Races, not cultures, will clash in future wars

In his influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington posited that any future wars between Western powers and Eastern nations would occur along religious lines.

Huntington argued that, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Islam would become the biggest obstacle to Western (i.e. Christian) domination of the world. Consequently, the West’s next major war would inevitably be with Islam. He opined that culture, rather than the political ideologies characterising nation-states, would play a more significant role in future wars, and that Western nations would lose their predominant roles in world affairs if they failed to recognise the irreconcilable nature of cultural tensions stemming from differing religious beliefs. He firmly believed in a Western culture rooted in Christianity. His implicit definition of Western culture does include the cultures of Russia and Eastern Europe, the emergence of Communism notwithstanding.

Huntington argued that the post-Cold War shift in geopolitical organisation and structure would require Western nations to strengthen themselves culturally. He conveniently ignored the role race played in his breakdown, along religious lines, of various civilisations across the globe.

That he was a closet, if not avowed, racist can be gleaned from his role as adviser to the apartheid regime in South Africa in the early 1980s. To quell the anti-apartheid protests in the country, he recommended that the government resort to deceit and duplicity and feign ignorance.

Huntington’s book was published in 1996, after the fall of the Soviet Union and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and well before China’s ascendancy as a global and military power. Was Huntington being prescient? Not really, since he has always been an advocate of western domination of the world, not unlike Henry Kissinger, also a Harvard product, whose domino theory of communist regimes resulted in America’s disastrous interventions in Southeast Asia – mostly Vietnam, but to some extent in Laos and Cambodia as well – aided and abetted by Thailand, a Buddhist monarchy, and Philippines, once a US colony.

After 9/11, Huntington’s political philosophy seems to have taken root in foreign policy and national policy think tanks in Washington DC, London, Paris, and other European capitals. The crackdown on migrants with Islamic backgrounds, America’s global war on terror, the two Iraq wars and, most recently, the savage attack on Iran (it is hard to forget that 185 innocent schoolgirls were killed by US missile strikes and harder yet to justify the absence of accountability for what is a war crime) would seem to suggest this is the case. That India is falling prey to such a mindset is unfortunate.

Instead of a clash of civilisations, what I see on the horizon is a clash of races, one that would involve Australia, Canada, the European Union, New Zealand, Russia, and the US – countries, majority white and Christian, arrayed against the non-white, non-Christian nations of India and China, only two countries with economies and military assets large enough to pose a threat to the hegemonic powers. African countries would not be in the picture unless co-opted by their former colonisers, which is quite likely.

Given the history of colonialism and conflict in both India and China, a yearning to get back to the good old days when the Western bloc’s (this includes Russia) authority was unchallenged by people whom it considered inferior should be taken seriously, given the havoc wrought on the world by Trump and his cronies in the MAGA sphere.

China has taken appropriate steps to ensure it never again has to endure what is labelled the ‘century of humiliation’. India has suffered nearly three centuries of humiliation and is yet to acknowledge it. In any protracted US-led coalition versus China war, if India makes the grave mistake of joining the coalition, it will end up as collateral damage inflicted by both sides.

As for this article, ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’. The Brits have left their mark on me, and it is hard to shake it off.

The writer is a computer scientist, a newly minted Luddite and a cynic.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.