Today, May 14, 2018, the US Embassy has opened in Jerusalem to the deadly protests of Palestinian Arabs across the Holy Land and diplomatic condemnation of nations across the Islamic world. For an event of such epochal significance, nothing less should have been expected.
But to truly appreciate the profundity of this development, let us consider just how we got here and, in light of that journey, what point we have arrived at.
The entire modern age - which dates roughly to the 15th century - can be thought of as a roundabout quest by the self-identifying people of God, that is to say Israel, to reestablish themselves in their appointed holy city, Jerusalem.
During the Middle Ages, it was the loss of pilgrimage access to the great City of David that triggered an entire war between civilizations - as European Christendom sought to recover the treasured land of its Savior either by forcing the Islamic caliphates out or compelling them to reinstate the previously free routes from the Western Mediterranean via Asia Minor into the Levant.
Quite tellingly, it's important to recall that this cycle of events was triggered not by the original Arabs or Persians who built up the magnificent early Islamic empires, but by aggressive nomadic upstarts from much further east: the Turks of the steppe lands of Central Asia, who had in the second part of the first millennium split off into two main groups - an eastern one that essentially conquered and reunited imperial China, and a western one that eventually found its way across the vast Central Asian plains all the way to the doorstep of Western Latin Christendom by defeating its Eastern Roman cousin, the mighty Byzantine empire, in the Greek Orthodox Christian domain of Asia Minor, which fittingly later came to be known as Turkey.
Thus, the Crusades which began at the end of the 11th century were already a general clash between East and West - not merely between Islam and Christianity - but over the course of this ultimately unsuccessful two-plus century endeavor of the Western European kingdoms and the Roman Catholic papacy to recover the prize of the holy city and its attendant Holy Land, not only did the key directive of mastery of the Near and Middle East become enshrined as the goal for all of Western civilization, but several contemporaneous developments underpinned the manner in which the attainment of this goal would play itself out in the subsequent modern era:
1. The imperative to integrate all advanced knowledge which Latin Christendom had been newly exposed to on a systematic scale from its militant forays into the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, namely the ancient Greek philosophies of the age of Plato and Aristotle recycled and merged with the more outright Eastern wisdom of both the Islamicized Arab-Persian civilization and its tenant population of Talmudic Judaism, which in this period underwent a systematic migration from a primarily Muslim into a primarily Christian host society.
2. The need to eventually unify and integrate the Eastern, or Greek Orthodox, and Western, or Latin Catholic, churches, which had been increasingly divided in the latter part of the first millennium and formally separated in the East-West Schism of 1054 AD; as the old Byzantine or Eastern Roman empire which embodied the Greek Orthodox communion continued its decline towards ultimate extinction in the face of Islamic and Turkish assaults, its late northern offshoots in the Slavic and Scythian cultures of the vast steppes of modern-day Ukraine and European Russia became more central in East-West unity considerations.
3. The increasing urgency to outflank the powerful Turkish-Islamic caliphates altogether by establishing an all-water route to the Far East - in order to be able to trade without middlemen with the powerful Oriental empires of China and the Indian subcontinent, the largest and most dynamic and technologically developed economies of that period.
It was to the last of these three ancillary missions of Western European Christendom - finding the fabled sea passage to the riches, splendors, and geopolitical might of the Far East - that the pioneering Christopher Columbus devoted his entire energies and imaginations upon as he sought to parlay the newfound ambitions of the Italian and Western European Renaissance of the late 15th century to the opening of an entirely new horizon to recover the long-sought prize of Jerusalem: a horizon in literally the other direction - west instead of east - that would put America on the world map for the first time in world history.
Half a millennium later, America is indeed laying formal claim to Jerusalem; in the intervening epoch, this is essentially what has transpired according to the apparent original design and script of the Master of History Himself:
The quest for the true East in order to master the more proximate east didn't quite go as Columbus intended, but his loss was Western civilization's gain: instead of directly attaining China and India, European Christendom gained an entire new hemisphere - America - which propelled it to towering heights not only above its fearsome Islamic rivals, but indeed over the envied and coveted Oriental legends of China and India too. Thus did the discovery of America trigger a 400-year ascent of European Western civilization to an apex of dominance of other civilizations and a degree of penetration of even the distant corners of the globe hitherto unprecedented and in fact inconceivable; this was the final prize for Columbus' bold venture into the expanse of the western ocean in a giant leap of faith which challenged all prior norms and conventions - the sea itself, which for all humanity had until then been a psychological no less than physical boundary of the limit of the species' activity, was transformed into the springboard for the rise to universal worldwide dominion of the Judeo-Christian God.
The opening of America afforded the peoples of the nations of Western Christendom an invaluable whole New World as a testing ground for the practical societal and institutional developments and innovations which were destined to grow out of the Judeo-Christian conception of the individual's absolute sovereignty before the Almighty Himself; over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, this built up, expanded, and matured to the point of giving birth to the crown jewel of the New World, the model of constitutional representative governance and rapid innovation-driven free-market economic development that is the United States.
With religious liberty and individual conscience secured by firm rule of Common Law as the foundation, the United States of America has essentially, from its very conception, operated and acted on a mandate from Heaven itself to disseminate a God-given idea and ideal of freedom as the basis of all just and true human activity; it achieved this mission of promoting capitalism and democracy in two distinct stages.
In the 19th century, as she rapidly industrialized and expanded westward to fulfill her "Manifest Destiny" on the North American continent, the United States internally resolved the twin conundrums of human bondage and national unity in the absence of a coercive central authority through a bloody civil war; she thus confirmed that even violence and bloodshed are just instruments in pursuit of the higher cause of human equality and universal dignity and progress unhindered by lineage and background - underpinning a continual unshackling of stultifying ancient and medieval hierarchies back in the Old World through natural cultural diffusion, but accentuated especially by a series of follow-on upheavals on continental Europe in the wake of the original twin of the American Revolution, the 1789 French Revolution. This chipping away of the monolith of hereditary privilege America accomplished in concert with the heyday of her self-reformed aristocratic cousin and ancestor, the British empire, which in the 1800s established the first truly global system of common intercourse between nations based on an established universal set of rules and principles of exchange.
In the 20th century, as the industrial revolution matured and gave way to the consumer and media revolutions, America - now having been made complete by a fusion of freedom- and opportunity-seeking immigration from all over Europe, Jewish as well as Gentile - took this mantle from Britain through two world wars: both with their ultimate origin in the explosion that was finally inevitably unleashed by the ever-growing tension between tradition and modernity in the Old World, especially the further eastward one went on the European continent. The conflagration of atavistic nationalism that was the Great War of 1914 ignited the greater cataclysmic eruption of the Russian Revolution in 1917, establishing Marxist socialism - or communism - as the great antithesis of Judeo-Christian individual conscience and thus Western capitalism and democracy, as this deeply reflective ideology similarly had its roots in the great, disproportionately Jewish bourgeois diaspora of Western Europe and America, ever hounded by the sectarian-religious persecution and destructively tribalistic national and ethnic conflict which were the consequence of the erosion of the residual social and religious ancient regimes of the east.
The world wars were thus a watershed for the Western modernity America had set in motion by emerging into history over the previous centuries: that modernity now required direct American intervention back in the Eastern hemisphere from whence she first sprang to preserve a balance between the old that was worth preserving and the new that was too powerful to resist. Yet the United States was initially reluctant to take up this calling - retreating to its own Western hemisphere after the initial foray of the Great War exposed how deep the costs would be of enforcing a new international order based on democratic sovereignty of nations and ethnicities, with no more recourse to the antiquated feudal and aristocratic modes of organization that had been drastically overturned by war and insurrection in the old central and eastern European empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey, and Czarist Russia.
This created the great tension of the interwar period, as American-style free-market capitalism and representative politics faced its first serious worldwide challenge from the communist expansionism of the Soviet Union, which in turn generated a reactionary backlash in the form of more virulent, militarily predatory, and even racist and anti-Semitic nationalism epitomized by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The failure of Anglo-American international capitalism - by now already popularly associated with an international Jewish Zionist conspiracy - in the 1930s Great Depression was thus the trigger point for the global catastrophe of the Second World War and its attendant genocidal Holocaust of European Jewry by the reactionary nationalist element of Germanic fascism.
Thereafter, the world found itself split into the two economic and political blocs that triumphed over German-Japanese fascism and Nazism: the West led by the capitalist United States and the East led by the communist Soviet Union dominated by Russia. Though the heart of this contest between the rival poles was central Europe, particularly Germany - where Western Allied and Soviet forces partitioned the former Nazi Reich - in the immediate postwar period the two key Asiatic fronts in this global ideological struggle also emerged: the Middle East, where America and Russia respectively threw their support behind the newly resurrected Jewish State of Israel and the post-colonial Arab states; and East Asia, where Japanese war-ravaged China fell to its own communist revolution, originally imported from Soviet Russia, upon completion of a generational civil war that forced the American-supported Nationalists to flee to the island of Taiwan.
Thus, in the four decades between the Korean War of 1950-53 and the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989-91, the Cold War was as much the struggle of traditional non-European Oriental societies such as China and the Arab-Islamic world to emerge into their own from the shadow of two centuries of globe-spanning European domination - yet using methods and ideas ultimately sourced from the West, whether directly or via the Eurasian land bridge of Russia - as they were the more conventionally Western- and Soviet-interpreted political-ideological competition between capitalism and socialism per se.
America gained the decisive upper hand about midway through this big game by securing the geopolitical coup of the century: opening communist China in the 1972 détente between Mao and Nixon; in the subsequent decade, deft US late-Cold War diplomacy secured not only China but also the hitherto Soviet-leaning Arab states - now critical for the role their massive oil wealth played in a new global monetary system built upon the US dollar's monopoly in international petroleum settlements (the "petrodollar") - under Washington's wing, effectively sidelining Moscow well before the Soviet empire itself crumbled and finally failed. By expanding the net of its inclusive free-market, free-trade regime to unprecedented levels of favor for newcomers such as the Arab oil producers and the East Asian industrial exporting powerhouses, America won what appeared - in the "end of history" late 1980s and 1990s - to be a final triumph over any purported alternate form of human development and societal order straying from its prescribed democratic and capitalist path.
Except the "end" has since really turned out to be a new beginning of the old: a rediscovery by the proud non-Western societies and cultures of the Eurasian landmass of their traditional identities upon the maximum practicable importation and adaptation of the upstart Western European project which so thoroughly ran a full circle around them by opening America in the Age of Discovery and establishing the US within it upon the successful application of the subsequent Enlightenment.
The Chinese communist crackdown on the pro-democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989 was thus a harbinger for the generation hence: what increasingly appears to be a comprehensive and systematic retrenchment by the non-Western world in opposition to Western democracy and capitalism. The dramatic failure of the Arab Spring has only been the most telling such instance of this: it was already preceded by the massive letdown of the US effort to transform Iraq into a model Arab democracy upon ousting its erstwhile ally and proxy Saddam Hussein, and from 2014 on has had close competition with the troubling reversion of even semi-Western Russia into authoritarianism and revanchist military adventurism in Ukraine.
But it has been the 2016 election of Donald Trump to the US presidency - a shock outcome now broadly acknowledged as having been brought about with some manner and degree of Russian collusion - and more to the point the drastic contrast he has positioned the entirety of his administration into as against that of predecessor Barack Obama, that underscores just what this incendiary move to open the Jerusalem embassy today is all about.
In no uncertain terms, Trump is basically declaring "Mission over": America's great mandate to civilize and - to the relevant extent, Westernize - the rest of the world in its own progressive image has pretty much run its course, at least in its longstanding formulation dating to the global US expansion and proselytization flowing out of last century's world wars. In the Obama era, so this line of thinking goes, the United States has already fundamentally shed its most intimate and core Judeo-Christian identity, and hence doesn't really have any authentic treasure left to share with the world at large, anyway: it has perverted the whole notion of freedom and rights to mean the evisceration of all long cherished conceptions of family and sexuality - the erasure of the distinction between objective liberty and subjective license - leaving in its wake a moral and spiritual anarchy that it foolishly continues to promote as some universal ideal for traditional non-Western societies who now have every reason to be repelled by what American "pop culture" seemingly stands for.
It is high time for America to return to its proper origins - the quest for a final homecoming of Western Christianity to Jerusalem, in the full splendor and glory of the coming reign of the King of Kings, the Lord of Israel. The United States' special relationship with the Jews - perhaps even more so than its own deepest identity as home for all Christian sects and churches that made the pilgrimage to the New World in search of an unfettered domain to seek the blessings of Providence - points the way. There is no point any longer denying that while the appeal of the Divine truths deemed "self-evident" in her founding document may be universal, its roots are highly particular: the United States of America has its true origins in Israel, just as Israel's great glory of the modern age is the United States of America.
That could well mean resigning the entire Middle East with the exception of the Holy Land to a great rival civilization and creed - Islam - and digging in for a new competition or even clash with the latter, now increasingly centered on a resurgent Persian-Babylonian empire emanating from contemporary Shiite Iran; just as it could mean doing so with the even greater challenge of a rising China wasting not a beat trying to surpass the Western barbarians which upended her imperial supremacy from 1500 to 1900 - ironically in the search for herself; and all this with the ultimate allegiance and orientation of everyone else - Europe, Russia, India, Africa, Latin America - in flux even if increasingly apparently predisposed to settle in either an Eastern or Western, or indeed mixed, cultural and institutional bearing.
The end of history may have returned, after all: the true end of it - that is to say, its permanent return at the conclusion of one age and the dawn of another. That is what the opening of the US Embassy in Jerusalem truly signifies.
