Against isolation

The old order changeth, yielding place to new: as Fidel Castro’s mortality marks the fall of the last Cold War colossus, so a new global ideological struggle hardens in our midst. The conflict in the Middle East is but one symptom of this battle between the West and militant Islam. To extract this particular crisis from its broader context and see it as merely another chapter in the long battle between Jew and Arab — as many do — is a grievous error, and one that could have terrible consequences far beyond the Middle East.

Rarely has the word ‘renaissance’ been used as euphemistically as it was by Tony Blair in his speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on Tuesday. In calling for ‘a complete renaissance of our strategy to defeat those that threaten us’, the Prime Minister was making public the exasperation he has long felt in private about the incoherence of the argument made by the West in response to 9/11 and its aftermath. He was not, as has been widely reported, calling for a new strategy, but demanding that the existing strategy be articulated clearly and championed fearlessly. He was challenging those — especially in America — who believe that regime change achieved by military force automatically leads to the flowering of Jeffersonian democracy (Iraq has tested that theory to destruction). But his speech was also a riposte to those who insist, with an air of intellectual self-congratulation, that ‘there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that 11 September predated either. The West didn’t attack this movement. We were attacked.’