Review of The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington

My personal copy of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

Category: Non-fiction, political science, national & international security, international relations, international diplomacy
Page Count: 352
Year of Publication: 2011 (Paperback Edition)
Rating: 5/5
10-Word Summary: Civilizations have replaced ideologies as the driving force of geopolitics.

About The Clash of Civilizations
Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is one of the greatest books I have read in my life. Sometimes I would just shake my head and pause my reading because I had to think about whether Huntington was some sort of fortune teller given how eerily accurate his prediction of the 21st century geopolitical landscape was when he published his book back in 1996.

Huntington was the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University and chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies. He was also director of security planning for the National Security Council in President Jimmy Carter’s administration, as well as the founder and coeditor of Foreign Policy.

The Clash of Civilizations is divided into five parts: Part I covers the first three chapters where Huntington argues that the most important distinction between peoples in the post-Cold War world is civilization and not ideology. For example, World War II was an ideological war featuring German Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Soviet Communism, while the Cold War was an ideological battle between the Communist East led by the Soviet Union and the capitalist West led by the United States. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the age of ideologically driven geopolitics had come to an end and was replaced with what Huntington proposes is the new paradigm of geopolitics going into the 21st century: civilizations. And the most important element of civilizations, that which divides nations and populations more than any other element, is religion.

Hence, in Part II, Huntington details that the upcoming geopolitical conflicts will be between civilizations due to the religious, and therefore political and cultural, differences. For example, the late 20th century featured the Islamic Resurgence, where Arab governments turned to Islam to enhance their political and spiritual authority and to gather popular support. The Iranian Revolution from 1978-1979 is the most famous example of this. Islamic law replaced Western law, Islamic codes of behavior, such as the banning of alcohol and proper female covering, replaced Western codes of behavior. But the interesting thing Huntington points out is that here in the West we call this Islamic “fundamentalism.” The irony is that these Islamic laws come from the prophet Muhammad himself, either from the Qur’an or from the hadith: the sayings and practices from the prophet Muhammad. If the Qur’an is supposed to be the literal word of God as Muslims believe it to be, then not following Islamic law is not following the will of Allah. All this to say that there is no middle ground: Western values inherently clash with the will of Allah.

Yet, the main idea in Part II is not necessarily the clash with Islam. Rather, the main idea is that the West is in decline—both in influence and military power. Henry Kissinger eerily says the same thing in Diplomacy, another famous book published two years earlier in 1994, where Kissinger also predicts how the geopolitics of the 21st century will be shaped.

Not only is the West in decline, but rapid economic development in Asia beginning with Japan in the 1950s and continuing into the mid-1990s with the rapid economic growth in China meant another threat to the West in the form of a Chinese-led world order in East Asia. Given Asian belief that Asia will surpass the West economically, growing Asian belief in the cultural superiority over the West, and the need for Asian nations to find common ground in Asia, it was clear to Huntington that Asia and its values will threaten the weakening Western-led world order.

This leads into Part III, where Huntington explains that the international relations of the 21st century will revolve around countries grouping themselves around the lead states of their civilizations. For example, the West, though in decline, will continue to be led by the United States, while East Asia will rally around the leadership of China, and the Baltic and Orthodox states will unite around Russia.

And in Part IV, Huntington explains that the West’s desire to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counterproliferation and the West’s desire to spread political values such as democracy and human rights will inevitably lead to conflicts with Islamic governments and East Asian governments. This is why Bill Clinton failed to halt the North Koreans from acquiring nuclear weapons and why the Japanese government distanced themselves from the United States’ human rights policies in the 1990s.

Part V ends the book on a somber note: The United States must affirm and preserve its Western identity and create stronger relations with other Western nations based on similar cultural and religious heritage. But the West must “Recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world”(Page 312). Hence, it’s best to leave China to East Asia and leave the Baltic states to Russia.

Should You Read The Clash of Civilizations?
I cannot do this book justice in a 1,000-word review. I have tried to summarize the book through the narrative of international relations, but this book is so much more than that. For example, Huntington discusses in great depth the civilizational conflicts that happen within the borders of one nation, such as the ones that happened in Yugoslavia—a conflict among the Catholic Croats, the Bosnian Muslims, and the Orthodox Serbs. And he discusses the problems that lead to decay within a civilization, such as the growth in crime, the growth in divorce, and the weakening of the work ethic.

If someone who knew nothing about geopolitics or international relations could only read one book to understand everything happening in the 21st century, I would say that this is the book to read. Huntington’s writing is great, he backs his assertions with great detail, but most importantly, his analysis is proving to be correct.