Tea With Tyrants

[Valin]

The American Interest:

Ruthless national interest as the sole basis of foreign policy is repugnant to the national conscience, and since the United States is a democracy, this conscience must be reckoned with.

Peter Berger

Feb. 5 2015

 

 

 

Across the Middle East today there is taking place a huge struggle for hegemony between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which is also a struggle (about 1400 years old) between the Sunni and the Shi’a versions of Islam. Outside powers continue to be involved, including the United States, Russia and India. The U.S., while still involved politically and militarily, plays a curious role in the basic hegemonic struggle. It is supposedly allied with Saudi Arabia, while the Iranian regime continues to regard the U.S. as “the Great Satan”. I cannot here pursue the paradoxical fact that the alleged ally supports anti-American Sunni Islamists throughout the world (except for those who directly threaten the Saudi state, like al-Qaida and ISIS). At the same time the U.S. and Iran are surreptitiously allied in Iraq and Syria by supporting in both countries Shi’a governments by bombing their Sunni enemies. I am not suggesting that religion is only used to legitimate hard-nosed power politics—there are real differences between the two principal versions of Islam, as there were between Catholics and Protestants during the wars of religion in Europe; there are people whose faith is seriously attached to the religious differences between the two sides. Yet the two antagonistic regimes in the Middle East have a lot in common. The Saudi government supports and is supported by a rigorous Sunni fundamentalism deriving from the 18^th-century teaching of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. The Iranian government represents a Shi’a fundamentalism of more recent vintage, which became more radical under the oppressive regime of the Shah. Both states claim to be Islamic, both are ruled by different but essentially similar forms if sharia law. They are also similar in the atrocities they routinely commit.

 

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As to atrocities committed abroad, Iranian secret services have been credited for assassinations abroad, such as the notorious massacre at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Saudi Arabia has efficient secret services, but I have not read about assassinations outside the country. However, the Wahhabi religious establishment conducts Islamic schools throughout the world that train imams preaching doctrines very similar to those proclaimed by Sunni terrorists (ironically, some of which seek to overthrow the Saudi monarchy). Religious freedom is zero in either country. Irony abounds: The Saudi government supports a center for interreligious dialogue in Vienna (there have been strong calls in Austria for the place to be shut down). Also, the Saudi ambassador to France attended the huge demonstration in Paris that protested the murder of the staff of the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and customers of a kosher supermarket—close to the date when a journalist received the first weekly brutal flogging to which he was sentenced for raising questions about the relation of the Saudi state and the Wahhabi establishment. (What is an Arabic synonym for chutzpah?)

 

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President Obama seems eager to make some sort of deal with Tehran, but so far not even he has suggested that this would lead to a cordial alliance. But there are moral questions for U.S. foreign policy with regard to Saudi Arabia. There are some tensions between Washington and Riyadh, because the Saudis are nervous about a possible U.S. rapprochement with Iran and annoyed that the U.S. still refuses to move against the Assad regime (a sort of Shi’a franchise), although U.S. bombing of Assad’s enemies in Syria helps him. (I imagine Bashar al-Assad muttering to himself what surely must be an ancient Arabic proverb – “He who bombs my enemies is my friend”.) Any government which claims certain values as guides for its actions must face the fact that there will be cases where political realities necessitate violations of these values. It begins with the etiquette of international relations: It is the duty of a diplomat, if necessary, to engage in polite conversations while having tea with tyrants. The necessity has been formulated by the theory of raison d’etat (or national interest), which was defined in the early 17^th century by an advisor to Cardinal Richelieu, the most powerful French minister at the time, as “a mean between what conscience permits and affairs require”. We must assume that Richelieu had a Catholic conscience. Yet he took the side of the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War, because it was in the national interest of France to weaken the power of the Holy Roman Emperor—the Protestants were useful to this purpose. Machiavelli summed up the moral dilemma of raison d’etat when he wrote that a ruler must be willing to risk the eternal salvation of his soul by serving the interest of his state. I think that this is a recurring reality of the actions of states. But the American state, born of a unique synthesis of the Puritan “city upon a hill” and the Enlightenment’s “new order of the centuries”, has a special problem in this matter. Ruthless national interest as the sole basis of foreign policy is repugnant to the national conscience, and since the United States is a democracy, this conscience must be reckoned with: Even if a particular policy is based on clear interests, there had better be some moral justification for it, if it is to be acceptable to the electorate.

 

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