The Foreign Service Journal, February 2006

60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 6 B O O K S the last word on the matter, but it is one that deserves to be read. William B. Quandt is professor of pol- itics at the University of Virginia, and the author of Peace Process: Ameri- can Diplomacy and the Arab-Israeli Conflict Since 1967, third edition (Brookings, 2005). He served on the National Security Council staff deal- ing with Middle Eastern affairs in the Nixon and Carter administrations. A Complex Relationship Liberty and Power: A Dialogue on Religion and U.S. Foreign Policy in an Unjust World J. Bryan Hehir, Michael Walzer et al., Brookings Institution Press, 2004, $16.95, paperback, 119 pages. R EVIEWED BY J OHN G RONDELSKI If we should “give unto Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God,” who gets for- eign policy? As recently as the 1970s, Caesar’s monopoly on relations with other Caesars would have been a given. But that is no longer true, as this collection of seven essays, Volume Four of the Pew Forum Dia- logues on Religion and Public Life series, demonstrates. (Though the book was published nearly two years ago, its insights are even more rele- vant today.) The anthology’s editor, J. Bryan Hehir, the Parker Gilbert Montgom- ery Professor of the Practice of Religion and Public Life at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, quotes the political philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain: “American politics is indecipherable if it is severed from the interplay and panoply of Ameri- ca’s religions.” He notes that the same is increasingly true of world politics. The essayists all freely acknowl- edge that the relationship between religion and foreign policy is complex, and its analysis is rife with potential pitfalls. James Lindsay, vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations, cautions against the tendency for self-righteousness to creep into the discourse. For his part, columnist Charles Krauthammer seems dubious about “the question of whether reli- gious convictions guide a moral for- eign policy,” though admitting that internationally “we have no choice but to act ... by our own definitions of what is right and just.” Alas, he does not tell us whence those definitions derive. Professor Shibley Telhami argues that winning the war against terrorism ulti- mately depends on “speak[ing] with moral authority.” The two central essays in the book, by Michael Walzer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Hehir, will be perhaps the most useful for many readers. Walzer acknowl- edges the contributions religion can make to foreign policy (arguing, for example, that even so-called “realistic” debates over obliteration bombing in the British government during World War II employed “realpolitik” lan- guage to cloak the interlocutors’ ethi- cal and moral commitments). But Walzer cautions against any conversa- tion partners “lay[ing] claims to divine authority.” Hehir points out that the exclusion of religion from foreign policy finds its roots in the Westphalian concept of state sovereignty that put an end to the Thirty Years’ War back in 1648. But he believes that approach needs fine- tuning. “... [T]here is a growing con- sensus that a complete secularization of world politics, or an analytical effort to divorce religion from the political order, yields a distorted conception of contemporary world politics. There is little support for a collapse of the dis- tinction between the political and reli- gious domains of life. The crossing of the fault lines resides in a more mod- est proposition that the public and social significance of religion, its potential for positive and negative effects on politics, must be given weight.” Still, systematic application of such a process, Hehir admits, is only in its incipient stages. While the bogeyman of 17th-cen- tury religious warfare is often invoked to justify the exorcism of religion from the public and diplomatic spheres, the fact remains that the most egregious violators of international peace and human rights in the 20th century were regimes driven by secular, even anti- religious, ideologies. The dangers of the state as author and sole measure of its own morality were well document- ed at Nuremberg. Renewing the dia- logue with religion can only illuminate the forces by which humans — indi- vidually, collectively, nationally, even internationally — order their affairs. These essays — balanced, probing and honest — are a good place to start in joining that ongoing dialogue. n John Grondelski, an FSO since 1998, served in London and Warsaw. He is now on the Russia desk. Renewing the dialogue with religion can only illuminate the forces by which humans order their affairs.