Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order turns 30 this year. The book was a worldwide hit in the late 1990s and has been published in some 30 translations, including in Arabic, Chinese, and Bengali. After 9/11, the first part of the title practically became a household phrase. Huntington had been an eminent political scientist at Harvard, but his 1996 book made him a global celebrity. (I first met him when I was a Ph.D. student at Harvard, and we later became friends.)
The gist of Huntington’s argument: The end of the Cold War did not mark the “end of history,” as the political theorist Francis Fukuyama had argued in a widely discussed article and subsequent book imagining that the collapse of the Soviet empire would virtually end the strife among states of millennia past and that liberal democracy and market economics would now rule.
Huntington predicted that a new conflict would rage after the demise of Communism. Now not states, but the great civilizations, would clash “along the cultural fault lines” separating them, including “Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African.” In the 21st century, the altar would again be mightier than the throne. Inter-civilizational conflict would “displace the political and ideological boundaries of the Cold War as the flash points for crisis and bloodshed.”
At first blush, the predictions in Clash seem to have panned out. Russia is now propelled by not Marxism but nationalism under the two-beamed cross of Orthodoxy. The Confucians—that is, the Chinese—are challenging the West across the board. Serbs went after Muslims in the former Yugoslavia. The Orthodox in Ukraine’s east clashed with the Catholics in its west along precisely the fault line Huntington sketched.
Huntington seemed most prescient regarding Islam. This civilization, he wrote in a notorious line, has “bloody borders.” Al-Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Soon after, the United States went to war with the Muslim nations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The trail of terror since is too long to lay out in all its horrifying detail—in Madrid and Munich, in Strasburg and Stockholm, and all the way to Hamas’s mass murder of Jews on October 7, 2023.
[From the December 2001 Issue: Looking the world in the eye]
But upon closer inspection, Huntington’s predictions begin to wobble. Three decades after Clash, rivalries among the great powers, rather than a new clash among faith-based civilizations, continue to dominate the globe. During the Cold War, two heavies, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., were the lead players. Now the conflict has been joined by China.
Buddhist-Taoist Japan, anointed as a new giant in Clash, has all but withdrawn from the stage. India, with its nuclear weapons and 1.4 billion people, has defied Huntington’s expectations as well. Instead of demanding a seat at the table of the Big Three, let alone dominating Asia, India keeps maneuvering among the U.S., China, and Russia to extract benefits from each.
And Europe? The past master of the universe is an economic colossus but, strategically, its civilization is an also-ran. Even during the presidency of Donald Trump, the European Union depends on the United States to be its protector against Russia’s stockpile of 4,300 nuclear weapons, which dwarf the diminutive deterrent of Britain and France.
The problem: 27 is less than one. What sounds like bad arithmetic is correct politics. The 27 EU members don’t amount to a unitary actor on the global stage. The EU’s $20 trillion GDP does not translate into political weight, because Europe does not obey a single will. So this civilizational giant ends up a political lightweight.
As for Islam, the key borders run inside this culture, something Huntington mentioned only in passing. We are not witnessing a clash of civilizations, let alone “The West against the Rest,” to invoke another famous Huntington line. What tortures the Muslim realm is the reverse: a culture of clashes at home.
Some telling examples: The longest war in the modern Middle East pitted Iraq against Iran from 1980 to 1988—incurring 1 million casualties. In Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, from 2014 to 2024, 350,000 died, according to the United Nations—or close to twice that many, as counted by expatriate outfits. In the ongoing Yemeni civil war, close to 400,000 have died since 2014—and the number will go higher still.
Likewise, the Christian West has never been a bunch of choir boys. In the 17th century, the Thirty Years’ War between Catholics and Protestants claimed as many as 8 million victims, about a fifth of the population in the Central European battlefield.
And China’s civil war during the past century left behind as many as 10 million dead. Mao Zedong is said to have been responsible for another 40 million.
[Idrees Kahloon: The return of MAGA’s favorite forbidden book]
Huntington’s clash among cultures cannot explain any of these blood orgies. What can? The culprits are, as always, states and empires seeking power, possession, and primacy, no matter whom they revere, whether Jesus, Marx, or the Prophet Muhammad.
And thus in history, if Huntington were right, Catholic France would not have fought with Germany’s Protestant princes against the Catholic Habsburgs in the Thirty Years’ War. Why did France’s King Francis I ally with the Muslim Ottomans against the Spanish-Austrian Empire, unified under Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1519? Easy—because le roi wanted to break the encirclement on his eastern and southern flanks. So bring in the Turks. Power politics beat belief then, and it continues to do so now.
Cultures and creeds were never the true engines of bloodshed—and aren’t in our day, either. Russia wants to swallow Ukraine, even though both nations share Orthodox rites. The driver is dominion, not religion.
At the same time, there is the rapprochement between Israel and Arab states, which began with the country’s peace deals with Egypt and Jordan—and then there is Israel’s recent Abraham Accords with sundry Muslim states, including Morocco and Sudan, with Saudi Arabia as silent partner. The common foe of all is expansionist Iran and its handmaidens Hamas and Hezbollah.
States keep calling the shots. South Korea and North Korea are rooted in the same culture, as are China and Taiwan. Yet they are deadly enemies. Cold-blooded interest beats ethos and faith.
Finally, a word on our present moment: When The Clash of Civilizations came out, the culture war in the West was in its infancy. It did not fit into the book’s scheme.
Eight years later, Huntington published a new book. It is titled Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity, and it zeroes in on what he glossed over back in 1996. What then focused his mind was the clash within the United States—and by extension the rest of the West. Uncontrolled immigration by Latinos and Muslims, he darkly warned, would divide America into “peoples, cultures and languages.” He felt it was time to reaffirm Protestant values and English as the national language of the United States.
In Who Are We?, Huntington concedes that the deepest fault lines run not among clashing civilizations but within them. And today, the dominant conflict within the United States is between those who are “woke” and those who want to conduct a “war on woke.”
Even great minds err, but the greatest revise their predictions when they fail.
