Suppose a ruler woke up one morning determined to change his people's religion. Could he do it?
The question sounds absurd. Faith is not a garment discarded with a ruler's robes, nor an edict issued and obeyed. Yet history tells us that Vladimir, prince of Kyiv, converted to Christianity and made it the religion of his realm in the late tenth century. In time it became a pillar of his people's identity. Akhenaten, by contrast, elevated the worship of Aten above Egypt's other gods, deployed the full authority of the pharaoh, and built a new capital for his faith. Soon after his death, his religious order receded, and the old gods returned.
Both men ruled. Why did one decision echo through the centuries while the other was almost buried with its author?
History places the ruler's name at the head of the story, tempting us to credit him with the whole transformation. But decisions do not descend upon empty ground. A new faith may already have travelled with merchants and migrants. Elites may see in it an alliance, a source of legitimacy or a more effective system of administration. Clerics, scribes, schools and money then carry what began in the palace into ordinary life.
And then comes time.
A political choice can harden into social custom and eventually become part of a people's identity. A decree that finds no institution to sustain it, no constituency to adopt it, and no need to answer may vanish with the hand that imposed it. Vladimir and Akhenaten set existing forces in motion; countless people whose names no chronicle records completed, resisted or remade what their rulers began.
This leads to a question at the heart of historical inquiry: do people make history, or does history make them? Some see a leader or reformer behind every great transformation. Others regard individuals as ripples on deeper currents: economics, geography, institutions, belief and the distribution of power. Yet history rarely shows us an actor without a structure, or a structure that acts without human agents. Structures constrain the will; they do not abolish it.
We still ask why an Arab ruler cannot simply propel his country into the ranks of developed nations: establish justice, repair education and abolish poverty. The question rightly holds power to account, but it treats the state as a single man and development as a command. A state is also an administration, a judiciary, a school system, a market and accumulated networks of interest and belief. A ruler may build universities while the labour market fails to reward knowledge. He may enact reform only for bureaucracy and patronage to empty it of substance.
Understanding constraints makes accountability more exacting, not less. Which options were genuinely available? Which limits were real and which were excuses? Did the ruler build institutions that could outlast him, or reduce every institution to his own shadow?
History, however, is moved not only by interests and power. It can also be moved by delusions. A political delusion need not be a conscious lie. It may be a settled belief through which leaders view the world, admitting evidence that confirms it and excluding what does not. When such a belief captures a small circle close to power, and a strong state gives it force, it passes from the realm of ideas into the realm of events.
This is where delusion must be distinguished from strategy. Both speak about the future. Strategy connects ends to means, tests its assumptions, measures the ability of others to resist, and leaves room for error and contingency. Delusion begins with the desired outcome and treats it as the likeliest — sometimes the only — one.
The invasion of Iraq grew out of an Iraqi delusion: that overthrowing a regime was equivalent to building a state, and that once a dictator had been removed, society would arrange itself in the image imagined by the victor. The fear that followed September 11, confidence in unrivalled American power and a narrow decision-making circle that excluded contrary expertise all fed that belief. The power of the state then turned it into war.
Named individuals chose the invasion, and their responsibility cannot be dissolved into circumstance. But reading the war solely as a fully formed conspiracy obscures an even more unsettling danger: powerful people can become captives of their own ideas, mistaking a capacity to destroy for a capacity to build.
Washington knew how to topple the regime. It did not know the Iraq that would emerge from the ruins.
At roughly the same time came a China delusion. Across two successive administrations and with broad bipartisan support, the United States promoted China's integration into the World Trade Organization. The wager was not merely economic. Many believed that markets would change politics; that wealth and information would bring liberalisation; and that a China benefiting from the global order would inevitably become a guardian of it.
This was the creed of an era. After the Soviet Union collapsed, history appeared to have revealed its direction, with markets carrying a particular political system inside them. Events proved less obedient. The Chinese state used the market without dissolving into it, and integration strengthened a competitor rather than simply taming it. This does not mean that engagement achieved nothing, but it does expose the error of treating political liberalisation as its inevitable destination.
Iraq and China were not equivalent in means, consequences or moral weight. One policy used war and the other trade. But both reflected the same confidence: that the United States could prescribe the path by which other societies would change. In Iraq, policymakers exaggerated the ability of military power to remake a society. In China, they exaggerated the ability of markets to remake a state.
It is not enough, with hindsight, to say they were wrong. The more useful question is how a delusion acquired the authority of state strategy. How did interests, fears and ideas combine until one option seemed like a law of history? Why did warnings fail to reach the decision, or fail to change it?
Statesmen need history not as a storehouse of analogies with which to justify choices already made, but as a discipline for separating the possible from the wished-for — strategy from delusion. Intellectuals and commentators need it for the same reason: to resist turning the world into a simple stage populated by an all-knowing conspirator and a passive victim, or an omnipotent ruler and a people waiting for his command.
It is never enough to ask who acted. We must also ask what world of interests, fears and ideas made the action possible; which alternatives were excluded; and which consequences were intended or unleashed by accident.
That is where reading history begins.
Hamed Sinan al Ghaithi
The writer is an Omani evolutionary biologist, translator and editor
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