Trump Republicans See Putin’s Russia As a New Front Line Against Islam
Channel: Trump Breaking News Network
Date: 04/01/2017

Trump Breaking News Network - Trump Republicans See Putin’s Russia As a New Front Line Against Islam.


Through his public statements and presidential appointments, Donald Trump is remaking Republican foreign policy in two fundamental ways. The first concerns Russia. Previous GOP leaders like Mitt Romney and John McCain described Moscow as an adversary. Trump describes it as a partner. The second concerns Islam. Previous GOP leaders—most notably George W. Bush—insisted that the U.S. had no beef with Islam, or with the vast majority of Muslims worldwide. Trump and his top advisors disagree. They often describe Islam itself as a hostile force, and view ordinary Muslims as guilty of jihadist sympathies until proven innocent.

On the surface, these two shifts seem unrelated. But they’re deeply intertwined. Before Trump, Republican leaders generally described the United States as fighting an ideological struggle against the enemies of freedom. Now, Trump and his advisors describe America as fighting a civilizational struggle against the enemies of the West. Seen through that very different lens, Muslims look more nefarious and Vladimir Putin looks more benign.

To understand this shift, it’s worth distinguishing two different strains of conservative foreign-policy thinking during the cold war. Civilizational conservatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Buchanan saw the cold war as a struggle between two countries defined primarily by their view of God: The Judeo-Christian United States versus the atheistic Soviet Union. Ideological conservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, by contrast, saw the cold war as a conflict between two countries defined primarily by their view of government: the liberty-loving United States versus the totalitarian USSR. (A third group, composed of realists like Henry Kissinger and George Kennan, saw the cold war as a traditional great power conflict between two countries defined primarily by their geopolitical heft.)

In the 1990s, after the Soviet Union collapsed, ideological conservatives and civilizational conservatives parted ways. The clearest example was the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, Serbs brutalized the largely Muslim breakaway republic of Bosnia. Ideological conservatives like Robert Kagan urged NATO to intervene in the name of human rights. Cultural conservatives like Buchanan wondered why the U.S. was going to war to defend Muslims against Christians. Ideological conservatives saw Russia, Serbia’s traditional ally, as defending tyranny and ethnic cleansing. Cultural conservatives saw Russia as defending Christendom.

For a while, 9/11 papered over these divisions. Bush largely justified the “war on terror” in ideological terms: as a struggle against a new totalitarian foe that had “hijacked” Islam. In this depiction, ordinary Muslims living in places like Afghanistan and Iraq were not the equivalent of Nazis or communists; they were the equivalent of the people who those previous totalitarian foes had held in bondage. Civilizational conservatives considered Bush naïve. Franklin Graham, who delivered the prayer at Bush’s first inauguration, repeatedly described Islam itself as wicked. But while their justifications for the “war on terror” differed, both ideological and civilizational conservatives backed Bush’s military adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Bush left behind a GOP establishment dominated by ideological conservatives. In 2008 and 2012, McCain and Romney both resisted describing Islam itself as a threat. Romney described authoritarian Russia as America’s greatest geopolitical foe. But during both election cycles, more populist, civilizationally-oriented, conservatives—Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Ben Carson—kept attacking Islam itself.  

Source: 

http://www.defenseone.com/politics/2016/12/trump-republicans-see-putins-russia-new-front-line-against-islam/133814/?oref=d-channelriver

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