who trade with foreigners are being taken advantage of. Sohe calls on the government to curtail such voluntary transactions by imposing tariffs and other restrictions.

Trump views America from the perspective of a crude tribalist. He believes that to defend America is not to defend an idea or a principle; rather, it is to protect the tribe of the native-born against foreign interaction. His interpretation of “America first” is shaped by the notion of economic nationalism. Do you want to buy goods from sellers abroad? Are you a foreign-born person who wants to lead a self-supporting life in America? Are you a businessman who wants to produce better and cheaper products by outsourcing work to India or building a factory in Mexico? Trump declares that you will be stopped in order to shield America from “outsiders.” America’s greatness, he holds, is the product of native-born, white Christians, who must be insulated from foreigners and from goods made by foreigners. These native-born people become a privileged group for whose sake individual rights are to be sacrificed. America’s self-interest is thus defined not by the preservation of individualism but by the entrenchment of collectivism—i.e., by enshrining the tribe, a tribe defined by the accidental fact of one’s geographic birthplace.

Let me briefly clear up a confusion some people have about  nationalism and patriotism. The two are very different. Nationalism is a collectivist idea, which regards the nation as the primary political unit of life and which holds that the citizen is obligated to devote his energies to the glorification of whatever state happens to declare him its subject. The nationalist demands, not loyalty, but unconditional loyalty—mindless loyalty—to the state. He is a collectivist, who believes in sacrificing the individual for the sake of the “nation as a whole.” The American patriot, however, supports his country because of an ideal it represents—the ideal of individualism, under which the primary unit of political life is the individual. The patriot understands that genuine self‑interest requires limitingthe state’s power for the pur­pose of upholding individual rights—in contrast to the nationalist, who calls for suppressing individual rights for the purpose of expandingthe state’s powers. The patriot readily criticizes his country when it becomes a threat to his rights. What he supports is not “America first” but America’s freedom first.

Now let’s continue to examine how the principles of a correct foreign policy should be implemented. If government must protect us against foreign threats to our freedom, what are those actual threats currently?

At the very top of the list is Islamic totalitarianism. The jihadists who launch terrorist attacks against us—from the airplane hijackers of 9/11, to the Houthis in Yemen today—are not simply a hodgepodge of fanatics who happen to have grudges against the United States. Rather, they are motivated by an ideology—an ideology calling for the imposition, by force, of the tenets of Islam. It’s an ideology that calls for the extermination of all “infidels,” starting with Americans.

And the pre-eminent source of that ideology is the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran is the wellspring of modern Islamic totalitarianism. It is a nation that was founded, in 1979, by a religious revolution against a secular, Western-style state. (The fact that it was ruled by a despot was not what motivated the Islamists, who installed a far more tyrannical government; it was the Western orientation that they found objectionable.)

 Iran is a nation governed by its clerics. It is a nation whose constitution calls for ”the perpetuation of the revolution inside and outside of Iran, in particular [by] developing ties with other Islamic and popular movements to pave the path for the unified world Muslim nationhood.” Iran is a nation that shelters leaders of al-Qaeda, the group responsible for the 9/11 attacks against us. It is a nation whose notorious fatwah against Salman Rushdie and his publishers—including America publishers—with a multi-million-dollar bounty on their lives, remains in force. It is a nation that sponsors the terrorist assaults against us by such groups as Hezbollah and Hamas, including the killing of dozens of Americans, in Israel, during the unspeakable attacks of Oct. 7, 2023.

The terrorist acts against us committed in the name Islam, at home and abroad, are inspired, encouraged and even financed by Iran. Iran is a nation that has understood from the very start—from the time in 1979 that it invaded our embassy in Tehran and held its occupants hostage for over a year—that America, the “Great Satan,” is its arch-enemy. Iran has long been at war with America—but America fails to realize it.

To remove the threat of Islamic totalitarianism, it is the government of Iran that needs to be removed. We need to overthrow it by subduing the country militarily. What motivates the perpetrators of terrorism is the belief that the forces of Islam are all-powerful and will ultimately prevail over an impotent West. We therefore need to demoralize the entire jihadist movement. And the way to do that is to eradicate its moral and financial patron: Iran. Once the jihadists see that their champion has been reduced to rubble, their commitment to their cause will dissipate.

In WWII, after the decisive defeat of our enemies, their premise of an unconquerable German Nazism and Japanese imperialism vanished. The people who had so fervently killed and died for those causes became spiritually disarmed.Once our enemies no longer had an ideology to cling to—once its impotence was made clear—its followers were demoralized and were no longer a threat to the free world.

The same will happen with Islamic totalitarianism, once we destroy its source.

Imagine that we had not crushed the enemy in WWII. Imagine instead that Hitler remained alive and was allowed to stay in power. And that after destroying Germany’s largest munitions plants, we simply called for a cease-fire. Would the world have been safe then? Would the zealots of Nazism have abandoned their deadly ideology?

What was needed then—and what America categorically demanded then—was an unconditional surrender by the enemy, and then the ousting of its government. That is what removed the danger to us.

For the same reason, we now need to forcibly depose Iran’s Islamist government, and tell its people to choose a replacement. There already exists a sizeable number of Iranian opponents of the theocracy. If necessary, we can provide them with arms. We don’t need to occupy Iran; once the current theocracy is ousted, we need only to issue an ultimatum: the Iranians can decide on their own government, but if it ever presents a jihadist threat to us, we will destroy the country. That should be sufficient to protect us.

Instead, we did a half-job–just as we’ve done regularly in the past. We destroyed much of Iran’s nuclear capacity but we have allowed its government to remain in power. We not only refrained from eradicating our enemy, but we even prevented a very willing Israel from doing so for us.

Thus, the Iranians are now loudly proclaiming that they have achieved victory—that they have confronted the Great Satan and emerged intact. And its government is renewing its efforts to round up and silence the dissidents within the country—dissidents who were expecting America’s promised support in overthrowing their oppressors, but who must now apparently abandon such hope.

As a consequence, far from being demoralized, the Iranian regime feels empowered to continue its global jihadist campaign. Yes, Americans, and the world, are better off with a non-nuclear Iran—however long that might last; but an Islamist Iran remains a danger—a danger that is not removed simply by the (temporary) elimination of its nukes.

THE NEED FOR A GUIDING PRINCIPLE

Iran is a clear-cut case of America’s need to use force to defend its interests. And so is the case of Israel fighting the Gaza war. Israel shares our basic values and its enemy in that war is simply a proxy for our enemy. So while a full-fledged deployment of U.S. troops is not warranted, we ought to supply Israel with the provisions it needs to annihilate Hamas and Hezbollah. And certainly, we should stop restraining Israel from using force against its foes.

Without a guiding principle, however, we have no way of knowing how to act in any situation. Should we bomb Iran or rely on diplomacy? If we take military action, is that just selfish aggression on our part? Are we entitled to be concerned solely with America’s interests and not Iran’s?  Do we have a right to make such decisions unilaterally or should we wait for directives from the United Nations? And if we fail to take action, will that be seen by our enemies as weakness on our part? Under a seat-of-the-pants approach, every such situation that arises becomes an insoluble dilemma.

Certainly, if we were guided by a proper principle, different circumstances would give rise to different responses on our part. They can range from engaging in all-out war, to supplying an ally with weaponry, to imposing economic sanctions, to perhaps no action at all. Even in a particular situation, there can be valid—i.e., self-interested– reasons to choose any of those options. But the underlying principle remains unchanged: our government must not hesitate to use whatever force is necessary to stop a physical threat against us.

For example, if such a policy were in place and Russia invaded Ukraine, we could decide that the threat to us is too remote to warrant action on our part. And we could be confident that this would not be taken by Russia as license to, say, try to invade Western Europe—which would be a clearer threat to our interests.

On the other hand, we could decide that since Russia is hostile to us—since it has weapons targeted at us–since it is a dictatorship with imperialistic goals and capabilities—since Ukraine’s desire to ally with America and the civilized West is what prompted Russia’s attack—we could decide that it is in our self-interest to help Ukraine defend itself. We  could decide, say, to provide the Ukrainians with arms—though not for the purpose of facilitating some compromise between the two countries, but for the purpose of completely repelling the Russian invasion. Whatever we chose to do, though, it would be plain that we were committed to a forceful defense of a clearly-defined national self-interest.

(More importantly, whether we decided to arm Ukraine or not, our government would decare our moral appraisal of that conflict, and of all similar ones. We would make known to the world which side we regard as the evil aggressor and which the innocent victim. A decision to take an  uambiguous moral stand on behalf of the victim will, in the long run, be more effective than a decision about whether or not to provide material aid.)

However, for the world to be convinced that we are committed to a principled foreign policy, we need political leaders capable of articulating and justifying it in theory. And we need at least one unmistakable demonstration of it in practice. Our willingness to use force to protect our interests would then not be questioned, even if, in some optional situation, we chose to take no action.

Sadly, we lack such a policy. Today, we have no firm guidelines, no clear idea of what our interests consist of and how to protect them. The history of our foreign policy for the past eighty years has been one of self-constraining, apologeticineptness. With no standard to guide us, we have engaged in battles which were largely self-sacrificial (such as in Vietnam), and in battles where our self-interest was clearly at stake (such as in Afghanistan in response to 9/11). Invariably, though, we took only self-doubting half-measures, resulting in America’s defeat by militarily inferior forces. The message conveyed by such events is that America is unwilling to wield the level of force necessary to achieve victory. What can the world conclude except that America cannot win a war, because it will always be outlasted by an enemy that, unlike America, is firmly committed to its cause?

Today, almost anything we do reflects weakness. And weakness invites aggression. Consider again Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. There, as usual, we chose an ineffectual, middle-of-the road approach. We decided to help arm the Ukrainians—but in a typically non-committal manner. We gave them weapons, but delayed delivery; we gave them weapons, but not the ones most needed to repel the invasion; we gave them weapons—and reprimanded Ukraine’s president for continuing to fight; we gave them weapons that are not enough for victory, but are rather intended to create a stalemate that will result in diplomatic negotiations. Trump’s view of a successful resolution to the conflict is the making of mutual concessions: the Ukrainians agree that parts of their country will now be under Russian rule; in return, the Russians agree that they will not take over all of Ukraine. That is the “art of the deal.”

To our enemies, this is just one more instance of American irresolution and impotence. And that emboldens them. This is why the Iranians believed they could seize our embassy in 1979 without repercussions; it’s why North Korea believed it could continue to develop its nuclear capacity with impunity; it’s why the Taliban government in Afghanistan, following its support of al Qaeda in its 9/11 attacks, believed—correctly—that it could outlast us militarily.

So the fundamental question to ask now is not how will we respond to, say, an attempt by China to take over Taiwan, or by North Korea to take over South Korea. Rather, what we should first be asking is: What do we have to do to prevent such aggression by our enemies? And that demands a consistently non-appeasing, non-conciliatory foreign policy.

I said that the adoption of a new foreign policy, in order to be convincing, requires at least one demonstration of our willingness to use whatever force was needed to eliminate a threat. Now, the question is whether Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities accomplishes that. Does it repudiate the failed foreign policy of past years, and inaugurate a new, self-assertive, self-confident one? Does this represent a fresh commitment to using extensive force to ensure America’s safety?

I wish it did. But it doesn’t. It is true that to whatever extent, and for however long, Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been degraded, we, and the world, are safer. But will this make true safety, which requires the removal of the Islamist government of Iran more easily achievable—or less?

This irresolute response by the U.S. establishes, in effect, a ceiling on what is acceptable. It implies that the ultimate goal of regime change in Iran is no longer an option. It makes only more difficult a decision by some future American president to take the necessary next step.

Trump refrained from military action for months, as he urged the Iranians to undertake negotiations with us. But they snubbed him. Now he is willing to offer them financial inducements to sit down and make a deal with him—inducements that amount to paying them protection money if they promise to stop threatening us. He is still insisting that Israel refrain from wiping out Hamas and Hezbollah, and that it agree to a negotiated ceasefire.Doesn’t this approach declare, in effect, that the ongoing war being waged against us by Iran can be resolved, not by Iran’s defeat and unconditional surrender, but by the method cherished by our pragmatic diplomats: the method of conciliation, of compromise, of horse-trading between the U.S. and its enemies?

What we need is a president who can self confidently proclaim a policy based on the moral principle of American self-interest. We don’t have such a president. We don’t even have a president who grasps the meaning of a moral principle.

A proper foreign policy requires a commitment to that principle, not ad hoc expediency and genteel diplomacy. The absence of such a commitment is why we remain vulnerable. We may have the strongest, best-equipped armed forces in the world, but that is not enough to protect us. In other words, America’s safety depends fundamentally, not on its military weaponry, but on its intellectual ammunition. It’s our job to help provide that.

The post Principles of a Proper Foreign Policy appeared first on PeterSchwartz.com.

What is the essential difference between someone conveying information and someone conveying propaganda? It’s not that the former is presenting something true while the latter, something false. No, the difference is that the propagandist has no concern for the truth. He does not care whether there are facts that contradict his position. He holds his views, not because they rest on facts and on logic, but simply because he desires them to be true. Like the fervent religionist whose beliefs are impervious to rational argument, the propagandist’s assertions, too, are not derived by reason.

What then are we to make of the accusations about widespread election fraud and cover-ups offered by President Trump in his July 16^th speech to the nation? Are we to take seriously a professed concern over election integrity when it comes from the man who encouraged a mob to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in order to undo the results of a presidential election? Can we believe that the man who pardoned all the people convicted of violent action during that riot actually wants to prevent interference in the election process? Can his warnings about alleged election tampering have any credibility when he tenaciously evades the overwhelming evidence, including dozens of court findings, that he lost the 2020 election?

When Trump declares that immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets—when Trump declares that the hundreds of thousands of deported immigrants are guilty of serious crimes—when he declares that the tariffs he has imposed on us are being paid for by foreign exporters—when, in other words, he makes claims that are easily shown to be baseless—he is engaged in the equivalent of propagandizing. His aim is not to present the truth, but to offer a rational façade for his irrational beliefs.

If someone says to you “7 times 3 equals 21,” you can judge that statement as true. Which means that it is a successful effort at cognition, a successful attempt to grasp reality. But if you hear those same words being uttered by a parrot, you cannot judge them as either true or false. The squawking of a parrot is outside the realm of cognition. The parrot is not trying to name a truth. It is just emitting sounds.

The same applies to Trump’s statements about election fraud. He does not care whether his assertions are actually true. So one’s initial response should not be to grant his arbitrary claims a cognitive status, any more than one would to the parrot’s squawkings. Rather, one should ask: What is Trump’s purpose?

And clearly his goal is to pave the way for his own intervention in future elections. His goal is to make the public receptive to his future claims of fraud and to his efforts to nullify voting results. He failed to reverse the 2020 vote. He will doubtless try to do better the next time. He has publicly stated that his big regret is having failed to send National Guard troops to seize voting machines after his loss in the 2020 election. Will he order them to do so for this year’s midterm, or 2028’s presidential, election? Will he authorize his armed ICE agents to oversee voting sites by claiming that illegal immigrants are casting ballots? Will he unleash the many Jan. 6 goons he pardoned, and instruct them to “ensure” honest elections?

What we need to fear is not the secret machinations of “deep state” conspirators who want to skew the vote, but the open attempts by our own head of government to overturn results he does not like.

The post Election Fraud: Information vs. Propaganda appeared first on PeterSchwartz.com.

Joel Hamkins: "Potential versus Actual Infinity". Link to the transcript.