The National Interest
Spring 2002

Weak Realpolitik

by Adam Garfinkle

 

About sixty years ago, R.G. Collingwood wrote, "Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way." Inasmuch as his thinking was suspended somewhere between hope for a science of history and an awareness of its practical limits, philosophers of history have been arguing ever since about what he really meant. But one thing he must have meant is that what interests us about the past is at least partly a function of what bothers us or makes us curious in the present. As Collingwood said, "As far as we can see history as a whole . . . we see it as a continuous development in which every phase consists of the solution of human problems set by the preceding phase."

Human affairs generally move so ponderously, or in such complicated ways, that contemporaries have trouble seeing "history as a whole", or detecting the phases to which Collingwood pointed. But as a glacier or a tectonic plate may slip to dramatic effect, so sometimes major events rattle us into historical awareness. When they do, it is uncanny how we find ourselves reassessing the significance of dates as symbols of the touching points of historical phases. On September 1, 1939, 1918–19 suddenly shrunk in significance for Britons and Frenchmen and 1870–71 suddenly grew. When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union dissolved, 1917 suddenly became a less important date, and 1914 a more important one. September 11, 2001, was such an event, so it is worth asking how our historical perceptions may change as a result of it. . . .

When we recall our lessons as to what was significant between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, we have been used to naming such items as the Washington Naval Conference, Locarno, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. From the vantage point of September 11, however, new historical coordinates arise. In the wizened, windswept autumn of 1924, the Al Saud wrested ownership of the Hejaz from the Hashemites, who had lorded over the holiest places of Islam since the 10th century. With that conquest—which could have been prevented by a few gunboats and some strong language had British policy not been otherwise bent—the basic territorial configuration of what became known in 1932 as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was established. Meanwhile, in the eastern part of the Kingdom oil was being found in abundance, and by the 1970s money began rolling into Saudi coffers in amounts that neither traditional conceptions nor vaults could hold.

The combination—oil riches and the religious legitimacy conferred by control of Mecca and Medina (and of the hajj along with it)—has allowed the Saudi partnership of the Al Saud and the Al Wahhab to overturn the equilibrium of Islamic civilization that had existed for nigh on a thousand years. The Wahhabi version of Sunni Islam is neither traditional nor orthodox. It is a slightly attenuated fundamentalism that dates only from the end of the 18th century. Though linked to the Islamic past through Ibn Taymiyah, a 13th century exegete, and to the minoritarian salafiyah strand of interpretation before him, as recently as fifty years ago the large majority of Muslims considered Saudi Wahhabism to be exotic, marginal and austere to the point of neurotic. But an aggressive and very well-funded campaign of intra-Islamic evangelism has established it as the paragon of Sunni piety today. This is, in a word, bad; bad for Arabs, for Muslims, and for everyone else. More than anything, the ascendancy of Wahhabism within the Islamic world, to a point that is now beyond the control of the Saudi state, is the core source of the terrorist attacks of September 11—and of the way that those attacks have been variously received and understood by Muslims everywhere.

Once we understand "1924" properly, we are instantly sobered by the new perspective it provides. We see that Saudi society, caught as it is between its origins and the inexorable press of modernity, is an inherent threat to the United States and to its allies, Arab and non-Arab alike; that by its very nature it cannot help but be such a threat. While we can and should try to persuade the Saudi government to help us "follow the money" and to do other things manifestly in its own self-interest as well as ours, we will get nowhere trying to persuade Saudis to be what they are not. We may not like the way Saudis think about the non-Islamic world, or what they teach in their schools, or how they define concepts like charity and terrorism. But for American Christians or Jews to demand that they educate their children to become "better" or "more tolerant" Muslims is utterly futile. Next to the apparently unlimited hubris of those who think it so easy to change the political culture of the Muslim world with so-called Middle East Marshall Plans, this presumption—that we have the right to insist on the reform of other peoples’ religions—has to rank as the most outrageous American foolishness of the post-September 11 period.

Too many Americans, then, have simultaneously underestimated the Saudi problem and overestimated the potential near-term efficacy of American influence in regard to it. On the one hand, as a matter of first principle, the United States should not "learn to live" with a Saudi Arabia in perpetuity. A Wahhabi-inspired country controlling the Hejaz and that much oil wealth will never be desirable from the perspective of either American interests or values. Arabia has not always been Saudi or Wahhabi, and some day it will probably stop being both; should it become prudent for the United States to advance that day, it would be worth considering. On the other hand, we must recognize that this time is not at hand. The Saudi version of weak realpolitik is becoming an increasingly tense management problem, but it is not just a Saudi problem; it’s our problem, too. . . .