Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East

doi:10.1017/CBO9781139021760.011

10 - Impatient Crusaders: The Making of America’s Informal Empire in the Middle East

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014

Douglas J. Little

Edited by

Frank Costigliola and

Michael J. Hogan

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Douglas J. Little: Affiliation:
Clark University
Frank Costigliola: Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
Michael J. Hogan: Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Springfield

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Summary

The rise of communism in our world is comparable to the rise of Islam and its challenge of Christian civilization in the high Middle Ages. Some of the measures we take against it are informed by the same lack of realism which characterized the Crusades. The Islamic power finally waned. It was destroyed not so much by its foes as by its own inner corruptions. The Sultan of Turkey found it ultimately impossible to support the double role of political head of a nation and the spiritual head of the Islamic world. Stalin has this same double role in the world communist religion. He or his successors will finally be convicted of insinuating the power impulses of a Russian state into the Messianic illusions of an ostensibly world-wide political religion. If we fully understand the deep springs which feed the illusions of this religion, the nature of the social resentments which nourish them and the realities of life which must ultimately refute them, we might acquire the necessary patience to wait out the long run of history while we take such measures as are necessary to combat the more immediate perils.

– Reinhold Niebuhr, 1952

New York City was unseasonably warm in January 1952 when Reinhold Niebuhr – pastor, political activist, and public intellectual – sat down in his study at Union Theological Seminary to ponder the Cold War. As he put the finishing touches on The Irony of American History, the fifty-nine-year-old Middle Westerner marveled at America’s rapid emergence as a superpower, but he also worried that those who regarded the United States as an “innocent nation in an innocent world” were in for a rude awakening in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Niebuhr was convinced that if Americans remained patient, the current communist threat to democracy would, like the Islamic challenge to Christianity during the Middle Ages, gradually disappear, “destroyed not so much by its foes as by its own inner corruptions.”

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Type: Chapter
Information: America in the World
The Historiography of American Foreign Relations since 1941
, pp. 212 - 235

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139021760.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2013

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