Religion and Geopolitics Review: Saturday, February 14

by David Pence and A. Joseph Lynch

                     

A TIME TO DEBATE AND REFLECT ON MILITARY STRATEGY

President Barack Obama’s proposed authorization for the use of military force (AUMF) against ISIS was submitted to Congress February 11, 2015. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee has jurisdiction over AUMF legislation. Let us hope it leads to a long overdue post cold-war strategic debate about America's place in the Mideast and among the nations. One remembers the seriousness of Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright (D-Ark) in leading similar debates on the Vietnam war. Can we expect the same from Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn), today's chairman? This is certainly where the debate belongs. Let us hope different strategic perspectives are truly developed before the yes or no vote to authorize. The chambers of Congress could help in formulating a real strategic debate which will carry into the presidential election of 2016.


                                                     THE ALLIANCE WE NEED

We are contesting a religious movement in ISIS, and it will be a religiously guided movement of nation states that will destroy them. The inability of the soulless states of the modern west to understand this conflict and muster the spiritual and military authority needed to end it should awaken the Christian nations. America, France, Germany and yes, Christian Russia need to join the Shiite states of Iran, Syria and Iraq to support the Sunni states of Jordan, Turkey, Pakistan, and Egypt to eradicate the ISIS entity that is preventing a new large civilized Sunni state from emerging in the broken Sunni areas of Syria and Iraq.

THE CENTRAL QUESTION: WHY IS RUSSIA AN ENEMY AND SAUDI ARABIA 

AN ALLY?    

We are in a war with radical Salafist Sunnis and yet we are at the same time contesting Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the Iranians over nuclear development and Assad for maintaining an Alawite Shiite government over Damascus and the coastal cities of truncated Syria. All of these states should be our allies. We are in a war with radical Salafist Sunnis yet we are allied with Saudi Arabia. This great contradiction must come to an end.

No Republican Senator has emerged as a William Fulbright to introduce a strategic alternative. Many foreign policy experts have seen a bigger strategic picture. The chairman of the Armed Services committee (John McCain, R-Arizona) is rabidly anti-Russia, anti-Iran, and anti-Assad. If it seems that President Obama wants to fight on no fronts, then the man he defeated for the presidency favors at least four major battle-lines!

         CAN WE FIGHT A RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT AS LIBERTINE ATHEISTS?

It is war against a religious movement and, until we understand how a Christian nation is meant to make both lasting alliances and abbreviated just wars, then we will be left tightening the Gordian knot of fighting ISIS with Charlie Hebdo.

THE CHRISTIAN NATIONS OF EUROPE VS GODLESS MODERN WEST OF THE E.U.

Europe as Europe is imploding. From the left in Greece and the right in France the soulless bureaucrats of Brussels are meeting nationalists with other plans. The leftists of Greece have a vision of a socialist Europe. They are rebelling from the austerity measures being imposed on their debt-ridden country. They see themselves and other high-debt high-unemployment nations as suffering at the hands of especially the Germans who they suggested might pay off Greece's debt as a war reparation for WWII. When Germans face their immigration problem and need to talk race they run from their national identity and embrace the Abend -- the West. This manifests the uncomfortable truth that the modern west, divorced from the universal obligations of Christianity and the communal ties of nations, can easily become a polite way of saying "us white people."

Here is a good history of the Euro monetary crisis: Euro zone history EU from a single currency to massive debt and unemployment.


                                 THE PUBLIC IDENTITY OF CHRISTIAN MEN
                          AND VOCATIONS TO THE APOSTOLIC PRIESTHOOD

Finally, a Christian civilization capable of defending itself in the competitive world of armed male groups is built not just on marriage and family but the public bonds of the Apostolic Church and the nations. The poetic prose of Anthony Esolen reminds us in a pair of articles of the deep anthropological link of manliness and priestly vocations -- part one and part two. Everything the Providence professor teaches us about the male priesthood has some correlate to civic life and masculine citizenship.