Modern Age - Fall 2014 - 47

WHAT U.S. FOREIGN SERVICE OFFICERS SHOULD KNOW

slaves until France took over North Africa in
1830. After that conquest, Muslims caused
the West no trouble until their post-WWI
decline. Hence, our troubles with the Mus-
lim world stem less from its nature than from
the balance of forces.
India's millennial civilization was based
on conflating man with nature while distin-
guishing sharply between castes of humans.
In our time, the British made their version of
Western civilization part of the mentality of
the Indian elite by using English as the lan-
guage of education. This led some Indians
(and Pakistanis) to imitate British bureau-
cracy and others merely to follow the West's
fashions. But for millions it opened the pos-
sibility of personal achievement through aca-
demic excellence. India (and its Muslim rival
on the subcontinent, Pakistan), however, is
home to more than a billion people whose
habits and outlook on life are deeply rooted
and very foreign to us. The foreigner never
knows with which of the many hybrid prod-
ucts of Hindu civilization's soil he is dealing.
Nor should the FSO assume that the Euro-
peans with whom he deals stand firmly on
the ground of Western civilization. In fact,
our civilization's basic premises-mankind's
unique status in a created universe, human
equality, and the imperative to discover truth
and master nature-are most in question in
the educational institutions that produce
Europe's ruling class, including diplomats.
In fact, the world's greatest struggles have
taken place within Judeo-Christian civiliza-
tion about those very premises. The ways
of life most contrary to Judeo-Christian
civilization have come from movements that
sprang from it and made war from within,
from medieval Gnostic sects to National
Socialist and Marxist ideologies.
At any given time, in any given place,
peoples and individuals among them will
exhibit a peculiar mix of a civilization's

traits depending on what persons, habits,
and ideas the ruling regime happens to favor
or oppose. Plato observed that every city
reflects the kind of person most prominent
in it, and Aristotle that the nature of every
polity changes along with its regime. We
have experienced several possible Germanys,
Russias, and Chinas. Germany, for example,
was a very different country under the pre-
1918 Wilhelmine monarchy than under the
Weimar Republic of the 1920s or the Nazi
regime of 1933-45, or in the 1950s Adenauer
years. In our time, it is a peaceful, prosper-
ous member of the European Union. Russia,
Japan, and China, among others, have been
sometimes passive and sometimes asser-
tive, sometimes producers and other times
destroyers of decency, domestic wealth, and
international peace.
The importance of any regime's nature
to an American FSO depends on what role
vis à vis America the regime is enabling
and encouraging its people to play. This is a
matter far more complex than categorizing
regimes according to Aristotle's typology of
governments (rule by one, few, or many, in
the rulers' particular interest or in that of
the whole) or to the modern American one
(democracy good, autocracy bad; secular
good, religious bad).

A

merica's founding generation, con-
cerned as it was to secure America's
peace, understood that wars arise out of pas-
sions and interests in all nations. Alexander
Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 6: "The
causes of hostility among nations are innu-
merable . . . the love of power or the desire
of preeminence . . . jealousy . . . equality and
safety . . . the attachments, enmities, interests,
hopes and fears of leading individuals . . . per-
sonal advantage or personal gratification."
Amid the indecipherable welter of motiva-
tions, what mattered was who, at any time,
47
Modern Age - Fall 2014

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