Samuel Huntington got Ukraine wrong.
That’s what a casual reader of “The Clash of Civilizations?“—published in Foreign Affairs 30 years ago this summer—might think.
Huntington was at the peak of his career as a political science professor and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University when he wrote “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.”
The Cold War with the Soviet Union was over. American troops easily evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait two years earlier. This was meant to be a golden age—a new world order, as President George H.W. Bush called it, even “the end of history.”
But Huntington knew perpetual peace had not arrived. Nor was foreign policy about to become mere police work. The Islamist atrocities of 9/11 confirmed his insights. The “War on Terror” was really a war between the West and another civilization’s most militant manifestation. The Bataclan Theater in Paris and the London Underground were as much a battlefield in this war as the caves of Tora Bora or the deserts of Iraq.
Read Full Article »
