Isaac Asimov's Foundation Novels and the War on Terrorism

Some time ago, I promised that this blog would touch upon the relationship between Isaac Asimov's Foundation series of novels and events in the real world. As it turns out, the books contain striking parallels to our current geopolitical state of affairs, but not at all in the way that might seem most obvious.

The Foundation novels take place in the distant future, when man has colonized the stars and created a giant galactic empire. This empire has reigned for thousands of years, but crippled by its vast size, is beginning to decline and decay. The Emperor and his subjects are fully oblivious to this slide, but a scientist named Hari Seldon, who has created a novel science of prediction called psychohistory, has mathematically forseen the impending collapse leading to a 30,000-year dark age of war, ignorance, and barbarism. To save mankind from these horrors, Seldon gathers the best and brightest from around the galaxy, and creates a colony on a faraway planet called the Foundation. This, as his psychohistorical calculations predict, will shorten the dark ages to a 1000-year period, at the end of which the Foundation will rise to form an enlightened and peaceful Second Empire.

But, of course, the Foundation must first survive the interim with its wars, political instability, and other myriad obstacles. Psychohistory predicts that the Foundation will do so, based upon the colony's nature as opposed to that of the empire (don't worry, this isn't a plot spoiler). But the Foundationers have no idea how they will actually make this occur.

Asimov wrote the original Foundation novels (a trilogy) after having read Edward Gibbon's The Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire. Now based on this, it is entirely forgivable if you are thinking that surely the books must parallel America and its current "empire." And indeed the stability of the post-Cold War "pax Americana" -- what Francis Fukuyama referred to as the "End of History," with liberal democracy emerging as the winner -- has come under serious strain as of late, with unrest in the Middle East, China, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

But such a comparison, in my view, is not really accurate. For Asimov's fictional empire is a true colonizing power, led by corrupt, unelected officials with an all-powerful Emperor at the helm. This empire indeed epitomizes the hallmarks of ancient Rome, with its hereditary leadership, few (if any) checks and balances on power, and numerous bloody palace coups. America is nothing like this.

Rather, the Foundation novels mirror current events via the science of psychohistory. Just as Hari Seldon predicts with virtual certainty that the Foundation will ultimately win, the nature of radical Islam predicts with virtual certainty that it will ultimately lose.

Now I know a lot of people probably aren't so confident of this. But I am. And I will explain Hari Seldon-style why this is so.

Psychohistory is, of course, a made-up science. But in Asimov's fictional world, Hari Seldon uses it to mathematically analyze the entirety of possible galacticopolitical stimuli that humankind may encounter, and then, based on the known reactions of mass behavior to these stimuli, predict the outcomes to about 99% accuracy. (Once again, none of this is a plot spoiler.)

Unlike Seldon, I'm not using any formal science here, and I doubt the word "galacticopolitical" is even in the dictionary. But based on a general knowledge of certain broad characteristics of radical Islam versus those of competing cultures, I believe that the outcome of the jihadists' current conflict with the rest of the world (and yes, it certainly is against the rest of the world) can be predicted just as accurately as that of the war between the Foundation and the empire. And radical Islam will not win.

Why? In a nutshell, for two overarching reasons. First, unlike all other world powers today and in the past, radical Islam's strength is entirely artificial and dependent on the West. And secondly, the jihadists have an insurmountable weakness in their absolute refusal to question or compromise any of their core goals.

Let's touch on both points. Radical Islam is an anomaly among powerful movements in that it created virtually none of its strength on its own. All other nations that have ever achieved a modicum of power, from ancient Greece to the colonial British to modern-day America, and even evil powers such as Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, did so by developing their own governments, economies, and militaries. Whether good or evil, they all conquered and/or influenced mighty swaths of territory primarily due to the fruits of their own internal labor and developments.

The Islamists, on the other hand, have never developed a successfully functioning government, economy, or military. And in fact, the ultra-authoritarian nature of radical Islam utterly prevents them from doing so. Any society that does not allow any questioning of authority and any true freedom of any kind cannot possibly function as a modern society. And as we can see, every terrorist-sponsoring country is mired in dire poverty, a weakly functioning government, and weak militaries. Their only strengths are in ideological radicalism and terrorism, which are funded and permitted entirely by oil money and foreign aid, neither of which the Islamists produced themselves.

So the only way for the Islamists to advance are to 1) fundamentally change so that they can indeed produce a modern successful society, or 2) defeat the West as they surely aim to do so. The problem for them is that if they choose Option 1, they will no longer be Islamists. And if they begin to make any real headway in Option 2, they will lose the source of their strength far before they can come close to completing the job.

Now the second reason for the Islamists' eventual defeat, their refusal to question or compromise anything, is related to Option 2 above. Because the jihadists won't budge from their all-or-nothing position, there is no room for the enemy (i.e. the rest of us) to negotiate anything with them. And this will inevitably lead to all-out war, where it is virtually certain that the West, which built itself up via its own internal strengths, will soundly win. Once again, the Islamists face an insurmountable choice - either change themselves and compromise, which they cannot do without losing their core identity, or fight the West and lose.

This also answers the question of whether the Islamists can exploit the West's one key weakness, which is the left-leaning infatuation with multiculturalism and relative values that allowed radical Islam to emerge as a threat in the first place. And the answer is yes they can, but not indefinitely. Right now, many voices in America and in Europe continue to delude themselves that they can negotiate with the jihadists, that our enemies have placable goals, and that by helping and understanding them we can calm them down. This continues because, by and large, we have been very military successful against them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and the leftist relativist element always feels guilty about being ahead. But anytime the jihadists commit acts of terror, tougher Western voices always emerge, and at some point (and I pray this occurs sooner than later), we will take no more and finally clamp down to utterly defeat them.

So there you have it - due to their very nature, the Islamists have no way to win. Ultimately, their only option is to lose.

But wait, you might be thinking, the Islamists acted the same way and yet carved out a mighty empire in the Middle East for a thousand years; how can you say this won't happen again? Well, the comparison may seem apt initially, but in reality the Islamic empire of old was very different than the jihadists of today. Back then, bloodthirsty and uncompromising as they were, they at least built up their own militaries, and while their their governments and economies were poor, so were everyone else's. Today the jihadists have none of these strengths.

No, the jihadists will not be successful and the rest of the world will ultimately come out victorious. Unfortunately this does not mean that the battle will be a cakewalk; just as Hari Seldon can predict only mass behavior and not the actions of any one individual, the Islamist-defeat model as presented here can forecast only the eventual outcome of the war at large. Very likely, there will be a number of challenges in the interim, which we must face and overcome strong and vigilantly. It is tragic that we have had to suffer even a single terrorist attack, and undoubtedly the jihadists are planning more evil actions as we speak. But make no mistake - in the end, we will win and they will lose.