A resurgent and increasingly fundamentalist Islam is embroiled in a fateful clash with America's historic, faith-based claim to a dominant role in the world. The Islamists are sustained by passion and rage; Americans draw inspiration from our Founders' claims that freedom and democracy were universal values. In the 21st century, these values are as precious and unique to America as ever; but as universal claims, they are demonstrably false, dangerous and costly. And while the 2006 National Security Strategy proclaims, "The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world", Islamist-inspired protestors in Western capitals carry placards about how one day all will be united into a single Islamic community.

The Great Awakenings

American Protestant eschatology (with its particular interpretation of the Book of Revelation and awaited "End Times") has historically maintained that the world is moving toward an end state in which America is the chosen agent through which good will triumph over evil. President Bush and some of his supporters are evidently influenced by that religious worldview--which many Americans believe is firmly rooted in our experience.

For example, in late April in northern California, President Bush said: "I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. . . . One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free."

Robert William Fogel, the 1993 Nobel laureate in economics and a professor at the University of Chicago, describes American history in terms of recurring cycles, or Great Awakenings.¹ The First Great Awakening of the early and middle 18th century emphasized individual responsibility for salvation. With preachers inveighing against corruption in London, this Great Awakening was instrumental in giving momentum to the American Revolution and the creation of a republic of free citizens.

The Second Great Awakening, in the early 19th century, held that anyone could achieve saving grace through inner (personal) and outer (societal) struggle against sin. This led to a number of reform movements--my family members, for example, were active abolitionists--that coalesced to form the Republican Party. Those movements and the party decried the moral corruption of the South and were a contributing force leading to the Civil War.

The Third Great Awakening--which started in the early 20th century--shifted the emphasis in American religious life from personal sin to institutional transgressions. It propelled the country to address the corruption of big-business "trusts" and the need to promote civil rights and equality of condition, and provided the underpinnings of support for more activist government programs such as welfare (as well as the need for an income tax).

The Fourth (and current) Great Awakening, beginning about 1960--the year I was first elected to Congress--eschewed the "Social Gospel" in favor of a return to emphasizing the importance of personal conversion, de-emphasized sacramental worship in favor of individual experiences of God's presence, and stressed a more literal, experiential reading of the Bible. Politically, this has led to the rise of pro-life, pro-family movements, expansion of the tax revolt and reform movements that have included attacks on corruption in corporate governance, on financial and sexual misbehavior in churches, and on corruption in politics at all levels, from the United Nations and certain members of Congress down to state governors and city officials. (One additional outgrowth of the Fourth Great Awakening is the phenomenon known as Christian Zionism, the belief that the creation of the state of Israel is an indispensable part of the divine plan and that American support for Israel should rest less on an assessment of U.S. national interests and more on a selective reading of the Old Testament.) In addition, the ethos of the Fourth Great Awakening, with its focus on combating personal sin, also helped to transform the U.S. military in the 1980s, rescuing the Vietnam-era Army from the drugs, alcohol and alienation that previously plagued the corps, at a time when the draft was abandoned in favor of volunteers, producing today's highly motivated, well-trained force.

While opposed to secular humanism at home, the religious perspective of the Fourth Great Awakening has merged with the belief held by many secular thinkers of the likelihood, if not the inevitability, of the triumph of Western civilization, defined in terms of democratic values. In a private conversation in late March, Professor Thomas Schelling, the 2005 Nobel laureate in economics, conveyed a highly sophisticated version of that notion. He said the dominant civilization--the West--is highly likely to prevail in the world, compared with the fundamentalist forces within Islamic (and other) religions, even if he did not suggest that this likely prevalence would be due to the forces of religion. The view that Western democracy is the end point of human social development created a bridge between the president's evangelical Christian base and the neoconservatives.

President Bush has used the language of the Great Awakenings to advance the American eschatological claim of good (democracy) triumphing over evil (non-democracy). The fusion of America's faith in democracy with geopolitics was completed in the second Inaugural Address, and reiterated in the 2006 National Security Strategy: "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

The alleged moral basis for our invasion of Iraq--promulgated by both neoconservatives and hard-line Protestant and Catholic evangelicals--simply crowded out almost all considerations of the national interest. Since the 1970s, leaders of the emerging political and religious Right have never quite forgiven President Nixon and Henry Kissinger for extricating the United States from Vietnam, forging a new relationship with the Soviet Union and starting a rapprochement with China--achievements that served the American national interest but did not advance America's "destiny." It is not surprising, then, that in a January opinion poll Daniel Yankelovich found that support for the Bush Administration's conduct of the War on Terror and the reconstruction of Iraq "seems to track the public's religiosity: the more often Americans attend religious services, the more likely they are to be content with current U.S. foreign policy." The Southern Baptist Convention (America's largest Protestant denomination) entered the geopolitical discussion in June 2003 when they unanimously resolved to "affirm President George W. Bush, the United States Congress, and our armed forces for their leadership in the successful execution of Operation Iraqi Freedom." Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, said he saw the invasion of Iraq as an opportunity to proselytize among Muslims. Jerry Falwell was quoted as saying "God is pro-war."²

This intense moral atmosphere and the war's sophisticated promoters silenced planning and even professional intelligence analysis for the post-invasion management of Iraq. That approach would have been inconsistent with their "cakewalk" theory of the invasion and its aftermath (since the forces of light were to be triumphant over the evildoers). As a result, as Vice President Dick Cheney maintained, we should have been welcomed in Iraq and throughout the Middle East as liberators. By logical extension of that premise, just as it was outlined in the Book of Daniel in the vision of the statue of the kingdoms, the Palestinian intifada and Hamas would wither away, along with the Saudi regime and the dictatorship in Syria and the theocracy in Iran. But the Muslims of the Greater Middle East have not been receptive.

Islamic Resistance

After the Second World War, the Middle East did experiment with Western civilization--Western science, Western political and economic theories, and even Western-style nationalism--as a potential solution to their own problems. They were disappointed. Industrialization and modernization did not bring about widespread prosperity. Western models could not prevent the squandering of the enormous wealth generated from the discovery of oil on palaces and arms purchases; Western planning seemed to offer no solution to the problems of population growth and water shortages.

Instead, the West's culture seduced the rulers of the faithful, rendering them weak, incompetent and corrupt. Islam suffered the loss of Palestine and then Jerusalem, its third-holiest city, to that outpost of Western modernity, Israel.

Muslims concluded that they were being punished for their apostasy in following the two secular outgrowths of Christianity: capitalism and communism. Both had failed. It seemed that, in the slogan adopted by the Muslim Brotherhood, Islam was the solution.

In the early 1970s the return to the "fundamental" precepts of Islam became unmistakable throughout the Middle East. There was greater adherence to the dietary laws, greater observance of the fast at Ramadan, more praying and vastly more people going on the pilgrimage to Mecca. The stagnation of the region's economies also spurred massive emigration to global urban centers like London, Marseilles, Detroit, Hamburg, Newark and Hong Kong--all of which became, to a greater or lesser extent, new centers of Islamic faith, culture and resentment.

In 1973 the fundamentalist Islamic resurgence intersected with geopolitics for the first time in the Yom Kippur War--when Egypt and Syria tried to prove that Arab Muslims could defeat the Israelis on the battlefield (but ended up being crushed by General Ariel Sharon). This was followed by Saudi Arabia's successful embargo on oil, which drove prices through the roof and severely damaged the economies of the Western world. In 1979 an elderly Muslim Shi'a cleric--Ayatollah Khomeini--led a revolution of militant pietists in Iran that destroyed a modernizing power supported by the United States. This revolution transformed the geopolitics of the Greater Middle East, first and foremost by opening the door to a war by Iraq against Iran. We ended up supporting Saddam's Iraq, a secular Arab power, against the passionately religious Shi'a Iran--and set in motion a chain of events that has brought us to our current predicament in the region. The Soviet Union was driven from Afghanistan, and Israel was pushed out from Southern Lebanon, in both cases by holy warriors inspired by their faith. And then there were the 9/11 attacks. The lesson seems to be that when Muslims embrace their religion and identity, they can triumph against the West.

A Looming Disaster?

We were told that American boots firmly planted in the soil of the Islamic resurgence would bring about seismic change in the Middle East, creating a new set of pro-American democracies throughout the Arab and Islamic world.

The United States tried to export the Bush Administration's version of freedom and democracy to Iraq. So far, what has happened is that we have given Iraq's Shi'a the freedom to vote for pro-Iranian religious parties that seek to create an Islamic republic modeled on Iran. Even today, without having to make a constitutional decision, the Shi'a south can apply Islamic law, as it is now doing. A similar process is underway in Afghanistan: Lauded as an emerging democracy, its judicial system was prepared to condemn a convert to Christianity to death. Indeed, the principal beneficiaries of the democratic opening elsewhere in the Middle East have been the Islamist parties, not the secular democrats. We are in uncharted territory. We are witnessing how national political disputes are increasingly being transformed into religious conflicts. For example, the Israeli-Palestinian issue has been largely transformed from a problem of working out the details of a two-state solution into a clash between Islam and the West, a tendency accelerated by Hamas's victory at the polls.

Meanwhile, Sunni insurgents are doing their best not only to force the United States to withdraw, but to provoke a sectarian civil war in Iraq. This raises pressure in Washington, particularly in the U.S. Army, to draw down our military deployment. The argument is put forward that our military presence has added to motivations for the violence, that our footprint in Iraq is much too big. But religiously motivated violence would likely spiral out of control if the United States were to withdraw precipitously, since Iraqi security forces are far from ready to operate on their own.

This would also raise the question whether our withdrawal will be perceived as a forced retreat rather than part of a prudent and carefully planned strategy designed to enhance international security. A withdrawal from Iraq that could allow the Sunni insurgency to claim a victory akin to that of Afghanistan's mujaheddin against the USSR would be catastrophic for U.S. interests. It would mark a turning point for America's role in the world.

If the United States leaves behind in Iraq either a failed state or some version of an Islamic republic, then the main geopolitical beneficiary of the U.S. war on Iraq could well be an Iran that now seems determined to acquire nuclear weapons. The very prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran casts a long shadow over the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf and the Middle East. Certainly, Israel's national security would be imperiled. And while the Iraqi Shi'a do not necessarily see themselves as geopolitical allies of Iran, they do accept both spiritual and material aid from Tehran. The ground could be laid for an arc of Shi'a domination stretching from Tehran to Baghdad and into Saudi Arabia's eastern provinces (the center of its oil industry) and the Gulf emirates.

Neither President Bush nor his evangelical Christian and neoconservative cheering sections intended any of this to happen. But this is the situation we have to deal with today in 2006. And we are in no position to be able to walk away from the Middle East or the Islamic world that is arguably now much more unsettled and unstable as a result of the invasion of Iraq. Suffice it to say that, for the foreseeable future, oil will remain the lifeblood of the global economy. Iraqi oil production under Saddam was greater than it is today--and the global risk premium is costing the world a pretty penny. Surging demand not only in the United States but in India and China means that, despite all the rhetoric about energy security, we shall become more and more dependent on the volatile Middle East and our task will be managing our energy insecurity. Fears that the region is once again standing on the brink of war is driving oil prices to record heights--and imperiling the global economy and political stability everywhere.

Stepping Back from the Abyss

In the midst of the Fifth Crusade, St. Francis of Assisi attempted to start a dialogue between Christians and Muslims when he visited Sultan al-Kamil in Egypt. While Francis's mission of peace failed, the groundwork was laid for one of the more remarkable incidents of the Crusades--the peace treaty Al-Kamil reached with the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick, an arrangement that balanced the competing claims of Christians and Muslims to the Holy Land (but, significantly, was denounced by religious extremists on both sides). Moderates on both sides have to back away from maximalist claims about the superiority or eventual triumph of either the civilizational model derived from Western Christianity or the restored caliphate promised by the Islamists.

It is therefore encouraging that the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, took a step toward accommodation between civilizations--as defined by their religions--when he hosted the inaugural meeting and formal launch of the Christian-Muslim Forum in London on January 24 of this year. The forum will meet three times a year. Funding for the project has come from a mix of sources, including grants from Christian and Muslim bodies, other trusts, and a start-up grant from the British government. From the outset, Dr. Williams has warned against assuming two particular stances when engaging in inter-religious dialogue: One is making exclusive claims to truth, while the other is a "slip into a world-view that assumes every religion is as good as another", which can cause a loss of confidence in one's faith. In other words, we can respect differences without having to abandon our own core beliefs in the process.

Why do these dialogues matter? "How many divisions", in Stalin's words, does the Archbishop of Canterbury have to deploy in Iraq? Why engage moderates in the Islamic world? Because, as President Bush himself noted in his remarks to the UN in September 2005, the struggle against extremism and terrorism "will not be won by force of arms alone. We must defeat the terrorists on the battlefield, and we must also defeat them in the battle of ideas."

Many in the Middle East are very aware--especially after the release of the UN's Arab Development Report--of the deficiencies and shortcomings of their societies. Throughout the region, from Turkey to Jordan, from Morocco to Qatar, there are ongoing experiments to try to develop democratic solutions that are authentically Islamic. What they are not prepared to accept is the recommendation that the solution to their ills is for the United States to "invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity"--and to prevent that from happening, most Muslims of the Middle East would throw their lot in with Al-Qaeda, even if, as polls indicate, very few would want the creation of a Taliban-style Islamic government.

The crusading spirit was alien to American leaders like John Adams, George Kennan and Ronald Reagan. None of them questioned that the United States of America and its experiment in republican democracy was a shining city on a hill, a light unto the world, an inspiration to other nations. They never believed that Americans should not be prepared to offer assistance and guidance. But they never advocated Americans going forth to impose ourselves and our institutions on others in the world.

We have given in to the temptation to use our overwhelming military technology and tactical arts without equivalent policy direction. American power can serve moral purposes, but the unique American national interest seems a surer guide than a religious claim to the exclusive possession of the truth.

Both President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have said that a "generational commitment" by Americans is necessary to advance freedom in the Middle East. Ironically, the president's invocation of religion to gain domestic American support for his geopolitical efforts--but without sufficient follow-up on the political dimension of the intensely religious Middle East as a whole--has split the United States politically in ways that make a generational commitment quite unlikely. Today, our only viable option seems to be to rally Arab and non-Arab Muslim support--and American political support--for a major military and political effort in the region--but with the more circumscribed goals of securing the new regime in Baghdad and blocking Iran's nuclear ambitions.

The ancient Greeks said the Owl of Minerva rises only at dusk. This describes the almost universal practice of waking up too late to the events of the day, or as the New Testament would put it, the signs of the times. Billy Graham, preaching in New York City this past June, said: "Almost everyone today understands that we're approaching a climactic moment in history. There's going to come an end to the world. Not the earth, but the world system in which we live." I would add my voice to that of Billy Graham and find hope in the wisdom of the Archbishop of Canterbury.

1. The Fourth Great Awakening and the Future of Egalitarianism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).

2. This contemporary religious enthusiasm for the Iraq War contrasts dramatically with the restrained pronouncements of evangelists such as Billy Graham on the geopolitics of three or four decades ago. I do not recall Dr. Graham ever mentioning the Vietnam War or the Soviet nuclear threat when I heard him preach in a football stadium in Tennessee during the 1968 presidential campaign, nor during Sunday services at the Nixon White House in early 1969.

Robert F. Ellsworth is vice chairman of The Nixon Center, and cofounder of the San Diego-based venture capital fund Hamilton BioVentures, LP. He served three terms as a Republican member of Congress from Kansas, was U.S. ambassador to NATO in the Nixon Administration, and deputy secretary of defense in the Ford Administration.