One of the differences between Trump and Clinton seems to be that Clinton promises to use American cleverness to achieve diverse foreign policy goals while Donald Trump promises to refrain from meddling with disputes outside of our (fully walled?) borders. We have already seen how this worked out in Afghanistan, where building up jihadists against the Soviet-allied regime resulted in us facing a formidable enemy twenty years later. Was that a unique blunder?
Lawrence in Arabia suggests otherwise. Germany is today facing an influx of millions of refugees from wars in Islamic regions that were, 100 years ago, governed in an orderly fashion. What were the best minds of German foreign policy doing back then?
Max von Oppenheim wanted to rearrange the regional political chessboard through stoking the fires of Islamic jihad. He had begun formulating the idea shortly after taking up his consular position in Cairo. In Oppenheim’s estimation, the great Achilles’ heels of Germany’s principal European competitors—Great Britain, France, and Russia—were the Muslim populations to be found within their imperial borders, populations that deeply resented being under the thumb of Christian colonial powers. As the only major European power never to have attempted colonization in the Muslim world, Oppenheim propounded, Germany was uniquely positioned to turn this situation to its advantage—especially if it could forge an alliance with the Ottoman Empire. If it came to a Europe-wide war, Oppenheim posited in a flurry of reports to the German foreign ministry, and the Ottoman authorities in Constantinople could be persuaded to call for a holy war against the Christian occupiers of their former lands, what would happen in British-ruled Egypt, or French Tunisia, or the Russian Caucasus? One person who was itching to find out was Kaiser Wilhelm II. Forwarded some of Oppenheim’s “war by revolution” treatises, the German emperor quickly became a committed proponent of the jihad notion. Wilhem saw to it that Oppenheim, “my feared spy,” was promoted at the Cairo embassy, assuming the somewhat ironic title of chief legal counsel.
Until the blessed day of pan-Islamic jihad came, there was plenty of work to be done in British Egypt. Through the early 1900s, Oppenheim spent much of his time—and not a little of his personal fortune—quietly wooing a broad cross section of the Egyptian elite opposed to British rule: tribal sheikhs, urban intellectuals, nationalists, and religious figures. While he had already won the kaiser to his jihadist ideas, in 1907 Oppenheim gained another adherent in the form of his new subordinate, Curt Prüfer. Enough with scholarly articles and Egyptian shadow plays; under the tutelage of his charismatic supervisor, Prüfer now saw the opportunity to spread gasoline over the region, put a match to it, and see what happened.
Germany suffered millions of casualties in the war that it started against the Soviet Union. What was happened 25 years earlier?
In mid-March, just days after he had set off for Abdullah’s camp, the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty in Russia had come to an abrupt end. Faced with paralyzing industrial strikes by workers demanding an end to the war, and a semimutinous army that refused to move against those workers, Czar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. The provisional government that had replaced the czar vowed to keep Russia in the Entente, but with the chaos worsening, there was growing doubt in other European capitals about just how long Petrograd might stand to that commitment. In fact, though no one yet realized it, the seed of the new Russian government’s destruction had already been sown through one of the most successful subversion operations in world history. On April 1, the German secret police had quietly gathered up a group of leftist Russian exiles, men just as opposed to the new moderate regime as they had been to the czar, and arranged their passage home. Among the returning malcontents was a Marxist named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, soon to become better known by his nom de cadre, Lenin.
Lawrence in Arabia is an interesting book that sheds light on our foreign policy challenges today.
It’s fair to portray Clinton as more interventionist than Trump, but I think you are cherry picking to get to “Donald Trump promises to refrain from meddling with disputes outside of our (fully walled?) borders”.
“So you would keep troops in Iraq after this year?” asked Evans.
“I would take the oil,” Trump responded.
“I don’t understand how you would take — does that mean keeping troops there, or staying involved in Iraq?”
“You heard me, I would take the oil,” Trump repeated. “I would not leave Iraq and let Iran take the oil.”
Whether he understood it or not, in that exchange Donald was proposing an extended, large scale occupation of Iraq.
H-Rod’s foreign policy is make checks payable to the Clinton foundation if you want stuff.
Interesting book, I’ll have to look it up. From past readings of history of WWI, I carried an impression (confirmed now by Wikipedia), that it primarily was the German Foreign Minister, Arthur Zimmerman, who came up with the bright idea that shipping a sealed wagon-load of Russian Kaffeklatsch revolutionaries through Germany to Russia in order to subvert the burgeuois Kerensky government (Feb 1917) there would stop right there. The same fellow essentially also triggered Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the WWI (Wilson was elected on a platform of staying neutral). Clearly, the gent slept through the lecture on the laws of unintended consequences.
(As an aside, during recent commemorations of the outbreak and c[o]urse of WWI on European English-speaking channels, hardly anything was said about such behind-the-scenes machinations by the Germans… perhaps because that time period isn’t exactly devoid of other mega-fuckups with grave repercussions to this very day).
Not to mention that WW II in Europe was just the resumption of WW I after an intermission.
Finding tenuous links between current political events and Western foreign policy from the past is a popular sport these days, but this one is one of the more elaborate ones I’ve seen 🙂
What makes the Middle-East and Afghanistan so susceptible to Western Foreign policy? East-Asia certainly wasn’t treated any better by the Western powers, but it hasn’t come back to haunt us. And it’s not Islam. Indonesia was abused for centuries by my country but, despite it being the largest Muslim nation in the world, the fallout we’ve suffered from that has been fairly minimal.
And the European powers were completely ruthless in dealing with Africa, but Africans so far have been unable to return the favor.