neoconservatism

Many westerners have speculated that a confrontation between Islam and the West is in the offing. For example, Samuel Huntington wrote in a recent, much noted article, that the centuries-old military interaction between these two civilizations "could become more violent" in the future. But a civilization-to-civilization showdown is not truly likely, for the simple reason that Muslims (and probably Westerners) are too diverse to stand as a bloc.

Instead, the cultural fireworks ahead will more likely take place among Muslims themselves--between those eager to accept Western ways and those who reject them. On one side stand those Muslims confident to learn from outsiders, oriented toward democracy and ready to integrate into the world; on the other stand those who are fearful, who seek strong rule, and who hope to withdraw from the world. In a word, it's a battle between secularist and fundamentalist Muslims--to be more precise, a competition between two of the great countries of the Middle East, Turkey and Iran. It's likely to be a long, deep, and difficult fight.

Trouble is, the Turks don't yet realize that they are engaged in this battle.

"...if when the chips are down the world's most powerful nation, the United States, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and institutions throughout the world."

--President Richard M. Nixon announcing the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, April 30, 1970

"The West's worst moral and political disaster since the Nazis is coming to a climax. And just as many politicians and institutions paid for the failure to stop Hitler, so many will pay dearly for allowing the Serbian tyrant, Slobodan Milosevic, to destroy Bosnia."

--Anthony Lewis, "The End of the Affair," The New York Times, August 13, 1993

Anthony Lewis' recent Richard Nixon impersonations are not only amusing, they are genuinely important. They are among the many signs that American thinking about foreign policy is finally entering the post-Cold War era--and perhaps dragging the rest of American politics along with it.

In foreign affairs, the old dividing lines are blurring or being ignored, and with good reason. As is clear from any recent op-ed page, familiar classifications such as interventionist and isolationist, hawk and dove, realist and idealist, and multilateralist and unilateralist (at least as they have been used since the end of World War II) no longer make much sense, in the absence of the Cold War's defining conditions. Abroad, those conditions included rigid military and ideological bipolarity and overwhelming American economic predominance within the free world camp; at home, widespread acceptance of a state of national emergency, and of the national priorities and resource allocations that followed therefrom. Because--as it is now fashionable to observe--foreign and domestic policies can no longer be neatly separated, ideological confusion has spilled over into domestic politics. Even ideas as basic to modern politics as Left and Right are undergoing redefinition.

Margaret Thatcher's memoir, The Downing Street Years, is an absorbing account which faithfully reflects its author and subject. Its style is her style: lucid, decisive, self-confident, and engaging. Its story is her story: what she intended and planned, what she did, whom she appointed and fired, how she was finally brought down as leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister of Great Britain.
We knew already that Margaret Thatcher was no Hamlet endlessly pondering difficult decisions, no Coriolanus too proud to state her case. From this memoir we learn just how confident she is in her understanding of Britain's problems and her ability to find solutions. She knows her strengths.

Of then-president George Bush, she writes that he was decent, honest, courageous and patriotic, but he "never had to think through his beliefs and fight for them when they were hopelessly unfashionable as Ronald Reagan and I had to do. This meant that much of his time was now taken up with reaching for answers to problems which to me came quite spontaneously because they sprang from my basic conviction."

Like most of the very small company of political leaders who actually change their time and place, Margaret Thatcher had a unifying vision of what Britain could be and should be. That vision was unfashionable, out of step with dominant opinion. But her vision of a more bold, successful, entrepreneurial, free Great Britain guided Thatcher as she guided Britain for over eleven years, much as Charles deGaulle's "idea" of France guided him through decades of effort to create the stronger, more united, more effective, more independent France that already existed in his mind. Like deGaulle and her great predecessor, Winston Churchill, Thatcher sought not only to revive Britain, but to strengthen and reinvigorate the British. Like deGaulle, Thatcher felt herself destined to accomplish this task.

Heather Wilson's article will, no doubt, win her few friends among her former colleagues in the Bush administration or among their successors. In fact, in the proliferation area, remarkably enough, these have proven to be one and the same--the thorough-going purge of Bush appointees that swept the Pentagon left a number of holdovers in the State Department and National Security Council. In any event, Wilson is probably right to say that neither the administration did very much to stop proliferation, with one major exception. The war against Iraq, launched in part to head off Iraq's bid for regional hegemony, turned into an assault on her nuclear potential. Had the Bush administration flinched from that conflict, or had it pursued its anti-Iraq policy less vigorously after the war, the world might well have witnessed the use of nuclear weapons in the Middle East before the end of the decade. Furthermore, by explicitly making the Iraqi nuclear program a target of attack, Bush legitimized the American use of armed force for this aim. In these respects, then, he deserves rather more credit than she gives him.

Russia's Extreme Right; Review of Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: HarperCollins, 1993)

Russian nationalism is the most important but least understood force to have emerged from the shadows following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It is the most important because it increasingly defines Moscow's domestic and foreign policies. But it is the least understood both because of the peculiar history of relations between the Russian state and its people and because of the particular way scholars have studied this phenomenon. Consequently, we can only welcome Walter Laqueur's chilling survey of its more extreme forms, forms all the more disturbing because their impact now extends not only to other Russian nationalists but to many Russians who would deny that they are nationalists at all.

Review of Olivier Bernier, Firework at Dusk: Paris in the Thirties (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1993); and Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944-56 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

France and Frenchmen, it may be said with some confidence, are incomprehensible for anyone insufficiently aware of their intellectual traditions. Those traditions, embodied in the works of great writers, are one of the glories of European civilization. From Montaigne onwards runs the line of brilliant moralists, whose concentration on the behavior of individuals in society enlarged the knowledge of human nature, laid the foundation for the achievements of a Balzac or a Stendhal, but also provided rather inadequate generalizations concerning the character of those who dined only intermittently at the top table of French culture. The importance for France of the development, during three centuries, of a classically clear and analytically subtle use of language to communicate ideas both within and outside the country cannot be overestimated. For more than two centuries French writers, painters, and architects made European culture, and the consciousness of this rayonnement de la culture franaise has remained to this day and explains the exaggerated and sometimes ludicrous importance attached to the spread of francophonie.