Robert Nicholson of the Philos Project lectured at Providence Magazine’s Christianity and National Security Conference on Nov. 2, 2018.

Thank you, thank you everybody. Those of you who are still awake, I want to thank my partner in crime Mark Tule for putting me in the absolute worst slot of the day. Thank you, Mark. No, seriously, it’s been a joy to work with Mark. We dreamed up this idea a few years back and here it is. I’m happy to say that, thanks to adding new staff and rearranging some things, Providence is doing better than ever. We’re getting more traffic by far online, and I think much better quality on our articles.

So, I’m Robert Nicholson. I’m going to talk. If you know anything about me, you know that I’m going to talk about the Middle East, because that’s what I do. I’m going to talk about American frustrations in the Middle East and hopefully how to overcome them, or at least start to overcome them. I want to start with a story of a bus full of Coptic Christian pilgrims who were headed from the town of Sohag to the city of El Mina in Egypt. As they went about their business going to the Saint Samuel Monastery there in El Mina, they were attacked mercilessly by a still unknown group of terrorists. Seven people died, fourteen people were wounded. On the bus was a family bringing their small child to be baptized at that monastery. And that wasn’t ten years ago, that was this morning when you slept. And this is the second time this has happened in that exact place in one year. And these attacks are happening all the time in Egypt and beyond. I was just in Egypt a few weeks ago, meeting with Copts, meeting with Muslims, talking to people about the state of society there. Needless to say, it’s really, really bad. It was actually worse than I expected. And it just reminded me that there is a tremendous amount of frustration for me, and not just for me, but for other Christians, other Americans about this part of the world.

I do think, you know, people always ask me, “Who cares about the Middle East? Why not Southeast Asia?” I think all regions of the world are important. Providence is dedicated to that idea. But for me, the Middle East, any question involving the Middle East has some kind of Christian element to it, of course, because our faith comes from there. Our faith is not American or European. It’s actually a Middle Eastern religion. There are also all kinds of religious dimensions when it comes to the Middle East. The three major Abrahamic religions were born there for a reason. It’s a very religious part of the world. If you’re a religious person, you know that there is an element of religion that needs to be taken into account. I’m going to come back to that. There’s also, as I mentioned, tremendous persecution of Christians, but not just Christians. Religious and ethnic minorities of all kinds, including Muslims who don’t toe the line of any particular group or society. And of course, if you’re a Christian and you care about the gospel, it is one of the most, by far, one of the most gospel-poor parts of the world. So there are many reasons to care about this region. And I think that overcoming these frustrations is a big part of engaging it more effectively.

So we are, I think, you know, for me, the pretext for this is the 100-year anniversary of Western engagement with the Middle East. Of course, we’ve engaged with the Middle East a lot longer than that, but World War I ended in the Middle East 100 years ago, almost exactly, on October 30th, 1918, when Ottoman and British officials signed the Armistice of Mudros aboard the HMS Agamemnon in the middle of the Aegean Sea. And while it was the final curtain for the Ottomans, the Sultanate would collapse in 1922, the caliphate collapsed in 1924, it was just the beginning for Western powers, who would spend the next hundred years entangled in Middle Eastern affairs, right up until today. And it’s been a frustrating century, to say the least.

There’s another anniversary that is the pretext of this talk, and that is the 15-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq that Mary talked about and has been referenced here and there. And what I would say, this is my opinion, is that it was the grandest and most disastrous American initiative in the region to date. It was a set piece and good intentions gone awry. It led to the death of nearly 5,000 coalition forces, over 100,000 Iraqis. It created a power vacuum in the center of the region that was exploited by Iran. It inspired and trained a new generation of Muslim terrorists, some of whom went on to create the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. It provoked a new era of sectarianism between Sunnis and Shias, left Christians, Yezidis, and other minorities without protection, convinced hundreds of millions of Middle Easterners that we’ll stop at nothing to interfere in their affairs under the pretext of fighting terrorism and spreading freedom. And I think, most importantly for this talk, it convinced many Americans, liberals and conservatives, that US policymakers are either devious or incompetent and should leave the region entirely.

And here, I’m going to bring in a little snippet from my favorite book, “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad. And it’s really just because I like Conrad and want to quote him. I try to work him into many different things. If any of you’ve read the book, you may know what I’m talking about. There’s a great moment when the main character is headed down to Africa. He’s going to pilot a riverboat on the Congo. And the whole story revolves around his trip there and his trip up the river and what he encounters. It explores not only colonialism and imperialism at the height of the British Empire but also human nature. It’s a really, really great book, and it’s really short, so I recommend it. But there’s this great part when he’s on the ship, headed down from Europe to Africa, where he’s sort of going along the coast of Western Africa. And there’s this passage, and the main character says this. He says, “For a time, I would feel I belong still to a world of straightforward facts. The feeling would not last long. Something would turn up to scare it away.

Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. It appears the French had one of their wars going on thereabouts. Her ensign dropped limp like a rag. The muzzles of these long six-inch guns stuck out all over the low hull. The greasy, slimy swells swung her up lazily and let her down, swaying her thin mass in the empty immensity of Earth’s sky and water. There she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent. Pop would go one of the six-inch guns. A small flame would dart and vanish. A little white smoke would appear. A tiny projectile would give a feeble screech. And nothing happened. Nothing could happen.

There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight. And it was not dissipated by someone on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives, he called them enemies, hidden out of sight somewhere.” And this idea of firing into a continent, this sort of folly of trying to impact a part of the world that we really don’t understand and where we don’t seem to be very successful is kind of the theme or the lens through which I want to talk about this. And it’s actually the title, the main title of my lecture, “Firing into a Continent.” This feeling, this frustration, this thing like, what are we doing in the Middle East? Why are we not being effective, leads to lots of divisive policies and spasmodic actions.

I think there’s no better illustration of that than Syria and particularly President Trump’s April missile attack on Bashar al-Assad’s chemical weapons infrastructure. So lots of people, I’m sure you know them or you may be among them, had a problem with this apparent half-measure. Some people wanted more action. They say, “You didn’t go far enough. A missile strike, that’s just not sufficient.” Other people wanted much less. And the sentiment that seemed the most common was either win the war or stay out of it. This concept of limited intervention, of doing something small to make a statement, to sort of mow the grass, as it were, is really hard to grasp for us as Americans. Because we have trouble talking about limited anything. If we’re going to fight, we want to win.

And we don’t want a technical knockout. We want the other guy splayed out on the floor. That’s the only way we’re going to fight. And it’s also hard to grasp because we’re the most powerful state in the world. And we know that we have some kind of moral responsibility to secure that world against tyranny, or so we’ve been told. And this disparity, this disparity between our overwhelming power and our failure to achieve definitive victory, is a source of major frustration for the American people. They ask, “How can we be so strong and yet so impotent in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria? One president after another has tried to

Explain what we’re doing in these places, but we never seem to win anywhere. If we can’t win, why are we still fighting?

The American people want to know. Now, I should say, we haven’t failed completely.

Perception: And part of this talk is to point out that some of what I’m talking about is perception. There’s a feeling of frustration that we never win, that there’s nothing good that we can accomplish in this part of the world. I think that’s wrong, but it is for sure a feeling. Evidence that we haven’t failed completely.

So, imperialism—the kind that Joseph Conrad knew so well, Ottoman imperialism of the Arabs, European colonialism—both of those have ended. They don’t exist anymore. Middle Eastern states are independent, and there are many of them. Another anniversary this year, 1948. In 1948, the Jewish people, indigenous people of the Middle East who had been scattered for a long time, became free and sovereign in their own homeland. I don’t think that should be taken for granted, especially in the days post-Pittsburg. Life expectancy is up, literacy is up, energy reserves are flowing more or less as needed. We’ve done a lot, the United States, the West, to aid ethnic and religious minorities—Christians, but also other groups like Yazidis.

There’s also something that’s rarely talked about, and that is the decades-long, maybe century-long project of Western scholars to understand and explore the history of the Middle East. I think it goes without saying that much of the past, when it comes to places like Egypt and Iraq and other places in the region, would not be known were it not for the efforts of Western scholars who deciphered many of these dead languages and excavated these ancient cities. So, we’ve done a lot. This is not a talk to say that we are terrible. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. But there is still frustration.

So, you ask yourself, well, what is it? What is it that’s so frustrating about this part of the world that seems to make it different from others? The obvious answer is that this region, really for the last hundred years since that day on the Agamemnon, the Middle East is continually unstable. It has not reached any kind of equilibrium since those days, since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. There have been constant wars, constant coups, revolutions. There never seems to be a baseline toward which we’re returning. If you ask yourself, is the situation better in the Middle East now than it was in 1922 or 1918 or 1924? The jury’s out, I don’t know. Is it better? It depends on how you’re measuring it. If stability is important to you, if order is important, I would say that by and large, it’s actually not been so successful. So, instability, this constant feeling of instability, this region won’t calm down. That’s one source of frustration.

Another is this sort of disproportionate hostility that comes out of the Middle East in our direction. And look, we weren’t, actually, with Conrad, we weren’t colonizing on behalf of the British or the French or anyone else. We came late to the game. And so there is a feeling that, you know, why do you hate us so much for? We didn’t even try to colonize. We had nothing to do with the British Mandate system or any of the machinations that happened in those early years of the 20th century. Nevertheless, there is this tremendous amount of hostility. Somehow, people like Vladimir Putin escape that hostility. I personally think it’s because people know he just doesn’t care. You can hate him if you want, but he’s gonna do what he wants to do. People know that we do care, and so they attack us. We get attacked because we do too much in the region, we’re meddling in all these different affairs. Or we get attacked because we don’t do enough. Why didn’t you get involved in this? Why aren’t you doing more in Syria? Why aren’t you doing more in Yemen? So, hostility, that’s the second reason, I would say, and this relates to the first point of instability.

There’s this failure to evolve that we see in the Middle East. And despite, there has been 12 consecutive years, at least as measured by Freedom House, of decline in global freedom. Nevertheless, liberal democracy, certainly last hundred years, has spread to many parts of the world, certainly many parts that we wouldn’t have thought a hundred years ago that it would reach. There’s a recent paper by our colleague Paul Miller, who was up here just a few hours ago. He published this summer in Washington Quarterly. He argues that liberal democracy is actually not unique to Western countries and is fully compatible with non-Western societies. He cites a 2017 Freedom House report that found 64 non-Western countries that were either free or partly free. And he sees that as a big achievement, a counter-argument to those who say, “Look, it’s never going to happen outside of the West.” But still, when it comes to the Middle East, only Israel and Tunisia are classified as free by that same set of indicators, and only Jordan, Lebanon, and Morocco are partly free. Every other state is classified as unfree. The region has a problem. It’s not moving in a systematic way, at least in the way that we would like it to move.

Fourthly, in this ghost of my opening anecdote, there’s something that I’m calling here a “freedom asymmetry.” So, even as we in the West are debating Muslim refugees, whether they be from Syria or anywhere else, and why they should be allowed in and how they should be granted equal rights, how they shouldn’t be treated any differently than any other group, we know that the mirror image of that is that Christians in the Middle East are getting the exact opposite treatment. At best, they’re living under Jim Crow status in most of these states, and at worst, things are happening like what happened this morning in Egypt. And there’s this feeling that it’s just not fair. How is it that we are treating your people nicely when they come here, and you’re not treating our people nicely when they’re there? It’s freedom asymmetry.

There are also all of these moral dilemmas that keep coming up and driving us crazy. And I think there’s no better case study here than what happened just in the last few weeks with Saudi Arabia and Jamal Khashoggi. This feeling that, okay, we find a stable country in the Middle East, okay, they’re not perfect, there’s a lot of warts, but hey, it’s better than nothing. What’s the alternative? It’s all relative when you’re working in the Middle East about what’s good and what’s bad. But then things happen like the murder of this journalist and his dismemberment inside the embassy of a NATO country. And as an American, you’re like, seriously? Like, can you—like, we can’t find anyone who can behave in this part of the world? We want to be your ally. We want to work with you. Nevertheless, you’re doing these things that are forcing us to have to do things about it. And all of these moral dilemmas that we face in all of these different countries, and there’s many of them, are deeply annoying to American people but also to American policymakers. You can imagine if, for the Trump administration, trying to build up Mohammed bin Salman and saying that this is a reformer, things are good, and then this happens. You’re just slapping your forehead like, come on, people, like, get your act together.

There’s, of course, the threat of terrorism. It doesn’t seem to be abating. We’ve been doing this now for almost two decades. It seems like terrorism is just as bad or even worse in some cases than it was back then.

And lastly, there’s this feeling like we can’t leave. And I think part of that is related to what we know, consciously or unconsciously, about the Middle East. And that is, locked up inside this part of the world, in a different way than in West Africa or Latin America, there are all of these religious forces. And maybe the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem most captures that. This is a city that—it’s intangible. You can’t box it. But we all know that whatever happens in that city sends shockwaves throughout the rest of the world, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. And there’s this feeling that we can’t just leave this region to its own devices. It’s not Northeast Asia. There’s things that happen there, whether we like it or not, are going to affect us back here. And the last thing we want is sort of the dark forces of religion unleashed from that part of the world.

There are several factors that hold us back, even as we try to overcome these frustrations. The first one—and some of these I’ve K

ind of said already, there’s this structural instability, failed and failing states. You know, Iraq is held up as something of a success story; it’s got some kind of democracy. But we know if you pay attention to Iraqi politics, notwithstanding a few bright spots, it’s a real mess. Lebanon, one of the few other stable countries of the Middle East, still deeply problematic. This failure for these states to come to some sort of political equilibrium, to have some approximation of order and justice, is really holding back our Mideast policy.

There’s of course also a number of rivals who are seeking to exploit the regional instability for their own ends. Of course, Russia being the first one of that. At this point, I think it’s fair to say that Bashar al-Assad has won in Syria and that the Russians are probably going to stay, and the Iranians, another actor that does not have our best interests in mind, will also stay. We as America have been basically sidelined. And that’s the good news is Syria, the Syrian civil war seems to be winding down. The bad news is the vacuum that was left by our leadership has been filled by what I think, and I think what many think, is a less well-intentioned actor.

Religion is another factor that holds us back, is religion and the discussion about religion. So we know it’s saying the obvious that a big part of the problem in the Middle East has to do with those Muslims who are interpreting their religion in a violent, radical, extreme way. Describe it the way that you want, but it’s very difficult for a secular American administration to talk in those terms. We know there are good Muslims and bad, but how do you discern between the one and the other? How do you even talk, how do you even have the conversation about the way that Islam contributes or certain interpretations of Islam contribute to what’s happening in the Middle East? As a secular government, how do you do that? And how do you address the elephant in the room in a way that doesn’t alienate those Muslims who are on your side? That is, I think, a very important factor in this discussion.

It’s related to another factor that holds us back, and I think it’s part of the problem of American foreign policy writ large, is this kind of this problem of mirror imaging. You know, we project on the world what we think the world is, and much of what we think the world is or ought to be is based on who we are. So we think, you know, Iraq, when we invaded in 2003, we thought, “Look, this is a budding nation-state full of proud Iraqis who just want to be free from tyranny so they can become like us.” Well, it didn’t exactly turn out that way. We thought people would vote according to some sort of political ideology or vote in the name of freedom, and that turns out they did what most people in the Middle East do, which is vote according to group identity. And now you have this sectarian problem in Iraq. But we, because we’re a society to separate church and state and that is a creedal republic that looks at all people as equal before the law, we don’t see that. We have a big blind spot when it comes to the cultural dynamics of the region.

That’s my last point, is culture. Just this dissonance between American or Western culture and Middle Eastern culture, they’re not the same. You know, Bill Maher famously said, or as you were, Ben Affleck famously said in the Bill Maher show, you know, “Don’t talk about Muslims that way. You know, they eat sandwiches just like we do.” It’s true, they eat sandwiches like we do, but their different cultures. And I think if you pretend, like many Americans do, that there are no cultural differences, humans and humans, a human, you’re gonna find yourself in a lot of dead ends.

Now, I should say that I don’t, this what follows is not the answer, but it’s a couple of things that I’ve thought about, working in this space, being in the Middle East, being here, seeing the differences between the two. So, the first sort of category of things is to adjust the domestic narrative, to basically manage expectations about our engagement with this part of the world.

We can’t change the Middle East. It’s not possible. We’re not, as Americans, even on our best day, we’re not going to change the Middle East. Even if it was possible, it’s really not our responsibility or our place to try to. It’s a region filled with hundreds of millions of people, they have their own culture, cultures, different religions. It is up to the people who live there to implement their values into their political systems as they want to.

We will, or we should, where we can promote our values, we must, actually. But we can’t force people to accept them. As a Christian, you know, you can preach all the time, you can give sermons, you can give altar calls, you can work with people, but at the end of the day, you can’t force someone to believe in a set of principles. And I think the same goes, in a different way, for foreign policy and our promotion of values.

At the end of the day, you should always promote your values, but you’ve got to realize that you are essentially limited in your ability to affect change. And at the end of the day, whether we like this or not, other people may have other values and other ideas about how to organize their societies. And this is where I think, even though it’s been much slighted in recent months, the concept of sovereignty is so important.

You know, we can’t baptize societies in our image through sheer force of will. It’s important that the American people understand that that’s not what America has ever been about. We are a pluralistic country internally, and I think we look at the world pluralistically, or at least we ought to. And we need to understand that these countries, we should shape them, we should try to influence them, but at the end of the day, they are sovereign states, and they’re going to do what they are going to do.

Understanding that first point, limited ability to affect change, I think you’re able to move on to the next point, which is in talking that in the domestic narrative about limited intervention. And I said at the beginning, it’s hard for us to think about limited intervention. You know, we were actually spoiled by World War II.

There we had this definitive victory over this obvious embodiment of evil. It’s like the archetypal battle of Troy. You know, and even though we keep craving more battles of Troy, the world keeps giving us, you know, suicide bombers and insurgency. And that’s really hard for us as Americans to deal with. We want apocalyptic struggle.

If we’re going to struggle, we want it to be apocalyptic. And if it’s not, then we’re not interested. This idea of doing little things, of making little tweaks, something that Paul Miller mentioned, you know, this much of foreign policy is just sort of keeping the machine going. And I think there are all kinds of limited interventions we can make, not just military, just interventions in the Middle East that can make a big difference, lots of little things, pruning the garden, mowing the lawn, whatever metaphor you choose.

And it’s important that as we speak to the American people, as policymakers, as executives speak to the American people, that they begin to wean people away, not just in the Middle East but more broadly, from this all-or-nothing mentality that we have to either take over Syria, defeat Bashar al-Assad, install a democracy, and win, or we just don’t do anything. There’s all kinds of interim steps that we can take.

And I think, you know, one of the ways to talk about this is to talk about the American neighborhood. You know, we all, whether we like it or not, in the world, live in the world that America built, at least since the Second World War. And for us, we don’t really need to win in Syria or anywhere else because, in some sense, we’ve actually already won. Our foreign policy objective is really just to protect our interests and to preserve what we already have, to maintain, to not lose, to eradicate or fill empty spaces that our rivals seek to exploit because the world is already organized according to American interests.

It’s in our interest to keep it that way, even if we have to spend a little time and money to do so. So, speaking to the American people, helping them understand that look, the world is actually great, at least if you care about American interests. We just need to do lots of little things to keep it that way. We don’t need to feel like we’re losing in Syria because we’re not.

So, second point, how to overcome the frustrations, be wary of hard power. And it’s sort of related, is be wary of hard power’s ability to affect change. You know, it is very important that we have, I’m a military person, I of all people believe it’s really important for us to be using hard power to target terrorists and to work with our allies to defeat the material threat of terrorism, from weapons of mass destruction to conventional weapons as well.

Having said that, no one should be under the illusion that hard power is going to change the Middle East. And in fact, we need to be very aware that hard power often exacerbates a lot of the animosity against America. So, this isn’t to say that we should not use hard power. I think we should use it sparingly, prudently, but we need to be aware that that is not one of the tools in the toolbox if we care about long-term engagement.

I think thirdly, and relatedly too, that is we ramp up soft power in the Middle East, some of the most effective things that we’ve ever done as Americans and as Westerners in the Middle East has been through soft power. Now, people are very skeptical of soft power. It doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t do anything, it has no teeth, it has no legs, there’s no hands, whatever. But the reality is we’ve done a lot.

Some of the universities that we’ve founded in the Middle East have been powerfully impactful in the history of the region. I mentioned to you a lot of the scholarly initiatives. I think there’s a lot to be said for public diplomacy, an information campaign, something we don’t spend nearly enough money on. You know, the Middle East is a place of the spirit. The people in the Middle East, at the risk of stereotyping, tend to be religious people. They care about ideas, they care about religion, they care about values.

They may disagree on the values depending on who they are, but they care about them. That is a conversation that Middle Easterners want to have, and I think we do far too little in the realm of communications. And when it comes to that, I know the president of the Middle East Broadcasting Network, Alberto Fernandez, one of the best Middle-East hands I think that I know. He’s Cuban, speaks fluent Arabic.

Though, just really somebody who’s salty, as we say in the Marines. He’s just been around for a long time but in all these countries, spent lots of time on the ground, made lots of relationships. And this is a point that he makes a lot as the head of the Middle East Broadcasting Network is that we just need to do so much more in terms of communicating messages. Now, it’s not a, you know, for if you’re an American and you want that, you know, that knockout, it doesn’t, it’s not quite satisfying.

But if you do care about promoting values, it’s going to come through persuasion and not through power. So, public diplomacy, information campaigns, a world of initiatives that can happen. And that’s relatedly to that, educational initiatives, universities, scholarships, innovative learning. There’s a whole conversation about education in this country and how it’s changing with the advent of technology.

I think there are many applications for bringing some of those technologies to the Middle East. Middle Easterners, one of the things they may hate America all day long, but they would love a middle-of-an-American degree. And I think that if there are ways for us to spread our values by working sort of with the interests of the people based on what they actually want and need, I think there’s a lot of potential for change there and doing so, I should say, while very carefully thinking about what it is that we’re teaching.

You know, I was like I said, I was in Egypt, I was in Cairo, the American University of Cairo is a great institution, but it may, you know, in some departments, it may be more anti-American than the people who live in the neighborhood around the American University of Cairo. And that’s unfortunate to go to the American University and come out even more charged with hostility toward this country.

I think we need to be more intentional about what we’re teaching, I think we need to train the next generation. I went back and watched my Providence lecture from last year and I spent some time on this then. I won’t mention it too much here, but when it comes to the people who are going to make policy, be diplomats, be involved in DoD and all these places, we need more people, especially young people who know languages and culture.

There are too many people I know who are trying to work on Middle Eastern, if it is probably true in every area of the globe, but who are really into the space, really into the field, want a very well-intentioned but know virtually nothing about the space. Learn Arabic, learn Hebrew, learn Turkish, learn Persian, like, you gotta have some connection, you gotta have some context for your work or you will be eaten alive, trust me, I can tell you from personal experience.

So, training the next generation, getting them away. Our theory doesn’t work in the Middle East, political science, I would argue, doesn’t work in the Middle East. The Middle East, at least right now, is, you know, the political regimes are the product of bargaining arrangements, relationships. Nobody’s trying to implement, you know, these very lofty ideas that are being taught in this August institution, they’re just trying to make do.

And I think that we need to recognize that and train our people, our people to go into that world knowing what it is that they’re going to encounter. And part of that is something else that Alberto Fernandez mentions a lot, is we need to develop a ground game. You know, he tells the story how he was the chief diplomat, he was the ambassador in Sudan, he was the only Western chief of station who knew Arabic.

The French, the British, the German, nobody knew Arabic. Meanwhile, the Russians, the Chinese, all of the other powers that were interested in the Sudan did know Arabic. And what he said is that these other groups had a tremendous ability because of that to have ground game, to be connected to people outside the four walls of the embassy. And I think if we’re open to have meaningful diplomacy, we need to be deploying people who actually know what they’re talking about.

Alright, I’m winding down here, the next, the last point is that we need to, as a society, as a government but especially as a society, to recognize and to think hard about the religious element that is involved with engaging the Middle East. I have a piece coming out in the next print edition of Providence where I propose the creation of a strategic working group of sort of very devout, believing, conservative Christians and very devout, believing, conservative Muslims as an informal group that could think about, talk about, debate, agree, disagree.

Actually, it’s more important to disagree about some of the big questions that are facing relations between our two societies. I think if this body, if formed and if filled with honest people who are willing to have this not interfaith conversation but a much more kind of what’s the word I’m looking for, just truthful and honest and sometimes even a little acrimonious conversation, will serve not only an important intercultural, multi-faith role but it also could serve over time as an advisory body, as a laboratory of sorts for policymakers and diplomats who are trying to think through these questions.

One of the things that bothers me so much is that, as I said before, it’s so much of people understand that it’s a religious part of the world but so much of the discussion takes place in these very politically correct terms and you have very liberal Christians talking to very liberal Muslims and really no one’s speaking to the street. I think we need to think about how to get the most believing parts of the two communities together because those are the two groups that have the most problems with each other and you can see that in data.

American Christians, believing Christians of different denominations, have very low opinions of Muslims and vice versa. That’s something that I think that we can begin to work on, it’ll take a long time as all of these things do but right now I don’t see anybody doing it very effectively, having the believers’ conversation about religion in Western-Middle East relations. And I think, and that sort of comes to my last point, my last last point, this point of, I said, freedom asymmetry is also some kind of spiritual asymmetry.

So here we are a secular country, it’s becoming increasingly secular, I should add, at least as measured by survey research and here we are engaging what is possibly the most religious part of the world and there’s a dissonance there. There’s a visit that we’re talking past each other. It’s very hard for us as a secular society to engage a number of very devout societies, this whole kind of rational actor approach that we take doesn’t always hold in the Middle East.

Sometimes people do things that are, you know, what others would describe as irrational. They do it because of faith and I think we as Christians of all people understand that look, there are some things that really aren’t in our interest to do as Christians but we do them anyway because we know that we’re obligated to do, we have that religious duty to do it. And I think that, you know, at least half of the problem in Western-Middle East relations, it’s not just about rising Islamism over there, it’s about declining Christianism back here.

And I think there’s a lot that we need to do to shore up the foundations of our own.

Civilization, rather than trying to fix the Middle East or the Islamic world, should focus on recognizing problems within the Western world. Christianity, as it moved westward from the Middle East, lost some of its native sensibilities about the transcendent. Reconnecting Westerners, especially the next generation, to the roots of their faith—its Middle Eastern origins—could significantly improve East-West relations by bridging cultural gaps. So, my final point is to fix ourselves. I hope I’m on time.

That concludes my remarks. Thank you for listening. [Applause]

Rob, your last point leads into my question. Do you think there’s irony in promoting American democratic values while acknowledging domestic challenges? The issue of Providence, as discussed in Niebuhr’s book, “The End of Liberalism,” questions why the Muslim world would endorse a project that excludes religious discourse from public life, marginalizing it in favor of partisan politics. This approach seems counterproductive, akin to administering medicine that harms the patient. How does your view on imperialism differ from Orientalism’s categorization and control of the East?

Regarding positive Christian engagement in the Middle East, our program focuses on reconnecting Christians to their Middle Eastern roots. As someone who observes American politics from abroad, I find it demoralizing and baffling at times. Conservative Muslim critiques of Westernization—accusing it of godlessness and cultural erosion—are not entirely unfounded. Charles Malik’s insights on the West’s engagement with lofty spiritual ideas versus its actual practices highlight a paradox. The U.S. government, while secular, should make space for civil society, particularly in religious spheres, to enhance international engagement.

Contrary to Orientalism, I advocate for respecting and supporting the cultural autonomy of Middle Eastern countries. It’s crucial not to impose American values but to engage respectfully. We must promote our values smarter, avoiding coercive tactics that undermine our credibility. For instance, leveraging economic and political influence rather than military force can be more effective with countries like Saudi Arabia. Upholding our values, despite criticism, is crucial for maintaining America’s global influence.

Hi, my name is Kelsey Richie from the University of Texas, studying counterterrorism and radicalization. How can the U.S. balance fixing its domestic narrative while ramping up soft power initiatives in public diplomacy? Historically, the U.S. has fought ideological battles, now facing Islamic extremism. Domestically, voices advocating defeating this ideology dominate, shaping public opinion. In the Middle East, can our diplomats engage in building common ground now or must they wait for domestic narrative shifts at the policymaking level?

Both approaches are necessary. We should immediately enhance public diplomacy in the Middle East, ideally delivering messages in local languages for greater sincerity and effectiveness. Yet, addressing domestic curiosity about U.S. foreign policy is crucial. Americans need to understand why decisions are made and their impact, aligning public support with policymaking. Simplifying communication, as seen in effective leadership styles, can bridge this gap, ensuring broad understanding and support for global engagements.

Brian Smith: Thank you. My name is Brian Smith, and my question, you mentioned the question of how a secular administration is going to speak religious language and, you know, diplomatic context. I’m sort of thinking in terms of the domestic narrative, perhaps more familiar to the religious right as it’s so-called, this eschatological narrative about the Middle East. Now, this kind of prophetic millennial dimension that you still hear about, and how does a secular administration speak religious languages when they actually internalize it? We get these statements by George Bush or even people going further back, Saddam Hussein and the Ayatollah, they’re all legitimizing their mission in some sort of eschatological narrative. American leaders, everyone in their at least, and it’s almost like perhaps we haven’t been so much facing a clash of civilizations as a clash of eschatology. How do you see that that narrative still has life and it still has some kind of salience? Whether it’s the moving of the embassy to Jerusalem, whatever, it’s all this. I feel like this is still alive, and I’m wondering how that plays out on the ground. That’s a big, big question. My answer will not be satisfying, I promise.

It’s, you know, Walter last year gave a talk and I think he touched on some of it this morning on the substratum of eschatological thinking in American public life in American foreign policy. He talks about post-millennial versus premillennial, there’s something there. Even if we’re not believers, we’ve internalized a lot of what this theological language has taught us. You know, there is a positive end of history we just need to work there or the end of history is going to be terrible and we need to prepare for the end of the world. You may not realize that you’re thinking in those terms, but chances are you are. Many Americans do, are things getting better or worse? That’s all eschatological. In the Middle East, it’s the same.

Abrahamic religions, they are historical, they think about beginnings, middles, and ends. They are teleological, they’re oriented toward particular ends, and I think that it crops up in Islam and Judaism and in Christianity. You’re not gonna get away from it. I think it’s unhelpful if it’s working its way into your policy. I don’t support any president referencing Armageddon or Gog and Magog and none of that. But the fact of the matter is in the Middle East, certainly among the bad actors of the Middle East, the sort of secular-ish autocrats, Bashar al-Assad, they don’t talk like that. But when you get to some of the people who are really sort of smoking it up, ISIS, bin Laden, or Iran, they very much believe in these things. And it may not be that the whole society does, in fact, certainly in the case of Iran, maybe the majority of the society does not. But in terms of the mainline of the government, they do, they preach that they’re waiting for the return of the Mahdi. So what do you do with that? I think the first, really the only point I would make, the first, last point is we need to recognize that.

Graham Wood did a great piece about ISIS in the Atlantic, this is probably now two years ago, where he broke down, you should probably read it, like what these people actually believe. And I think for a lot of, you know, Beltway wonks and, if you’re here, I apologize, but it’s sort of like you don’t believe it. Like, really? Come on, these guys, they don’t really believe it. No, they really do believe that. And I think that there’s no real response, certainly no quick and easy response. But you need to understand that these people, many of these people, are just not rational actors.

And so as you’re creating responses to them, you know, there’s this sort of famous thing where, you know, the problem with ISIS is that people just don’t have jobs, right? Well, there’s probably some of that, but the people who sort of founded ISIS and led it, they’re very much operating in terms of ideology. And so as you’re crafting policy responses, military responses, you need to understand that at the end of the day, this is an idea. It’s not even a rational idea. And there’s only so much that brute force is going to change that. So I don’t know that it’s a silver bullet, but you have to sort of know that that’s the case.

And, by the way, that when large numbers of Americans, probably tens of millions of Americans, maybe, I don’t know, hundreds of millions, who knows, actually subconsciously or consciously see the world in similar terms also. Well, people, you know, working in two capitals may be very secular. They may be sort of making all kinds of calculations about what the other is going to do and crafting policy based on that. The counter and to counter again, the populations that they represent are seeing the world in much starker, even Manichaean terms. And so it’s just a reality.

Again, I don’t think U.S. policy is really equipped to handle beyond that. It’s hard to, well, I mean, look, if your argument is that moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem was part of some apocalyptic thing, I don’t think you or people that sure think you need to be careful about what messages you’re telegraphing to the world, for sure. But at the end of the day, just because somebody’s going to interpret me doing X, Y, or Z in some kind of apocalyptic way doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t do it, right? I mean, but you do need to be, you did need to be aware. That’s all I can say. Thank you, everybody. Appreciate your patience. Enjoy the rest of the conference. [Applause]