Tuxedos and ball gowns often accompany frivolity, but they were appropriate for the history-making inaugural Scholar-Statesman Award Dinner of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Wednesday night at the Pierre.

It took a few hours — filled with cocktails, roast beef, and a video of luminaries praising the institute — to get to the history-making: an exchange between the award recipients, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, Bernard Lewis, and a former secretary of state, George Shultz, on American foreign policy on terrorism and radical Islam.

“It’s misleading to say we are engaged in a war against terrorism,” Mr. Lewis said. “If Churchill had told us that we were engaged in a war against submarines and war craft, we’d be in a different world today. Terrorism is a tactic, it is not the enemy.”

The enemy, he said, is Islamism, which he placed as the third in a sequence of ideological deformations that have taken place in his lifetime, the first two being Nazism and Bolshevism.

“There is only one way to deal with Islamism: to mobilize the Muslims themselves on our side,” Mr. Lewis said. “Nazism and Bolshevism were a curse to their own people before they became a threat to the world. We must strive for the same situation. … Perhaps it is our only solution. We must free them or they will destroy us.”

Mr. Lewis said his optimism in facing Islamism derives from his expectation of foolishness and error on the part of our adversaries, noting historical examples such as Hitler’s exile of his best scientists.

Mr. Shultz paid deference to his co-honoree. “When you asked me to come to this, I said I’d come, but I’d rather listen to Lewis,” Mr. Shultz told the executive director of the institute, Robert Satloff.

Mr. Shultz had plenty to say, however. On the challenge of radical Islam: “I fear that to a certain extent we’re going to sleep on it. In the Reagan years, we had a strategy, we had an idea, and a way of going about it, but we don’t seem to have such an idea right now,” he said.

He proposed going back to the three key words that guided him during the Reagan administration: realism, strength, and diplomacy. “If you have ideas, you’re going to get somewhere. The ideas are your compass,” he said.

Mr. Shultz also addressed the role of lobbyists. “Lobbies are a good thing, but it’s up to the government to take all this in and decide what’s in the best interests of the U.S,” Mr. Shultz said. Asked about the book “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Mr. Shultz said: “I don’t even want to talk about the book. It’s a disgrace. And to call Israel an apartheid society is also a disgrace.”

The most moving moment of the exchange came when Mr. Shultz recalled an experience during his deanship at the University of Chicago. It was 1967, around the time of the Six-Day War.

“At the end of the each quarter I held a party. My wife made beans — ‘Dean’s Beans,’ they called them. Always there was a young man named Joseph Levy, who was on the dean’s list. He wasn’t just smart, he had it all,” Mr. Shultz said. “I had hardly heard that the war started when I heard that Levy had been killed. He’d found out about it and went right to Israel. He was a tank commander. I remember it so well. It made a deep impact on me.”

The anecdote drove home that leadership and ideas are ultimately the products of people. It was the privilege of the 315 patrons of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy assembled Wednesday to learn that lesson over roast beef, rather than Dean’s Beans.

“I support the institute because it explores vital issues, and I admire the leaders for their judgment and commitment, and my son is a trustee,” Morris Mark said, referring to his son Matthew.

The institute’s leaders include chairman Roger Hertog, an owner of The New York Sun and vice chairman emeritus at AllianceBernstein, and president Howard Berkowitz, managing director and head of BlackRock’s hedge fund business. The event raised $1.4 million for the institute.

agordon@nysun.com