Charles Hill - The Weavers Lost Art

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

ESSAY SERIES:

THE GREAT UNRAVELING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Russell A. Berman

Itamar Rabinovich

Samuel Tadros

Fouad Ajami

Charles Hill

Lee Smith

ESSAYS

Joshua Teitelbaum

Habib C. Malik

Nibras Kazimi

Ziad Haider

Marius Deeb

[For a list of books published under the auspices of the WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER, please see page 63.]

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 650

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California, 94305-6010

Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the

Leland Stanford Junior University

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HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

ITS A MANTRA, but it is also true: the Middle East is being unmade and remade. The autocracies that gave so many of these states the appearance of stability are gone, their dreaded rulers dispatched to prison or exile or cut down by young people who had yearned for the end of the despotisms. These autocracies were large prisons, and in 2011, a storm overtook that stagnant world. The spectacle wasnt pretty, but prison riots never are. In the Fertile Crescent, the work of the colonial cartographersGertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceauare in play as they have never been before. Arab nationalists were given to lamenting that they lived in nation-states invented by Western powers in the aftermath of the Great War. Now, a century later, with the ground burning in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and the religious sects at war, not even the most ardent nationalists can be sure that they can put in place anything better than the old order.

Men get used to the troubles they know, and the Greater Middle East seems fated for grief and breakdown. Outside powers approach it with dread; merciless political contenders have the run of it. There is swagger in Iran and a belief that the radical theocracy can bully its rivals into submission. There was a period when the United States provided a modicum of order in these Middle Eastern lands. But pleading fatigue, and financial scarcity at home, we have all but announced the end of that stewardship. We are poorer for that abdication, and the Middle East is thus left to the mercy of predators of every kind.

We asked a number of authors to give this spectacle of disorder their best try. We imposed no rules on them, as we were sure their essays would take us close to the sources of the malady.

FOUAD AJAMI

CHARLES HILL

THE TANGLED SKEIN of the worlds problems is Gordian knotted in the worst places; in other words, what we call the field of international relationsglobal studies, foreign affairs, world politics, etc.in recent years has evolved into one more dimension of professional policy analysis or social science research, as the methodologies of domestic issues are applied with scant success to the larger outside scene.

But there has always been something mysterious and intellectually profound hovering around such matters, something now disdained or forgotten. Hegel conveyed the sense that here, in high world affairs, lay the most significant philosophical and moral questions of the human condition, questions which, if not ultimately answerable, had to be confronted if humanity were to grasp its own meaning. This in turn implied that ideas and assumptions of the greatest consequence might be at work far below the surface of strategy, policy, and daily operations. This essay will attempt to locate and illuminate that realm.

For a hundred years or more the United States has acted as the monitor and guarantor of the international state system and the elemental requirements of world order, sometimes intervening, sometimes standing aside, sometimes deferring to the United Nations and the claims of international law. Now, in the early twenty-first century, it appears that the US is abdicating, no longer willingand soon perhaps no longer ableto take a leading responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security.