The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

No. I'm not going to pretend to be some kind of happy optimist who thinks that everything is going to get steadily better. Human beings and the societies that they create are flawed. They also come into conflict. Their conflicts tend to go on for a long time. Of course, pretending that everything is going to get better without effort is part of the problem. The idiots who think this book is great are taken in by Huntington's trap which is to invoke Francis Fukuyama and his utterly ridiculous The End of History essay (then book) where he advances the theory that the end of the Soviet Union means the end of conflict. No really. He said that. And people bought it. And they gave him book contracts. Probably because compared to him, everyone else seemed intelligent. So when you invoke Pollyanna and say that that's not the case, it makes you sound wise for a second. It also makes you sound pessimistic, cynical and realpolitik when really you're just stating a fact that any 10 year old with a minimal grasp of history could figure out. So Huntington is not a blithering idiot like Fukuyama. Instead, he's merely ignorant and a slave to gross generalizations. And meaningless statistics. This book is about THE WEST. THE WEST was once imperial and now it's not and all those Western beliefs like democracy and freedom are not going to fly in the world of ISLAM or ASIA. No, he didn't put those words in all caps but he might as well have. And then after he makes this point, he keeps making it. Islam is not the West. Asia is not the West. His proofs are dubious as he simply quotes thinkers who were once pro-WEST but then decided to embrace their traditions. "Embracing one's traditions" is the same thing as "Rejecting ALL Western values" in the mind of Huntington. Of course, that's not true. I wasn't raised as an Orthodox Jew but I became one over time and this in no way makes me hostile to WESTERN values like democracy, freedom of speech, etc. Of course, he's not talking about Jews. Jews don't really fit into his all-encompassing Theory of Everything (Jews rarely do) but Islam is similar enough to warrant a good old fashioned WTF reaction by the fiftieth time he says Islam as if it's one all encompassing group. In fact, he even groups Hezbollah in with the Balkan Wars which is monstrous considering that the Muslims of the former Yugoslavia were VICTIMS of one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust. And as if the book couldn't get stupid enough, he even believes that Japan and China will get together to stand against the WEST. Because China and Japan have so much in common - like they're Asian, and they are relatively short in comparison to Westerners and they mix up their R's and L's when speaking English and...yeah there's nothing else. I was going to give this book 2 stars for being badly written, stating the obvious and generalizing with wild abandon. But then I read that part about how he predicts Japan and China will get together to challenge the West, I realized that I was reading the work of an ignorant fool whose reputation is completely undeserved. Granted, not knowing that Japan and China are completely different countries with completely different cultures who only interact in order to go to war with each other is a mistake anyone could make - anyone who has absolutely no knowledge of Asia whatsoever - like a political science professor who is pontificating on this stuff and acting like he knows anything. Utterly stupid book. Badly written. If anyone recommends you read this book, punch them in the mouth. If your professor assigns it, drop the class. Nothing good can come of reading this thing. The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski.Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as indispensable to our understanding of American foreign policy today as the day it was published. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new foreword to the book, it “has earned a place on the shelf of only about a dozen or so truly enduring works that provide the quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.”Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. Events since the publication of the book have proved the wisdom of that analysis. The 9/11 attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the threat of civilizations but have also shown how vital international cross-civilization cooperation is to restoring peace. As ideological distinctions among nations have been replaced by cultural differences, world politics has been reconfigured. Across the globe, new conflicts—and new cooperation—have replaced the old order of the Cold War era.The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify intercivilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, muliticivilizational world. From the Preface... In the summer of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article of mine titled "The Clash of Civilizations?". That article, according to the Foreign Affairs editors, stirred up more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s. It certainly stirred up more debate in three years than anything else I have written. The responses and comments on it have come from every continent and scores of countries. People were variously impressed, intrigued, outraged, frightened, and perplexed by my argument that the central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics would be conflict between groups from differing civilizations. Whatever else it did, the article struck a nerve in people of every civilization. Given the interest in, misrepresentation of, and controversy over the article, it seemed desirable for me to explore further the issues it raised. One constructive way of posing a question is to state an hypothesis. The article, which had a generally ignored question mark in its title, was an effort to do that. This book is intended to provide a fuller, deeper, and more thoroughly documented answer to the article's question. I here attempt to elaborate, refine, supplement, and, on occasion, qualify the themes set forth in the article and to develop many ideas and cover many topics not dealt with or touched on only in passing in the article. In the summer of 1993 Foreign Affairs published an article entitled "The Clash of Civilizations?" by Samuel Huntington. No article, according to the editors of that distinguished journal, has generated more discussion since George Kennan's "X" article on containment in the 1940s. Now, Mr. Huntington expands on his article, explores further the issues he raised then, and develops many new penetrating and controversial analyses. In the article, he posed the question whether conflicts between civilizations would dominate the future of world politics. In the book, he gives his answer, showing not only how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war Based on the author's seminal article in Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is an analysis of the state of world politics after the fall of communism. In this work, Huntington explains how "civilizations" have replaced nations and ideologies as the driving force in global politics today and offers an analysis of the current climate and future possibilities of our world's volatile political culture. --From publisher's description On January 3, 1992, a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow.