Clash Within Civilizations?
After more than four decades of distinguished scholarship and a stint on the National Security Council, in 1992 Samuel P. Huntington introduced his "clash of civilizations" thesis in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute. The provocative theory caused an earthquake in the field of international relations. Huntington foresaw that the next threat to the world order would come from Islamic civilization and China would soon come into conflict with the West. With less prescience, Huntington also predicted that the new fault lines of geopolitical conflict would pit civilizations against each other rather than ideologies: "Conflicts between [actors from] different civilizations will be more frequent, more sustained, and more violent than conflicts between groups in the same civilization." The clash between Islamic terror and the West appears less acute than it did twenty years ago, but today the rivalry between the United States and China dominates world politics, as Huntington predicted. However, the composition of the alliances differ from the ones Huntington suggested, as, during the last decade, from Syria to Ukraine, more blood has been spilt within civilizations than between them. After thirty years, power politics continues to drive clashes between nations much more than civilizational kinship.
Taken by itself, the West fits Huntington’s model exactly. The vast majority of western countries are American allies. The remainder are officially neutral. No western nation is likely to go to war with another. However, the West’s relationship with the world at large subverts the model. The United States has important allies all over the world to the point that the West is the center of a global alliance that splits several of Huntington’s civilizations.
The Dar al-Islam (House of Islam, the Islamic world) finds itself in a Hobbesian state of disorder. There are certainly elements in the Islamic World pursuing a civilizational struggle against the West. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan conform to Huntington’s thesis, but this is not the whole story. If, per the scholar William Lind, the world wars and the Cold War acted as the West’s “civil war,” then today the Islamic World fights its own civil war. The primary Islamic geopolitical conflict is not between a Muslim country and a civilizational outsider, but rather a regional cold war between Shiite Iran and the Sunni Arab states. This struggle does not even absorb all of Islam’s attention. Kenya and Tanzania prove more concerned with East African cooperation than with provocations in the Persian Gulf. Kazakhstan concerns itself with walking the tightrope between falling to domestic chaos and turning into a Russian client state. Malaysia and Indonesia are ready for a pivot to Asia.
The Sunni Arabs do not represent all of Islam, or even a majority. Furthermore, they do not find their most important allies within the Dar al-Islam. Saudi Arabia traditionally relied on the United States for defense and now leans on Israel, as the American public grows weary of sending young men to die in the Middle East. On the other side of the ledger, Syria now relies on Russia for its paltry modicum of stability, and Iran, in addition to juggling its satellite satrapies, attempts to forge closer relations with China and Russia. In short, the Dar al-Islam acts not like a coherent civilizational community with a few peripheral breakaways, but rather as a patchwork of warring blocs, each one willing to seek help from the decadent Christian, the Godless atheist, and the perfidious Jew to vouchsafe their own security.
Since 2011, wars between Islamic powers and civilizational outsiders have not necessarily been the most consequential conflicts in the Dar al-Islam. While the war in Afghanistan (a textbook clash of civilizations if there ever was one) lasted twenty years and cost two hundred thousand lives, the ongoing Syrian civil war is eleven years old and has killed half a million people. So far Afghanistan is more sustained, but Syria proved more lethal. Islam’s “bloody borders” are matched only by its “bloody innards.”
China, as one scholar observed, is a “civilization pretending to be a nation state.” Home to roughly 80 percent of the Confucian world’s people, China is by far the civilization’s largest country. However, five other Confucian nations orbit China (the two Koreas, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore) and until recently, Hong Kong existed as a semi-autonomous city state. Save North Korea and Hong Kong, U.S. allies all. Huntington predicted that the four Chinese countries (Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and China itself) would voluntarily grow closer. This has not come to pass. The Maoist regime incorporated Hong Kong by force in the face of valiant street protests, as the flower of the city’s youth mortgaged their lives in the lost cause of defending the pearl of the orient. This has no doubt made China’s “one country, two systems” a less appealing proposition to Taiwan. Even as tensions rise between the USA and China, the lines of the new cold war divide Confucian civilization instead of uniting it against the West, and the only casualties so far have been the Hong Konger protesters.
Contemporary Russia provides an even starker contrast with Huntington’s predictions. Russia’s only solid ally in all of Orthodox Civilization is poor Belarus. Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Montenegro, and North Macedonia are NATO members. Unhappy Ukraine and Georgia would very much like to join them. Armenia entered the Russian orbit reluctantly, only after being ghosted by an apathetic United States. Serbia, aggressively courted though it was by its Slavic big brother, voted to condemn the brutal invasion of Ukraine at the UN. The great Orthodox standard bearer does not have many friends under her flag.
The aforementioned brutal invasion also provides a counterexample to Huntington’s worldview. In his 1996 book, Huntington predicted peace between Russia and Ukraine on the basis of his model: “If civilization is what counts, however, the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low. They are two Slavic, primarily Orthodox peoples…” While Huntington viewed Ukraine as predominantly Orthodox, some have come to view Ukraine as a “torn country” in recent years. “Torn country,” Huntington’s term for a state that could plausibly gravitate towards either of two civilizations, could apply to Ukraine. However, Ukraine does not behave like Huntington’s paradigmatic torn country. The war in Ukraine does not appear to be a civil war between Orthodox and Catholics. If anything, it is a smackdown between Russian speakers and Ukrainian speakers (both groups predominantly Orthodox), but even then many native Russophone Ukrainians deplore Putin’s invasion. While the border between West and Orthodox runs through western Ukraine, the fighting is far east of that line.
Furthermore, Huntington argued that conflict in a torn country would attract civilizational patrons eager to aid their beleaguered little brothers. Since Russia and Belarus started this war against Ukraine, China has offered moral support and a market for taboo oil, while the butcher of Damascus, good vassal that he is, committed Syrian troops to bolster Putin’s war machine. Most Orthodox states of the world, by contrast, have been more likely to condemn Russia at the United Nations, levy sanctions on Russia, and offer material support to the Ukrainian freedom fighters. Ukraine does not look like a clash of civilizations, but rather a competition for security between Russia and NATO where the battle lines are drawn between the free and the autocratic. Everything old is new again.
The largest and most disruptive conflicts in the world right now are fought between Orthodox Russians and Orthodox Ukrainians, or between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs. Nowhere in the world are inter-civilizational conflicts decidedly “more frequent, more sustained, and more violent” than wars within civilizations.