Opinion | Yes, There Is a Clash of Civilizations – The New York Times

But in every other theater of the world, his thesis looked relatively dubious. American power didnt seem to be obviously declining. China was integrating with the Western world and liberalizing to some degree, not charting its own civilizational course. Russia in Putins first term seemed to aspire to alliances with America and Europe and to a certain kind of democratic normalcy. In India the forces of Hindu nationalism werent ascendant yet. And even in the Muslim world, there were repeated moments, from the Green Movement in Iran to the Arab Spring, that seemed to promise 1989-style democratic revolutions followed by convergence with the West.

The first years of the 21st century, in other words, provided a fair amount of evidence for the universal appeal of Western capitalism, liberalism and democracy, with outright opposition to those values confined to the margins Islamists, far-left critics of globalization, the government of North Korea.

The last decade, on the other hand, has made Huntingtons predictions of civilizational divergence look much more prescient. It isnt just that American power has obviously declined relative to our rivals and competitors, or that our post-9/11 efforts to spread Western values by force of arms so often came to grief. The specific divergences between the worlds major powers have also followed, in general ways, the civilizational patterns Huntington sketched out.

Chinas one-party meritocracy, Putins uncrowned czardom, the post-Arab Spring triumph of dictatorship and monarchy over religious populism in the Middle East, the Hindutva populism transforming Indian democracy these arent just all indistinguishable forms of autocracy, but culturally distinctive developments that fit well with Huntingtons typology, his assumption that specific civilizational inheritances would manifest themselves as Western power diminishes, as American might recedes.

And then, just as tellingly, the region where this recent divergence has been weaker, the post-Cold War wave of democratization more resilient, is Latin America, about which Huntington acknowledged some uncertainty whether it deserved its own civilizational category, or whether it essentially belonged with the United States and Western Europe. (He chose the former; the latter seems more plausible today.)

Then what about Huntingtons specific predictions about Ukraine, raised by Roy and Caldwell in critique? Well, there he did get something wrong: Though he accurately foresaw internal Ukrainian divisions, the split between the Orthodox and Russian-speaking east and the more Catholic and Western-leaning west, his assumption that civilizational alignments would trump national ones hasnt been borne out in Putins war, in which eastern Ukraine has resisted Russia fiercely.

That example fits a larger pattern: None of the emerging non-Western great powers have yet built grand alliances based on civilizational affinities, meaning that the third of the four big Huntingtonian predictions looks like the weakest one today. He imagined, for instance, that a rising China might be able to peacefully integrate Taiwan and maybe even draw Japan into its sphere of influence; that scenario seems highly unlikely at the moment. Instead, wherever smaller countries are somehow torn, in his language, between some other civilization and the liberal West, they usually prefer an American alliance to an alignment with Moscow or Beijing.

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Opinion | Yes, There Is a Clash of Civilizations - The New York Times