Religion and American foreign policy

In: Survival: global politics and strategy, Band 46, Heft 1, S. 23-37

Abstract

American foreign policy will more effectively counter Islamist terrorism if it more effectively counters the terrorists' invocation of Islam. The indirect promotion of religious tolerance in the Muslim world, rather than direct promotion of Western-style democracy, is the key. To that end, the United States must cultivate Muslim human-rights activists and intellectuals as assiduously as it did their Soviet counterparts during the Cold War. First, however, it must reassert the constitutional separation of church and State that some Americans seem eager to blur. No velvet revolution impends in any case: the Muslim political future will probably look more like Yugoslavia than Czechoslovakia. But long-running internecine conflicts may have left the umma in a state of exhaustion analogous to Europe's at the end of the Thirty Years War. Ihere is, in short, a moment to be seized if American diplomacy can muster the cultural sophistication to seize it. (Survival / SWP)