Vexed by the apocalyptic vibes of the last few months, I recently went back and re-read the controversial book Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Harvard political science professor Samuel Huntington. The book was controversial when it came out in the mid-nineties because Huntington, in a moment of post-Soviet euphoria, dared to doubt the universality of mankind and instead highlighted the enduring rifts that separate us. Three decades on, it’s uncanny how much he got right.
Interestingly, the book was panned by nationalists and globalists alike, who saw “civilization” as an artificial construct invented by philosophers and conquerors. International affairs turn on state power or universal principles, they said. Anything in between is an irrelevant abstraction.
To be honest, there’s some truth to this critique. What are civilizations anyway? They don’t have constitutions, armies, or flags. They don’t have capitals, pass laws, or make decisions. By the way, Huntington made no attempt to hide these facts. “Civilizations have no clear-cut boundaries and no precise beginnings and endings,” he wrote. “People can and do redefine their identities and, as a result, the composition and shapes of civilizations change over time.”
Yet Huntington made his case no less strongly, first in a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and later in his seminal 1996 book. Just two years after the fall of the USSR, he wrote, “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. 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.”
Having spent more than a decade working along these cultural fault lines, I can’t help but agree. Civilizational mega-forces are real, and we ignore them to our detriment.
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This is the first post of a new Providence column that aims to fill a gap in the debate about foreign policy by analyzing world events through the lens of civilization.
Naturally this column, like others on foreign policy, will be focused primarily on the use of power—the wielding of it, the checking of it, the balancing of it—by states in the jungle of global affairs. But my aim is to go further, evaluating power with reference to the invisible things that shape individuals and collectives: the ideas, hopes, and imagined identities that drive human decision making no less than physical survival.
I start from a familiar premise: Man does not live by bread alone. For while human beings need material resources to stay alive and will wage wars to obtain them, they also crave identity, meaning, and purpose. When they seek resources, they do so not just to survive as individuals but to preserve a corporate way of life. Biblical anthropology presents man as a complex being, a fusion of body and spirit created from the dust of the earth yet tethered to a divine personality in heaven. The gravest mistake in foreign policy is to see this two-dimensional creature in just one dimension.
To see civilizationally is to see the currents, not the waves. And with threats mounting on every side, we can’t afford to do otherwise. The Russia-Ukraine war; the Israel-Iran conflict; the rise of China; the self-immolation of the Islamic world; the nativist-migrant struggle in Europe; the identity crisis here in the US—in all these cases, a civilizational analysis does more than merely explain. Applied to real situations, it offers the basis for better policy.
The core of the analysis comes down to the question of belief. What do Russians and Ukrainians, Israelis and Iranians, Americans and Chinese believe about themselves and the world, and how do those beliefs shape their collective decision making? And how can politicians, generals, diplomats, and policymakers account for these beliefs in the fast-paced environment of 21st century affairs?
These are the kinds of questions I want to explore, and I thank my readers in advance for indulging me.
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A few caveats at the outset.
First, the civilizational model isn’t a silver bullet. “This picture of post-Cold War world politics…is highly simplified,” Huntington admitted. “It omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others.” Any model of global affairs will conceal as much as it reveals. “Yet if we are to think seriously about the world, and act effectively in it, some sort of simplified map of reality, some theory, concept, model, paradigm is necessary.” It’s my position that the civilizational paradigm, despite its shortcomings, is far superior to the alternatives.
Second, Huntington was wise beyond his years, but he wasn’t infallible. In fact, one of my goals in this column is to point out what he got right, what he got wrong, and why. Clash offers a framework, a point of departure, a guide; but the world in 2024 looks different than it did in 1996. At the end of the day, my desire is to understand the world for what it is—not back then, but today.
Third, my analysis is intentionally subjective—that is, I speak in the first person on purpose. Too much foreign policy writing is generated in the sensory vacuum of DC cubicles, cut off from the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the street; and too often the authors are more worried about impressing (or dunking on) fellow Ivy Leaguers in connection with academic theories or social media trends. It’s my view that the best commentary is one-part geopolitical analysis, one-part historical reflection, and one-part travelogue—and if not the best, certainly the most interesting.
Fourth, my analysis is openly biased. Providence is a magazine of Christian realism and I, in fact, am a Christian—a pretty average, indeed pretty flawed, European-American Baptist raised in upstate New York who found faith in his twenties through an inquiry into the Hebraic backstory of Christianity. I am an American patriot, a former Marine, and a conservative-leaning independent with blue collar roots and a natural affinity for the working class. I am a fan of Western civilization (if a critical one), and I hope it will survive.
These biases don’t disqualify me from writing about civilizations; indeed, they make it possible. It’s a common mistake to think that proud membership in one civilization makes effective engagement with others impossible. The truth is quite the opposite. How can one talk of the power of religion and culture while denying any such commitments of his own? How can one understand the ”irrational” feelings that animate foreign societies without harboring such feelings in his own heart? Confidence in one’s own beliefs cultivates respect, even if begrudging, for the beliefs of others.
I’ll end this first post with the last sentence of Huntington’s book: “In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.”
What would such an international order look like? How do we get there? The short answer is, I don’t know. But it’s high time we start talking about it.
The post Our Civilizational Moment first appeared on Providence.