In February 1946, as U.S- Soviet relations continued to deteriorate following the defeat of the Axis powers, a diplomat in our Moscow embassy named George Kennan sent his "long telegram" to top Truman administration officials.
The telegram, later turned into a celebrated article in Foreign Affairs, attempted to explain what made Stalin's Soviet Union tick and how to best counter it.
The rest is, of course, history, as Harry Truman embraced Kennan's analysis and moved forward with the Marshall Plan, NATO and other Cold War policies designed to blunt the communist advance. Kennan became the architect of "containment," the foreign-policy doctrine that all subsequent presidents would more or less follow until the Soviet collapse in 1991.
We now might have, belatedly, 14 years after 9/11, found our Kennan for the Islamic terrorism threat--Graeme Wood, courtesy of his already much-discussed article "What ISIS Really Wants" in the latest issue of The Atlantic.
The first contribution that Wood makes to our till now largely incoherent debate over Islam and terrorism is to emphasize that ISIS is not just Islamic but profoundly Islamic. Indeed, the problem is that ISIS is too Islamic, in the sense of representing an especially rigid, dogmatic, even purist understanding of Islamic teaching.
For Wood, and many of the prominent scholars he consults, ISIS is a purposive throwback to a more primitive and medieval Islam. In this sense, our mystification over its savagery is little more than a reflection of the manner in which we have become accustomed over the centuries to a more sanitized, gentler version of Islam and other religious creeds (including Christianity).
The problem isn't that ISIS is a distortion of Islam but that it doesn't distort Islam enough; it is precisely its literalness of interpretation that produces its extremism. It is profoundly fundamentalist rather than defanged and reformed.
The subtitle of Wood's piece reads: "The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse." Or, as Princeton's Barnard Haykel, the world's leading expert on ISIS, observes in Wood's essay, "Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition" because ISIS fighters "are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day."
The dogmatic Islam of ISIS is what makes it vastly more dangerous than al-Qaida and the other radical Islamist groups it has surpassed. By creating a new caliphate under the leadership of a declared caliph (ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi) that governs a territory larger than the United Kingdom, ISIS has become a magnet drawing thousands of devout Muslims from all over the world. And, as Woods makes clear, it is precisely its highly literal interpretation of Koranic scripture, the undeniably authentic nature of its approach to Islam in its earliest form, that has become the primary source of its appeal.
It has now become a religious obligation for many Muslims to travel to, pledge loyalty to and live under the new ISIS caliphate, much like communists once felt obligated to defend the Soviet experiment as the lone vanguard of socialism in an otherwise capitalist world after the Bolshevik Revolution.
But therein can also be found, according to Wood, the potential weakness of ISIS and the broader Islamist threat which it symbolizes--the need to hold onto and expand the territory under its Caliphate. Just as Kennan prophesied that the Soviet Union could present itself as the future only so long as it marched from victory to victory at the expense of the capitalist world, Wood posits that ISIS can maintain its appeal only by expanding at the expense of non-Muslims and Muslim apostates.
And just as Kennan's observation regarding the Soviet need for expansion would suggest his doctrine of containment, and the prediction that, if so contained, the USSR would eventually implode due to its fundamentally dysfunctional nature, Wood recommends a policy of containment of ISIS that will turn it inward and gradually produce disillusionment among those living under its brutal sway.
Alas, just as Kennan was, perhaps understandably, somewhat ambiguous about how to implement containment and how long it would take to work, so, too, is Wood. Resisting calls for the deployment of American ground troops, which he argues is precisely what many of the more savage acts of ISIS are designed to provoke and which would only confirm its apocalyptic vision, he recommends that, out of a choice of bad options, we continue to employ a combination of proxy forces and airpower to prevent further advances.
George Kennan's "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" became required reading in Washington in the late-1940s. And Kennan lived long enough (until 2005) to see his analysis and recommendations vindicated by the Soviet collapse.
Let us hope that "What ISIS Really Wants" gains a similar wide reading and influence. And that the ambivalent Democrat who currently sits in the Oval Office learns from it in the way Harry Truman once learned about communism from Kennan. And then demonstrates some of Truman's resolve in confronting this latest menace to liberal democracy.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 03/02/2015