David IgnatiusWASHINGTON – French President Francois Hollande has announced that his country is at war with the Islamic State, and America is surely part of that conflict, too. What the warfighters need urgently is a road map for the future, after the terrorist group is defeated.
Planning the shape of the post-war Middle East may seem like a fantasy right now, when the extremists are widening their fight. But it’s a crucial exercise for the broad coalition fighting the Islamic State, which includes Russia, Iran and most Sunni Arab countries, as well as the U.S., France and most of the rest of Europe.
To guide this strategic planning, it’s useful to look at five dates that marked the end of other convulsive conflicts: 1648, 1815, 1919, 1945 and 1989. Four of them created durable new frameworks that addressed the causes of instability. One, however, set in motion the disaster of the modern Middle East. Let’s quickly review these five peace agreements. In each, there’s a lesson for today:
* The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is probably better known than the obscure conflicts it resolved, which are collectively described as the Thirty Years’ War. Many analysts have likened this Catholic-Protestant fratricide in Europe to the Sunni-Shiite sectarian inferno in the Middle East.
The Westphalia settlement went to the heart of Europe’s disorder by creating a system for sovereignty in which each ruler could determine the established religion of his state. By embracing the idea of noninterference in others’ affairs, the treaty is often thought to mark the creation of the modern nation-state.