On September 17, 1656, Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, addressed the English Parliament to layout his foreign policy, and he began by asking the most basic political questions: Who are our enemies, and why do they hate us? There was, he then asserted, an axis of evil abroad in the world. England's enemies, he said, "are all the wicked men of the world, whether abroad or at home ... '" And, in the language of the seventeenth century, he said that they hate us because they hate God and all that is good. They hate us "from that very enmity that is in them against whatsoever should serve the glory of God and the interest of his people; which they see to be more eminently, yea most eminently patronized and professed in this nation-we will speak it not with vanity-above all the nations in the world." (Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, ed. Ivan Roots (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1989,80).

Cromwell went on to spell out for the Roundheads, as the partisans of Parliament had been known in the English Civil War, that the axis of evil had a leader: a great power which had put itself in the service of evil. "Truly," said Cromwell, "your great enemy is the Spaniard ... through that enmity that is in him against all that is of God that is in you." That enmity came from the origin of the Catholic religion in the primordial revolt against God, embodied by the serpent in the Garden of Eden. "I will put an enmity between thy seed and her seed," Cromwell said, citing God's curse on the serpent and the enmity He would fix between the Children of Darkness and the Children of Light. (Ibid., 81.)

 For those who consider  America's history as a world power however, history began in the 1940s; only World War II and the Cold War can serve as examples of how international partnerships and coalitions work or fail. Both of these alliances were, by the standards of the maritime system, relatively straightforward. The Cold War alliances forged in the late 1940s survived for forty years with little change; the World War II alliance with the Soviet Union was more tempestuous, but American involvement in the war lasted less than four years. These unusually benign experiences may have left Americans unprepared for the twists and turns more characteristic of multipower coalitions in long wars. The wars against Louis XIV and Napoleon featured complex and fractious coalitions in which the different agendas and priorities of the coalition partners had serious and sometimes, from the British point of view, very unfortunate consequences for the course of the war. The war on terror is still relatively young, but already its international politics look more like the politics of the older and more complex partnerships than like the relatively simple international coalitions of the last fifty years. A deeper awareness of these dynamics would have helped the Bush administration in the years after 9/11 and enabled both the administration's critics and its supporters to make more thoughtful and appropriate policy recommendations during that confused and difficult time. The domestic politics of the Cold War and World War II were also more straightforward than those of earlier international conflicts. During the wars against France, British politicians were often deeply divided not only on the strategy but on the necessity and the morality of the conflicts. Many of Britain's most famous political and intellectual leaders sided with the Americans during the American Revolution and with the French during much of the French Revolution. It was domestic politics more than developments on the battlefield that brought Britain to the negotiating table to end the War of the Spanish Succession and the Seven Years' War.

A better knowledge of the history of the maritime order would have stood the United States in good stead after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. Not only would this knowledge have helped limit the illusion that history was over and that the nation could safely withdraw its attention from international affairs; it would have also helped Americans recognize the changes that were taking place and think more clearly about the choices they had. Over the last three hundred years, the maritime order has existed under two very different sets of conditions. Both Britain and the United States at various times have been actively defending a maritime system against direct attack by a power or coalition of powers seeking to overturn its foundations; sometimes they have found themselves trying to manage an order that is not being attacked. The two tasks require quite different priorities and outlooks, but they are both difficult and demanding. Better understanding of the difficulties and responsibilities of managing a world system in relatively peaceful times would have helped the United States after 1989; a deeper understanding of the dynamics and dangers of defending the system against an attack would have helped the Bush administration avoid some of the expensive errors it made after 9/11. Since the end of the Cold War, policy makers and engaged thinkers in the United States and elsewhere have debated the future course of American power. Broadly speaking, there are two principal positions in the debate. Some argue that the United States has already begun or is about to begin a process of inexorable decline. Others argue that the "unipolar" world described by Charles Krauthammer in 1990 is likely to endure and that American power may be destined to become even greater as time goes by. In the context of maritime history, this debate appears too stark. Decline and continuing unipolarity are both possible futures; neither, however, appears likely.

Declinist arguments generally proceed from one of two standpoints: a general argument about the rise and fall of civilizations, or analogies, either explicit or implied, between the United States and Great Britain. These arguments are less reliable than they are sometimes thought to be, and not just because proving that something must someday decline is very different from proving that it is currently declining. Rooted in the work of thinkers like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, these arguments reflect ideas about civilizations and history that looked more probable in the early and middle years of the twentieth century than they do today. Consider the idea that all civilizations decline. Fifty or one hundred years ago, perhaps, China looked like an example of a formerly great civilization (and empire) that had fallen into contemptible weakness and backwardness. Does it still look that way today? What about India? These are among the world's most ancient civilizations and they don't rise and fall so much as they wax and wane, and then wax again. They have good times and bad times, but they recover from their setbacks and go on-much as they have been doing back to the earliest written records we have. Some civilizations do fall; others pass through one crisis after another. The idea that there is some sort of inexorable law of aging and decline to which all civilizations are somehow subject looked quite compelling in 1920, when all the world's civilizations except for those with roots in western Europe (and Japan) appeared to be tottering toward their doom.

Today, these civilizations no longer seem to be ready for the graveyard. This fact should and perhaps ultimately will discredit the idea that civilizations are analogous to individuals with birth, youth, maturity, and decline in inevitable sequence. For now, however, the faith in decline remains strong, but the location of decline has changed. China, India, and Islam are rising and today are held out as examples of vigorous and expanding civilizations; it is Europe that is often seen as the one tottering into an assisted-living facility, and this decline is held to reflect the inexorable processes of historical necessity. The real lesson here should be that there is nothing inevitable about the decline and fall of civilizations, and that the outlook for civilizations and cultures can be transformed on short notice. It is true that great civilizations have fallen, but this is the exception rather than the rule. Invasions whether by barbarian tribes or by "civilized" people behaving very badly, demographic or ecological catastrophes, or religious conversion can lead to cultural changes so profound that later observers speak of the fall of a given civilization-but this perhaps was never very common and is becoming rarer today. All the world's great civilizations now are very ancient, and all of them have survived many shocks and many winters. Great civilizations don't fall; they are pushed, and it takes an unusual combination of circumstances for a whole civilization to be pushed past its breaking point. Even granting the premises that the United States remains part of Western civilization and that Western civilization as a whole is on the decline, the (so called) West despite its differences is a unit in world politics. The historical record furthermore seems to show that the British triumphed over the Spanish and the French because they had different concepts of religion, different social values, and different ideas about the relationship between government and society. World history seems to confirm that this was no fluke; the differences within major civilizations are often more important than similarities when it comes to the political destinies of states and empires.

The two ancient halves of the Greco-Roman civilization shared many values and ideas, and Greek philosophy and culture were decisive elements in Roman cultural life. Yet from a political standpoint their destinies were not linked. The high point of Athenian power was touched in about 430 B.C., close to the start of the Peloponnesian War. Arguably the high point of Greek power more generally came with Alexander the Great's conquest of Egypt and Persia one hundred years later. The decline and fall of Greece did not cause the fall of Rome. On the contrary: Roman power rose as Greek power declined, and it was Roman arms that put an end to the power of some of the chief Hellenistic kingdoms. Not until four hundred years after Alexander's death did the emperor Trajan expand the Roman Empire's boundaries to their greatest extent-and three more centuries passed before the Goths sacked Rome.

There are many other cases in which different parts of the world's great civilizations have faced very different political outlooks at the same time. In the Islamic world, Arab power was collapsing in Spain and declining in the western Mediterranean as the Ottoman, Persian, and Moghul empires were rising to new heights of glory in the early modern world. At the start of the twentieth century Japan established itself as a great power even as China, the source of Japanese culture and civilization, entered what seemed to most observers like the final stages of collapse and decrepitude. The differences between Europe and the English-speaking world, not the similarities, continue to shape events in the Atlantic world today, as they have done since the seventeenth century. Europe's decline-if Europe does not emerge from its current doldrums and the decline continues-does not imply a similar decline for the United States or the collapse of the maritime system, any more than the decline of the Hellenistic kingdoms after the death of Alexander implied the fall of Rome.

As early as 1850 Macaulay was able to point to more than 150 years of dire prophecy about the national debt and national ruin when he described the foundation of the Bank of England. Since Macaulay's time, 150 more years have passed, years that have rung and rung again with dire prophecies of ruin. Yet, so far, the ruin has not come. The United States was a debtor nation through the nineteenth century; it was a much greater and richer country after one hundred years of debt. The American national debt was far higher as a percentage of GDP after World War II than it was sixty years later. The ruin did not come. The press echoed and reechoed through the Reagan administration that the unprecedented budget and trade deficits of those years-hundred-billion-dollar-plus deficits stretching ahead "as far as the eye can see"-meant that ruin was at hand. The result? Between 1983 and 2006 the American economy enjoyed the two longest expansions in its history, punctuated only by short and mild recessions. The European and Japanese competitors who seemed on the point of overtaking the American economy in 1983 spent the next generation anxiously studying and seeking to replicate the extraordinary successes the American economy went on to enjoy. Far from staggering under the hideous mountains of Reagan-era debt, the Clinton administration went on to bask in a prosperity unmatched in the history of the world. The history of the maritime order suggests that the Anglo-Americans have not excelled at staying out of debt. On the contrary, they have often had larger debts than other people. But they have historically been better than others at managing debt through creative finance and flexible markets, and they have been unusually successful at making good use of borrowed money. The ability to bear staggering, unprecedented levels of debt while continuing to prosper and to grow has been the hallmark of the AngloSaxons since they borrowed the techniques of "Dutch finance" in the late seventeenth century. They may someday lose this knack, but so far they seem to be managing.

Prosperity and power in the shadow of debt is now more than three hundred years old, yet the cries continue to draw the same attention and alarm as if the phenomenon and the warning were new. At each stage in the rise of the various debt mountains of the English-speaking world, there have always been voices ready to point out that the new debts are greater than the old, and that the danger of collapse is therefore greater than ever before. Over that time prophecies of imminent financial doom have been brought forward by thoughtful, well-educated, and well-respected figures who have managed to assemble powerful arguments well fortified with bristling bulwarks of fact; they have led public and elite opinion into one bout after another of panic, pessimism, and gloom-and have been profoundly and perpetually wrong. Just as Britain was ultimately surpassed by rising powers like Russia, Germany, and the United States, the argument mns, the United States today will be left behind by rising superpowers in Asia. China and India are now achieving growth rates three to four times greater than those of the United States. Fairly quickly on the basis of purchasing power parity and more slowly on the basis of market exchange rates, the economies of these countries may match and surpass the American economy in size and technological sophistication. When that happens, the United States will be in a position like that of Great Britain in 1910: facing economic and political rivals with larger populations and larger economies than its own. In such a world, the United States, as the argument goes, would have no choice but to follow Britain's long path of decline. This kind of logic underpins part of Yale scholar Paul Kennedy's argument that the United States may be facing "imperial overstretch," a condition in which our commitments outrun our ability to maintain them. This analogy on its face seems both accurate and inevitable; it is probably the chief intellectual pillar supporting the view that some form of American decline is inevitable in the twenty-first century. But a closer look at even this analogy in the light of the history of the maritime system suggests that the forces supporting the unique American position in the world may be appreciably stronger than they appear at first glance.

To begin, Britain achieved its unique global position at a time when it had less than a third of France's population-and about half of its estimated GDP. In 1700 the U.K. is believed to have had a population of about 6 million; France had 21 million. British GDP at that time is estimated at around $10.6 million in 2006 values; the French GDP was $19.5 million.1 The same pattern held true on a global scale. In 1820, China is believed to have had the largest economy in the world, accounting for 33 percent of global GDP.2 Economically, Britain's acquisition of its Indian empire was like a toad swallowing a cow; Britain's share of global GDP in those years was only 5 percent,3 and the Indian economy remained significantly larger than Britain's through the end of the nineteenth century.4 Britain's GDP as a percentage of global GDP is believed to have peaked in about 1870 at 9 percent of total world output-almost two hundred years after Britain began its rise to world power, and at a time when some scholars believe Britain's decline had already begun.5 Clearly, the relationship between the relative sizes of economies and the political role of countries is not simple. Britain became a world power with an economy much smaller than some of the countries that opposed it. It is therefore not obvious that a decline in the relative size of a country's economy translates automatically into a declining political position. India's economy today is significantly smaller as a share of global GDP than it was in 1800, but today's united, democratic India is a far more effective force on the world stage than it was when the British were extending their authority across the subcontinent, two hundred years ago. In any case, for the foreseeable future, America's economy will account for a substantially larger percentage of global GDP than Britain's ever did. According to the World Bank, the United States currently accounts for about 28 percent of global output, and there is no sign that the U.S. will sink to anything like the single-digit percentage of global output that Britain claimed even at its peak.6

The geopolitical outlook provides additional reason to believe that the maritime order remains stably based. Some point to the European Union and some to Asia to find the powers that will one day overturn the maritime order or replace the Americans as its guiding power. This looks premature. Conditions in both Asia and Europe seem broadly favorable to the continuation of a unique American global role and to the absence (or the failure) of great -power challenges to the maritime system. Memories of the long wars between the British and their continental rivals help shape the fear occasionally voiced even today that the European continent will be the source for a new and potentially successful assault on the foundations of the maritime system. This is partly due to a sense, felt more strongly among anti-EU forces in the U.K. perhaps than in the U.S., that the integration of Europe under Franco-German leadership represents a strategic defeat for the balance-of-power politics that the English-speaking world has followed on the European mainland since the time of the Tudors. The European Union is not the triumphant Continental System of Napoleon's dreams. The finely balanced European political system provides binding legal assurances that no single country can use European institutions to impose its will on the rest. The multiple centers of power in the vast and complex Brussels bureaucracy, the tradition of collegial decision making in many European institutions, the existence of both national and EUwide judicial systems able to check the actions of executive and legislative powers, the democratic traditions and different political cultures within each member state, and the continuing disagreements among the members about foreign policy priorities all combine to make very unlikely the emergence of a single-minded, aggressive, and strategic power from the presentday EU. This is not the overthrow of the European balance of power; it is the institutionalization of the "liberties of Europe" for which the British once fought. Despite occasional transatlantic spats on everything from trade to security policy, the development of the European Union is fundamentally compatible with the continuing success of the maritime order. In many ways the European Union remains the crowning achievement of American foreign policy, and Europe, once the source of one challenge after another to the liberal democratic and maritime order, is now one of its chief pillars.

Outside the EU, Russia is the most important country in Europe, and those who envision an anti-American or anti-maritime system alliance in the twenty-first century look to some combination of Germany, Russia, and China. This grand land alliance would attempt to balance against the United States and, in particular, would seek to profit from American vulnerabilities in the Middle East. As many world leaders have discovered, this alliance is easier to envision than to consolidate. The politics of the European Union, in which many countries and smaller nationalities associate German-Russian partnerships with some of the saddest hours in their long histories, will present one important obstacle to this kind of alliance, but the most important obstacle may be Russia's vulnerabilities. The demographic and social collapse of Russia casts a heavy shadow over that country's future. The rise in mortality and the fall in birthrates since the demise of the Soviet Union have seen Russia's population fall from 148 million to 143 million between 1990 and 2006. Currently, the fertility rate is too low to maintain the existing level of population.7 From 1987 to 1999, the yearly number of births in Russia plummeted from 2.5 million to 1.2 million.8 According to official Russian projections as well as U.N. forecasts, Russia's population may decline below 100 million by 2050.9

From the Kremlin's perspective these numbers are even worse than they look. The population crisis in Russia is almost entirely concentrated among ethnic Russians. The Muslim minorities in Russia are gaining population, and the birthrates in the north Caucasus are markedly higher than in the Slavic parts of Russia. Since 1989 Russia's Muslim population has grown 40 percent to more than 25 million people.IO The non-Muslim population of the country fell by roughly 13 million people after 1990, a 10 percent decline in less than a generation. Given these trends, at least one former U.S. government official has suggested that Russia may have a Muslim majority within thirty years. II The Russian Far East is another major area of vulnerability. The sparsely populated, resource-rich territories of Asian Russia are potentially a major flash point in international politics. Today the always meager Russian population of the region is in retreat. The smaller towns and northern settlements were always heavily dependent on government subsidies and the Soviet system of control and internal exile; without these props many people are migrating back toward the heartland of European Russia. As a result, the Russian population of the Far East is falling even faster than the overall demographic level. According to demographer V. F. Galetskii, the region's population of 6.6 million in 2006 marked a drop-off of 16.5 percent since 1989, and the decline is projected to continue at least through 2025.12

The ethnic Chinese population of the region is another matter. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Chinese may move north as the Russians move west. From a population of several thousand in the I980s to over 250,000 today, this rapidly growing minority is projected by some to become the largest ethnic group in the Russian Far East by 2025.13 Meanwhile, China's economic success and growing political and military power make it an increasingly intimidating neighbor for an overstretched, underpopulated, and underperforming Russia. Bitter and resentful, still unreconciled to the loss of its superpower status after the Cold War, today's Russia is an angry, dissatisfied power that blames the United States for many of its troubles. At the same time, the failure of post-Soviet Russia to develop, so far, a viable system of liberal or even quasi-liberal capitalism means that it is unable to receive many of the economic benefits that the maritime system offers to those willing and able to play by its rules. Yet Russia's need for help containing unrest and rebellion among some of its Muslim minorities, its desire for economic cooperation, and its weak and deteriorating position in the Far East, place sharp limits on its ability to embark on a wholesale and determined policy of strategic anti-Americanism. Until and unless the wounds of the Cold War heal and Russia develops the institutional and cultural foundations for a more successful participation in the maritime system and finds a stable and satisfactory framework for its relations with former Soviet republics like Ukraine and Georgia, Americans should expect that Russia will be quick to oppose the United States where it can. It must, however, overcome daunting obstacles to become a strategic competitor like the Soviet Union, or to form a key link in an effective and enduring anti-American, anti-maritime system alliance of hostile land powers.

The signs of growing Chinese influence in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are often seen as indicators of trends that will ultimately result in the sharp reduction in American power throughout the world. Additionally, the rise of other great Asian economic and political powers such as India, combined with the increasing power and independence of Japan and others, look to many like early stages in a general erosion of the American world position. A look at the history of the maritime system suggests that this approach is both too simplistic and too gloomy. Indeed, looking at world history over the longer term suggests that far from being a danger to the maritime order and to America's unique world role, an emerging match between American national interests and the complex strategic geometry of a changing Asia presents the United States with an extraordinary set of opportunities in the twenty-first century. With three great powers (China, Japan, India), a traditional fourth (Russia), and currently or potentially significant regional powers like Indonesia, Australia, Vietnam, Thailand, and Pakistan, the world's fastest-developing region offers many favorable prospects for the key strategic, economic, and political concerns of the United States and the maritime order it seeks to preserve. Overall, Asia seems to be moving toward a complex balance of power, something like the European system that emerged after the Congress of Vienna. In this system, an offshore balancing power-Britain in 1815, the United States today-ean exercise great influence and protect its vital interests at a relatively low cost, even if other powers in the system have larger populations or economies, or even, by some measures, stronger military forces. From the classic point of view of maritime balancing powers like Britain and America, the first key feature of this situation is that it begins to look impossible for any single country realistically to aspire to an Asian hegemony. Not only does the United States stand offshore ready to build coalitions against any threatening power, the Asian powers look increasingly able to keep a rough balance on their own. Even though the rise of India and China over the long term poses a threat to Japan's standing as Asia's preeminent economic and technological power, for the foreseeable future the three great Asian powers form a potentially stable triangle. Either India or China, plus Japan, is likely to be strong enough to make it unrealistic for the third power in the triangle to seek to dominate the other two. With the United States as a second balancing power available to counter any aspiring hegemon, the path to an Asian supremacy for India, China, or Japan seems difficult if not impossible to navigate-always assuming that the other powers, including the United States, recognize and act on their national interests. (This cannot always be counted on: France and Britain could have stopped Hitler easily in the early I930s; by 1939 it was too late.)

In the past, American policy in Asia has been haunted by the wobbly nature of the regional balance of power. Before the rise of Japan, no Asian power was developing in ways that could prevent the British and/or other Europeans from carving the region up. When Japan began its extraordinary modernization, the failure of China to follow suit (while British power waned) created an intrinsically unbalanced and dangerous situation and ultimately led to the Pacific war. For the first time in modem history, Asia today seems to have all the elements of a potentially stable balance of power. China is developing and modernizing, so is India, so are many of the (relatively) middle-size regional powers, and Japan is not fading away. In fact, the greatest danger to the United States in Asia does not come from the prospect that India and China will continue to modernize and grow; it lies in the possibility that one or both of them may fail. The economic and social transformations now sweeping through these countries make an awesome sight. Never in the history of the world have so many people experienced so much change. Despite continuing issues and problems, thus far India and China have managed this process with extraordinary success. It is less clear that their political systems can remain coherent and effective as pressures and changes accumulate. Environmental problems and social pressures could drastically affect the outlook for India, China, or both. From an American point of view, anything that interrupts their progress is a problem. If one country should falter while the other surges ahead, defending the balance of power in Asia would require a more active and perhaps risky American policy. If both countries should falter, the region could be engulfed by political, military, and economic chaos with unpredictable consequences on a global as well as a regional scale. America's strategic interests lead it to wish all Asian countries well, to support the development of major and minor powers in the region, and to promote integration and cooperation among the major Asian powers. Here Richard Haass's characterization of the coming era for the United States as one of opportunity is surely the right one. The United States is uniquely positioned to play an extraordinary and positive role in Asian politics in the twenty-first century; the consequences for Asia, for world politics, and for the United States itself if we take full advantage of this great opportunity will be truly historic.

THE LONG VIEW of Anglo-American history makes inexorable decline look unlikely; it does not, however, support the opinion held by some commentators that the United States will remain the "unipolar" center of world politics. There have been unipolar and bipolar moments during the history of the maritime system. After Britain's 1763 victory in the Seven Years' War, it had achieved a recognized position as the leading hegemonic power in the Mediterranean basin, the Americas, and Asia. After the fall of Napoleon, only Russia could match Britain's influence-and even then, Russia was largely a European power, while Britain was unchallenged as the leading global power. Through much of the nineteenth century, Britain's prestige, wealth, and global reach put it in a league of its own. Yet there were also moments when Britain could be better described as the first among equals in a world of more balanced competition and power-or when it was able to hold its own against powers like Spain or France only because it joined coalitions that it could not always control. In the shorter period of American leadership since the end of World War II, the position of the United States in the international system has moved through different phases. Immediately after the Second World War, the United States enjoyed overwhelming economic advantages: it was the world's largest and most advanced producer and exporter of oil and of most agricultural commodities in a world facing famine, as well as the leading manufacturing power from the standpoint of both quantity and technological sophistication; in its communications and financial capacities it towered above all possible rivals. In the military sphere it was the world's only nuclear power, and no other country could match America's ability to send conventional forces to all comers of the earth and then support them. Indeed, for some years after World War II, no other power was capable of sustaining overseas military adventures without the blessing and even the support of the United States.

Not even after the Cold War would the United States enjoy this kind of global primacy, but is decline really the best word to describe what happened to American power between 1945 and 1989? There were terrible setbacks in those years: the rising Communist tide in so many developing countries including, most tragically, China; the inconclusive war in Korea; the defeat in Vietnam; the continuing decline of Britain; the Soviet Union's successful drive for nuclear and strategic parity; the peak, followed by the gradual decline, of America's oil production; the Iranian revolution; growing anti-Americanism in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East; the rise of powerful and successful technological and economic rivals to American firms first in Europe and Japan, then throughout the developing world. The list can be extended-but surely America was richer and its key interests more secure after the Cold War than in 1945, when Europe teetered on the brink of starvation and Communist takeovers, the global economy lay in ruins, and against the hard-eyed certainty of Communism and its acolytes neither the Americans nor anyone else had a clear idea about a path forward. The real question about the future of American power is less whether the world will be more or less unipolar in 2015 or 2050 than it was in 1946 or even 1989 than whether the United States will be able to secure and promote the maritime system as time goes by. For some, this will seem like a counterintuitive proposition, but there are many circumstances in which a reduction of American unipolarity will actually promote the defense and development of the maritime system rather than undermine it. Developments in Europe after both the Napoleonic Wars and World War II illustrate this point. After the fall of Napoleon, only Russia could match British prestige and influence. France was defeated, Austria had been shaken to the core, Prussia had yet to recover from the shocks and traumas of the war. All over Europe, trembling monarchs on their shaky thrones waited with bated breath in fear that the revolutionary forces unleashed in France would explode once again and plunge Europe into another generation of ruinous conflict. As France, Prussia, Austria, and the lesser powers stabilized after the Congress of Vienna, and as the continental economies recovered from war and began to master the techniques of the Industrial Revolution, Britain's ability to influence events on the European mainland tended to diminish. Yet Britain was clearly safer and richer, and its global position clearly more comfortable and sustainable as Europe "normalized" after the wars. After 1815 it would be many decades before the rise of other European powers posed a serious threat to Great Britain, and even then the dynamism and power of the United States meant that the maritime system was becoming more deeply entrenched as the unipolar and bipolar eras of the early nineteenth century yielded to a more multipolar world.

Indeed, the growing multipolarity of post-Napoleonic Europe strengthened Britain's world position. The return of a balance-of-power system in Europe, especially one that was-at least until the time of Bismarck's wars-accepted as necessary and even legitimate by all the European powers, including the strongest one, was a great strategic asset for Britain's world role. It was a good thing that British fleets had been able to blockade the continent during the wars, and that Wellington's forces could defeat Napoleon in pitched battles. It was, however, much better not to have to mount the blockades or fight the battles and to enjoy the benefits of a European order that safeguarded British interests without sustained British involvement. Events after World War II have followed a somewhat similar course in Europe. The strategic goals of American policy (preventing one strong country from controlling the rest, an end to generations of warfare, promotion of liberal political and economic models, market access for American producers and investors, cooperation in facing regional security challenges) have been greatly advanced even as direct American political power has diminished. A similar trade-off in Asia would strengthen rather than erode the foundations of the mantlme system and secure vital American interests at steadily diminishing cost. The long view tells us that unipolarity is neither the most desirable nor the most typical form that Anglo-American power has taken during the history of the maritime system; in the past, a shift from a unipolar world to a world order compatible with the maritime system in which many powers have voices has not represented a decline in AngloAmerican power. Rather, it is a sign of successful diplomacy and of a fortunate tide in world affairs. This is why the emergence of a multipolar international system in Asia can be an extraordinary opportunity for the United States and its maritime system. The interests of the key Asian powers appear to be aligned with those of the United States and of the liberal capitalist order; American interests are never more secure than when multiple pillars support the system. This ability to match strategic and economic interests with those of important countries around the world is one of the core advantages of sea-power strategies. The offshore balancing power that is interested in an open global trading system poses less threat and offers more opportunity to more partners than traditional land powers can usually match. A narrow focus on the American world role gives something like sixty years of precedent and experience, from World War II through the "war on terror." But if we look back at the whole rise of the maritime system we find a much richer historical memory; American power seems more deeply rooted in the structure of world politics than it does when one looks at the United States alone. The United States is the leading state in a power system with a threehundred-year history, one that has flourished under many different sets of conditions. It rose when both the Netherlands and Britain had smaller populations and fewer natural resources than rivals they ultimately defeated; it has weathered many storms and surmounted many challenges. It has fought many different kinds of wars with many different coalitions; it has pursued its basic goals in many different ways under changing conditions. America's world role is not a mushroom that sprang up suddenly, almost by accident, after World War II devastated potential rivals; it was not improbably revived once more when the Soviet Union collapsed. It is the result of processes that have been shaping world history since the time of Louis XlV. The forces that support both the maritime system and American power are durable and strong.

The military and political ordeals that the maritime system endured under Dutch and British leadership were far more severe and testing than anything Americans have yet to endure. The Dutch saw their homeland invaded, their cities razed; they were forced to open the dikes to flood their low-lying farms in order to keep their enemies at bay. Philip II at one point put all the Dutch under a universal sentence of death for the crimes of heresy and rebellion. In 1588,1803, and again in 1940 Britain awaited a possible invasion by powerful forces that if they weren't stopped at sea could not be stopped at all. This history suggests rather dismally that the Americans need to prepare themselves for greater and sterner tests than they have so far endured. Yet should the world darken and the threats grow until the United States stands alone or almost so against large and fanatical enemies, the British and Dutch victories in those earlier conflicts will be beacons of hope in trials yet to come. Above all, history teaches the vital importance of sea power in the broadest sense for both the domestic prosperity and the international position of the United States. The combination of geopolitical and economic strategies with an enduring domestic commitment to a dynamic society powered the Dutch and British versions of the maritime system for centuries. This combination remains, or always ought to remain, the central concern of American statesmanship today.

Develop and maintain an open, dynamic society at home; turn the economic energy of that society out into world trade; protect commerce throughout the world and defend the balance of power in the world's chief geopolitical theaters; open the global system to others, even to potential competitors in time of peace; turn the system against one's opponents in war; promote liberal values and institutions wherever one can. This sea-power strategy remains, in the words of Ronald Searle's fictional English schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, "how to be topp" in the global power competition, and the United States remains a sea power in the fullest sense of the phrase. Maintaining the health and the vitality of the maritime order is the primary task facing American leaders in the twenty-first century. Debates over American grand strategy, international economic policy, and domestic policy need to be set in this context, and policy alternatives evaluated in terms of whether their likely outcomes will shore up and extend or weaken and diminish this order. To the degree that American foreign policy debates take the health of the maritime order into account, these debates will have greater coherence than they often do now. Both expert and lay opinion will incorporate a set of common ideas about the structure of American interests, and the advocates of different policy prescriptions will be able to build greater support for their proposals to the degree that they can convincingly show how their prescriptions will advance a set of interests that are generally understood. For almost four hundred years, taking the Dutch experience into account, the countries that have been willing and able to follow this strategy consistently have prospered, even triumphed. Such a heritage should not be lightly cast aside. Spain, France, Germany, Japan, the Soviet Union: all these great powers once fought great wars against the maritime order. Once each of these powers seemed wrapped in an air of power and triumph; their armies bristled with advanced weapons, their military leadership included men of great courage and wisdom; their brilliant diplomats dominated world politics and they assembled great and intimidating alliances; often, the world's leading intellectuals sang hosannas to the glory and the wonder of the philosophy or religion in whose name they marched.

More than once, the maritime powers have been foolish and divided. At times they have been late to recognize danger and slow to act. At other times they have rashly embarked on campaigns that increased the dangers they faced and strengthened the coalitions they fought. Greed, cowardice, arrogance, complacency, sloth, and self-righteousness: every vice known to history has flourished in the politics and policy of the maritime states. They have committed almost every possible folly and crime. They have neglected the rise of great and dangerous rivals. They have antagonized vast swaths of the world population through cruelty and injustice. They have suffered staggering defeats. They periodically lost their grip on the stubborn realities of international life and squandered great opportunities to make the world better in an ill-advised rush to make it perfect. And yet, despite these failings and more, three centuries have seen the Walrus and the Carpenter advance toward more democratic, more affluent, and more open societies at home, while defending and developing the maritime system abroad.

If history teaches anything at all, it should teach Americans that this grand strategy works, that we should remain what Admiral Mahan would call a sea power in the fullest sense of the term, and that in the United States of the twenty-first century, Thomas Pelhan-Holles's comments about British policy in the eighteenth century still hold true: "Ministers in this country, where every part of the World affects us, in some way or another, should consider the whole Globe." The greatest disasters that came upon the United States-and indeed the whole world-in the last one hundred years did not come from the many American blunders in carrying out a sea-power program. The intervention in Vietnam, the rash invasion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq: these were disasters that brought untold grief and pain to innocent victims, that sacrificed the lives of honorable and patriotic soldiers, that squandered American treasure and damaged America's standing. Yet these disasters pale before the horrors brought on by isolation, abstention, and the foolish neglect of our responsibilities abroad. George Kennan, the scholar and diplomat credited with the development of the containment strategy that guided American foreign policy during the Cold War, was a bitter critic of both the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Yet Kennan's history of American foreign policy from 1900 through 1950 makes much harsher judgments about America's failure to engage comprehensively, globally, and, at times, to use force. Kennan argues that America's neglect of the deteriorating European balance of power before World War I encouraged Germany on the road to war, and that America's vacillation and delay before entering the conflict made that war longer and uglier than it had to be. This is almost certainly true; had America recognized Britain's increasing need for assistance in managing the maritime order and responded to it earlier, that war and its attendant horrors might well have been avoided. Nazism and Communism might never have come to power; hundreds of millions of lives could have been saved.

America compounded its failures and folly after that war. Wilson's tragically flawed peace proposals, the American withdrawal not only from the League of Nations but also from the European security system after the failure of the Treaty of Versailles, the willful American blindness to the danger posed by the rise of Nazi and Stalinist power: these helped make World War II inevitable in Europe and contributed to some of the darkest hours and darkest deeds the world has ever known. American folly and complacency were equally disastrous for Asia, Kennan notes, where American diplomacy feebly opposed Japanese aggression with pious sentiments, and American passivity and blindness helped bring on the agonies of the war in the Pacific and its terrible aftermath in China. No blunder, no folly, no crime, no sin of commission by American foreign policy since has been as devastating and costly as the silent sins of omission that so marked and marred the first half of the twentieth century. This, too, is a lesson of history. Americans need to be cautious and prudent, but above all they must be globally engaged. And the business on which they must be engaged is the old business of the old firm: the creation and development of a world system based on the five-point program that the Dutch first dimly envisioned. The maintenance of global geopolitical stability; the growth of global commerce and the rising prosperity of the poor; the spread of liberal and democratic institutions and practices around the world: American grand strategy must always concern itself with these goals. To the Waspophobic imagination, this strategy looks a little Mordoresque ("One Ring to rule them all, one Ring to find them, one Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"). Yet for Americans today there is no alternative. There can and should be strong debate over how, exactly, this grand strategy can best be carried out in the changing circumstances of the contemporary world, but the strategy itself, tested and tempered by time, reflects the American character and serves the nation's and indeed humanity's interest far better than anything else we could do.

The world changes. War changes. The relationships between cultures and civilizations change. There was in fact an almost ritualistic quality to the old European wars. Some wicked war leader-emperor, king, fuhrer-would cross some line in the sand, usually invading the Low Countries in violation of various solemn treaties. The British would be appalled. While intellectuals and prelates on both sides of the contest uttered threats, imprecations, and anathemas at one another, the British cracked down on whatever "fifth column" within seemed particularly troublesome at the moment and tightened their links with current or potential Continental allies and conducted various military activities in and around Europe. The European struggle spread into a world war. Britain sought to deny its enemy access to world markets and the enemy vainly sought to counter Britain's sea power. There were various disastrous expeditions, failed campaigns, episodes of gross incompetence among politicians and military leaders alike. Public opinion turned sullen. Each side industriously publicized various allegations of atrocities, a disheartening number of which were based on fact. A bidding auction broke out to lure neutral powers, however odious, onto the different sides. The enemy played the Celtic card, supporting rebellions in Scotland and/or Ireland. * The Celtic card failed, and Britain's superior economic strength gradually made itself felt. Often, this happened even as Britain and its allies were soundly and repeatedly bested in various land campaigns. But in the end the sea power system prevailed, the British won, and the old saws were heard yet again: Britain muddles through. Britain loses every battle but the last. A peace of sorts was scratched up, and the various participants licked their wounds and prepared for the next round. This pattern played itself out and the era of great European wars seems to have come to an end. As the center of world politics shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the conflicts of the future are extremely unlikely to follow the traditional pattern, and we do not need to guard against the possibility that either China or AI-Qaeda will invade the Low Countries. Nevertheless, the key principles of international relations that Americans and their allies need to review and update rather than discard the traditional five-point strategy as they prepare for the future.

* The Celtic card, originating in the medieval "auld alliance" between Scotland and France, gained new prominence as Catholic Irish and Scots Highlanders continued to support the deposed Stuart dynasty. Napoleon supported Wolfe Tone's rebellion in Ireland and the card was still being played in World War I as Germany ferried the Irish republican leader Sir Roger Casement to Ireland in a submarine. Under Norwegian colors the Germans sent a surface ship with weapons for an Irish rising; the ship was intercepted and the Easter Rising of 1916 was easily crushed. Perhaps the last example of this traditional gambit came in World War II when Germany vigorously courted the Irish government and when Rudolf Hess parachuted into Scotland to meet what he hoped was an anti -Churchill member of the Scottish nobility.

Rising antiAmericanism, and growing estrangement between the Arab world and the United States that marked the George W. Bush administration are matters of grave concern, but this is far from the greatest crisis in the long history of the maritime system. The study of the history of the maritime order can help us think more clearly about the relationship between the Anglo-Saxon powers and the world of Islam. This is not the first time that waves of Waspophobia have swept large parts of the world; it is not the first time that foolish and imprudent policies of Anglo-American governments have made a bad situation worse; it is not the first time that atrocities committed by Anglo-Saxon forces have ignited international outrage; it is not the first time that countries seeking to oppose the maritime order have been able to tap into widespread world sentiment favoring their cause. It is not even the first time all this has happened while the Walrus and the Carpenter were cluelessly congratulating themselves on the imminent global triumph of their ideas and their order. From its emergence in the revolt of Dutch Protestants against the Catholic empire of Spain, through the long struggles between Britain and France, and on through the wars of the twentieth century, the maritime order repeatedly found itself engaged in conflicts which have been, among other things, wars of religion. While each struggle has its unique features, a look back at the long history of these conflicts can help us now as we seek to avoid a great confrontation with Islam, and to help the world of Islam find an appropriate and satisfactory place in the global system. The chief lesson history offers is that this does not have to be a struggle to the death. Protestantism and Catholicism today are well integrated into the religious life of the maritime order, and endless contrasts are drawn in the Western media between Christian values, which are believed to be compatible with the liberal ideal of the open society, and the supposedly closed and unenlightened values that are seen as part of the essence of Islam. This is almost surely wrong. Catholicism had a long and bitter history of opposing the values of the open society before finally making peace with it. Even Protestantism did not at first accept the open society, and when some observers call wistfully for an "Islamic Reformation" so that Islam will become a more tolerant and open faith, they miss both the nature of the Reformation and the current condition of Islam.

The year 1856 was one of crisis for the Xhosa people in what is now the Republic of South Africa. A long series of wars with Dutch and British colonists led to the progressive loss of Xhosa territory. Most recently, the Xhosa had suffered a shattering defeat in the War of the Axe and seen British forts established in their territory. A devastating cattle disease had decimated the herds on which they depended. With former allies weakened, and a British military presence that appeared to be growing stronger and more insolent, the Xhosa leadership saw few positive options. At this moment, in May 1856, a young girl had a vision as she went down to fetch water from a pool by the river. Nongquawusa came back from the river and told her uncle that the gods had appeared to her and promised that if the Xhosa sacrificed all their cattle and destroyed all their crops, the gods would replace all the lost goods and more. Moreover, the British and indeed all the whites would die or leave the country, and the old prosperity would return. Her uncle believed her, and repeated the story to the paramount chief of the Xhosa. He, too, believed, and the word went out to the villages and tribes of the people. Some believed that this was a clever strategy to unite the people in a last great war against the British. With no food or cattle to rely on, the people would have no choice but to fall on the British settlements in a do-or-die battle. Others appear to have believed the prophecy. Eagerly awaiting the promised bounty, many built new corrals and prepared storage facilities for the expected grain. The Xhosa systematically slaughtered their cattle; 300,000 head are estimated to have been killed, and uncounted quantities of grain and other foodstuffs were destroyed. When the new cattle and grain promised by the gods failed to appear, the spirit of resistance was crushed. A famine is believed to have killed half of the Xhosa population; N ongquawusa survived, though her uncle did not.

Other cultures under this kind of stress have found similar beliefs attractive. We are in trouble, the reasoning goes, because we have not fully trusted or fully followed the righteous ways of our ancestors. Charismatic figures have visions, revelations, and dreams which promise that the old religion and old gods (or God) will deliver us from the hated foreigner if we truly repent and return. Our religion, our culture, is far more powerful than we realize, they say. If we just fully trust and believe, the hidden powers will manifest themselves, cleansing the world of our foes and restoring a righteous order to mankind. Prophets of this kind arose among the American Indians at various points in their long and losing struggles with the whites. The Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa (1775-1836) urged members of many of the native nations to purify themselves of European influence, and give up the use of European goods, and, especially, avoid substances like alcohol. Strengthened and united, they would be able to resist the settlers then pouring into the Ohio Valley. Indians who favored cooperation with the whites were accused of witchcraft; some were executed. Indians from many tribes gathered with Tenskwatawa at the settlement of Prophetstown, which flourished until a preemptive attack against United States forces under William Henry Harrison failed. Tenskwatawa's religious renewal collapsed, and Harrison went on to be elected president of the United States because of his victory over the prophet's forces at the battle of Tippecanoe. In 1890, when Harrison's grandson Benjamin was president of the United States, another movement inspired by another prophet spurred the Lakota (Sioux) people to a final struggle. At that time, the Sioux faced a major crisis as American authorities divided the Great Sioux Reservation into five smaller territories and forced Sioux families to live as farmers. A religious revival based on visions spread not only through the Sioux but through other tribal peoples of the west. The original form of the revival was syncretistic and pacifist; the Paiute prophet Wovoka (also known as Jack Wilson) reported a vision of the whites disappearing from the prairie and the return of the buffalo and the antelope-if the Indians would dance a variant of a traditional Spirit Ghost Dance. In Wovoka's vision, if the Indians lived in peace and followed the ancestral ways, God would divide the continent, making Harrison his deputy to rule the east, and putting Wovoka in charge of the west. The new movement spread throughout the West; members of the various tribes came to hear Wovoka as others had come to Tenskwatawa. Among the Sioux the pacific aspect of the revival disappeared. A belief grew up that it was not enough to dance the Ghost Dance and wait for the whites to abandon tribal lands. It would be necessary to drive them out. Fortunately, dancers wearing Spirit or Ghost Shirts would be invulnerable to the weapons of the whites. Inspired by their version of Wovoka's message, some of the Sioux refused to accept the increasingly unbearable treaty terms dictated by American forces. This resistance would end tragically at the Wounded Knee massacre. Such movements are not confined to small nations on the fringes of expanding civilizations. The Righteous Harmony Movement in China followers were known among Westerners as "Boxers," and the movement is called the Boxer Rebellion-involved a widespread belief that magic shirts would defend the wearers against bullets and that the purity and rigor with which traditional Chinese beliefs were followed would endow the practitioners with a supernatural ability to drive the foreigners away. In European history, Carlist soldiers fighting against what they saw as a secular and antireligious Spanish government believed that specially blessed images of the Blessed Heart of Jesus would protect them from the bullets of the unrighteous but well-equipped (and British-backed) enemy. As Japan faced defeat during the Second World War, there were factions in the armed forces and the government who similarly believed that a return to a (hypothetical and unhistorical) purity would yet lead the country to victory. The cult of the kamikaze pilots, the first organized corps of suicide bombers, was part of this movement. There are many other examples of a desperate culture or subculture that, on the cusp of an overwhelming and destructive encounter with a dynamic and overpowering foreign culture, came to believe that a return to its pure roots would provide a miraculous path out of an unsustainable situation.

Movements like Al-Qaeda clearly share many traits with these earlier examples. Like Tenskwatawa's followers, modem Islamic ghost dancers brand leaders who favor compromise with the foreigners as religious deviants. Visions and dreams were prevalent among the followers of Osama bin Laden during the Afghan war against the Soviets, and presumably still continue to inspire resistance today. Members of these movements believe that if they and the Muslim peoples as a whole throw off foreign and Western customs, and truly embrace the righteous ways of the early followers of Islam, God will give them victory over their enemies, however intimidating the odds may seem. Suicide bombers, hijackers on missions like the 9/11 attacks, and the human waves of enthusiastic young men charging the Iraqi front lines during the Iran-Iraq war all show the power of these beliefs to inspire people-especially young people-to face death for them. Unfortunately, ghost dancers do not always remain marginalized outsiders in the political or literal wilderness. Nongquawusa quickly gained the support of the Xhosa leaders. Tenskwatawa's movement attracted many powerful leaders and talented individuals and helped Tenskwatawa's brother Tecumseh organize one of the most effective coalitions that the American Indians ever achieved. The dowager empress Cixi supported the Boxers against foreign forces. Adolf Hitler started his political career among the isolated and marginalized ultranationalist ghost dancers of Weimar Germany and brought a ragbag collection of fanatics, lunatics, thugs, and crackpot intellectuals to power in one of the world's most powerful states. The ghost-dancing Ayatollah Khomeini took the helm in the venerable state of Iran. On the other hand, the arrival of the ghost dancers is often a sign that the struggles within a culture or civilization are reaching their climax. The most important result of the Ghost Dance movement among the American Indians was not the massacre at Wounded Knee; it was the discovery of the cultural resources and strengths that allowed Native Americans all over the country to preserve their languages and pride in the face of defeat. The most famous name in the political history of the Xhosa is Nelson Mandela, not Nongquawusa. With the defeat of the Boxers, China began the process of revolution and modernization which, through a century of horror and bloodshed, has finally seen that country moving to find a place at the center of global history. The historical fate of most ghost dancers is to illustrate by the futility of their actions that the path of rejection is closed. Once they are out of the way, the real business of renewal and adjustment can begin.

The imperatives of history force the world's civilizations into contact with one another. Whether they like it or not, all civilizations today are condemned to live in close contact, to deal with one another, and to affect one another. This is one of the ways in which liberal capitalist society imposes its own preferences on the rest of the globe: mass travel, instant communications technology, and global economic integration are products of the maritime system produced by the liberal capitalist realm to serve its own purposes, and the rest of the earth's other cultures have no choice but to address the challenges posed by a shrinking world. Both to prevent the rise and spread of terrorism and more broadly to promote the peaceful development of global society along lines favorable to the security and the interests of dynamic society, managing the relationship between the maritime system and the cultures and civilizations affected by it may well be the primary task of American foreign policy in the decades to come. The first four years of the administration of George W. Bush were almost a textbook example of the dangers that American foreign policy faces when it ignores the enduring importance of collective recognition in international life. Its European policy trampled openly on the sensibilities of Cold War allies, raising questions about the structure of the Atlantic alliance in ways that seriously reduced public support for that alliance in much of Europe. At times the Bush administration seemed to glory in its relative isolation and its capacity for unilateral action, and it was only too happy to remind countries like Germany and France that they were not the great powers they had once been. What proved to be an unnecessary and poorly planned war in Iraq reminded America's allies of the limits on America's wisdom. With gratuitous slights and grandiose posturing, men like former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld made American power odious in much of the world. This was not wise; it risked waking old memories and disturbing old ghosts best left to slumber in peace. The chief European allies of the United States today are to a large degree former foes: Satans or aspiring Satans brought low by the crushing power of the maritime system.

Many Arabs think the Crusades never ended because, for them, they haven't. For the last three hundred years, the Christian powers have been carving up the Islamic world, and first the Walrus and now the Carpenter have been the powers with the sharpest carving knives and the longest reach. The stunning reversal of Muslim history since about 1700, and the rise of the Christian West as a whole and especially of the maritime system to power over the Muslim world are the defining facts of the contemporary world for many Muslims, particularly Arabs. Many historians date the turning point from the 1699 Treaty of Karlowitz. For the first time the mighty Ottoman Empire had to yield; Russia and Poland made territorial gains, and the Austrian Hapsburgs received a right to intervene in Ottoman affairs to protect the rights of Roman Catholics. Since that time, a tsunami of Christian conquest has swept over the Muslim world. First the outlying and contestable lands fell-the khanates of Russia, the most extreme Ottoman conquests like Budapest. But the tide of disaster continued. The Dutch overcame Islamic resistance in the East Indies; Muslim power collapsed in much of Ukraine and into the Caucasus as the Orthodox Russian armies advanced. The British put increasing pressure on the Muslim states of India. The eighteenth century witnessed the decline of Muslim power, the years from 1800 to 1920 saw the fall. North Africa fell to the French and the Italians, and Muslims encountered systematic discrimination in their homelands. Tens of thousands of European settlers planted themselves on the best agricultural land and built exclusive neighborhoods like the Israeli settlements on the West Bank. Muslims paid extra taxes but could not attend good schools; native Algerian Jews received automatic French citizenship but Muslims were barred unless they abjured the use of Muslim religious law. The British brought the once-powerful Moghul Empire in India to an end, reducing the emperors to puppets before deposing the last. The Muslim emirates and sultanates of sub-Saharan Africa were crushed by European forces (mainly British and French). The Ottoman Empire itself came under more and more vigorous and unremitting attack. Christian powers vied to be named "protectors" of various Christian minorities in the empire to give their governments the right to intervene in Ottoman politics. Encouraged and often armed and supplied by Christian powers, the Christian minorities of Europe rose to fight for independence. The most bitter wars of the era were fought in modern-day Greece and the Balkans. These were wars of ethnicity and wars of religion; grievances ran deep on both sides. Over the centuries, many Greeks and Slavs had converted to Islam, while Turks and other Muslims had settled throughout the empire. As the Greeks, Bulgarians, Romanians, Croats, and Serbs sought to regain their independence in the nineteenth century, supported by one or more of the European Christian powers, savage and brutal warfare spread throughout the region. Hundreds of thousands of civilians on both sides were killed in one vicious atrocity after another. Muslims killed Christians, Christians killed Muslims-and often killed Jews for good measure. When Russian forces drove the Turks out of Bulgaria in the 1870s, panicky Bulgarian Jews fled with the Muslims, fearing the attacks of their Christian neighbors and the forces of the Russian tsar. According to historian Justin McCarthy's Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821-1922, approximately five million European Muslims were driven from their homes between 1821 and 1922 in the greatest movement of ethnic cleansing in Europe until the forced removals of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia following World War II. A century of ethnic cleansing and murder converted the former territories of the Ottoman Empire in Europe from a population with an absolute majority of Muslims to a region with a Christian majority. Between 1912 and 1920 alone, an estimated 62 percent of the Muslim population of southeastern Europe (excluding Albania) disappeared, fled, or was killed or driven into exile.1O Twenty-seven percent of the original Muslim population died. Many of the survivors fled to what became Turkey;lI one-fifth of Turks today are descended from Balkan refugees, and no doubt they receive both pleasure and instruction from the many lectures showered on them by earnest Western politicians urging Turkey to live up to European values.

The final stage came with World War 1. The British had previously made themselves the paramount power in the Persian Gulf, imposing themselves on Persians and Arabs alike--even before the region's oil was discovered. The Ottomans held the British off at Gallipoli, but across the Arab Middle East British armies advanced into the Arab heartland of Islam almost at will. The Crusaders briefly emerged from historical obscurity in Britain in 1917, when joyful Britons hailed General (later Field Marshal) Edmund Allenby, who entered Jerusalem on December 9, 1917. After the war, virtually the entire Arab world was divided among the European powers, with Britain having by far the largest share, and France coming second. By 1920, when the British Empire reached its geographical peak, more Muslims lived under British rule than had ever lived under any Muslim caliph or sultan. An empire that included one-fourth of the world's people and one-fourth of its land surface ruled over more than half of the world's Muslims, and in much of the world, Britain was seen as the leading imperialist power and the greatest threat to the freedom and the religion of Muslims. "We certainly do not want to administer their disgusting territories and people," the British "political advisor" in Bahrain stated at one point.  The British preferred to rule indirectly through local elites and royal families. Some of these families still sit on Middle Eastern thrones today; many Middle Easterners believe that the United States is pursuing a slightly modernized version of Britain's traditional practice of indirect rule. From the standpoint of the Arab world, then, the Crusades are not an ancient and misty memory of Saladins and Paladins whacking away. The last three hundred years have seen one invasion after another by the Christian powers of lands that the Muslim world considered part of its own territory. No comer of the Muslim world was or is safe from this unrelenting onslaught. Since Allenby's entry into Jerusalem, the third holiest city in Islam has been mostly under either Christian or Jewish rule. At the time of this writing, the seat of the first great caliphate in Baghdad is patrolled by American troops. The dependence of Saudi Arabia, site of the holiest places * Balkan history in this period is, of course, a controversial subject. I do not wish to imply that the Ottomans and the Muslims were innocent of atrocities; all sides sometimes behaved badly in a century of vicious and bitter conflict. My goal here is not to balance the accounts and give a dispassionate and evenhanded account of the period; my goal is to help a Western and non-Muslim audience understand the perceptions behind contemporary Muslim attitudes toward the West. in Islam, on the American military for its security has been demonstrated over and over.

Decolonization has not given Muslims the recognition they hoped for. Muslim power in India was not restored when the British left; most of British India has become an aggressive and growing Hindu power. Muslims are left as minorities in India, or as citizens in troubled and less powerful Pakistan and Bangladesh. No Arab state outside the tiny sheikhdoms of the Gulf has achieved European or American standards of affluence. Worse, East Asia has long passed the Arab world as China, Korea, and other Asian countries advance. This is the context in which Arab opinion (and indeed much Muslim opinion throughout the world) views American foreign policy and the state of Israel. Israel is simply the latest in a long line of incursions into Muslim territories; Muslims are shoved aside and Europeans (and Middle Eastern Jews) are preferred, just as they were in Algeria. The Muslims huddle in miserable camps, as they did in Anatolia after the various ethnic cleansings of the Balkan Wars. Arrogant Christian powers lecture Muslims on moral and civilizational values as they recklessly play with the fates of Muslim peoples for the sake of their own imperial games. The Americans, like the British, are utterly inflexible where their national interests are concerned and where oil is at stake. And American power is even more omnipresent than British power used to be. On top of all that, the secrets of economic success still seem hidden away. The Israelis are prospering more on their strip of worthless sand than the Egyptians or the Syrians, to say nothing of the Iraqis, with their oil and water riches.

This is not a complete and is certainly not an unbiased account of the last three hundred years of Muslim-Christian relations, and it does not include other, more positive elements in the relationship, but the context described here is an important fact with which American foreign policy in the region must work. In Arab eyes, the maritime system and the European civilization from which it sprang lack legitimacy from almost every point of view. Religiously it is both alien and hostile. Geopolitically it is responsible for centuries of wrong, and today its power is seen as continuing to block the aspirations of Muslim states. Its firm support of Israel is not an isolated instance; it is part of a long established pattern of anti-Muslim, anti-Arab foreign policy. Into this charged environment came Bush and Blair, intoning pieties about individual rights, the virtues of liberal economic policy, the need for massive revolutionary upheaval in the Arab world, and the universal principles of moral law. Many Arabs dismissed this as simply the usual happyclappy Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy, meaningless background noise for the invasion of Iraq. Others saw it as an attempt to undermine Arab cohesion and resistance in the service of some sinister plot connected either to Israeli expansionism, oil, or both. Still others saw it as the latest stage of a conscious and well-developed plan to undermine Islam, hatched by the enemies of God. Yet there is no way forward without a much deeper encounter between the United States and the Arab world, and this encounter cannot succeed unless the Carpenter can learn to talk less and listen more. It appears very unlikely that the Arab world will quickly develop the ability to surf the waves of global change. And what is true of the Arab world is true also of a number of other Muslim societies, of Russia, and of substantial portions of Latin America and Africa. And there will be conflicts within societies between ethnic groups and between elites and the masses as some groups run faster than others within individual countries. Even those countries like India and China that have found new success are likely to face increasing challenges as the pace of change accelerates, and social pressures and conflicts arise.

The situation becomes more dire at the international level. The larger and grander the abstraction, the less critical we are of the claims, and the less need we feel to recognize the just claims of those who belong to competing camps. It is patriotic to make large claims for our nation, pious to make them for our faith. Great powers exhibit the arrogance of power, trampling over the rights and concerns of smaller peoples and weaker nations with little real awareness of what they have done. But there is also an arrogance of impotence; wronged peoples attach a cosmic importance to those wrongs, demand impossible things, and reject realistic compromises out of a romantic attachment to "ideals" they feel to be nonnegotiable. Into all this comes the mix of anger, resentment, blindness, and bigotry that Herder and Berlin found among nations who are or perceive themselves to be victims, and the weak with their own bitterness and limits then engage with the blindness, arrogance, self-centeredness, and self-righteousness of the strong. The greatest conflicts and the greatest crimes often stem from the noblest aspirations, and the same collectivities that give life meaning and offer opportunities for solidarity serve also as the seedbeds of conflict. This is both a tragic and an ironic view of the world. It is tragic because the noblest human aspirations are undermined by the flaw deep in our nature. It is ironic because it is when we are most confident that we are acting righteously, most sure of the moral ground beneath our feet that we are in the greatest danger. To achieve such a rich and paradoxical view of the world using the classic elements of Anglo-American thought is a remarkable thing, and Niebuhr can justly be ranked among the greatest and most profound thinkers twentieth century America produced.

AS AMERICANS STRIVE TO UNDERSTAND the nature of the threat revealed by the terror attacks of 9/II and to develop a foreign policy stance that can guide them through this latest challenge to the maritime order, Niebuhr's ideas seem more compelling and vital than ever. More even than in the Cold War, the United States will have to combine a capacity for action and assertion with a capacity for reflection and self-criticism. The world of religiously motivated Middle Eastern terrorists is far more alien to most Americans than was communism. Marxism, after all, is a product of the same Western civilization that produced the United States, and the worldview of its Soviet adherents was recognizable and comprehensible though repugnant to many Americans. Niebuhr himself had been a socialist and was a serious student both of Marx and of the intellectual history that shaped his worldview. To understand the terrorists, and to understand the shades of opinion surrounding the movement, much less to learn how to operate effectively in the political and cultural environment of the modern Middle East, the United States must make larger intellectual and cultural leaps than it did in the Cold War. It will have to come to terms with rage and frustration that is more deeply seated, more diffuse, and harder to reconcile than the mix of anticapitalism, Occidentalism, and Russian nationalism that powered the Soviet Union. The task will be all the more difficult in that the religious overtones and connotations of the terror threat invoke deeply seated collective identities both in the mostly Muslim Middle East and in the mostly Christian United States. For both sides the greatest possible disaster would be to regard one another as enemies in an escalating spiral of misunderstanding, provocation, violence, and retaliation. Given the history, and given the religious and cultural differences, this would be a dangerous possibility under any circumstances; with disciplined, highly trained terrorists seeking to bring about just such an outcome a worst-case scenario can look ominously likely. To broaden our horizon from the Middle East to the world at large, the diplomacy of civilizations involves handling the relationship between capitalism, a system with global implications that forces every country to adjust and respond, and the separate identities, aspirations, and attitudes of the many different societies affected by the maritime system. And in a world where many countries already feel with the Red Queen that they are running as fast as they can, capitalism is a relentless taskmaster demanding that everyone go faster and faster.

The worldview that emerges from this picture is not one of unrelieved darkness and gloom. There is real room for improvement. Not just individuals, but nations and civilizations can learn from mistakes. The diplomacy of civilizations is not just an eternal and desperate attempt to stave off a perpetually threatening set of conflicts. Good policy and thoughtful global engagement on our part can reduce the likelihood of such conflicts. Utopia is not just around the comer, but we can and should work for modest improvements. Here one returns to Niebuhr's idea of "just enough": just enough national and cultural growth to better fit us for the diplomacy of civilizations; just enough success in that diplomacy to prevent the collisions and clashes between the world's classes and cultures from plunging us all into a bottomless pit of destruction and war. Even this may be more than we get, but it is well worth the try.

 

Anglo-American Ascendance P.1.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.3: Asia in the New Spatial Order.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.4: The China Blockade.

Anglo-American Ascendance P.5: The Japan Blockade

Anglo-American Ascendance P.6: Opium War

 

1. Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: Development Center of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 2001), 261.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid

4. Ibid

5. Ibid

6. World Development Indicators Database, World Bank, July I, 2006, http:// siteresources. worldbank.org/ DATASTATISTICS/Resources/GDP.pdf (accessed March ro, 2005).

7. Julie DaVanzo and Clifford Grammich, "Dire Demographics: Population Trends in the Russian Federation," RAND Corporation (200r), 21.

8. Ibid.

9. Steven Eke, "Russia Faces Demographic Disaster," BBC, June7, 2006.

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