To begin with, let me recount an old Soviet, Cold War–era joke about America.

A Russian and an American are seated side by side on an airplane flying from Moscow to Washington. The American turns to the Russian and says: “I must admit, your state propaganda is truly impressive.” The Soviet smiles, thanks him for the compliment, and replies that it is nothing compared to American propaganda.

“But we don’t have state propaganda,” the American answers, horrified and bewildered.

The Soviet smiles again and says: “Exactly.”

The joke came back to mind while I was looking into Donald Trump’s personnel choices and stumbled upon the books written by two prominent officials of the current administration: Michael T. Flynn, former National Security Advisor to the president and now the self-styled “intellectual” grey eminence of the MAGA movement — Michael T. Flynn and Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How to Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2016) — and the current U.S. Secretary of Defense (or, as Trump has rechristened the office, the Secretary of War), Pete Hegseth — Pete Hegseth, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free (New York: Center Street, 2020).

 Without the slightest hesitation, I can place these books among the most foolish and internally contradictory works I have ever read. And I mean that quite literally — including Noel Malcolm’s Bosnia: A Short History, written by the British historian and public intellectual Noel Malcolm; Islam Between East and West by Alija Izetbegović, the Bosnian Islamist thinker and first president of independent Bosnia and Herzegovina; the collected writings of Dragoš Kalajić, the Serbian far-right philosopher, painter, and cultural polemicist; or even the memoirs of Nikola Koljević, the Shakespeare scholar who became one of the political leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the 1990s war, in which he gravely assures the reader that Serbs would never be able to survive in a hypothetical postwar Sarajevo district because of the allegedly excessive Muslim birth rate…  

But let us first turn to the newest great friend of Milorad Dodik—Michael Flynn. Dodik, for those unfamiliar with the Balkan theatre, is the informal political leader of the Bosnian Serbs and, in his latest ideological metamorphosis, a freshly minted white nationalist. And one must thank Providence that Flynn is, at least, a military officer rather than a self-proclaimed literary visionary like the family friend of Alija Izetbegović, the Israeli lobbyist Bernard-Henri Lévy. For had Flynn, by some twist of fate, also fancied himself a dramatist, we might soon—after Lévy’s theatrical vision of Alija as the saviour of Europe—be treated to a new stage production: “Dodik, Knight of Judeo-Christian Civilization,” brandishing his sword atop Mount Zion while a choir from an improvised gallery solemnly chants about the clash of civilizations.

In the manner of dusty, second-rate Cold War propaganda (pardon—of course I meant universal cosmic truth, for America, as we all know, has never produced propaganda; that unfortunate habit belongs exclusively to others), the author patiently explains that Islamists, Marxists, and Nazis are essentially the same thing:

“It is an old story. If Marx and Lenin predicted the inevitable defeat of capitalism, then it will surely fall. If the Aryan race is vastly superior to our ‘impure’ population, then we might as well start learning German immediately. Now there is a new certainty that drives the jihadists: if Allah has blessed the jihad against America, then it cannot fail.”

When one reads this gem of geopolitical dialectics, one cannot help but wonder how humanity managed to survive for so many centuries without such a brilliant synthesis. For it now turns out that Marxism, Nazism, and Islamism are essentially one and the same thing—roughly as if someone were to explain that fire, water, and ice are identical simply because they are all elements encountered in nature.
After all, a heterogeneous ideology that speaks of the cyclical crises of the capitalist economy—which, incidentally, do occur in reality and regularly produce social catastrophes and wars—and that identifies control over resources and markets as the driving force behind imperial expansion, however controversial it may appear to some, imperialists in particular, nevertheless proceeds from a socio-economic analysis. By contrast, an ideology that, however radical it may be, rests on the religious premise that all human beings are equal before God belongs to an entirely different moral plane. Neither of these, whatever one’s personal opinion of them, bears any essential resemblance to an ideology that sought to reduce people of “inferior races” to slavery—or, more efficiently still, to exterminate them like insects in gas chambers.

The qualitative gulf between these positions is so obvious that it requires a rather dense fog of propaganda to blur it into something resembling a coherent argument. And yet precisely such a fog is necessary for another ideological construction of our own time: the ruling neoconservative Protestant–Zionist doctrine, born of the curious and rather unnatural fusion between American millenarianism and the distorted remnants of Trotskyism that conveniently provided it with a veneer of “scientific” respectability. According to this doctrine, God Himself entrusted the United States with a historical mission—to protect Israel and strike at its enemies—thereby allegedly hastening the arrival of Armageddon, that final cosmic reckoning in which all the enemies of the white Protestant Jesus, as promised by the apocalyptic imagination of His modern interpreters, will be mercilessly destroyed.

Compared to such a cosmic scenario, even the fiercest ideological disputes of the twentieth century begin to look like rather modest intellectual disagreements.
For once Marx, Hitler, and the jihadists are casually stuffed into the same sentence, what is being written is no longer history but the script of a propaganda disaster movie—almost, one might say, a Hollywood blockbuster: a little apocalypse, a little civilizational drama, and in the end the obligatory message that against this cosmic pact of evil a new crusading army must be assembled.
Except that this is not a film.

It is American reality.

In the other remarkably foolish book written by the aforementioned Trump cabinet member, Hegseth, we read the following—verbatim:

“Islamism is the most dangerous threat to freedom in the world. It cannot be negotiated with, it cannot be coexisted with, nor can it be understood; it must be exposed, marginalized, and defeated. Just as the Christian Crusaders in the twelfth century pushed back the Muslim hordes, so too must American crusaders today summon the same courage against the Islamists.”

And also this:

“Islam is a religion practiced by billions of people. Islamism is defined as the belief in imposing Islam on others, through both violent and nonviolent means, and it is practiced by hundreds of millions of people. Even if we take the lower estimate of the percentage of Muslims in the world who can properly be described as Islamists (approximately 25 percent), we are still speaking about a population larger than that of the entire United States.”

And this as well:

“I fully understand the difference between ‘peaceful’ Muslims and Islamist Muslims. I have many dear friends who are Muslims—including Omar from Texas, his family, and colleagues from FOX News. They are wonderful people who, in their view, work and struggle to save a religion occupied by radicals. I disagree with that assessment, but they love America, and I respect them greatly for it.”

One might assume that after such a sweeping diagnosis there would at least follow some elementary analysis of the realities of the Islamic world. But that is precisely where the real circus begins. For this supposedly “monolithic Islamism,” which allegedly stands at the gates of McDonald’s civilization, in reality resembles anything but a unified force.

The Islamic world today is fragmented into dozens of mutually antagonistic states, hundreds of movements that display radical intolerance toward one another, and countless rival sects. Shiites against Sunnis, Sunnis against Sunnis, Salafis against one another and against everyone else, national states against transnational movements such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Erdoğan’s followers against the Gülenists—and so on, without end.

Islam as a heterogeneous global religious and political phenomenon possesses no central institution of authority today. There is no caliph—and historically there rarely was one—whose word could trigger anything resembling a “general mobilization.” Even ISIS’s blood-soaked and almost caricatural attempt to resurrect the caliphate failed to attract even a fraction of a percent of the world’s Muslims, let alone the alleged “hundreds of millions.”

And here we arrive at the most delightful part of this geopolitical comedy. While the author brandishes his crusader’s sword against “Islamism,” it was precisely the United States that for decades systematically supported the most radical Salafist currents in the Islamic world—most often against those very regimes that were comparatively more secular and politically “moderate.” From the mujahideen in Afghanistan, through a variety of insurgent networks in the Middle East and Libya, all the way to the Syrian war, where in the chaos of arming the so-called “moderate opposition” the greatest advantage was reaped by the best organized Islamist factions. Not to mention the long-standing, solid alliance with states in which radical Salafism functions practically as the official ideology—Saudi Arabia being the most obvious example—in the geopolitical struggle against Shiite Iran, whose regime, however authoritarian and theocratic it may appear from a liberal perspective, can sometimes, by comparison with Riyadh’s puritanism, genuinely resemble an Enlightenment experiment.

And then, as in every cheap Hollywood script, comes the obligatory scene with the “good Muslims.” The minister assures us that he personally knows several wonderful Muslims—even one from Texas—who love America very much, and for that reason he respects them deeply. Which is certainly touching and commendable. Only at the very same time he advocates a new “crusade” against the Islamic world, while in that crusade assembling as his principal allies precisely the most radical Salafist regimes and movements from Riyadh to the Syrian desert—those very actors whom, in his own rather foolish book, he acknowledges as financing… well, yes, radical Islamic movements in America and Europe.

Thus emerges the curious geopolitical formula of our age: a struggle against Islamic extremism in which the principal partners are—Islamic extremists.

None of this, of course, means that radical Islamist movements are not dangerous. On the contrary: given the opportunity, many of these sects—like many others throughout history—would gladly push even their own followers to the margins of society over disagreements as trivial as whether the left or the right sleeve should be put on first, while sending the rest of the population under the sword. But that does not make them a uniquely singular threat, nor does it render any less dangerous the other, no less messianic fraternity—the Washington Zionist sect convinced that it has been personally entrusted by God with arranging the geopolitical stage for the arrival of the white Protestant Jesus. The very same Jesus who, according to their theological imagination, will one day descend to turn all unbelievers into fuel for the eternal fires of hell—especially those who have had the audacity to suggest that the mass killing of children in Gaza or the bombing of Iran might not entirely conform to the ethics of the New Testament.

And the most remarkable part of the entire story is this: for decades now, these two dangers have been living together in a remarkably stable alliance.

In other words, the front ranks of today’s defenders of “civilizational values” against those supposedly diabolical Iranians are indeed an impressive company. There is the American president with a value system reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan; the Saudi grand mufti Ṣāliḥ al-Fawzān, who once thundered curses at those who believed in the heliocentric system and now explains how his country, together with American soldiers, is waging a holy jihad; Ukrainian neo-Nazis rallying behind the “good Jew” Zelensky; Israeli right-wingers who calmly debate the practical aspects of genocide in television studios while schoolchildren are taught that the Messiah—not the white Protestant Jesus, but another one entirely—will soon arrive to make all nations the servants of Israel. And the exhausted windbag Bernard-Henri Lévy helpfully clarifies that there are noble wars, and that Trump’s war—which on its very first day claimed the lives of 180 underage girls—is apparently one of them.

And on the domestic, Bosnian-Herzegovinian civilizational front, the spectacle is no less exalted. There is the former communist Milorad Dodik, now marching arm in arm with Trump’s luminary Flynn, enthusiastically singing “Sprem’te se, sprem’te četnici” while railing against “commies.” There is also the former physical-education teacher turned Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Dino Konaković, lamenting the destruction of American military installations in Arab countries—the very same bases from which, incidentally, another sovereign state is being attacked. And behind them, as a worthy background choir, stand the Mostar crypto-Ustaše, waving an Israeli flag in one hand and an LGBT banner in the other, accompanied by a special guest appearance from the tele-hadith Salafi sheikh Elvedin Pezić, who finds the invasion of Iran unworthy of comment but happily instructs respectable householders of all confessions on the finer points of beating one’s wife without leaving visible bruises—or why there is nothing particularly wrong with close relatives marrying each other. All together, of course, ready to explain to us the subtleties of this salvational civilizational synthesis.

So if anyone is still wondering where exactly “Western civilization” is being defended today, they need only take a glance at this remarkable ensemble. Rarely in history has such a harmonious coalition gathered together: apocalyptic theologians, shameless manipulators whose stupidity is rivalled only by their boundless greed, and creatures who appear to have been carefully selected from the registries of the world’s psychiatric institutions. When such an elite assembles to save the world, one almost wishes the world would somehow manage—by moving resolutely in the opposite direction—to save itself.

Exactly so.