As we (or the better informed among us at least) celebrate the
anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto this Saturday, marking the
date in 1571 when the navy of Pope Pius V’s Holy League turned back
the Ottoman Turks from one of their recurrent jihads, it might be
opportune to consider how the Islamic world has advanced
politically over the last half century.
Not terribly well, I reckon. But if the Arab portion of that
world is soon swept up by democratic reform, then it seems likely
that the future will be, well, perhaps something like the Gaza
Strip, where political parties Hamas and Fatah supplement ballots
with running street battles, familiar to us as well from Lebanon
and Iraq.
To each his own, says I. Better that Arab-Muslim passions be
turned against their own city councilmen and politicos than against
the Zionist-Crusader Conspiracy, and better that Sunnis and Shias
proclaim death to each other rather than death to us — though the
gunmen of Hamas and Fatah and others in the region seem fairly
ambidextrous in their hatreds and willingness to dispense
violence.
As far as our national interest is concerned, it doesn’t much
matter what Islamists and Baathists and Fatahists do to one another
as long as they leave us alone — and by leaving us alone, I mean
not only not attacking us (or developing means to attack us), but
deferring to our right to befriend whom we choose to befriend, to
trade with whom we wish to trade, and to broadcast our ideas to
whoever wants to listen, to be ourselves in the world, and to be
true to our unofficial motto of Don’t Tread on Me.
THE TRICK TO ENSURING that they do leave us alone and confine
themselves to killing only each other, is to copy the best example
we have of peaceful Christian coexistence with the Muslim world,
which is not some imaginary Islamic renaissance in medieval Spain,
but the British Empire.
The British, when they ruled a quarter of the globe, had
millions of Islamic subjects. And while British troops had to slap
down mad mullahs, impetuous imams, crazed tribesmen, and dervish
armies on the periphery of empire, for the most part Her Majesty’s
Muslim subjects were not only quiescent, a great many of them were
markedly loyal and were numbered among the warrior races with which
the British liked to stock the Indian Army.
The key to this was that while the British were happy to leave
traditional arrangements (tribal leaders, religious affiliations,
and so on) standing, they insisted that Muslims accommodate
themselves to British law, custom, government, and
civilization.
The pressure today, after the collapse of the European empires
and the not coincidental rise of moral relativism and
multiculturalism, is the reverse. Danish cartoonists, German
operatic productions, the pope, and European law and foreign policy
are expected to accommodate militant Islam. Militant Islam is not
expected to accommodate the West — even when the Islamists live in
London or Berlin or Paris — because the West lacks confidence that
it has a civilization worth promoting over, or even defending
against, the Islamists.
TO WIN THIS BATTLE, Americans (and preferably Europeans too) need
to recapture a bit of civilizational confidence. We might begin by
reminding ourselves that we have every right to act freely in the
world, that we are Britain’s heirs of empire, and that that’s
nothing new. The Founders knew that.
One need only open Federalist One to see Alexander Hamilton
refer to America as “an empire, in many respects, the most
interesting in the world,” and one that he later hoped to extend to
the Southern Hemisphere. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and George
Washington likewise thought of America as an empire — an empire
that would surpass Britain’s in size and power. King George III
himself recognized that “The rebellious war… is manifestly
carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.”
Thomas Jefferson, of course, envisioned America as an “empire of
liberty.” James Polk considered that the Mexican War had delivered
“to the United States an immense empire.” And American empire
builders like Andrew Jackson (annexing Florida) or the filibusters
who brought us Hawaii or America’s acceptance of the White Man’s
Burden in the Philippines (where we set up the first democratic
government in Asia), spread America’s Manifest Destiny from the
Atlantic Coast, to the Gulf of Mexico, to the far reaches of the
Pacific. All of which is not to mention our taking on the imperial
responsibility of setting things aright for the world in two world
wars and the Cold War and creating a global system of free trade
and international institutions like the United Nations and the
International Monetary Fund. The world has enjoyed a Pax
Americana for at least the last half century, and it takes an
imperial power to deliver a global peace.
Whenever the liberal myth that America is inherently
anti-imperialist has guided our foreign policy, the result has been
disaster, whether that myth was held by FDR who was far more
insistent on getting the British out of Hong Kong and India than on
protecting Eastern Europe from Stalin (“Of one thing I am certain,
Stalin is not an imperialist”); or by Secretary of State John
Foster Dulles and President Dwight David Eisenhower standing
side-by-side with the Soviets and Gamal Abdel Nasser and against
Britain, France, and Israel at Suez in 1956; or by Jimmy Carter,
refusing to support the Shah of Iran (whose very position was a
shameful reminder of the sin of Anglo-American imperialism) against
the people’s choice, and obviously a man we could do business with,
the Ayatollah Khomeini.
That anti-imperialism is a harmful idea should be obvious from
our own history. Should we not have annexed the American southwest
from Mexico? Should we have prevented Andrew Jackson from seizing
Florida from Spain? Should we have accepted the British-drawn
proclamation line of 1763 and left the interior of America to the
Indians? Should we regret the British Empire’s original sin of
planting us here at all?
The left beats the anti-colonial, anti-imperial drum because it
serves the liberal interest of accommodating the West to retreat,
to moral relativism, and to multiculturalism.
BUT IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS, though apparently it isn’t, that if
America is to win the so-called war on terror we will need to
revert to our imperial heritage as a people whose regnant spirit
has always been Don’t Tread on Me, who would not willingly
accept any restrictions on our trade, our travel, or our speech,
and who had no doubt that where Americans went, there went liberty,
and that Indians and Mexicans and Spaniards and Frenchmen, had
better make way because a superior civilization was plowing
through. We need a similar confidence if we are to tame militant
Islam.
The Pax Britannica was a tremendous civilizing force.
We now need a renewal of a Pax Americana that likewise
thinks of our own institutions, our own ideas of justice, and our
own civilization — including, even most especially, our religion
— as worth spreading, as a benefit to the world, and to be denied
nowhere.
Imperialism is an outward sign of such confidence and vigor.
Today, it is something of an imperative as well. If we are going to
win the clash of civilizations, if Europe is to be saved, if
America’s spirit of Don’t Tread on Me is to be
perpetuated, it will be because we will once again have convinced
our enemies — and ourselves — that the West is best.
