While Russia’s war in Ukraine has dominated much of official Washington’s focus these last three years, America’s other two principal adversaries – China and Iran – are working to definitively upset the teetering world order that America made. And as the January 1, 2025 attack in New Orleans reminds us, the threat posed by other militant Islamists to the homeland endures.
Unfortunately, too few voices in the halls of power appreciate the root motivations of either the Imperial Chinese or militant Islamist mindset. But as the international situation grows increasingly perilous and the cost of failure grows higher, it is essential to understand the history – deep history – of these adversaries’ attitudes toward the West. This is necessary if Americans are to defend their way of life.
Both China and Iran do believe America is a degenerate hegemon, but that has less to do with recent events than many realize. Their specific complaints about the United States stem from deep hostility to the West, which knocked these powers from what they believe was a rightful place at the center of global politics centuries ago. Though far from united in their own ambitions, anti-Westernism is a potent glue that keeps Beijing and Tehran – and their anti-American coalition – together and growing.
The Egyptian Epiphany
Militant Islam’s grievances date deep in time, but the current incarnation burst into view in Egypt in the 1790s. At the time, Egyptian scholars like Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti confidently viewed the rest of the world as their inferiors. When a French army led by Napoleon Bonaparte seized Alexandria in 1798, this at first seemed a nonevent. As al-Jabarti recalled “people were saying that the moment that [commander in chief] Murad Bey arrived at his destination, victory would be theirs.”1
Al-Jabarti’s contempt for the French and their culture seeps through his writing. He denounces the “incoherent words and vulgar constructions” in their Arabic writing as heatedly as he condemns their bedroom and bathroom habits.2
Regardless of their contempt for the French, the Egyptians’ complacency was shattered when Napoleon brushed aside Murad Bey’s forces and practically strolled into Cairo in a campaign marked the beginnings of more than a century and a half of European domination of the Middle East.
Imperious China
A few years earlier in 1793, China’s Qian Long emperor held an audience with an emissary from the King of England, Lord Macartney. George III sought to establish trade and diplomatic relations with China, and, as a token of good will, Macartney had brought six hundred crates of gifts with him. The Qian Long emperor was unimpressed. As he wrote to George III, “We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures.” Moreover, “It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that, by perpetual submission to our Throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter.3
From his perspective, the British Empire, despite all its overseas possessions, wealth, and fearsome naval reputation, was not the equal to China in diplomatic affairs – and never would be.4
The emperor’s subjects had a little more time than their Egyptian counterparts to enjoy such an opinion. Despite the warnings from officials like Wei Yuan, who would later describe the Westerners as “many barbarian tribes, who cherish only profit and power, and indeed are as treacherous as the owls,” the imperial court ignored the looming threat of European colonial expansion.5
China’s complacency ended in 1842, when Britain defeated it militarily in the First Opium War and imposed a punitive peace treaty. Despite his title, the man on the throne in Beijing was evidently not the ruler of “all under heaven.” The war began what the Chinese Communists call the “century of humiliation,” during which the Chinese government ceded much of its sovereignty and even some of its territory to European and Japanese imperialists.
Diagnosing The Fall
Islamic and Chinese intellectuals spent much of the 19th and early 20th centuries trying to discern how their countries had declined so far with so little warning – and how to get back on top. In both places, a rough consensus emerged that their societies had become too ossified and sclerotic, but the path to revival was more controversial.
The Muslim world, which was politically fragmented, tended to have more open exchanges of ideas. Firebrands like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, a man of uncertain origins who claimed to be Afghan, could flit from the Ottoman Empire to Egypt, Iran, or the smaller Central Asian principalities as they wore out their welcome, so they had more opportunities to promulgate their ideas.
The Islamist reformers generally fell into two camps. One set thought that constitutions – and sometimes even democracy – were necessary for Islamic revival. In this view, closely emulating Western political institutions was necessary for the scientific and technological dynamism that would create national power. Ottoman officials like Midhat Pasha and his Persian counterparts implemented constitutions for their countries that borrowed from some European ideas. After World War I, Mustafa Kemal remade Turkey as a secular, Europeanizing state.
Their rivals believed that Muslims needed to slough off centuries of accumulated jurisprudence and return to Islam’s roots. For this group, social and moral purification were the first, prerequisite steps to driving out the Westerners. Hassan al-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, was one such purifier.
According to later accounts, in 1916, when he was just ten years old, al-Banna persuaded local police to confiscate and destroy an “obscene” statue of a woman on a nearby river barge. He began his studies in Cairo in 1923, shortly after Kemal drove the occupying Europeans out of Turkey and just before the Kemalists abolished the caliphate, the titular head of the Islamic community. Al-Banna lamented the high prestige of the secularizing Kemalists and encroaching street signs written in “the language of the economic occupation” near the Suez Canal.6
Al-Banna founded the Brotherhood to revive Islam’s moral core and drive out the British. He saw these two initiatives as going hand-in-hand since, as he later wrote to King Farouk I, “the Almighty… has made change in the affairs of nations contingent on change within their moral character and the rectitude of their souls.”7
The West, by contrast, “is now bankrupt and in decline.”8 Farouk I’s government did not take his advice. The Brotherhood became more violent, eventually assassinating an Egyptian prime minister before al-Banna himself was assassinated in 1949.
In China, the debate proceeded differently. Nearly every reformer agreed the empire’s Confucian ideology had made China too inwardly focused and backward-looking. At first, many of them thought democracy would strengthen their country. But after World War I, leaders like Yan Fu lamented, “I have come to feel that their [the West’s] progress during the last three hundred years has only led to selfishness, slaughter, corruption, and shamelessness.”9
And while nationalists in the May Fourth movement called for “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy,” others soured on Western ideas when the Treaty of Versailles permitted foreign occupation of parts of China.
During this period, neither the Muslim world nor China had much reason to fear or hate the United States. Americans who visited the Middle East tended to be traders, tourists, or missionaries who built schools and hospitals.10 Missionaries and merchants from the United States also reached China, and the U.S. government tried to protect them, albeit nowhere near as rapaciously as the European states exercised power on behalf of their ex-patriots.
For example, after a multinational coalition defeated the xenophobic Boxer Rebellion, President Theodore Roosevelt used the indemnity payments to educate Chinese students. His successor, William Howard Taft, unsuccessfully sought a development path for China that would protect it from further Japanese and Russian encroachment. During World War II, Americans fought alongside the Chinese against Japanese imperialism.11
American Roadblock & Decadence
There are two principal reasons for Chinese Communist and Islamist antipathy toward the United States today: the first is that Washington is now the main obstacle between each movement and their dreams of restoring former glories; the second is a perception of inherently debauched Western culture.
After World War II, American policymakers realized the British Empire could no longer maintain a favorable balance of power and sought to prevent any one country from dominating either Europe or Asia. Since China wants to once again dominate “all under heaven,” starting in Asia, the Chinese Communist Party sees the United States as an inhibitor to its global ambitions.
The United States has also sought to shape the global economy to benefit Americans, particularly by ensuring freedom of the seas and stable energy markets. That requires a balance of power in the Middle East, the region Islamists, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian government, intend as a springboard for the global advance of their visions of Islam. Their dream may be more fanciful than China’s; their leaders are no less determined to fight those who stand in their way, particularly Israel and the United States.
Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communists depict the West as morally corrupt — the recent Chinese blockbuster The Battle of Lake Changjin shows some wholesome Chinese soldiers confused by an American poster of a pinup girl.12 Soon after taking power, Xi Jinping issued guidance to the Party that it should squelch a set of dangerous ideas which bear a striking resemblance to the American Bill of Rights.13
Xi is pursuing a model of development that he hopes will allow China to surpass American power without adopting American ideas. As he sees it, the Western playbook for economic development gives too much power to monied interests and increases social and political strife. He believes that without the Communist Party, China will “lose its soul” to seductive Westerners. His “people-centered” model will, in his view, suit China better and benefit other countries that adopt it. In time, it might destroy the “myth” that the Western path to modernization is the best.14
Islamists also find Americans to be moral degenerates. Sayyid Qutb, who was born in Egypt in 1906, became one of the most influential Islamist thinkers shortly after al-Banna’s death (his personal lawyer was the uncle of Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri).15 Qutb famously decided that the United States was an enemy during his time studying in Greeley, Colorado: among other things, he was appalled by a dance in a church basement he attended.16 If church dances in mild-mannered Middle America were a mortal threat to the Muslim Brotherhood, it should be no surprise that Hamas’ constitution denounces other American institutions – like the Rotary Club.17
To be clear, Islamist and Chinese Communist ideologies are radically different — one religious, one atheist — and neither wants to be ruled by the other. But their hatred and fear of the West, for now, cements a bond between them.
Having a shared enemy also creates important openings for both to build a coalition that opposes American and allied interests. As the international reaction to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine reveals, much of the developing world remains skeptical at best of Western leadership. Not everyone shares Vladimir Putin’s belief that the West is “satanic,” but American and European moral influence is much weaker than many in Washington realize.18 For example, Gallup’s most recent data shows that in 2023, global support for American leadership is at 41 percent, and that it has not achieved a majority since the poll began in 2007.19
China’s moral leadership is even lower than America’s, but Xi is not aiming to win a global popularity contest. To succeed, he just needs other countries to disdain the United States more than they do China.
Prescription for the Future
Breaking up the anti-Western coalition will not be easy, but the same attributes that make the United States a formidable adversary can also reduce the appeal of anti-Westernism, if leveraged correctly. As the empires that governed the areas now described as the developing world decayed and ultimately collapsed, reformers usually did not debate the merits of friendship with the West. Rather, they mostly saw Westerners as adversaries that needed to be bested. But the ones who wanted to emulate the best of the West’s ideas – such as individual rights and self-government – tended to direct their countries down pathways ultimately friendlier to the West. (As perhaps the most salient example, Turkey joined NATO in 1952, within fifteen years of Mustafa Kemal’s death.)
Other countries, peoples, and movements will not necessarily become more pro-American if the United States is kinder, humbler, and gentler. But they are far more likely to copy American institutions and ideas if they believe it will make their own societies wealthier and stronger. The United States should message to these undecideds accordingly.
As Osama bin Laden himself once told supporters, “when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”20 The best way to beat the Islamists and the Communists is to show others that adopting American and Western ways is the best way to help them achieve their goals, not Washington’s.