Last month, I wrote an article that looked back at two of the most important foreign relations concepts of the 1990s with the idea of evaluating them in the present to see what, if anything, from those theories proved true.
That article mainly focused on Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis, which argued that with the collapse of communism, liberal democracy had proven itself to be the final and most successful form of government. He believes that humanity was reaching the “end point” of ideological evolution because liberal democracy and capitalism would eventually spread across the globe. On the heels of that argument, Samuel Huntington challenged it with his own concept, which he called “The Clash of Civilizations,” published in Foreign Affairs Magazine in 1993. Huntington believed that future conflicts would no longer be based on ideology or economics, but instead on culture and civilization.
Huntington wrote, “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 sources of conflict will be culture. 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 line of the future.”
Like Fukuyama, Huntington saw the last century as a conflict of ideologies. First, there was communism and fascism against liberal democracy, then just communism versus liberal democracy. However, with the end of the Cold War, he saw us moving into conflict between the Western and non-Western worlds.
The new world would no longer be divided into economic categories like first-, second-, and third-world countries, but instead by shared civilizations. To Huntington, a culture was defined as the shared history, language, religion, traditions, and values that give people a common identity. These cultures make up a civilization, which he defined as the highest level of cultural identity, made up of people who share common history, religion, language, traditions, and values. Think of it as a civilization having cultures that are more the same than different.
When you start seeing more differences than similarities, you have a new civilization. A village in southern Italy is different from northern Italy, but they are more similar than different, as both are Italian. They are different than Germans, but their European cultures are still more similar if you compare them to Middle Eastern culture. That is where Huntington saw the split. Europe is a civilization and the Middle East is a civilization; they have more differences than similarities, and it is on the border between them that he saw the “clash.”
Huntington saw eight unique civilizations, and size did not matter: Western, meaning Western Europe, the United States, and Canada; Confucian, meaning most of Asia; Japanese, which he believed is unique enough to be its own civilization; Islamic, meaning the Middle East and parts of Asia and Europe with majority Muslim populations; Hindu, meaning mostly India but also Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; Slavic-Orthodox, meaning Eastern Europe; Latin American, meaning Mexico, Central and South America; and African, meaning the nations south of the Islamic ones.
Huntington wrote, “The people of different civilizations have different views on the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear.”
Huntington believed these differences are far more important than differences in political ideologies. This does not necessarily mean problems or violence, but over the centuries it has led to some of the worst world conflicts. Because religion is often involved, he did not think compromise was as easy. It is possible to be half Arab and half American, but you cannot be half Muslim and half Catholic.
Part of the fault of the “clash” is the West. It believes its civilization is a “Universal Civilization” that fits everyone and has made inroads into other civilizations more than non-Western cultures have into ours. Yet these Western concepts fundamentally differ from non-Western civilizations. This has caused many cultures to turn away from the West, like the Islamification of the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably through the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
Here is where Huntington gets the most controversial. He believed that most of the new conflicts in the world would revolve around the Islamic civilization, one that he saw as violent. He saw most of the “clashes” along the borders of the Islamic world. In Africa, where Christians are being slaughtered, places like Chad, Nigeria, and Sudan. In Eastern Europe, there have been conflicts between Islam and Orthodox believers in Bosnia, Sarajevo, Bulgaria, and among Turkish minorities. In Asia, there have been conflicts between Muslims and Hindus in Pakistan and India. Finally, while 9/11 happened after Huntington’s article was published, it seemed like further evidence proving his point.
Looking back at “Clash of Civilizations” from 2026, clearly, he got some things right and some things wrong. Culture and religious identity are larger sources of conflict than communism, well, except perhaps within the United States. As we only recently ended wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and then started a new conflict with Iran, much of what Huntington predicted has come true. He also seemed accurate in predicting that the West’s attempt to spread its democratic and secular values would create backlash.
Many have been critical of Huntington, both then and now. Many believed, and still do, that he oversimplified cultures, especially Islamic ones, which contain many different ethnic groups, political systems, and religious interpretations. Critics also claim that many conflicts occur within civilizations, like those in Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Iran.
Many also argue that he underestimated the importance of economics, politics, and nationalism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example, is often explained more by political power than by cultural differences, especially since they are considered part of the same civilization.
In the end, Huntington gave an interesting view of the world in 1993, some of which has come true and some of which has not. He died before witnessing the massive flood of immigrants blending the cultures of the West, the Islamic world, and Latin America, so we do not know if that would have changed his thesis.
Yet, if we blend the arguments of Huntington and Fukuyama today, it is possible to infer that they might argue that the biggest threat to America today may come not from without but within, as we are seeing attacks against liberal democratic capitalism as well as clashes of cultures within Western nations.
