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The challenge that Islamists pose for world order
The Islamist war on the international state system
The Islamist war on world order
For decades, the ideologues of pan-Islam have refused to accept the boundaries and the responsibilities of the order of states. In Trial of a Thousand Years, Charles Hill analyzes the long war of Islamism against the international state system. Hill places the Islamists in their proper historical place, showing that they are but the latest challenge to the requirements that states had placed on themselves since the international system was born in 1648.
The author describes the many wars on the world order over the centuries--the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II, the cold war—and gives a unique historical perspective to the Islamic challenge of the twenty-first century in Iran, Afghanistan, and beyond. He identifies the key areas in which the Islamists are at odds with the rest of the world—legal, military, the state, women, democracy, nuclear weapons, and values—and tells what the United States, as the chief protector of world order, must do to deal effectively with the adversaries of the international system.
Charles Hill, a career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Hill was executive aide to former U.S. secretary of state George P. Shultz (1985–89) and served as special consultant on policy to the secretary-general of the United Nations from 1992 to 1996. He is also the Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy and Senior Lecturer in International Studies and in Humanities at Yale University.
Foreword Fouad Ajami ix
Prologue 3
On a Ship to Oman 3
On the Train to the Army-Navy Game 6
Chapter 1 Two World Orders 9
Christendom and Caliphate 11
Duality or Unity? 13
"The Turk" and "Oriental Despotism" 17
Three World-Historical Events 25
Chapter 2 The Modern Ordering Takes Shape 29
1648 30
The Enlightenment Views the Prophet 32
The Sick Man of Europe 38
Chapter 3 The Wars on World Order 49
The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars 49
The Taiping Rebellion, 1851-1866 52
The American Civil War and the Utah War 55
The Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871 59
The Great War 63
World War II: Imperial Japan and the Third Reich 69
The Cold War 76
The Indian Mutiny and the International System 83
Chapter 4 An Islamic Challenge Takes Shape 89
1979: Iran 89
1979: Saudi Arabia 91
1979: Pakistan 92
1979: Afghanistan 93
1979: Egypt 93
1979: Saddam's Iraq—Bonfire of the Pathologies 94
The Lost Decade of the 1990s 99
The Islamist War on World Order, Well Underway 103
Saddam Overthrown 106
Saddam's Strategy 109
Chapter 5 The Shock of Recognition 115
Centers of Gravity 121
Legal 123
Military 123
The State 126
Women 131
Democracy 134
Nuclear Weapons 138
Values 140
Chapter 6 In the Matter of Grand Strategy 145
Religion in World Order Revisited 153
Epilogue: On the Road to Oxiana 162
Bibliography 165
About the Author 171
About the Hoover Institution's Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International Order 173
Index 175
Overview
The challenge that Islamists pose for world order
The Islamist war on the international state system
The Islamist war on world order
For decades, the ideologues of pan-Islam have refused to accept the boundaries and the responsibilities of the order of states. In Trial of a Thousand Years, Charles Hill analyzes the long war of Islamism against the international state system....