Why the West So Often Fails at Geo-Politics
Some fifteen years ago I wrote that Western reliance on its lens of secular rationality was no longer adequate as a means to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It was becoming obvious — even then — that the future of the region would be one of wars increasingly defined by religious symbols: i.e. Al-Aqsa versus the Third Temple.
Since then, things have moved on: In Israel, national elections in November 2022 brought a new leadership committed to founding Israel on the ‘Land of (Greater) Israel’; displacing the non-Jewish population and implementing Halachic law.
The new government’s platform was an expression of an eschatological and messianic purpose with a teleology of pursuing a path toward messianic Redemption. It was not secular, nor couched in Enlightenment tones.
My point then — and still is — that Western secular mechanistic ways of thinking will misunderstand these fundamental shifts. The West insists to apply its westernised conceptual precepts to something — Messianism and the pursuit of Redemption — that lies outside the frame of today’s post-modern western consciousness. We understand well enough power politics, but eschatology largely is a closed-book to most western seculars.
The bottom line is that no purpose is served in trying to convince those absorbed by a messianic vision that their solution consists of a two-state political structure in historic Palestine. The former actually welcome Armageddon and the defeat it would portend for non-Jews.
Nor can this be viewed as a passing phase, or a whim. Messianism has been a prominent, yet fluctuating, impulse in Judaism since Sabbatai Zevi (1660s) and Jacob Franks (18th century). (Some of its thinking filtered into European notions too, during the later Enlightenment period).
Jewish historian and scholar, Gershom Scholem, correctly predicted that religious Zionism — which in recent decades has aligned with Likud and the settler movement — operates as a “militant,” “apocalyptic,” and “radical” messianic movement that tries to “force the end” by demanding that the state engage in, for example, massive territorial control — i.e. they demand territorial conquest for end-of-times reasons.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, western mechanistic rationality however, has proved to be as much at a loss in its grasp of what motivates Iran as it is in understanding today’s Israel. The literal approach simply amputates any awareness of Iran’s deeper resistance and revolutionary anima.
Rather, we choose to project onto Iran our image of the 19th century nation-state — the concept of a state ruled by top-down, centralised government as the dominant, sometimes autocratic, vehicle of rule over which wider polities once were governed through other principles of legitimacy.
In an interview in 1979 with Richard Falk, Ayatollah Khomeinei said plainly that the Revolution was a civilizational rather than a national triumph. He stressed that he felt that the basic community for all people in the Islamic world was civilizational and religious — and not national and territorial. Khomeini explained that territorial sovereign states built around national identity did not form a natural community in the Middle East in the way they did in Europe.
His insistent theme was to express the view that a government consistent with Islamic values could not be reliably established on democratic principles without it being subject to unelected religious guidance from top Islamic clerical scholars as the source of highest political authority.
The repression of Islam (forced secularisation) and the destruction of the Caliphate pursued by Mustafa Kamal in the early 1900s had led Seyyed Qutub to preach revolutionary vanguardism until his execution in 1966. Qutb’s writings, but more particularly his Social Justice in Islam — coinciding with mass protests throughout the Muslim world at the partition of Palestine in 1947 — laid the principal groundwork for the revolutionary thinking that would emerge in Iran.
For Iranians, this was a call to a return to an earlier way-of-being, with a storied lineage, reaching far back — one that reflects a more spiritual and inward transformation of the human: A world of hierarchical modes of consciousness and a disposition to fight against oppression, and to care for the dispossessed.
Thus, to view Iran through the nation-state lens is to misread Iran. The limits of mechanistic thinking make it impossible for outsiders to grasp or predict the way ahead for Iran. Today, young Iranians are returning enthusiastically to the ethos encompassed in the 1979 Revolution. There is a new energy apparent in Iran — and it is radical. And its reverberations are spreading well beyond the borders of Iran.
If we in the West want to hear and understand, then it would be wise to first hold up a mirror to ourselves. Are we truly so secular and rationally strategic as we believe?
US military historian Michael Vlahos, in a long essay — America is a Religion — points out that the US itself is far from unaffected by the currents of messianic idealism, millenarianism and Manichaeism — “This is an enduring theme whose deep current flows into Christianity”:
“Since its founding, the United States has pursued, with burning religious fervour, a higher calling to redeem humanity, punish the wicked, and christen a golden millennium on earth. America has steadfastly hewed to its unique vision of divine mission as “God’s New Israel”.
Of course, American ‘Civil Religion’ is inextricably linked with the Reformation, Calvinist Christianity, and Protestantism. “Although its scriptural reading became secular in the Progressive era, the American religion still remained tethered to its formative roots”, Vlahos argues.
“Hence, America is not only “messianic” in character — as in, “possessed by passion and zeal” — but manifests an implicitly biblical vision proclaiming its faith in the predestined nature of its passage. A “chosen nation” divinely elected to act in the name of Providence as the world’s Redeemer”.
However, as Vlahos tells it — like with the Zionists in Israel, in the last election — the US had its moment of metamorphosis: It was triggered by 60 years (1963-2023) of repeated and unrequited battlefield débâcles:
“Each episode [that was] waged to fulfil the prophecy of a global democratic millennium—and with each time, that dream slipped away”.
Consequently, writes Vlahos, American messianism slid into “a Manichaean caricature of itself – in which American “good news” has been replaced by the ever-present spectre of Evil and the threat of force. The holy words, Freedom and Democracy, whilst still chanted, have become a hollow mantra”.
“The American “gospel” no longer preaches about bringing redemption and expiation: it is now concerned with enforcement and punishment.
“The volte-face came in an instant, on 9/11 — and with Guantanamo.
“Almost overnight, America ditched “international rules” and “civilized norms”—and instead built out an archipelago of torture and arbitrary incarceration, without oversight or appeal”.
Today, the US is experiencing deep polarisation at home, whilst still pursuing conflicts overseas whose aims US leaders try to connect to the redemptive narratives coined for service in the domestic struggle (i.e. validating the ‘Peace through Strength‘ meme) via the war on Iran. The US establishment thus links ‘victory’ in a foreign war as the means to restore its political standing domestically and internationally. Michael Vlahos calls this duality “a mutually destructive dynamic”.
It virtually assures that Washington will not be able to think straight about Iran, and will opt for the wrong tactics.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/the-mechanistic-fallacy-why-the-west