U.S. Foreign Policy and the Destruction of Christian Communities in the Middle East
“In this battle, we have fought for the cause of liberty, and for the peace of the world… Your courage, your willingness to face danger for your country and for each other, made this day possible. Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen, and Iraq is free.”
Twenty-one years later, President George W. Bush’s pronouncement of “mission accomplished” aboard the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, stands as the apogee of hubris.
During the Cold War, realism triumphed over idealism. In the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the United States sought stability rather than transformation. Cosmopolitan values—such as individual autonomy, democratic participation, and human rights promotion—took a back seat to core economic and security interests. Between 1945 and 1990, in particular, the U.S. sought to contain Soviet influence by supporting autocratic client regimes, protect the export of oil and gas from the Persian Gulf, and provide diplomatic, economic, and defense assistance to Israel. The MENA region was the classic case study in the inherent tension between values and interests in the promotion of U.S. foreign policy.
However, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the U.S. faced a global environment where it could operate unencumbered by the threat of a great power competitor. The rise of the “unipolar moment,” presented an unprecedented opportunity to expand the “liberal international order” – a global network of rules-based institutions based on liberal values that include free trade, liberal democratic governance, universal human rights, and collective security. Through a pursuit of liberal hegemony, policymakers would harness economic, military, and political primacy to not only protect the U.S.’s status as a global hegemon, but also transform regional politics in the Middle East.
The most destructive expression of liberal hegemony was the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), a twenty-year adventure in nation-building and counter-terrorism operations across 86 countries between 2001 and 2021. Architects of the GWOT fused interests and values by prioritizing regional transformation, rather than stability, as the solution to the threat of terrorism. The U.S. and her allies would go to war against an ideology—Islamic extremism—and in the process lump together various militant organizations and “rogue” regimes who were often adversaries of one other. Much like the vaunted “domino theory” that led the U.S. into Vietnam, regime change in Afghanistan, Iraq—and later Syria and Iran—would prevent the further diffusion of Islamist violence. As President George W. Bush explained to the nation five days after the 9/11 attacks: “This is a new kind of—a new kind of evil. And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while. And the American people must be patient. I’m going to be patient.”
In retrospect, the United States’s pursuit of GWOT undermined its own security, economic prosperity, and reputation for promoting liberal-democratic values. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across 83 additional countries cost U.S. taxpayers an estimated $8 trillion in estimated future costs for veterans’ care, the total budgetary costs and future obligations of the post-9/11 wars. More tragically, they also produced 7,000 US service member fatalities and 53,000 wounded. Not to mention those suffering the silent effects of war in the decades to come. Equally traumatic, these wars killed an estimated 432,000 civilians, and displaced 3 to 5 million more. Geopolitically, the GWOT produced the conditions giving rise to the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, the expansion of Iranian aggression, and collapse of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and rise of the Second Intifada.
While the first wave of historical revisionism surrounding the GWOT is currently emerging, most analysts have overlooked how U.S. foreign policy has adversely affected the region’s vulnerable Christian minorities. Since 9/11, the negative and unintended consequences of the GWOT have accelerated the persecution and destruction of Christian communities in Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria. American Christians must come to terms with the reality that their solidarity with Middle East Christians will put them at odds with the national interest, as articulated by foreign policy elites of both parties. Accordingly, they should lament the sins of liberal hegemony and demand a change of strategy moving forward.
Before proceeding, however, it is worth considering an important counterfactual. Would the plight of the region’s minorities look any different had the U.S. not expanded its footprint after 9/11? Defenders of U.S. intervention in the Middle East observe that minority communities were already declining before the U.S. asserted a hegemonic role in the region in the early 1970s. The MENA region’s Christian population has gradually decreased three-fold over the past century, from roughly 12 percent in 1920 to 4 percent in 2020.
Over this time period, several of the main threats to Christian minorities had little to do with U.S. foreign policy. For example, during World War I, the Turkish genocide of Armenians and Assyrian communities killed and dislocated upwards of 1.5 million people. After 1945, stagnant economies and regime repression—especially the lack of education and employment prospects—created massive brain-drain for the region’s best and brightest. Finally, Islamist violence—especially in the context of protected domestic unrest, political violence, and civil war—also threatened these communities. Lebanon’s bloody, 15-year civil war, for example, killed approximately 150,000 and displaced an additional 1 million residents. In short, absent U.S. military intervention, Christian minorities would continue to decline in the face of political repression, economic stagnation, and active conflict.
My argument is not that the U.S.’s pursuit of liberal hegemony triggered the decline of minority communities. Rather, I contend that by seeking to transform domestic politics through military intervention, the United States accelerated the persecution and decimation of Christian communities across the Middle East. The negative, unintended consequences of liberal hegemony produced instability and chaos that continues to reverberate across the region. In short, I am offering an empirical analysis of the fruits of liberal hegemony as opposed to a philosophical or theoretical critique.
As the greatest “unforced error” of U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam, the 2003 intervention in Iraq created a chain reaction of instability which threatened U.S. allies and adversaries alike. Within Iraq, the indigenous Christian population faces near extinction in the 21st century. Prior to 2003, the Christian population—comprised mostly of Chaldean, Syriac, and Assyrian believers—stood at around 1.5 million. In typical “divide-and-rule” fashion, the authoritarian regime of Saddam Hussein protected ethnic and religious minorities like the Christians in order to keep the Shiʿa majority in check. With the collapse of the Baʿthist regime in April 2003, however, the threat of insurgency, terrorism, and civil war decimated historic Christian communities in Baghdad and rural communities circling Mosul.
While no current census estimates exist, denominational data indicates that between 100,000 and 250,000 Christians remain. Forced displacement and preemptive migration account for most of the decline, with two major waves occurring in spring 2003 and summer 2014 with the rise of the Islamic State occupation. In 2003, approximately 1 million Christians died or were displaced from Baghdad’s historic Christian congregations in Rashid (Dora) and Karrada districts. In 2014, in comparison, approximately 125,000 Christians in and around Mosul fled in response to the Islamic State offensive between June and August. Those who remained, faced persecution not only from IS insurgents, but also from some of their Shabak and Turkmen neighbors looking to recoup material and status losses during the war.
The effects of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East have been equally devastating for Syria’s Christian minority. Assad’s repression against the Arab uprising protests of March 2011 triggered a drawn-out civil war which is still ongoing to this day. In response to Assad’s repression of popular protests, the United States and European allies decided to wage a covert proxy war against Assad by arming the opposition. The problem was that the most combat capable rebels were not defectors from the Syrian Armed Forces (i.e., the “Free Syrian Army”), but rather, a network of Islamist terror groups including local franchises of al-Qaeda (Jabhat al-Nusra) and later, ISIS. Astonishingly, at one point in 2013, different elements of the US intelligence community—including the CIA and Pentagon–were funding rival Islamist groups combatting not only Assad, but one another, to the tune of $1 billion USD.
Much like Iraq and Lebanon’s civil wars, Syria’s Christian communities found themselves in the middle of a bloody game of tug-of-war between the Assad regime and opposition. Like Saddam, Assad protected the Christian community in an effort to bolster control over the Sunni majority. “By presenting Christians as his proteges and allies, Assad took us hostage,” explained Samira Moubayed, vice-president of Syrian Christians for Peace. Once the war broke out, however, Islamist rebel groups began targeting non-Arab and non-Muslim minorities. Displacement and targeted killings of Syrian Christians resulted in the decline of the total population from 2.2 million (25 percent of the population) in 2010 to 600,000 in 2021.
Unsurprisingly, Lebanon has borne the brunt of political instability in both Syria and Iraq. As of writing, 20 percent of Lebanon’s population consists of refugees, including over 800,000 Syrians and 17,000 Iraqis, joining the over 175,000 Palestinian refugees already there since the late 1940s. Combined with the worst economic crisis since independence, the inability of political elites to form a government after the May 2022 parliamentary elections, and Hezbollah’s escalating war with Israel, the country is on the precipice of collapse. Lebanon’s Christian population—constituting about one third of the total population—face growing domestic pressure despite a constitutional mandate for sectarian power sharing among Christians, Sunni, and Shiʿa. In response, U.S. foreign policy should extend economic aid and security assistance to the central government conditional on political and economic reforms aimed at dampening domestic political dysfunction. Key to this effort is the ability of U.S. policymakers to deescalating the border war between Hezbollah and Israel.
Relatedly, it is impossible to discuss the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East without addressing the U.S.-Israel relationship. Advocates of a strong diplomatic relationship between Washington and Tel Aviv note that Israel is the only country in the region where non-Jewish minorities—20 percent of the population consisting of Bedouins, Druze, as well as Palestinian Christians and Muslims—enjoy adequate physical safety, economic and education opportunities, and civil liberties. As a “Jewish and democratic state,” the Basic Laws protect the religious and political rights of non-Jews in principle, if not in practice.
As Shadi Khalloul, an Aramean-Israeli IDF veteran, notes: “Today, Israel’s non-Jewish minorities are granted full political rights and are entitled to complete participation in Israeli society. They are active in Israeli social, political, and civic life and enjoy representation in the Knesset, Foreign Service, and judicial system.” When critics point out the ways in which the Israeli government fails to extend equality under law to minorities, advocates respond by highlighting the double standard that Israel is held to in comparison to the way Christian minorities are treated in neighboring, “backsliding” democracies such as Turkey.
At the same time, Israel is not a secular or liberal democracy. The government only recognizes marriages performed by a religious authority, several political parties have religious orthodoxy as a core component of their platform, and the Chief Rabbinate operates as a state institution. Critiques of Israeli government institutions argue that the government operates off the principle of “Jewish supremacy,” a term which might be conceptually accurate but also diverges into conspiracism and antisemitism. As such, it is better to describe Israel as a theocratic democracy (or “theodemocracy”) seeking to harmonize the divine authority of religious teachings with the democratic principle of government by the people. As journalist Yossi Klein Halevi aptly summarized, “Israel is based on two non-negotiable identities. The homeland of all Jews, whether or not they are citizens of Israel, and it’s the state of all its citizens, whether or not they are Jews.”
Despite Halevi’s aspirations, non-Jewish citizens fail to enjoy equality for all before the law. Within Israel, political rights depend not only on one’s citizenship (i.e., Israeli), but also their nationality (e.g., Jewish, Arab, Druze, Bedouin, etc.). In other words, Arab and Jewish Israelis might both be citizens, but they enjoy different legal rights determined by their nationality (a distinction between “formal” and “full” citizenship). The most prominent example is the 1950 Law of Return, which grants all Jews—including their children, grandchildren, and spouses—the right to move to Israel and automatically gain full citizenship. Non-Jews do not have this right, including those Palestinians who can document their ancestor’s displacement from Israeli territory in 1948 or 1967. Moreover, non-Jewish minorities confront active discrimination in the domains of housing, education, and employment, as well as in their treatment as citizens by law enforcement and the judiciary.
In East Jerusalem and the West Bank, Palestinians live under military occupation, where a system of Apartheid enforces separate legal regimes for Jewish settlers and Palestinian residents. Palestinian Christians in Bethlehem, for example, are not Israeli citizens and have a different legal status under military law, including a distinct, color-coded identification card. The 620,000 Jewish settlers, in contrast, are governed under Israeli law, enjoy voting rights, and are held accountable to civil courts. Most international visitors to holy sites in Bethlehem will arrive from Jerusalem via bus, spend two or three hours on tour, and then return to their hotels in Israel without realizing the extent to which local Christians face systematic segregation, displacement, and denial of basic human rights.
More troubling still, the IDF response to the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023, has resulted in the near extinction of Christian communities within the Gaza Strip. Gaza has served as a crucial gathering place for Christian pilgrims heading north to Jerusalem and south to the Sinai Peninsula since the sixth century. The Strip is home to three, small Christian congregations, worshiping at the Church of the Holy Family, Saint Porphyrius Orthodox Church, and Gaza Baptist church in Gaza City.
However, since the aftermath of the June 1967 war, the Christian community has dwindled from 6,000 in the mid 1960s, to 2,000 in 2022. A 19 October 2023 airstrike adjacent to Saint Porphyrius resulted in the death of 16 people, with a second strike damaging the church grounds on 7 August 2024. An IDF airstrike and subsequent ground assault on the primary school associated with the Church of the Holy Family resulted in the death of four people, including two Christian women. As of writing, the conflict remains ongoing, resulting in fewer than 1,000 Christians left in Gaza.
Since the collapse of the Oslo Accords and the rise of the Second Intifada in late 2000, U.S. foreign policy toward Israel has intensified the challenges and oppression faced by indigenous Christian communities. Moreover, both Republican and Democratic administrations have failed to “normalize” Washington’s relationship with Tel Aviv by conditioning diplomatic and military support based on a set of common national interests. Two decades later, the problem is not only that the U.S. will not treat Israel the way it relates to other strong allies such as the United Kingdom or France, but that it fails to enforce the terms of the relationship that already exist. Congress’s refusal (or inability) to improve legislative oversight and enforcement of the Leahy Law— legislation prohibiting the U.S. from providing security assistance to foreign governments or groups that commit “gross human rights violations”—is a case in point. While both progressive and conservative non-interventionists call for a fundamental change to U.S.-Israel relations, a more modest starting point would be to enforce the conditionality which already exists.
More hopefully, there are two countries in the region where the future of Christian communities looks less bleak. Ironically, this has little to do with American efforts to promote liberal democracy or protect international religious freedom.
In Egypt, where the US sought to reinforce rather than revise the status quo, Christian demographics have remained stable. Approximately one in ten Egyptians belong to the historic Coptic Church, with an addition one percent identifying with different Protestant denominations (there are approximately 250,000 Catholics in a country of 95 million). While Egyptian Christians regularly face the risk of suicide terrorism during Lent, the autocratic regime of President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi is still preferable to any Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders such as the late Muhammad Morsi.
The Islamic Republic of Iran, most surprisingly, represents one of the few bright spots for the growth of Middle Eastern Christianity. Despite historical roots to the faith going back to Emperor Constantine’s rule in the fourth century, Christianity has struggled to survive in a region home to Zoroastrianism, Islam, and the rise and fall of three successive local dynasties. The country is now witnessing a revival within especially Evangelical circles, with over 800,000 citizens coming to faith in the past twenty years. As one Iranian church leader put it in 2019: “What if I told you the best evangelist for Jesus was the Ayatollah Khomeini [founder of the Islamic Republic]?” In a region full of political contradictions, it’s deeply ironic that America’s fiercest adversary is also experiencing the largest Christian revival in the Middle East.
While U.S. voters rarely make up their mind based on foreign policy issues, perhaps the best place to start is continued prayer and advocacy based on the end of St. John’s apocalypse in Revelation 22:
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.
Image Credit: Unsplash
There is much to agree with in Knuppe’s article. The short of it is that U.S. foreign policies have put Christian communities in far off lands in harm’s way. That started with the GWOT and American policies toward Israel.
But to call the Cold War a time where “realism triumphed over idealism” is not a good analysis. Rather, the Cold War was a time where tribalism triumphed over realism. And example of that is when a study that occurred at the request of the Eisenhower Administration found that many of the people in the Middle East hated the U.S. because of the autocratic regimes that it had either put in place or supported for sake of economic or strategic goals. Remember that, in 1953, the democratically elected leader of Iran was overthrown thanks in large part to the combined efforts of the U.S. and the U.K. because that leader moved to nationalize oil reserves and thus cutting profits from British oil companies. The later result of those efforts was the Iranian Revolution. Or look at the US efforts to overthrow the democratically elected leader of Guatemala because his proposed land reforms would interfere with United Fruit’s efforts to maximize profits? And where was the realism in overthrowing Pinochet or replacing a democratic effort in Greece with military dictatorship? How realistic is it to bully nations into embracing leaders that were first serving the needs and desires of the U.S.? Weren’t those efforts a predecessor to our invasion of Vietnam which occurred after the U.S. rejected an international consensus to let Vietnam determine is future through elections? And despite the alleged Soviet Union and actual China’s efforts to fight off the American invasion, wasn’t the Vietnam War eventually about reunification rather than Communism? And our involvement in Afghanistan started in 1979 as Carter signed an order that led to the U.S. supporting its future foes: Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
What is idealism here? Isn’t it first about doing what is right and promoting equality and social justice? And if nations are excused from doing what is right when attempting to secure their own interests, why can’t individuals assume the same right when they are pursuing their dreams?
The real contest here is between doing what is right, which is a limited way of seeking first the Kingdom of God, pursuing ones own interests and agenda. Should Jesus’s statement telling to seek first the Kingdom of God and all of these things will be given to you apply to the foreign policies of nations?