DK ON HUNTINGTON RETROSPECTIVE

"Somewhere in my office is a paperback entitled No More Vietnams?, edited by Richard Pfeffer, which appeared in the fateful year of 1968. I don’t have it in front of me and haven’t read it for decades, but as I recall it is an account of an academic conference whose participants included Richard Barnett of the Institute for Policy Studies, Stanley Hoffmann and Samuel Huntington of Harvard, and others. Both the Vietnam War and the protests against it were reaching their climax when it appeared, and all the participants understood that the assumptions of Cold War foreign policy had come under attack. And my most vivid memory was the obvious panic among some, though hardly all, of the participants, who were terrified that the effects of Vietnam might militate against future interventions of that type. In the short run they had something to fear; in the long run, as it turns out, they didn’t.

"The Arab world for half a century has been ruled by bureaucratic and military dictatorships, some of them heavily supported by western nations, including the United States. Meanwhile, thanks largely to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the west in general and the United States in particular have become more and more unpopular among the Arab masses. In the 1990s, the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, who was never afraid to take a big idea and run with it, foresaw a clash of civilizations. Tragically, in the first decade of this century, an American President, George W. Bush, did his best to make that prophecy come true.

"Draper's main examples were Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Brzezinski's then-staffer, Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington. Not only had they all supported the war, but none of them had ever come up with any very good reasons for doing so. Yet they remained pillars of the foreign policy establishment and at that moment they were directing American foreign policy.

"Among the neoconservatives who essentially ran foreign policy during the second Bush Administration, this meant that the the United States could safely dispose of regimes that stood in its way, confident that friendly, liberal allies would replace them. One dissenting view came from Samuel Huntington, whose book, The Clash of Civilizations, predicted a series of conflicts between regions based on different political and cultural values.  He was half right--that is one feature of the world situation that is now emerging, but only one.

"He (Obama) rejects Samuel Huntington’s idea of a clash of civilizations, even though he knows from his own experience that Islam is much more traditional and conservative even in Indonesia, where he lived, than it was fifty years ago.  Believing as I do that world civilization reshapes itself every eighty years or so, and that change does not always point in the same direction, I am not so hopeful.  The question of how we will deal with the Muslim world if it becomes increasingly radicalized remains open.   Europe faced that challenge from the 15^th through the 17^th centuries, and I believe western civilization could again, but we have no blueprint for doing so." DK