In Defense of Luttwak

Edward N. Luttwak is one of the foremost strategic thinkers of our time, a far-sighted man given to challenging conventional wisdom in a manner guaranteed both to get public attention and generate controversy. This one-time enfant terrible of strategic analysis, author of such classic works as Coup d'Etat, A Practical Handbook, Grand Strategy of the Soviet Union, The Pentagon and the Art of War, and his masterwork, Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, has a penchant for seeing things that others miss, and pointing this out with such logic and clarity that, in retrospect, it seems strikingly obvious.

Thus, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Francis Fukuyama was declaring the End of History, and Thomas Friedman was discovering that The World is Flat, Luttwak wrote the book Turbocapitalism (1999) in which he pointed out that economic globalization, while bringing a multiplicity of benefits to many people around the world, has not been an unalloyed good, and was creating problems of social alienation, resentment and radicalization that had the potential to stir ethnic and religious conflict around the world. But of course!

By way of disclosure, Edward Luttwak has been a friend and mentor to me; he was my teacher at Georgetown University, he gave me my first real job, and once upon a time, we wrote a book together. That does not mean, however, that we are attached at the hip. We have had some pretty furious disagreements, most notably about the First Gulf War. I did not buy into a lot of his theories on "geo-economics" as presented in Turbocaptialism. More recently, I have had cause to disagree with a number of his editorials and articles related to the Middle East and the ongoing war on terrorism. But whether I agree or disagree, when Edward Luttwak speaks, I pay attention, because what he has to say is always thought provoking and frequently brilliant.

Luttwak stirred up a tempest in a teapot with his recent op-ed in the New York Times, provocatively entitled "President Apostate?" Luttwak writes that Barak Obama, running as a charismatic candidate, has generated in his supporters some very high expectations which he may have problems in meeting. "A case in point," writes Luttwak, "is the oft-made claim that an Obama presidency would be welcomed by the Muslim world." It is said that just as Obama's being "half African" stirs up enthusiasm in that region, so his being "half Muslim" will win over people in the Muslim world. But Luttwak rightly points out that in Islamic eyes, there is no such thing as "half Muslim"--one either is or is not. One's status as a Muslim is determined either by conversion or by birth, and under Islamic law, reflected in the civil law of most Islamic countries, a child automatically receives the religion of his father. Thus, Obama's father being a Muslim automatically makes Obama a Muslim according to Islamic law.