Religion, Nationalism, and Terror

Munson: Zakaria should have foreseen that the outrage provoked by the occupation of Iraq would benefit the militant Islamists it was supposed to weaken. He did not. Moreover, he fails to mention that many foreign-born Americans bring with them the myopias they were born into. Some Indian-born Americans, for example, are supporters of militant Hindu nationalism. Zakaria is nonetheless right to stress that an understanding of how others see us is an essential ingredient of a sensible foreign policy.

Fareed Zakaria: The Power of Personality, Newsweek.com, December 24, 2007

I’ve spent my life acquiring formal expertise on foreign policy. I’ve got fancy degrees, have run research projects, taught in colleges and graduate schools, edited a foreign-affairs journal, advised politicians and businessmen, written columns and cover stories, and traveled hundreds of thousands of miles all over the world. I’ve never thought of my identity as any kind of qualification. I’ve never written an article that contains the phrase “As an Indian-American …” or “As a person of color …”

But when I think about what is truly distinctive about the way I look at the world, about the advantage that I may have over others in understanding foreign affairs, it is that I know what it means not to be an American. I know intimately the attraction, the repulsion, the hopes, the disappointments that the other 95 percent of humanity feels when thinking about this country. I know it because for a good part of my life, I wasn’t an American.