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G 2017 • N

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BER 7

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO HOURS & FIFTY YEARS: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL OREN

THE SEVENTH DAY & COUNTING: THE ELUSIVE PEACE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

A POPE & A PRESIDENT: JOHN PAUL II, RONALD REAGAN, & THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

PAUL KENGOR

ALSO: ROBERT KAUFMAN BACKS THOMISTIC OFFENSE • CHRISTOPHER KOLAKOWSKI REMEMBERS BATAAN • C.S. LEWIS CELEBRATES THE 1ST SERVANT • ALAN DOWD INTERROGATES AMERICAN

INTERVENTION • MARK TOOLEY ON AMERICAN INTERESTS • GENERAL MACARTHUR CONSTRUCTS A MAN • MARK COPPENGER OFFERS AIDE TO THOSE SNOWED-IN • GEORGE ELIOT LAUDS A SPOT OF

NATIVE LAND & ROBERT NICHOLSON PUTS SIX DAYS IN PROPER CONTEXT

“WE HAVE UNITED JERUSALEM, THE DIVIDED CAPITAL OF ISRAEL. WE HAVE RETURNED TO THE HOLIEST OF OUR

HOLY PLACES, NEVER TO PART FROM IT AGAIN.

To our Arab neighbors, we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace. And to our

Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem

for the sake of other peoples’ holy places, nor to interfere with believers of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and

to live here together with others, in unity.”

Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defense Ministerstatement at the Kotel, June 7, 1967

SPRING 1967/2017 • NUMBER 7

A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIANITY & AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

THE SEVENTH DAY & COUNTING: THE ELUSIVE PEACE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR 18JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

SPRING 2017 | NUMBER 7

Army Chief Chaplain Rabbi Shlomo Goren, sur-rounded by Israeli Defense Force soldiers of the Paratroop Brigade, blows the shofar in front of the

Kotel is a segment of a much longer, ancient, lime-stone retaining wall that encased the hill known as

Palestine, the blowing of the shofar at the Kotel was

accordance to agreements with Muslim authorities,

FEATURES

PROVIDENCE

28 A POPE & A PRESIDENT: JOHN PAUL II, RONALD REAGAN, & THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

PAUL KENGOR

4 ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO HOURS & FIFTY YEARS: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL OREN

MARK COPPENGERSNOWDENISM: A MORAL ASSESSMENT 37

CHRISTOPHER L. KOLAKOWSKI

FLICKERING FORLORN HOPE:THE BATTLE OF BATAAN 44

MARK TOOLEY

AMERICAN INTERESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS 50 ALAN DOWD

IN THE INTEREST OF HUMANITY 54

ROBERT G. KAUFMAN

IN DEFENSE OF AQUINAS:PREEMPTION, PREVENTION, & DECISIVENESS AS JUST WAR STAPLES 64

ESSAYS

PUBLISHERSMARK TOOLEY

ROBERT NICHOLSON

EDITORMARK TOOLEY

MANAGING EDITORMARC LIVECCHE

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JAMES TURNER JOHNSONHERB LONDON

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S P O N S O R E D B Y

AD ORIENTEMROBERT NICHOLSONJUSTICE IN HISTORICAL CONTEXT 80

BOOKSHELFTHE QUARTERMASTER’S BOOKSHELF:Recommendations for further reading & a survey of newly available books 75

REVIEWSJONATHAN LEEMANAN EXCEPTIONAL CRISISJohn Wilsey’s American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea 71

PROLOGUE

In the dead of night, on the last day of 1964, a 35-year-old for-mer engineer from Gaza named Yasser Arafat led a squad of

al-Fatah guerillas from Lebanon into northern Israel. Bearing Soviet-made explosives, and donned in Syrian-supplied uniforms, their target was a pump for conveying Galilee water to the Negev

MARC LIVECCHE

ONE HUNDRED- THIRTY-TWO HOURS &

FIFTY YEARS: A CONVERSATION WITH

MICHAEL OREN

FEATURE

5

Nevertheless, the operation does important duty as Michael Oren’s opening vignette in his magnificent . The water pump was always only one element of the du-al-purpose mission. In addition to inflicting as much damage as they could against Israeli civilians, al-Fatah hoped their action would “provoke an Israeli retaliation against one of its neighboring countries—Lebanon itself, or Jordan—igniting an all-Arab offensive to destroy the Zionist state.”

Oren admits one might won-der at the “singularly limber imagination” required to be-lieve such petty sabotage, even if successful, would somehow ignite a full-scale war. Yet, as he asserts, “al-Fatah’s oper-ation contained many of the flashpoints that would set off precisely such a war less than three years later.” Among much else, “there was, of course, the Palestinian dimension, a complex and volatile issue that plagued the Arab states as much as it did Israel. There was terror and Syrian support for it and Soviet support for Syria. And there was water.” Water won’t feature much in the essay below, but feature large it did, indeed, in the buildup to the war in 1967. By the beginning of 1964, Arab leaders were concerned about Israeli plans to channel Galilee water to the Negev desert in southern Israel. An irrigated Negev, the Arabs feared, would support mil-lions of additional Jewish immigrants and further solidify Israel’s presence in Palestine. Arab leaders responded with the Headwaters Diversion Plan, an effort to stem two of the three sources of the Jordan River and prevent them from entering the Sea of Galilee—and so drastically reducing both the quantity and quality of the water available to Israel. Against such a threat, rightly characterized

as existential, Israel could not remain passive. Several such potentially existential crises would manifest prior to 1967 and would begin to bracket Israel’s sense of available options, until her preemptive strike against Egypt became the inevitable outcome. And so a seemingly minor act of terrorist aggression contained within itself all the tinder necessary to set a region alight.

When this conflagration did ignite, it would rage for less than a week, but would change the

region, its people, and global politics forever.

Deputy Minister Michael Oren is an American-born Israeli historian (PhD, Princeton), writer, diplomat, politician, and combat veteran. He served as the Israeli ambassador to the United States from 2009-2013, entered the Knesset and the governing coalition in 2015 as a member of the centrist Kulanu, and is now deputy

minister for public diplomacy in the Prime Minister’s Office. The following interview is primarily drawn from two sources: an initial phone conversation with the deputy minister in late April, and then a private address to our Philos Project tour group—in Israel to study the war and the modern Middle East—that Oren delivered in the Israeli Knesset in May, on the eve of the anniversary of the reunifi-cation of Jerusalem. I also draw from Oren’s

Lengthy material taken from this book is set apart in quotation marks.

THE WAR

PROVIDENCE: Before setting up the context of the war, I’d like to begin with a per-sonal moment. In your book, you recall your early memories of the Six-Day

desert. This nighttime raid, al-Fatah’s maiden operation, would be a spectacular flop. Not only would the planted explosives fail to detonate, but the terrorists would be arrested by Lebanese police as they attempted to slip back across the border.

6

War, listening to the event on the news, your parents’ response, and early fears that gave way to elation.

MICHAEL OREN: Yes. No event had a greater influence on me than the Six-Day War. I was 12 years old. The beginning of the crisis coin-cided with my birthday. There wasn’t a lot of celebrating. My parents feared for what they believed was Israel’s imminent destruction. They feared a second Holocaust was about to occur. They believed that the world was again going to do nothing. To witness it silently.

And then came June 5th. Israel’s victory in the war that followed allowed American Jews to walk with their backs straight, and they could now flex their political muscles. That’s what was said. “American Jewish organizations that previously kept Israel at arm’s length suddenly proclaimed their Zionism. For me, personally, the war’s impact was especially poignant. I will never forget my father rushing to the breakfast table, waving a copy of Life. On its cover was a photo of an Israeli soldier chest-deep in the Suez Canal, a captured Kalashnikov brandished over his head. ‘You see that!’ he shouted. ‘That’s what we can do!’ And he kissed the picture.” I decided then-and-there that I was going to move to Israel.

PROV: That’s right—you moved to Israel, as you wrote, to “take part in the dra-ma of Jewish independence.” And it’s been a drama, with no guarantees. I’m particularly struck by the idea that Jews feared a second Holocaust. The rapidity and decisiveness of the Israeli victory in ’67, makes it easy to forget that, in the buildup to the war, the Jewish people really thought Israel was facing an existential threat. Despite the victory, this fear wasn’t misplaced, was it?

OREN: Not at all. There was every reason to believe Israel was facing an existential threat. This is widely forgotten. To understand the Six-Day War you have to take a snapshot of Israel on June 4th, 1967. What did this country look like? The Middle East? The world?

Israel is nine miles wide at its narrowest. It has a population of 2.7 million people, many of whom are traumatized. Many had survived the Holocaust; this is just 20 years after Auschwitz. Many were refugees of op-pression in Arab lands, from which they fled or were driven out. Israel is surrounded by 639 miles of hostile neighbors with whom it is in a state of war: Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt. These enemies don’t just threaten to attack Israel, but to drive it into the sea. The West Bank was annexed by Jordan in 1950, Gaza has been under Egyptian military occupation since 1948. Jerusalem is divided. There’s a wall right across middle of the city. Arab snipers regularly pick off Jews on the other side of that wall. Old Jerusalemites all know people who were shot by snipers. There was no access to holy places for Jews, above all the Western Wall. Divided. Israeli farms, in Israel, in the north, are constantly being shelled from Syrian positions on the Golan Heights.

The Arab world is divided in two big ways, and then several small ways. It is divided between the Arab radical states—Algeria, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and the conservative monarchies—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, many of the Gulf States. The conservatives are backed by the United States, the radicals by the Soviet Union. Within each camp, they all hate each other. Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser is the ostensible leader of the radical camp, but he’s in competition with the Syrians, who are in competition with the Iraqis. The Jordanians are in competition with the Saudis. But for everybody, the way you win this competition is to show you’re the most anti-Israel. One Arab state pushes the other Arab states to do something against Israel increasingly radical.

So you have an Arab-Israeli conflict, which has several concentric circles to it. I’ve already mentioned the inner-circle, the Arab border states. There’s an outer circle, as well. This includes Iraq, the Gulf States, and the North African states. They’re not on the frontline with Israel, but they can send forces. In 1948, Iraq did send forces, and they fought in Jerusalem. Militarily, “the Arab’s combined

outlay on arms—$938 million annually—was nearly twice that of Israel.” And Egypt and Syria hold key terrain: Egypt can blockade Israel’s Red Sea port, strangling our economy, and Syria can stop the flow of water into the Galilee. These, too, are existential threats. This is important to keep in mind because the generation that ran Israel in 1967 kept it in mind.

Into this mix you throw a couple of Palestinian terrorist outfits, which are always causing trouble. You have the Palestine Liberation Organization, which is created by Nasser in 1964 to advance Egyptian interests; it’s a straw organization. You have this tiny or-ganization called al-Fatah, headed by one Yasser Arafat. It’s backed by the Syrians and operating out of the West Bank for the most part, or off the Golan Heights. They don’t have an enormous impact, but what they’re good at is ratcheting up the aggression against Israel and getting the Israeli army to retaliate, usually at the Jordanians or the Syrians. In turn, the Syrians and Jordanians strike back. And Israel doesn’t sit passive. You can see how this escalates.

In the world, Israel is more isolated than it has ever been or ever will be. China, India, all hostile. The Soviet Union, very hostile. The Soviet Bloc of 12 Central and Eastern Europe, hostile. The United States is friendly, but not an ally. There’s no strategic alliance,

no military support. Internationally, Israel has one ally. That’s France. And on the eve of the Six-Day War, France switches sides.

Threats to annihilate us, utterly alone, out-gunned. The Israeli leadership is convinced that we were literally on the eve of a war of destruction. Israeli government digs about 10,000 graves in a Tel Aviv park and is con-vinced it’s not going to be enough to hold all the bodies. After the war, I read Robert Littell’s . “It left me sleepless for nights. In vivid prose, the au-thor describes endless columns of burned-out Israeli tanks and trucks, thousands of destitute POWs, and widespread massacres of Jewish civilians. Especially haunting for me was the final chapter in which Nasser’s helicopter flies over the ruins of Tel Aviv, and Moshe Dayan is placed in front of a firing squad.” That book had a very powerful effect. It captured the mood of the times.

PROV: You mentioned Egypt’s ability to blockade Israel’s Red Sea port. Of course, Nasser actually does exactly this, a major factor precipitating the Six-Day War. Yet in reading your book, I came away with the impression that, perhaps, Nasser didn’t want war as much as he simply wanted the fruits of war. While he pledged, repeatedly, to destroy the Jewish state and drive its people into the sea, one doesn’t get the

impression of a rabid anti-Semite. Did he hate the Jews? Were they simply a scapegoat for some larger inter-Arab dispute? Did he blunder into war? Was he pressured into it?

OREN: I think it was a combination of those factors. I don’t think Nasser thought Israel was going to attack, even after blocking the Straits of Tiran. He lost control. Inter-Arab feuding certainly factored in, he was in com-petition with the Saudis. He was an Arab Nationalist but also a radical, and there was, as I’ve said, a huge battle for leadership of the Arab world.

Go back to late 1966. A Palestinian terror-ist organization carries out an attack from

Israeli forces retaliate, cross into the West Bank, and run, by accident, into a battalion of Jordanian infantry. A lot of Jordanians got killed. Jordan’s King Hussein blames Nasser for not standing up to the Israelis.

Another Palestinian terrorist organization carries out an attack from the Golan Heights and, in March of 1967, Israel retaliates against

the Syrians. The Syrians shell the Galilee, Israel sends up its air force to hit the emplace-ments on the Golan, the Syrians send up their air force, and the Israelis end up shooting down six Syrian MiGs. In 30 seconds, they achieve air supremacy over Damascus. The Syrians blame Nasser for not standing up for the Arab cause.

Then there is the interference of larger global players. For reasons up for conjecture, the Soviet Union begins spreading rumors that Israeli troops are massing on Syria’s border in preparation for war. The Egyptians know full well that this is not true, but by May 1967, Nasser is already in hot water, and is feeling pressure to act.

He needs to do something symbolic that’s going to reestablish his leadership of the Arab world. What does he come up with? He de-cides to evict the United Nations Emergency Force (UNEF) from the Sinai, where they had been placed at the end of the Suez crisis in 1956. Now, as far as Nasser was concerned, the fact that there was an international force in the Sinai did not derogate from Egypt’s sovereign rights. UNEF was there at the suf-ferance of Egypt, it wasn’t imposed on Egypt.

The Lion’s Gate,

But in May, Nasser evicts them. UN Secretary General U Thant buckles quickly, and, basi-cally, within 24 hours the first peacekeeping force in history abandons its mission. They are kicked out.

Nasser sends his army into Sinai. He march-es them in This is very important because, according to the documents I read later on, he did this on purpose to signal to the Israelis that he did not want war. It was all done publicly. He wasn’t sneaking anyone in. Nevertheless, what’s clear is that Nasser has suddenly just remilitarized the Sinai. He brings his army up against Israel’s. There is no buffer anymore.

This creates huge war fervor among Arabs. Demonstrations occur throughout the Arab world urging the destruction of the Jewish state. And so Nasser feels he must take an-other step. On May 22nd, he closes the Straits of Tiran, the portal between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, about a mile and half wide. If you close them to Israel-bound shipping, you effectively neutralize Israel’s southern port of Eilat, and eliminate Israel’s exit to Asia. Israel got all its oil through Eilat—so if you blockade the strait you’ve cut off Israel’s oil supply. Not good. The blockade is an act of war.

More war fervor, the Syrians, the Iraqis, quickly sign a mutual defense pact with Egypt, and suddenly everyone is talking war. Jordan’s King Hussein is Egypt’s archenemy. Nasser’s tried to assassinate him no less than 11 times. But Hussein gets on an airplane and goes to Cairo. Nasser meets him at the airport and tells him, “I could kill you.” And Hussein replies, “You could kill me, but I’ve come here to put my army under your command.” So the Egyptian army takes command of the Jordanian army and, you know, the Jordanian army is, then, right here in Jerusalem—just up the road, about a mile from here.

This is all happening in a very short period of time. As I said, Israeli leadership believes we are on the verge of a fight for our lives. They is-sue gas masks, dig graves. The Knesset sends messages out to the international community

for help. The only leader who responds is President Lyndon Johnson, who says, “Listen, I’d love to help but I’m bogged down in a war.” Remember, at this time there’s no strategic alliance between the United States and Israel, there’s no obligation there. “But what we’ll do,” Johnson says, “is form an international convoy made of 26 ships from 26 nations and we’ll sail them through the Straits of Tiran. If the Egyptians open fire at us we’ll open fire back at the Egyptians.” They even picked the targets they would hit. The only problem is that no other country was willing to contribute a single ship. Even the United States Congress was against it. Even Israel’s friends in the US Congress were against it.

Nasser wasn’t anti-Semitic. He had had ex-tensive contacts with Israelis in the 1948 war. He’d conducted truce negotiations, corre-sponded with the Israelis in the early 1950s; he was always willing to talk directly with Israel. So there wasn’t out-and-out hatred. Simply, waging war against Israel or appear-ing to wage against Israel is what established legitimacy. The big problem with Arab coun-tries then, as today, is legitimacy. You saw in the Arab spring what happens to countries without legitimacy. It’s not by accident that the only countries who survived the Arab spring are the monarchies; they can trace their legitimacy back to prophet Mohammed. Without legitimacy, governments are swept aside. It wasn’t any different in 1960s.

“This is not to say Nasser acted entirely ir-rationally. He…had every reason to believe that he had won a bloodless victory, a polit-ical triumph that restored him to his former ascendency in the Arab world. A more per-ceptive Nasser, however—a Nasser less prone to believe his own propaganda…would have known that the Israelis would not remain inactive indefinitely.”

PROV: There’s a real tragedy there. If Nasser didn’t want the war, who did?

OREN: Arafat wanted it. The Palestinians want-ed it. Some of the crazier Syrians wanted it. Syria was a very radical regime. Bashar

al-Assad’s father was one of the heads. Very radical. Nasser’s Chief of Staff Abd al-Hakim Amer maybe wanted it. Hussein didn’t, but “ultimately…to survive politically, physically, Hussein had to fight.”

PROV: Israel?

OREN: Not at all. It’s important to know, crucial to know, that Israel tried again and again to warn Arab leaders that they didn’t want a war. Israel sent messages on back channels to the Syrians, to Nasser, saying “We don’t want war. Let’s climb down the ladder.” Personal letters were sent back-and-forth to King Hussein saying we don’t war. Nothing happens. Arab armies continue building up on Israel’s door.

There followed a three-week period of high tension, the most nerve-wracking, traumatic weeks. Nowadays we have mothers protesting against war; back then they were protesting for it—they could not bear the fact that their husbands and sons and brothers had been mo-bilized in the reserves. We were an agrarian economy back then, and no one was picking the fruit, mowing the alfalfa. The economy was in a nosedive. The joke was, “Would the last person out of the airport kindly turn off all the lights?” The thought was that people would just start fleeing.

All this sets in motion a series of events that are truly inexorable. History has taught the Jewish people that despite Israeli self-defense coming at significant economic, diplomatic, and human costs there is not, nor has ever been, any practical or moral alternative. Her tactic is deterrence. Her strategy is to survive. Negotiations leading to peace can be realistic with an adversary who shares that goal. What do you do with enemies who seek only your annihilation? You cannot, in the immediate term or until dispositions change, induce them to peace. But you can deter them from war. We must make the cost of aggression too high to pay.

Israeli leaders made a decision to have a very limited preemptive strike. It had only two goals. One, neutralize the Egyptian air

force. Egypt had about 400 Soviet planes; this was an existential threat. The other goal was to attack and capture the first of three defensive lines in the Sinai and so move the Egyptian army back. That’s it. Moshe Dayan, the Defense Minister, even warns the generals that he will personally shoot the first Israeli soldier to reach the Suez Canal—he so did not want to reach the Suez Canal!

PROV: So, what happened? How did you go from limited objectives on the morn-ing of Operation Moked (Focus)—the Israel Air Force assault on the Egyptian airfields—to the situation six days later in which Israel had quadrupled the ter-ritory under its control, to include all of Sinai and the Suez Canal, Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan, and, of course, all of Jerusalem?

OREN: The imponderables and the unpredict-able happens! First, the Egyptian air force is destroyed in two hours—it’s the greatest air victory in military history, studied to this day—350 Egyptian planes destroyed in about an hour and a half.

Three Israeli columns enter Sinai. The north-ernmost one is unexpectedly shot at from Gaza. There was no plan to conquer Gaza; Gaza was out of it. But there was an Egyptian force there with Palestinian irregulars, and they start shooting. So, the Israelis do a little side move, and they enter Gaza. And there’s fighting—which wasn’t planned. Meanwhile, the Israeli lines hit that first Egyptian defen-sive line, which breaks so fast that the three Israeli columns proceed to hit the second and third Egyptian lines, and they break fast as well. The Egyptians begin a helter-skelter retreat toward the Suez Canal. Officers take vehicles and abandon their men. Some have to flee on foot, so they took off their shoes and ran across the dunes of Sinai—because you can’t run across those dunes in shoes.

Despite all this, the Egyptian commanders of the Jordanian army are issued “a number of far-reaching actions, including the destruc-tion of Israeli airfields by a combination of

artillery fire, jet bombing, and commando raids.” The Jordanian artillery arsenal in-cluded American-made 155-mm “Long Toms.” “Two batteries of the…guns went into action, one zeroing in on the suburbs of Tel Aviv.” Then “Jordanian army howitzers launched the first of 6,000 shells on Jewish Jerusalem… Military installations were targeted, along with the Knesset and the prime minister’s house, but the firing was also indiscriminate… Over a thousand civilians were wounded, 150 seriously, 20 of them died.”

Most significantly, Jordanian ground forces began entering the city, over near the Haas promenade. Most Israelis had lived through the 1948 War of Independence. The Jordanian army beat the Israeli army in every single bat-tle, one. They are perceived as a major threat. In 1948, they also laid siege to West Jerusalem, leaving 100,000 Jews without food or water. A deep scar. They move into West Jerusalem? Another existential crisis. Israel is going to react.

The Israeli air force takes an hour to destroy the Jordanian air force. Israeli ground forces begin to counterattack, in Jerusalem and the

West Bank. No plans for this. There were no paratroopers here; they were down in Sinai getting ready to parachute into El-Arish. All of a sudden they’re redirected to Jerusalem, to fight in a city they don’t know. “They had rarely trained for urban combat and lacked maps and aerial photographs of the battle-ground.” But they got on buses, and they came. The greatest number of paratroopers killed and wounded in Jerusalem were killed and wounded getting off those buses, hit by artillery. It’s a nightmare.

Another Israeli armor column enters the West Bank through Latrun, an old British fortress. Their main goal is to get to Mount Scopus, an Israeli enclave demilitarized for 19 years. The Jordanians have 100 M-60 Patton tanks, the largest tanks in the Middle East at the time. Israel had nothing that could stop it. The tanks had left Jericho and were moving up toward Jerusalem. The fear is that they were going to overrun Mt. Scopus. They, too, get taken out by the Israeli air force. Most never got to Jerusalem.

Throughout the West Bank the Jordanians fight hard. But June 6th, June 7th, they begin to

retreat. Israel is sucked into the West Bank, up against the Jordan River. Israeli paratroopers surround the Old City. On the morning of June 7th, they’re prepared to go in.

Remember, even throughout the war, the Israeli government kept sending messages to the Jordanians saying that if they stopped fighting the Israelis would stop fighting. On the morning of June 7th, Prime Minister Eshkol sends a message to Hussein saying, “Stop fighting and enter peace talks and we won’t even take the Old City.”

Think about that. On Jerusalem Day, we walk through the Old City with flags, celebrating the reunification. In 1967, the Israeli gov-ernment was willing to forgo, willing to for-feit, that historic reunification of the Jewish people with its holiest sites in order to have peace with one Arab country. King Hussein never responds. Israeli paratroopers enter the Old City at about 9 a.m. Two hours later they report, “The Temple Mount is in our Hands,” and the war is essentially over on the Jordanian front.

What’s left? Syria. Like the Jordanians, they get a message from Cairo on June 5th to open fire, and they do so, massively, from the Golan Heights, firing tens of thousands of shells down on Israeli farms and villages. Israel fires back, but the decision was made to not open another front. Additionally, the Syrian regime was particularly close to the Soviets, and Israel didn’t want a tussle with the Soviets. That said, by the end of the first day of the war, “Syria had little air force left. Two-thirds of it…had been eliminated in eighty-two midday sorties.” Three enemy air forces destroyed in a single day.

Even up to June 8th, the “Syrian shelling of kibbutzim and settlements in Israel [had] been continuous and incessant…forty-eight of them were hit.” The two other fronts had stabilized and the Syrians were still fighting. So, what choice was there? We gotta go up there and get rid of them. Now we have the opportunity. So, on June 8th we open a third front. The fight for the Golan Heights was a very tough fight.

PROV: You’ve said somewhere that Israel wins all its wars but it never wins the peace. ’67 in some ways fits that pat-tern. This can be see, perhaps, in what you describe as a move from what was generally regarded as an Arab-Israeli conflict, prior to 1967, to one described afterward as an Israeli-Palestinian conflict. With this shift came some-thing of an inversion of the public perception of the power dynamic in the Middle East. In the Arab-Israeli conflict, power was perceived as rest-ing with the Arabs. After ’67 proved this wrong, power is now perceived to be on the side of Israel, and it is the Jews who are seen, by many, to be the aggressors.

OREN: Right, the David and Goliath thing. That’s true, but the analogy is predicated on an outdated notion of what power is. No, Israel doesn’t face a conventional military threat vis-à-vis the Arabs. Not anymore. But it faces all kinds of different threats. Hezbollah

and Hamas rockets in the north and south respectively can render life emotionally un-tenable. Their rockets are now capable of hit-ting every part of our country, taking out our airport, freezing the economy, and spurring a mass exodus. Not to mention emboldening other adversaries into joining the assault. Add to this suicide bombers. Add to this the delegitimization and boycott campaigns in intellectual and academic circles and the press—all of which is political warfare. Add the Iranian nuclear threat. Beyond prolif-eration and first-strike threats—which they have vowed to do—the possibility exists that the Iranians would transfer their nuclear capability to terrorist groups. There are still existential threats.

Over the course of observances of the 50th anniversary, while Israelis and many others are celebrating—for the good reasons that

the victory saved us from destruction and reunited our holiest city—the Palestinians are mourning a half-century of suffering and, they claim, an Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza that has subjected them to colonization and denied them statehood. But the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has never been about territory Israel captured in 1967. It is about whether a Jewish state has the right to exist in the Middle East at all. On that point, Abu Mazen—Mahmoud Abbas—for one, was very clear when he said, “I will never accept a Jewish state.”

This is what I mean when I say that wars in history become wars of history. There will be some on the extreme left, within Israel, who agree with the Palestinians in calling the ’67 war a great catastrophe—because it resulted in the occupation and settlements. But events have been unkind to this view.

The watershed was September 2000, the outbreak of the Second Intifada. It followed an offer by Ehud Barak and Bill Clinton to Yasser Arafat of Palestinian statehood—of all of Gaza, almost all the West Bank, and half of Jerusalem—Israel offered to re-divide Jerusalem. In return for that offer we got war. We didn’t get peace; we got war. For an entire generation of Israelis, who believed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was all about the results of 1967, this was a profound shock. They suddenly realized the conflict had just as much to do with 1917, 1937, and 1947.

In 1917, a century ago this November, Britain issued the Balfour Declaration, pledging to create a national home for the Jewish people. It didn’t commit to creating a Jewish home-land in all of Palestine. The national home could have been tiny. The declaration also promised to maintain the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities. Nevertheless, the Palestinians rejected the Declaration; they vowed never to accept such a Jewish nation. And so, in the 1920s, when

the declaration was followed by a wave of Jewish immigration, Palestinian Jews were murdered in Arab riots that eradicated the ancient Jewish communities of Hebron and Safed.

The Israeli-Palestinian feud is also about 1937, when Zionist leaders under David Ben-Gurion supported the Peel Commission—which pre-sented a plan to divide Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab states. But once again, while the Jews recognized the Palestinian Arabs as a people with sovereign rights, the Arabs didn’t return the favor. Not only did they reject the plan, they successfully pressured Britain into cutting off almost all Jewish immigration to Palestine, denying European Jews of their last escape route from Hitler.

This November also marks 70 years since the UN General Assembly passed the Partition Resolution creating independent Arab and Jewish states in the wake of six million mur-dered Jews. While Zionist leaders, again, embraced the plan, the Palestinian Arabs,

once again, rejected the idea of Jewish peo-plehood and independence. Their leader, Haj Amin-Husseini—who had had collaborated with the Nazis and invited Hitler to extend his anti-Jewish plan into the Middle East—promised that Arabs would not only block the plan but would “continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated.”

So the Second Intifada demonstrated that Palestinians were not going to accept Israel on any borders. That was a profound shock to the left, one from which the Israeli left has never recovered. It was reinforced in 2005 with the disengagement from Gaza. Israel ripped up all the settlements, ripped up 21 settlements and moved back to the 1967 lines. It didn’t get peace. It got Hamas—and tens of thousands of rockets. These are shocks from which the left has never recovered.

PROV: Right, and to go back to 1948, while Arab fighting was certainly directed at destroying the Jewish people, it was never, apparently, also

directed at providing a homeland for the Palestinians. But after ’48, there was no reason the Arabs couldn’t have given Palestinians a homeland.

OREN: Well, this is why—and this might sur-prise you—the biggest winners of the ’67 war were probably the Palestinians. Think about it. Before ’67, what was the situation? Jordan had illegally annexed the West Bank. Egypt militarily occupied Gaza. No one was talking about a Palestinian state; no one was talking about Palestinians at all. Usually if you referred to a Palestinian prior to 1967, you were referring to a Palestinian prior to the establishment of the state. I have in my office several copies of Life magazine from the 1960s, early 1970s. Even in the early ‘70s, when you’re referring to a Palestinian, it means you’re referring to a Palestinian Jew pre-1948. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the Palestinian pavilion was the Jewish Zionist pavilion. You went in and got genuine Palestinian food, Palestinian art. It was all Jewish. The 1947 partition resolution talks about creating an Arab state and Jewish state, not a Jewish state and a Palestinian one. The terrorists that were Palestinian terrorists were then simply called Arab terrorists.

What happened, then, is that the ’67 war reunited the three major centers of the Palestinian population—Gaza, the West Bank, and Israel—and brought them under one rule for the first time since the British mandate: Israel’s rule. The result was a huge infusion of Palestinian identity. But not just that, the Palestinians, who before the war worshipped Nasser, didn’t worship him any-more. The ’67 war disabuses the Palestinians of the belief that they can look to Nasser, or Arab Nationalism, or any state to bring about their redemption, and they begin to look to themselves.

It’s no accident that only two years after the ’67 war, the PLO, which was a shell organi-zation, emerges as a significant Middle East player. It becomes a Palestinian organization, an umbrella for many terrorist groups—they all unite under the PLO. Yasser Arafat, by

1969, is its head. Prior to this, Arafat wasn’t even a member of the PLO, he was in a ri-val organization—Fatah. All of this changed because of 1967. Five years later, Arafat is getting standing ovations at the UN General Assembly. All of a sudden, the world is talking about a Palestinian problem. No, prior to ’67, no one was talking about a two-state solution. Certainly not the Arabs. Two state solution for the Palestinians? You kidding?

PROV: What are the other significant legacies of ’67?

OREN: “The collapse of pan-Arabism and its replacement by Islamic extremist ideas.” Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism, jihadism, have been in a contest since the mid-19th century. The founding fathers of what would become the Muslim Brotherhoods, basically all the purist movements, even ISIS, find their roots in the Egypt of the 1870s to 1880s, the same formative period of Arab nationalism. The competition was this: the nationalists said the reason we are weak is because we don’t have what the West has; we don’t have nationalism. The Islamists said we’re weak because we’ve ignored our own roots, so we have to go back to our own roots. In a certain way, the Arab nationalists were more flexible because of an essentially secular ideology. Not that that made them very pleasant to deal with; Saddam Hussein was an Arab nationalist. Bashar al Assad is an Arab nationalist. Nobody has ever accused him of being a nice guy. But if you have to choose between ISIS and an Arab nationalist, you might consider an Arab nationalist.

The war also inaugurated the emergence of the US-Israel Strategic alliance. It didn’t exist before the Six-Day War. On the seventh day, American policymakers woke up and said, “Whoa, there’s this little superpower out there that’s democratic, and pro-American. Maybe we should have a strategic alliance with that country.” That’s where it begins. Keep in mind, prior to ’67, not only had no president ever been here, but no Israeli prime minister had ever been to the White House. Kennedy met Ben-Gurion, one time, in the

Waldorf Astoria in New York, not in the White House. Founder of this country, he was not even greeted in the White House. What we consider today commonplace was, back then, simply non-existent.

Today, that alliance is probably the deepest, most multifaceted strategic alliance that the United States has with any foreign power; I say that without reservation. Note just one facet: the Israeli army is more than twice the size of the British and the French armies, combined. And it just happens to be located at the most strategically sensitive and valu-able intersection on earth. That’s why the American military is nowhere near here. No bases. No fleets. You don’t need it. You’ve got us. It is an immense asset to American security, and America is an immense asset to Israeli security. So it’s a very deep alliance. It emerges from the start of the Six-Day War. It will probably only get stronger.

PROV: What does the reunification of Jerusalem mean for Israel?

OREN: Jerusalem is the political and the spiritual capital of the land of Israel, of the Jewish people. Ben-Gurion understood this at the state’s creation in 1948. Even with large sections of the Galilee and the Negev already lost, he devoted the bulk of Israel’s forces to breaking the siege of Jerusalem. He understood the city is the soul of the Jewish state. Prior to ’67, the state of Israel was not particularly located in biblical lands, but after ’67 it was. Haifa’s not in the Bible! Hebron, Jericho, Bethlehem—these The ’67 war, Israel’s victory, makes the Jewish state pal-pable. It makes the Jewish state more Jewish.

PROV: In the days leading up to the Six-Day War, songwriter Naomi Shemer wrote “Jerusalem of Gold” for Israel’s 19th Independence Day. With its pri-mary theme of exile and longing for Jerusalem, it became something of an unofficial national anthem. After the war, a paratrooper wrote “Jerusalem of Iron,” a song based on Shemer’s song but capturing a different mood.

OREN: Meir Ariel—I’m a big fan. He was a poet and a singer. And, yes, he was a paratrooper in 1967. He was disgusted by the war victory fervor that swept over the country. His reac-tion to this was to write this song, “Jerusalem of Iron,” or steel, to talk about the pain. There are other songs like this. “The Song of Peace” is a threnody for the recent dead. In it, the dead talk to the living, saying don’t celebrate war, look at what it did to us. In Israeli soci-ety, there is always this tension—the desire to celebrate and a remembrance of what the war cost. Israel lost about 750 soldiers in the war. In a country as small as Israel, it was a large loss—the equivalent, in America today, of about 80,000 people. Such losses were proportionally higher than the Yom Kippur War. Tens of thousands of Egyptian dead. Significant losses in Jordan and Syria. “Large numbers of noncombatants suffered, and suffered acutely. Between 175,000 and 250,000 Palestinians fled the West Bank for Jordan, many of them second-time refugees.” So, there was a tension. This doesn’t take away from the understanding that the ’67 war was a great victory.

PROV: Yom Jerusalem, Jerusalem Day. We’re going to be out on the streets in the thick of it. What should we expect?

OREN: To be on the streets of Jerusalem on Jerusalem Day, on the 50th anniversary of the reunification, will be an extraordinary scene. Thousands and thousands of Israeli youth will be marching, dancing, with the Israeli flag. See, Israeli young people are what would be considered in an American context right wing. In contrast to the United States, you can be very cool in this country and right wing! In particular, religious youth will be out. Go to the Kotel. For the religious Jews, as for many evangelicals, the ’67 War is perceived as being an act of Divine inter-vention having millennial ramifications. It will be very moving.

Michael Oren is an American-born Israeli histo-rian, author, politician, former ambassador to the United States, and current member of the Knesset for the Kulanu party and Deputy Minister in the

Marc LiVecche (PhD, University of Chicago) is managing editor of

FEATURE

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

THE SEVENTH DAY & COUNTING:

THE ELUSIVE PEACE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

On May 13, 1967, Anwar Sadat, the then-Speaker of Egypt’s National Assembly, returned from a visit to Moscow to

pass along to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser a bit of intelligence that the Kremlin had revealed to him. Israel, it said, was mobilizing forces on its northern border to attack Syria. This “intelligence” was completely false, and to this day we have only contending theories about the Kremlin’s motives in concocting it. But it set off a chain of events unforeseen by any of the actors, including especially the Soviet government, which came away one of the episode’s big losers.Within a day, Arab officials were publicly repeating the accusation, although Israel’s leaders strenuously denied it. Israel even invited Soviet representatives to join them for a flight to the border to see for themselves that no Israeli forces were massed, but the offer was spurned. Within two days, however, tanks could be heard rumbling through Cairo, and Egyptian forces began to flood into the Sinai desert. Cairo Radio broadcasted:

The existence of Israel has continued too long. We welcome the Israeli ag-gression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The peak hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.

Then, Nasser demanded the withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force. These soldiers had taken up positions on the Egyptian side of the border with Israel as part of an agree-ment settling the 1956 Sinai War. Israel had

seized the entire peninsula but evacuated it in exchange for the placement of the UN force and the lifting of Egypt’s 1951 ban on Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran. (The Straits, a narrow waterway through which Israel could reach the Indian Ocean, were legally international waters, but they were bordered on one side by Egypt and readily controlled from there.)

UN Secretary General U Thant promptly complied with Nasser’s demand, having little other choice since most of the forces came from India and Yugoslavia, two close allies of Egypt. A few days later, Nasser announced that Egypt was renewing its blockade of Israeli shipping through the Straits of Tiran, which under international law constituted an act of war.

These belligerent acts were reinforced by a drumbeat of incendiary broadcasts and proclamations. Nasser boasted that “[t]he

armies of Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon are poised on the borders of Israel…while standing behind us are the armies of Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan and the whole Arab nation.” And he warned that if war came, “Our basic objective will be to destroy Israel.” Would it come? Egypt’s main official news-paper, Al Ahram, said it was “inevitable.” Likewise, other Arab officials made similar boasts; for example, Iraq’s President Abdul Salam Arif said, “Our goal is clear—to wipe Israel off the map.” Ahmed Shuqairy, the lead-er of the Palestine Liberation Organization, echoed this phrase, adding piquantly, “no Jew will be left alive.”

Israel, meanwhile, sent appeals for peace in public statements and through diplomatic channels. A major radio address by Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, perhaps the least char-ismatic of that country’s leaders, sounded so conciliatory and was delivered so haltingly as to project fear. Itzhak Rabin, then the young and dynamic chief of staff of Israel’s armed forces and later a celebrated prime minister, disappeared from sight for a few days. It was said he had overdosed on coffee and cigarettes. It is now generally acknowledged that he had a nervous breakdown, although he recovered in a few days.

Israel was indeed afraid. It had prevailed in its war of independence of 1948, but one percent of its people had perished. It had triumphed again in the 1956 Sinai campaign, but with the tactical advantage of taking the initiative and with Britain and France having its back. Now, the Arabs had the initiative, and no one had Israel’s back.

In those first decades of Israel’s life, Israel’s main patron and arms supplier was France, while the United States, unlike today, at-tempted to be evenhanded in the Israel-Arab conflict. But when Israel’s envoy met urgently with French President Charles de Gaulle, he warned that France would withdraw support if Israel fired first. De Gaulle embargoed further arms deliveries to Israel, even of those already bought and paid for. U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, his hands more than full with the Vietnam War, also warned that Israel

would not have America’s support if it initi-ated hostilities. But Israel’s military planners calculated that whichever side struck first was likely to win.

The country still hoped to avoid war, but the Arab mobilization on its borders and the blockade of the straits constituted a casus belli, not only in a strict legal sense but for practical reasons, too. Like so many other countries, Israel depended on imported oil, and that oil necessarily came mostly from the east, meaning through the straits. And, too, Israel could not withstand a prolonged mobilization of forces since, unlike the Arab armies, Israel’s consisted mostly of mobilized civilians. If they were mobilized for long, the economy would grind to a halt.

President Johnson appealed to Israel to bide its time while he organized a flotilla of ships from the U.S. and several allied countries to sail through the straits and break the block-ade. But after days passed, it became apparent that Washington had no luck in assembling any participants. Meanwhile, another omi-nous event occurred.

Jordan had long been the most moderate of the Arab states. King Hussein’s grandfather and predecessor, Abdullah, had been the sole Arab leader prepared to accept a compromise with the Zionists. For this he had been mur-dered before the eyes of the then-teenaged Hussein. The boy, who soon acceded to the throne, continued his grandfather’s moder-ation but was cautious about offending more militant Arabs and inviting his grandfather’s fate. Now, in the heat of the moment, Hussein flew to Cairo, patching over longstanding antagonism with Nasser, and announced that he was placing Jordan’s military under Egyptian command.

For Israel, the fat was now truly in the fire, and early on June 5, ignoring ongoing Western appeals for patience and claiming falsely that the other side had opened fire, Israel struck. Its target was the Egyptian air force. Although Israel was outnumbered in personnel, guns, tanks, planes, and other weaponry, it held clear advantages in the élan of its soldiers

and in intelligence. In particular, Israel’s commanders knew exactly where Egypt’s air forces were stationed, the times its planes would be on the ground, and even the hours Egyptian pilots would be busy breakfasting. In that first wave of strikes, Israel’s bombers all but destroyed the Egyptian air force on the ground and thus determined the war’s outcome. Egypt’s superior tank numbers counted for little while Israel controlled the skies over a vast desert battlefield with little place to hide.

While focusing on Egypt, its most powerful enemy, Israel held Syria at bay and attempted to keep Jordan out of the fight altogether. Placing hopes in King Hussein’s disposition to moderation, Israeli officials appealed to him through American diplomatic channels, promising not to attack Jordan if he did not attack. Had he heeded them, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including the old city, would still be part of Jordan today.

But Hussein ordered his forces into the fray. Perhaps he believed Nasser, who called to tell him falsely of great Egyptian victories at the war’s outset and to urge him to get in on the spoils. (Hussein’s early gesture of placing Jordanian forces under Egyptian command had been all for show; they remained firmly in

his hand.) Or perhaps he sensed that Nasser was lying but calculated that it would be less costly to absorb defeat in the field than to incur the suicidal ignominy of abandoning the Arab cause.

Jordan’s offensive unleashed the war’s clos-est-quarter battles, the most costly ones for Israel, and the ones of most portentous result, as Israel’s soldiers wrested East Jerusalem and the surrounding area from Jordan. Emblematically, Jewish soldiers danced with Torah scrolls before the Western Wall, this remnant of Judaism’s holiest site returned to Jewish hands after two millennia.

Then, with quiet on the Egyptian and Jordanian fronts, Israel turned to Syria, which had, with Soviet connivance, triggered the war. Syrian guns atop the 2,000-foot-high Golan Heights habitually shelled Kibbutz Ein Gev immediately below as well as scores of other farms and settlements within artillery range. Fighting up this steep and rocky incline was a daunting military challenge, but by this stage momentum and confidence, as well as air power, rested entirely with the Israelis while on the other side morale was sinking. Once at the summit, Israeli forces fanned out to occupy a swath of elevated plain of perhaps 500 square miles. When fighting concluded

on this front, the guns of the Six-Day War fell silent.

Of course, the guns didn’t just fall silent. Rather, firing ceased in accordance with a res-olution of the UN Security Council. Resolution 242, introduced by the United Kingdom and supported by the United States, affirmed in its preamble “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war,” then called on “withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territory occupied in the recent war” and the “termination of all claims or states of bellig-erency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and

political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”

What this all meant was that the Arabs had to make lasting peace with Israel, accepting its presence within the region, while Israel had to withdraw from territory it had seized from Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, territory far larger than Israel as a whole had been at the war’s outbreak. There was, however, a nuance to the text. The Soviet representative proposed inserting the word “the” before the phrase “territory occupied in the recent war.” But the resolution’s sponsor rejected

that amendment, and it was dropped. The intent of the sponsors was that Israel should withdraw from some of the occupied territory, probably from most of it, but not necessarily from all of it.

Israel’s representative, Abba Eban, a man from the dovish side of the Israeli spectrum, deplored Israel’s prewar borders as “Auschwitz borders” because they left the country only nine miles wide at its center and thus painful-ly exposed to attack. Moreover, those borders had little legal dignity, having derived from the ceasefire lines of the 1948 war that had never been codified into any treaty. From

Israel’s view, its victory in a war in which the other side had threatened its annihilation justified its insistence on redrawing the map to make itself less vulnerable.

And what about the “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”? Well, for one thing, that language was only in the preamble, perhaps a statement of general principles rather than a binding determination. And, too, there is perhaps a modicum of difference between offensive and defensive war. Is ac-quiring territory in the course of self-defense the same as acquiring it “by war”? Scarcely more than twenty years earlier, the borders of Europe were redrawn especially to the benefit

of the USSR, but these acquisitions in the course of self-defense were little challenged (even though the largest Soviet acquisition came at the expense of Poland, which was a victim and not an aggressor).

The intent of the resolution was to lay the groundwork for a negotiation in which Israel would pull back in exchange for Arab recog-nition and peace. When an interviewer asked Israel’s defense minister, Moshe Dayan, what comes next, he replied that he was “waiting for a phone call” from Arab leaders to launch the bargaining. But that call never came. Instead, the Arab League met in Khartoum two months later and issued a defiant decla-ration: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiation with Israel.” In short, just as the war had disappointed the hopes of the Arabs to be rid of Israel, so it disappointed Israel’s hope the Arabs would be forced to come to peace terms.

It did, however, establish Israel’s military superiority. The country was never again to appear so vulnerable as it did on the eve of that conflagration. Indeed, the pendulum was to swing in the opposite direction. Israelis, so filled with fear during the run up to war, now grew complacent.

This was personified for me by Tzvika, the diminutive nickname for the common Israeli name, Tzvi. In 1972, I led a delegation of Young Socialists from the U.S. on a tour of Israel hosted by the youth section of Israel’s ruling Labor Party, and Tzvika was one of our hosts and guides1. Like every Israeli, he had served in the military and, as a tank commander, was active in the reserves. Redheaded and slight of build, he was warm, outgoing, and playful, and exuded the confidence characteristic of post-1967 Israel. He told me that if the Arabs started another war, Israel would win in fewer than six days, but if the Soviets joined them in combat it would take a few weeks.

A year later, Egypt, having sent Soviet advi-sors packing, launched an attack in coordina-tion only with Syria. It was Yom Kippur, and Israel, taken by surprise and thinly defended, was nearly overrun. My lovely friend Tzvika,

so I learned later, was quickly mobilized to the front. His tank paused somewhere in the Sinai, and Tzvika emerged from the turret to survey the battlefield. As soon as he did, an Egyptian sniper’s bullet tore through his neck, killing him instantly, a heartbreaking token of that brief moment of Israeli hubris that followed the great victory of 1967.

Israel survived in 1973 thanks to the indi-vidual heroics of young soldiers who held off vastly superior forces while Israel’s citizen army mobilized and thanks also to a massive emergency airlift of American arms ordered by President Nixon. Although Nixon was later revealed to have spoken disparaging-ly of Jews, he was a savior to Israel. When Kissinger proposed proceeding cautiously and secretively with the shipments, Nixon over-ruled him, saying, “It’s got to be the works… We are going to get blamed just as much for three planes as for 300.”

Israelis later spoke with wonder and gratitude for the air bridge of C-5s and C-141s, immense transporters that disgorged a desperately needed resupply of arms, tanks, and even of fighter planes. Planes were airlifted within planes like massive matryoshka dolls. Such ponderous shipments required refueling en route, but no European country would allow the American planes access. Indeed, they even denied overflight rights until Nixon twisted the arm of our most vulnerable ally, the anachronistic military regime of Portugal, which granted refueling stops in the Azores.

Why were America’s allies so uncoopera-tive? Because they were desperately afraid of the oil boycott that the Arabs unleashed in conjunction with the war. But the shift of European countries away from friendliness to Israel toward embrace of the Arabs had begun already in 1967 with de Gaulle. The consummate realpolitiker, de Gaulle made plain that French interests must come first, and these dictated aligning with the side that had greater numbers and resources. Until 1967, France had been Israel’s primary patron and armorer; but in the aftermath of that war, the United States and Israel drew close, and France became a champion of the Arabs.

ALAN DOWD

In the years following the Six-Day War, oth-er Europeans began to follow Paris’s lead, spurred by their fear of terrorism. The up-surge of international air piracy, bombings, and other forms of terrorism was another indirect consequence of that war.

Over the preceding decades, the dominant idea in the Arab world had been pan-Ara-bism, also called Arab nationalism. If all Arabs would join in a single omnibus state, they could regain a place of power and glory among the nations of the world. This was the hot idea of the time, firing the imaginations of young people in the coffee shops of Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, much as radical Islam was to do a generation or two later. One strain of this ideology was Ba’athism, which came to dominate Syria and Iraq, but there were others, too, and the leading exponent of Arab nationalism was Egypt’s Nasser, who was the most popular leader ever in the Arab world—and remains so to this day.

The first task of Arab nationalism was to elim-inate Israel, and the Arabs’ ignominious defeat in 1967 was seen above all as a humiliation of Nasser. Indeed, he resigned as president before street crowds, probably in part ginned up by Egypt’s intelligence agents and in part spontaneous, beseeched him to resume office. Resume he did, but all the air had gone out of the balloon of Arab nationalism.

This deflation made space for the reasser-tion of other nationalisms among the Arabs, and in particular for the birth of Palestinian nationalism. Until this point, Palestinian nationalism scarcely existed. At most it had been a thought tossed out by miscellaneous Arab thinkers now and again since World War I, but it had gained no traction.

True, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been formed in 1964. But it was not found-ed at the initiative of Palestinian Arabs, but rather of Nasser. He appointed the PLO’s first head, Ahmed Shuquairy, a pan-Arab factotum who had served at various times as a diplomat for Syria and Saudi Arabia and an officer of the Arab League. The PLO’s purpose was not the liberation of “Palestinians,” but rather of

Palestine, a territory unacceptably occupied by the Jews. The PLO’s founding document made no mention of a Palestinian state or Palestinian sovereignty.

One of the miscellaneous thinkers who had hit on the idea of Palestinian nationality was a young teacher who had grown up in Cairo and lived now in Kuwait, Yasser Arafat. He became the leader of a small group in Kuwait of men whose origins were in Palestine, and they called their group “Fatah.” It pub-lished a newsletter propounding the idea of Palestinian nationality, and in 1967 some of its numbers traveled to the front to join the brief fight against Israel. Their military contributions were nil, but enabled them afterwards to don a cloak of bravery while most of the Arab armies were in disgrace.

So marginal had Fatah been that it had been excluded from the PLO, but in the war’s after-math it was admitted and by 1969 had taken over, with Arafat becoming PLO chairman. It set to work fostering a sense of Palestinian identity among the Arabs of Palestine, in part through propaganda and in part through “propaganda of the deed,” that is, spectacular acts of international terrorism in the skies and across Europe and the Middle East.

These hijackings and killings drew the world’s attention to the Palestinian cause, brought fame on the perpetrating groups, stirred the blood of Palestinian Arabs, and served to in-timidate Europeans and moderate Arabs. The most famous of these acts was the 1972 attack on the Israeli team at the Munich Olympics in which eleven Olympians were slaughtered, and its aftermath reflected tellingly the tem-per of the times.

Of the eight perpetrators, five died in a shootout with German security personnel, while three were taken into custody. The trio was held for all of a month before being exchanged in an airplane hijacking that the German government appeared to have collab-orated in staging. Arafat’s deputy, Abu Iyad, explained, “German authorities, moved by a sense of guilt or perhaps out of cowardice, were clearly anxious to have the captured

Fedayeen off their hands.” The German re-action was far from atypical. The Times reported in 1973, “Although most Arab terrorists responsible for hijackings, kidnappings, and the seizure and execution of hostages over the last few years have been captured or have given themselves up, few have suffered meaningful punishments.”

Rather than combat Palestinian terrorists, Europe took the tack of appeasement. This expressed itself not only in the treatment of arrestees but also on the diplomatic level in a move away from support for Israel to an embrace of the PLO. This appeasement may

have served to deflect terrorist acts away from European soil, but it also served to legitimize terrorism, which became a growing interna-tional scourge in the decades that followed.

Through all these years, and one horrifying act after another, the UN has never been able to agree on an international convention against terrorism, despite much trying and a particularly strong push in 2005 by then-Sec-retary General Kofi Annan. The reason is that the Muslim states, determined to maintain the legitimacy of Palestinian terrorism, have insisted that terrorism must be defined by the validity of the cause rather than the nature

of the act. In recent times, Arab and Muslim terror, albeit not Palestinian, has come back to bite Europe ferociously.

It was not only by intimidation that the Palestinian cause gained adherents, but also by ideology. Arafat’s predecessor and sometime mentor as leader of the Palestinian Arabs was Haj Amin el-Husseini, grand mufti of Jerusalem. In World War II, al-Husseini aligned closely with Hitler, basing himself in Germany, doing propaganda broadcasts from there, and even traveling in Europe to recruit Muslims for an SS brigade. In the 1970s, however, Arafat, guided by Algerian revolu-tionaries who had vanquished France, repo-sitioned the Palestinian cause from Right to Left. He made pilgrimages to Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow, and the PLO claimed a place alongside the Viet Cong and other Communist and revolutionary guerrilla movements across the “Third World.”

The Soviet Union, although having lost the romantic appeal it enjoyed in the 1930s and 1940s to younger Communist regimes in Cuba and Vietnam, nonetheless still com-manded an unmatched worldwide network of propaganda resources. These were now deployed in calumniating Israel. As their role in instigating the 1967 war with false tales illustrated, the Soviets were already aligned against Israel. But the outcome of the war redoubled their antipathy, expressed in a crude and anti-Semitic propaganda campaign against the bugaboo “Zionism.” Its capstone was a resolution pushed through the UN General Assembly in 1975 by the Soviets and the Arabs condemning Zionism as “racism.”

The reason behind Moscow’s venom was that along with Nasser and the Arabs, the Kremlin was the war’s big loser. The Arabs were equipped with MiG aircraft and other Soviet arms, while Israel deployed French Mirage jets and other western equipment. Israel’s overwhelming victory was seen to signify the inferior quality of Soviet weaponry.

The harm to the Soviets went beyond this humiliation. Israel’s against-the-odds tri-umph lit a spark among Jews in the Soviet

Union, who numbered a few million. Because religion, especially the Jewish religion, had been suppressed and derided in official pro-paganda for fifty years, few of these Jews worshipped or had much knowledge of Jewish faith or culture. But they knew they were Jews; indeed, the regime forced them to know because the identity “Jew” was stamped into their internal passport, a document every Soviet subject had to carry.

A movement was kindled among them to explore their Jewish identity, to study Hebrew, and, most astonishing, to move to Israel. The Soviet Union did not allow its citizens to leave, but this marked it as more repressive than non-Communist dictatorships and black-ened its reputation as the Jewish demand to emigrate brought it to light. Despite the refusals and arrests, the movement of Soviet Jews seeking to go to Israel grew, nurtured by support from Jews abroad. It became the first substantial protest movement in the history of the Soviet state and ate away at the sinews of totalitarianism.

Israel’s victory even served as inspiration to non-Jews under the Soviet yoke. Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had each been subjected to Communist rule by the Soviet army at the end of World War II. Hungary had rebelled, and Poles had rioted against Communism, though these risings were each time brutally quashed. For the most part, they were kept in thrall through the aura of Russian and Communist invincibility, convey-ing relentlessly the message that opposition to the status quo was hopeless.

Now, however, little Israel had thoroughly defeated much larger opponents who were seen as Soviet surrogates. This planted the idea that resistance was not hopeless at all, however much it might seem against the odds. Indeed, the Czechs peacefully but massively rebelled a year later. And the Poles mounted repeated waves of resistance through the 1970s, culminating in the rise of Solidarity.

Thus, all of the initiators of the Six-Day War had reason to regret their acts. Nasser was to die of a heart attack in 1970 without ever

having recaptured his former prestige. The Syrian regime was overthrown in 1970 by its Defense Minister, Hafez al-Assad, who eventually passed power to his son, creat-ing a dynasty that has presided over the de-struction of that country. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, its ramparts weakened by the protest movements of Soviet Jews and Eastern European dissidents that the war had aroused.

Security Council Resolution 242, the fruit of that war, remains the basis on which hopes for an eventual peace between Israel and the Arabs rest. Those hopes were partially ful-filled when the remarkable Anwar Sadat, who had carried the Kremlin’s poisoned “intelli-gence” of May 1967, succeeded Nasser and, after making one more war, opted decisively for peace. In the 1990s, Israel offered Syria the return of the Golan Heights, but the deal foundered over the division of the narrow sliver of land separating the heights from the Sea of Galilee. Given recent events in Syria, it is unlikely any Israeli government will ever renew the offer. Also in the 1990s, Prince

Hussein signed a peace treaty with Israel, but he had already ceded claim to the West Bank and East Jerusalem to the PLO, thanks to the “climate of terror” that the PLO had created (in the boastful words of Abu Iyad).

Peace with the Palestinians remains the elu-sive piece needed to bring this century-long conflict to an end. But the Palestinians are also at war with themselves. One faction—Hamas—swears it will never make peace with Israel. The other—Fatah, now led by Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas—says it wishes but refuses to negotiate. The Six-Day War reshaped the conflict, but sadly its final resolution remains somewhere over the horizon.

Joshua Muravchik is a distinguished fellow at the World Affairs Institute and the author of, among other works,

. 1. I am no longer a socialist and, alas, no longer young, but I hasten to add that even then the group I was part of was not very far out. We were not Communists, but rather in the mold of European social democrats.

PAUL KENGOR

A POPE & A PRESIDENT: JOHN PAUL II, RONALD

REAGAN, & THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

II teamed up to seek precisely that historic victory, an outcome they perceived as not only historical but spiritual. For both men, the Soviet empire was not a mere empire, but an atheistic empire that pursued what Mikhail Gorbachev described as a “war on religion.” It was, as Reagan put it, an “Evil Empire.”

What did Pope John Paul II mean to America in that battle against atheistic communism? What did he mean to America’s president in that epic fight against evil? And what did President Reagan mean to the Polish pontiff, the Vatican, and the Roman Catholic Church’s two-century-long assault on communism?1 How did these two men see the hand of Providence in what they did?

The following offers a look at what these two extremely influential statesmen did in pursuing Cold War victory. These pages are a tiny portion of what I detail at great length in a book published this May 2017. This article cannot give due justice to the Reagan-John

These shocking moments rocked interna-tional headlines. And we now know today what an anxious world did not know then: both men came perilously close to dying. Had they not survived, the 20th century would not have ended as it did, surely not as joyously as it did—that is, with the Cold War ending as it did. Soviet communism would not have been dispatched to what Reagan called “the ash-heap of history”—or certainly not as soon or peacefully.

For Americans, for Europeans, for Protestants and Catholics, for Jews, for believers of all stripes, and for so many others worldwide, the momentous and tranquil termination of the Cold War was the signature event of the close of the 20th century. It was one of the most remarkable events of the entire turbulent cen-tury, a century where over 100 million people were killed by communist governments, far exceeding the combined death tolls of World War I and World War II, history’s deadliest wars. And Ronald Reagan and John Paul

On March 30, 1981, just outside the Washington Hilton in the heart of the nation’s capital, Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United

States and leader of the free world, was shot by a would-be assassin.

On May 13, 1981, just outside the Vatican in the heart of St. Peter’s Square, Pope John Paul II, 264th occupant of the chair of St. Peter and leader of the world’s largest group of Christians, was shot by a would-be assassin.

FEATURE

Paul II extraordinary joint effort. Nonetheless, it does attempt to offer a glimpse.

TRANSCENDING COMMUNISMThe American public got a taste of John Paul’s significance to Ronald Reagan when the na-tion’s new president, still recovering from the shooting on March 30, stepped to the podium to speak at Notre Dame University—America’s premier Catholic college—on May 17, 1981, only days after the pontiff had been shot in St. Peter’s Square.

It was Reagan’s first public speech since the shooting of the pope, and it happened to be at a college named after the Virgin Mary, to whom John Paul II had a special dedication.

Reagan had earlier accepted the invitation to be the commencement speaker, and he had too much to say to pass up the invite, even amid his ongoing recovery. Reagan began his remarks by acknowledging not his own health situation but that of the pope—wishing him well for a speedy recovery, and drawing

grateful applause. It is very interesting what followed next.

Next came a stirring statement in the pres-ident’s text. It went hand-in-glove with his thoughts about the pope, whom Reagan was already viewing as a partner against Soviet communism: “The years ahead are great ones for this country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization,” said Reagan. “The West won’t contain communism, it will transcend communism… It will dismiss it as some bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

People were amazed at what Reagan asserted. Many outright laughed.

That audacious prediction, particularly along-side his remarks on the pope, was actually a statement that foreshadowed Reagan’s policy and his intentions with John Paul II: he would not seek to contain communism; he would seek to reverse and defeat communism.

The 40th president spoke to his audience about a higher cause and challenge. He rallied them

to a “common cause” that was “bigger than ourselves,” to “attain the unattainable.” If Americans met this challenge, history would look back, Reagan assured, and determine that “the American Nation came of age,” that it “affirmed its leadership of free men and women serving selflessly a vision of man with God.” He invoked: “It is time for the world to know our intellectual and spiritual values are rooted in the source of all strength, a belief in a Supreme Being, and a law higher than our own.”

Reagan drew on remarks made by Winston Churchill during the ominous Battle of Britain: “When great causes are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits, not ani-mals, and that something is going on in space and time, and beyond space and time, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.” To Reagan, the obligation Americans must meet was their duty to fight expansionist Soviet Marxism. This was a higher duty separating humans from beasts. It was a transcendent cause that would be implicit to transcending atheistic communism.

In that, Ronald Reagan saw Pope John Paul II as his partner in a battle as spiritual as political. And he also saw the Slavic pope’s native land, Poland, as a pivotal spot where the battle could be waged and won.

POLAND: THE FIRST “CRACKS” IN THE COMMUNIST BLOCOne month after that Notre Dame speech, a reporter during a White House press con-ference dared Reagan to stand by his bold prediction. Reagan went further, telling the press that he believed that recent intrigues in Poland, in particular, were an added sign of communism’s doom. “Communism is an aberration,” insisted Reagan. “It’s not a moral way of living for human beings, and I think we are seeing the first, beginning cracks, the beginning of the end.”2

The cracks intensified on December 13, 1981. The Polish communist government, acting under orders from Moscow, declared martial

law on the Polish people, with the Solidarity movement the main focus of the crackdown. Solidarity was a fiercely independent, an-ti-communist, anti-Soviet labor union led by Lech Walesa, an electrician from the Lenin Shipyard (ironically) in Gdansk. Practically every worker in Poland was a member, an unacceptable situation for the communists.

Solidarity leaders were rounded up and ar-rested and silenced. There was armed violence by the communist police and military. The communists were shooting the workers. The Party was smashing the Proletariat.

The Soviet leadership issued a statement of support for martial law. For its part, Solidarity, under siege, issued an appeal to friends everywhere: “We appeal to you: help us in our struggle by mass protests and moral support. Do not watch passively the attempts to strangle the beginnings of democracy in the heart of Europe. Be with us in these difficult moments. Solidarity with Solidarity. Poland is not yet lost.”3

Among the friends who listened to these words intently were the Polish pope and the American president. Both committed to save and sustain Solidarity as the wedge that—they believed, they judged—could ultimately splinter the Soviet bloc from top to bottom. To Ronald Reagan, the ugliness that was martial law presented beautiful possibilities—and Pope John Paul II, in Reagan’s mind, could join him in exploiting and pursuing those possibilities.

THE POPE’S VISIT TO POLAND

Before considering those next steps, let’s take a step back.

It is critical to understand that, long before the explosive events of December 1981, Ronald Reagan had believed that Poland could be the catalyst to knock down the Soviet dominoes in Eastern Europe.

Ronald Reagan viewed Poles as tragic vic-tims of two totalitarianisms: Nazism and

Bolshevism. He spoke of “the martyred nation of Poland.” The Allies had liberated Poland in World War II but sold it down the river to Stalin at Yalta. Reagan hated Yalta, calling it “immoral.” He hoped to someday “undo” the damage.

Thus, Reagan was especially affected by two huge events in the two years prior to his election in November 1980: the Vatican in October 1978 chose its first non-Italian pope in 455 years and its first Slavic pope ever, one from Poland no less, the heart of the Soviet bloc; and the new pope took a nine-day pilgrimage to his Polish homeland in June 1979. The new man in Rome shrewdly chose Poland as his first foreign visit. Moscow was scared to death.

Reagan paid close at-tention to the pope’s June 1979 trip, where the Holy Father—as the secret police pressed in—stoically told his brothers and sisters, in words packed with New Testament meaning, to “Be not afraid.” John Paul II openly insisted that all Eastern European governments be allowed freedom of conscience, individual rights, private property, elections, and inde-pendence. He asserted: “There can be no just Europe without the independence of Poland marked on its map!”

That was a riveting statement that bears re-peating: “the independence of Poland marked on its

”

That was a shot heard in Moscow. It was also heard by Ronald Reagan.

Reagan was elated. He spoke out excitedly about what he saw from afar. He had a popular

daily radio commentary heard on thousands of stations across the country. He paused to record several broadcasts on the pope’s trip. In these, Reagan blasted the “communist atheism” that had preyed on Poland follow-ing World War II. It outraged Reagan that, “These young people of Poland had been born and raised and spent their entire lives under

communist atheism.” He asked: “Once in the days of Stalin he is said to have dismissed the Vatican by contemp-tuously asking: ‘How many divisions does the pope have?’ Well, in recent weeks that ques-tion has been answered by Pope John Paul II. It has been a long time since we’ve seen a lead-er of such courage and such uncompromising dedication to simple morality—to the belief that right does make might.” 4

Reagan noted that wherever the pontiff traveled in Poland, he was greeted by “unbe-

lievable numbers” of people. The future Great Communicator told his fellow Americans that for 40 years the Polish people had lived first under the Nazis and then the Soviets. The voices behind those tanks and guns told them there is no God. Now, said Reagan, Pope John Paul II had come to remind his fellow Poles and the world that there is a God and they had a right to freely worship that God. Reagan asked: “Will the Kremlin ever be the same again? Will any of us for that matter?”

Reagan was never the same again. He recog-nized that this was a momentous event that threatened communism’s hold on Eastern Europe. As he watched news footage of the pope’s visit from his California home, where he sat next to his friend and adviser Richard V. Allen, Reagan was visibly moved to tears. He told Allen (as he would tell others) that John

Paul II was “the key” to help Poland become the splinter to break up the Soviet empire.5

For the record, the future president’s powerful thinking on the potential of Poland and the pope’s 1979 visit was not the shared opinion of the West. In an editorial on June 5, 1979,

declared authoritatively: “As much as the visit of Pope John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and re-inspire the Roman Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe.”6

The Times could not have been more wrong. Fortunately for Poland, for Eastern Europe, for America, for the world, and for the cause of freedom, the views of The were never those of Ronald Reagan or John Paul II.

Reagan further resolved to get himself elected president and one day reach out to the pope and Vatican to “make them an ally.”

“DUBIOUS DISTINCTION”Reagan’s chances of getting to that point took a major jump forward when he defeated Jimmy Carter in November 1980, winning 44 of 50 states and defeating the incumbent president in an Electoral College landslide, 489 to 49.

Reagan wasted no time reaching out to the Vatican, even going so far as to contact a pleasantly surprised Archbishop Pio Laghi and congratulating him for being named papal nuncio to Washington. Reagan did so from the headquarters of his transition team. Reagan was still weeks away from his inauguration; nonetheless, he yearned to get together with the Vatican, with the pope, as soon as he could.

Any such progress, however, came to a vi-cious halt amid a series of bullets that flew in Washington and Rome in March and May 1981. Ironically, these shots, which could have forever separated Reagan and John Paul II, drew them closer.

On May 18, only five days after the pope was shot, Reagan sent the pontiff a second personal note since the shooting—this one a birthday wish, but much more than that. The letter was delivered personally to the pontiff by Rep. Peter Rodino (D-NJ) on a Sunday evening. In that letter, Reagan shared his unique form of identification with the pope:

Happily, few leaders in the world today have the dubious distinction of knowing with some precision the kind of event you have just experienced. Fewer still can ap-preciate, as can I, the depth of courage and commitment on which you must have called, not only to survive that horrible event but to do so with such grace, nobility, and forgiveness.

Your heroism, and the universal outpouring of love and concern which it evoked, is proof that a single irrational act cannot prevail against the basic human decency which continues to inspire most people in most places. The qualities you exemplify remain a precious asset as we confront the growing dangers of the moment—confront

Their historic paths began with sacrifice. It was as if they had to start their journey together against the Soviet monster by first carrying the cross—to be made worthy of the historical-spiritual mission ahead.

The Soviets had worried about an anti-com-munist, anti-Moscow kinship between the president and the pope; now they had better worry more so.

JUNE 7, 1982: MEETING AT THE VATICAN—& MOREThe pope and the president at long last came together on June 7, 1982, at the Vatican.

“It was always assumed the president would meet with the Holy Father as soon as feasible,” said Bill Clark, President Reagan’s closest aide, and a devout Catholic who admired John Paul II. “Because of their mutual interests, the two men would come together and form some sort of collaboration.”7

The two talked alone for 50 minutes in the Vatican Library. The attempted assassina-tions were raised right away. Pio Laghi later recounted that Reagan told the pope: “Look how the evil forces were put in our way and how Providence intervened.” Clark confirmed that sentiment, saying that both referred to the “miraculous” fact that they had survived.8

The Protestant and Catholic, said Clark, shared a “unity” in spiritual views and in their “vision on the Soviet empire,” namely, “that right or correctness would ultimately prevail in the divine plan.”

In fact, Clark and Reagan had their own pet phrase for this divine plan; the two old friends called it “The DP.”

That day in Rome, said Clark, they shared their common view that they had been given “a spiritual mission—a special role in the divine plan.” Both expressed concern for “the terrible oppression of atheistic communism,” as Clark put it, and agreed that “atheistic communism lived a lie that…must ultimately fail.”9

They also had common visions on what should be done. As Reagan said, “We both felt that a great mistake had been made at Yalta and something should be done. Solidarity was the very weapon for bringing this about.” Reagan told the pope: “Hope remains in Poland. We, working together, can keep it alive.”10

June 7, 1982, was far from the only time the two men or their staffs would meet. Much more was in store; they would meet five more times in total. A substantial effort ensued, conducted in close coordination between the White House and Vatican. The major play-ers included Clark, CIA Director Bill Casey, Ambassador Vernon Walters, Cardinal Pio Laghi, and Cardinal Agostino Casaroli.

Clark characterized the nature of the col-laboration: “We knew we were both going in the same direction and so we decided to collaborate, particularly on intelligence issues regarding the Eastern Bloc.” Clark told me: “There was a natural convergence of interests,

which led officials at the White House to work together with their counterparts at the Vatican.”

Clark dubbed the mutual effort a “successful collaboration” led “under Ronald Reagan’s di-rection.” He says that he, Casey, Ambassador Walters—all active Catholics—and Laghi “played extensive roles.”

Among the numerous exchanges, those be-tween Clark, Casey, and Laghi are especially interesting. The June 1982 meeting at the Vatican led to something that Clark colorful-ly dubbed “Cappuccino Diplomacy.”11 Clark explained: “Casey and I dropped into his [Laghi’s] residence early mornings during critical times to gather his comments and counsel. We’d have breakfast and coffee and discuss what was being done in Poland. I’d speak to him frequently on the phone, and he would be in touch with the pope.”12

Laghi’s coffee, Clark always told me with a smile, was the good stuff—genuine Italian cappuccino, which, in Washington in the 1980s, was not available on every block. The coffee became a code. Alert to the possibility that their phone lines might be bugged by Russian listening devices, Clark and Casey, when they felt they needed to once again touch base with the Vatican, would coyly say to one another, “Would you like to have some cappuccino?” This meant it was time to consult the papal nuncio.

Clark said that his contacts with Laghi oc-curred “at least weekly,” and sometimes more.

The conversations, said Clark, were always “back channel.” No note-takers, and abso-lutely no media. This was done completely outside normal channels, especially outside State Department channels.

Here were three Catholic men, two of them Irish and one Italian, who relished figuring out what the Soviets were up to, who dis-cerned “the DP” for this remarkable time they were living through, and who seemed to nervously enjoy plotting the demise of the USSR.

Outside the United States, briefings were provided at the Vatican by Casey and Walters. Casey flew secret missions to Rome in a win-dowless C-141 black jet. The Reagan adminis-tration fueled an intelligence shuttle between Washington and the Holy See, through which Casey and Walters clandestinely briefed the pope on a regular basis. Between them, they paid at least 15 secret visits to John Paul II over a six-year period.13

Both the pope and the president eagerly an-ticipated the information gained from these varied briefings. And beyond the human intelligence shared, the pope benefited from the mighty arm of U.S. technical intelligence, receiving some of the nation’s most guarded secrets and sophisticated analysis. He was able to pour over satellite imagery detailed beyond his conception.

A “BEST FRIEND” & A COLLAPSEThe various personal contacts, letters, ca-bles, diplomatic pouches, telephone calls, and more between Reagan and John Paul II and their liaisons are too many to note here. The White House documents today are mostly declassified, largely through FOIA requests I personally began submitting in 2000. The letters from the pope were typically embedded within White House Situation Room cables labeled “SECRET,” and are still today total-ly redacted. One batch I received from the Reagan Library in June 2009 included four letters the Vatican/pope sent in January 1982 alone—and all remained completely blacked out. As for Vatican documents, they are sealed for 75 years from date—no exceptions.

So many contacts, so much information. But with that said, it may be particularly revealing to look back to the day after that initial June 7, 1982, face-to-face meeting at the Vatican.

On June 8, President Reagan went to London. He had left the Vatican reinvigorated with a spiritual zeal to undermine communism. At Westminster, Reagan gave the most prescient speech of his presidency, proclaiming: “What I am describing now is a policy and a hope

for the long term—the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.” Very tellingly, Reagan opted for the word “policy” in addition to “hope.”

And that, of course, is precisely what would happen: a policy to undermine Soviet com-munism, culminating in the historic events of 1989. That year is remembered for the fall of the Berlin Wall, the enduring symbol of the collapse. In truth, however, the first domino fell earlier that year, with elections in Poland. What happened in Poland with those elections, as Mikhail Gorbachev him-self would put it, threatened not only “chaos in Poland” but the “ensuing break-up of the entire Socialist camp.” When those elections were held in Poland in June 1989, Gorbachev saw the writing on the wall.14

And those elections, too, carry another mean-ingful Reagan-John Paul II moment:

It was the spring of 1989. Ronald Reagan’s two terms as president were over. Poland, the nation he so long respected, was preparing for what in December 1981 would have been unimaginable: free and fair parliamentary elections, open to candidates from any po-litical party, Solidarity included. History was on the verge of being made.

A few weeks before the elections, Reagan had a visit at his California office from two Solidarity members and two Polish Americans hosting them. One host, Chris Zawitkowski, head of the Polish-American Foundation for Economic Research and Education, asked Reagan, the master campaigner, if he had any words of political wisdom for the two Solidarity members as they prepared for the June elections. The men expected to hear about political strategy, but were taken aback by what they heard from the seasoned candi-date: “Listen to your conscience,” said Reagan, “because that is where the Holy Spirit speaks to you.”15

The ex-president then pointed to a picture of Pope John Paul II on his office wall: “He is my best friend,” said Reagan with a smile.

“Yes, you know I’m Protestant, but he’s still my best friend.”

His “best friend”—so said Ronald Reagan himself. It was surely an exaggeration person-ally speaking, but it was just as surely spot-on as a poignant testimony to what the two friends achieved on the international stage.

By the end of the year, communism would collapse in Eastern Europe. Fittingly, the ultimate sign of communist death came on Christmas Day 1989 in Romania, when the people there somehow rose up and rid themselves of the worst dictator in the entire Communist Bloc: Nicolai Ceausescu.

Christmas Day, once banned in the com-munist world, would come to hold double significance, as the final blow to the crum-bling Soviet empire arrived precisely two years later, on December 25, 1991. On that December day, Mikhail Gorbachev, jockey-ing for leadership with another president in Moscow—Boris Yeltsin, an anti-commu-nist who had been freely elected as Russia’s president the previous June—announced to a shocked world that he was resigning his position as head of the USSR. In so doing, he effectively resigned the Soviet Union itself.

The Cold War was over, without a missile fired, without the nuclear Armageddon that everyone feared for so long. It was extraordi-nary: that entire totalitarian system, which destroyed so much and so many, went down peacefully. It was a testimony to the work of Ronald Reagan, John Paul II, and also to names like Gorbachev, Yeltsin, Walesa, Vaclav Havel, and Margaret Thatcher.

But among that cast of historic figures, there were two, a Catholic and a Protestant, a Pole and an American, at the Vatican and at the White House, who uniquely stood out and stood together; they together resolved to stop the atheistic Soviet empire. Both placed a dagger in the black heart of murderous, atheistic Soviet communism. Together, they helped end the USSR and the Cold War, and did so peacefully.

Many Americans credit Ronald Reagan for that historic triumph, and many also credit a man named Karol Wojtyla, Poland’s native son. Ronald Reagan surely could not have achieved what he did without Pope John Paul II, his best friend in that endeavor. And John Paul II, likewise, surely could not have done what he did without Ronald Reagan.

It was a historic and extraordinary part-nership and victory—and surely the work of Providence and the “DP” fulfilled.

Paul Kengor is professor of political science at Grove City College and executive director of the college’s Center for Vision & Values. He is author of over a dozen books, including his newly released A

th Century

(Endnotes)1 That assault dates back to Pope Pius IX’s condemnation of communism in the encyclical Qui pluribus (On Faith and Religion), released in November 1846, two years before the publication of the Communist Manifesto.2 Reagan, “The President’s News Conference,” Public Papers

, June 16, 1981.3 David Cross, “Shooting reported in Poland as troops break wave of strikes,” London Times, December 16, 1981.4 Located in “Ronald Reagan: Pre-Presidential Papers: Selected Radio Broadcasts, 1975-1979,” October 31, 1978 to October 1979, Box 4, Ronald Reagan Library (RRL). For a full transcript, see Kiron Skinner, Martin Anderson, and Annelise Anderson, (New York: Free Press, 2001), pp. 176-77.5 Source: Multiple author interviews and discussions with Richard V. Allen.6 Editorial, “The Polish Pope in Poland,” Times, June 5, 1979. 7 Interview with Bill Clark, August 24, 2001. This was the first of many such conversations I had with Clark on this subject.8 See Carl Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance,” Time, February 24, 1992, pp. 28 and 30.9 See “The Pope and the President: A key adviser reflects on the Reagan Administration,” interview with Bill Clark,

, November 1999; and Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance,” p. 30. 10 Quoted in Peter Schweizer, (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 213.11 Paul Kengor and Patricia Clark Doerner,

(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007).12 See Bernstein, “The Holy Alliance.”13 Ibid.14 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), pp. 478-9.15 This information was shared with me by Zawitkowski. Interview with Chris M. Zawitkowski, November 9, 2005. http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1540343/images/o-EDWARD-SNOWDEN-facebook.jpg

ESSAY

WHAT SHALL WE MAKE OF “SNOWDENISM”?

MARK COPPENGER

Some dreamers insist “the more domestic surveillance

the better!” Indeed, the reve-lations of high-profile “whis-tleblowers,” troubling to many, have stirred their zeal for the possibilities, as it’s become in-creasingly clear that the sky’s the limit when it comes to existing or emerging technology’s abil-ity to delve into the nooks and crannies of society.

We’re encountering a dazzling array of gathering techniques and programs, with names like XKEYSCORE, PRISM, and TEMPORA. We’ve learned of big snooping dishes on the British

coast and a mega-storehouse of information in Utah; of the com-plicity of Internet providers, fa-cilitators, and firms like Google, Skype, YouTube, Facebook, and various phone companies; of the way in which they can monitor, cache, and access anything with an electronic footprint—the par-ties to conversations (whether voice, email, or texting), the course of individual internet explorations, credit card trans-actions, and travel details. They have the potential to activate the camera on your laptop, supplying images from inside your home to complement those captured on ubiquitous closed

circuit cameras in public places, and to examine the content of particular conversations.

Less sanguine than the dream-ers, others caution, “The less surveillance the better.” They delight in the work of the trifecta of Edward Snowden, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, who brought a raft of theretofore top-secret intelli-gence to light, revealing both content and capabilities. I call these enthusiasts the party of Snowdenism, one that enjoys enormous acclaim around the world.

Snowden is proud to announce on his website that he is the re-cipient of a good many honors for his deeds—from Norway, Sweden, Germany, Brazil, and America. He has been the sub-ject of hagiographical films (Oliver Stone’s Snowden1 and Laura Poitras’s Oscar-winning documentary, Citizenfour2) and books (

by Glenn Greenwald;3 The Snowden Files by Luke Harding;4 and Snowden,5 a work of graphic nonfiction by Ted Rall).

But Senator Tom Cotton de-murs, calling Snowden “an ego-tistical serial liar and traitor” who “deserves to rot in jail for the rest of his life.”6 So what shall we say? Are Snowden and his fellow travelers laureates or reprobates?7 There are several factors that should be consid-ered as we generate a verdict.

THE OBVIOUSLet’s start with the basics. Though the disclosures brought about by these men affected a wide range of parties around the world, from foreign heads of state to troops in the field, our focus will be on domestic surveillance, Snowden’s special interest. Of course, the Kim Jong-uns and Hassan Rouhanis of this world are more natu-rally the targets of such scru-tiny, but they have not mur-dered as many Americans as the Tsarnaev brothers, who enjoyed “legal permanent residence” in Massachusetts, or Virginia-born, U.S. Army Major Nidal Hassan of Fort Hood infamy. Peril is everywhere, so we may need to keep tabs on all kinds of people.

Furthermore, we’d be foolish to fail to integrate advances in technology. We’ve come a long way from the mid-1970s when,

each day, “a courier went up to New York on the train and re-turned to Fort Meade with large reels of magnetic tape, which were copies of the internation-al telegrams sent from New York the previous day using the facilities of three telegraph companies.”8 Nevertheless, de-cades later, “The FBI’s effort to find [AA Flight 77 hijackers] al-Hamzi and al-Mihdhar was pursued with too few resourc-es. Simply using commercially available software to track their credit card usage might have been decisive, but no such effort was made.”9 We’re asking for more than another 9-11 if we fail to systematically upgrade our capabilities and deployed them aggressively.

THE NOT SO OBVIOUSMany things are more compli-cated than they appear to be on the surface. Among these is the oft-made rejoinder that if a citizen is not up to something nefarious, he has nothing to fear from intrusive surveillance. We’re assured that, while it can be embarrassing and even infu-riating to learn that you’ve been closely watched, wounded feel-ings or diminished privacy do not outweigh the hard realities of a terrorist threat. But it’s not so simple.

Granted, we can certainly earn or even choose close scrutiny, whether by landing on suicide watch in prison, signing up for Covenant Eyes, or accepting a job despite, for instance, camera surveillance of the lunchroom or other forms of suffocating supervision.10 But involuntary submission to indiscriminate observation is another thing entirely, one which Snowden addressed. There are four points we should consider here.

The LawThe Fourth Amendment is strik-ing in its strictures:

The right of the people to be secure in their per-sons, houses, papers, and

-able searches and sei-zures, shall not be violat-ed, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath

-ticularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Amendment “grew out of opposition to the infamous ‘writs of assistance’ used by of-ficers of the Crown against the colonists in the New World.” These were, “in essence, general warrants allowing an officer to enter private property and con-duct a dragnet search for ‘smug-gled goods,’” without specifying what they were looking for. As Massachusetts attorney James Otis, Jr., put it, the writ “places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.”11

Of course, those intrusive red-coats and indignant colonists knew nothing of electronics, and indeed, the 20th-century pi-oneers of vacuum tube and tran-sistor technology could scarcely imagine such phenomena as smart-phone GPS tracking and Internet surfing. Nevertheless, the Amendment stands, and its defenders have cried “foul” at the NSA.

In this vein, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon has argued that the gathering and storing for five years (with renewals beyond this) of “bulk telephony metada-ta” is a practice that likely vio-lates the Fourth Amendment.12 He brushed aside the argu-ment that a 1979 court decision

sanctioning the placement of a warrantless, individualized “pen register” (dialed-num-ber recorder) on a suspect’s phone13 gave the state the right to gather, horde, and scan ev-erything the citizenry did on their phones.

Against the 1979 precedent, Judge Leon cited statistics to bolster his argument that the situation is substantially differ-ent today: including a 3,000-fold increase in cell-phone subscribers since 1984, and a jump in voice minutes from the billions in 1997 to the trillions in 2013. With such a vast pool, the math of surveillance allow-ances such as the “three hop” rule becomes staggering. Hops allow the intelligence communi-ty to develop contact chains by starting with the suspect and de-termining with whom he com-municated. If a person talks to 50 contacts, those 50 numbers could be collected. That’s one hop. All the contacts of those 50 contacts could then be gathered. That’s a second hop. After the third hop, the total of collected numbers could easily surpass a million. Indeed, from tracking a single suspicious “seed” and working the rule, eventually everyone who contacted any-one who communicated with someone who connected elec-tronically with the person in question was fair game for scru-tiny (and just imagine if one of those contacts was a carry-out pizza joint).

Moreover, it’s important to rec-ognize that the state need not scrutinize the actual words of your conversations to learn an invasive amount about your daily life. As NYU law professor Barry Friedman put it, “Today, phone metadata reveals not only what number you called, but whether the call was complet-ed, how long you were on the

line, where you made the call from, [and] what equipment you used.” Indeed, “What peo-ple, including some judges, are rapidly coming to see is that all these bits and pieces of meta-data about people are just as revealing of our lives as content information—and thus deserve similar protection.”14

Although Judge Leon’s rul-ing was later overturned by an appeals court on a technicality, Congress enacted major reforms to the program based on many of the same concerns.15

Regard for Personal DignityOf course, all of us are fallen creatures and will eventual-ly, if not regularly, do things we’re ashamed of. And an en-emy watching our every move would inevitably find material useful for humiliation or black-mail. But even if someone were perfect in behavior, we would still have to contend with the machinations of “vicious curi-osity.”16 What if the images of our getting dressed, bathroom events, chaste lovemaking, or nose-picking at a stoplight were shared across the land? No ex-posure of sin on our part, but damage just the same. For to be an effective person, I need to be able to compose myself before going public.

Indeed, the word “person” de-rives from the Latin word per-sona, originally the part one played in a drama. Think of the masks that one might adopt, one with a smile denoting comedy, another with a frown designed for tragedy. One then assumes a persona, depending upon the play. Similarly, we choose per-sonas (doting grandparent; bold preacher; businesslike banker) designed for particular situa-tions, and indeed our person-hood is our role-playing ca-pacity. And this is not, per se,

artificial. Rather, it’s a matter of effective presentation; it is the stewardship of one’s life.

This may seem an arcane point, but it suggests how the elimi-nation of privacy strikes at the very heart of our personhood, and is not to be taken lightly. As Harvard’s Sissela Bok ob-served, “With no control over secrecy and openness, human beings could not remain either sane or free.”17 Stealing a look “backstage” is not a trivial or innocuous matter.

About fifteen years ago, Baptist Press called to ask if I’d write a piece on bestiality, and I im-mediately wondered why they’d chosen me out of 16 million Southern Baptists. The short answer was that I’d done some writing for them, that I lived in Illinois (as a pastor in Evanston), and that the Illinois legislature was putting bestial-ity back into the criminal code. In their predecessors’ haste to be progressive and erase the sodomy statutes a few years back, they’d thrown the baby (or sheep) out with the bath. But an uptick in bestiality, something they hadn’t dreamed would oc-cur, sent lawmakers running back to the table.

I agreed to give it a try, and I soon discovered, thanks to the Internet, that the word for this practice was “zoophilia,” and there were websites standing by to encourage and counsel the perverse. Nasty stuff.

Why do I bring this up? To ar-gue that without context, con-tent can be meaningless—or made to mean anything at all. Whether through misunder-standing or malice, someone with access to my search history could have pressed unjust diffi-culties upon me at that point.

DissentOf course, it’s important for a legitimate government to be vigilant and on guard against internal foes who would initiate violent overthrow to establish an unjust regime. But there are, of course, legitimate re-form movements, and if those in power could, by employing priv-ileged information, short circuit or eliminate their foes’ tactical advantage (e.g., an “October surprise”), then that would con-stitute grave abuse of legitimate powers.

Taken together, these four con-siderations push back against the notion that honest citizens have nothing to fear from un-fettered governmental surveil-lance. After all, government employees are just as fallen as the general populace, equally capable of shameful acts, and

there must be hedges on their power.

HEROES OR TRAITORS?But building a case for or against close governmental sur-veillance doesn’t bear directly on our assessment of Snowden himself. We still must consider the nature of justified whis-tleblowing and whether the Snowden-Manning-Assange tri-fecta meets the standard. Julian Assange suggests he does, de-scribing his own motivation in heroic terms: “I like crush-ing bastards.”18 But after closer examination, several points strongly suggest that Assange is quite mistaken about who the actual “bastards” really are.

Snowden might count himself as a “whistleblower,” but profes-sor-turned-investigative-jour-

nalist Edward Jay Epstein ar-gues that he was certainly not content with this “humble” role. After all, he could have masked his identity in the Poitras video in which he discussed the NSA leaks, but he hungered for pow-erful celebrity status, “no longer a near nonentity servicing a computer system at a backwater NSA base in Hawaii.”19

Of course, the word “whis-tleblower” has warm conno-tations, and Bradley/Chelsea Manning’s attorneys were hap-py to use it on the occasion of President Obama’s gift to their client (commutation of his 35-year sentence to time served plus four months). They called him “the longest-serving whistle-blower in the history of the United States.”20 But to discern the counterfeit, it is useful to first study the real thing, e.g., the disclosures of

Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson. A helicopter pi-lot during the Vietnam War, Thompson was in the air on March 16, 1968, when he inter-vened against fellow servicemen carrying out atrocities in the

-lage in South Vietnam. In what would come to be known as the My Lai Massacre, over 400 Vietnamese civilian men, wom-en, children, and infants would be murdered, but Thompson’s actions—and those of his crew—prevented a greater bloodlet-ting. He immediately reported the massacre to his higher ups, and for this, he was both vilified and honored, eventually receiv-ing the Soldier’s Medal for val-or.21 But Thompson’s revelation was laser-like in designating

the particular offenders and their offense, executed in fidel-ity to Army values, serving real justice.

In contrast to Thompson’s thoughtful and pointed reports, Manning’s (and Snowden’s and Assange’s) actions were analo-gous to the disastrous release of a million and half balloons by Cleveland’s United Way back in 1986, a public-relations pro-duction resulting, however inad-vertently, in chaos, loss of life, and serious damage to property, thanks to the effects of wind and rain. Moreover, while the Ohioans’ motives were pure throughout, Pvt. Manning’s were, from the start, petulant, presumptuous, and narcissistic, as well as chaotic.

His “moral crusade” was prompted by a video taken from an Apache helicopter gunship. The scene in question was a tragic case of mistaken identity, wherein the gunners, tracking insurgents, mistook a Reuters cameraman’s long lens for a weapon and opened fire, killing non-combatants. Manning was indignant over the “callous” use of the order to “Light ‘em up!” that started the engagement.22 In a case of “slanderous emot-ing,”23 Manning made his own sensitivity the measure of all things in order to condemn the motives and actions of others. His intervention meant the in-discriminate release of near-ly three-quarters of a million classified and sensitive military and diplomatic documents. His

Top Left:Top Right:

Bottom Left: Lord Clive meeting with Mir Jafar after the Battle of Plassey

Bottom Right: The Assassination of JuliusCaesar

deeds were scattershot and un-targeted, and, therefore, anti-thetical to the pursuit of justice. Rather than being faithful to Army values, Manning’s action was a perverse betrayal.

The damage done by Manning, Assange, and Snowden is prob-ably incalculable, though we already know some of the cost in lives and diminished national security. Furthermore, as one analyst estimates, “It was not the quantity of Mr. Snowden’s theft but the quality that was most telling. Mr. Snowden’s theft put documents at risk that could reveal the NSA’s Level 3 tool kit—a reference to doc-uments containing the NSA’s most important sources and methods.”24

All this being said, perhaps there’s room to give thanks for the revelations of our trio of flawed whistleblowers. Partly in response to Snowden’s reve-lations, for instance, Congress approved the USA Freedom Act—legislation that curtailed certain aspects of the Patriot Act, placing restrictions on the bulk collection of telecom-munications metadata from American citizens by the US in-telligence community. Perhaps we should follow the lead of Eric Holder, once a fierce crit-ic, when he eventually declared that Snowden had performed “a public service.”25

But it’s one thing to observe that some good has come from something wicked, and quite another to praise or excuse the behavior of the one who did the deed. The stoning of Stephen in Acts 7 resulted in the mis-sionary diaspora of the Early Church, but those throwing the deadly stones were morally cul-pable. The Nuremberg court condemned Dr. Karl Brandt to

death for heartless medical ex-periments on imprisoned Jews, some of which were designed to help German pilots who might face life-threatening reversals at high altitudes or who crashed into icy ocean waters. But even if data from the studies (which were fatal to the Jewish sub-jects) were instrumental in sav-ing American lives in subse-quent wars, we ought still to refuse to speak warmly of Karl Brandt for services rendered.

WHAT THEN?Genesis 9:20-25 tells us the sto-ry of Noah’s post-Flood drunk-enness. Ham comes upon his fa-ther lying naked in his tent and hurries off to tell his brothers. Unlike Ham, they refuse to in-dulge in the spectacle, but rath-er they put a garment on their shoulders and walk backwards into the tent to lay it on their father, without looking. They seek remedy to the situation without parading the titillating details for all to see. This is the way of love. This is manifestly not the way of Snowdenism, whose adherents seem to take self-righteous delight in humili-ating their own country. Indeed,

since the word “patriotism” de-rives from the Greek and Roman words for “father,” we should deem Snowden, Assange, and Manning, as well as those who laud them, as cousins of Ham. They defile what they ought to redeem.

How, then, might we in-stead choose the way of love? Certainly, we start by acknowl-edging that there are rocks on both sides, as Aristotle put it. Privacy is not nothing. Neither is the need for intelligence. We have to steer through the proper middle.

To complicate things, the rock-bordered waterway we’re called to negotiate presents the helmsman with twists and turns, frustrating the use of an automatic pilot. New challenges and capabilities arise. Outliers and the outlandish can catch us by surprise, and fresh data can disturb us. Everything must be taken on a case-by-case basis and safeguards shouldn’t be disdained.

Reflecting on the first sev-en years of the FISA court—which oversees requests for surveillance warrants against

suspected foreign spies inside the United States—CIA director Stansfield Turner (1977-1981) observed that they had “never yet found a request to be de-ficient.”26 Perhaps that should have been a red flag instead of a reassurance to those concerned that the new setup would choke out counterintelligence. And on the subject of protocols, Thomas Paunovich spoke for many of us when he asked rhetorically, “Why do we allow someone in Mr. Snowden’s low-level po-sition to have unfettered ac-cess to super critical intelli-gence information in the first place?”27 Indeed, and the same goes for the lamentable Bradley Manning.

As for the unforeseen, who knew that the proliferation of police body cams could open up Public Records Act nightmares, as the Seattle police have discovered. Thinking that, in the wake of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner deaths, they were taking steps to increase police accountability, they found themselves sitting on 1.5 million individual videos (300,000 hours and 350 tera-bytes), eagerly sought by KOMO reporter Tracy Vedder, footage that could contain up-close-and-personal looks at witnesses and informants as well as the interi-ors of houses and hotel rooms, no matter how innocent the residents.28 Do we really want all that available to the public?

Of course, we’d love to have the clear answer to past, pres-ent, and future issues, but I think this is too ambitious. I’m reminded of a remark I heard in Jerusalem some years back, when an Israeli official speaking to a small group of us responded to a question about “the” solu-tion to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. He said they didn’t think the problem could be so much

as managed. And I think

the same can be said of domestic surveillance tensions.

As Sissela Bok put it:

Secrecy is as dispensable

and as greatly feared. Both enhance and protect

lay waste, spread out of all control. Both may be used to guard intimacy or to invade it, to nurture or to consume. And each can be turned against itself; barriers of secrecy are set up to guard against secret plots and surrepti-

29

So we’re dealing with fire, and we must take care to not burn ourselves as we seek to keep the cabin cozy and the predators at bay.

Mark Coppenger is a profes-sor of Christian apologetics at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also managing ed-itor of the online He has authored, edited, or con-tributed to numerous books, and his articles have appeared in ven-ues such as Teaching Philosophy, Touchstone, American Spectator,

and He

(Endnotes)1 Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone (Gruenwald, Germany: KrautPack Entertainment, 2016). 2 Citizenfour, DVD, directed by Laura Poitras (New York: Praxis Films, 2014).3 Glenn Greenwald, :

(New York: Picador, 2014).4 Luke Harding,

(New York: Vintage/Random House, 2014).5 Ted Rall, Snowden (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2015).6 Tom Cotton, “Cotton Statement on Bipartisan HPSCI Report on Edward Snowden” (December 22, 2016). Accessed April 19, 2017, at cotton.senate.gov.7 This piece builds on a talk I gave

at the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington on February 16, 2017. 8 James Bamford,

Security Agency (New York: Anchor/Random House, 2002), 435.9 George Tenet, At the Center of the

(New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 204.10 Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy, (New York: Knopf, 1995), 317.11 Alderman and Kennedy, 10-11. 12 957 F. Supp. 2d 1 (D.D.C. 2013), 800 F.3d 559 (D.C. Cir. 2015).13 442 U.S. 735 (1979).14 Barry Friedman,

(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2017), 254.15 Jeremy Daimond, “NSA surveillance bill passes after weeks-long showdown,” CNN (Sept. 7, 2015), http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/02/politics/senate-usa-freedom-act-vote-patriot-act-nsa/16 W. Jay Wood,

(Downers Grove: Intervarsity, 1998), 58. 17 Sissela Bok,

(New York: Pantheon, 1982), 24.18

, DVD, directed by Alex Gibney (Universal City, CA: Universal Pictures, 2013).19 Edward Jay Epstein,

Man and the Theft (New York: Knopf, 2017), 281-282.20 Charlie Savage, “Chelsea Manning to Be Released Early as Obama Commutes Sentence,” (January 17, 2017).21 Richard Goldstein, “Hugh Thompson, 62, Who Saved Civilians at My Lai, Dies,” , (January 7, 2006 22 .23 Mark Coppenger, “Slanderous Emoting,” (March 25, 2016). Accessed April 18, 2017, at providencemag.com.24 Edward Jay Epstein, “The Fable of Edward Snowden,”

December 31, 2016).25 Irina Aleksander, “The Snowden Plot,” (September 4, 2016), 32.26 Stansfield Turner, Secrecy and

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1985), 156.27 Thomas J. Paunovich, “Letters to the Editor,” (January 6, 2016).28 McKenzie Funk, “Open City,” The

(October 23, 2016), 32-33.29 Bok, 18.

FLICKERING FORLORN HOPE:

THE BATTLE OF BATAANCHRISTOPHER L. KOLAKOWSKI

Three-quarters of a century ago, in the opening days of

the Second World War in the Pacific, a joint U.S. and Filipino (Filamerican) army fought des-perately to defend Manila Bay and the Philippines against a Japanese invasion. Much of the campaign (8 December 1941–6 May 1942) was waged on both the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island in the mouth of Manila Bay. Despite

dwindling supplies and dim prospects for outside help, the garrison held on as long as pos-sible and seriously delayed the Japanese timetable for conquest in the Pacific. In the end, the Japanese succeeded in forcing the largest capitulation in U.S. military history.

The 1941–1942 Philippine Campaign was fought be-tween the Japanese 14th Army,

commanded by Lieutenant General Masaharu Homma, and General Douglas MacArthur’s U.S. Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE). The Japanese were confident of victory, and gave Homma just 50 days to capture the Philippines before his troops would be transferred elsewhere; only the British bastion at Singapore was expected to hold out longer. Japanese planners expected that MacArthur would

ESSAY

make his stand around Manila, the Philippine capital, and once that battle was won the rest of the islands could be occupied at leisure.

The campaign began on 8 December 1941 (7 December, Washington time) with air strikes on key air bases on the main island of Luzon, which succeeded in wiping out much of MacArthur’s air force and removing one of the key pil-lars of the Filamerican defense strategy. Small Japanese land-ings on the north of Luzon fol-lowed, but failed to stir a strong Filamerican reaction.

MacArthur’s command was di-vided in two: the North Luzon Force under Major General Jonathan M. Wainwright, and the South Luzon Force un-der Major General George M. Parker. On 22 December 1941, the 14th Army’s main body land-ed at Lingayen Gulf; two days later another force landed on the Bicol Peninsula in southeastern Luzon. MacArthur planned to defend the beaches and throw the invaders back into the sea, but Wainwright’s counterat-tacks on the 22nd and 23rd failed due to poor reconnaissance, poor coordination, and poor logistics. Many Filipino units were untrained or half-trained at the war’s start, and broke at first contact with the enemy.

In Manila, MacArthur digested the reports from Lingayen Gulf. He realized the landing repre-sented the main Japanese effort with Manila as its objective. MacArthur also faced the hard truth that his plan to defend the beaches had failed within the first 24 hours of the main invasion. Prewar planners had prepared a scheme for with-drawing to the Bataan Peninsula and Corregidor Island (on the western end of Manila Bay), and

on Christmas Eve MacArthur ordered the plan, known as WPO-3, put into effect.

WPO-3’s activation meant that all of USAFFE’s 80,000 men had to move from all over Luzon to Bataan. Writing after the war, MacArthur’s staff summed up the challenges:

[MacArthur] faced was to sideslip his troops west-ward in a series of rapid maneuvers and holding actions to the rocky pen-insula and to the island forts in Manila Bay before superior forces of the ene-

from the north. The crux of the problem was the successful passage of a

bridge at Calumpit, just south of San Fernando in Pampanga, where Highway No. 3 from northern Luzon to Manila joined with Highway No. 7 leading into Bataan. The movement of the Southern Luzon Force, already complicated through the passage of Manila, was inevitably canalized at Calumpit, and once across the bridge, this force would also have to pass through

1942, the Calumpit Bridge was destroyed. Homma’s forces en-tered Manila on 2 January; from Corregidor Americans watched through binoculars as Japanese flags went up over the Manila Hotel and other places along the waterfront.

By 7 January the USAFFE forces stood ready on Bataan to repel any further Japanese advances. However, in the hasty with-drawal not enough food made it to the peninsula in time; the Bataan garrison immediately went on half rations.

MacArthur’s line stretched across the peninsula’s base from Abucay to Mauban, with a break around rugged Mount Natib. Wainwright’s force, renamed I Corps, held the western sector while Parker’s command (now known as II Corps) took over

the eastern half. The Japanese repeatedly attacked the Abucay position head on, but failed to break through. Assaults west of Abucay bent Parker’s line with fierce fighting. Flanking oper-ations over Mt. Natib finally succeeded reaching the USAFFE rear, in one place cutting the main road behind I Corps. On 22 January MacArthur ordered a retreat to a new position half-way down the peninsula, run-ning from Orion to Bagac. Four days later his forces were in po-sition and reorganizing for their last stand on Bataan.

Flushed with victory, Homma’s men closed with this new line and attacked immediately. Most of the assaults were repulsed af-ter several days of intense fight-ing, but a deep penetration in Wainwright’s line (later known as the Pockets) took three weeks

San Fernando before it was safely on the road to Bataan.

As a corollary, the hard-pressed Northern Luzon Force would have to hold the enemy back from San Fernando and the Calumpit bridge no matter what the price until the Southern Luzon Force had cleared the

MacArthur stood to lose nearly half the forces with which he expected to defend Bataan and Corregidor. On top of these risks, the Japanese held air supremacy over

3 movements would be detected and attacked.

WPO-3’s evacuation shocked Manila. Many Filipinos assumed there would be a battle for the capital, and fear swept through Manila’s diverse population. On Christmas Eve Philippine President Manuel Quezon, his family, and elements of the cab-inet left for Corregidor. Late in the day MacArthur sailed to Corregidor with his senior staff and family, who had evacuated their residence in the Manila Hotel that afternoon on four hours’ notice. On Boxing Day the Philippine capital was de-clared an open city.

In a series of hard-fought battles, Wainwright’s North Luzon Force held successive defense positions long enough for the South Luzon Force to race northward and west-ward around Manila Bay. Men and supplies also moved into Bataan despite Japanese air attacks; Homma’s staff under-estimated the significance of the Filamerican withdrawal and stayed focused on Manila. On the morning of New Year’s Day

to wipe out. Homma also sent several battalions of infantry to land on the west coast of Bataan and smash supplies and rear-area installations. These landings (named the Points) were contained by a scratch force of Philippine Scouts, pilots converted to infantry, and other rear-area troops. Reserve infan-try and tanks came forward and crushed the Points and Pockets over two weeks of bitter fighting that ended in mid-February.

The defeat of the Points and the Pockets attacks represent-ed the first time Allied forces had stopped a major Japanese land offensive in the Pacific War. More importantly for MacArthur, the victory en-sured the continued survival of his forces for the time being. Homma pulled back his man-gled units to regroup and await reinforcements. Judging his forces too weak to counterat-tack, MacArthur ordered them to dig in and await the next Japanese blow.

A lull settled over the Bataan battlefront. However, the cu-mulative effects of poor rations now became more apparent. Daily rations of 2,000 calo-ries had “dropped to 20 ounces (1,500 calories) in February and to 15 ounces (1,000 calories) in March and April,” report-ed Brigadier General Charles Drake, MacArthur’s chief quar-termaster. “The last consisted principally of rice varying from ten to fourteen ounces and a little meat, canned milk, and canned vegetables.” Insufficient food left the men listless, easily tired, and showing what one Filipino officer termed an “un-acceptable indifference” to the battlefield situation.

Disease also took its toll. “Bataan is a malarial infested region,” wrote General Parker.

“Lack of quinine had brought the hospitalization for ma-laria to 500 daily by 1 March and 1000 daily by 1 April. Due to lack of vitamins, beriberi was flagrant and increasing. Dysentery and diarrhea were extremely prevalent and due to the weakened condition of the men, it could not be controlled.” By 1 April the Bataan garrison’s 78,500 men were down to only 25 percent effectiveness.

Still, the defenders held togeth-er. Some clung to rumors of reinforcements: “There was not a day that you didn’t hear ships were on the way,” remembered Lieutenant Hattie Brantley, a U.S. Army nurse. “And we be-lieved every word of every ru-mor. I think, now, it was part of the psychology of surviv-al. If you had known that you were going to be a captive of the Japs for three and a half years, you wouldn’t have existed. You would have given up right then.”

Lieutenant Henry Lee struck a deep chord with his widely-cir-culated poem, “Fighting On”:

I see no gleam of victory alluring, No chance of splendid booty or of gain, If I endure—I must go on

enduring And my reward for bearing pain—is pain; Yet, though the thrill, the zest, the hope are gone, Something within me

Bataan’s defenders defiantly referred to themselves as “The Battling Bastards of Bataan.”

Events elsewhere affected the Philippine defenders’ fortunes. Bataan was the only place where the Japanese march of conquest had been stopped; elsewhere in Southeast Asia the Allies met defeat after defeat throughout February and early March. As the Philippines became more isolated, it became clear that the defenders were doomed. In February submarines evacuated part of the Philippine treasury, President Quezon and his fam-ily, and High Commissioner Francis Sayre and his family.

Radio Tokyo had announced that MacArthur would be hung in Tokyo as a war criminal; in the United States, political pressure built upon President Franklin Roosevelt to save MacArthur. But MacArthur was determined not to leave, tell-ing Washington on 11 February that he, his wife Jean, and their

4-year-old son Arthur would “share the fate of the garrison.” What tipped the balance was a request from Australia for a senior U.S. general to take com-mand of the Southwest Pacific region.

On 23 February MacArthur received a telegram from Washington. He read: “The President directs that you make arrangements to leave Fort Mills [Corregidor] and proceed to Mindanao. You are directed to make this change as quickly as possible. The President desires that in Mindanao you take such measures as will ensure a pro-longed defense of that region… From Mindanao you will pro-ceed to Australia where you will assume command of all United States troops.”

A stunned MacArthur tried to duck the order, even to the point of resigning his commis-sion. His staff talked him out of that, and MacArthur prepared for departure. On 11 March he, his family, and select staff de-parted Corregidor via PT boats and arrived on the north shore of Mindanao on the morning of 13 March. Three days later they flew on B-17s overnight to Australia, landing on the morn-ing of 17 March. Shortly after

his arrival, General MacArthur announced to the press, “I came through, and I shall return.”

General Wainwright received a third star and overall com-mand of the Philippine defend-ers, renamed U.S. Forces in the Philippines, or USFIP. Major General Edward P. King as-sumed command of the Bataan garrison, renamed Luzon Force, and Major General Albert Jones took over I Corps.

Homma meanwhile received heavy reinforcements and planned a new offensive. The final Japanese blow fell on Good Friday, 3 April 1942, and it fell squarely on the II Corps line. The Filamerican forces gave ground, and King committed his reserves to counterattack and stabilize the situation. Despite these efforts, the Japanese con-tinued to slash their way south-ward. By the evening of 6 April, the Luzon Force’s line was irrep-arably broken; Japanese units raced down the east coast of Bataan. Troops gathered for a last stand, but everyone sensed the end was near. To save his men from massacre, General King surrendered the Luzon Force on 9 April, in the largest capitulation in U.S. history.

In Australia, General MacArthur issued a statement. “The Bataan force went out as it would have wished, fighting to the end of its flickering, forlorn hope,” he said. “No army has ever done so much with so little and nothing became it more than its last hour of trial and agony. To the weeping mothers of its dead, I can only say that the sacrifice and halo of Jesus of Nazareth has descended upon their sons, and that God will take them unto Himself.”

General King surrendered 76,000 American and Filipino soldiers on 9 April 1942. Approximately 1,500 of that to-tal were transferred or escaped to Corregidor, which meant that about 74,000 men were go-ing with him into captivity—far more than the 40,000 prison-ers the Japanese expected to house and feed. The result was one of the Pacific War’s worst atrocities.

Over the next three days, King’s troops began their trip out of Bataan to a prison camp at Camp O’Donnell near Clark Field. Except for a short train trip from San Fernando Pampanga to Capas, the 66-mile journey was by road. Some rode in Japanese trucks, but the

majority of prisoners, including several senior commanders, walked. Japanese treatment of the Bataan defenders was often cruel, capricious, and in some cases murderous. Only 54,000 arrived at Camp O’Donnell, which meant that over two weeks, 20,000 Americans and Filipinos disappeared between Bataan and O’Donnell. Five thousand stayed behind in the hospitals and on work details, while an undetermined number escaped to fight as guerrillas. The vast majority (usually es-timated at 11,000) died on the road. Of those deaths, at least 650 were Americans. Ever af-ter, this trip to prison would be known as the Bataan Death March.

The Japanese next turned their attention to Corregidor. After nearly a month of incessant air and artillery bombardment, they invaded and captured the island on 6 May 1942. The fall of Corregidor precipitated the sur-

render of the entire Philippines, and the Japanese finally held the islands after more than five months of hard fighting.

The fall of the Philippines ranks as one of the worst defeats in U.S. military history, and King’s capitulation on 9 April is far and away the largest of its kind in American history. But the val-iant defense of the Philippines was not in vain; the USAFFE/USFIP troops had held out for five months, disrupted the Japanese timetable of conquest, and denied the enemy use of the key base at Manila Bay. Their stand inspired the Allied world, and would do so until the final victory over the Axis in 1945. Most importantly, through their victories in early February the Bataan defenders had shown that the Japanese could be beat-en. Lessons and intelligence about weapons and tactics, both American and Japanese, learned during the campaign would in-fluence U.S. training, equip-

ment, and preparations for bat-tle in future Pacific operations.

Today, the defense of Bataan occupies a central place in Philippine national identity. Monuments mark key locations on the battlefield, and the 9th of April is a national holiday. The Camp O’Donnell site is now the Capas National Shrine. One of the monuments there hon-ors the men held there in the summer of 1942. At the top is a quote from General King: “Courage is a quality God has seen fit to dispense with utmost care. The men of Bataan were His chosen favorites.” There is no better tribute.

Christopher L. Kolakowski works as a historian in Norfolk, Virginia. He is the author of four books on the American Civil War and World War II, and is working on a study of the 1944 India-Burma campaigns. The views contained herein are his own.

AMERICAN INTERESTS & HUMAN RIGHTS

MARK TOOLEY

For a century American foreign policy has often purportedly

seesawed between cold focus on American interests through realpolitik or high-minded ad-vocacy of democracy and hu-man rights. The former was, in popular perception, embodied by Teddy Roosevelt or more recently by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The latter was, ostensibly, incarnated by Woodrow Wilson or more recently by George W. Bush. Donald Trump’s speech in Saudi

Arabia on May 21 further con-firms he is a realist and not a Wilsonian.

“In my inaugural address to the American People, I pledged to strengthen America’s old-est friendships, and to build new partnerships in pursuit of peace,” Trump told scores of heads of state from major-ity-Muslim countries. “I also promised that America will not seek to impose our way of life on others, but to outstretch our

hands in the spirit of coopera-tion and trust.”

Trump promised not to “lecture”:

America is a sovereign -

ority is always the safety and security of our citi-zens. We are not here to lecture. We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.

ESSAY

Instead, we are here to

on shared interests and values to pursue a better future.

And Trump extolled realism over idealism:

For our part, America is committed to adjusting our strategies to meet evolving threats and new facts. We will discard those strategies that have not worked—and will ap-ply new approaches in-formed by experience and judgment. We are adopt-ing a Principled Realism, rooted in common values and shared interests.

Those “common values” of course were not identified as democracy and human rights but resistance to terrorism and extremism:

Our goal is a coalition of nations who share the aim of stamping out ex-tremism and providing our children a hopeful future that does honor to God. And so this historic and unprecedented gath-ering of leaders—unique in the history of nations—is a symbol to the world of our shared resolve and our mutual respect. To the leaders and citizens of every country assem-bled here today, I want you to know that the United States is eager to form closer bonds of friendship, security, cul-ture and commerce.

Trump focused on security as “shared interests”:

Terrorism has spread across the world. But the path to peace begins right here, on this ancient

soil, in this sacred land. America is prepared to stand with you—in pur-suit of shared interests and common security.

Plus:

Here at this summit we will discuss many inter-ests we share together. But above all we must be united in pursuing the one goal that transcends every other consider-ation. That goal is to meet history’s great test—to conquer extremism and vanquish the forces of terrorism.

And Trump emphasized re-alism’s preference for se-curity over “ideology” and “perfection”:

Our friends will never question our support, and our enemies will never doubt our determination. Our partnerships will ad-vance security through stability, not through rad-ical disruption. We will make decisions based on real-world outcomes—not

will be guided by the lessons of experience,

thinking. And, wherev-er possible, we will seek gradual reforms—not sudden intervention. We must seek partners, not perfection—and to make allies of all who share our goals.

Trump’s only implied reference to human rights was aimed at Syria’s Assad, who “has com-mitted unspeakable crimes,” and Iran, for which he prayed “for the day when the Iranian people have the just and righ-teous government they deserve.”

Maybe Trump’s Saudi speech echoes Nixon’s approach in his 1972 visit to communist China, with whom he sought collabo-ration against the Soviet Union, not commonality on democracy:

You believe deeply in your system, and we believe just as deeply in our system. It is not our common beliefs that have brought us together here, but our common interests and our common hopes, the interest that each of us has to maintain our independence and the se-curity of our peoples and the hope that each of us has to build a new world order in which nations

-

values can live together in peace, respecting one an-other while disagreeing with one another, letting history rather than the

Nixon believed national inter-ests and balance of power were surer guides to security and peace than lofty human rights ideals. Yet he was not indifferent to the Wilsonian tradition in American statecraft. For all his hard-nosed rhetoric, Nixon was a Quaker who deeply identified with the Presbyterian Wilson’s relentless pursuit of world peace through the spread of democrat-ic principles superintended by disinterested American power.

At a 1970 prayer breakfast, Nixon sounded like Wilson, whom he deeply admired and whose portrait he chose to display:

We do have a destiny, not a destiny to conquer the world or to exploit the world, but a destiny

to give something more to the world simply than an example which other nations in the past have been able to give of great military strength and great economic wealth, to give to other nations of the world an example of spiritual leadership and idealism which no mate-rial strength or military power can provide.

In his 1972 address to the Soviet Union, Nixon further echoed Wilson:

We covet no one else’s territory, we seek no do-minion over any other people, we seek the right to live in peace, not only for ourselves but for all the peoples of this earth. Our power will only be used to keep the peace,

never to break it, only to defend freedom, never to destroy it. No nation that does not threaten its neighbors has anything to fear from the United States.

Kissinger did not share his pres-ident’s grudging commitment to Wilsonian ideals but admit-ted those ideals are intrinsic to American character and cannot be ignored in a successful for-eign policy that has the required backing of the American people.

Wilson did not invent the im-age of America as custodian of democracy, but refined an understanding dating to the Puritans, solidified by later waves of evangelical revivalism followed by the immigrant ex-perience of Catholics and Jews fleeing oppression.

Successful foreign policy pres-idents like Reagan harmonize the American expectation of national interest with advo-cacy for democracy and hu-man rights. Collaboration and alliances with tyrannies like Saudi Arabia or communist China are often strategically and even morally imperative if they balance against greater evils. But for America to remain in continuity with its historical soul and innately religious char-acter, presidents must at least articulate our ongoing hope and prayer for a world that is safe for democracy and human rights, which are ultimately gifts of the Almighty. Words, even if aspi-rational, have power.

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion & Democracy and co-publisher and editor of

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in

some spot of native land, where it may get the

love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for

the labours men go forth to, for the sounds

and accents that haunt it, for whatever will

give that early home a familiar unmistakable dif-

ference amidst the future widening of knowl-

edge: a sport where the definiteness of early

memories may be inwrought with affection.

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

ESSAY

IN THE INTEREST OF HUMANITY

ALAN W. DOWD

Before leaving his post as UN secretary general in

late 2016, Ban Ki-moon called Syria “a gaping hole in the global conscience.”1

His words, while sobering, are an understatement: More than 480,000 people (including 50,000 children) have been

killed in Syria’s brutal civil war; 11 million Syrians have been dis-placed; 13.5 million Syrians re-quire humanitarian assistance; 70 percent of Syria is without access to drinking water; the Pandora’s Box of chemical war-fare has been reopened. And a watching world did little, if anything, to stop the butchery.

Why did the world fail to in-tervene in this manmade hu-manitarian disaster? There are many culprits and causes. Some blame Russia’s intransigence at the UN Security Council. Others blame Europe’s failure to step up. However, expecting Vladimir Putin to stand aside and allow Western warplanes

The Intervention of the Sabine Women,

55

reach, resources, and record, there is some merit to this. As President George H.W. Bush observed during Somalia’s man-made famine, “Some crises in the world cannot be resolved without American involve-ment… American involvement is often the catalyst for broader involvement in the community of nations.”2 Bush 41 under-stood that leading a superpower with a conscience is a thankless, endless, but necessary task.

Obama seemed to understand this as well. “The burdens of leadership are often heavy, but the world is a better place be-cause we have borne them,” he explained. “Sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.”3 If only he had heeded his own counsel as Syria began its descent. But he didn’t. After 15 years of war, the American people had no stomach for an-other military intervention—especially one with tenuous links to the national interest. So Obama allowed—even en-couraged—America to avert her gaze. Assad barrel-bombed and gassed his countrymen into sub-mission. And Syria took its place alongside Bosnia, Rwanda, and all the other lands that shamed the world into saying “Never again.”

What can U.S. policymakers and citizens do to prevent that list from growing larger, and what are we called to do when America’s collective conscience is assaulted but her interests are not?

THE HONORABLE COURSEWe tend to think of humani-tarian military intervention as a modern phenomenon. Yet in 1897, a young Navy official passionately argued against “cold-blooded indifference

to dismantle Bashar Assad’s murder machine—especially after NATO’s intervention in Libya, which Moscow saw as duplicitous—was a pipedream. And expecting the Europeans, with their bloated bureaucracies and atrophied militaries, to lead the charge into Syria was equal-ly unlikely—again, especially

after NATO’s intervention in Libya, where President Barack Obama’s “lead from behind” ex-periment was tested and failed.

That brings us, uncomfortably, to the United States. Some blame the international commu-nity’s failure on Washington’s failure to lead. Given America’s

to the misery of the op-pressed.”4 Even when “our own interests are not greatly involved,” he declared in 1904, there are times to act “in the interest of humanity at large.”5

President Theodore Roosevelt recognized something that many Americans to this day fail to grasp: The national inter-est and the interest of human-ity are not necessarily separate spheres; the two can overlap.

Roosevelt explained it this way. A “stable, orderly and prosper-ous” Western Hemisphere—and world—are in America’s inter-ests. He understood that stability, order, and prosperity—and insta-bility, disorder, and poverty, for that matter—are not fated upon nations. Rather, they are a function of government poli-cies, which are, by definition, a function of governments. Thus, Roosevelt argued, “[c]hronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loos-ening of the ties of civilized so-ciety” may sometimes “require intervention by some civilized nation.” He added that in “fla-grant cases” the United States may even be called upon to “the exercise of an international po-lice power.”

To be sure, given that he was de-fending his actions in Venezuela, Roosevelt spoke in terms of the Western Hemisphere. However, given his expansion of America’s role in the world and explicit mention in this very speech of “the massacre of the Jews in Kishenef” (in Russia) and “systematic and long-extend-ed cruelty and oppression” of Armenians, it’s fair to conclude that he was thinking globally.

There are “occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror,” he declared, that “action may be justifiable and proper. What

form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstanc-es of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it.”

The American people took such action a few years earlier “to put a stop to intolerable condi-tions in Cuba,” in Roosevelt’s words. After the Cuban people revolted against Spanish rule, Spanish troops herded thou-sands of Cubans into “barbed-wire concentration camps.”6 Spain’s brutal treatment of Cuba sparked outrage from the American people and helped pave the way for America’s first humanitarian war. As Robert Kagan observes, “The fact that many believed they could do something…helped convince them they should do something, that intervention was the only honorable course.”7

Of course, the Spanish-American War had strategic as well as humanitarian im-plications, which has been true of many U.S. military interventions.

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) maintains a run-ning list of “instances of use of United States armed forces

abroad.” Of the 300-plus U.S. interventions since 1798 tallied by CRS, 34 fall under the um-brella of humanitarian inter-vention—14 of which occurred before U.S. entry into World War II. These include naval de-ployments in the Mediterranean in response to massacres in the Ottoman Empire; “operations to protect foreign lives” in China and to “protect foreigners” in Cuba; lengthy and repeated in-terventions to restore order in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and China; and the deployment of U.S. forces to “police order between the Italians and Serbs” in Dalmatia, protect “foreigners” in Honduras, and “keep order” in Panama.8

Many of these had little to do with threats to the national in-terest, but instead were a func-tion of the American people’s sense of justice. Consider the 1892 Democratic Party plat-form, which declared that the U.S. should “in the interest of justice and humanity…use its prompt and best efforts” to stop the “cruel persecutions in the dominions of the Czar and to secure to the oppressed equal rights.”9

In other words, the notion that America was, once upon a time, content to focus solely on self-interest is fiction. America’s humanitarian impulse is per-haps as old as America.

Consider that American relief ships, merchant ships, and warships were sent to feed the starving people of the Cape Verde Islands in the 1830s as well as famine-ravaged Ireland in the 1840s.10 When an earthquake and tsunami dev-astated Japan, President Calvin Coolidge deployed the U.S. Pacific Fleet to lead recovery and rescue efforts. When Stalin tried to starve Berlin into submis-sion, President Harry Truman

stirred around the globe. This networked world makes avert-ing our gaze from the “mis-ery of the oppressed” nearly impossible.

These factors have led to devel-opment of the “responsibility to protect” doctrine—“R2P” in the UN’s abbreviation-laden lexicon. As Ban explained in 2008, R2P holds that states have an obligation “to protect their populations—whether cit-izens or not—from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humani-ty, and from their incitement.” R2P also aims “to help states succeed” and “meet one of their core responsibilities,” namely protecting their citizens.12

All of that sounds eminently reasonable. Protecting one’s population from crimes against humanity seems like the mini-mum requirement for a govern-ment, and helping weak states live up to the obligations of na-tionhood is time (and money) well spent by the international community.13

However, according to Ban, all UN members have a “responsi-bility to respond in a timely and decisive manner…to help pro-tect populations from the four listed crimes and violations.” In other words, R2P would oblige outside powers to intervene to prevent or stop those violations. As Ban conceded, understated-ly, R2P “could have profound implications.”14

R2P grew out of the interna-tional community’s slow-motion response to the ethno-religious war in Bosnia (which claimed some 250,000 lives between 1992 and 1995, out of a pop-ulation of 4.4 million in 1991) and failure to respond to the machete massacre in Rwanda

As Theodore Roosevelt put it, “The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms…are necessarily very few.”11 Why would he say that? One rea-son surely is that the United States of Roosevelt’s day was just coming into its own as a global power, having only re-cently acquired territories out-side its hemisphere and hav-ing just begun constructing the infrastructure to support a power-projecting military. Another likely reason: In this fallen, broken world, there will always be evil men, willful acts of brutality, and benign neglect that will shock the conscience of the American people—too much evil, too many brutalities, and too much neglect even for a good and great nation to ad-dress in every instance.

RESPONSIBILITYThe need for humanitarian intervention is arguably not greater today than in the past. However, our awareness of hu-manitarian crises and our abil-ity to address them are. That’s because the ingredients for hu-manitarian intervention—mass suffering and mass communi-cations—are constantly being

launched Operation Vittles (bet-ter known as the Berlin Airlift). When Vietnamese children were abandoned, President Gerald Ford launched Operation Babylift. When Saddam Hussein tried to strangle the Kurds, and when warlords created a man-made famine in Somalia, Bush 41 dispatched U.S. troops to protect the Kurds and feed Somalia. When Slobodan Milosevic waged a war of eth-nic cleansing in the Balkans, President Bill Clinton used air power to stop him. When ter-rorists and tyrants turned large swaths of Southwest Asia into a torture chamber, President George W. Bush used American might to build a bridge back to civilization for Iraqis and Afghans, making the case for intervention on both human-itarian and national-interest grounds. And although he did not act in Syria (except to tar-get Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and its affiliates, which was not a humanitarian mis-sion), Obama did intervene in Libya on humanitarian grounds.

Obama’s intervention in Libya and his non-intervention in Syria underscore that U.S. presidents often choose not to engage in humanitarian mili-tary interventions. Indeed, in a mirror image of the above paragraph, it’s worth noting that Bush 43 didn’t intervene in Darfur; Clinton didn’t inter-vene in Rwanda; Bush 41 didn’t intervene in Bosnia; President Ronald Reagan didn’t inter-vene to stop or punish Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons; President Jimmy Carter didn’t intervene to stop the “Red Terror” massacres in Ethiopia; Ford didn’t inter-vene in Cambodia’s campaign of self-genocide; President Franklin Roosevelt didn’t in-tervene in Nanking. The list of non-interventions is longer than the list of interventions.

(which claimed 800,000 lives in 1994, out of a population of 6 million in 1993). In the wake of those conflicts, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan argued for “timely intervention by the international community when death and suffering are being inflicted on large numbers of people.”15

Many observers saw Libya as a test case for R2P. As the Arab Spring swept into Libya, Qaddafi called the demonstrators “rats,” “cockroaches,” and “germs.” He vowed to show them “no mercy.” The UN Security Council took him at his word and authorized a no-fly zone to protect Libya’s civilians. NATO then used that authorization as a pretext to target and topple the Qaddafi regime. (That decision carried considerable fallout: Moscow argued the UNSC resolution for Libya did not authorize what the NATO-led coalition ulti-mately did—remove Qaddafi—and cited what happened in Libya to justify its opposition to any similar resolution for Syria. Meanwhile, the fact that Obama and his counterparts in Paris and other NATO capitals waged in Libya a preemptive war of regime change—exactly what they pilloried Bush 43 for—was an irony overlooked or missed by many.)

Obama defended U.S. partici-pation in Libya by echoing the language of R2P: He cited “our responsibilities to our fellow human beings,” adding, “When our interests and values are at stake, we have a responsibility to act.”16

R2P advocates expected NATO to round up another posse when the Arab Spring revolt turned deadly in Syria. As Obama’s UN ambassador, Samantha Power, said of Syria, R2P “should have compelled…the international

community to step in earli-er, lend advice and assistance and prevent the situation from reaching its current metastatic proportions.”17 However, the humanitarian cavalry never ma-terialized, which is difficult to understand given that Assad did far worse to his people than Qaddafi did to his. This incon-sistency of application is one of the many problems with the well-intentioned R2P doctrine: If the people of Benghazi and Pristina are worthy of protec-tion, why aren’t the people of Aleppo and Kigali?

Beyond inconsistency of ap-plication, expecting—let alone requiring—members of the UN Security Council to intervene whenever a government fails to live up to the murky definition of “protecting” its population is problematic.

First, R2P taken to its logical conclusion would increase the heavy burdens on a shrinking U.S. military, while decreasing America’s freedom of action. The U.S. military is already civ-ilization’s last line of defense. Playing this role in pursuit of an enlightened self-interest that is guided by U.S. policymakers, promotes U.S. goals, and helps the world’s unfortunates along the way is one thing. Doing it as handmaiden to the UN and International Criminal Court (ICC)—or just because CNN decides “Washington must do something”—is quite another.

Second, when it comes to the trigger for intervention, who at the UN, ICC, or CNN de-cides what justifies an R2P intervention?

R2P advocates are quick to an-swer that an R2P intervention can be triggered only by geno-cide, war crimes, ethnic cleans-ing, crimes against humanity,

or inciting such actions. Yet as horrible as they are, all of these terms can be subjective. Just ask the Syrian government and Syria’s various rebel groups; Qaddafi’s henchmen and their opponents; the Taliban and NATO; Kosovo, Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia; Rwanda’s Hutus and Tutsis; Russia and Chechnya; Saddam Hussein’s generals and their former sub-jects. Indeed, everyone from Prime Minister Tony Blair to Gen. Tommy Franks was ac-cused of war crimes during the Iraq War. After NATO inter-vened in Libya, Russia called on the ICC to investigate “all cases of NATO bombing that caused civilian casualties.”18 The ICC has conducted investi-gations of U.S. and NATO forc-es in Afghanistan “to check if crimes against humanity, war crimes or genocide have been committed.”19

The purpose here is not to toss every use of military force into a soup of moral relativism. For most Americans, it’s easy to de-cipher the good guys from the bad guys, the use of force to stop a wrong from the use of force to commit a wrong, a legitimate military operation from a war crime. But that sort of common sense is not so common in the halls of the UN.

Nor is the purpose here to argue that the United States should never engage in humanitarian interventions. Americans have a proud history of helping the helpless, as discussed above. However, the trigger for U.S. military intervention in a hu-manitarian crisis—a shock to the conscience, a tug on the heart-strings, a risk to the national interest, or some combination of these—should be determined by the president and Congress, not some malleable UN mandate.

TENSIONSSo, when should the United States respond to humanitari-an crises?

That question is easy to answer for those who believe the con-duct of U.S. foreign and defense policy should be based solely on interests. But it’s much harder to justify taking a Pilate-like approach for those of us who wrestle with the headlines and believe the civilized world is called to defend more than nar-row interests.

For me, this tension has at least three sources.

First, there’s Luke 12, where Jesus explains, “From the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Given how much we Americans have been entrusted and blessed with, why would heaven not expect us to answer when the innocent cry out for help?

Second, there’s Proverbs 3, which commands, “Do not withhold good from those who deserve it, when it is in your power to act,” and the timeless lesson of the Good Samaritan. Given the reach and resources of the United States, it’s vir-tually always within our pow-er to act, which is to say, the U.S. can always “do something.” And Christ’s story of the Good Samaritan who helped the wounded traveler—and the peo-ple who failed to help because they were busy, apathetic, or distracted—reminds us that all people of goodwill are neigh-bors and that actions make a difference.

That leads to a third source of tension—one that has less to do with enduring biblical principles than with today’s public-policy

realities: A president must balance America’s ideals and America’s interests—a sense of justice with a recognition that the U.S. is not omnipotent and hence cannot fix everything. Even though it is richer, more powerful, and indeed more glob-al than any nation the world has ever known, there are limits to its wealth, strength, and reach. Even a superpower must hus-band its economic, political, and military resources. As Theodore Roosevelt understood, answer-ing every 9-1-1 call would drain America’s capacity to serve as civilization’s last line of defense, undermine domestic support for international engagement, and erode the U.S. military’s ability to carry out its primary mission: defending and protecting the people, territory, and interests of the United States.

Perhaps the way out of this di-lemma is to cling to the notion that those biblical admonitions from Luke and Proverbs are intended for individuals, not governments. Governments, after all, are not expected do ev-erything individuals are called to do in scripture, and governments are expected to do certain things individuals are not supposed to

do. For example, a government that turned the other cheek or put away the sword could be conquered, leaving countless innocents defenseless.

Yet as citizens of a democratic republic, we cannot put our heads in the sand and pretend we know nothing about what our government does (or doesn’t do) to address the brokenness of the world. And as followers of Christ, we cannot keep our heads in the clouds and declare ourselves above the brokenness of the world. A great and good nation like the United States does not just “bear witness,” as Obama so often said.20 It acts, or it bears responsibility. “Those who have the greatest power and influ-ence,” Václav Havel reminded the American people, “also bear the greatest responsibility.”

Part of being a great power is cop-ing with that responsibility—and coming to grips with the conse-quences of action and of inaction.

QUESTIONSDeciding when and where to intervene on humanitarian grounds—and when and where not to intervene—requires wis-dom in the executive branch, collaboration between the ex-ecutive and legislative branches, and communication between the president and the American people.

Wisdom is necessary because there are no easy answers when it comes to humanitarian in-tervention. Every question of humanitarian intervention re-quires a president to choose and defend the least-bad op-tion. Collaboration between Congress and the president—and buy-in from Congress—is necessary precisely because most humanitarian interven-tions lack a clear link to the

national interest. And dialogue between the president and the American people is necessary because only the president rep-resents all of the American peo-ple, because the sentiments of the American people fluctuate, because what arouses the na-tion’s conscience in one decade may not in another.

With that as a starting point, and with the caveat that it’s far easier to critique a foreign policy than it is to fashion and conduct one (take it from someone who does his share of critiquing), here are some guiding questions to help Americans determine whether to intervene in human-itarian crises.

First, can we make a difference? Policymakers must assess if U.S. intervention will likely make a positive impact. If that impact is only temporary, they must consider follow-on courses of action that can sustain positive outcomes and prevent a return to the situation that triggered intervention in the first place.

For instance, the U.S.-led UN intervention in Somalia in 1992 ended the famine, but the fol-low-on plans proved too am-bitious (a wholesale rebuilding of the state) and inadequately resourced (UN effectiveness is a function of its members’ commitment, which was half-hearted). The result was a return to anarchy and priva-tion. Similarly, NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya stopped Qaddafi from turning Benghazi into Srebrenica, but there was no plan for the day after. The result, again, was anarchy.

On the other hand, the U.S.-led NATO intervention in the Balkans not only made a posi-tive immediate impact by stop-ping Milosevic’s campaign of ethnic cleansing; it also, by

making a long-term commit-ment to stabilizing the region, prevented the former Yugoslavia from backsliding into further ethnic warfare. The parable of the Good Samaritan is in-structive here: Recall that the Samaritan not only provided the “half dead” traveler immediate help; he also provided long-term assistance. He “brought him to an inn and took care of him,” gave the innkeeper resources to help the traveler’s recovery, and returned to ensure that the recovery was complete.

NATO’s peacekeeping force was in Bosnia for nine years, at which time NATO handed off its mission to an EU peace-keeping force, which remains in Bosnia today—21 years after the peacekeeping operation began. U.S. and NATO peacekeepers are still in Kosovo today—18 years after they arrived. The rea-son the U.S. and its allies made this long-term commitment underscores why the Balkans is a success story, why Somalia and Libya are not, and perhaps why humanitarian interventions seldom do much more than triage: The U.S. and the rest of NATO concluded that their in-terests—not just their collective conscience—were impacted by what was happening in south-eastern Europe.

Second, are U.S. interests in jeopardy? When U.S. interests will likely be impacted by the continuation of a humanitarian crisis, intervention is not only sensible; it’s arguably necessary. Clinton made such a case to the American people in defending humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo.

In Bosnia, he connected hu-manitarian concerns and na-tional interests by noting that, yes, “hearts are broken by the suffering and the slaughter,”

but also that Sarajevo “is where World War I began. World War II and the Holocaust engulfed this region,” he explained. “Just imagine if leaders back then had acted wisely and early enough, how many lives could have been saved, how many Americans would not have had to die.”21

In Kosovo, too, he appealed to America’s heart and head by explaining, “We act to protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive,” and then warning, “We act to prevent a wider war, to defuse a powder keg at the heart of Europe that has exploded twice before in this century with catastrophic results.”22

Syria was another instance where humanitarian ideals and national interests overlapped. The war in Syria threatened Turkey, Jordan, and Israel (U.S. allies all), served as a magnet for Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah (U.S. adversaries all), fueled jihadist groups in Iraq, and de-stabilized the region. In addition to sparing tens of thousands Syrian and Iraqi innocents (a humanitarian motivation), us-ing airpower early on to con-strain the Assad regime might have checked Iran, blocked Russia’s return to the region, prevented Assad from reopen-ing the Pandora’s Box of chem-ical warfare, protected Europe from a tidal wave of refugees, and prevented the birth of ISIS (all national-security interests).

Syria and the Balkans are in-structive in that in both cases the U.S. resisted intervening because, the realists assured us, “U.S. interests are not threat-ened.” But as these wars con-tinued, Washington reversed course. Why? Because U.S. interests are, in fact, threat-ened by tidal waves of refugees,

radicalization of victim popula-tions, and actions that under-mine international order and the security of allies.

Third, can anyone else help? This is where Obama’s “leading from behind” concept was theo-retically sound, albeit poorly ex-ecuted and improperly applied. If, to borrow Bush 41’s phrase, the U.S. can serve as a catalyst or enabler for broader interna-tional action to stop a human-itarian crisis, intervention is sensible. If not, the president should consider the costs—in political capital, national trea-sure, and U.S. military person-nel—of taking on a long-term humanitarian operation.

last is an entirely different mat-ter, but obtaining it is helpful.)

The Military Humanitarian Operations Act (MHOA), which was introduced in 2012 and has been reintroduced in the new Congress, offers parameters for wrestling with humanitarian military intervention and ensur-ing Congress is involved in the process. The original bill was an outgrowth of congressional frus-tration over U.S. intervention in Libya. As one Democratic law-maker said during the Libya op-eration, administration officials “consulted the United Nations. They did not consult the United States Congress.”23 That seems precisely backwards.

When it comes to launching military operations to support humanitarian aims—operations where no national interests are at stake and where there is no immediate threat to the U.S., as in Somalia in 1992, Kosovo in 1999, and Libya in 2011—seeking congressional authori-zation should not be seen as a hindrance. In fact, Congress can help the president by conferring legitimacy onto a humanitarian operation (thereby sharing the burden and responsibility of intervention) or by rejecting plans for intervention (thereby preventing the president from committing to an effort lacking popular support).

Sixth, will words help or hinder? Presidents need to weigh their words carefully when it comes to getting in or staying out of hu-manitarian crises. The current president and his immediate predecessor offer contrasting examples of what not to say.

President Donald Trump was initially blunt and unfeeling about Syria: “Why do we care?” he asked as a candidate.25 Before his election, he declared, “My rules of engagement are pret-ty simple: If we are going to intervene in a conflict it had better pose a direct threat to our interest.”26 This could be seen as a green light for mass murderers. Yet when Trump decided to launch missile strikes against the Syrian air force in response to Assad’s chemical attacks, the president used the language of humanitarian inter-vention, describing the deaths of “innocent children” as “an affront to humanity.”27 Then again, he said, the operation was conducted in the “vital national security interest of the United States to prevent and deter the spread and use of deadly chemi-cal weapons.” Defense Secretary James Mattis added, “Our mil-itary policy in Syria has not

Fourth, how bad is it? This is a threshold question each pres-ident should ask about each humanitarian crisis that comes before his desk. The harsh real-ity is that certain atrocities on the international stage, just like certain crimes on a local scale, are worse than others and de-mand more action than others. With 100,000 dead and the repeated use of chemical weap-ons, Syria by 2013 was arguably such a case.

Fifth, are the American people on board? In cases of inter-vention that are not in defense of the national interest, it is prudent to seek public support through Congress. (Whether and how long that support will

To be sure, presidents must have the flexibility to act swiftly in defense of American inter-ests. Hence, the MHOA defines military humanitarian opera-tions as those “where hostile activities are reasonably antic-ipated” and where the aim is “preventing or responding to a humanitarian catastrophe.” It would not impact retaliatory operations, operations aimed at preventing or repelling attacks on the United States or U.S. interests, operations related to collective self-defense, opera-tions to protect or rescue U.S. citizens or personnel, opera-tions conducted to fulfill treaty commitments, or operations in response to natural disasters.24

changed,” signaling there were no plans to mount a humani-tarian operation to end Assad’s butchery.28 In short, the Trump administration’s words and ac-tions have been less than clear.

Obama, on the other hand, said things like this: “We cannot stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy…where innocent men and women face brutality and death at the hands of their own government.”29 (That was his description of Libya, a year be-fore Assad turned Syria into a mass grave.) And this: “When dictators commit atrocities, they depend upon the world to look the other way until those horri-fying pictures fade from memo-ry…sometimes resolutions and statements of condemnation are simply not enough.”30 (That was after Assad’s gassing of Ghouta.) And this: “Awareness without action changes nothing…‘Never again’ is a challenge to us all… Too often, the world has failed to prevent the killing of inno-cents on a massive scale. And we are haunted by the atrocities that we did not stop and the lives we did not save.”31 (That was after a year of butchery in Syria.)

Words like this raise the expec-tation for intervention, while lowering the threshold for inter-vention. That’s a dangerous mix.

Worse, Obama talked like Havel and then acted like Kissinger. Theodore Roosevelt worried about this very possibility: “It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation, as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force,” he warned. “If there is no intention of providing and keeping the force necessary to back up a

strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.”32

To make the threshold for U.S. military intervention “a direct threat to our interest,” as Trump puts it, is to ignore more than 180 years of U.S. history—and to attempt to numb America’s conscience. America’s humani-tarian impulse must be a factor when determining whether to intervene.

However, to declare that “awareness without action changes nothing” and then to do nothing, to say “never again” and then, in effect, to say “never mind,” as Obama did, is equally problematic because it high-lights our hypocrisy as well as our inaction.

These guiding questions may be unsatisfying; they are surely imperfect and incomplete. But the exercise is a reminder that determining when and where to serve “the interest of humanity” is not a science. In a broken world, American policymakers must seek the counsel of the heart and the head, aim for the achievable, and choose the least-bad option.

Alan W. Dowd is a senior fel-low with the Sagamore Institute Center for America’s Purpose and a contributing editor of

(Endnotes)1 UN News Center, December 16, 2016, http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=55818#.WFrZK_krLIX. 2 President George H.W. Bush, Address on Somalia, December 4, 1992.3 President Barack Obama, Address to the Nation on Syria, September 10, 2013.4 Theodore Roosevelt, Speech to the Naval War College, June 2, 1897.5 Theodore Roosevelt’s Annual Message to Congress, December 6, 1904.6 Walter LaFeber, The American Age, 1994, p.197.7 Robert Kagan, , 2006, p.409.8 Barbara Salazar Torreon, “Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2016,” CRS Report for

Congress, October 7, 2016.9 Quoted in Kagan, p.289.10 Bremner, American Philanthropy, 1980, pp.53-54.11 Roosevelt, December 6, 1904.12 United Nations, July 15, 2008, http://www.un.org/press/en/2008/sgsm11701.doc.htm.13 For a broader discussion on the importance of nation-states in maintaining international order, see Alan Dowd, “A Banner for the Nations: Preserving International Order and the Nation-State System,” , Spring 2016.14 United Nations, July 15, 2008.15 Kofi Annan, “Two concepts of sovereignty,” The Economist, September 18, 1999.16 President Barack Obama, Address to the Nation on Libya, March 28, 2011.17 Rick Gladstone and Nick Cumming-Bruce, “U.N. Leader Admits Failure to Halt Syrian Atrocities,” , September 11, 2013.18 UPI, “Russia wants ICC to examine NATO bombings,” May 18, 2012.19 Daniel Schwammenthal, “Prosecuting American ‘war crimes,’”

, November 26, 2009. 20 See President Barack Obama, Statement to the Press, Stockholm, Sweden, September 4, 2013; President Barack Obama, Statement on Iran, November 3, 2009; Office of the Press Secretary, White House Statement, September 29, 2011; Office of the Press Secretary, Statement from the President on Iran, June 20, 2009.21 resident Bill Clinton, Remarks at the Bosnia Treaty Signing, February 14, 1996; President Bill Clinton, Statement on Kosovo, March 24, 1999.22 Clinton, March 24, 1999.23 Jonathan Allen and John Bresnahan, “Liberal Dems in Uproar over Libya,” March 19, 2011.24 Military Humanitarian Operations Act of 2017 and Military Humanitarian Operations Act of 2012.25 David Sherfinski, “Donald Trump: ‘Let Russia fight ISIS’ in Syria,” The

, September 29, 2015.26 On the Issues, “Donald Trump on War & Peace,” ontheissues.org.27 Remarks by President Trump, April 5, 2017 and Statement by President Trump on Syria, April 6, 2017.28 Richard Sisk, “Mattis: Cruise Missile Attack on Syria Was One-Off Mission,” DoD Buzz, April 11, 2017, dodbuzz.com.29 President Barack Obama, Remarks on Libya, March 19, 2011.30 Obama, September 10, 2013.31 President Barack Obama, Remarks at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 23, 2012.32 Roosevelt, December 6, 1904.

Build me a son, O Lord, who will be strong enough to know when he is weak, and brave enough to face himself when he is afraid; one who will be proud and unbending in honest defeat, and humble and gentle in victory.

Build me a son whose wishbone will not be where his backbone should be; a son who will know Thee….Lead him, I pray, not in the path of ease and comfort, but un-der the stress and spur of difficulties and challenge. Here let him learn to stand up in the storm; here let him learn compassion for those who fail.

Build me a son whose heart will be clean, whose goal will be high; a son who will master himself before he seeks to master other men; one who will learn to laugh, yet never forget how to weep; one who will reach into the future, yet never forget the past.

And after all these things are his, add, I pray, enough of a sense of humor, so that he may always be serious, yet never take himself too seriously. Give him humility, so that he may always remember the simplicity of greatness, the open mind of true wisdom, the meekness of true strength.

Then I, his father, will dare to whisper, “I have not lived in vain.”

Gen. Douglas MacArthur in the pacific, during the early days of WWII

Saint Thomas Aquinas,

ESSAY

JUST PRUDENCE:DEFENDING AQUINAS ON

PREEMPTION, PREVENTION, & DECISIVENESS IN WAR

ROBERT G. KAUFMAN

The just war tradition right-ly requires a moral as well as geopolitical rationale for using military force, which states-men ignore at their peril. The American people will not sup-port long and costly wars unless they meet the dual requirements of being right as well as being in our self-interest. Yet modern religious and secular just war theories imperil rather than facilitate the achievement of provisional justice by making the use of force categorically a last resort.2 The United Nations Charter contains an even stron-ger presumption against war than even the most restrictive versions of these modern the-ories, prohibiting the use of force with two exceptions: the

rare-as-a-solar-eclipse event when the UN Security Council overcomes its organic gridlock to sanction collective action; or else individual or collective self-defense against attack, as permitted by Article 51.3

This essay offers a robust dis-sent to these well-intended but unwise modern trends unduly to restrict the use of force. Ruling out anticipatory defense in var-ious modes confounds morality and practicality, entailing a cure worse than the disease. Instead, prudence as St. Thomas Aquinas envisaged it—the cardinal vir-tue of right reason about right things to be done—ought to determine whether or not to use force sooner rather than

later in accordance with the other criteria for Aquinas stipulates: rightful au-thority, just cause, and right intention.4 Aquinas maintains a wise silence on the question of precisely whether or when force should be used sooner rather than later.5 So should we.

Nor, as James Turner Johnson observes in his splendid analysis of the subject, does Aquinas ele-vate the requirements of propor-tionality in waging war to a near categorical imperative.6 On the contrary, the preeminence that Aquinas accords prudence as a moral virtue ought to inform the relationship between the re-quirements of and

, with decisiveness

When martial force becomes necessary, the just war tradition has contributed nobly to mitigating the tragedy of war by instilling a

disposition to avoid moral evil and to pursue instead the greatest possible good. As is well known, statesmen must satisfy two sets of requirements for a war to qualify as just: the and the Kant, some just war thinkers have formalized a third requirement which Aquinas’s notion of (the tranquility of order) always implied: the —the justice of the post-war peace agreement, encompassing not only the details of the peace, but its enforcement and

1

worse case. You may have

hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.7

We know that had the de-mocracies heeded Churchill’s warnings and stopped Hitler at various watersheds during the 1930s, particularly when Nazi Germany invaded the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, in violation of two international agreements, the worst war in history might have been averted. Hitler admit-ted as much, calling the first 48 hours of the Rhineland crisis the most nervous of his life, because French resistance would have caused his regime to collapse.8 Of course, we also know, given the nature of the academy, that had the democracies stopped Hitler sooner rather than lat-er, generations of ungrateful professors would still be writ-ing tomes complaining about preventive war and exonerat-ing Hitler as a legitimate folk nationalist.

Nazi Germany hardly stands as a unique case when the actual, pre-emptive, or preventive use of force averted vastly greater moral and geopolitical evil. In July 1940, with Nazi Germany triumphant in Europe, the Soviet Union neutrally pro-Na-zi, the United States still isola-tionist, and Great Britain cling-ing precariously to freedom, Winston Churchill ordered a preventive strike against the Vichy French fleet harbored in Oran, killing nearly 1,300 Frenchmen. He did this despite Vichy’s nominal independence, which the United States recog-nized, and despite possessing no hard evidence that Vichy’s Minister of War, Admiral Jean François Darlan, intended to turn the French fleet over to Hitler. Darlan insisted until his dying day that he had no

such intention. Yet Churchill was right not to risk jeopardiz-ing Great Britain’s maritime supremacy—especially given Hitler’s serial mendacity, his malevolence, and the dire con-sequences of erring on the side of optimism at a point of maxi-mum peril.9

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, the Kennedy Administration may have launched a preventive attack against Soviet missiles deployed in Cuba despite no proof of an imminent threat of war had the Soviet Union not conceded un-der pressure to remove them. President Kennedy was right to consider the option. The United States could not risk allowing the Soviet Union to transform the balance of power to the det-riment of our vital moral and geopolitical interests.10

In an issue featuring commen-tary on the Six-Day War, it’s appropriate to mention Israel in this context. But we can look beyond the legitimately preemp-tive attack of 1967 to another case, June 1981, when Israel launched Operation Opera, a preventive strike against Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak. It was an attack which the United Nations unanimously con-demned. Yet Israel was right. Otherwise, Saddam Hussein would likely have possessed a nuclear capability when he invaded Kuwait in 1990, by the reckoning of UN inspectors, which may have deterred the United States from responding decisively or, at least, would have exponentially raised the cost and risk of doing so.11

Sticking to the region, the world should, again, thank rather than scorn Israel for launching a si-lent strike in September 2007 on a Syrian nuclear reactor at al-Kibar. Though Syria never

taking priority over propor-tionality when the two come in conflict. Aquinas’s formulation of just war theory grounded in the cardinal virtue of prudence should loom large in any calcu-lation of when, how, for what purposes, and to what effect the United States should wage war.

IWhether the United States re-sorts to force sooner rather than later should be a prudential judgment, not a categorical one. Statesmen should weigh the interplay of the gravity of the danger, the probability of its realization, the availability of plausible alternative means, and the prospects for success. Although the burden of proof should be greater for resorting to force preventively (forestall-ing more distant threats) rather than preemptively (forestalling an imminent grave threat), and while the burden of proof should be greater for resorting to force preemptively rather than re-sponding to attack, prudential statesmen ought to have pre-vention and preemption in their repertoire of options.

Experience is a stern teach-er. We know from history that sometimes using force soon-er can save much blood, toil, tears, and sweat later. No states-man speaks more authorita-tively about that than Winston Churchill:

for the right when you can easily win without blood-

when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may come to the mo-ment when you will have

against you and only a precarious chance of sur-vival. There may even be a

admitted to even having a reac-tor, let alone one with a military purpose, in the face of credi-ble intelligence to the contrary, Israel was right not to tolerate a genuine, if not demonstratively imminent, threat that the rogue Syrian regime of Bashar al-As-sad would cross the nuclear weapons threshold. Imagine how much worse the already horrible sectarian war raging in Syria would be if Assad pos-sessed nuclear weapons. The ty-rant’s lack of compunction using chemical weapons on his own people does not inspire confi-dence that Israel’s forbearance would have induced reciprocal restraint.12

For all our mistakes in execu-tion, the tragedy and injustice of the Iraq War of 2003 is not found in President Bush’s deci-sion to fight it, but in President Obama’s premature withdraw-al, which snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. Saddam’s bellicosity, propensity to take enormous risks, deception, the vigor of his pre-1990 WMD program, the brutality of his regime, the lack of any plausi-ble alternatives for his remov-al, and his serial defiance of 17 UN resolutions more than justified President Bush’s de-cision to forcibly remove him. Although, we plausibly overesti-mated the progress of Saddam’s WMD program, as Churchill momentarily overestimated the state of German rearma-ment as of March 7, 1936. But even the Iraqi Survey Group’s 2004 Duelfer Report, much used by many to “prove” the Bush Administration was wrong about Iraqi WMDs, cited in the first lines of its Key Findings summary that Saddam actively sought to reconstitute his WMD capability eventually.13 But addi-tionally, and crucially, the strat-egy of containing and deterring Saddam also had passed the

become the best of bad options. Thomas Aquinas’s sparer but wiser tradition of just war theo-ry infused with prudence would permit that. Many modern just war theories or the UN Charter imprudently do not.

IIA prudent statesman striving to be just must also weigh carefully Aquinas’s third ad bellum crite-ria for a just war—that the war be waged with right intention for a rightly ordered peace, or what Kant would classify as post bellum.15 Our greatest mil-itary historians, such as Victor Davis Hanson and Geoffrey Blainey, have demonstrated that the most just and durable peace settlements usually oc-cur when wars have decisive outcomes, eradicating the root cause of aggression, entailing regime change of a vanquished foe.16 This insight runs counter to modern just war thinking and international positive law, treat-ing restraint and discrimina-tion in the employment of force as co-equal or paramount vir-tues to decisiveness. Especially against implacable adversaries, it is better to err on the side of decisiveness rather than settle for an ambiguous outcome.

One of the major causes of World War II was the failure of the Treaty of Versailles to address the root cause of World War I. By October 1918, German generals knew they were beaten and forced the Kaiser to ab-dicate, expecting that a dem-ocratic German government would obtain more lenient peace terms. It did not appear to the German people, however, that defeat was inevitable or im-minent as the German army retreated in good order with German territory unscathed. When the German people react-ed with outrage to the Treaty of

point of diminishing moral and strategic return. Sanctions pun-ished millions of innocent Iraqis without addressing the root cause of their misery and the source of danger—i.e., Saddam’s odious regime. We succeeded provisionally in establishing an Iraqi regime more decent to its people and safer for its neighbors before all unraveled when President Obama used the alleged rather than real Iraqi refusal to negotiate a status of forces agreement as an excuse for leaving Iraq in the lurch.

Nor should the United States rule out categorically—on just war grounds infused with pru-dence—a preventive or preemp-tive attack against either North Korea’s or Iran’s nuclear pro-grams. Both qualify as rogue regimes where conventional strategies of deterrence or con-tainment may not prudently suf-fice under certain circumstanc-es. The nuclear deal President Obama improvidently signed with Iran will aid and abet Iran crossing the nuclear threshold, even in the unlikely event the Iranians abide by it. The nucle-ar deal with Iran is also unver-ifiable—depending on Iran to provide access at its discretion to nuclear facilities—and un-enforceable—depending on the UN Security Council to snap back sanctions in the event of Iranian non-compliance, which Russia and China would cer-tainly veto. A nuclear, militant, and virulently anti-American Iran would trigger an unbridled arms race in the world’s most volatile political region. In all likelihood, this Iranian regime will use the deal to wage war by other means, gulling the West into a false sense of security while steadily achieving a nucle-ar breakout capability.14 So the United States must keep on the table the option of a preemptive or preventive strike, should it

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Versailles—a treaty less harsh than what the Germans had in mind if they had won the war—the German generals did not admit Germany’s defeat or the responsibility of the Kaiser’s militaristic autocratic regime for the war. Instead, they men-daciously blamed the Weimar Democratic regime for “stab-bing Germany in the back.”17 Woodrow Wilson’s insistence on accepting an armistice to minimize casualties rather than press for unconditional surren-der—as Theodore Roosevelt and his own commanding general, John “Black Jack” Pershing, ad-vised—had moral and practical consequences despite Wilson’s good intentions. The Allies’ un-willingness to enforce the Treaty of Versailles compounded the mistake of letting the Kaiser’s regime off the hook in the first place. Hitler’s diabolical ex-ploitation of the stab-in-the-back myth facilitated his rise to power.18

President Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill did not make the same mistake of let-ting understandable concerns for in bello proportionality trump their goal of decisiveness as a precondition for a rightly ordered peace. They would set-tle for nothing less than uncon-ditional surrender and the total defeat of the Nazi regime in a manner so devastating that the German people could not deny it—perhaps a justification, or at least mitigating feature, of the allied strategic bombing cam-paign that technically lacked the capacity to distinguish ci-vilians from combatants on the American side or to treat both categories as one and the same on the British side. Roosevelt’s and Churchill’s successors not only insisted on democratic re-gime change in Germany, but left sizable forces indefinitely without any premature exit to

enforce it, creating and sustain-ing the conditions for Aquinas’s rightly ordered peace.19 Judged against the magnitude of the Nazi evil, the existential threat facing Western Civilization, the unavailability of effective alter-natives to strategic bombing, and the essential decency of the Anglo-American allies, it is reasonable to declare justified even such an undeniably awful military action.

One of the major causes of the Iraq War of 2003 was the am-biguous outcome of the Gulf War of 1990-1991. We meant well, but we did no good in let-ting well-intentioned concerns for proportionality—best exem-plified perhaps by prematurely stopping the bombing of the retreating, or repositioning, elite units of Saddam’s Republican Guard on the so-called highway of death—ultimately allowing Saddam to survive and continue to oppress and menace for more than another decade longer. Conversely, a decisive outcome and democratic regime change would have improved exponen-tially the chances for a rightly ordered peace settling the root cause of aggression.

Granted, to paraphrase the im-mortal words of the Rolling Stones, the United States can-not always get what it wants. Sometimes, the weight of pru-dence dictates settling for less-than-total or immediate victory. During the Cold War, for exam-ple, nuclear weapons precluded the United States from defeat-ing the Soviet Union directly by traditional military means. The Korean War of 1950-1953 is a prime example of a just war when fighting for less-than-total victory was a more prudential alternative than either capitu-lation or an all-out war. When, however, the United States does have to fight, it should be with

the strong presumption of striv-ing for total victory in order to achieve a rightly ordered peace. This accords not only with St. Thomas’s just war thinking, but the traditional formulation of the doctrine of double effect that Catholic casuists devised in the Middle Ages, conceptu-alizing the proper relationship between the requirements of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. Michael Walzer summarizes the four conditions of the doctrine.

1. The act is good in it--

ent, which means for our purposes that it is a legitimate act of war.

morally acceptable—the destruction of military supplies, for example, or the killing of enemy soldiers.

3. The intention of the actor is good.

--

20

In a triumph of good intentions over good judgment, however, Walzer imprudently imposes additional restraints on the jus in bello detrimental to achiev-ing a decisive outcome essen-tial for a rightly ordered peace. He recommends, for example, modifying the doctrine of sec-ondary effect to oblige even the just side to expose their soldiers to greater risk to minimize even unintended but foreseeable en-emy civilian casualties.21 This is untenable as a categorical imperative.

Normally, the beneficial effect of fighting to achieve total vic-tory warrants prolonging the fighting, despite the increase in casualties that may alas include large numbers of traditional

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non-combatants. I defend, for example, the morality and prac-ticality of the American strate-gic bombing campaign against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan from start to finish, even though technology often pre-cluded distinguishing between civilians and combatants, no matter what American bomber command argued to the con-trary. As Richard Overy demon-strates authoritatively, stra-tegic bombing shortened the war, saving hundreds of thou-sands and perhaps millions of lives—allied soldiers, German and Japanese soldiers thrust into battle as suicide warriors, concentration camp victims lib-erated from extermination.22 By my reckoning, such geopolitical and moral triage trumps in bello requirements of proportionali-ty. A similar calculus justifies President Truman’s decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan—an action which the

preponderance of evidence sug-gests saved millions of lives, given the fanaticism and impla-cability of the Imperial Japanese regime committed to fighting to the finish despite their defeat being certain.23 Decent states-men should always deliberate rigorously whether less severe means could achieve the same result. Tragically, a prudent statesman sometimes must con-clude no alternative plausible option exists to avert great mor-al and geopolitical evil.

The First Battle of Falluja be-tween the U.S. and Islamist insurgents fought in April 2004 and Israel’s 2008-2009 War with Hamas in Gaza illustrate the moral and geopolitical risks of honoring in bello proportion-ality as a near-categorical im-perative even against implacable foes who embed themselves among civilian non-combatants as a deliberate strategy to take

advantage of our self-imposed in bello limits. In both cases, well-intended but imprudent restraint swelled the costs for all concerned in the long run, because the cancer of aggression recurred by stopping the fight-ing too soon, while decisiveness may have eradicated it once and for all.

Walzer defends a much nar-rower utilitarian ethic than I deem prudent, overriding jus in bello only provisionally as a near-one-time exception arising from “a supreme emergency”: the overwhelming imperative of preventing a uniquely-evil Nazi regime’s victory and overrun-ning of Western Civilization.24

Finally, my defense of a more traditional version of just war theory infused with prudence raises the legitimate question of whether this standard adequate-ly constrains the temptations for the United States to define its own interests too selfishly and, in defending these inter-ests, to abuse the prerogatives of prevention and preemption that I’ve justified. Are not slav-ery, our treatment of Native Americans, and our internment of Americans of Japanese de-scent during WWII sobering reminders that we Americans often fall far short of our ideals? My answer rests on probabili-ties rather than certainties—the firmest if imperfect basis that this subject matter admits. For all our shortcomings, life is, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, much more “nasty, solitary, brutish, and short” when the United States retrenches and retreats. The greatest dangers to American ideals and self-in-terest arise not when the United States is too strong but rather too weak and irresolute in con-fronting the devils that lurk around the corner in interna-tional relations, even in the best

Saint Thomas Aquinas, Protector of the University of Cusco, circa 1690. Museo de Arte de Lima, Peru. Source: Google Art Project, via Wikimedia Commons.

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of times. Also, because demo-cratic statesmen act on behalf not of themselves but of their citizens, they already face the salutary checks and balances of having to discharge a greater burden of proof to use force in the first place. As David Hackett Fischer observes, our founders and the leaders of the American Revolution never believed win-ning was enough. “One of their greatest achievements,” writes Fischer, was to wage the war “in a manner that was true to the ex-panding humanitarian ideals of the American Revolution.” That holds largely true of America’s major wars ever since. American statesmen have honored the principle—usually not in the breach—that the United States must fight and win wars in a way consistent with the values of the Declaration of Independence, the American Founding, and the principles of its cause.25

The just war tradition, as Aquinas conceived it rather than as more restrictive mod-ern versions do, strikes the best prudential balance reconcil-ing the desirable with the pos-sible, consistent with Judeo-Christian ethics rightly under-stood. Aquinas knows more than his modern emendators do about grounding his just war deliberations—and much else—in the cardinal moral virtue of prudence.

two-year program to propel inno-vative ideas for reimagining the future of America’s conservative movement.(Endnotes)

1 The literature on just war theory is vast. The works of Michael Walzer and James Turner Johnson rank high in the pantheon of writing on the subject. See, for example, Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, fifth ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2015); James Turner Johnson, Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 2014). For more recent worthy studies, among others, see Alex J. Bellamy, Just Wars from Cicero to Iraq (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2006); and James Dubik, Just War Reconsidered: Strategy, Ethics, and Theory (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). 2 This includes not only the Catholic bishop’s presumption against war and the secular Weinberger guidelines, but also the otherwise exemplary Jean Bethke Elshtain. National Conference of Catholic Bishops (1983 and 1993), “A Presumption Against War” in Gregory M. Reichberg, Henry Syse, Endre Begby, ed., The Ethics of War (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 669-82; Caspar Weinberger, “On the Use of Military Power,” Pentagon News Release, October 28, 1984; Jean Bethke Elshtain, Just War Against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 46-58. 3 Charter of the United Nations, http://www.un.org/en/charter-united-nations/. 4 St. Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Prudence, Questions 47-52, Second Part of the Second Part, Summa Theologica, http://www3.nd.edu/~affredos/courses/453/prudence/htm. For an excellent explication of Prudence as Aquinas conceived it—the wellspring of the cardinal virtues—see Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues (South Bend: Notre Dame Press, 1966), 41-72.5 Aquinas, Of War, II-II.Q40, Summa Theologica6 James Turner Johnson, “Just War, as It Was and Is,” First Things (Number 149, January 2005), 14-24. 7 Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), 348.8 Quoted in Andreas Hillgruber, Germany and the Two Wars, trans. William C. Kirby (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 57. 9 Winston S. Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949),

224-41.10 Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War and the Preservation of the Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), 437-573.11 Robert G. Kaufman, In Defense of the Bush Doctrine (Lexington and London: University Press of Kentucky, 2007), 92. 12 David Makovsky, “The Silent Strike: How Israel Bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret,” New Yorker, September 17, 2012, newyorker.com.13 Robert G. Kaufman, Dangerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America (Lexington and London: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 106-11. 14 Ibid., 203-209. 15 George Weigel has made this general argument with his customary insight and eloquence. George Weigel, Tranquillitas Ordinis: The Present Failure and Future Promise of American Catholic Thought on War and Peace (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 25-45, 139-47, 342-48. 16 Victor Davis Hanson, The Soul of Battle: From Ancient Times to the Present Day: How Three Great Liberators Vanquished Tyanny (1999; rept., New York: Anchor Books, 2001); and Geoffrey Blainey, The Causes of War, Third ed. (New York: Free Press, 1988), 3. 17 See, for example, Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Hill and Wang, 2001), 1-145. 18 Robert G. Kaufman, A Tale of Bad to Worse: Progressivism and American Foreign Policy from Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, Heritage Foundation, First Principles Series (forthcoming). 19 Michael Beschloss, The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1941-1945 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002), 13-19. 20 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 153. 21 Ibid., 153-57.22 Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1996), 101-133; Richard Overy, The Bombing and the Bombed (London and New York: Penguin, 2014), 171-230, 428-37. 23 Ronald Spector, Eagle Against the Sun: The American War with Japan (New York: Vintage, 1985), 532-66. 24 Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 138-59. 25 David Hackett Fischer, Washington’s Crossing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 375-76.

Robert G. Kaufman is the Dockson Professor of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. His most recent book is Dan-gerous Doctrine: How Obama’s Grand Strategy Weakened America. This essay was writ-ten as part of Pepperdine’s “The American Project: On the Future of Conservatism,” a

If you haven’t noticed, America is in the middle of an identity crisis. It’s get-ting harder and harder to agree upon an “unum” in the What exactly makes America one? Ask those wear-ing red “Make America Great Again” ball caps and those holding “Black Lives Matter” picket signs, and you’ll hear pretty different answers.

The culture wars have been with us for decades. But those rivalries seem to have deepened and complexified of late. The late Anthony Scalia, in a 2013 interview with

, waxed wistful about Katherine Graham’s DC dinner parties in the 1970s and 80s where Republican and Democrat powerbrokers fraternized and clinked glasses. But this “doesn’t happen any-more,” Scalia said. “It’s a nasty time. It’s a nasty time.”

Indeed, think of what has transpired even since 2013:

and the non-stop showdown between erotic and religious liberty, the explosion of police-brutality—real and imagined—videos and the emer-gence of Black Lives Matter, the sudden prominence of the transgender movement, the rise of the alt-right, the growing divide between globalists and

AN EXCEPTIONAL CRISIS BOOK REVIEW

nationalists, the still-bewilder-ing 2016 elections, and the na-tivist resurgence which Donald Trump represents.

Perhaps every generation feels like its moral and political battles amount to “an extinc-tion-level event,” to borrow Andrew Sullivan’s mid-2016 description of the Trump can-didacy. Human beings often view their own life and times in alternatively exalted and draco-nian terms. Yet underneath all these newspaper headlines is a real battle over what or who America is.

A “nation” might be de-fined as a group of peo-ple whose sense of being a “we” is strong enough to create a belief in their moral right to self-govern-ment, whether or not they have the capacity to estab-lish such a government. This sense of “we” might root in a land, a family lin-eage, or a religion or creed, suggests British philoso-pher Roger Scruton. For Americans it’s a creed. We may sing “This Land Is Your Land” with Woody Gutherie, but general-ly speaking Americans identify themselves by a set of ideas involving natural rights, individu-al freedom, and equali-ty. These shared values comprise America’s civil religion, says John Wilsey

in his prescient 2015 book

. They com-prise the DNA inside of “we the people.” And they make us feel “exceptional.”

The phrase “civil religion” should not be confused with traditional religion, says Wilsey. It refers to the set of practices, symbols, and beliefs around which a citizenry unite (20). For Americans, George Washington is our Moses-figure, Abraham Lincoln our premier theologian, the Declaration of Independence

AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM AND CIVIL RELIGION: REASSESSING THE HISTORY OF AN IDEA. JOHN D. WILSEY , IVP Academic, 2015, 262 pages.

and Constitution our Old Testament, the Gettysburg Address and Lincoln’s Second Inaugural our New—which fulfills and interprets the Old. Memorial Day, Veterans Day, Presidents Day, and, more re-cently, Martin Luther King Jr. Day compose part of our litur-gical calendar.

The phrase “American excep-tionalism” goes back to that ear-ly American observer Alexis de Tocqueville. Yet the word “ex-ceptional,” Wilsey observes, can mean either “different” or “spe-cial.” Barack Obama employed the first sense when he affirmed American exceptionalism, “just as I expect the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek excep-tionalism.” More often, how-ever, Americans have used the phrase to mean special, which shades into better, transcen-dent, normative, tasked with a divine mission in the world.

Wilsey traces these two concepts of exceptionalism through this book, referring to them as open exceptionalism and closed ex-ceptionalism, respectively. His basic argument is that closed ex-ceptionalism “is at odds with the Christian gospel,” while open exceptionalism “can serve as a beacon pointing to justice, natural rights and the ethical well-being of the nation and the world” (18, 19).

Closed exceptionalism takes five biblical concepts meant for God’s chosen people in Scripture—(1) chosen nation, (2) divine commission, (3) in-nocence, (4) sacred land, and (5) glory—and applies them to America. Think of John Winthrop’s admonishing the Massachusetts Bay colonists in 1630 to be a “city on a hill,” borrowing words from Matthew 5:14 that Jesus intended for his

followers. The phrase would eventually be picked up by ev-eryone from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan. The danger of treating the nation like God’s chosen people, aside from per-verting the real gospel and mis-using Scripture, is that it creates a people who sanctify all their transgressions and prejudices under the holy cloak of a divine mission or “manifest destiny.” The nation becomes an idol, and just like every idol in the Old Testament, it requires sac-rifices, whether that’s the bodies of Native Americans or African Americans. Closed exception-alism, effectively, is White. It poses as Christian. It’s exclu-sivist. It cannot admit error. It is self-satisfied and sectarian.

Open exceptionalism, on the other hand, refuses to confuse itself with revealed religion, but confines itself to affirm-ing universal values in the so-called political and cultural do-main: the rights to life, liberty, property, religious freedom, equality, rule of law, individ-ual dignity, and justice (26). It is not Christian, per se, but what Wilsey calls “an amal-gamation” of Christianity and Enlightenment principles (51). It is inclusivistic. It opens free-dom to all. It is never self-sat-isfied but always aspires to the principles of natural law. It is willing to chasten the “sectarian tendencies of the Christian tra-dition (or any religion, for that matter), to prevent the curtail-ment of religious freedom” (35).

It’s highly tempting to walk through every chapter of the book. Each fascinates. I won’t, but I will simply note that Wilsey covers a vast range of topics from the millennial, cov-enantal, and typological read-ings of political history by New England Puritans; to Benjamin Franklin and John Adam’s

identification of America’s sto-ryline with Israel’s; to the as-sumptions of divine chosenness inhering in Andrew Jackson’s destruction of Native Americans or in White territorial demands along the Mexican border; to comparisons between John O’Sullivan’s “manifest destiny” and Lincoln’s epistemic humil-ity; to the foreign policy of John Foster Dulles and its legacy in the wars of today; to Ronald Reagan’s rhetoric of national innocence; to conceptions of the sanctity of the land as illustrated in the paintings of Thomas Cole; to a much-needed analysis of three popular homeschooling curriculums.

Abraham Lincoln and W. E. B. Dubois are the heroes in Wilsey’s tale of two exception-alisms. They don’t mistake their political ambitions for God’s. Meanwhile, Wilsey draws other American heroes from individ-ual Founders to Ronald Reagan with feet of clay, participants in a story of messianic pretentions that, amidst the good, also did bad. Jonathan Edwards, for in-stance, presented the colonies as a turning point in history such that, in Edwards’ words, “the new and most glorious state of God’s church on earth might commence there” (56). Thomas Jefferson, in his second inaugu-ral, likened the nation to “Israel of old” planted in the land by the divine Being (98). These kinds of millennial and typo-logical assumptions enabled Americans to rationalize their high-handed exploitations and discriminations.

Wilsey’s book is not a whole-sale condemnation of “White Christian America,” like one or two other diatribes I’ve recently read. Yet he certainly challenges White American Christians on their tendency to mix nation-alism and Christianity. Such

mingling “hijacks” Christian theology and (at worst) builds the faith on racial hubris (80, 226). Wilsey doesn’t quite ac-cuse American Christians with harlotry, like the Old Testament prophets did for combining wor-ship of Yahweh with worship of Baal. Yet it’s effectively the same indictment—idolatry—albeit in an urbane academic vernacular.

As someone who regularly writes for pastors, I’d sum-marize the book’s lesson in a pastoral vernacular like this: Wilsey exposes the major role that a civil prosperity gospel has played in American history from the moment of the nation’s conception. It’s like our national DNA is laced through with sote-riological, millennial, and even perfectionist assumptions. What do prosperity preachers do, after all? They hijack the promises of wealth and land that God uniquely gave to Israel in order to manufacture their own brand of legalism. In a similar way, our Christian political rhetoric in this country—more than you’ll hear from the saints in other na-tions—often promises that God will give or withhold his bless-ings to the nation according to the nation’s obedience. These Deuteronomic notes resound in everything from the jeremi-ads of colonial preachers1 to the harangues of today’s religious right or social justice left.

All this to say, the pastor in me strongly recommends this book, especially to pastors, Sunday School teachers, Christian school teachers, homeschool-ing parents, and more. And lest there be any misunderstanding, Wilsey is no America-basher. He would be the first to say that American Christians should thank God for the many and unique gifts he has given to America. To deny acknowledg-ing God’s blessings would be to

rob God of praise. Yet like the Old Testament prophets and like Paul (see Rom. 9:1), we love our nations more, not less, by being willing to admit and address where they have gone astray. One of the first signs of a self-deceived and idolatrous nationalism is an unwilling-ness to hear critique, as if our nation was uniquely exempt from the nationalistic rage of Psalm 2 against the Lord and his Anointed. We should instead follow the example of Lincoln, who fretted, “I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and the nation should be on the Lord’s side” (87).

With these praises of Wilsey’s book firmly in place, let me now turn a corner and speak as a political theologian. I’m both sympathetic with Wilsey’s proj-ect as well as uncertain of it. I wholly agree with his critique of closed exceptionalism, but I wonder about the high degree of confidence he maintains in the American Experiment. I would say that this experiment is up for grabs at this moment in American history, which is why we have difficulty agreeing upon the unum in

The American Experiment is the historical hypothesis that people of different faiths or no faith can unite around certain universal principles (like rights, freedom, and equality). Christians today remain slow to recognize it, but the Experiment is fundamen-tally an Enlightenment project, not merely an “amalgamation” or “consilience” or “gentle-man’s agreement” between the Enlightenment and Christianity, as Wilsey and so many oth-er historians have argued. It’s historically true that Baptist preachers like Isaac Backus en-tered this “agreement” shaking

hands with Enlightenment men like Thomas Jefferson, one holding firmly to the Bible and the other to some form of nat-ural law. Yet read the contract carefully. It grounds governing authority in their act of agreement (“deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed”), in spite of whatever religious beliefs inspire every party’s en-tering into the agreement. After all, people’s respective appeals to one God, twenty gods, or no god make no difference, as Jefferson famously put it. From the get-go, then, the idea that is “America” made plenty of space for believers and paral-leled the beliefs of believers; but it was built upon a contract for believers and unbelievers alike, meaning belief did not formally belong to the contract. Like Enlightenment philosophy generally, that contract remains suspended in midair with no ultimate foundations, making it subject to the whims of the times. Indeed, this is precisely why Founders like Washington and Adams pointed out that their system of government would work among a virtuous people, but be a disaster among an unvirtuous people.

Consider, then, what happens if “we the people” no longer agree upon which universals bind us together? Or rather, what if we continue to use words like “rights,” “freedom,” and “equal-ity,” but mean very different things by them? Would Wilsey grant the right to an abortion? The freedom to define one’s own gender? Or marriage equality? I suspect not.

Or consider this supposedly uni-versal ideal: religious freedom. Early American documents grounded religious freedom in the freedom of conscience and not in a religious argument.

That way religious freedom re-mained non-sectarian and pub-licly accessible. Yet what hap-pens when people’s consciences disagree? Planned Parenthood

said that “men and women of good conscience can disagree” on abortion. Wouldn’t it seem, then, that we should protect abortion as a religious freedom? Pro-choicers surely fight for their cause with reli-gious zeal. Why? Because sexual freedom is religious freedom in a pagan culture. It’s an al-tar of worship, just as it was in the ancient world. American Christians overlook this.

Wilsey, relying on the assump-tions of philosophical liberal-ism, attempts to separate tra-ditional and civil religion. The problem is that our traditional religions will necessarily in-form our civil religion. The two cannot be separated. I cannot enter the public square on the basis of my civil religion but not my actual religion. No one—not the Christian, not the secular progressivist—sets aside his God or gods when entering the public square. It’s impossible to do so. We only think we have set them aside because our gods (by God’s common grace) so often agree. But raise an issue where our gods disagree, and you will quickly discover that those gods have never left our

side. Somebody’s god must win the decision. And so the cul-ture war—or really, religious war—erupts. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the public square is nothing more or less than a battleground of gods.

Wilsey’s book treats the cancer of closed exceptionalism with the medicine of open exception-alism. And he does this by dou-bling down on these gifts: rights, freedom, and equality. Those indeed are good gifts, but what happens when a nation begins to worship those gifts? When rights, freedom, and equality themselves become the idols? I know that’s not the purpose of his book, but when I’m stand-ing in the temple of expressive individualism, surrounded by worshipers of the self, I cannot help but wonder about offering a medicine that has become its own kind of cancer. In fact, could it be that the idolatry of rights, freedom, and equality are the very things that send an open exceptionalism careening toward old and new forms of closed exceptionalism?

Again, please don’t misunder-stand: my understanding of the New Covenant destroys any con-cept of a theocracy. I have very Christian and Baptist (sectari-an!) reasons to affirm religious freedom and the separation

of church and state—those American ideals. Still, we find ourselves in this strange mo-ment of American history where the American arguments for religious freedom just might be destroying religious free-dom, and the American argu-ments for rights and equality just might be destroying rights and equality. Again, I refer you to the warnings of Washington and Adams about an unvirtuous people.

Bottom line: American is a genuinely

excellent book. I strongly en-courage pastors and teachers of every kind to read it for the sake of the cancer he does treat. You need his historical analysis. My political theologian’s caveat is that our national problems may be deeper and more pro-found—more than he realizes.

Jonathon Leeman is the au-thor of Local Assembly as Embassy of Christ’s Rule and the editorial di-rector at 9Marks, an organization that produces church leadership resources in Washington, D.C. He is an elder at Capitol Hill Baptist Church.

(Endnotes)1 See “The American Jeremiad,” at 9marks.org.

THE QUARTERMASTER’S BOOKSHELF:

DEEP DIVES: ISRAEL & THE MIDDLE EAST

Inside the Middle East: Making Sense of the Most Dangerous and Complicated Region on Earth, Avi Melamed, 2016. Melamed has written a powerhouse analysis of the intricate complexities that make up the mod-ern Middle East. Grounded in over 30 years of interpreting, researching, analyzing, interviewing, and writing on Middle Eastern affairs, he expounds on the explosion of ISIS, the Arab Spring, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and other crises that have long bewildered the West. More importantly, he offers readers a roadmap for navigating and tackling the multifaceted concerns in the region.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn, Daniel Gordis, 2016. Providence co-publisher Robert Nicholson calls Israel possibly the best single-vol-ume history of the nation he’s ever read. Masterfully combining the miraculous and the tragic in the broad sweep of history, Gordis transcends surface stereotypes to expose the real-life experiences of human beings on the inside. With chapters on the significance of the Balfour Declaration, the Six-Day War, and the rise of Israel’s Political Right, this book provides a solid primer for those new to the history of Israel and offers deeper insight for those already familiar.

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation, Yossi Klein Halevi, 2014. This is undoubtedly one of the best works covering the history of Modern Israel over the past five decades. Halevi reflects upon the lives of seven young members from the 55th Paratroopers Reserve Brigade, the unit responsible for the reinstatement of Jewish autonomy in Jerusalem. Masterfully detailing the soldiers’ diverse political viewpoints, Halevi offers insight into the deep political and cultural divide within contemporary Israeli society. Like Dreamers is essential reading to understand domestic Israeli politics and the delicate balance within the Arab-Israeli conflict.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR FURTHER READING & A SURVEY OF NEWLY AVAILABLE BOOKS

Islamic Exceptionalism: How the Struggle over Islam is Reshaping the World, Shadi Hamid, 2016. This work is required reading for anyone trying to comprehend the complex, deep-seated, and fast-paced transformation rocking the Middle East. Featuring chapters ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood and its transformation to ISIS, to focusing on case-studies of Islam in various countries, Hamid writes with discernment, compassion, and a knack for the human story that does justice to the 2 billion people who claim fidelity to Islam as well as everyone else who is simply trying to figure out what the heck is going on.

Making David into Goliath, Joshua Muravchik, 2014. Muravchik has written an excellent source for anyone wanting a pro-Israel perspective on how the Jewish state went from the world’s darling to the world’s pariah. While detailing how national interests and intellectual fashion led to the general abandonment of Israel, Muravchik stoutly critiques Israel’s decriers even as he addresses how some of Israel’s actions have damaged the state’s international standing. A balanced, thoughtful, and fair defense of Israel and America’s indispensable relationship with her.

THE WAR IN THE PACIFIC

Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia, Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, 2005. This book examines Southeast Asia from 1941-45 through a lens of social, military, racial, and political factors as they play out against the backdrop of Japanese and British offensives and counteroffensives. The British may have won back what they lost at war’s start, but the Japanese victories had kindled nascent independence movements that soon ended the British Empire in the East. These stories are important parts of national identities in the region today.

American Caesar, William Manchester, 1978. Manchester’s history is still a classic, if a bit dated. Douglas MacArthur is critical to understanding modern Asia and America’s place in the Pacific today. This work thoroughly chronicles MacArthur’s unique and zealous life. Surveying the General’s brilliant military career by delib-erating his many victories and some failures on the battlefield during World War I, World War II, and the Korean War, this is among the most accessible one-volume biographies of the General available.

Last Stand on Bataan: The Defense of the Philippines, December 1941-May 1942, Christopher Kolakowski, 2016. Drawing on accounts from American and Filipino participants and archival sources, Kolakowski chronicles the critical months of the Pacific War, from the first airstrikes to the fall of Bataan and Corregidor. While offering deep-in-the-weeds pinpoint details, Last Stand makes extensive use of maps and easy writing to combine historical precision with great readability. This is the first book to seriously mine newly-available resources and accounts that were not accessible during the last campaign synthesis in the early 70s.

The Fall of the Philippines, Louis Morton, 1953. The US Army’s official history of the Philippines campaign, Morton’s work offers readers (amateur and specialist) a wide-ranging account of the three-month defense of Bataan, the siege of Corregidor, General MacArthur’s evacuation, and the surrender of 78,000 American and Allied troops, thus leading to the infamous death march. The first comprehensive look at the operations in the Philippines, this remains an essential resource for learning more about Bataan and Corregidor..

AMERICAN POWER

Conservative Internationalism, Henry Nau, 2013. Skillfully identify-ing and explaining the major US foreign policy traditions—nationalism, realism, liberal internationalism, and conservative internationalism—and discussing each tradition’s most noteworthy practitioners, Nau makes the case for why conser-vative internationalism is the most effective at promoting the national interest. Practiced by Jefferson, Polk, Truman, and Reagan, conservative internationalism (and ) offers a vision that will astound and challenge liberals, conservatives, and realists alike.

The Fifty Year Wound, Derek Leebaert, 2002. This essential history of the Cold War analyzes how much it cost the United States to wage and win it and brings the lessons learned to bear on the post-9/11 world. Leebaert adds layers of texture and background to the Cold War’s major milestones and decision points, giving those events new meaning and relevance in addition to offering fresh insights. He also delves deep into the key figures of the Cold War, sometimes challenging the views we have of Cold War icons, occasionally forcing us to reevaluate the roles played by lesser-known figures.

Daring Young Men, Richard Reeves, 2010. This history of the Berlin Airlift is loaded with anecdotes, first-hand accounts, and interviews that illustrate the her-oism and creativity of the men who manned the airlift, the risks taken by the men who planned it, and the vast differences between the West and its Cold War foes. At a time when America seems to doubt itself—and when Western values are under assault internally and externally—Reeves serves a reminder that we in the West have been through far tougher times against far more threatening foes, and yet have found a way to endure those times and defeat those foes while defending our values and expanding the community of peace-loving, free nations.

American Power & Liberal Order, Paul Miller, 2016. US military involve-ment in Iraq and Afghanistan has convinced many that the United States ought to pull back, reduce its role in international affairs, and promote restraint as the foun-dation for US grand strategy. Against this growing shift in ideology, Miller asserts that US security hinges upon vigorous, unremitting support of the international liberal order. Prudently guiding the reader through the strengths and weakness of liberal internationalism, realism, Christian realism, and conservative internation-alism, Miller settles on a hybrid theory to guide American power as it engages with and within the international liberal order.

In King Lear (lll, vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not

even given him a name: he is merely ‘‘First Servant’.

All the characters around him—Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund—have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The

servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go.

But he understands the present scene. ‘He sees an abomination’ (the blinding of old

Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him from behind. That is his whole part:

eight lines all told. But If it were real life and not a play, that is the

part it would be best to have acted.

C.S. Lewis “The World’s Last Night”

A feature article in a May 2017 issue of The Economist opens its discussion of the Six-Day War with a clever play on the Genesis

narrative:

In the beginning they destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground and knocked out the planes of Jordan, Iraq and Syria. That was Monday. Then they broke Egypt’s massive de-fences in Sinai. That was Tuesday. Next, they took the old city of Jerusalem and prayed. That was Wednesday.

The author, Anton La Guardia, ends the montage a few lines later: “And on the seventh day the soldiers of Israel rested.”

La Guardia’s historically-playful opening belies a complete indifference to actual history. Careful read-ers will note that he begins his story mid-sentence with no mention of the Arab aggression that preced-ed the war, even though it is only in the context of that aggression that the war could have happened or, in retrospect, can even make sense. To read La Guardia is to encounter Jews resolving to bomb other people’s planes and take other people’s cities for no other reason than to pray in Jerusalem. That the Six-Day War was a response to an abiding and active Arab plan to destroy the young Jewish state goes entirely unstated.

The pattern continues. In regard to Israel’s found-ing, La Guardia writes, “In the war of 1947-48, when Israel was established, Palestinians fled or were pushed out en masse. Hundreds of villages were destroyed.” Yet the most important fact about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—what Israelis call the War of Independence and Arabs call the , or ca-tastrophe—is that Arab armies attacked Israel upon Israel’s declaration of statehood, not the other way around. It was the Arab invasion, not any policy of Israel, that proximately caused the Palestinian refugee crisis.

Ahistorical analysis of any event tends to be inaccu-rate and dishonest. But it’s not unusual. In a June 2017 edition of , Palestinian activist Yousef Munayyer argues that a classic Six-Day War photograph of three Israeli soldiers standing by the Western Wall marks the moment of “the arrival of

Zionist vision…into new territory,” a vision that had already “denied equal treatment under the law to non-Jews, denied return to Palestinian refugees, and physically destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages that dotted the landscape” in the pre-1967 borders of Israel. With the Six-Day War, Munayyer avers, the Zionists simply pushed their colonial en-terprise deeper into historic Palestine.

What Munayyer doesn’t tell his readers is that Israel had no intention of capturing Jerusalem, much less the West Bank, and begged the king of Jordan to stay out of the fight. For reasons that are still un-clear, King Hussein began shelling the civilians of Jerusalem anyway. Israel responded, Israel won, and “the Zionist vision” reluctantly assumed the burden of ruling a local Arab population that had previously been occupied, and abandoned, by Jordan.

A world of difference a little context makes.

THE VIRUS OF AHISTORICISM would be dangerous enough if it were only confined to pundits. But the same disease has gripped the American church, especially those segments that are focused on the promotion of social justice.

Who has not encountered these zealous “ambassa-dors of reconciliation” who leap from issue to issue, injustice to injustice, driven by a Christ-like concern for the downtrodden but afflicted by a raging case of presentism? These peacemakers have little interest in how a given injustice came to be because the task of acquiring such knowledge would be so arduous as to impair their ability to parachute in and out of conflict zones with one-size-fits-all solutions. What matters is today: what I see, what I feel, what God is telling me. History is supplanted by sentiment, or—to hear them tell it—the urging of the Holy Spirit.

This approach was affirmed in a recent Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking seminar held at a popular US megachurch in Chicago. Teaching a rapt audi-ence how to facilitate reconciliation between Jews and Arabs, the speaker said, “Both sides have their own experiences of the same events. At some point it really doesn’t matter who started it if we want to play the role of the peacemaker.”

That Christians would approach the world this way is bizarre. Many writers over the centuries have pointed out that Christians, like their Jewish fore-bears, are perhaps the most historically-minded of all people. “Christianity…is essentially a historical religion,” wrote Marc Bloch in his seminal The

, “that is, whose prime dogmas are based on events.” The journey of Abraham out of Ur, the covenantal ceremony between God and Israel at Sinai, the crucifixion and resurrection of the Messiah—these are moments that took place in real time as witnessed by real people.

AD ORIENTEM - A WESTERN PERSPECTIVE ON THE MIDDLE EAST

ROBERT NICHOLSON

JUSTICE IN HISTORICAL

CONTEXT

For the Christian, transcendent meaning can only be found in an appreciation of history. “In contrast to ahistorical cultures,” Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in his book , “Biblical faith af-firms the potential meaning of life in history. It is in history, and not in a flight from history, that the divine power which bears and completes history is revealed.” God chose to embed us in time and gave us memory to make sense of it. Freedom, choice, causality, consequences—these are lessons endlessly reiterated throughout special and general revela-tion. “Don’t be deceived,” Paul told the believers in Galatia, “God is not mocked. For whatever a man sows he will also reap.” It is this principle of sowing and reaping—human choice subjugated to the judg-ment of God—that supplies meaning both within and beyond the framework of history.

In supplying meaning, history also supplies truth; for meaning and truth are one. Here we find the wisdom, or chokhmah, that was so eloquently praised by Solomon as the greatest treasure of all—so valuable that it even surpasses justice in the kingdom of God. “Justice is of a lower order than truth,” wrote John Lukacs in At the End of an Age, “and un-truth is lower than in-justice.” He continued:

At the same time there hangs over the world an enor-mous and spread-ing dark cloud cover

discrepancy, which is replete with the gravest of potential dangers, few are aware that the indiscriminate pursuit of justice may turn to insane lengths—indeed, that it may lay the world to waste.

The pursuit of justice is commanded by Scripture, but it cannot be based on a subjective approach to suffering. If it could, every case would be decided in favor of the one who weeps the loudest. True jus-tice begins with an objective analysis of the facts. No court can award judgment before hearing what actually happened.

Love of justice presumes a love of truth, for justice without truth is a contradiction in terms. And love, to the extent it matters in the procurement of justice, is only effective when purified by truth.

LA GUARDIA ENDS HIS PIECE with reference to the ambiguous legal and political status of the West

Bank and Gaza. “Fifty years after 1967, it has become too easy for Israel to forget that, just a short drive away, the grinding occupation of Palestinians has become all but permanent.” Here La Guardia touch-es on one of the most vexing issues of the conflict, subtly implying that Israel is to blame for the situ-ation and therefore bears the burden for fixing it.

Following the logic of his article, that seems right. Following the logic of history, that seems wrong. Following the logic of the peacemaking seminar, it doesn’t really matter: whoever seems to be suf-fering the most right now deserves compensation from the other.

Pursuing justice is noble, but this kind of indis-criminate pursuit may indeed lay the world to waste. Christians wading into the emotionally-com-

plex world of Middle Eastern culture and conflict cannot afford to be so unmoored from the past. They must maintain a firm grip on history or oth-erwise be swept away.

Knowing the past doesn’t mean wield-ing it like a weapon. Israel should work with Arab states and the Palestinian people to reach a settlement re-gardless of who started the Six-Day War—and Israel does. But medi-ation of that settlement

will be far more effective when mediators under-stand whom the parties are, how they got here, who has made offers for peace, and who has rejected them. Here that means recognizing the enormous lengths to which Israel has gone and the less-than-equal response from the other side.

CAUSALITY MATTERS. CONTEXT MATTTERS. Geo-graphy, culture, history—they all matter. The great-est flaw of US engagement in the Middle East is the lack of cultural and historical context. Our love of the universal blinds us in a region built on the particular.

Only when our policymakers—and, in the case of the church, our peacemakers—are informed by a deep understanding of history and causality will our policies, and our ministries, truly begin to bear the fruit of justice.

Robert Nicholson is the executive director of the Philos Project, and co-publisher of

THE SEVENTH DAY & COUNTING: THE ELUSIVE PEACE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR 18JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

SPRING 2017 | NUMBER 7

Army Chief Chaplain Rabbi Shlomo Goren, sur-rounded by Israeli Defense Force soldiers of the Paratroop Brigade, blows the shofar in front of the

Kotel is a segment of a much longer, ancient, lime-stone retaining wall that encased the hill known as

Palestine, the blowing of the shofar at the Kotel was

accordance to agreements with Muslim authorities,

FEATURES

PROVIDENCE

28 A POPE & A PRESIDENT: JOHN PAUL II, RONALD REAGAN, & THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

PAUL KENGOR

4 ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO HOURS & FIFTY YEARS: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL OREN

SP

RIN

G 2017 • N

UM

BER 7

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-TWO HOURS & FIFTY YEARS: A CONVERSATION WITH MICHAEL OREN

THE SEVENTH DAY & COUNTING: THE ELUSIVE PEACE OF THE SIX-DAY WAR

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

A POPE & A PRESIDENT: JOHN PAUL II, RONALD REAGAN, & THE COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM

PAUL KENGOR

ALSO: ROBERT KAUFMAN BACKS THOMISTIC OFFENSE • CHRISTOPHER KOLAKOWSKI REMEMBERS BATAAN • C.S. LEWIS CELEBRATES THE 1ST SERVANT • ALAN DOWD INTERROGATES AMERICAN

INTERVENTION • MARK TOOLEY ON AMERICAN INTERESTS • GENERAL MACARTHUR CONSTRUCTS A MAN • MARK COPPENGER OFFERS AIDE TO THOSE SNOWED-IN • GEORGE ELIOT LAUDS A SPOT OF

NATIVE LAND & ROBERT NICHOLSON PUTS SIX DAYS IN PROPER CONTEXT

“WE HAVE UNITED JERUSALEM, THE DIVIDED CAPITAL OF ISRAEL. WE HAVE RETURNED TO THE HOLIEST OF OUR

HOLY PLACES, NEVER TO PART FROM IT AGAIN.

To our Arab neighbors, we extend, also at this hour—and with added emphasis at this hour—our hand in peace. And to our

Christian and Muslim fellow citizens, we solemnly promise full religious freedom and rights. We did not come to Jerusalem

for the sake of other peoples’ holy places, nor to interfere with believers of other faiths, but in order to safeguard its entirety, and

to live here together with others, in unity.”

Moshe Dayan, Israeli Defense Ministerstatement at the Kotel, June 7, 1967

SPRING 1967/2017 • NUMBER 7

A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIANITY & AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY