And so we are stuck. Unlike Israel, most Western states don’t perceive a direct threat from the likes of the Islamic State. But all of us recognize that these groups represent a fundamental ideological challenge.
How can we counter it?
The answer can be gleaned from our enemies.
If Qatar, Turkey and Russia promote non-state actors which are transforming into regimes, why can’t we? They can form groups where the like-minded can congregate and control territories. They form groups that control places like Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Afghanistan and wide swaths of Africa.
Why can’t we.
In Israel’s case, we can stop negotiating with various shades of terror. Instead, we can establish a small Palestinian state of our own. We can pick who gets to live there. We can help with governance and provide protection. We can establish it under an ideological umbrella that represents our vision for the rest of world. A vision in which man imitates G-d: creating and using the fruits of our creation to connect to the timeless.
We don’t need to stop there. Why choose between the Shia and Sunni in Iraq. Establish a place, perhaps a place with a large minority population, and create something small, but something better. Perhaps we can create a Yazidi-led state, if they aren’t eliminated too quickly.
Initially, we can provide military protection. And we can drain the neighboring fever swamps of dictatorship and exploitation of their most important resources; people driven to create. We can drain them of those people who otherwise would be taxed into supporting the Islamists’ visions of peace through destruction.
We can pull our allies from amongst our enemies.
A tiny physical area can accrue tremendous wealth and power and serve as a model for its neighbors and a refuge for those who would seek life and creation rather than death and destruction.
We can establish these sorts of places wherever the breakdown of the state is in progress. We can do this in Africa, in Afghanistan, in Yemen. We can do it in Syria and Iraq. And we can do it here.
Indeed, the rump state is a time-honored tool for marginalizing enemies, confusing others’ messages of condemnation and, when placed in the service of a higher ideology, improving the world.
The national model has much to recommend it. But where the state is an instrument of dictatorship, oppression and ruin, we ought to seek to undermine it. We ought to give people a way to participate in something better.
In fact, we must.
Faced with radical Islamism and other stateless ideologies, the national model and its representative democracy of dictatorships have become either defenseless or complicit.
It’s time to fight back.