Andrew C. McCarthy speaks about American foreign policy in the Middle East
Andrew C. McCarthy traveled across the country to speak to Utah State students and Logan community members about national security and foreign policy on Saturday. The Government Relations Council invited the Statesman to hold a private interview with McCarthy about his presentation and other topics. The following are excerpts from the interview:
Utah Statesman: What brings you to Utah State? Why is the National Review Institute reaching out to college campuses?
Andrew McCarthy: On behalf of National Review Institute, we’re going to have a discussion tonight abut national security and foreign policy. I’m looking forward to it. I think the mission of National Review has always been to be the beacon of the conservative movement. If you’re going to have a vibrant movement, you have to start with young people. And you have to stay in touch with what their concerns are. I think when you’re trying to pitch an ideological movement because you think it works, it makes life better for people, you should come unapologetically and in good cheer to try and explain why that not only has made our lives better, but will make your lives better.
US: I think that would be difficult when addressing confusing topics like foreign policy.
AM: Everything’s confusing in its own way. Foreign policy is particularly difficult because even though we think of ourselves as global, our lives aren’t global. Our concerns tend to be very local. The calculus of how much America should be involved outside of our borders is a pretty hotly disputed topic right now. I’ve always thought the firm principle ought to be we act in our own interests. We try to act consistently on our principles. I don’t like to say values, because values are the things you do like and principles are the things that you should like. We want to act in a way that’s consistent with advancing liberty, but we can’t get ourselves entrenched in everybody’s problems. That’s a blurry place to be. It creates a lot of controversy, because people have very different ideas about how you square that circle.
US: What do you hope students will learn or remember from your presentation tonight?
AM: I’m hoping to learn too. I’m hoping to get a better fix on what the students’ concerns are. I hope to the extent that we can talk about some of the things that are controversial topics to draw some of the passion out of it and try to walk through it in a reasonable, linear way. For example, to be more concrete about it, Islam, in the environment that we have to deal with in national security and foreign policy, is crucially important and is a topic that in the United States is difficult to speak about without people at extremes at both ends either wanting to absolve Islam of any culpability whatsoever in terrorism, and on the other side you have people who suspect that because someone’s a Muslim they must be a terrorist. Of course, the truth isn’t either. The truth is complicated, and Islam is complicated. Sometimes we talk about it in a very simplistic way, and I hope maybe tonight we’ll deal with why it’s complicated and why in some ways the complication is good for us.
US: Why do you believe students should stay informed about foreign policy?
AM: Because it greatly impacts your life. We’d all like to be able to build a cocoon that we can be safe in, even if we’re interested in what goes on outside the world; we’d like to be able to be in control of what has impact on us or not. War, which is something we are oddly fatigued by, and I guess it’s not odd when you think about how long the hostilities have been going on, but it is odd in American history. In prior wars, the country has been much more invested in the war effort than they have in this one. To the extent that people say they’re weary of it, is because they’re tired of hearing about it.
US: Are you referring to the war on terror?
AM: Yes, or what’s called the war on terror. I’ve always hated that expression. War on terror has always been an awful label for what this effort is. It’s awful because conceptually you can’t fight a tactic. Terrorism is a tactic, it’s not an enemy. Having a war on terror is like having a war on guns. It’s not the guns, it’s the people who have the guns you need to worry about. But the other thing about war on terror which makes is what makes it a lazy term and a confusing term, is that if you’re not fighting an identifiable enemy, it gets hard to monitor the government in terms of what they want to do to combat the enemy. The next thing you know, you’re giving up a lot of your freedom. Since what we try to do when the US goes to war is promote freedom, if we have the result of the war effort turning out to be that we’re actually attiring our freedom gradually in some ways that we don’t even realize it’s happening, then it’s not a successful war effort, no matter how it comes out.
US: What would you call the war, if not war on terror?
AM: I think it’s a war against what I call Islamic supremacy, which is an interpretation of Islam that is not as marginal and tiny as we’d like to imagine. It’s actually the vibrant Islam in a lot of parts of the world.
US: Extremists?
AM: How extreme can it be if it’s actually mainstream? And in certain places it is mainstream. I think we make a mistake trying to convince ourselves that the scope of what we’re challenged by is much smaller than it is. The way we do that is we conflate jihadism, which is the most violent and extreme form of Islamic supremacy, with Islamic supremacy. What I mean by that is all jihadists are Islamic supremacists but not all Islamic supremacists are jihadists, in fact only a small percentage are. The reasons it’s important to focus on Islamic supremacism in the broader phenomenon than the more narrow problem of violent jihad is violent jihad thrives in a bigger community. What we find all over the world where there is a problem of jihadism, it’s largely because there are these enclaves of Islamic supremacy where it takes root, where it can recruit, where it can train, where it can raise funds and the like. So the problem isn’t just the violence, the problem is the etiological environment in which the violence thrives.
US: What is one word you would use to describe the future of American foreign policy in the Middle East?
AM: I hope realistic. I don’t mean realism, which is a whole school of foreign policy thought. I mean realistic in the good, old common sense, of realistic, which is let’s not underestimate what we’re dealing with. Let’s not overestimate what we can accomplish. We can be arrogant this way: we think and we treat the Middle East, which has a very rich culture that goes back way further than ours does, we think sometimes that they just don’t get Western democracy, and if we just go over there and show it to them, all will be well. The problem is, they are their own independent culture and their own independent civilization. It’s not that they don’t understand ours, they don’t want it. They think theirs is better.
US: Why do you work to stop terrorism and terrorists?
AM: I had a very fortunate career as a lawyer. I started out as any prosecutor does, doing ordinary run-of-the-mill cases. I got to work on some pretty neat cases. I did a case in the 1980s called the Pizza Connection case which is still the longest federal criminal trial of all time. I think 17 months. At the time, it was an amazing case. It was an amazing time to be in the US attorney office. Then when the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, we really didn’t have experience in the country coping with systematic international terrorism. I had as close an analogue as we had to what we thought we were dealing with. Only when you get in it do you realize that it’s very different. To me, the feeling was that I wasn’t doing real lawyer work. I was actually doing something for the country, I was doing something that was important. Not that the other stuff wasn’t important, but this was important in a much different way. You come to appreciate, even if you don’t understand it in the beginning, that there’s a big difference between how you enforce the law and how you do national security. I had to learn that the hard way in a lot of ways. This wasn’t just about a case. This was about protecting the country and trying to get policy right, trying to protect national secrets in a way that would allow us to protect Americans.
US: What would you say to a student considering going what you’re doing?
AM: Get a good basic education. I get people all the time saying I want to go to law school. But I do tell people, forget all this other stuff they gear you for law school. If you want to have the skills you need as a lawyer, read the classics. Read philosophy. Read things that challenge your premises, learn why you think what you think. Learn to try get into the math and science side of it. Learn how to get from A to B to C in a linear way because what you ultimately find when you’re proving big cases, what convinces people to go your way in big cases tend to be the small things. You can never get removed from how the community thinks, and you can never get to far from how they feel about things. The best way to prepare for that is to not specialize in a specialty. Get a decent education and learn how to think.
—ashley.ruth.stilson@aggiemail.usu.edu