The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel P. Huntington

Is it possible to have too many books? I suppose that it is. Proven recently by a friend who, like myself collects books, but had simply ran out of room in which to store them all. And, as it turns out, I was fortunate enough to become the great benefactor to her conundrum. When the books arrived I hastily raced my way to the bottom of the box and I have to say that I was impressed by the quality of books I had received, both in a literary sense and in the sense that they had obviously been well taken care of. One in particular had caught my attention because it happened to be one that was on my personal 'list of books to be read'. Samuel P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. And I offer it here, as my initial book review.

The main reason why I wanted to read Huntington's most well known work, published in 1993, was less to do with his skill as a writer and more to do with his career as a political insider. As a close personal friend of Zbigniew Brzezinski, a co-editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, the co-author of the Trilateral Commission sponsored The Crisis of Democracy, the director for Harvard's Center for International Affairs for over half a century and the White House Coordinator of Security Planning for the National Security Council during the Carter administration, Huntington represents an important voice in global strategy.

For me personally, as an advocate for the personal rights and freedoms of the 'rugged individual', I often find myself in direct odds with these monolithic establishment organizations in which Huntington has spent his entire career. His intimate associations with groups like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission and Harvard University present many contradictions to my beliefs, however, that is precisely the reason for my interest in his writings. One of the most important processes of the critical thinking mind is to consider all information and accept only the facts. So as much as it pains me to read the writings of insiders like Huntington, Brzezinski or Kissinger a lot can be gleaned from the information they offer, much can be understood about our present situation from the direction in which these men are pushing the opinion of the American public and U.S. foreign policy.

Huntington's main theory presented within the three hundred plus pages, is written from a post Cold War era viewpoint and posits that global conflicts will be initiated less by the existing Statist powers than by the cultural differences that permeate the human condition. Huntington puts forth a somewhat convincing proposition that most wars in history have been fought primarily on behalf of differences in religious beliefs than any other causal factor. According to Huntington, the 'West versus the Rest' paradigm that existed at the turn of the 20th century was nearing its conclusion and the greatest threat to the U.S. in particular and the West in general, would be that of Islam.

And while the theory that wars around the globe have often centered around religious affiliations is hardly groundbreaking, we can see, from the benefit of hindsight, that Huntington has proven to be accurate in predicting the West's present day crisis with Islam. Since the writing of Huntington's book we have witnessed a striking shift in western culture. The rise of anti-west sentiment that emanates from out of the middle eastern cauldron of conflict and the introduction into English vernacular words like 'jihad' and 'Islamic terrorism' have certainly put Huntington's theory in the foreground of American and western European consideration.

Huntington also seems to predict the Ukraine/Russia conflict within the pages of The Clash of Civilization and further details the fall of the American Empire and as the geopolitical landscape continues to experience massive upheaval and fluctuations in the power structure as it nears the first quarter of the new century we see this prediction also to be true.

However, we can also use the power of hindsight to see the shortcomings of Huntington's predictions. We plainly see that the wars initiated by Statist power, especially that of the Western countries that he predicts will come to a halt, has continued unabated well into the twenty-first century and has little to do with religion, political ideology or differences in language. Using the events of September 11, 2001 as a catalyst, American 'interventionalism' has been free to cast a long shadow over the middle east that now includes extensive military bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Turkey and Oman. All in line with neo-con plans laid out around the time of the publication of The Clash of Civilizations, all in an effort to finally overturn the final holdouts in the region, the governments in Syria and Iran. The area has been a beehive of U.S. military action that aims to not only free the flow of oil but also impose western owned central banks across the entire Arabian peninsula that would conclude in total U.S. hegemonic control over the entire ancient fertile crescent.

It is here that I exercise my skeptical evaluation of 'connected' men like Huntington when evaluating his book as well as his predictions. It certainly cannot be considered a coincidence that the trajectory taken by the Carter Administration during Huntington's time as White House Coordinator of Security in the eighties followed a strikingly similar path that had been laid out by Huntington in his co-authored, The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. And it is important to remember this when considering the prognostications made in The Clash of Civilizations. I am far more certain to believe that Huntington and Brzezinski were essential figures in helping shape the future of U.S. foreign policy well beyond the days of Carter than I am inclined to believe that they made impressively accurate assumptions based on the layout of the tea leaves. It is in fact, under the Carter administration that the U.S. funded and trained a young Osama Bin Laden and the Mujahideen in an effort to thwart Russian involvement in Afghanistan signalling the beginning of the 'jihad' against Western ideals that we are experiencing today.

Similarly, the neo-con think tank, The Project for a New American Century, also made plans concerning the Middle East that have proven extremely accurate today. That plan, first put forth in 1997, by men like Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle laid out the blueprint that the U.S. would need to follow in the event of 'a new Pearl Harbour' and it's main objective was toppling the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq and the takeover of the entire Middle East. A plan that, as we near the year 2018, we see as nearly complete. Making one wonder if Huntington and his ilk are more than just the innocent authors of their books, but also the authors of catastrophic events that have led to this 'century of chaos'.

So while I'm reticent to applaud Huntington on any of his predictions, and I would be far from endorsing his talents as a writer, I would not diminish the importance of his writings. I strongly encourage the reader to search out his books. I see great value in the information presented within them because when taken from a certain perspective, they prove invaluable when determining the future of global affairs. In regards to American foreign policy and geopolitics, Huntington's books are often the harbingers of things to come, less so because of any uncanny ability he may have to foresee the future but because he has simply been on the inside and has seen the blueprint.