British-born Sebastian Gorka was appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President of the United States by Donald Trump in January and is viewed as one of the key figures behind the President’s national security strategy. Steve Fuller presents an analysis of Gorka’s world-view, writing that his conception of an ideological struggle between Islamic jihadism and the West may ultimately be difficult to square with the views of Trump’s core supporters, who have a sharper focus on territorial integrity and the material security of American citizens

Fuller, Steve

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14/02/2017Mastering Trump’s mastermind: Sebastian Gorka and thestruggle between Islam and the Westblogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2017/02/14/mastering-trump-mastermind-sebastian-gorka/British-born Sebastian Gorka was appointed as Deputy Assistant to the President of the UnitedStates by Donald Trump in January and is viewed as one of the key figures behind the President’snational security strategy. Steve Fuller presents an analysis of Gorka’s world-view, writing that hisconception of an ideological struggle between Islamic jihadism and the West may ultimately bedifficult to square with the views of Trump’s core supporters, who have a sharper focus on territorialintegrity and the material security of American citizens.Sebastian Gorka. Credits: 7th Army Training Command. (CC BY 2.0)When one thinks of who might be the ‘mastermind’ behind Donald Trump’s presidency, Steve Bannon of Breitbartand ‘fake news’ fame is the obvious candidate. However, arguably a deeper thinker in the same mould is SebastianGorka, Trump’s deputy assistant and an increasingly familiar face to television audiences, as he offers – ‘asserts’may be a better word – straightforward justifications for the byzantine turns in Trump’s policy initiatives. What followsis my presentation of Gorka’s world-view, which is by no means crazy but not so easy to square with the world-viewof the seemingly solid block of 40% of Americans who back Trump because they think their material security is hisprimary concern. In any case, it helps to begin with some history.The Cold War was often portrayed as a struggle between competing ideologies, capitalism and socialism. Itsoriginal master thinker, George Kennan, believed that it was a struggle without end, since the two ideologies areirreconcilable: Both demand global domination and each has its own way of legitimising this demand. Indeed, theydo so in ways that could appeal to members of the other side, given a fair hearing. So there are only two possiblestrategies for each side: either destroy or ‘contain’ the other (i.e. simply block its spread). Destruction, whiletechnically feasible with nuclear weapons, could also result in ‘mutually assured destruction’, so containment would1/5be the more sensible option to lead with.However, for all practical purposes, the Cold War’s so-called ideological struggle was really between the UnitedStates and the Soviet Union, two nation-states, each of which amassed other nation-states in various political,economic, military and cultural alliances. The Cold War was transacted in state-minted currency, which in turn wasspent to fund an ‘arms race’ and a ‘space race’ that was claimed to have universal import.But contra Kennan, the Cold War came to an end less than a half-century after it started. One of the anchor nation-states, the Soviet Union, had effectively gone bankrupt and sought a peaceful exit strategy, which the US clumsilymanaged. The so-called ideological struggle between capitalism and socialism ended at that point, notwithstandingpockets of resistance in places like Cuba. Other nation-states, most noticeably China, had no problem adapting itsown geopolitical conduct to the newly relaxed capitalism-socialism divide.Gorka’s world-view begins with the claim that today the West’s struggle against ‘Islamic jihadism’ is a much moreliteral version of a Kennan-style ‘ideological struggle’ than Kennan himself had envisaged the Cold War to be. This isbecause at least one of the parties to the struggle is not defined in nation-state terms. Islamic jihadists areemboldened by certain radical Muslim thinkers to read the Qur’an for themselves so as to interpret ‘jihad’(humanity’s struggle to arise from its fallen state) as not simply a personal struggle but a geopolitical one, the fullresolution of which requires universal conversion to Islam.That highly esteemed Muslim religious leaders may not support such an inflated sense of jihadism is irrelevant to thetrue jihadi, as religious leaders can always already appear compromised in some way. Thus, Gorka does not placeany special burden on ‘normal’ Muslims to counter jihadism. That would be like expecting the established Christianchurches – both Catholic and Protestant – to have taken responsibility for all of the violence of the Christiandissenters, say, in the 17th century English Civil War and other modern freedom-fighting movements. Arguably onesuch movement was the American Revolution itself, which drew on St Augustine’s theology of humanexceptionalism (i.e. our having been created ‘in the image and likeness of God’), without subscribing to anyparticular church.Sebastian Gorka speaking about the expansion of ISIL at the SOCOM Wargame Centre.Credits: Sk-gorka (CC BY-SA 4.0)2/5Here the trope of ‘Protestantism’, which in recent years has been invoked by liberal Muslims such as Reza Aslan asthe path to reforming Islam, should be seen in a more nuanced light. Just because the historical outcome of theProtestant Reformation has been, broadly speaking, a victory for secular democratic values, the forces thatunleashed both ‘jihadism’ and secular liberalism are largely the same. (Consider, say, the violent tone in which theoriginal modern classic of freedom of expression, John Milton’s Areopagitica, is written.) In both cases, people wereencouraged to take the sacred book into their own hands as a source of personal empowerment, with the book readas posing to each reader an existential challenge.Those who accept the challenge may join to form communities of various sorts, but these are never more thantemporary holding patterns until the Kingdom of God is realised for all to see – what on this reading of the Qur’an isthe true ‘caliphate’. However, it is the sacred book – not some particular human authority – that ultimately licensesthat activity. The resulting political sensibility may indeed be totalitarian yet without being especially authoritarian.(Here the writings of Eric Voegelin on political theology are useful.)It is this ‘permanently revolutionary’ sense of Protestantism to which Gorka’s jihadism harkens, rather than the moresettled secular versions exemplified by the US Constitution and other democracies formulated on similar grounds inthe modern era. In these cases, the original revolutionary violence was specifically focused on more-or-lesspolitically unified territories. Thus, the conflicts were broadly comprehensible within what’s still called the‘Westphalian settlement’, named for the 1648 European treaty that established the convention that nation-states arethe primary units of political sovereignty. This fundamental assumption of modern international relations at both thediplomatic and military levels is now called into radical question by Gorka’s totalising sense of jihadism.Moreover, the plausibility of Gorka’s world-view is facilitated by the de-territorialisation of ideology that informationtechnology increasingly permits. In other words, Islamic jihadists can coordinate their activities across self-organising networks that are distributed across many countries, most if not all of which may otherwise abhor theideology. Moreover, Islamic jihadism is a genuinely ‘transhumanist’ ideology in that its self-identifying members thinkof themselves primarily as platforms for advancing the ideology, the full realisation of which they may or may not bepersonally involved in.At one level, this sense of ‘self-sacrifice’ is familiar from both capitalist and socialist narratives, which argue that thecurrent generation lays the basis for subsequent generations to live better lives. In these explicitly secularnarratives, which were pervasive during the Cold War, the expectation was that one’s children or grandchildrenmight live in the utopia that the current generation was struggling to achieve. However, Islamic jihadism possessesat least three features that serve to undermine this Cold War intergenerational template of geopolitical struggle. I willgo through them quickly.1. There is no anticipated endpoint to the struggle. More to the point, there is no specific secular foe who needsto be overcome in order for the struggle to be won. Whereas the US and the USSR recognised each other aseach other’s main opponent in the Cold War, Islamic jihadism is simply opposed to all those who oppose theirideology. This leaves the impression that the struggle may continue forever, as one foe replaces another.2. Because Islamic jihadism is ultimately rooted in a reading of the Qur’an, it can strategically equivocate overthe ontological status of the ‘caliphate’. Here information technology comes to its aid. As the difference invalue between living a ‘real’ vis-à-vis ‘virtual’ existence gets reduced, any potential jihadist’s sense of thedifference in value between real material progress and an imagined heavenly afterlife is bound to blur. Thiswill then make acts like suicide bombing appear less personally forbidding than they have in the past.3/53. Together (1) and (2) imply that Islamic jihadists are sufficiently ‘post-Maslow’ not to predicate any higher-ordersense of ‘self-actualisation’ on the security of material needs, let alone territorial sovereignty. In this respect,the jihadists seek a purely parasitic relationship with any nation that hosts their activities. Land and peopleare never more than vehicles for ideological promotion. This makes them impervious to the Henry Kissinger-style of détente, which supposed that the primary interest of the US and USSR was to secure the materialinterests of their respective peoples – and on that common basis some fruitful albeit tentative negotiationsmight be forged.I do not wish to comment here on the accuracy of Gorka’s characterisation of so-called Islamic jihadists. But hecertainly means to take them seriously – so much so that he believes the United States and its allies should mirrormuch of their modus operandi. For example, Gorka thinks that security agencies should treat mosques and otherreligious institutions as secular public spaces, just as the jihadists themselves do, since the jihadists regard law-abiding Muslims as spiritually suspect unless proven otherwise. These spaces then become sites of ideologicalcontestation, in which the religious authorities nominally in charge of them have little standing with either thejihadists or the US security agencies.An epistemologically interesting consequence of Gorka’s mirror strategy pertains to the role of information. It reflectsthe ease with which Steve Bannon and the Breitbart crowd surrounding Trump can live with the idea that we live in a‘post-truth’ world. Information is treated quite literally as a political football to be batted back and forth – spun and re-spun. One might even speak of information as having become ‘weaponised’ much more thoroughly than in pastpropaganda campaigns, which tended to emanate from a few authorised sources.The key general insight, which underwrites the phenomenon of ‘fake news’, is that the distributed character ofcomputer networks effectively blurs the difference between the production and consumption of information. But thisgoes beyond the mere fact that those who consume information can also produce it. Of greater significance is that itbecomes harder for the consumer to tell how the information was produced. Indeed, as productive capacity isincreased, accountability is decreased. Here Gorka is influenced by David Kilcullen, an Australian military strategistof ‘counterinsurgency’, a term he has made his own to characterise the mirroring posture that he would have the USand its allies adopt towards Islamic jihadists.Kilcullen was a vocal critic of the Iraq war and especially the use of drones in warfare, as Barack Obama had begunto normalise in Afghanistan. In terms of the information war with the jihadists, all that did was provide visualammunition for the enemy. Any image of a successful drone mission could be repackaged as having killed manyinnocents by some artful (or not, as the case may be) textual and visual recontextualisation. In that case, the sheerimmediacy of the message combined with its multiple seemingly independent reproductions – say, on social media– would override concerns about the image’s authenticity, which may have been untraceable in any case. (JacquesDerrida must be either turning over in his grave or laughing to the bank.)What is perhaps most striking about Gorka’s world-view is his Platonic sensibility about the nature of war – it is allabout winning hearts and minds, not lands and lives. His own writings make it clear that s/he who strives the hardestthe longest ultimately wins, regardless of the body count. While this ethic will be immediately recognisable to the so-called Islamic jihadists, it is not so clear how it will play with Trump supporters who identify their interests – includingwhat they mean by ‘security’ – with something having a much more restricted world-historic scope. In other words:How exactly can a potentially endless ideological struggle be fought when one of the parties – the United States –seems under President Trump to be keener than ever to protect its territorial integrity and the material security of itscitizens?Please read our comments policy before commenting .Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy, norof the London School of Economics.4/5_________________________________About the authorSteve Fuller – University of WarwickSteve Fuller holds the Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology in the Department of Sociologyat the University of Warwick.5/5

Mastering Trump’s mastermind: Sebastian Gorka and the struggle between Islam and the West

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