In his influential 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington said that wars of the future will not be fought by nation against nation, but by cultures and religions from different civilizations, one against the other. Although Huntington was a terrific scholar, 23 years after his book, no Clash of Civilizations has appeared.
Isn't the West in a civilization clash with jihadism? No. The jihadists have only bombs. They rule no countries, large or small. They lack unified leadership. Their philosophy is a religious atavism, only alive, ironically, because of up-to-date weapons. Moreover, their victims are scattered across half a dozen civilizations, burdening them with endless targets, and giving Europe, Africa, America and others a shared, pathetic foe.
Like many large-scale theories, The Clash of Civilizations, when read today, overstates the coherence of its analytical units. Chinese civilization mixes Western free markets with its own top-down political traditions. Huntington wrote that East Asian culture produced the economic success of China and others, but a US-led security order helped. Muslim civilization shows fractures not foreseen by Huntington: Two major Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia and Iran, oppose each other. Pakistan, Egypt and other Muslim governments battle jihadist protestors. Tens of millions of Muslim believers live in Europe and raise teenagers who seldom visit a mosque. Indonesia, with the largest Muslim population in the world, bears little resemblance to the Middle East.
Within the West, the E.U. and Trump's U.S. differ on tax policy, the death penalty, abortion, and other social issues. East European states, all once Communist and now EU members, have moved sharply to the right. Poland and Hungary are closer in philosophy, now, to Trump's U.S. than to France and Germany, and more democratic than Brussels permits some E.U. members to be. No wonder Huntington had trouble fitting Japan and Australia into his civilizational boxes.
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