By Andreas Pantazopoulos · Monday, July 6, 2020 The following essay was originally published in French as “La Grèce et la pandémie: Quelques réflexions,” in Revue Politique, June 30, 2020, and appears here by permission. Translated by Russell A. Berman.
 It is widely recognized that Greece survived the difficult test of COVID-19 well. The international press has been writing about the “little Greek miracle” for more than a month: a country ravaged by the economic crisis of the past years has been able to resist the public health challenge better than many other European countries. And it is right to emphasize this unexpected success as due primarily to the speed of the government’s decisions, the closing of the borders, the strict lockdown of about two months, but also the population’s obedience to special laws issued by the authorities, both in terms of health and politics. Every evening at 6:00 PM, the epidemiologist Professor Sotirios Tsiodras spoke to the public directly on television about the measures taken and the track of the pandemic, in a calm, humane, and confident tone, showing appropriate emotions when he spoke of the deaths, turning into the family doctor, a personality familiar to everyone.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Thursday, December 12, 2019 For decades, Sunni Islamism was led by Saudi Wahabism, while the Muslim Brotherhood developed strategies for taking over governments. When King Salman assumed power in Saudi Arabia in 2015, a major shift took place in Saudi politics. For the first time in the history of the kingdom, Wahabis were confronted in the centers of power. This coincided with the escalation of Turkey’s Islamist ambitions to become the leading Sunni imperial power, led by Erdoğan. The center of Sunni Islamism gradually moved from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, and this was reinforced when the Saudis came out in support of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood’s attempts to reinstall their ousted president, Mohamed Morsi. Erdoğan, on the other hand, lost a strategic ally when Morsi was deposed by el-Sisi.
Parallel to this shift of the Sunni centers of gravity, Al-Qaida was losing ground while ISIS emerged as the main force capable of recruiting fundamentalist youth to join jihad. As many of Al-Qaida’s funding sources dried up due to new Saudi policies, Turkey did everything short of openly professing support to empower ISIS. Erdoğan’s regime allowed tens of thousands of jihadis to join ISIS from 2012, when ISIS became a major force in the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars, to 2018, when it ultimately fell under the Kurdish attacks supported by the United States.
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By Saladdin Ahmed · Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Despite a decade of resistance since the Iranian Green Revolution in 2009, another Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has yet to be born. In its way lie Sunni and Shia Islamist blocs, which have been remarkably successful in preventing entire societies from stepping forward. In countries where they have assumed state power, Islamist forces have been aggressive and totalitarian, while elsewhere they have hijacked popular liberal movements of regime change in recent years. Ultimately, if the anti-Islamist resistance does not soon bring down the main sponsors of the Sunni and Shia blocs—the Turkish and Iranian regimes, respectively—the coming era will be no less bloody than the period from 1919 to 1945.
In my view, the avalanche that will topple the regime in Iran is gaining speed, but as for the Sunni bloc, I am less optimistic. The Kurds are the last obstacle to Erdoğan’s neo-Ottoman caliphate, and it seems they are being left to face their heroic yet tragic fate alone. If the Islamist momentum of militarization and mobilization is allowed to continue building, it will eventually shatter the prospects for international peace. Perhaps only then, looking back on these days, will liberal democracies recognize their own culpability for failing to support anti-Islamist struggles in the region.
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By Kim R. Holmes · Wednesday, May 1, 2019 Kim R. Holmes’s “A Man between Two Worlds: Assessing Martin Sklar’s Philosophy of Liberalism” appears in Telos 186 (Spring 2019), as part of a symposium on Martin J. Sklar. Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 Martin Sklar is an underappreciated thinker. The fact that he was a leading intellectual of the New Left in the 1960s and remained a self-identified leftist gave him a unique historical perspective. It enabled him to cut through many misunderstandings and clichés about the history of American liberalism, and gives us an opportunity to understand the left’s theory of community in a different light. One of Sklar’s central theses is his contention that the American system during the Progressive Era became a “mix” of capitalism and socialism. Looking at this background, one of Sklar’s more prescient theses is his distinction between the “broad left” and the “sectarian left.” This also informs his insightful idea of the “transvestiture of left and right”—that the left and right have largely changed historical places on ideas. The postmodern left is very different from, and indeed has largely broken off ideologically from, classic as well as mainstream liberalism as it has been understood in the past. One very important component missing from Sklar’s approach is religion. It must be recognized that the post-revolutionary construct in America helped ensure that the freedom of civil society as a liberal project could not fully flourish without the support of religion. Sklar’s work illuminates the great intellectual divide between classic liberalism and socialism, and between the moderate and radical Enlightenment legacies, which rest on two different views of human nature. However, if a choice had to be made between liberty and the dictates of community, Sklar always chose liberty.
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By David Pan · Monday, March 18, 2019 Telos 186 (Spring 2019) is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
This issue is devoted to the question of universal history and is based in part on a 2015 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference organized by Greg Melleuish. As this event suggested, universal history today imagines the convergence of humanity around a single trajectory of capitalist technological progress coupled with the defense of liberal rights. But as much as technology has increasingly linked the world into a single movement of history, we cannot say the same about liberal rights. Rather than pointing us toward the liberal light at the end of the historical tunnel, world politics seems to be casting us into the blazing arena of the “clash of civilizations” presaged by Samuel Huntington, with different regions of the world—Africa, America, Asia, Europe, the Muslim world—increasingly at odds, each region with a dominant civilization pursuing its own cultural and political hegemony. This divergence between a materialist unity of development and a cultural fragmentation frames the problem of universal history.
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By Mitchell Dean · Friday, February 8, 2019 Mitchell Dean’s “Oath and Office” appears in Telos 185 (Winter 2018). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 The oath pertains to law, sovereignty, and office. A public servant takes an oath. A witness and a juror at a trial swear an oath. The British monarch swears a coronation oath and the president-elect of the United States an oath of office. While the coronation of the monarch has been regarded as “medieval” and the inauguration of the president as “ceremonial” or “symbolic,” it would be a mistake to view them as empty rituals, particularly the oaths taken. And while the oath invokes God, it would be an error to assume that it is merely an atavism, a retroversion, or a vestige of a more religious past. But what it is and what it does is far from clear, including to those who swear oaths. When President Obama, sworn in by Chief Justice John Roberts, misspoke his oath of office in January 2009, he was advised to retake it the next day, as the White House counsel put it, “out of an abundance of caution.” Ex abundanti cautela might indeed by the principle that scholars should adopt, given the thicket of false trails, unfathomable origins, prejudices, and commonplaces that afflict any attempt to study this practice. The appropriate method to study the oath uses multiple examples and cases, considers them from as many different viewpoints as it can, and remains wary of both our commonsense assumptions about its origins and efficacy and their theoretical correlates.
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