I’ve been reading Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order, and it is a very informative book about grand strategic world history as seen through the eyes of one of the global elite’s better-known servitors. It’s interesting how regardless of whether one looks at the world through the 4GW lens or through the NWO lens, the same diagnosis appears: the modern Westphalian state is endangered:
German unification altered the equilibrium of Europe because no constitutional arrangement could change the reality that Germany alone was again the strongest European state. The single currency produced a degree of unity that had not been seen in Europe since the Holy Roman Empire. Would the EU achieve the global role its charter proclaimed, or would it, like Charles V’s empire, prove incapable of holding itself together?
The new structure represented in some sense a renunciation of Westphalia. Yet the EU can also be interpreted as Europe’s return to the Westphalian international state system that it created, spread across the globe, defended, and exemplified through much of the modern age—this time as a regional, not a national, power, as a new unit in a now global version of the Westphalian system. The outcome has combined aspects of both the national and the regional approaches without, as yet, securing the full benefits of either.
He also, in passing, explains something that I mentioned yesterday, which is how the West planted the seeds for the third great wave of Islamic expansion that we now know as ISIS and the global jihad.
In the spring of 1947, Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian watchmaker, schoolteacher, and widely read self-taught religious activist, addressed a critique of Egyptian institutions to Egypt’s King Farouk titled “Toward the Light.” It offered an Islamic alternative to the secular national state. In studiedly polite yet sweeping language, al-Banna outlined the principles and aspirations of the Egyptian Society of Muslim Brothers (known colloquially as the Muslim Brotherhood), the organization he had founded in 1928 to combat what he saw as the degrading effects of foreign influence and secular ways of life….
The West, al-Banna asserted, “which was brilliant by virtue of its scientific perfection for a long time … is now bankrupt and in decline. Its foundations are crumbling, and its institutions and guiding principles are falling apart.” The Western powers had lost control of their own world order: “Their congresses are failures, their treaties are broken, and their covenants torn to pieces.” The League of Nations, intended to keep the peace, was “a phantasm.” Though he did not use the terms, al-Banna was arguing that the Westphalian world order had lost both its legitimacy and its power. And he was explicitly announcing that the opportunity to create a new world order based on Islam had arrived. “The Islamic way has been tried before,” he argued, and “history has testified as to its soundness.” If a society were to dedicate itself to a “complete and all-encompassing” course of restoring the original principles of Islam and building the social order the Quran prescribes, the “Islamic nation in its entirety”—that is, all Muslims globally—“will support us”; “Arab unity” and eventually “Islamic unity” would result.
How would a restored Islamic world order relate to the modern international system, built around states? A true Muslim’s loyalty, al-Banna argued, was to multiple, overlapping spheres, at the apex of which stood a unified Islamic system whose purview would eventually embrace the entire world. His homeland was first a “particular country”; “then it extends to the other Islamic countries, for all of them are a fatherland and an abode for the Muslim”; then it proceeds to an “Islamic Empire” on the model of that erected by the pious ancestors, for “the Muslim will be asked before God” what he had done “to restore it.” The final circle was global: “Then the fatherland of the Muslim expands to encompass the entire world.
Through its attempts to impose a Westphalian order on the dar al-Islam and its development of the concept of world revolution, the secular West inadvertently created a rival it cannot possibly defeat on its own. The secular West’s advantages – science and technology – are readily utilized by the jihad, while its weaknesses of demoralization, apathy, multiculturalism, and demographic decline are both readily exploited and easily avoided.
To paraphrase the immortal words of LTC Tom Kratman, if you’re going to wage a religious war, you damn well better bring a religion. And as one reader noted: “In 100 years, either Norway will be an Islamic republic or there will be statues of Anders Breivik in every Norwegian town.”