I read Kedourie’s points about associating “liberals” with the idea of changing the region toward democracy in a different way. Kedourie was right at the time and in the present context the statement takes on a great irony. For it was a traditional liberal vision that the Middle East (like Latin America) should solve its problems by moving toward democracy and greater respect for human rights. Two quick examples are the policy of presidents Kennedy and (pre-revolution) Carter toward Iran. What makes this so interesting is that President George W. Bush took a traditional liberal policy and adapted it, but everyone then forgot where the ideas originally came from. They definitely did not originate among conservatives.

And if Kedourie were alive today, there would be no fiercer critic of the Bush administration’s policies and the invasion of Iraq.

On the central issue, what was Kedourie saying? (And I not only read this in his work but heard it from him directly.) Bruce Jentleson is quite correct in saying his ideas were in the realist tradition, but they are not like some Edward Said-caricature of Western views. (And we should always remember that Kedourie spoke as a Middle Easterner somewhat bemused by Western naïveté, saying things that many Arabs—albeit not so often in public—say every day.)

I would say two points are key. First, the main problem with the region was the nature of the internal systems: the dictatorships, ideology, and social systems that dominated the countries. The regimes acted on the basis of their interests (both survival and foreign policy goals) but these interests were often quite different from those perceived by many in the West.

Second, these problems were not going to be fixed by outsiders because they were very deep, requiring a long-term and major process of change that had not even begun.

I hope that in my work, books like The Tragedy of the Middle East, The Truth About Syria, and The Long War for Freedom, among others, I have provided an extension of his basic viewpoint. In my opinion, he was the best analyst of the Middle East in the twentieth century. I hope that students today will continue to read and think about his work, and I note that its absence from university courses is yet one more indication of the lamentable state of studies on the region.

Barry Rubin is a member of MESH.

First, it embodies “small-r realism.” This is not to get into the Realism of IR-isms. It is to get back to fundamental meanings as in common parlance like “let’s be realistic about the way things are.” I’m comfortable under that umbrella. It evokes the power of history, especially for us Americans who have so little sense of it, most especially in our recurring self-concept of re-makings of the world. It cautions us against naïveté on the one side and hubris on the other, each risking commitments and “projects” that are flawed from the start and that cumulatively can add up to strategic overstretch.

Second, though, as a particular targeting of liberals and our “meliorism”: hello, what about the Bush administration and neo-conservatives and their often blind, ideological sense of America-the-Remaker-of-the-World (not even just the Middle East)? For or against us, freedom vs. fundamentalism, evildoers: you can’t get more dichotomous or un-small r-realist than that. And, frankly, more damaging of American strategic interests than any policy or set of policies pursued by administrations on the other side of the aisle.

Third, to get down to strategy: If not this, then what? I pose the question to open up non-dichotomous debate about strategies. A few points along these lines:

• Kedourie’s assessment of instability as “endemic” is true depending on how fully one means endemic. As a prudent caution, absolutely yes. But if taken too far it becomes like the debate about ethnic conflicts as “primordialist”—essentially historically-determined, based on identities going back centuries as fixed and continuous bases for deep conflict (“Balkan ghosts,” medieval buhake agricultural caste system of Tutsi dominance over Hutu in what is now Rwanda)—rather than “purposive”—historically shaped but not determined, acknowledging the deep-seated nature of animosities but also the forces and factors that intensify and activate these as serve particular interests. So, sure, “the doctrine that the world tends to become better or may be made better by human effort” (meliorism according to Webster’s) needs caution and qualifiers. But so too do we have to deal with the fact that the world tends to become worse or may be made worse by human effort.

• Kedourie also can be read as fitting the warning about the need for “ripeness” of conflicts. Here too it is realistic to stress that unless conditions are at least somewhat conducive, efforts to intercede are much less likely to succeed. But we also have to be concerned about “rotting.” If the fruit is left on the vine too long, it gets diseased. So yes, à la Kedourie, states can err by doing too much too soon. But they also can err by doing too little for too long.

• “It is enough for practical men to fend off present evils and secure existing interests.” This is the sentence that bothers me the most. Think the current bursting of the American economic bubble: homeowners and other consumers took on too much and too risky debt; bankers and investors went after quick-hit profits; both may have “secured existing interests,” but neither was sustainable. And in foreign policy terms, think much of US Cold War policy in the Third World: support for Mobutu in Zaire, Siad Barre in Somalia, the Shah in Iran, Somoza in Nicaragua. And, as we speak, Musharraf in Pakistan. Short-term fendings-off and calculuses of interests very often end up incurring medium- and longer-term strategic costs.

Bruce Jentleson is a member of MESH.