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The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs |
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The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs
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by Madeleine Albright
Sales Rank: 145291
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Discount: 30 %
List Price: $14.95
$10.46
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on 4-19-2008.
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Features
Cover Type: Paperback with 368 pages
Published by: Harper Perennial March 27, 2007
Written in: English
ISBN 10 Number: 0060892587
ISBN 13 Number: 978-0060892586
Book Dimensions:
7.8 x 5.2 x 1 inches
Weighs: 8.8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Secretary of State under President Clinton and a devout Catholic (with recently discovered Jewish roots), Albright (Madam Secretary) is especially qualified to tackle the thorny subject of the role of faith in international relations. In a remarkably accessible, even breezy style, she looks at these issues in light of recent History both abroad and at home, from the religious fundamentalism that led to the ouster of the shah of Iran to the invasion of Iraq and American hope that a political culture can emerge there that integrates democracy and Islam. But Albright also looks critically at President Bush, an evangelical Christian who invokes God in the name of fighting "evil." In this ambitious, thoughtful, and wide-ranging treatment, Albright deftly balances the pragmatic need to confront religious-based unrest and the idealistic need to temper one's own personal beliefs in the public realm. While fully acknowledging the threat al- Qaeda poses, Albright rejects the notion that a "clash of civilizations" is in progress and wisely calls for care and nuance in how America approaches international confrontations that are tinged with religion. (May 2)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In his introduction to Madeleine Albright's surprising new book on Religion and foreign policy, Bill Clinton writes that his former secretary of state picked her subject "against the advice of friends." Those friends are left unnamed, but they surely include colleagues who helped Albright craft U.S. foreign policy in the Clinton years -- and maybe even President Clinton himself. The cause of their trepidation must have related to the most important -- and bravest -- point that Albright makes here: that on her watch, U.S. foreign policy made every effort to ignore religion.
To a new generation of foreign policy thinkers who must now deal with jihadist terrorism, it seems ridiculous that America's leaders self-consciously pretended that Religion was not an important world force. But according to Albright -- and it is hard to see why she would overstate the case -- the Clinton team insisted privately, not just publicly, that the Balkan crises, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, yes, al-Qaeda's August 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa were "not about religion."
Given that the participants in all these events said that their conflicts were precisely about religion, it is worth wondering how our best and brightest could have remained so obstinately in denial. The cause, according to Albright, was the legacy of foreign policy "realism" -- the view that nations' actions could be predicted by assuming that they would rationally pursue their own interests. This theory, which is "almost exclusively secular," taught diplomats to ignore religious rhetoric and zeal and to look instead for familiar, interest-based motives. Albright, with the help of her longtime speechwriter Bill Woodward, argues that the realist approach must be amended by inserting an awareness of the increasingly significant role that Religion plays in the making of individual and national decisions, not just abroad but here in the United States as well. The result is a book that makes an important contribution to the question of how our foreign policy should adjust to the rise of Religion worldwide.
Albright's reckoning with her own policy legacy amounts to a particularly candid first draft of history. She's right that foreign policy realism did, in a certain sense, downplay the religious interests of nations, but she does not acknowledge the main reason that realism let her down in confronting the principal diplomatic crises of the 1990s. Put simply, realism is a theory about the behavior of states. Yet the most important foreign policy challenges of the Clinton years came not from states but from nonstate actors such as Osama bin Laden's terrorist network and the militias in failed or failing states such as Somalia. Even Yasser Arafat, whose intransigence at the summer 2000 Israeli-Palestinian summit at Camp David cost Albright and Clinton a permanent place in diplomatic history, was not the head of a proper state.
This matters a lot. Leaders without states have very different incentives than do presidents and kings. Although dictators and democrats do not always behave the same way, any government -- admirable or nasty -- requirements to deliver basic security and services in order to maintain its authority. That is why the behavior of presidents (for life or otherwise) can often be predicted by asking what actions would best serve the interests of the state in question.
The same is not true of guerrillas, freedom fighters or terrorists, who may be chasing dreams of world-transformation. Without a body of citizens for whose well-being they are in some way responsible, nonstate leaders are free to act according to ideals that may well clash with practical reality -- and some of those ideals will be religious ones. Albright is therefore right to call for enhancing religious expertise in the State Department, but we also need to pay much more attention to the ways that U.S. foreign policy engages not just governments but groups and movements made up of ordinary people who are moved by the full range of human beliefs and emotions.
Of course, religion's role in foreign policy does not stop at the water's edge. In our own democracy, citizens' religious commitments often play a major role in shaping their preferences about how the United States should engage the world. It would be hard to explain, for example, America's close relationship to Israel without at least some reference to the strong connection to the Holy Land felt by many Christians and Jews.
When it comes to the effect of Religion on U.S. policies, Albright takes a somewhat complicated stand. She is eager to make common cause with evangelicals who care deeply about humanitarian issues in order to create an international genocide-prevention force under U.N. auspices. (How many evangelicals would agree to this plan is left unexamined.) She studiously avoids criticizing the Bush administration's foreign policy as religiously inspired, though she quotes others who accuse the White House of being "theologically presumptuous" and "dangerously messianic." And she accepts that "religion must be taken into account" by leaders who, like the rest of us, are inevitably influenced by their faith when they choose a course of action.
At the same time, Albright espouses a skeptical theology according to which we should tolerate other people's religious views because they might turn out to be right, after all. As a proof text for this approach, she quotes Clinton himself: "It is OK to say you believe your Religion is true, even truer than other faiths, but not that you are in possession in this life of a hundred percent of the truth." This cautious doctrine is appealing -- even characteristically American. But it is by no means shared by all people of faith, many of whom believe the Bible or the Koran contains the whole truth. In a democracy, the votes of the true believers weigh just as heavily as the votes of the skeptics. To welcome Religion into the making of our foreign policy is to acknowledge that certainties, not just well-meant aspirations, are going to play their part.
The painful truth about democracy is that the policies we make will generally be the product of compromise, not reasoned judgment. Realism sought to solve this problem by teaching diplomats to ignore ideals and focus on long-term interests. Today, our moral compass tells us that realism without values is not enough. But once we open the door to values, we cannot be sure that our policies will be coherent enough to succeed.
Reviewed by Noah Feldman
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
Reader Reviews
This review is from: The Mighty and the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (Hardcover)
The former UN Ambassador and Secretary of State sees a place for personal faith among public officials. She believes personal faith has helped herself and many other people make very difficult decisions which impacted the world. However, she doesn't use that personal faith as a public battering ram to attack 'others' and their perspectives. Having grown up under state oppression, she knows first-hand what totalitarian states where everybody must worship one way...etc really are like. Albright did not and still does not attempt to turn her own faith into a partisan and one-dimensional caricature for political benefit. Her public faith is a civil belief in the state to advocate for the less fortunate. She understands democracy doesn't work when only talked about in the abstract. It has to be practiced. Contrasting with the current administration, she sees the world as complex and multifaceted--there are no clear-cut good and evil sides in a religious conflict. Current American policy prolongs the bloodshed by not adopting a more nuanced analysis.
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