Beyond Ukraine and Gaza: the battle for the soul of the west

Friday, August 1st, 2014

As the current conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine continue to dominate international headlines, it is worth stepping back and taking a longer view.

The forces fighting Israel are essentially the same as those trying to remove Bashar al-Assad in Syria and those seeking to take over Afghanistan on the borders with Russia – radical Sunni jihadists, most notably the group ISIS who look back to the tradition of the conquering caliphate.

Their sworn enemy is not primarily the liberal West or the imperial United States, but instead Catholic and Orthodox Christendom.

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed leader of the Islamic State stretching from Iraq to Syria, has called on Muslims to rally behind his pan-Islamic project:

“Rush O Muslims to your state. It is your state.

“Syria is not for Syrians and Iraq is not for Iraqis. The land is for the Muslims, all Muslims.

“This is my advice to you. If you hold to it you will conquer Rome and own the world, if Allah wills.”

This should come as no surprise to anyone.

For decades Sunni jihadists have waged war on Christian oriental communities across the Middle East and North Africa, while other Islamic extremists are fighting Russian Orthodoxy in the Caucasus and throughout Central Asia.

In novel and frightening ways, this pits the militant strands of Sunni Islam not only against the more traditional forms of Sufism, including the Alawites in Syria, but also the remnants of Christendom.

I shall return to the importance of Christendom in due course. But first, a number of points need to be made about the contemporary global geopolitical situation.

The end of Westphalia and the rise of “neo-medievalism”

To begin with, we are witnessing the death throes of the Westphalian system that was dominated by national states and transnational markets, in which great powers could simply buy off small countries and rule by proxy. Continue reading

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