Author: Martin Kramer

Edward Said and Middle Eastern studies in America

On By Martin Kramer

On May 11, 2017, the Persian intellectual journal Ghalamro interviewed me about the state of Middle Eastern studies. A Persian translation appeared in the journal. Below is an edited version of the original English transcript. Posted retroactively on Sandbox.

Interviewer: Is it correct to say that Edward Said was the first one who raised the issue of politics in Middle Eastern studies by his book Orientalism, arguing that behind this kind of study, there is politics leading in a specific direction?

Kramer: Edward Said was not the first one to do it. He published Orientalism in 1978, but already from the late ’60s and into the early ’70s, there was criticism of Middle Eastern studies coming from a Marxist point of departure. The Egyptian Anouar Abdel-Malek wrote a very influential piece critical of Orientalism, to which some Orientalists responded at the time. And there was a group called MERIP [Middle East Research and Information Project] which had a strong left orientation, and in the early ’70s published attacks on some of the leading scholars, accusing them of complicity with the Pentagon and so forth.

Said’s critique came from a different corner. It wasn’t a Marxist critique; one might say it was a humanist critique, and while it won sympathy on the left, I think its basic premises were rather different. Nevertheless, Said had much more of an effect than the left-Marxist critics precisely because he came from the very center of the academy and from the humanist rather than the Marxist tradition. So very soon people forgot the leftist criticism, and the Saidian critique became the dominant one.

Interviewer: And several decades after the publication of Orientalism, what can you say about the impact of Orientalism on Middle Eastern studies?

Kramer: It had a very profound impact because it came at a particular moment in the history of the academy. There was a crisis of self-confidence in Middle Eastern studies because scholars failed to anticipate the rise of the Palestinian movement, of which Said was an avatar, and they failed to see the rise of the Islamic movement as well. Many in Middle Eastern studies were probing their own premises—why did we not anticipate, why could we not predict? 

So they were vulnerable and incapable of mounting a spirited defense. Said entered, and delegitimated the mandarins, the leading figures in the field, including my teacher Bernard Lewis.

This also coincided with a very particular moment in institutional Middle Eastern studies. There had been larger and larger numbers of Middle Easterners coming to do their work in the field. There were not a lot of positions open at the time, it was a period of retrenchment in the academy, and so there was a very acute struggle over each academic appointment. Said’s book was a kind of manifesto for affirmative action for Muslims and Arabs, because once Orientalism was defined as a kind of racism, you wanted to be sure when you made an appointment that you didn’t select someone who was tainted with it. 

And if Said was right that no Westerner could escape the influence, the gravitational force, of Orientalism, then the way to be sure that you didn’t appoint someone who might be a latent Orientalist, a latent racist, was to appoint a Muslim or an Arab.

Orientalism became a kind of manifesto on which many built their careers; it opened up entry-level positions to Muslims and Arabs. They owed their livelihoods to Edward Said, and they formed a huge constituency which has carried forth his critique of Middle Eastern studies and institutionalized it. Just as there was an old establishment, today there is a newer establishment, and the present-day establishment is the one which gained entry through the work of Edward Said.

Interviewer: Was impact of Said on Middle Eastern studies departments in the United States different from his impact on other departments?

Kramer: Said’s book had an impact in several fields. It was considered the founding text of postcolonial studies, and it had some broader impact in cultural studies. It had a later effect on Middle Eastern studies because there was initial resistance to it and it took some time for the battle to be decided. It was twenty years after publication of the book, in 1998, when Edward Said appeared at the Middle East Studies Association to celebrate the anniversary of publication. There he was finally acclaimed as having won the debate. 

But it took a while. In fact, in 1986, there was an actual debate between Bernard Lewis and Edward Said at the Middle East Studies Association. So it took time for Said to achieve his decisive victory in Middle Eastern studies.

We’re now many years later and Said’s influence in other disciplines has waned. Elsewhere, Said’s portrayal of the interaction of East and West is seen as too black-and-white. Today, the emphasis is on hybridity. But in Middle Eastern studies, Said’s influence has persisted because it still fulfills that same function that I mentioned earlier: it encourages preferential treatment for certain practitioners over others.

Interviewer: How do we evaluate this impact? Was it good or was it bad? What was missed or what was uncovered?

Kramer: Oh, there’s no question that the net effect was negative. It’s always important for a discipline or a field to revisit its premises, but I think that the only valid criticism of what was called Orientalism in the old tradition could have come from within the Orientalist tradition itself, not from the outside. 

For all its limitations, the Orientalist tradition did put the study of Islam and the study of the Middle East on a scientific footing. It was that scholarly tradition which was responsible for banishing medieval prejudices and false assumptions, fake knowledge, and replacing it with a more accurate representation based on a careful reading of the Islamic texts. It is to Orientalism that we owe the assembly and translation of the core texts of Islamic civilization, and it is to its careful philological methods that we owe the critical readings of these texts.

The criticism of Orientalism threw out the good with the bad. It presumed that the tradition was one of prejudice and bias against Islam, when in fact it was precisely the Orientalist tradition which broke the medieval prejudice and bias against Islam. That’s not to say that there weren’t individual scholars with their own prejudices. Some of them came from the missionary tradition, for example, and they may not have made the full transition to scholarly research. But on the whole, it was a tradition which was making progress, just as archaeology, philology, and any other science were making progress. This progress was arrested by the Saidian revolution, which elevated politics above competency. Your ability to interpret a text and its context was less important than your fealty to a certain set of political convictions.

Interviewer: When you look at Middle Eastern studies in the United States since the publication of Orientalism, what are the main turning points in its development?

Kramer: In its initial phase (and I’m going back here to the early twentieth century), Middle Eastern studies were driven to some extent by missionaries or children of missionaries. Some were associated with the American University of Beirut. The department from which I graduated, Near Eastern Studies at Princeton, had a very close association with this tradition.

Then when you get to the ’40s and into the ’50s, you have the influx of scholars from Europe. Some of them were Jews who were fleeing from Nazi persecution, others were not Jews but refugees from tyranny like Gustave von Grunebaum. And they were some of the founders of major Middle East centers—for example, von Grunebaum, first at the University of Chicago and then at UCLA. Then you also had people who came from the Middle East. Princeton was much influenced by Phillip Hitti, and Farhat Ziadeh came to the University of Washington. So you had the great minds of Europe and the wise men from the East. These were the founding fathers of the field.

When you get into the ’60s and ’70s, you have the rise of American-born and trained social scientists in Middle Eastern studies. They did not come from the Orientalist tradition, they came from within the disciplines. Leonard Binder was a good example of this trend in the field. It was very American, and it was very oriented toward modernization theory. Edward Said made his appearance toward the end of that phase. 

Since then, you’ve had the present phase, which is third-worldist, anti-Orientalist, left-oriented, characterized by the marked presence of people from the region in leading positions. So that’s where we stand now, and really the question is whether we’re on the verge of another shift. 

9/11 represented a kind of watershed. 9/11 was as much a shock to the new establishment as Edward Said was a shock to the old establishment, because Said had a blind spot when it came to Islam and Islamic movements. Bernard Lewis saw them coming. In 1976, he published a very prescient article entitled “The Return of Islam.” Edward Said did not see them. He saw the Palestinian revolution, and the Palestinian revolution caught many people by surprise, but he didn’t see the Iranian revolution coming.

He wrote a book after Orientalism called Covering Islam. It was an attempt to cover his own failure to anticipate the new salience of Islam. It’s not surprising that someone who was himself not a Muslim, was strongly secular, and was living in Morningside Heights in Upper Manhattan, wouldn’t have seen this. Someone who had a disdain for the the study of Islamic texts and was unfamiliar with them would not have seen Khomeinion the horizon. That’s always been the weak spot of the Saidian critique.

After 9/11, Said himself retreated from the media because he had no answers. He said something like: “Who am I to pronounce on the motives of these people?” Well, Bernard Lewis did pronounce on their motives, and he became a best-selling author twice in the aftermath of 9/11. 

So I think that there’s a sense that this newer establishment is under siege, and its premises have now been called into question, just as Said and followers had called into question the premises of the previous generation.

Today we have many Americans who have been out to the Middle East in far greater numbers than ever before, several million in various capacities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. They represent, perhaps, the next phase, that is, one of direct experience. Those people are beginning to make their way to academic careers, and I think that will be a major challenge to the Saidian aristocracy in Middle Eastern studies.

Interviewer: And what could be the new premises for this kind of approach?

Kramer: The new premises would first of all give religion its due place—not as simply an effect of some other cause, but as a prime mover in its own right. Not exclusively so, but it can no longer be seen as a subordinate element or a mere trace of something deeper. 

There will be a much greater awareness of the subnational identities in the Middle East. Said emphasized the Palestinians, others emphasized the nation-state, but the Palestinians and the nation-state in the Middle East are in disarray. So I think there’s more interest in sects and tribes, and you can talk about these things today, unlike in the past. Before, it was deemed to be a colonialist agenda. Well, a lot of Americans have been out to the Middle East and back, and they don’t see tribes as part of a colonialist agenda, but as realities. So there will emerge a more empirically-based and less ideological view of the region.

It’s not totally unconnected to the expanded role of American power in this part of the world. But just because knowledge is acquired through the exercise of power doesn’t make it invalid. Even if you think that the United States is a thief in the night, the thief still has to know which windows can be opened easily and where the safe is hidden in the house. That’s actual knowledge, and it can’t be so readily dismissed. 

So, yes, there’s an association between this new trend and the exercise of American power over the past fifteen years in the Middle East, but that doesn’t invalidate the knowledge; in fact, to a considerable extent, it gives it an empirical base.

Interviewer: So can we say that your book Ivory Towers on Sand was an effort to legitimize such knowledge anew?

Kramer: You can never go back. I think that even if there had been no book such as Orientalism, there would have been a revision. I think that there would have been a greater interest in social movements, there would have been an understanding of the limitations of modernization theory. Right through the ’70s, it was generally assumed by leading scholars that the Middle East was on the same track to modernization as parts of East Asia, and that it was simply a matter of time. Now we know, of course, that that did not happen. 

I think there would have been a crisis of Middle Eastern studies one way or another, but it would have produced a new synthesis, which would have been much superior to the ideological and the highly politicized kind of Middle Eastern studies that emerged from the Saidian revolution.

My purpose was not to legitimize things which had their day; the aim of my book was just to create more space. One of things I noticed among the acolytes of Edward Said was a high degree of intolerance for views other than their own. They were almost militant in closing out other approaches and assuring that only their associates were appointed to academic positions, creating a kind of an academic monolith. It’s happened in other areas in the humanities; Middle Eastern studies are not unique in that respect. So the purpose of my book was just to open some space for other views. 

I might have had a small effect there. The larger effect was the events that happened in the Middle East. I’m not a young student anymore, but I’m not too old that I might not hope to see further change before I retire.

Interviewer: Please give us your assessment of the impact of your book in different academic circles in the United States.

Kramer: The book received a lot of attention at the time it was published because it appeared six weeks after 9/11, and people were asking, what did we not see and why did we not see it? When I wrote the book, I thought the only people interested in it would be in Middle Eastern studies. When you write a book, you always think of your reader looking over your shoulder. The reader looking over my shoulder was someone in the field. 

But because of 9/11 many, many other people read the book. Journalists read it, policy people read it, other academics outside of Middle Eastern studies read it, college presidents, university presidents, and provosts read it. There was an article in the New York Times about it, which gave it a lot of momentum, and in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It was much discussed in the journals, including two critical reviews in Foreign Affairs. It created a stir because the timing was right.

What was the actual effect it had? Not surprisingly, those I criticized circled the wagons, and did everything to try to discredit me. They said the publisher was The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and “they obviously have an agenda.” “Martin Kramer is a student of Bernard Lewis, he obviously is taking the Saidian critique personally.” 

But it wasn’t enough to stop the discussion. I remember being told by Larry Summers, who was at the time president of Harvard, that after he received a copy of the book, he took it to a meeting with the Middle East faculty, held it up and said, “Is any of this true?” They were not pleased. They had to defend themselves. It made many university presidents and provosts say to themselves, “You know, I’ve got one of these programs or departments in my university, and I haven’t been paying attention. Maybe I should.” So it brought more scrutiny. 

The then-president of Brandeis, Jehuda Reinharz, ordered a carton of the books and used them to mobilize support for a new alternative Middle East center which was founded shortly thereafter. I spoke at the inauguration.

Now, it would be presumptuous of me to say that this made for some huge change in Middle Eastern studies. And yet, I think that it did open, in a few places, some space for people to feel a little bit more confident in asking: What did we not see that manifested itself on 9/11? What did we not see that has manifested itself in the Iranian revolution? And it made a little bit of space for bringing religion back in. People went back and maybe read Bernard Lewis a little more carefully and Edward Said a little more critically.

Fifteen years on, it would be useful for someone else younger than I am to go back and do this again, repeat the exercise, because there were other things which since then have surprised us—the Arab Spring, most notably. We need an account of what went wrong in academe’s understanding of the Arab Spring, for which there was a huge amount of enthusiasm and an overestimation of its potential for change. So there’s more to be done, and I hope to have successors.

America: Great again in the Middle East?

On By Martin Kramer

Remarks delivered at a conference entitled “A New Era? Trump and the Middle East,” convened in memory of Barry Rubin at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya, Israel on March 5, 2017. 

This past year, on more than one occasion, I’ve asked myself what would Barry Rubin have to say about the election of Donald Trump. And it says something about Barry’s complexity as an observer of politics, that I can’t answer that question with any confidence.

Barry’s view of Barack Obama was no secret, of course, and he leveled a withering critique of Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state. But the same can be said of many people who didn’t board the Trump train. When Barry was first diagnosed with cancer, in mid-2012, he wrote these words:

I don’t expect to live to see utopia realized. But it would be nice to live long enough to see America and the world pass out from this current dreadful era, to see some restoration of sanity and reality, some kind of victory for goodness, some kind of restoration of intellectual standards, and a higher level of justice.

Would Barry have regarded the elevation of Donald Trump as a restoration of sanity and reality, a victory of goodness, a restoration of intellectual standards, and a higher level of justice? We just don’t know. But I think it’s safe to say this one thing: Barry wouldn’t have been surprised.

Barry of course lived in Israel, but even in the short time he spent each year in the United States, he made sure not to spend all of it in the Washington bubble. As a Civil War buff, Barry would go off annually to battle reenactments. There he would live for several days in tents with small contractors, office and construction workers, mechanics—and there he rediscovered the spirit of America that he so admired. There I’m certain he encountered many people who would vote later for Donald Trump.

I can’t say whether Barry would have agreed with them, or argued with them. But he would have heard them, understood them, and registered the changes that others missed completely. He did the same in analyzing the Middle East: he listened to people who told him things that contradicted conventional wisdom, and that’s why he never fell prey to conventional wisdom. He wasn’t just a contrarian by disposition. He based himself on evidence.

So what can we say now of the evidence about the Trump administration and the Middle East? Let me begin with two methodological caveats. The usual way to gauge the likely trajectory of a new administration is to parse the words of the president, and look closely at his appointments to high office. At no time in the modern history of the presidency have these two methods been less effective.

First, the words of the president. Usually when a president addresses an issue, even off the cuff, this is preceded by some sort of process. Presidents, and even candidates for president, understand that what they say always has ramifications, and so they learn to weigh their words. Certainly when Trump speaks prepared remarks, as he did the other evening before Congress, these have been very carefully weighed.

But there’s a vast corpus of statements and tweets by Trump that seem to reflect very little process. These aren’t just off the cuff; they’re from the hip. And it’s turned out to be a methodological error to parse them too closely. During the campaign, it was famously said of Trump that the press took him literally, but not seriously; his supporters took him seriously, but not literally. His supporters were right: it turns out that much of what he says is really only a first draft, almost certain to be revised. Banning all Muslims from entering the U.S., taking Iraq’s oil, jettisoning NATO, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, passing on the two-state solution: all of these statements attracted huge headlines when they were made. But Trump or one of his appointees eventually walked all of them back, at least in part. He didn’t mean it, or he didn’t mean it that way, and so on. Pundits who raced to parse Trump’s initial statements had their chains yanked.

So we’re in a new era, where the president of the United States launches his trial balloons not to a few advisers in the West Wing but to millions of Twitter followers. The proper method, when Trump speaks, isn’t to treat his words like a considered statement of policy intent. No, it’s to register what Trump says, and then wait for the other shoes to drop. They always do.

And that’s why these statements give us very few pointers about what Trump intends to do in the Middle East. Is he really going to attempt to eradicate ISIS from the earth, as he said in his inaugural address? Is he really going to walk back the “bad deal” with Iran? Is he really going to give Israel lots of slack? Who knows?

The second method is to watch those appointments to high office. Traditionally, political appointments are read as indicators of a policy direction. The problem, in Trump’s case, is that because he ran as an insurgent even in his own party, he entered office without much of a national security brain trust. So far, he’s shown no inclination to appoint the fence-sitters or never-Trumpers in the Republican national security establishment. Instead he’s pulled in people who have backgrounds in business or military strategy. Fine people they may be, but they seem to have very little personal connection to the president, and have little or no record in foreign policy decision-making.

So it’s very hard, based on these appointments, to determine what the Middle East policy of this administration will be. The one man who did articulate some sort of vision, Michael Flynn, ended up serving the shortest term of any National Security Adviser in American history. I don’t doubt that Secretary of State Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Mattis, and National Security Adviser McMaster all have perspectives on policy. But I don’t see any point in ploughing through their past statements and records for clues about the future. They didn’t walk the long walk with Trump; others did. We know little to nothing about the nature of their interaction with Trump. It’s telling, too, that the White House has been blocking the appointments that Tillerson and Mattis would like to make at State and Defense. My bet is that we’ll see more personnel turnover in this administration than is usual. “You’re fired” may become a persistent refrain. Along with “I resign.”

That said, I’m going to venture a few speculations, based not on the usual method of reading tea leaves, but on a reading of Trump’s overarching theme about America. And there is a theme. I’m going to argue that in this view, what’s of paramount importance is that America be great again—but that trying to be great again in the Middle East cuts against that objective. In the Trumpian vision, the Middle East is a place where American treasure is forfeited for nothing, and at a huge opportunity cost.

And so anyone who thinks a Trump administration is going to come riding back into the Middle East to restore American primacy is going to be disappointed. Trump understands something Obama understood: the Middle East has exhausted the patience of Americans. What Southeast Asia was to an earlier generation, the Middle East is to this one. Obama took one step back; Trump is likely to take the other.

Let me begin with a quote from Trump’s address to Congress. As we’ll see, it’s not new, and it’s not a one-off statement that he’s walked back; it’s a recurring motif.

America has spent approximately $6 trillion dollars in the Middle East, all this while our infrastructure at home is crumbling. With this $6 trillion dollars we could have rebuilt our country— twice. And maybe even three times if we had people who had the ability to negotiate.

Here are some earlier variations on the theme. Trump, in remarks to state governors the week before last:

If you think about it, we’re less than nowhere. The Middle East is far worse than it was 16, 17 years ago. There’s not even a contest. So we’ve spent $6 trillion. We have a hornet’s nest. It’s a mess like you’ve never seen before. We’re nowhere…. We spend $6 trillion in the Middle East and we have potholes all over our highways and our roads.

Here he is, in remarks to airline executives at the beginning of February:

We’ve spent $6 trillion—think of it—as of about two months ago, $6 trillion in the Middle East. We’ve got nothing. We’ve got nothing. We never even kept just even a little tiny oil well. Not one little one. I said, keep the oil. But we’ve spent right now $6 trillion in the Middle East. We have nothing. And we have an obsolete plane system, we have obsolete airports, we have obsolete trains.

(By the way, the “keep the oil” part of this was walked back by General Mattis on a visit to Baghdad, where he reassured Iraqi leaders that Trump didn’t mean it.)

Now the fact-checkers contest the $6 trillion figure, but that’s beside the point. It signifies what the Middle East represents to Donald Trump: a sinkhole. Notice that he never talks about the lives lost. Trump is careful not to suggest that American lives were wasted. But the implicit message is that if those trillions of dollars were wasted, so too were those thousands of lives.

And if you take off partisan spectacles, this isn’t really that far from Obama’s take, as told to Jeffrey Goldberg in that Atlantic interview. You’ll remember that Obama told Goldberg that the United States can’t fix the Middle East, shouldn’t attempt to govern it, and will have to wait a generation until the region’s conflicts burn themselves out.

Ah, but you say, Trump will be more muscular. Let’s look at that more closely. There’s the promise of a military buildup, but this shouldn’t be misunderstood. The $50-billion plus addition to the Pentagon budget isn’t designed to position America to relaunch in the Middle East. It’s another stimulus program. Keeping the shipyards and aircraft manufacturers and others busy employs countless Americans. In 2001, the Pentagon’s budget was about $290 billion. Today it’s just over $600 billion, twice as large, and larger than the next seven countries combined. America’s capabilities haven’t dwindled. But another $50 billion is a lot of middle class jobs.

Yes, you can buy more hardware for that money, but that’s not going to make it more likely that the United States will put more boots on the ground in the Middle East. In any case, most of this hardware won’t be ready until Trump leaves the White House.

And then there’s the “eradication” of ISIS, promised in Trump’s inaugural address. In the campaign, Trump said he had an “extremely tough” plan, details of which he couldn’t reveal, but that would totally “change the playbook.” Trump claimed to know more about ISIS than the generals, and that he would “bomb the shit out of them.” In fact, Trump had no such plan, so after his inauguration he ordered the Pentagon to come up with one. Last week they presented a preliminary options paper, which includes various actions designed to crush ISIS in Syria within ten months.

Given Trump’s past (and rather shaky) claim that he opposed the Iraq war, one can be sure this isn’t going to be a grand plan of resetting the Middle East, post-ISIS. U.S. forces will assist in driving ISIS from western Mosul and Raqqa, basically by bombing and shelling the shit out of them. What the plan won’t include is any deeper commitment of resources to state-building in northern Syria. It’ll be left to the Russians, the Turks, the Kurds, and the Iranians to sort it all out, once the United States declares “mission accomplished.” ISIS might be out of the game, but the United States won’t be in it.

Then there’s the repeated refrain, that America is at war with “radical Islamic terrorism.” This is wording that Obama scrupulously avoided, but that Trump has trumpeted, as did his deposed adviser General Flynn. General McMaster was quoted as having described this terminology as unhelpful, but Trump repeated it the other day in his speech before Congress. So much for McMaster’s influence.

I actually think Trump is right to call this spade a spade. But all those people who are worried or excited that he’s going to launch a counter-jihad miss the point. The opposite is the case. The terminology won’t be used to justify all kinds of counter-jihadist operations around the globe. Trump knows perfectly well that the risk-reward calculation here is tricky, as his Yemen operation proved. There he fobbed off responsibility for the mistakes on “the generals,” but that’s not something the commander-in-chief can afford to do on a regular basis.

The purpose of the talk about “radical Islamic terrorism” is to justify defensive, not offensive action. It’s meant to justify the travel ban he attempted, and the new one he’s said is in the works. Obama managed to keep the homeland safe by a combination of offensive and defensive measures: drone attacks and a program for “countering extremism” and keeping Guantanamo open. Trump seems to be shifting the balance to defensive measures—and if this is to work alone, they have to be much more stringent. Whether the U.S. courts will allow this, we’ll have to see.

Finally, there is what Trump has called the “bad deal” with Iran. All of us wish we knew what that meant in practice. What I think it doesn’t mean is a dramatic escalation with Iran. The “bad deal” may be bad, but it doesn’t expire until Trump is out of office even in the maximum scenario of two terms. It’s not his problem unless he makes it his, and this he’s unlikely to do. Yes, stringent enforcement of the deal; yes, personal sanctions against assorted nasty Iranians, why not? But there’s no appetite for the costs of rolling back Iran in the Middle East. General Flynn came the closest to wanting to do this, and he’s gone.

So as you can see, I don’t think Donald Trump much cares if America becomes great again in the Middle East. Indeed, in his view, it was America’s over-involvement in the Middle East that contributed massively to its loss of greatness. America can’t get back those trillions wasted. But it’s not going to waste trillions more, or even the tens of billions it spends in the region on foreign aid. Obama began America’s retreat from the Middle East; Trump will continue it. The tune is different, but the lyrics are the same: the Middle East is bad for America’s health.

If you want a perfect statement of this view, I recommend to you the article in the new magazine, American Affairs, by Michael Anton, who’s now head of strategic communications at the National Security Council. I know Michael Anton; we worked together for some months on the foreign policy team of the Giuliani presidential campaign in 2008. He’s a formidable intellect. A critic has labelled him Trump’s Ben Rhodes, which I suppose is meant as a compliment. His article, written before he took his job, is entitled “America and the Liberal International Order.”

I just want to quote one passage. Anton points out that when the U.S. forged the liberal international order between 1945 and 1950,

it was never intended to encompass the globe. It was built to protect the interests of America and its non-Communist friends in Europe and Asia and keep Communism out of the Western Hemisphere. The Middle East was added later, in stages, as Anglo-French hegemony collapsed after Suez, as the original Western-friendly Arab kings fell, and as the West (and the United States especially) became net oil importers. The attempt, beginning in 1991-92, to extend that order over the whole world was a case of American eyes being much bigger than our stomachs (or teeth), a confusion of ideology and interests. In fact, however, such expansion was never necessary to core American interests—peace, prosperity, prestige.

Anton’s point is that America doesn’t need to be in the Middle East to defend its core interests. It’s past time to back out. A critic has chided Anton, saying that in any case, the United States still needs a policy toward the Middle East, something the administration seems to lack. And I’m sure that the United States will eventually have a policy toward the region. But so do Britain, Russia, France, and China. Pursuit of a policy isn’t the same as pursuit of primacy, and if Anton’s piece is anything to go by, America isn’t prepared to pay the ever-escalating price of primacy in the Middle East, if it can protect its minimal interests on the cheap.

I haven’t touched on Israel here, because I’m to be followed by Caroline Glick, and that’s her topic. I’d only say this. Yes, there may be opportunities here. The Trump administration isn’t going to trash America’s allies the way Obama did. But American politics are now an unmapped minefield, and the president himself could step on a mine and blow up. It’s not so far-fetched, especially around Russia, hacks, leaks, and tax returns. There’s a heightened instability in the American system, so Israel has to be on its guard and continue to maintain and build alliances across the board.

Even more significant, America is more divided than at any time since the Vietnam war, and that’s not good for us. It weakens the president’s ability to deliver on promises that we take literally. Just think back to Lyndon Johnson, Vietnam, and the 1967 war. Johnson, wrote Abba Eban later, was “paralyzed” by the polarization of America, unable or unwilling to keep promises made to Israel. Whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, he presides over a deeply polarized nation, a nation weary of keeping commitments to foreign nations, a people turning inwards to address its own serious, cumulative deficits. And whatever one thinks of Donald Trump, this is a president operating on the very edge of legitimacy, which he seems to know all too well, to judge from the fights he’s picked since his election.

A deeply divided America isn’t good for Israel, if a crisis emerges from somewhere or nowhere, and requires that the president act very presidential and take risks abroad. It’s never been wise to bet against the United States. I wouldn’t do it now. But for Israel, and some of our neighbors, I submit that now is the moment to hedge our bets. Or, to put it another way, Israel first.

The Jewish ban (Arab version)

On By Martin Kramer

British passportAs I followed the fierce debate over President Trump’s executive order, denounced by its opponents as a “Muslim ban,” my thoughts turned the Jewish ban that changed the career of my mentor, Bernard Lewis.

Lewis, the great historian of the Middle East who last May turned 100, travelled extensively in Arab countries in the late 1930s and 1940s. Born in Britain to British-born parents, he traversed French-ruled Syria for his doctoral work, and then served in the British army in Arab lands during the Second World War. In 1949, at the age of 33, he was already a highly-regarded academic authority on medieval Islam and a full professor at the University of London. The university gave him a year of study leave to travel in the Middle East. But the Arab reaction to the creation of Israel derailed his research plans. Lewis explained what happened in an article published in 2006:

Virtually all the Arab governments announced that they would not give visas to Jews of any nationality. This was not furtive—it was public, proclaimed on the visa forms and in the tourist literature. They made it quite clear that people of the Jewish religion, no matter what their citizenship, would not be given visas or be permitted to enter any independent Arab country. Again, not a word of protest from anywhere. One can imagine the outrage if Israel had announced that it would not give visas to Muslims, still more if the United States were to do so. As directed against Jews, this ban was seen as perfectly natural and normal. In some countries it continues to this day, although in practice most Arab countries have given it up.

Neither the United Nations nor the public protested any of this in any way, so it is hardly surprising that Arab governments concluded that they had license for this sort of action and worse.

According to Lewis (in his memoirs), some Jews fudged their religious identification on visa applications. (“One ingenious lady from New York City even described herself as a ‘Seventh Avenue Adventist.'”) Others simply lied.

But most of us, even the nonreligious, found it morally impossible to make such compromises for no better reason than the pursuit of an academic career. This considerably reduced the number of places to which one could go and in which one could work…. At that time, for Jewish scholars interested in the Middle East, only three countries were open—Turkey, Iran and Israel…. It was in these three countries therefore that I arranged to spend the academic year 1949-50.

In retrospect, it is fortunate that Lewis had to make the adjustment: he became the first Western historian admitted to the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, and his pioneering work in this area opened up a vast field of study. Yet his exclusion as a Jew clearly rankled. It was something he hadn’t experienced in Britain, yet Western governments now failed to stand up for their Jewish citizens by insisting that they be accorded equal treatment. And in the 1950s, it got worse: not only did Arab states not admit Jews, they drove their own Jews into exile. This may have been the animating force behind Lewis’s 1986 book Semites and Anti-Semites, one of the first to analyze the continuing mutations of antisemitism in the Arab world.

Today, Arab states don’t ban Jews as such. They do ban Israelis. In fact, six of the seven states featured in Trump’s executive order ban entry of Israeli passport-holders: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. (So, too, do another ten Muslim-majority states.) Those same six states also won’t admit anyone whose non-Israeli passport includes an Israeli visa. I’m not aware that the international community regards this as a particularly egregious affront to international norms. The governments of these countries regard every Israeli, whether Jewish or Arab, or any past visitor to Israel of any nationality, as a potential security threat. That’s not irrational, since some of these governments have a record of threatening Israel through incitement, sponsorship of terrorism, and dubious weapons projects.

Trump’s limited executive order doesn’t resemble the sweeping Jewish ban that changed the career of Bernard Lewis. It’s more in line with the Israel bans implemented in the very same countries he’s named. Trump regards holders of certain nationalities as potential security threats, and has excluded them on that basis. There’s plenty of room to debate the wisdom, efficacy, and even morality of the executive order. While the United States may not be as great an exception to the rule as it sometimes claims to be, it still isn’t Sudan or Yemen. And one would hope that the United States, which has invested untold billions (or is it trillions?) in intelligence collection and vetting since 9/11, would be capable of telling friend from foe, and victim from victimizer, within nations.

But the governments of states like Iran have no cause to profess outrage. No one has practiced blanket exclusion on the basis of nationality as unremittingly, decade after decade, as they have, and they aren’t likely to give it up any time soon. It would be unfortunate if this became the norm in the world. But it wouldn’t mark much of a change in the Middle East.