Kishore Mahbubani: America's Conflicting Destinies
[Kishore Mahbubani is dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of “The New Asian Hemisphere: The Irresistible Shift of Global Power to the East.”]
President Barack Obama’s departure for his first trip to Asia as president was delayed by a day to allow him to attend the memorial service for victims of the Fort Hood massacre. The delay symbolized well the tension between America’s two destinies.
The United States would like to link more closely with the Asia-Pacific century that it has sparked. Yet it is constantly held back by its tragic involvement with the Islamic world.
The biggest strategic mistake America made in the 20th century was to interweave the destiny of 300 million Americans with the fate of 1.3 billion Muslims.
It did this in several ways. First, it created and stoked an army of jihadists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then, after the Cold War ended, thoughtlessly walked away from its creation. Second, it backtracked from a sensitive and balanced policy on the Israel-Palestine dispute — which had paved the way for Camp David (1978), Madrid (1991) and the Oslo Accords (1993) — for an unbalanced, partisan position that angered and humiliated many Muslims.
Of course we can read the tragic and senseless killings at Fort Hood as the deranged act of one man. But it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge that some of the anger he expressed reflects a larger anger in the Islamic world.
Indeed, many of the tragedies that America has experienced in recent decades reflect America’s troubled entanglement with the Islamic world — Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of these troubles were predestined; they are the result of geopolitical hubris and incompetence...
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President Barack Obama’s departure for his first trip to Asia as president was delayed by a day to allow him to attend the memorial service for victims of the Fort Hood massacre. The delay symbolized well the tension between America’s two destinies.
The United States would like to link more closely with the Asia-Pacific century that it has sparked. Yet it is constantly held back by its tragic involvement with the Islamic world.
The biggest strategic mistake America made in the 20th century was to interweave the destiny of 300 million Americans with the fate of 1.3 billion Muslims.
It did this in several ways. First, it created and stoked an army of jihadists to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then, after the Cold War ended, thoughtlessly walked away from its creation. Second, it backtracked from a sensitive and balanced policy on the Israel-Palestine dispute — which had paved the way for Camp David (1978), Madrid (1991) and the Oslo Accords (1993) — for an unbalanced, partisan position that angered and humiliated many Muslims.
Of course we can read the tragic and senseless killings at Fort Hood as the deranged act of one man. But it would be intellectually dishonest not to acknowledge that some of the anger he expressed reflects a larger anger in the Islamic world.
Indeed, many of the tragedies that America has experienced in recent decades reflect America’s troubled entanglement with the Islamic world — Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of these troubles were predestined; they are the result of geopolitical hubris and incompetence...