Shariah is coming! Shariah is coming!

[SteveMetz]

Steve, a nice article but with two significant caveats.

1) I don't think you've established that Islamophobic sentiments have become dominant within the American political establishment. It might have found a receptive audience in large segments of the American population, but that's a far cry from actually becoming influential over either the policy community or the political community as a whole. Americans generally don't vote on foreign policy, and while there is a lot of free-floating hostility out there that can coalesce around cultural markers, that's not the same as formulating a new foreign policy direction. American alliances with Muslim countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia are deeply embedded. Anti-Americanism in both places has run far higher in the past than Islamophobia has in the U.S., but that has not prevented Turkish or Saudi elites from deepening the alliance further for much the same reason --- domestic constituencies often have greater priorities than the relationship with the U.S.

2) Even assuming your point about anti-Muslim feelings becoming a driving force in American foreign policy, I cannot see how this leads to inevitably to disengagement/containment or smaller defense budgets. There are enormous domestic political constituencies invested in larger defense budgets. A forward-leaning Islamophobic American foreign policy is also possible, based on aggressive military action against supposed threats (which would now extend to a far greater spectrum of Muslim 'enemies') and a greater tolerance for civilian casualties.

In this quintessentially pyschological conflict, I don't think it matters whether America actually IS Islamophobic. What matters is whether a large segment of the population in the Islamic world believes it. And since the publics there are already prone to believe that, all it takes is the occasional Koran burning or mosque protest to sustain the perception. People in the Islamic have difficulty believing that Gingrich, Palin, Boykin, Gaffney and Fox News don't reflect the dominant position within the American public and elite. Remember that a hefty portion of the public in the Islamic world already believes that Israel and American Jews control public opinion. Again, the reality (or unreality) of this matters less than the perception.

Being Americans, though, we think like Americans. We believe that if we can show polls to people in the Islamic world demonstrating that 51% of Americans don't have negative attitudes toward Islam, that will suffice. I don't think it will.

And my point was that the more democratic governments in the Islamic world become, the more anti-Americanism will influence their policies. Just compare Turkey's relationship to the U.S. today to its relationship under the military junta. Same with Pakistan.

I believe that means that our best partners are going to be despots like Mubarak and the house of Saud. The more democracy grows, the less receptiveness to us.

Is that a basis for a global strategy?

On defense budgets, I agree with you. I simply suggested that shifting from the forward strategy in the Islamic world would give us the opportunity to shrink it. We may eschew that opportunity and simply find some new mission or threat to focus on. Maybe the Navy and Air Force will win out and China will become our focus threat.