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Jihadi Islam's Challenge to NATO and the Free World

It is commonly assumed that future challenges to security of the free world and NATO will significantly differ from those of the past. The main reason for it is emergence of Islamic Jihadist threat in different forms. Adversaries of the past, such as Nazism and Communism, were primarily pursuing territorial conquest, ideological expansion and pragmatic interests. In suppressing threat they posed, knowing their policies, methods, goals, strategies and tactics was of prime and crucial importance. There was little or no need to understand premises and schemes of their ideologies, or worldviews and motives of their protagonists. Understanding their behavior, not their theory, was sufficient to successfully restrain, oppose, and eventually defeat them. Islamic threat is thoroughly different. Knowing Jihadi tactics is, of course relevant from an immediate security perspective, but it is often of limited, temporary use. To engage Islamic threat in a long-term perspective, understanding of motives, driving ideas, worldview, set of beliefs, and authoritative texts may be of far greater importance than it has been generally recognized. To begin with, only a minority of Muslims sympathize with Jihadi, Salafi teaching, and it is vital to understand how and why aggressive, lethal radicalism is born within a religion. Ever since the contemporary Islamic threat first appeared in Europe and the US, there was tendency to fight it the way other major threats were fought. Indeed, many times it proved efficient, but hardly ever sufficient. Islamic threat has been emerging and growing in unexpected, unpredictable ways. Without thoroughly studying its roots, the West more often than not blamed it on poverty, lack of education, anti-colonialist grievances and the like, wrongly seeing it as ideology, not belief.

Jihadi Islam ; Security ; NATO ; Terrorism ; Orientalism

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