The Wisdom Project
A multi-year, multi-aspected initiative focusing on international relations and US foreign policy toward Israel and the Muslim Middle East. It includes the new book being written by Charles Strohmer.

Begun by Charles Strohmer in 2002 as an independent researcher and writer, The Wisdom Project is now being pursued by Mr. Strohmer as a Visiting Fellow of the Center for Public Justice (Washington, DC). Through round table discussions, workshops, lectures, articles, and policy papers, The Wisdom Project seeks to make a contribution to the national (and international) conversation that is centered on finding fresh ways ahead for US foreign relations in the Middle East. The centerpiece of the Project will be the book  being written by Charles. The book and the other aspects of the Project bring a unique voice to this increasingly important conversation by shedding light on the long-neglected wisdom narrative as a viable source of ideas, principles, and norms for guiding US foreign relations. The summary that follows locates the place of The Wisdom Project and book in the conversation and describes why a resurrected wisdom tradition can play a vital role in US relationships and policy in the Middle East.

The Wisdom Project in More Detail

The incendiary conduct of nineteen men aboard four aircraft on September 11, 2001 stabbed the American public awake to a keen interest in US foreign policy. Overnight, US relations with the Muslim world became a staple of prime time media coverage and dinner table conversations across the nation. That heightened attention has not been misplaced nor has it flagged. Quite the opposite. Ongoing international events, beginning with ousting the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan, have sustained growing public interest in US foreign policy in the Middle East, now so amped up that it often rivals, when it does not surpass, domestic issues in the minds of voters choosing their elected representatives.

It is one thing, however, for US citizens, Congress, and the White House to have raised stakes in the nation’s troubled relations with the Muslim Middle East and to want to do something about it; it is quite another thing to reach consensus about what should be done and then to carry it through. The war about Iraq has been particularly instructive. By 2005 it had become a hot, when not bitter, foreign policy debate entrenching the political left against the right and dividing America. But it is not just Iraq. The Madrid, London, and Amman Jordan bombings, not to mention the occasional video tape recordings of Osama bin Laden’s threats and the alarming disclosures about Iran’s nuclear intentions, all serve as poignant reminders that something remains terribly wrong between the West and the Muslim world and that America has a key role to play in reversing that. But such events have served a further purpose. They have shown just how far away we are in reaching national consensus on a best way to reverse the trend.

Worse, any decisive movement Americans might want to make toward policy consensus in this area, such as was needed to contest Soviet communism during the Cold War era, would be sorely crippled by the hardened political polemic often stereotypically framed as Republican versus Democrat or neoconservative versus liberal. However one defines it, neither side seems able to rethink US policy in ways that safely negotiate the deep and ever-changing volatile waters of US relations with the Middle Eastern Muslim world. The extreme position on one side can sound like war mongering and the call for a crusade; the extreme position on the other can sound politically naive and open to unthinkable capitulation. But this kind of political dualism is not new. The martial and the anti-war traditions have coexisted with us for millennia, writes noted foreign policy theorist Jonathan Schell (The Unconquerable World). The long history of each tradition “has seemed to express an ineradicable truth. Each has retained its power in spite of the other. Neither has been discarded in the name of the other.”

In Washington, these two antithetical and coexisting traditions appear to be locked in a contentious, winner-take-all struggle over who should hold the reins of US foreign policy power—not an auspicious sign if you are the United States facing perhaps its greatest national security challenge. Might there be another approach—a third way? One that would not divide America on this vital issue; one that would not make enemies unnecessarily in the Middle East; one that would not emphasize war but turn US foreign policy in directions that would build on common ground agreements with peoples and nations who are not like us, yet without anyone being naive about the differences? Because the United States faces an unprecedented challenge vis a vis the peoples and countries of the Middle East, it makes sense to explore new avenues of foreign policy. Indeed, there is a growing literature on the subject by some of our foremost foreign policy thinkers and advisors. It is in this “third way” conversation that The Wisdom Project is making a contribution.

War, a rueful change-agent at any time, is a narrow, wretchedly impossible means for the kind of geopolitical ends Americans would like to achieve with the Muslim world. The war about Iraq has made that clear, if nothing else. Elevated and determined US emphases on non-martial initiatives in the region are therefore sorely needed. As Schell describes it, the United States and the civilized world must look beyond dealing with the global terrorist networks to address the larger and more fundamental questions, greatly de-emphasizing the old war system and instituting more peaceful paths.

This means Washington must turn a corner. For the great difficulty posed by getting beyond the war system is to know just what kind of non-military initiatives ought to come out of Washington to address the larger and more fundamental questions posed by America’s relations with Israel and the Muslim Middle East. Joseph Nye, also an acclaimed foreign policy advisor, has built a vision on what he calls soft power, a term he coined in the late 1980s when he opened an important discussion about America’s power to attract and persuade. The antithesis of hard power (coercion through military might or economic clout), soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, values, political ideas, and policies. In The Paradox of American Power, Nye writes that the exercise of soft power “co-opts people rather than coerces them.”

Schell, who has spent many years explaining the limits that violence can attain in its quest for a nonviolent future, and who ultimately does not consider himself a pacifist, argues for a vision of the future rooted in what he calls cooperative rather than coercive international power arrangements. He writes that “force can only lead to more force, not to peace. Only a turn to structures of cooperative power can offer hope.” Walter Russell Mead has also been contemplating the future of US foreign policy toward the Muslim world. Writing during the invasion of Iraq and the cooled US relations with Europe (Power, Terror, Peace, and War), he argues for a distinction between sharp (military), sticky (economic), and sweet (cultural and political) power as means for shaping a more peaceable world—without losing American identity in the process. “Genuinely new and original directions in foreign policy often start badly,” Mead reminds us. “So the froth and spray of the first waves of a new version of American grand strategy do not determine where the tide is headed, and the mistakes do not invalidate the general movement. There is, it must always be remembered, no perfect foreign policy that solves all problems and costs nothing.” These are but three of the thoughtful and sensible long-term non-martial alternatives that have been waiting in the wings and ought to be receiving more recognition by our political leaders.

The Wisdom Project steps into this conversation as a nonpartisan contributor in the increasingly urgent concerns of Washington toward Israel and the Middle East. By emphasizing the wisdom narrative, both the Project and the book are able to provide substantial help particularly in Washington’s increasing realization that the nexus of faith and foreign policy can no longer be ignored in its international relations. This represents a fundamental shift in US policy thinking. Historically, Washington has misread or even disregarded the role that religion has played in nations that are the objects of its policy, even when religious belief was paramount to the politics of those nations.

In a ground-breaking book on the subject in 1994, edited by Douglass Johnston and Cynthia Sampson, international relations scholar and policy advisor Johnston wrote that “the rigorous separation of church and state in the United States has desensitized many citizens to the fact that much of the rest of the world does not operate on a similar basis. Foreign policy practitioners, for instance, are often inadequately equipped to deal with situations involving other nation-states where the imperatives of religious doctrine blend intimately with those of politics and economics. At times, this has led to uninformed policy choices, especially in our dealings with countries in the Middle East” (Religion: The Missing Dimension of Statecraft). In an essay from the same book, Edward Luttwak identifies this as a product of what he calls a secularizing reductivism, an “Enlightenment prejudice that has remained amply manifest in the contemporary professional analysis of foreign affairs.” Secularizing reductivism, writes Luttwak, explains why both politicians and journalists have often ignored “the role of religion, religious institutions, and religious motivation in explaining politics and conflict,” and that as a consequence they have focused far too much on geographic, economic, social, political, or other non-religious primary causes. Luttwak believes that this indicates “a learned repugnance to contend intellectually with all that is religion or belongs to it.”

Of course this conclusion was reached before 9/11, and it would now need to be footnoted to indicate the shift that has taken place in the US foreign policy community in light of a number of factors; for instance: the unarguable religious motivation behind 9/11; Washington’s increased contest with militant Islam for hearts and minds of the Muslim mainstream; the role of religion upon the politics of both Sunni and Shia Iraqis, who prefer to be recognized first as Muslim rather than as Iraqi (by contrast, it would be common in America for a Christian to answer “I’m an American” before saying “I’m a Christian”); the differing interpretations that fundamentalist Muslims and the more reformist Muslims apply to the shari’ah laws (stunningly revealed in March 2006, and calling into question the democracy experiment in Afghanistan, when forty-one year old Abdul Rahman faced a death sentence because he had converted from Islam to Christianity). These and other indicators have in recent years established beyond doubt the role that religious concerns and religious believers may have in starting, sustaining, or ending political conflict.

That footnote has, in fact, now become an entire book. Writing in 2003 (Faith-based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik), Johnston and another team of scholars have acknowledged the practical initiatives begun by Washington to take religion from beyond the bounds of critical analysis and give it its proper place in conflict analysis and political solutions. Johnston cites, for instance, the State Department’s Office of International Religious Freedom (established in 1998) and the later assignment of military chaplains to that department’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. He also sees a training program for Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard chaplains in religion and statecraft as another manifestation of the new U.S. emphasis on the importance of religion in policy and diplomacy. Nevertheless, “although such measures show a growing awareness of religion’s political importance, religious imperatives have yet to be incorporated as a major consideration in U.S. foreign policy. They should be.” Johnston is making the significant point that, having turned the corner, Washington cannot expect in just a few years time to have overcome two hundred years of institutionalized predisposition against the significance of religious belief and religious actors in its foreign policy structure. Processing that kind of a worldview shift takes time to work itself into the system and work itself out practically. (Other books on the subject of international relations and religion are emerging, such as Scott Thomas’s The Global Resurgence of Religion and the Transformation of International Relations and Religion and Security: The New Nexus in International Relations, edited by former US ambassador Robert Seiple and Dennis Hoover.)

Washington’s new emphasis on religion is equally true outside the halls of power in the important context of “public diplomacy,” a term that is now something of a catchphrase to describe US efforts to dispel Muslim resentment of America overseas through multi-media initiatives. Experimentation, here, however, has often proved rather silly and foolish-looking to Muslims, especially choice of subject matter on some of the television and radio programs. Also, the same institutionalized predisposition against religious concerns remains a concern. After studying the cottage industry of reports about US public diplomacy that have been put out in recent years by the government, by think tanks, and by other policy groups and analysts, David Fabrycky of the U.S. Foreign Service maintains that American public diplomacy still pooh-poohs “any serious discussion about religion.” As a result, Fabrycky has concluded that efforts by The State Department and the Bush administration to raise the level of religious concerns through public diplomacy remains “detrimental to U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East where religion has a shaping influence on public life.” Reminiscent of Johnston’s contention, Fabrycky attributes this inattention to religion to what he calls “the mistake of mirror-making: projecting [secular] American ways of thinking and acting onto another country” (“U.S. Public Diplomacy and Religion in the Muslim World,” The Review of Faith and International Affairs,” Fall, 2005).

Foreign policy theorists and practitioners, diplomats, foreign secretaries, advisors, and others working in the field of international relations or public diplomacy will find the wisdom tradition particularly suited to helping them determine what the proper place of religion should be in the policy affairs of nations. The Wisdom Project and the book therefore run concurrent with Washington’s growing interest to accommodate the role that religious belief, religious institutions, religious concerns, and religious spokespersons should play in areas such international relations, conflict analysis, policy negotiations, and public diplomacy amidst the very religious and equally political Muslim world.

It must be quickly said, however, that The Wisdom Project and the book are not religious initiatives, for the wisdom tradition is a paradigm for international relations and foreign policy accommodating both religious concerns and concerns that would not be considered religious but secular, such as politics, economics, social life, and issues of justice. In short, the wisdom tradition offers seats to many different views around its table, including the religious. In fact, it seems ideally suited to accommodate both the religious and the secular (to use the common understandings of those two words).

The modern history of literature about the wisdom tradition has almost entirely ignored this. Instead, the literature has generally focused wisdom as proverbs and wise sayings. There has been precious little published to show how the wisdom tradition of the Scriptures can illuminate international relations and foreign policy: even though this is one of its primary features. The Wisdom Project therefore seeks to recover this “lost” dimension of the wisdom literature to show its relevance for international relations today, with a special focus on US foreign policy toward Israel and the Muslim Middle East. This will be done through the book and through other Project goals, including roundtable discussions and workshops, seminars, lectures, articles, and policy papers. Neglected though it has been, this dimension of the wisdom tradition seems particularly suited to the Middle East today, for it was the paradigm for conducting international relations within the pluralistic old-world Middle East.

Much can be learned for today’s pluralistic environment from this narrative, with its old-world political and religions leaders and their diverse functions and offices, and the struggles they faced. Of the many different classes of actors in the wisdom narrative (both men and women) were those who held high offices in government or the military, or in civil or religious life, with many being highly trained professionals in international relations. In today’s vernacular, they would be called statesmen, foreign secretaries, ambassadors, diplomats, military advisors, political theorists, policy makers, ecclesiastical officials, cabinet secretaries, professional political writers, and the like. They were old-world counterparts to cabinet secretaries like Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell, or to professional advisors such as Dennis Ross and Bernard Lewis, or to international relations theorists like the ones cited above. In brief, they were trained as professionals in the wisdom tradition and they plied their skills in geopolitical contexts. They traveled to the capitals of neighboring nations and they entertained their counterparts in their own capitals. And they understood not only their own nation’s interests and values but the interests and values of the surrounding nations. “There is little prospect of mediating any conflict,” writes seasoned Middle East negotiator Dennis Ross, “if one does not understand the historical narrative of each side” (The Missing Peace).

Because the wisdom tradition functions in a way that is able to include all dialogue partners, it can offer a context for the constructive debates and mutual understanding that are indispensable for creating rapprochement and more peaceable arrangements in the pluralistic relationships between America, Israel, and the Muslim world. Without being idealistic about it, it is therefore the Project’s hope to offer Jews, Muslims, Christians, and secularists a fresh perspective for creating equitable ways ahead in the value-laden debates and negotiations being conducted by people with diverse and even conflicting commitments.

In recent years, good and sufficient arguments have arisen to leave millions of people on both the left and the right, both religious and non-religious, disillusioned with US policies in the Middle East. They are equally frustrated with the hardening anti-American attitudes of Muslims, which they believe can be changed by wiser engagement. And to get us there they desire “third way” voices beyond the current polarity of US policy initiatives. This is the time, then, to rethink these international relations and to wisely replace policies that are ill-advised or past their sell-by date. A window of opportunity now exists for this, writes Richard Haass, but it is not permanent. “It will over time fade or even disappear altogether.... Opportunity coexists with necessity and urgency. It is not inevitable that things turn out right. This could easily become an era akin to the last one, defined by the cold war, or even worse, by chaos. But just as easily, this could turn out to be an era of great promise.... There is little in the way of resource limits or institutional barriers to prevent the United States from choosing such a course. Further generations will have grounds to be critical and then some if it turns out that we failed to seize the opportunity at hand” (The Opportunity).

Drawing from identifiable features, principles, norms, and learned lessons of the wisdom narrative and applying those to today’s US, British, and other Western relations with the Middle East relations, The Wisdom Project seeks to provide a fresh, alternative voice on one of America’s highest priority issues.