"'Only bloody chaos will result from shortsighted attempts to plant, in a biblical region, political models from a different civilizational matrix, without taking into account the worldview and values that have shaped peoples’ lives for centuries and millennia,' Reverend Nikolai Balashov, the deputy chairman of the Moscow Patriarchate’s department of external church relations, told the New York Times. 'Forming foreign policy without accounting for the religious factor could lead to a catastrophe, to the deaths of thousands and millions."'

Read more: Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest