U.S. foreign policy and the Muslim world

Anak Agung Banyu Perwita , Bandung

Despite its military's success in bringing Saddam Hussein down from power following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack on two of its major cities, the United States is now facing challenges to its foreign policy on the Muslim world.

The recent attack of al-Qaeda on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was an obvious reprisal to the U.S. military's offensive in Iraq (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 8, 2004).

Several polls have even shown an increasingly anti-American trend in most Muslim countries. Suspicion and antipathy toward U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including the decision to attack Iraq, has caused relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world to deteriorate to its lowest level.

A deepening tension between the U.S. and the wider Muslim world is also observed.

How crucial are the impacts of worsening relations, and what are the challenges facing the Bush administration?

The first challenge that the newly reelected President Bush will need to meet is a new power trend at the global level. The post-Cold War era has diminished the power of state-centered political and military rivalry to dominate international relations.

It is a fact that there is a process of reconfiguring power through which international security relationships are channeled. As part of the process, the revival of political Islam has become a significant ideological force in the Third World, particularly in the Muslim world.

The revival of political Islam is aimed at what the Islamists perceive as the global conspiracy against Islam both as a religion and a culture.

As Hassan Hanafi, a distinguished Egyptian Islamist scholar, has described globalization as the "new colonialism", the revival of political Islam is also a reaction towards the modern -- or U.S. -- Western-style capitalist development.

The second challenge will be at the state level. For the past several decades, the U.S. has been a strong supporter of a status quo of autocratic regimes in many Muslim countries. While we saw a significant global movement toward freedom and democracy in the last decade, the U.S. still maintained its traditional allies -- authoritarian regimes in the Muslim world.

As a result, the U.S. is seen as the guardian of oppressive regimes. Thus, there is a strong perception that the U.S. foreign policy does adopt a separate standard for the Muslim world when it comes to the advocacy of values such as human rights and democracy.

The next challenge to U.S. foreign policy -- which is related to the first and second challenges -- will be the concept of establishing civil society in the Muslim world. The idea is crucial as it offers alternatives to autocratic rule and religious radicalism.

In this context, the U.S. must determine how to assist local groups working toward democratization without turning them into its agents.

U.S. policy toward the Muslim world has tended to be incrementalist, a prudent approach that stemmed from a variety of considerations.

First, the U.S. did not want to appear explicitly hostile toward political Islam, which it believed would threaten its global interests.

Second, it was reluctant to give open political support to any Muslim country, whether moderate or radical, so as to maintain a global balance of power.

Third, skepticism prevailed among U.S. foreign policy makers on the compatibility between political Islam and democratic values as perceived by the U.S.

These considerations clearly show that there is a wide gap between the U.S.' official rhetoric and its actions. This is mainly because the Muslim world is not monolithic, so the U.S. has no "one size fits all" policy for the Muslim world.

In other words, the Western world -- that is, the U.S. -- lacks a comprehensive strategy to deal with the Muslim world, largely determining their positions and policies on the particular conditions of each Muslim state.

The U.S.' involvement with the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East, has been inconsistent, mainly due to a complex interplay of historical, cultural, religious and political factors that cause many difficulties in managing a "healthy" relationship.

The writer is a lecturer at the Department of International Relations and a researcher at the Parahyangan Center for International Studies, Parahyangan Catholic Universiy, Bandung.