I spent a good portion of last week reading Samuel Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations.” If you’re interested in geopolitics, and you haven’t read it, I will tell you that I can’t imagine a book that is more important than this one. As a result, I will be posting about it throughout the week.
The book was written in 1996, but it essentially foresaw, in one way or another, everything that has happened in the last 25 years. The rise of China, Islamic fundamentalism, identity politics both here and abroad, Russian imperialism–it’s all there.
Huntington divides the world into nine civilizations: West; Orthodox; Islam; Sinic; Latin America; Japan; Africa; Hindu; and Buddhist. Each of these civilizations comes with an identity that is non-negotiable when threatened by another group. Conflicts between civilizations–particularly between the West on one hand and the Sinic and Islamic groups on the other–can lead to disaster.
Huntington basically anticipated every geopolitical fault line that is in the news today, but his predictions about some of them turned out to be wildly incorrect. These include:
- Ukraine: Huntington says Ukraine will either fall slowly into the Orthodox sphere of influence (i.e., become a Russian vassal state) or break up. He didn’t anticipate Putin’s invasions and the resulting rejection of Russian hegemony.
- Japan and Korea: Huntington puts Korea in the “Sinic” zone as a unified whole. He also predicts that Japan will move away from the West and closer to China. In reality, South Korea and Japan have edged closer to the West in response to aggressive Chinese and North Korean behavior.
- Islamic fundamentalism: Huntington identifies this as a trend, even before 9/11, but does not foresee its ultimate failure as a ruling concept. The Islamic world is notable more for its divisions than its unity today.
- Soft and hard power: Soft power does not inevitably follow hard military and economic power. The Chinese have less of it today than they did a decade ago.
What you should take away from these faulty predictions is that ideology, individual agency, and big power politics sometimes prevail over issues involving corporate identity. I don’t think Huntington would have disagreed with that. The validity of the book’s thesis is still intact.