Is the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) a threat to the West, including the United States? Absolutely, as is every other radical Islamic group spreading violence around the globe. But the larger question is, how much of a future threat is this radical Islamic faith? How successful will it be in spreading its murderous ideology throughout the non-Muslim world going forward?
From that perspective, let’s compare today’s attempts to spread radical Islam to the spread of Communism during the Cold War. As far back as the late 1920s, Communism was gaining acceptance as an alternative to what was then seen as the failure of Capitalism. Various strains of Communism had made real headway in parts of the world that suffered extreme poverty — Southeast Asia, for example, and to some extent Latin America (back then poverty-stricken Africa was mostly ruled by dictatorships whose only ideology was staying in power). And after World War II, with Europe destroyed and devastated by poverty, Communist parties sprang up throughout Western Europe — in France and Italy in particular — and Communist insurgencies in Greece and Turkey were making real headway.
And, of course, most of Eastern Europe was Communist, and although these governments were puppets of Moscow, at least initially they had roots in popular appeal.
The point being that the Cold War was a fierce battle in which the forces of Democracy had to contend with the real threat of an ever-expanding Communist ideology that was sometimes imposed, but in most cases grew because millions of people around the globe found it attractive.
Radical Islam has no such global appeal. Indeed, the number of Christians attracted to a faith in which Sharia law is to be imposed on the entire world is infinitesimal, and the vast majority of the world’s 2 billion Muslims are repelled by both the ideology of radical Islam and the violence it has spawned. And even within radical Islam, there is vicious infighting between the Sunni and Shiite ideologies.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that the Cold War, although far more of a global struggle than the Islamic one, was a battle between two secular ideologies. Communist leaders in Moscow may have hated the West, but they loved their children and didn’t want to see them die in a nuclear war anymore than did Western leaders. For nearly 40 years both sides had their finger on the nuclear trigger, but never pulled it because in neither of their ideologies was sacrificial death a fast-track to Paradise.
Not so radical Islam, so if its proponents acquire nuclear weapons — as they are trying very hard to do — how widespread their movement becomes won’t matter much to the rest of the world.
