Angry Planet - An Islamic Reformation may be beside the point

Episode Date: September 21, 2016

The separation of church and state is one of the fundamental tenets of the modern Western world, but that doesn't make it inevitable for all cultures. But does that mean that the Islamic world and the Western one are in an existential struggle? Or is that division even meaningful?Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast? Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. The opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants, not of Reuters' News. So the solution then is in hopes, these misplaced hopes for a reformation. Oh, you know, it's just a matter of time, and at least it is kind of patronizing discourse of, hey, you Muslims, you'll get there in time.

Just be patient. We went through it too. We killed each other. Then we got our act together. Let's not hope for something which is unlikely. Can church and state be separated in an Islamic society? And is that even desirable? This week on War College, we talk about Sharia

and how it fits into the politics that shape our world. You're listening to Reuters War College, a discussion of the world in conflict, focusing on the stories behind the front lines. Here are your hosts, Jason Fields, and Matthew Galt. Hello and welcome to War College. I'm Jason Fields with Reuters. And I'm Matthew Galt with War is Born. With us today is Shadi Hamid.

He's a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. And he's the author of a new book, Islamic Exceptionalism, how the struggle over Islam is reshaping the world. Today he's here with us to talk about one of America's greatest fears, I guess, political Islam. So Shadi, thank you so much for joining us. Hi, thanks for having me. So can we just start off by getting some basic terms set up? What do you see as the difference between Islamism, Salafism, and jihadism. And by the way, any ism I mispronounce, please let me know. Sure, okay. Well, so first of all, I generally define Islamist groups as those that believe

that Islam and Islamic law should play a central role in public life. And that's a broad enough definition to encompass a wide variety of groups. And then you can kind of dive into more specifics under that broader category. And then we can talk about Salafi, Salafi jihadists, and so on. Salafis are often referred to as ultra-conservatives, which is fair. They are at least more literalist than most Muslims in their interpretation of the Quran and the sayings and deeds of Prophet Muhammad. And they tend to just have a stricter interpretation of Islamic law and less room for, let's say, allegory or kind of creative reasoning. And they try to stick to the letter of law, at least in theory. So those are Salafis. And Salafis are also, I think, characterized

by how they view sovereignty. So they tend to believe in a kind of absolute sense of divine sovereignty, which is why many of them are skeptical of parliaments and electoral processes, because they don't believe parliaments should be as involved in passing legislation because that infringes on God's role as the sole lawgiver. So that's one of the key divides between ultra-conservative Salafi types and then more mainstream Islamists like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt or the Aq Party in Turkey or in Nakhda in Tunisia. So I often will make a distinction between mainstream Islamists

and more kind of extremist Islamists. And obviously there's a spectrum in between. And that's where the jihadists come in who are the true extremists on the far right or in the case of ISIS, the far, far right. And those are groups that very much believe in jihad, that jihad is not just an optional thing, but it's incumbent upon all Muslims at a time when Muslims are facing various challenges from the West. Jihadists would argue that Muslims have to fight not just against the West, but also against kind of apostate regimes that don't implement Islamic law correctly. And when you say Islamic law, do you mean Sharia law? And if you could kind of expound on exactly what Sharia law is for us? Yeah, so we can talk about Sharia. So Sharia isn't just law in the kind of narrow sense of rules and regulations. It's a very diverse and rich tradition. And it's not always about very specific things. So when you when you say Sharia to a Muslim, they just, oh, that's God's path. Or it's so it's, it's always.

almost more all-encompassing. But when we talk about the more legal aspects of Sharia or Islamic law, then you get more into the discussion of rules and regulations and how to apply them in the modern era, what that means in practice. And Sharia should not be a stand-in for strict interpretation of Islamic law. I think that's often how it's used in public discourse. But there are more progressive interpretations of Sharia. There are more extreme or literal interpretations of Sharia. Sharia also includes things that most practicing Muslims do. So you can't, you won't, there's no way to know how to pray, for example, five times a day without Sharia, because those guidelines are in the Islamic tradition and you can't just make that up. You have

to find that from the original sources and otherwise people wouldn't know how to pray. So in that sense, Sharia isn't just about public life and public law, but also about private. practice. To understand exactly how this works, I think, you know, people from more of Judeo-Christian background, I mean, there's this understanding of, you know, 10 commandments. I mean, there's 10 specific laws that everybody knows they were on tablets, and there's some interpretation, but I think that's an idea that everybody sort of gets behind as fundamental to the concept of justice. Is there anything like a 10 commandments that is a basis of Sharifference, that is a basis of Sharia law, or is it something that's based more broadly on the whole of the Quran and also

the Hadith, which are, if I have this read of the sayings and also stories about how the Prophet actually lived? Yeah, so the two main sources of Sharia are, you know, as you said, the Quran and the Sunnah or the sayings and deeds of the Prophet, including the Hadith, which, you know, people talk about and all that. So those are the two kind of questions. sources, but then you have, you know, after the Prophet dies and after the early generations pass and you have the Muslim community facing these very new situations, they're capturing territory, you know, really across the world, including into parts of Europe. So they're dealing with new challenges and that's where scholars have to interpret and use analogy in

different types of reasoning to figure out how. how to apply the message of the Quran and the prophetic sunnah to new circumstances. So in that sense, there's a lot of scholarship. There's centuries of scholarship and legal commentaries. So it's not enough to just pick up the Quran and say, hey, I'm going to find Islamic law here. And that's, I think, a very common misconception. You have to look at really centuries of Islamic tradition. Now, there are some Muslims who argue that, hey, forget all those legal commentaries and that rich, diverse tradition.

Let's just go back right to the source. And that's more how Salafis, these ultra-conservatives, look at it. They want to get rid of a lot of what happened in between and go back to this pure moment, the prophetic model, the prophetic moment. And that's why they do things like imitating the prophet in very specific manners of behavior and dress. So, you know, you'll sometimes even see this in parts of the U.S. where there are Salafis. It's not very common, but, you know, every now and then you'll see people, they'll wear their pants only to their ankle length because the Prophet would wear his robes, but they wouldn't go below the ankle. So Celophis are very careful about that, which might seem like an odd thing. And that's also why there's like a whole Celophie hipster meme, because are they Celophies or hipsters?

because hipsters also wear their pants at ankle length. So, you know, anyway, that's just one example. You won me over when you, with the Salafi hipster, man. Okay. So the other thing I wanted to just to mention is I think there's a lot of confusion when we talk about Sharia because there isn't really something equivalent in Christianity in quite the same way. I mean, the closest thing you have is canon law. And then obviously you have the Ten Commandments, which applies to, you know,

both Jews and Christians in theory. But that doesn't quite capture what Sharia is really about because Sharia covers much more things than just, hey, the basic Ten Commandments. Or if you look, for example, a canon law, which is more about the internal hierarchy of the church and its surroundings and rights and rituals. And it doesn't go into public law and the state and governance as much. So it's, and if there's no equivalent to Islamic law in the Christian tradition, that's where you get a lot of the confusion where when Christians are trying to understand Islamic law, there isn't a key anchor. And that's also why I would argue, and this is one of the arguments I make in my book, that Islam in this sense is fundamentally different than other religions and certainly Christianity. And that makes it, I think, hard sometimes for Westerners to grasp some of these concepts because they're not really they're not really. there in the Western tradition as much.

Do you think this is part of why Islam and Islamic countries have resisted secularization? Yeah, because you have this big thing called Islamic law, and it's hard to convince people to give that up. No one in the U.S., even far-right evangelicals are talking about, well, first of all they well, there isn't something called Christian law. Even using that phrase would be weird. If you're talking about Catholics, Catholic conservatives aren't talking about, oh, we want implement canon law. It wouldn't even make any sense. So there is this thing called Sharia, which

people have different interpretations of, but oftentimes if you ask someone, they'll have a positive impression of that word. Because for them, it's synonymous with justice and promoting good and promoting social order and whatever it happens to be. So the question then is, how do you try to adapt Islamic law or make it more relevant or in some cases make it less relevant? Or, in some cases, make it less relevant if you don't want it to play much of a role in the modern era. And that's what Muslims are debating right now. But there isn't an easy solution where you tell people, hey, religion should just be private. You can pray and fast and do that on your own time, but don't bring that into the state or into public law. That's a harder case to make because people would say why. And that you have to

really go back to the founding moment, too, that Prophet Muhammad, unlike Jesus, was not just, he wasn't a dissident against a reigning state. He became a head of state. He was a state builder, and he was in a very basic way, a politician. So the religious and political functions are intertwined in the person of Muhammad. So if you're some secular guy and you're coming, and there are Muslim secular reformers who have tried to make this case, they haven't gained a very big following in the Middle East because they basically have to argue against a prophetic model and say, hey, Prophet Muhammad did it this way 14 centuries ago, but that's no longer applicable. Push that to the side.

Now, you can make that argument, but you have to engage in kind of complex reinterpretation and hermeneutical techniques. And if you're an ordinary Muslim, you're not interested in a lot of intellectualizing of your faith. you want to just practice and hopefully, you know, get to heaven or whatever. And that might sound weird that, hey, people just want to get into heaven and that's their priority in life. But yeah, there are a lot of people like that. And I've met a lot of people like that in the Middle East. It sounds like one of the key differences is that the Christian tradition, the religious leaders,

were separate from the secular leaders from the beginning. Like you said, Jesus was not so much a political figure. And as things went through the later Roman Empire, you had various leaders through the Pope and then other leaders who were to the side of the emperors. And it's interesting because there's always been that tension pretty much since the beginning between the secular ruler and the religious leaders in the Western tradition. So it seems like what you're saying is it really was never the case in Islam that you had that tension. So the closest thing you have like that in Islam is you have some separation of mosque and state in the sense that you would have the caliph. And the caliph wasn't necessarily a scholarly figure or a cleric. And then you had the clerical class, which was somewhat independent and semi-autonomous, but they were never just dealing with private issues or ritual.

They were very influential in statecraft and in public law. and the caliph respected their domain in that respect. So that, so there is, there is some separation, but it's not quite what you find in Christianity where that dualism is really baked into Christianity's DNA from the very beginning. And where you have, there's a clear distinction between civil law and ecclesial law. And you even have this idea of the, the temporal world being fallen to sin, which is why you had spiritual brotherhoods and sisterhoods where people, would essentially wall themselves off from everyday life. And that was a way to avoid, they wanted to be closer to the kingdom of God rather than

the kind of kingdom of men, if you will. And so there's always this sense of these different worlds and they can interact and they can intersect. But in the end, there is the place of civil law and then there's a place of religious law. And you don't quite have that in the Islamic context, not nearly to the same extent, even if you want to argue there's a little bit of that. So do you think that this lack of distinction is part of what has left the West so afraid of, you know, at least what's perceived as Islam? Some of it's certainly that the concepts don't translate very easily. But I think it's also, you know, as someone who lives in,

you know, Washington, D.C., you know, we live in these bastions of liberal elite, liberal elitism or whatever. and religion isn't very prominent. It doesn't figure into our everyday conversations. So when you're talking about policymakers and people in the U.S. government, there is a gap there in trying to understand the everyday power of religion in a place like the Middle East, but also the kind of everyday magic of religion, that people, they see the supernatural, they see magical things happening. I don't mean magical and kind of the dismissal. sense, but that not everything is technocratic and rationalist and one plus one equals two. Politics is more, there's more of that emotional resonance because people aren't debating just policy.

They're debating the fundamentals of who they are. I mean, the very nature and meaning of the nation state, the role of religion and public life, should the state be ideologically or religiously neutral? Or should the state promote a particular conception? of the good life. So it's these almost kind of metaphysical ideas that really affect people on a daily basis. And maybe it's changing now in Europe and the U.S. that we are having our political conversations are less about policy and they're more about who are we as Americans and there are two Americas now apparently. And with the rise of Donald Trump and the rise of white nativism and

hypernationalism and xenophobia in the U.S. and Europe and so on. So I think that's, we're getting more a taste of that, but when we get a taste of that here in the U.S., it's not so much in the form of religion. It's in the form of ethno-nationalism or white nativism. And I think people are still having trouble relating to the relevance that religion has, and I would argue, we'll continue to have in the Middle East. And it's almost like, wait, these people, you know, we live in the modern era, we live in the 21st century.

Why can't these people get with it? And I think there's a kind of, there's an implicit and sometimes, explicit frustration when we have these discussions after usually we have these discussions every time there's a terrorist attack and it's like oh you know what's going on here how do we make sense of it and there's an anger that hey why can't muslims get their act together and i think that's unfortunate that there isn't more of an effort to try to understand so even if Islam is different that doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing and i think that we as western liberals and I mean here small L liberals who believe in the classical liberal tradition.

We believe everyone should be liberal in the sense of believing in these non-negotiable rights and freedoms, gender equality, minority rights, and all of these things that we think we're so evolved on. And maybe we are. But not all people's societies and cultures are necessarily going to go in the same trajectory of reformation, enlightenment, secularism. And I think that we think that the arc of history bends in this direction. when we see people who are seemingly defying that arc of history, we're confused. How is this possible in the modern era?

Speaking of people that are seemingly defying the arc of history, I wondered if you would tell us a little bit about Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and what's different there, especially in terms of Sharia law and political Islam? Sure. So Indonesia and Malaysia are often held up as sort of, I guess, models, if you want to use that word of tolerance and pluralism and demonel. I mean, certainly Indonesia, and Indonesia is the largest Muslim democracy. But what's interesting there is the role of Islam in public life has become more normalized.

So in conservative regions in both of those countries, you do actually see some experimentation with Sharia ordinances on the local level. And you might say, oh, that's kind of weird. So Indonesia's democratic, but it also has Sharia ordinances in some parts of the country. and more than in many countries in the Middle East, actually. So more than, say, Egypt, Tunisia, Turkey, Morocco, Jordan. So that seems counterintuitive. But if a country is democratic and leaders are democratically elected,

it means they have to be more responsive to popular sentiment. And where popular sentiment is conservative, then leaders have to meet the median voter halfway. And what's really interesting is that this isn't just coming from Islamist parties, even so-called secular parties, and in both of those countries, ostensibly secular parties are ruling, you see them very comfortable using the language of religion. You see them talking about the implementation of Islamic law. You hear them talking about, you know, social and moral issues, and, you know,

should we restrict alcohol consumption, you know, should people to get a marriage certificate in a certain area, should they kind of demonstrate some kind of religious proficiency or literacy, should people wear the headscarf, if they're civil servants. So people are debating those issues, and it's not just Islamists who are talking about these things. And you might say, well, why would a secular party engage in these kinds of discussions and not just dismiss them out of hand? And again, it goes back to, hey, in countries that are decentralized and both Malaysia, Indonesia have significant levels of decentralization, if you want to win an election in a conservative area, you got to play the game, even if you don't fully believe it yourself.

That doesn't sound like it's restricted to Asia. Everyone plays to the base when they need to, it looks like. Exactly. So let's say here in the U.S., if 80% of Americans believed in Christianity playing a larger role, and that would affect issues like gay rights or the teaching of evolution. And in some states, you do actually have that tension where local legislatures or state politicians have pushed back against LGBT rights or they don't want evolution to be taught in schools or debates about school prayer. So obviously those are different debates and the ones that are being had in Asia or the Middle East. But it is this same kind of idea that, hey, in Mississippi, there's going to be a little bit of a different conversation because it's a state that's more socially and morally conservative. or so we're told. Can I ask, and this is, I think, somewhat painful considering the fact that this conversation has been remarkably free of violence or this discussion of violence. But how do you think

we've gotten to this point where there is so much violence that at least the people perpetrating it are putting almost the label of Islam on it? Certainly the West is applying that label as well. how do you think we've gotten to where we are now? So I wouldn't want to give the impression that the violence that we're seeing in the Middle East is all about religion. Yes, some of it is inspired by a religion and that's a factor that we have to take into account. But obviously politics matters. And even if we want to talk very specifically about the rise of ISIS, ISIS wouldn't have risen to prominence if it wasn't for governance vacuums in Syria. So ISIS was able to gain traction in Syria, revive itself, and spill over into Iraq.

Why? Because there was a civil war going on, and the Assad regime had lost control over parts of its own territory. So the political context is very important. You don't see ISIS setting up shop and having a state in Morocco or Jordan. Why? Because there are governments there that control their own territory. They are somewhat legitimate in the eyes of their own people, whatever their faults might be. so ISIS can't really gain a foothold there. So we have to look then at how religion intersects with politics. And religion becomes a much more powerful force in context of civil war. And this is why whenever people say, hey, you know, why aren't there more moderate rebels in Syria? And I think to myself, okay, we're telling people that they have to be nice, fluffy moderates in the midst of a civil war when they're fighting and dying for a cause.

that's not the way civil war works. Civil wars are conducive to radicalization. The moderates lose out because they're less comfortable with violence, so on and so forth. So that's one thing I would say. I would also say that violence is effective, unfortunately, more often than we like to admit. And that to me is the sad lesson of the Arab Spring. I mean, the lesson of the Arab Spring was supposed to be, oh, people power, peaceful protests and all that. But when people are in the streets and they're facing off against tanks and the international community doesn't want to support them or speak out for their rights, then these protesters will oftentimes get killed. And then the question is how do peaceful protesters dislodge authoritarian regimes that want to stay in power at any cost or willing

to shed the blood of their own citizens? And that's what we saw in places like Libya, Syria, Bahrain, even Egypt in a later period with the military coup in 2013. So violence in these cases actually worked. So democracy has not been very successful. It has not taken root. And like I said, in the case of Egypt, which was one of the democratic experiments as flawed as it was, when the message gets sent that, hey, there can be a military coup against a democratically elected government, which in this case was an Islamist government.

So Muhammad Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. And so, yeah, they might have been problematic and we don't like Islamists and all of that, but they're democratically elected. But the international community's response to the coup was to basically accept it and in some way support it and legitimize it. So I think it's things like that

that send a very negative message about the incentive structures are aligned in favor, aligned towards violence, instead of the other way around. It seems like, you know, we were talking a few minutes ago about the arc of history. What's happened in Egypt or other places where popular uprisings, I guess they are actually shut down more often than they succeed. Yeah, so I guess the arc of history turning towards democracy seems like, well, I don't know. Would you say it's something of a myth, or would I be overstating it?

So I think the arc of history bends towards democracy, broadly speaking, that eventually autocracies can't last forever because at some point people say, hey, enough is enough and they want to express their rights and freedoms and take control over their own lives. Where I think the arc of history doesn't necessarily bend is towards Western conceptions of liberalism, and liberalism is not the same as democracy. And oftentimes we conflate these two concepts, and democracy is basically a short-hand hand for liberal democracy. But I sort of alluded to this earlier that you can have Democratic elections and you can have parties that respect the democratic process but are not believers in

liberalism. So they might not be totally on board with gender equality or the privatization of religion. They might want clerics to play a role in the passing of legislation. So this is what happens when Islamist parties win in elections. We as Americans were put in an uncomfortable situation because we are small L liberals but also small D Democrats and what happens when these two ideas are intention. So you can have parties that promote illiberal policies and outcomes through the democratic process. And I think Americans maybe for the first time in a while

are getting a firsthand experience of this with Donald Trump. Donald Trump, I would argue, is an illiberal Democrat in the sense that he's antagonistic towards the classical liberal tradition. He seems to have an ambivalent relationship with the Bill of Rights and minority protections. Anti-Muslim bigotry is a big problem. He refused to disavow FDR's internment of Japanese Americans. This suggests that Trump is, he might be democratically elected, and then I as an American will have to respect that outcome, but he could undermine the liberal protections as enshrined in our Bill of Rights and Constitution. So that's an example of how it might apply.

in the West. Just kind of everything you're saying, it seems like four small D democracies to flourish in kind of these, what I would say, problem areas that may be insulting in the Middle East. The people and the governments have to reconcile that Islam is a political religion. Right. There has to be some sort of reckoning with that. It feels like that's a large part of the tension. Yeah. So I think that, so the solution then is in hopes, these misplaced hopes for a Reformation. Oh, you know, it's just a matter of time, and at least it is kind of patronizing discourse of, hey, you Muslims, you'll get there in time, just be patient. We went through it too. We killed each other. Then we got our act together. So I think let's not hope for something,

which is unlikely, a Reformation, which I would argue is very specific to the experience of Christian Europe. But also, I think that to take one step further is coming to terms with the role that Islam plays. And instead of governments in the region suppressing the expression of religion, whether you have, I mean, Turkey is an example where overt expressions of religiosity were suppressed for decades under this kind of French style aggressive secularism. That's a dangerous approach. First of all, it doesn't work, and it also leads to repression. So I think part of it is coming to terms. Part of it is just normalizing Islam's role in public life, so it ceases to be so polarizing. And I think one way to do that or approach

that is to promote power-sharing arrangements between Islamists and secularists or postponed controversial debates about Sharia until after democratic transitions are secure and consolidated. The danger is when you have these debates very early on, when a transition is still fragile, there is a danger that the whole democratic process will collapse because passions are just so raw and existential between different parties and groups over these very controversial questions on religion and the nature of the nation state and so on. So there are ways to try to approach it in a much more gradual and careful way where people might still hate each other. So what I, you know, what I say sometimes is, hey, I'm not, I'm not one of these people who believes that we're going

to like each other or we're going to agree with each other. I think people hate each other sometimes for legitimate reasons, and we shouldn't be under this impression that, hey, if we just talk to the other side, we're all going to get along and understand the other, not necessarily. Sometimes you talk to other people and you're like, hey, we have fundamentally different visions of what the state should be. And when it comes to issues like that that are almost metaphysical because they're so foundational to the state and to issues having to do with religion, which is very personal to people, hey, sometimes you're not going to be able to split the middle. So the best you can hope for is for people to hate each other, but for them to hate each other

through a political process where they respect democratic outcomes and they don't resort to violence or military coups. And what that means in the long run is that the hope eventually is that people find a way to work these differences out on the question of Islam and its role through some kind of dialogue process where not everyone gets. what they want, but people learn to live with it. And this is where I think Tunisia is maybe one of the few examples, but also, like I said, Indonesia and Malaysia. The democratic process is continuing in Indonesia. There are some problematic things where the rights of minorities are being threatened and you hope that people can push back, but ultimately it's up to them to push back.

And sometimes the outcomes won't be to our liking because there is sometimes anti-Shea sentiment or anti-Christian sentiment or not everyone believes in full gender equality. But you can't force people to believe in things they don't believe in. They have to come to those conclusions on their own. And we can't be here and say, hey, you have to be this or you have to be that, because that doesn't usually work. It's not like, even if you don't resort to violence, I guess, it's not that people or countries don't try to impose their values on others anyway, right? I mean, do you think that this country or any other will actually just be able to take that biggest step back and just say, hey, what you're doing, that's culturally appropriate for where you are? Do you think that a place,

like the United States should step back? So I think that we should stand for our values, but I think that we have to prioritize some things over others. I think the focus should be on establishing democratic processes, national dialogue, inclusion, but we can't tell people what the preord, you know, what the preordained outcomes are. So if legislation is passed, that is problematic on, say, the right to get divorced and divorce proceedings become more difficult for women. And that's not even something that is just limited to the Middle East, but I'm just giving one example there, or restricting alcohol consumption, or imposing some kind of ban on co-education at certain levels of primary schooling or secondary schooling. These are things that are very socially and morally

conservative, let's say. But are we going to tell people, hey, you can't have a ban on alcohol consumption when we ourselves at prohibition? And why is it our business to protect the right of people to drink beer? I mean, that's not in the constitution of most countries, right? So I'm just, it's kind of a flippant example, but it's also. It is in fact in the U.S. Constitution. Okay, but that's only because we undid prohibition. So, but yeah, yes. I know, I know. But here's the thing. We have allies that are pretty bad.

So Saudi Arabia is the worst when it comes to women's rights. So how are we in a sanction certain countries that are much better than Saudi Arabia are more democratic? And they pass a piece of problematic legislation on women's inheritance, for example, when Saudi Arabia is like a full-on theocracy. So it would be very difficult for us to kind of, and where do we draw the line? what is beyond the pale and what is not. We haven't achieved full total gender equality.

We don't have equal pay for women. So it just becomes very hard when you put these standards up and then you have to decide what's appropriate for each country when each country has a different cultural context. So I would say we as Americans shouldn't get into all of that. We should have overarching principles and not get into the specifics of legislation on some of these issues. The best thing for us to do is to promote a process

where people have the right to undo bad legislation. They have the right to vote for other parties. If the party they've voted for the first time turns out really bad, what that means is the focus should be on small D democracy and not sort of force a liberal template on other contexts where liberalism isn't really something that people have embraced for, you know, and for whatever reason that may be. And we can debate that.

But where even the word liberal is a bad word or the word secular is a bad word. or the word secular is a bad word. We're going to go in tell them, hey, you have to be secular even though you don't even use that word in Arabic. What do you see happening going forward, especially in the Middle East? Do you see things becoming more liberal or at least more democratic? Or do you see things getting worse for a while? So this is where I think it brings us back to this question of how much do our values as Americans or Westerners matter?

And, you know, speaking as an American, I think that, One thing that we can do that I think is universal that no one would disagree on is that it's not good to kill civilians. Good. Let's start from there. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians have been killed over the last few years and the U.S. and the international community have done very little to stop it. So I think that, you know, let's get our priorities in order and we don't really have to have a big debate of what do we do if illiberal legislation is passed in Indonesia when we can't even work up the effort. to stop mass killing as a kind of global community. And that's one reason that I'm actually pretty pessimistic because Syria has spilled over everywhere. And I think that the top priority for any administration going forward

is to do something serious to stop, or not, you can't stop. You're not going to stop it completely, but to reduce the killing and to move to an actual resolution instead of pretending that Russia is going to be nice and decide to do the right thing overnight. And we've seen how the refugee crisis in Syria has affected Europe. So we're not just talking about the Middle East. We're not just talking about what's happening abroad.

We're talking about the very future of the European project. I don't think Brexit would have passed if it wasn't for the rise of far-right populism and anti-immigrant sentiment, which was in part a product of what was happening in Syria with the influx of refugees into, Germany and other countries. Could that have shifted the vote two or three percent? I think it could have. So I think that's the kind of way we have to look at this, that what's happening in the Middle East will affect the rest of the world. So let's try to do what we can to promote the end of conflict and to help resolve civil wars. And that can sometimes require a credible threat of military force to get people to come to the negotiating table.

Some people will not negotiate in good faith unless there's a credible threat of military force. That's just one example. And that's the bigger point here is that I'm pessimistic that the international community is going to play that leadership role. And I think we're going to see a situation where a violence and civil war in many countries in the Middle East for the foreseeable future for many reasons, but including the reason that we've talked about, I hope that they'll improve. but I don't think we should go into it with a lot of optimism. We should go into it with pessimism, but we should think to ourselves, what can we do to make it at least a little bit better? And we shouldn't give up hope and resign ourselves to pessimism because we all have agency,

right? The international community has agency. The U.S. has agency. We are still, I think, a superpower or whatever, I think, or we're not that anymore. I don't know. I think it depends on who you ask. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. It was my pleasure. Thanks for listening to this week's show. None of these issues are simple, but we hope this conversation was informative. Send your comments to us on Twitter. We are at War underscore College. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe.

Or tell us how we're doing on our iTunes page. War College was created by me, Jason Fields, and Craig Heddock. Matthew Galt co-hosts the show and makes the guests happen. Our producer this week was Bethel Hoptic.