*5.4. The Three Tiers Are Independent from One Another*

The three tiers follow one another in the decision making sequence, from identifying a situation, assessing its implications to the national interests, evaluating action alternatives, choosing the most beneficial alternative, and executing this choice (Rosenberg 1995; Brecher et al. 1969; Redd and Mintz 2013). A decisionmaker's perceptions of the link between their state's security and religion shape how they assess the situation and its implications for the state's security. Then, religion's role in global, regional and internal politics influences how they evaluate the options open to them, and their choice of the most beneficial action. Finally, the action chosen sometimes requires decisionmakers themselves to utilize religion for its execution. When national policymakers identify a religion threat (the first tier), they are more sensitive to information on the religious conditions of choice in their environment (the second tier) and they utilize religion more in their attempts to counter the threat (the third tier).

Yet, each of the three tiers is independent. Religion factors can be involved in only one tier of the process and not in the others. While governmental utilization of religion is frequently shaped by the long-term perceptions of the first tier, and by the domestic and regional circumstances of the second tier, it can also be taken in a completely utilitarian manner. A case in point is Olmert's insistence that the Quartet, on the Middle East, would make Hamas' recognition of Israel as a Jewish state one of three conditions for recognition of a Hamas-led Palestinian government. Knowing that Hamas would not agree to this condition, Olmert used Hamas's ideological-religious position to deny the Hamas regime in the Strip international recognition and support (Esposito 2007, p. 134).

Lastly, there is feedback from the third tier to the first tier of the model, meaning that the actions a state takes in the sphere of religion for national security objectives have the power to reshape the state's environment so much so, that the state's policymakers must change their beliefs on the religion-security nexus (the first tier) and on what is possible for them to achieve in the new security environment (the second tier). Feedback that irrevocably changed modern politics can be observed in American national security policy. In the 1980s, during the Cold War, American national security policy led US decisionmakers to coordinate a successful campaign with Pakistan, to propel Muslims worldwide to wage jihad against the Soviet Union after its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. This American utilization of Islam succeeded in achieving its goal; the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and then collapsed. Radicalized Islam, however, retained its expertise and prestige to threaten superpowers, and become a real security threat to the US itself, when the armed Islamic radicals of the 1990s turned on and attacked the only remaining superpower—the US. This development, which became most evident in the 9.11 attacks, required the American policymakers of the 21st century to rethink their presumptions on the link between American security on the one hand, and Islam and religious freedom on the other—the first tier (Ahmed 2012, pp. 279–89; Shaw 2011, pp. 1–3, 27–30; Bar and Minzili 2006, p. 1).

This feedback loop between national security actions that utilize religion (the third tier) and the beliefs of later decisionmakers pertaining to the relations between religion and security (the first tier) is part of a wider feedback between national security actions and the religious sphere. All national-security measures, even those that do not utilize religion, have the power to reshape the role religion plays in the target environment—which, in turn, shapes the security situation of future policymakers of the acting state. For example, the success of the mostly secular security doctrine of young Israel contributed to the religionization of the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, which, later on, transformed Israel's security predicament and options. Similarly, the American attempts in the 2000s to counter the new threat of Islamic terror by a military invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, an action that did not utilize religion for its most part, enflamed an even wider wave of religious extremism in the Middle East and reshaped the regional religious politics into a battle between two rival "religious" camps—Shi'a and Sunna—which changed the security calculations of later American administrations (Bar and Minzili 2006, p. 1). Although the influence of national security policies on the religious field is not much explored in the scholarship, this influence is as present, significant and multifaceted as the influence of the religious field on national security policymaking explored in this article.
