Huntington Clash Of Civilizations Quotes

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

Some Westerners […] have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.

Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

Multiculturalism is in its essence anti-European civilization. It is basically an anti-Western ideology.

There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are.

People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam Hussein might be a bloody tyrant, but, paralleling FDR's thinking, "he is our bloody tyrant." In their view, the invasion was a family affair to be settled within the family and those who intervened in the name of some grand theory of international justice were doing so to protect their own selfish interests and to maintain Arab subordination to the west.

The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.

God and Caesar, church and state, spiritual authority and temporal authority, have been a prevailing dualism in Western culture. Only in Hindu civilization were religion and politics also so distinctly separated. In Islam, God is Caesar; in China and Japan, Caesar is God; in Orthodoxy, God is Caesar’s junior partner.

The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac. The fact that non-Westerners may bite into the latter has no implications for their accepting the former.

reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.

Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted, but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq, but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth, but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China, but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed, but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do.”16

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. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.

interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness. Alone among civilizations the West

ability of Asian regimes to resist Western human rights pressures was reinforced by several factors. American and European businesses were desperately anxious to expand their trade with and their investment in these rapidly

In the post-Cold War world flags count and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses, crescents, and even head coverings, because culture counts, and cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people.

One grim Weltanschauung for this new era was well expressed by the Venetian nationalist demagogue in Michael Dibdin’s novel, Dead Lagoon: “There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are. These are the old truths we are painfully rediscovering after a century and more of sentimental cant. Those who deny them deny their family, their heritage, their culture, their birthright, their very selves! They will not lightly be forgiven.

Religion for them, as Régis Debray put it, is not “the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the weak.

Again and again both Westerners and non-Westerners point to individualism as the central distinguishing mark of the West.

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

What, however, makes culture and ideology attractive? They become attractive when they are seen as rooted in material success and influence. Soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power. Increases in hard economic and military power produce enhanced self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of one’s own culture or soft power compared to those of other peoples and greatly increase its attractiveness to other peoples. Decreases in economic and military power lead to self-doubt, crises of identity, and efforts to find in other cultures the keys to economic, military, and political success.

Cultural assertion follows material success; hard power generates soft power.

On January 3, 1992, a meeting of Russian and American scholars took place in the auditorium of a government building in Moscow. Two weeks earlier the Soviet Union had ceased to exist and the Russian Federation had become an independent country. As a result, the statue of Lenin which previously graced the stage of the auditorium had disappeared and instead the flag of the Russian Federation was now displayed on the front wall. The only problem, one American observed, was that the flag had been hung upside down.

The philosophical assumptions, underlying values, social relations, customs, and overall outlooks on life differ significantly among civilizations. The revitalization of religion throughout much of the world is reinforcing these cultural differences. Cultures can change, and the nature of their impact on politics and economics can vary from one period to another. Yet the major differences in political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic culture explains in large part the failure of democracy to emerge in much of the Muslim world.

It is absurd to assume that the new political societies emerging in the East will be copies of the societies we know in the West.

Today China’s economic power,” Richard Nixon observed in 1994, “makes U.S. lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.

This changing international environment brought to the fore the fundamental cultural differences between Asian and American civilizations. At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.

In wars between cultures, culture loses.

For peoples seeking identity and reinventing ethnicity, enemies are essential, and the potentially most dangerous enmities occur across the fault lines between the world’s major civilizations.

The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.

In addition, as the Russians stopped behaving like Marxists and began behaving like Russians, the gap between Russia and the West broadened. The conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism was between ideologies which, despite their major differences, were both modern and secular and ostensibly shared ultimate goals of freedom, equality, and material well-being. A Western democrat could carry on an intellectual debate with a Soviet Marxist. It would be impossible for him to do that with a Russian Orthodox nationalist.

In the coming era, in short, the avoidance of major intercivilizational wars requires core states to refrain from intervening in conflicts in other civilizations. This is a truth which some states, particularly the United States, will undoubtedly find difficult to accept.

The attribution of value to a traditional religion,” Ronald Dore noted, “is a claim to parity of respect asserted against ‘dominant other’ nations, and often, simultaneously and more proximately, against a local ruling class which has embraced the values and life-styles of those dominant other nations.

As Mahathir suggested, Asians generally pursue their goals with others in ways which are subtle, indirect, modulated, devious, nonjudgmental, nonmoralistic, and non-confrontational. Australians, in contrast, are the most direct, blunt, outspoken, some would say insensitive, people in the English-speaking world.

Some Americans have promoted multiculturalism at home; some have promoted universalism abroad; and some have done both. Multiculturalism at home threatens the United States and the West; universalism abroad threatens the West and the world. Both deny the uniqueness of Western culture. The global monoculturalists want to make the world like America. The domestic mulitculturalists want to make America like the world. A multicultural America is impossible because a non-Western America is not American. A multicultural world is unavoidable because global empire is impossible. The preservation of the United States and the West requires the renewal of Western identity. The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.

In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural. Peoples and nations are attempting to answer the most basic question humans can face: Who are we? And they are answering that question in the traditional way human beings have answered it, by reference to the things that mean most to them. People define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, customs, and institutions. They identify with cultural groups: tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, nations, and, at the broadest level, civilizations. People use politics not just to advance their interests but also to define their identity. We know who we are only when we know who we are not and often only when we know whom we are against.

В този смисъл възраждането на незападните религии е най-мощната проява на антизападната нагласа в незападните общества. Това възраждане не означава отхвърляне на модернизацията, то е отхвърляне на Запада и на светската, релативистка, дегенерирала култура, свързвана със Запада. Това е отхвърляне на онова, което се нарича „позападняване“ на незападните общества. То е декларация за културната независимост от Запада, гордо заявление: „Ще станем модерни, но ние няма да се превърнем във вас.

The weakening of the state and the emergence of failed states contribute to a fourth image of a world in anarchy. This paradigm emphasises the decline of governmental authority, the disintegration of states, the intensification of ethnic, religious and tribal conflicts, the rise of international criminal organisations, refugee numbers growing into the tens of millions, the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, the spread of terrorism and the prevalence of mass murder and ethnic cleansing.

In this sense, English is the world’s way of communicating interculturally just as the Christian calendar is the world’s way of tracking time, Arabic numbers are the world’s way of counting, and the metric system is, for the most part, the world’s way of measuring. The use of English in this way, however, is intercultural communication; it presupposes the existence of separate cultures. A lingua franca is a way of coping with linguistic and cultural differences, not a way of eliminating them. It is a tool for communication not a source of identity and community

Основният проблем за Запада не е ислямският фундаментализъм. Той е ислямът, една различна цивилизация, чието население е убедено в превъзходството на своята култура и е обхванато от мания за малоценността на своята мощ. Проблемът за исляма не е ЦРУ или Министерството на отбраната на САЩ. Той е Западът, една различна цивилизация, чието население е убедено в универсалността на своята култура и вярва, че неговата доминираща, макар и западаща мощ му вменява в дълг да разпространява западната култура в целия свят. Това са основните компоненти, които подхранват конфликта между исляма и Запада.

Участниците в процеса на религиозно възраждане произхождат от всички слоеве на обществото, но най-вече от две категории, като и двете са градски и мобилни. Току-що преселилите се мигранти в градовете обикновено се нуждаят от емоционална, социална и материална подкрепа и ръководство, неща, които религиозните групи осигуряват в много по-голяма степен от каквато и да била друга група. Както отбелязва Режи Дебре, за тях „религията не е опиум за народа, а витамин за слабите“[38]. Другата основна категория е новата средна класа, олицетворяваща посочения от Дор „феномен на индигенизация при второто поколение“. Активистите в ислямските фундаменталистки групи, изтъква Кепел, не са „застаряващи консерватори или неграмотни селяни“. Както при другите религии, при мюсюлманите религиозното възраждане е градски феномен и то привлича хора, които имат модерна ориентация, които са добре образовани и са избрали пътя на професионална кариера на държавници или на бизнесмени.[39] При мюсюлманите религиозни са младите, докато родителите им имат светски разбирания. Същото е и случаят с индуизма, където лидерите на възродителните движения също идват от индигенизираното второ поколение и чето са „преуспяващи бизнесмени и администратори“, които индийската преса нарича „скупита“, т. е. облечени в шафранени одежди юпита. В началото на 90-те години техните привърженици са предимно „хора от солидната средна класа — търговци, счетоводители, адвокати и инженери“, както и от „висшите държавни чиновници, интелектуалците и журналистите“[40]. В Южна Корея хора от същия тип изпълват католическите и презвитерианските църкви през 60-те и 70-те години.

Rich, modern countries have common traits that make them different from poor, traditional countries, which also share common traits. Differences in wealth can lead to conflict between societies, but the evidence suggests that this mainly occurs when rich and powerful societies try to conquer and colonize poor and traditional societies.

Maps and Paradigms. This picture of post-Cold War world politics shaped by cultural factors and involving interactions among states and groups from different civilizations is highly simplified. It omits many things, distorts some things, and obscures others. 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. Without such intellectual constructs, there is, as William James said, only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Intellectual and scientific advance, Thomas Kuhn showed in his classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, consists of the displacement of one paradigm, which has become increasingly incapable of explaining new or newly discovered facts, by a new paradigm, which does account for those facts in a more satisfactory fashion. “To be accepted as a paradigm,” Kuhn wrote, “a theory must seem better than its competitors, but it need not, and in fact never does, explain all the facts with which it can be confronted.”4 “Finding one’s way through unfamiliar terrain,” John Lewis Gaddis also wisely observed, “generally requires a map of some sort. Cartography, like cognition itself, is a necessary simplification that allows us to see where we are, and where we may be going.

A civilizational approach, on the other hand, emphasizes the close cultural, personal, and historical links between Russia and Ukraine and the intermingling of Russians and Ukrainians in both countries, and focuses instead on the civilizational fault line that divides Orthodox eastern Ukraine from Uniate western Ukraine, a central historical fact of long standing which, in keeping with the “realist” concept of states as unified and self-identified entities, Mearsheimer totally ignores. While a statist approach highlights the possibility of a Russian-Ukrainian war, a civilizational approach minimizes that and instead highlights the possibility of Ukraine splitting in half, a separation which cultural factors would lead one to predict might be more violent than that of Czechoslovakia but far less bloody than that of Yugoslavia. These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Mearsheimer’s statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest of Ukraine leads him to support Ukraine’s having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, promote substantial economic assistance and other measures to help maintain Ukrainian unity and independence, and sponsor contingency planning for the possible breakup of Ukraine.

The moment of euphoria at the end of the Cold War generated an illusion of harmony, which was soon revealed to be exactly that. The world became different in the early 1990s, but not necessarily more peaceful. Change was inevitable; progress was not. Similar illusions of harmony flourished, briefly, at the end of each of the twentieth century’s other major conflicts. World War I was the “war to end wars” and to make the world safe for democracy. World War II, as Franklin Roosevelt put it, would “end the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries — and have always failed.” Instead we will have “a universal organization” of “peace-loving Nations” and the beginnings of a “permanent structure of peace.”7 World War I, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. World War II produced a Cold War that was truly global. The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and “ethnic cleansing,” the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the “diplomacy of smiles” and “policy of yes” in Russia’s relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China.

Paradigms also generate predictions, and a crucial test of a paradigm’s validity and usefulness is the extent to which the predictions derived from it turn out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms. A statist paradigm, for instance, leads John Mearsheimer to predict that “the situation between Ukraine and Russia is ripe for the outbreak of security competition between them. Great powers that share a long and unprotected common border, like that between Russia and Ukraine, often lapse into competition driven by security fears. Russia and Ukraine might overcome this dynamic and learn to live together in harmony, but it would be unusual if they do.

Religious groups meet social needs left untended by state bureaucracies. These include the provision of medical and hospital services, kindergartens and schools, care for the elderly, prompt relief after natural and other catastrophes, and welfare and social support during periods of economic deprivation.

Най-очевидната, най-натрапчивата и най-сериозната причина за глобалното религиозно възраждане е тъкмо тази, за която се предполага, че е причинила смъртта на религията: процесите на социална, икономическа и културна модернизация, които заливат света през втората половина на XX в. Рушат се дълговечни извори на идентичност и системи на авторитет. Хората се преместват от селата към градовете, откъснат се от корените си и започват нова работа или остават безработни. Те влизат във взаимодействие с голям брой непознати и встъпват в нови кръгове. Те се нуждаят от нови източници на идентичност, от нови форми на стабилна общност и от нова система от морални принципи, които да им дадат усещане за смисъл и за цел. Религията, както традиционната, така и фундаменталистката, отговаря на тези нужди. ............................................ Хората не живеят само с разума си. Те не могат да преценяват и да действат рационално, преследвайки интересите cи, ако не се стремят да определят собственото Аз. Политиката на интересите предполага идентичност. Във времена на бърза социална промяна вече изградените идентичности се paзпадат, Азът трябва да се предефинира и да се създаде нова идентичност.За хора, изправени пред необходимостта да oпределят „Кой съм аз?“, „Къде ми е мястото?“, религията предлага непоклатими отговори, а религиозните групи дават възможност на малките социални общности да получат компенсация за загубеното от урбанизацията. Както пише Хасан ал-Тураби, всички религии предоставят на „хората усещане за идентичност и перспектива в живота“. В този процес xopата преоткриват себе си ил

political and economic development among civilizations are clearly rooted in their different cultures. East Asian economic success has its source in East Asian culture, as do the difficulties East Asian societies have had in achieving stable democratic political systems. Islamic

Their case was summed up by British Defense Minister Malcolm Rifkind, who, in November 1994, argued the need for “an Atlantic Community,” resting on four pillars: defense and security embodied in NATO; “shared belief in the rule of law and parliamentary democracy”; “liberal capitalism and free trade”; and “the shared European cultural heritage emanating from Greece and Rome through the Renaissance to the shared values, beliefs and civilization of our own century.

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.

In the long run, however, Mohammed wins out. Christianity spreads primarily by conversion, Islam by conversion and reproduction. The percentage of Christians in the world peaked at about 30 percent in the 1980s, leveled off, is now declining, and will probably approximate about 25 percent of the world’s population by 2025. As a result of their extremely high rates of population growth (see chapter 5), the proportion of Muslims in the world will continue to increase dramatically, amounting to 20 percent of the world’s population about the turn of the century, surpassing the number of Christians some years later, and probably accounting for about 30 percent of the world’s population by 2025.19

It, as seems to be the case, economic integration depends on cultural commonality, Japan as a culturally lone country could have an economically lonely future.

In non-Western societies two opposing trends appear to be underway. On the one hand, English is increasingly used at the university level to equip graduates to function effectively in the global competition for capital and customers. On the other hand, social and political pressures increasingly lead to the more general use of indigenous languages, Arabic displacing French in North Africa, Urdu supplanting English as the language of government and education in Pakistan, and indigenous language media replacing English media in India.

The ‘Orient’, in this set of processes, was homogenized, and its ‘essence’ regarded as immutable. The widely influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis advanced by the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in 1997 is testament to the enduring frame of the forever-continuing ‘West versus Islam’ (and other cultures) idea that Said had highlighted

The West is the only civilization which has substantial interests in every other civilization or region and has the ability to affect the politics, economics, and security of every other civilization or region.

The distribution of cultures in the world reflects the distribution of power. Trade may or may not follow the flag, but culture almost always follows power.

The collapse of this ideology in the Soviet Union and its substantial adaptation in China and Vietnam does not, however, necessarily mean that these societies will import the other Western ideology of liberal democracy. Westerners who assume that it does are likely to be surprised by the creativity, resilience, and individuality of non-Western cultures.

Non-Westerners also do not hesitate to point to the gaps between Western principle and Western action. Hypocrisy, double standards, and “but nots” are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

In Xinjiang, Uighurs and other Muslim groups struggle against Sinification and are developing relations with their ethnic and religious kin in the former Soviet republics.

Economic growth strengthens Asian governments; demographic growth threatens Muslim governments and non-Muslim societies.

In the early phases of change, Westernization thus promotes modernization. In the later phases, modernization promotes de-Westernization and the resurgence of indigenous culture in two ways. At the societal level, modernization enhances the economic, military, and political power of the society as a whole and encourages the people of that society to have confidence in their culture and to become culturally assertive. At the individual level, modernization generates feelings of alienation and anomie as traditional bonds and social relations are broken and leads to crises of identity to which religion provides an answer. This causal flow is set forth in simple form in Figure 3.2.

The European powers make it clear that they do not want a Muslim state, Turkey, in the European Union and are not happy about having a second Muslim state, Bosnia, on the European continent.

Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West. In fundamental ways, the world is becoming more modern and less Western.

For those who fought the Soviets, however, the Afghan War was something else. It was “the first successful resistance to a foreign power,” one Western scholar observed,2 “which was not based on either nationalist or socialist principles” but instead on Islamic principles, which was waged as a jihad, and which gave a tremendous boost to Islamic self-confidence and power. Its impact on the Islamic world was, in effect, comparable to the impact which the Japanese defeat of the Russians in 1905 had on the Oriental world. What the West sees as a victory for the Free World, Muslims see as a victory for Islam.

For the present, can Taiwan remain democratic without becoming formally independent? In the future could Taiwan be democratic without remaining actually independent?

Many, perhaps most, Americans,” one observer commented in 1994, “still see their nation as a European settled country, whose laws are an inheritance from England, whose language is (and should remain) English, whose institutions and public buildings find inspiration in Western classical norms, whose religion has Judeo-Christian roots, and whose greatness initially arose from the Protestant work ethic.

The dynamism of Islam is the ongoing source of many relatively small fault line wars; the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states.

The United States would be a more willing container of China, but in the mid-1990s it is unclear how far it will go to contest an assertion of Chinese control over the South China Sea.

At the micro level, the most violent fault lines are between Islam and its Orthodox, Hindu, African, and Western Christian neighbors. At the macro level, the dominant division is between “the West and the rest,” with the most intense conflicts occurring between Muslim and Asian societies on the one hand, and the West on the other.

Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are.

[C]ulturally Australia is still European,” Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia declared in October 1994, “… we think it’s European,” and hence Australia should not be a member of the East Asian Economic Caucus. We Asians “are less prone to making outright criticism of other countries or passing judgment on them. But Australia, being European culturally, feels that it has a right to tell others what to do, what not to do, what is right, what is wrong. And then, of course, it is not compatible with the group. That is my reason [for opposing their membership in EAEC].

When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan.42 Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the “discipline” to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

With the end of the Cold War, China’s efforts to establish more friendly relations with its neighbors extended to India and tensions between the two lessened. This trend, however, is unlikely to continue for long. China has actively involved itself in South Asian politics and presumably will continue to do so: maintaining a close relation with Pakistan, strengthening Pakistan’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities, and courting Myanmar with economic assistance, investment, and military aid, while possibly developing naval facilities there. Chinese power is expanding at the moment; India’s power could grow substantially in the early twenty-first century. Conflict seems highly probable. “The underlying power rivalry between the two Asian giants, and their self-images as natural great powers and centers of civilization and culture,” one analyst has observed, “will continue to drive them to support different countries and causes. India will strive to emerge, not only as an independent power center in the multipolar world, but as a counterweight to Chinese power and influence.”48

A more persuasive factor possibly explaining both intra- and extra-Islamic conflict is the absence of one or more core states in Islam.

Given this American interest, how might war between the United States and China develop? Assume the year is 2010. American troops are out of Korea, which has been reunified, and the United States has a greatly reduced military presence in Japan. Taiwan and mainland China have reached an accommodation in which Taiwan continues to have most of its de facto independence but explicitly acknowledges Beijing’s suzerainty and with China’s sponsorship has been admitted to the United Nations on the model of Ukraine and Belorussia in 1946. The development of the oil resources in the South China Sea has proceeded apace, largely under Chinese auspices but with some areas under Vietnamese control being developed by American companies. Its confidence boosted by its new power projection capabilities, China announces that it will establish its full control of the entire sea, over all of which it has always claimed sovereignty. The Vietnamese resist and fighting occurs between Chinese and Vietnamese warships. The Chinese, eager to revenge their 1979 humiliation, invade Vietnam. The Vietnamese appeal for American assistance. The Chinese warn the United States to stay out. Japan and the other nations in Asia dither. The United States says it cannot accept Chinese conquest of Vietnam, calls for economic sanctions against China, and dispatches one of its few remaining carrier task forces to the South China Sea. The Chinese denounce this as a violation of Chinese territorial waters and launch air strikes against the task force. Efforts by the U.N. secretary general and the Japanese prime minister to negotiate a cease-fire fail, and the fighting spreads elsewhere in East Asia. Japan prohibits the use of U.S. bases in Japan for action against China, the United States ignores that prohibition, and Japan announces its neutrality and quarantines the bases. Chinese submarines and land-based aircraft operating from both Taiwan and the mainland impose serious damage on U.S. ships and facilities in East Asia. Meanwhile Chinese ground forces enter Hanoi and occupy large portions of Vietnam.

What people have in common is “more the sense of a common enemy [or evil] than the commitment to a common culture.” Human society is “universal because it is human, particular because it is a society.