Theory of Clash of Civilizations

Samuel P. Huntington proposed his theory in the 1993 Foreign

Affairs article A Clash of Civilizations? He also published a book
in 1996 called The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
World Order based on the article. According to him, the future
fault line will center around culture and religion. His theory of the
clash of civilizations predicts alignments and wars among various
civilizationsWestern, Islamic, Chinese, Japanese,
Orthodox/Russian, Hindu, African, and Latin. The term clash of
civilizations was first used by Bernard Lewis in an article in the
September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled The Roots of
Muslim Rage.

According to Huntington,
The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source
of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most
powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of
global politics will occur between nations and groups of different
civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics.
The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the
future. [1]
One of his hypotheses predicts a world war among the worlds
major civilizations in 2020. According to this hypothesis, American
troops will have left Korea, which will lead to Korean reunification
and a reduced presence for American troops in Japan. Taiwan and
mainland China will reach an accommodation in which Taiwan
continues to have most of its de facto independence but explicitly
acknowledges Beijings suzerainty, and with Chinas sponsorship
be admitted to the United Nations on the model of Ukraine and
Belorussia in 1946. China will attack Vietnam over the oil in the
South China Sea and to avenge its humiliation in 1979. Because

American companies are involved in the development of these oil

fields on behalf of Vietnam, the U.S. will send one of its few
remaining carrier task forces to the South China Sea following
Vietnams appeal for help and despite Chinas warning to the U.S.,
Japan, and others to stay out of the conflict. In response, China
launches a military strike against the American task force.
Negotiations for a cease-fire led by the U.N. secretary general and
the Japanese prime minister fail, resulting in Japanese neutrality
and its refusal to allow the U.S. to use its bases for action against
China; the U.S. will use these bases despite the Japanese
quarantine. The Chinese navy and air force, operating from both
the mainland and Taiwan, will inflict serious damage on American
ships and facilities in East Asia. China will occupy a major portion
of Vietnam, including Hanoi.
According to Huntingtons hypothesis, the United States will
refrain from escalating this war because domestic public opinion
will regard it as a war for American hegemony in Southeast Asia
or control of the South China Sea. In the meantime, after
watching China engage in a war in East Asia, India will attack
Pakistan, as a result of which Iran will join the conflict on
Pakistans side. At the same time, Chinas initial successes
against the United States will stimulate major anti-Western
movements in Muslim societies, and pro-Western regimes in Arab
nations and Turkey will be ousted by the Muslim youth bulge
(males between the ages of 16 and 30). The surge of antiWesternism encouraged by Western weakness will lead to a
massive Arab attack on Israel, which the much-reduced U.S. Sixth
Fleet will be unable to stop.
Because of Chinese military successes, Japan will change its
position from neutral to pro-Chinese and occupy American bases
in Japan, causing the U.S. to evacuate its troops from those bases.
The United States will declare a blockade on Japan, and American
and Japanese ships will engage in sporadic duels in the Western

Pacific. At the start of the conflict, China will offer a mutual

security pact to Russia (vaguely reminiscent of the Hitler-Stalin
pact), which Russia declines. Russia will take an anti-China stance
because of its fear of Chinese dominance of East Asia, and
reinforce its troops in Siberia, resulting in a revolt by the
numerous Chinese settlers there, bringing Chinese troops into the
conflict. China will occupy Vladivostok, the Amur River valley,
and other key parts of eastern Siberia. As fighting spreads
between Russian and Chinese troops in central Siberia, uprisings
occurs in Mongolia, which China had earlier placed under a
protectorate.
Huntingtons hypothetical hostilities thus far have been limited to
East Asia and the Indian subcontinent. In order to expand them
into the conflagration of a world war, he further hypothesizes that
China and Iran will secretly deploy intermediate-range, nuclearcapable missiles in Bosnia and Algeria in order to intimidate
Americas European allies from joining the U.S. This has the
opposite effect, however, because before NATO can mobilize,
Serbia, wishing to reclaim its historic role as the defender of
Christianity against the Turks, invades Bosnia. Croatia joins in, and
the two countries occupy and partition Bosnia, capture the
missiles, and proceed with efforts to complete the ethnic
cleansing they had been forced to stop in the 1990s. Albania and
Turkey then attempt to help the Bosnians, and Greece and
Bulgaria invade Turkey. Meanwhile, a missile with a nuclear
warhead, launched from Algeria, explodes outside Marseilles, and
NATO retaliates with devastating air attacks on North African
targets.
Huntingtons hypothesis postulates a global conflict between two
alliancesthe U.S., Europe, Russia, and India on one side, and
China, Japan, and most of Islam on the other. Because both sides
have major nuclear capabilities and these are brought into play,
both sides could be substantially destroyed; but if mutual

deterrence is effective, mutual exhaustion might lead to a

negotiated armistice. The West may be able to defeat China by
supporting insurrections against Chinese rule by Tibetans,
Uighurs, and Mongolians, and by deploying Western and Russian
forces eastward into Siberia for a final assault on Beijing,
Manchuria, and the Han heartland. According to Huntington,
because the economic, demographic, and military power of the
major participants in the war will decline dramatically as a result
of the conflict, the center of world politics will move south to
nations that avoid it, such as the Latin American nations, New
Zealand, Mynamar, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India also
if it escapes major devastation despite its participation.
The 2001 attack on the World Trade Center and subsequent U.S.
attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq have led political scientists to
believe in Huntingtons theory of the clash of civilizations. As
discussed in chapter 5, it was because of economic greed (for oil)
and the Israel lobby that the U.S. attacked Iraq in 2003, however,
not because of civilizational fault lines. Moreover, the world has
not witnessed any significant increase in conflict along
civilizational fault lines for the last century. It is economic greed
more than all other factors that creates and maintains fault lines
among nations and peoples and that drives wars.
In addition, Huntingtons civilizations are only partly unified in
nature, especially Islam. In Islam, Shiites and Sunnis fight bitterly
with each other, and for this reason, Saudi Arabia, which is ruled
by Sunnis, is collaborating with its bitter enemy, Israel, to fight
Shiite Iran. Although Muslims in Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, North
Africa, and the rest of the Arab world are Sunnis, they have
different viewpoints amongst themselves, and several of them
have been struggling with secessionist movements and other
internal conflicts for decades: for example, the Kurds in Turkey,
the Baluchs and Pashtuns in Pakistan, and the Aceh in Indonesia.
These factors make a unified Islam, at least, next to impossible.

Finally, as we saw during the Cold War and in particular in the

Nixon governments theory of Mutually Assured Destruction
(MAD) vis--vis the Soviet Union, a prolonged conventional war
is unlikely to occur between two countries that have sufficient
nuclear bombs and missiles to destroy each other. Therefore,
Huntingtons prediction of a bloody, cataclysmic clash between
the Sinic and Western civilizations is not going to happen.