February 22, 2006
Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy and Hazards of Global Ambition:
America's Struggle against Islamic Terrorism
Robert Merry
President and Publisher of Congressional Quarterly and author
Minutes of the 21st Meeting of the 64th Year
President Haynes called the 98 attendees of the 21st meeting of the 64th year to order at the Friend Center four minutes early, allowing Bruno Walmsley to make an effective presentation on accessing our new website – a bit of help which was preceded by Charles Dennison’s invocation and by John Rassweiler’s reading of his eloquent minutes for last week’s meeting – minutes which managed to cover everything of note within four minutes, a salutary example which, for today, I am unable to follow. Jim Harford introduced his guest Paul Sigmund and Bill Schoelwer introduced Van Becker as a guest; visitors were also presented: his wife Millie, daughter Susan and friend Carl Brown by Jim Harford; Bob Waltman introduced his wife Deedi and friend Evelyn Pierce. The President put out Charlie Ufford’s appeal for the return of a raincoat. He then called our attention to next week’s hospitality hour and talk. Don Dickason remarked that about two-thirds of members now had e-mail, and gave thanks on behalf of the Crisis Ministry for gifts of food. He recommended members to visit the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Finally, he gave Don Young a certificate of emeritus status earned last week.
James Harford introduced the speaker, Robert Merry, a distinguished journalist who spent three years as an Army counter-espionage agent in Germany, and, after studying at Columbia, worked on various newspapers including the National Observer and The Wall Street Journal. He worked for the Congressional Quarterly for 19 years, becoming president and publisher in 1997. His talk turned out to be one of the most compelling and meticulously succinct we have enjoyed.
Mr. Merry began by summarizing the first four chapters of his recent book, Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy and the Hazards of Global Ambition. His anxiety arose in the 1990s for two reasons - first, the growing influence in U.S. foreign policy of Wilsonian interventionism; humanitarian impulses were driving policy, beginning with the deployment of 20,000 troops to Somalia. Secondly, it worried him that so great an innovation was receiving no serious debate. The policy was applauded, perhaps even instigated, by the press, especially Time magazine. Before long, the media pressed for an extension of the unprecedented policy: into the Balkans.
The attacks of 2001 resulted in a marriage between Wilsonian intervention, seen as morally justifiable, and an empire-building impulse served up by both the neo-conservatives and nationalists enraptured by American exceptionalism who wanted, in the name of American idealism a hegemony, where U.S. dominance would spread as widely as possible as far into the future as possible. This union he called “missionary democracy”. He wrote his book to stimulate a debate, not between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, but rather a more fundamental debate – one between two different views of history.
One view was the idea of progress, a view which began at least with Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. The other idea, also rising in western Europe, was a cyclical view in which rises were followed by declines, an idea popularized by Spengler and Toynbee. The first view sees history as the story of mankind climbing to ever higher levels – a view regarded by many, especially in America, as a truism. But two contradictions appear, as well as a “mischievous corollary” – how do we know if change is upward? This was answered by faith in perfectibility. Nowhere was this more explicit than in Marxism which was the twentieth century’s foremost battle over the nature of man. In this regard, the speaker might well benefit from a study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1943 work The Nature and Destiny of Man which considered just this issue from a theological perspective.
The second contradiction was the awkward fact that only Westerners seemed to show the requisite progress. That was countered by the idea that all would enjoy the benefits as soon as the non-Westerners woke up and embraced our culture and its dependence on the scientific method. In other words, progress morphed into Western cultural arrogance. The “mischievous corollary” was the notion that mankind can manufacture peace and tranquillity by changing and perfecting human nature. It was a prospect dear to the heart of the French revolutionists, but had left the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and America cold. For the founding fathers, government was not there to bring utopia but to keep in check the destructive tendencies of immutable human nature.
The alternative school of thought to the exaltation of progress, which did not – alas – get a leg into the arena, sees history as a panoply of different cultures which flower and decline. It says culture is the most powerful driving force; there can be no universal culture (pace globalization); all cultures decline. American policy discussion took little notice that scholars like Toynbee, or Sam Huntington of Harvard, vigorously dissented from the flattering view that one culture – our own – is exempt from the cyclical pattern.
What has all this to do with Iraq? He then told us, if we hadn’t already caught on. Western capitalism emerged from the Cold War as dominant; in the words of Fukuyama echoing Hegel and joined by Thomas Friedman in his two books. History had ended: progress writ large and supreme. The model for the world was America. In contrast, Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he saw us moving into a world of differing cultures rubbing up against each other, sometimes persistently and bloodily so. Economic power could not trump culture since culture is about people’s identity. Huntington saw a West declining rather than being the universal culture. Core states like the U.S., Russia, China and India would have to provide stability, internal discipline and a measure of co-existence. This posed a problem for Islam which, as yet, has no core state.
Since the 1990s, the children of progress have called the shots in Washington. Wilsonian benevolence may have collapsed in 2001 but it was superceded by a missionary zeal for spreading democracy which gathered strength as a rationale to replace weapons-of-mass-destruction when that excuse was discredited. Merry believed that the real debate over culture is not occurring. Because the cyclical view is not heard, culture is under-rated, as in our behaviour after the invasion of Iraq, which ignored the force of culture. Here I must intrude my own question – noting Islam’s lack of a core state, has our action in Iraq handed that role to Iran on a platter?
Believing we are on the wrong track, he cited John Quincy Adams, “America is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” After several questions, the meeting adjourned at 11:30 AM.
Respectfully submitted,
John Frederick
James Harford introduced the speaker, Robert Merry, a distinguished journalist who spent three years as an Army counter-espionage agent in Germany, and, after studying at Columbia, worked on various newspapers including the National Observer and The Wall Street Journal. He worked for the Congressional Quarterly for 19 years, becoming president and publisher in 1997. His talk turned out to be one of the most compelling and meticulously succinct we have enjoyed.
Mr. Merry began by summarizing the first four chapters of his recent book, Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy and the Hazards of Global Ambition. His anxiety arose in the 1990s for two reasons - first, the growing influence in U.S. foreign policy of Wilsonian interventionism; humanitarian impulses were driving policy, beginning with the deployment of 20,000 troops to Somalia. Secondly, it worried him that so great an innovation was receiving no serious debate. The policy was applauded, perhaps even instigated, by the press, especially Time magazine. Before long, the media pressed for an extension of the unprecedented policy: into the Balkans.
The attacks of 2001 resulted in a marriage between Wilsonian intervention, seen as morally justifiable, and an empire-building impulse served up by both the neo-conservatives and nationalists enraptured by American exceptionalism who wanted, in the name of American idealism a hegemony, where U.S. dominance would spread as widely as possible as far into the future as possible. This union he called “missionary democracy”. He wrote his book to stimulate a debate, not between left and right, Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, but rather a more fundamental debate – one between two different views of history.
One view was the idea of progress, a view which began at least with Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century. The other idea, also rising in western Europe, was a cyclical view in which rises were followed by declines, an idea popularized by Spengler and Toynbee. The first view sees history as the story of mankind climbing to ever higher levels – a view regarded by many, especially in America, as a truism. But two contradictions appear, as well as a “mischievous corollary” – how do we know if change is upward? This was answered by faith in perfectibility. Nowhere was this more explicit than in Marxism which was the twentieth century’s foremost battle over the nature of man. In this regard, the speaker might well benefit from a study of Reinhold Niebuhr’s 1943 work The Nature and Destiny of Man which considered just this issue from a theological perspective.
The second contradiction was the awkward fact that only Westerners seemed to show the requisite progress. That was countered by the idea that all would enjoy the benefits as soon as the non-Westerners woke up and embraced our culture and its dependence on the scientific method. In other words, progress morphed into Western cultural arrogance. The “mischievous corollary” was the notion that mankind can manufacture peace and tranquillity by changing and perfecting human nature. It was a prospect dear to the heart of the French revolutionists, but had left the Anglo-Saxons in Britain and America cold. For the founding fathers, government was not there to bring utopia but to keep in check the destructive tendencies of immutable human nature.
The alternative school of thought to the exaltation of progress, which did not – alas – get a leg into the arena, sees history as a panoply of different cultures which flower and decline. It says culture is the most powerful driving force; there can be no universal culture (pace globalization); all cultures decline. American policy discussion took little notice that scholars like Toynbee, or Sam Huntington of Harvard, vigorously dissented from the flattering view that one culture – our own – is exempt from the cyclical pattern.
What has all this to do with Iraq? He then told us, if we hadn’t already caught on. Western capitalism emerged from the Cold War as dominant; in the words of Fukuyama echoing Hegel and joined by Thomas Friedman in his two books. History had ended: progress writ large and supreme. The model for the world was America. In contrast, Huntington wrote The Clash of Civilizations, in which he saw us moving into a world of differing cultures rubbing up against each other, sometimes persistently and bloodily so. Economic power could not trump culture since culture is about people’s identity. Huntington saw a West declining rather than being the universal culture. Core states like the U.S., Russia, China and India would have to provide stability, internal discipline and a measure of co-existence. This posed a problem for Islam which, as yet, has no core state.
Since the 1990s, the children of progress have called the shots in Washington. Wilsonian benevolence may have collapsed in 2001 but it was superceded by a missionary zeal for spreading democracy which gathered strength as a rationale to replace weapons-of-mass-destruction when that excuse was discredited. Merry believed that the real debate over culture is not occurring. Because the cyclical view is not heard, culture is under-rated, as in our behaviour after the invasion of Iraq, which ignored the force of culture. Here I must intrude my own question – noting Islam’s lack of a core state, has our action in Iraq handed that role to Iran on a platter?
Believing we are on the wrong track, he cited John Quincy Adams, “America is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all; she is the champion and vindicator only of her own.” After several questions, the meeting adjourned at 11:30 AM.
Respectfully submitted,
John Frederick