[Rockingham]

The Brits are the only ones since Rome who come close to the US record of success in war. Yet as a world power, the Brits came off second best in a one on one match-up against a nascent US and its revolutionary founding principles. A century and a half later, the Brits became reliant on US power for national survival and adapted to their current role as a loyal US ally.

Germany and France both had brief and storied runs as dominant military powers, but both lost badly in the end. Although Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany could win battles, they were unable to fashion war-winning strategies.

In another parallel with Rome, the US is a status quo power in its strategies but a revolutionary power in its appeal. The US aims to preserve the current favorable international order that emerged after WW II, yet it also promotes modernity, capitalism, human rights, and democracy. For much of the world, these are appealing but deeply disruptive.

With that in mind, it is a sign of both a lack of realism and a lack of intellectual grasp of grand strategy that the US has not fully embraced and promoted a reform agenda in the Muslim world. In the battle of ideas, human rights, democracy, and fair treatment of women would do much to counter Islamist radicalism and subvert the medieval mindset of Muslim societies. The terror war is early in its middle stages though and such an approach may yet be adopted.

[Sherman Logan]

Sorry, but I’m not sure you’re right. Your idea assumes that Muslims consider “human rights, democracy, and fair treatment of women” to constitute “reform.”

The actual fact is that many of them consider “reform” to be a return to the early days of Islam. IOW, Islamism is reformist, to them.

Everybody is in favor of reform. Take “immigration reform.” I’m as much in favor as La Raza. Except that our definition of what would constitute reform differ pretty drastically.

To a great many Muslims, becoming more like the West does not constitute “reform.” Given that our society is at least as much about promiscuity, drug use, atheism and moral laxity as it is about human rights, they have a point.

In particular, what we would call “fair treatment of women” they would often call exploitation of women. To some extent they have a point here too. Women has, in my estimation, gotten the short end of the sexual revolution stick.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the very notion of “reform” as a self-evident good implies a basic consensus in society as to what is the right direction for us to be moving. Reform is the policy that moves us in that direction. Absent such consensus there can be no reform, as such, just competing policy ideas.