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 truth 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!

The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique and not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.

No paradigm is eternally valid. While a civilizational approach may be helpful to understanding global politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this does not mean that it would have been equally helpful in the mid-20th century or that it will be helpful in the mid-21st century.

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.

As their power and self-confidence increase, non-Western societies increasingly assert their own cultural values and reject those “imposed” on them by the West.

Countries with cultural affinities cooperate economically and politically. International organizations based on states with cultural commonality, such as the EU, are far more successful than those that attempt to transcend cultures.

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 only “a bloomin’ buzzin’ confusion.” Intellectual and scientific advance 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, 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.

The Cold War image of superpower competition was such a model, articulated first by Harry Truman, as “an exercise in geopolitical cartography that depicted the international landscape in terms everyone could understand, and so doing prepared the way for the sophisticated strategy of containment that was soon to follow.”

Simplified paradigms or maps are indispensable for human thought and action. On the other hand, we may explicitly formulate theories or models and consciously use them to guide our behavior. Alternatively, we may deny the need for such guides and assume that we will act only in terms of specific “objective” facts, dealing with each case “on its merits.” If we assume this, however, we delude ourselves. For in the back of our minds are hidden assumptions, biases, and prejudices that determine how we perceive reality, what facts we look at, and how we judge their importance and merits. We need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to:

  1. order and generalize about reality
  2. understand causal relationships among phenomena
  3. anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments
  4. distinguish what is important from what is unimportant
  5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals

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 20th century’s other major conflicts. WW1 was the “war to end wars” and to make the world safe for democracy. WW2, as FDR 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 beginning of a “permanent structure of peace.” WW1, however, generated communism, fascism, and the reversal of a century-old trend toward democracy. WW2 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 UN and the US to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China. In the 5 years after the Berlin wall came down, the word “genocide” was heard far more often than in any 5 years of the Cold War.

While one-world expectations appear at the end of major conflicts, the tendency to think in terms of two words recurs throughout human history. People are always tempted to divide people into us and them, the in-group and the other, our civilization and those barbarians. Scholars have analyzed the world in terms of the Orient and the Occident, North and South, center and periphery.

At a more general level, conflicts between rich and poor are unlikely because, except in special circumstances, the poor countries lack the political unity, economic power, and military capability to challenge the rich countries. Rich states may fight trade wars with each other; poor states may fight violent wars with each other; but an international class war between the poor South and the wealthy North is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world.

It assumes all states perceive their interests in the same way and act in the same way. Its simple assumption that power is all is a starting point for understanding state behavior but does not get one very far. States define their interests in terms of power but also in terms of much else besides. States often, of course, attempt to balance power, but if that is all they did, Western European countries would have coalesced with the Soviet Union against the US in the 1940s. States respond primarily to perceived threats, and the Western European states then saw a political, ideological, and military threat from the East. They saw their interests in a way which would not have bene predicted by classic realist theory. Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests.

Publics and statesmen are less likely to see threats emerging from people they feel they understand and can trust because of shared language, religion, values, institutions, and culture.

State governments have in considerable measure lost the ability to control the flow of money in and out of their country and are having increasing difficulty controlling the flows of ideas, technology, goods, and people. State borders, in short, have become increasingly permeable.

Yet it suffers even more than the states paradigm in being too close to reality. The world may be chaos but it is not totally without order. An image of universal and undifferentiated anarchy provides few clues for understanding the world, for ordering events and evaluating their importance, for predicting trends in the anarchy, for distinguishing among types of chaos and their possibly different causes and consequences, and for developing guidelines for governmental policy makers.

Both trends indeed exist, and a more complex model will more closely approximate reality than a simpler one. Yet this sacrifices parsimony for realism and, if pursued very far, leads to the rejection of all paradigms or theories.

  • The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion and civilizational consciousness.
  • The world, in short, is divided between a Western one and a non-Western many.
  • Nation states are and will remain the most important actors in the world affairs, but their interests, associations, and conflicts are increasingly shaped by cultural and civilizational factors.
  • The world is indeed anarchical, rife with tribal and nationality conflicts, but the conflicts that pose the greatest dangers for stability are those between states or groups from different civilizations.

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 turns out to be more accurate than those from alternative paradigms.

These different predictions, in turn, give rise to different policy priorities. Statist prediction of possible war and Russian conquest leads to support of Ukraine’s having nuclear weapons. A civilizational approach would encourage cooperation between Russia and Ukraine, urge Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons.

The confrontation at the Vienna Human Rights Conference between the West, lead by US Secretary of State Warren Christopher, denouncing “cultural relativism,” and a coalition of Islamic and Confucian states rejecting “Western universalism.”

It would be absurd to imagine that these new political societies coming to birth in the East will be replicas of those with which we in the West are familiar. The revival of these ancient civilizations will take new forms.

The idea of civilization was developed by 18th-century French thinkers as the opposite of the concept of “barbarism.” Civilized society differed from primitive society because it was settled, urban, and literate. To be civilized was good, to be uncivilized was bad. The concept of civilization provided a standard by which to judge societies, and during the 19th century, Europeans devoted much intellectual, diplomatic, and political energy to elaborating the criteria by which non-European societies might be judged sufficiently “civilized” to be accepted as members of the European-dominated international system.

Blood, language, religion, way of life, were what the Greeks had in common and what distinguished them from the Persians and other non-Greeks. Of all the objective elements which define civilizations, however, the most important usually is religion, as the Athenians emphasized. To a very large degree, the major civilizations in human history have been closely identified with the world’s great religions; and people who share ethnicity and language but differ in religion may slaughter each other.

A civilization is thus the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by common objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself with varying degrees of intensity as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he strongly identifies.

Civilization is in fact the longest story of all. Empire rise and fall, governments come and go, civilizations remain and “survive political, social, economic, even ideological upheavals. Virtually all the major civilizations in the world either have existed for a millennium or, as with Latin America, are the immediate offspring of another long-lived civilization.

China is a civilization pretending to be a state. Japan is a civilization that is a state. Most civilizations, however, contain more than one state or other political entity.

Reasonable agreement exists on at least 12 major civilizations, 7 of which no longer exist (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Cretan, Classical, Byzantine, Middle American, Andean) and 5 which do (Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Islamic, and Western). To these 5 it is useful in the contemporary world to add Orthodox, Latin American, and, possibly, African civilizations.

As a result, many distinct cultures or subcivilizations exist within Islam, including Arab, Turkic, Persian, and Malay.

For much of their history, Americans defined their society in opposition to Europe. America was the land of freedom, equality, opportunity, the future; Europe represented oppression, class conflict, hierarchy, backwardness. America, it was even argued, was a distinct civilization. This positing of an opposition between America and Europe was, in considerable measure, a result of the fact that at least until the end of the 19th century America had only limited contacts with non-Western civilizations. Once the US moved out on the world scene, however, the sense of a broader identity with Europe developed.

Religion is a central defining characteristic of civilizations, and, as Dawson said, “the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.” Of Weber’s 5 “world religions,” 4 — Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Confucianism — are associated with major civilizations. The 5th, Buddhism, is not. Why is this the case? Like Islam and Christianity, Buddhism early separated into 2 main subdivisions, and, like Christianity, it did not survive in the land of its birth.

While India and China, for instance, were on occasion invade and subjected by other peoples (Moguls, Mongols), both civilizations also had extensive times of “warring states” within their own civilization. Similarly, the Greeks fought each other and traded with each other far more often than they did with Persians or other non-Greeks.

China under Tang, Sung, and Ming dynasties, the Islamic world from the 8th to the 12th centuries, and Byzantium form the 8th to the 11th centuries far surpassed Europe in wealth, territory, military power, and artistic, literary, and scientific achievement. Between the 11th and 13th centuries, European culture began to develop, facilitated by the “eager and systematic appropriation of suitable elements from the higher civilizations of Islam and Byzantium, together with adaptation of this inheritance to the special conditions and interests 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.

By the 1910 the world was more one politically and economically than at any other time in human history. International trade as a proportion of the gross world product was higher than it had ever been before and would not again approximate until the 1970s and 1980s.

The Westphalian separation of religion and international politics, an idiosyncratic product of Western civilization, is coming to an end, and religion is increasingly likely to intrude into international affairs. The intracivilizational clash of political ideas spawned by the West is being supplanted by an intercivilizational clash of culture and religion.

Concomitantly, the Western global empires of 1920 shrank to the much more limited “Free World” of the 1960s (which included many non-Western states opposed to communism) and then to the still more restricted “West” of the 1990s.

An international system exist when two or more states have sufficient contact between them, and have sufficient impact on one another’s decisions, to cause them to behave — at least in some measure — as parts of a whole. An international society, however, exists only when states in an international system have common interests and common values, conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules, share in the working of common institutions, and have a common culture or civilization.

In 1918 Spengler denounced the myopic view of history prevailing in the West with its neat division into ancient, medieval, and modern phases relevant only to the West. A few decades later Toynbee castigated the parochialism and impertinence of the West manifested in the egocentric illusions that the world revolved around it, that there was an unchanging East, and that progress was inevitable. Like Spengler, he had no use for the assumption of the unity of history, the assumption that there is only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or lost in the desert sands.

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.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Americans consumed millions of Japanese cars, TV sets, cameras, and electronic gadgets without being “Japanized” and indeed while becoming considerably more antagonistic toward Japan. Only naive arrogance can lead Westerners to assume that non-Westerners will become “Westernized” by acquiring Western goods.

During the heyday of the Soviet Union, Russia was the lingua franca from Prague to Hanoi. The decline of Russian power is accompanied by a parallel decline in the use of Russian as a second language. As with other forms of culture, increasing power generates both linguistic assertiveness by native speakers and incentives to learn the language by others.

Language is realigned and reconstructed to accord with the identities and contours of civilizations. As power diffuses Babelization spreads.

This argument suffers from the single alternative fallacy. It is rooted in the Cold War perspective that the only alternative to communism is liberal democracy and that the demise of the first produces the universality of the second. Obviously, however, there are many forms of authoritarianism, nationalism, corporatism, and market communism (as in China) that are alive and well in today’s world. More significantly, there are all the religious alternatives that lie outside the world of secular ideologies.

One perceives oneself in terms of characteristics that distinguish oneself from other humans, especially from people in one’s usual social milieu. A woman psychologist int he company of a dozen women who work at other occupations thinks of herself as a psychologist; when with a dozen male psychologists, she thinks of herself as a woman.

From sociology, globalization theory produces a similar conclusion: in an increasingly globalized world — characterized by historically exceptional degrees of civilizational, societal and other modes of interdependence and widespread consciousness there of — there is an exacerbation of civilizational, societal and ethnic self-consciousness. The global religious revival, “the return to the sacred,” is a response to people’s perception of the world as “a single place.”

As the first civilization to modernize, the West leads in the acquisition of the culture of modernity. As other societies acquire similar patterns of education, work, wealth, and class structure, the argument runs, this modern Western culture will become the universal culture of the world.

In agricultural societies, in short, social structure is shaped by geography. Industry, in contrast, is much less dependent on the local natural environment. Differences in industrial organization are likely to derive from differences in culture and social structure rather than geography, and the former conceivably can converge while the latter cannot.

Western civilization emerged in the 8th and 9th centuries and developed its distinctive characteristics in the following centuries. It did not begin to modernize until the 17th and 18th centuries. The West was the West long before it was modern. The central characteristics of the West, those which distinguish it from other civilizations, antedate the modernization of the West.

The legacies of the West from Classical civilization are many, including Greek philosophy and rationalism, Roman law, Latin, and Christianity. Islamic and Orthodox civilizations also inherited from Classical civilization but nowhere near to the same degree the West did.

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.

During the phase of absolutism in the 16th and 17th centuries the rule of law was observed more in the breach than in reality, but the idea persisted of the subordination of human power to some external restraint. The tradition of the rule of law laid the basis for constitutionalism and the protection of human rights, including property rights, against the exercise of arbitrary power. In most other civilization law was a much less important factor in shaping thought and behavior.

What is distinctive about the West “is the rise and persistence of diverse autonomous groups not based on blood relationship or marriage.”

He highlighted the dominance of individualism in the West compared to the prevalence of collectivism elsewhere and concluded that “the values that are most important in the West are least important worldwide.”

Individually almost none of these factors was unique to the West. The combination of them was, however, and this is what gave the West its distinctive quality. These concepts, practices, and institutions simply have been more prevalent in the West than in other civilizations. They are what is Western but not modern about the West. They are also in large part the factors which enabled the West to take the lead in modernizing itself and the world.

Unlike Japan, China’s rejectionist policy was in large part rooted in the Chinese image of itself as the Middle Kingdom and the firm belief in the superiority of Chinese culture to those of all other peoples.

This approach was epitomized in the arguments of some late 19th century Japanese and Chinese intellectuals that in order to modernize, their societies should abandon their historic languages and adopt English as their national language. This view, not surprisingly, has been even more popular among Westerners than among non-Western elites. Its message is: “To be successful, you must be like us; our way is the only way.”

In China in the last stages of the Qing dynasty, the slogan was Ti-Yong, “Chinese learning for the fundamental principles, Western learning for practical use.” In Japan it was Wakon, Yosei, “Japanese spirit, Western technique.”

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 lead to crises of identity to which religion provides an answer.

Almost all of the non-Western civilizations in the world have existed for at least one millennium and in some cases for several. They have demonstrated record of borrowing from other civilizations in ways to enhance their own survival. China’s absorption of Buddhism from India failed to produce the “Indianization” of China. The Chinese adapted Buddhism to Chinese purposes and needs. Chinese culture remained Chinese.

Modernization requires no one political ideology or set of institutions: elections, national boundaries, civic associations, and the other hallmarks of Western life are not necessary to economic growth. As a creed, Islam satisfies management consultants as well as peasants.

Similarly, even extreme proponents of anti-Westernism and the revitalization of indigenous cultures do not hesistate to use modern techniques of email, cassettes, and TV to promote their cause.

Modernization, in short, does not necessarily mean Westernization.

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. Societies from other civilizations usually need Western help to achieve their goals and protect their interests. Western nations:

  • Own and operate the international banking system
  • Control all hard currencies
  • Are the world’s principal customer
  • Provide the majority of the world’s finished goods
  • Dominate international capital markets
  • Exert considerable moral leadership within many societies
  • Are capable of massive military intervention
  • Control the sea lanes
  • Conduct most advanced technical R&D
  • Control the leading edge technical education
  • Dominate access to space
  • Dominate the aerospace industry
  • Dominate international communications
  • Dominate the high-tech weapons industry

The second picture of the West is very different. It is of a civilization in decline, its share of world political, economic, and military power going down relative to that of other civilizations. The West’s victory in the Cold War has produced not triumph but exhaustion. The West is increasingly concerned with its internal problems and needs, as it confronts slow economic growth, stagnating populations, unemployment, huge government deficits, a declining work ethic, low savings rates, and in many countries including the US social disintegration, drugs, and crime.

The willingness of other societies to accept the West’s dictates or abide its sermons is rapidly evaporating, and so are the West’s self-confidence and will to dominate.

The decline of the West has 3 major characteristics.

First, it is a slow process. The rise of Western power took 400 years. Its recession could take as long.

Second, decline does not proceed in a straight line. It is highly irregular with pauses, reversals, and reassertions of Western power following manifestations of Western weaknesses.

Third, power is the ability of one person or group to change the behavior of another person or group. The West’s share of most, but not all, of the important power resources peaked early in the 20th century and then began to decline relative to those of other civilizations.

During the Cold War, however, American military power was matched by that of the Soviets and American economic power declined relative to that of Japan. Yet periodic efforts at military and economic renewal did occur.

Socially mobilized societies are more powerful societies. In 1953, when less than 15% of Iranians were literate and less than 17% urban, Kermit Roosevelt and a few CIA operatives rather easily suppressed an insurgency and restored the Shah to his throne. In 1979, when 50% of Iranians were literate and 47% lived in cities, no amount of US military power could have kept the Shah on his throne.

In 1991, 4 or the world’s 7 largest economies belonged to non-Western nations: Japan (2nd), China (3rd), Russia (6th), and India (7th).

Military power has 4 dimensions: quantitative, technological, organizational, and societal.

In 1919 Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau together virtually controlled the world. Sitting in Paris, they determined what countries would exist and which would not, what new countries would be created, what their boundaries would be and who would rule them, and how the Middle East and other parts of the world would be divided up among the victorious powers. A hundred years later, no small group of statesmen will be able to exercise comparable power.

The distribution of cultures in the world reflects the distribution of power. Trade may or may not follow the flag, but culture almost always follow power. Throughout history the expansion of the power of a civilization has usually occurred simultaneously with the flowering of its culture and has almost always involved its using that power to extend its values, practices, and institutions to other societies. A universal civilization requires universal power. Roman power created a near-universal civilization within the limited confines of the Classical world.

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. As non-Western societies enhance their economic, military, and political capacity, they increasingly trumpet the virtues of their own values, institutions, and culture.

Now, however, these Kemalist attitudes have disappeared in East Asia. East Asians attribute their dramatic economic development not to their import of Western culture but rather to their adherence to their own culture. They are succeeding, they argue, because they are different from the West. Similarly, when non-Western societies felt weak in relation to the West, they invoked Western values of self-determination, liberalism, democracy, and independence to justify their opposition to Western domination. Now that they are no longer weak but increasingly powerful, they do not hesitate to attack those same values which they previously used to promote their interests. The revolt against the West was originally legitimated by asserting the universality of Western values; it is now legitimated by asserting the superiority of non-Western values.

Partly because they first go abroad as impressionable teenagers, their absorption of Western values and lifestyles may well be profound. Most of the much larger second generation, in contrast, gets its education at home in universities created by the first generation, and the local rather than the colonial language is increasingly used for instruction. These universities provide a much more diluted contact with metropolitan world culture and knowledge is indigenized by means of translations — usually of limited range and of poor quality.

Lee was, in the words of one British cabinet minister, “the best bloody Englishman east of Suez.”

Indigenization is furthered by the democracy paradox: adoption by non-Western societies of Western democratic institutions encourages and gives access to power to nativist and anti-Western political movements. Politicians in non-Western societies do not win elections by demonstrating how Western they are. Electoral competition instead stimulates them to fashion what they believe will be the most popular appeals, and those are usually ethnic, nationalist, and religious in character.

At various times before the 19th century, Byzantines, Arabs, Chinese, Ottomans, Moguls, and Russians were highly confident of their strength and achievements compared to those of the West. At these times they also were contemptuous of the cultural inferiority, institutional backwardness, corruption, and decadence of the West. As the success of the West fades relatively, such attitudes reappear. People feel “they don’t have to take it anymore.”

In the first half of the 20th century intellectual elites generally assumed that economic and social modernization was leading to the withering away of religion as a significant element in human existence. Modernizing secularists hailed the extent to which science, rationalism, and pragmatism were eliminating the superstitions, myths, irrationalities, and rituals that formed the core of existing religions. Worried conservatives, on the other hand, warned of the dire consequences of the disappearance of religious beliefs, religious institutions, and the moral guidance religion provide for individual and collective human behavior. The end result would be anarchy, depravity, the undermining of civilized life. “If you will not have God (and He is a jealous God),” T.S. Eliot said, “you should pay your respects to Hitler or Stalin.”

Filling the vacuum left by the collapse of ideology, religious revivals have swept through these countries from Albania to Vietnam.

The most obvious, most salient, and most powerful cause of the global religious resurgence is precisely what was supposed to cause the death of religion: the processes of social, economic, and cultural modernization that swept across the world in the second half of the 20th century. Longstanding sources of identity and systems of authority are disrupted.

We are agricultural societies that have industrialized within one or two generations. What happened in the West over 200 years or more is happening here in about 50 years or less. It is all crammed and rushed into a very tight time frame, so there are bound to be dislocations and malfunctions. If you look at the fast-growing countries — Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and Singapore — there’s been one remarkable phenomenon: the rise of religion… The old customs and religions — ancestor worship, shamanism — no longer completely satisfy. There is a quest for some higher explanations about man’s purpose, about why we are here. This is associated with periods of great stress in society.

People do not live by reason alone. They cannot calculate and act rationally in pursuit of their self-interest until they define their self.

Meanwhile, however, people see communism as only the latest secular god to have failed, and in the absence of compelling new secular deities they turn with relief and passion to the real thing. Religion takes over from ideology, and religious nationalism replaces secular nationalism.

Recent migrants to the cities generally need emotional, social, and material support and guidance, which religious groups provide more than any other source. Religion for them is not “the opium of the people, but the vitamin of the weak.”

In this sense, the revival of non-Western religions is the most powerful manifestation of anti-Westernism in non-Western societies. The revival is not a rejection of modernity; it is a rejection of the West and of the secular, relativistic, degenerate culture associated with the West. It is a declaration of cultural independence from the West, a proud statement that: “We will be modern but we wont’ be you.”

Successful economic development generates self-confidence and assertiveness on the part of those who produce it and benefit from it. Wealth, like power, is assumed to be proof of virtue, a demonstration of moral and cultural superiority.

In Japan total defeat in WW2 produced total cultural discombobulation. The loss of the war was a complete shock to the system. In their minds, the whole thing became worthless and was thrown out. In its place, everything connected with the West and particularly the victorious US came to be seen as good and desirable.

The post-Tiananmen regime has eagerly embraced Chinese nationalism as a new fount of legitimacy and has consciously aroused anti-Americanism to justify its power and its behavior.

Democracy, in this historical reemergence, is discredited, as is Leninism, as just another foreign imposition.

In the 1980s the Chinese government began to promote interest in Confucianism, with party leaders declaring it “the mainstream” of Chinese culture. Confucianism also became an enthusiasm of LKY, who saw it as a source of Singapore’s success and became a missionary of Confucian values to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile in Japan in the 1980s successful economic development contrasted with the perceived failures and “decline” of the American economy and social system led Japanese to become increasingly disenchanted with Western models and increasingly convinced that the sources of their success must lie within their own culture.

The increased familiarity of Japanese with Western society led them to realize that being Western is not magically wonderful in and of itself.

Asians, another Asian leader said, are “at the end of the era of awe and the beginning of the era of talking back” in the relations with the US.

Asians believe this economic success is largely a product of Asian culture, which is superior to that of the West, which is culturally and socially decadent.

From LKY on down, Singaporean leaders trumpeted the rise of Asia in relation to the West and contrasted the virtues of Asian, basically Confucian, culture responsible for this success — order, discipline, family responsibility, hard work, collectivism, abstemiousness — to the self-indulgence, sloth, individualism, crime, inferior education, disrespect for authority, and “mental ossification” responsible for the decline of the West.

Equally important is the shared rejection of individualism and the prevalence of “soft” authoritarianism or very limited forms of democracy.

Powerful societies are universalistic; weak societies are particularistic. The mounting self-confidence of East Asia has given rise to an emerging Asian universalism comparable to that which has been characteristic of the West. “Asian values are universal values. European values are European values,” declaimed PM Mahathir.

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

In its political manifestations, the Islamic Resurgence bears some resemblance to Marxism, with scriptural texts, a vision of the perfect society, commitment to fundamental change, rejection of the powers that be and the nation state, and doctrinal diversity ranging from moderate reformist to violent revolutionary. A more useful analogy, however, is the Protestant Reformation. Both are reactions to the stagnation and corruption of existing institutions; advocate a return to a purer and more demanding form of their religion; preach work, order, and discipline; and appeal to emerging, dynamic, middle-class people.

Sweeping generalizations are always dangerous and often wrong.

Islam offered “a dignified identity” to these newly uprooted masses. Islamic parties successfully organized and appealed to “the downtrodden and dispossessed.”

The Pope was central to ending the communist regime in Poland, the ayatollah to bringing down the Shah’s regime in Iran.

In one Muslim society after another, to write of liberalism and of a national bourgeois tradition is to write obituaries of men who took on impossible odds and then failed.

At least until the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states provided massive funding to the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic groups in a variety of countries.

Just as Western wealth had previously been seen as the evidence of the superiority of Western culture, oil wealth was seen as evidence of the superiority of Islam.

Young people are the protagonists of protest, instability, reform, and revolution. Historically, the existence of large cohorts of young people has tended to coincide with such movements. The Protestant Reformation is an example of one of the outstanding youth movements in history.

The rapid expansion of literacy in Arab societies also creates a gap between a literate younger generation and a largely illiterate older generation and thus a dissociation between knowledge and power likely to put a strain on political systems.

Larger populations need more resources, and hence people from societies with dense and / or rapidly growing population tend to push outward, occupy territory, and exert pressure on other less demographically dynamic people.

Alignments defined by ideology and superpower relations are giving way to alignment defined by culture and civilization. Political boundaries increasingly are redrawn to coincide with cultural ones: ethnic, religious, and civilizational.

The question, “Which side are you on?” has been replaced by the much more fundamental one, “Who are you?” Every state has to have an answer. That answer, its cultural identity, defines the state’s place in world politics, its friends and its enemies.

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

With the disappearance of the Soviet threat, the “unnatural” alliance between Greece and Turkey becomes essentially meaningless, as conflicts intensify between them over the Aegean Sea, Cyprus, their military balance, their roles in NATO and the EU, and their relations with the US.

At the same time, the US and Canada attempt to absorb Mexico into the NAFTA in a process whose long-term success depends largely on the ability of Mexico to redefine itself culturally from Latin American to North American.

In a world where culture counts, the platoons are tribes and ethnic groups, the regiments are nations, and the armies are civilizations.

Differences in secular ideology between Marxism-Leninism and liberal democracy can at least be debated if not resolved. Differences in material interest can be negotiated and often settled by compromise in a way cultural issues are not. Hindus and Muslims are unlikely to resolve the issue of whether a temple or a mosque should be built at Ayodhya by building both, or neither, or a syncretic building that is both a mosque and a temple. Neither French authorities nor Muslim parents are likely to accept a compromise which would allow schoolgirls to wear Muslim dress every other day during the school year. Cultural questions like these involved a yes or no, zero-sum choice.

Fifth and finally is the ubiquity of conflict. It is human to hate. For self-definition and motivation people need enemies: competitors in business, rivals in achievement, opponents in politics. They naturally distrust and see as threats those who are different and have the capability to harm them. The resolution of one conflict and the disappearance of one enemy generate personal, social, and political forces that give rise to new ones. The “us versus them” tendency is in the political arena, almost universal.

Regions are a basis for cooperation among states only to the extent that geography coincides with culture. Divorced from culture, propinquity does not yield commonality and may foster just the reverse. Military alliances and economic associations require cooperation among their members, cooperation depends on trust, and trust most easily springs from common values and culture.

Japan, however, is a lone country with few cultural connections with its neighbors and as of 1995 no yen bloc had materialized.

In the emerging world, patterns of trade will be decisively influenced by the patterns of culture. Businessmen make deals with people they can understand and trust; states surrender sovereignty to international associations composed of like-minded states they understand and trust. The roots of economic cooperation are in cultural commonality.

The most important lone country is Japan. No other country shares its distinct culture, and Japanese migrants are either not numerically significant in other countries or have assimilated to the cultures of those countries. Japan’s loneliness is further enhanced by the fact that its culture is highly particularistic and does not involve a potentially universal religion (Christianity, Islam) or ideology (liberalism, communism) that could be exported to other societies and thus establish a cultural connection with people in those societies.

Kievan rus and Muscovy existed separately from the West and had little contact with Western European societies. Russian civilization developed as an offspring of Byzantine civilization and then for 200 years, from the mid-13th to the mid-15th centuries, Russia was under Mongol suzerainty. Russia had no or little exposure to the defining historical phenomena of Western civilization: Roman Catholicism, feudalism, the Renaissance, the Reformation, overseas expansion and colonization, the Enlightenment, and the emergence of the nation state. 7 of the 8 previously identified distinctive features of Western civilization — religion, languages, separation of church and state, rule of law, social pluralism, representative bodies, individualism — were almost totally absent from the Russian experience. The only possible exception is the Classical legacy, which, however, came to Russia via Byzantium and hence was quite different from that which came to the West directly from Rome.

The Slavophiles and Westernizers had debated whether Russia could be different from the West without being backward compared to the West. Communism brilliantly resolved this issue: Russia was different from and fundamentally opposed to the West because it was more advanced than the West. It was taking the lead in the proletarian revolution which would eventually sweep across the world. Russia embodied not a backward Asiatic past but a progressive Soviet future. In effect, the Revolution enable Russia to leapfrog the West, differentiating itself not because “you are different and we won’t become like you,” as the Slavophiles had argued, but because “we are different and eventually you will become like us,” as was the message of the Communist International.

Turkey’s involvement with the West, embodied in its NATO membership, was, however, a product of the Cold War. Its end removes the principal reason for that involvement and leads to a weakening and redefinition of that connection. Turkey is no longer useful to the West as a bulwark against the major threat from the north, but rather, as in the Gulf War, a possible partner in dealing with lesser threats from the south.

Why was Turkey passed over and why does it always seem to be at the end of the queue? In public, European officials referred to Turkey’s low level of economic development and its less than Scandinavian respect for human rights. In private, both Europeans and Turks agreed that the real reasons were the intense opposition of the Greeks and, more importantly, the fact that Turkey is a Muslim country. European countries did not want to face the possibility of opening their borders to immigration from a country of 60 million Muslims and much unemployment. Even more significantly, they felt that culturally the Turks did not belong in Europe.

In 1993 it was reported that Islamic-style beards and veiled women have proliferated in Turkey, that mosques are drawing even larger crowds, and that some bookstores are overflowing with books and journals glorifying Islamic history, precepts and way of life and exalting the Ottoman Empire’s role in preserving the values of the Prophet Muhammad.

A bridge, however, is an artificial creation connecting two solid entities but is part of neither. When Turkey’s leaders term their country a bridge, they euphemistically confirm that it is torn.

The case for redefining Australia as an Asian country was grounded on the assumption that economics overrides culture in shaping the destiny of nations. The central impetus was the dynamic growth of East Asian economies, which in turn spurred the rapid expansion of Australian trade with Asia.

Third and most important, the elites of Asian countries have been even less receptive to Australia’s advances than European elites have been to Turkey’s. They have made it clear that if Australia wants to be part of Asia it must become truly Asian, which they think unlikely if not impossible.

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. It is not the color of the skin, but the culture.

The real problem for Australia in the region is not our flag, but the root social values. I suspect you won’t find any Australians who are willing to surrender any of those values to be accepted in the region.

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.

In this respect, Australia could be the first of possibly many Western countries to attempt to defect from the West and bandwagon with rising non-Western civilizations.

Political leaders imbued with the hubris to think that they can fundamentally reshape the culture of their societies are destined to fail. While they can introduce elements of Western culture, they are unable permanently to suppress or to eliminate the core elements of their indigenous culture. Conversely, the Western virus, once it is lodged in another society, is difficult to expunge. The virus persists but is not fatal; the patient survives but is never whole. Political leaders can make history but hey cannot escape history. They produce torn countries; they do not create Western societies.

It is thus futile to do as UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali did in 1994 and promulgate a rule of “sphere of influence keeping” that no more than 1/3 of the UN peacekeeping force should be provided by the dominant regional power. Such a requirement defies the geopolitical reality that in any given region where there is a dominant state peace can be achieved and maintained only through the leadership of that state. The UN is no alternative to regional power, and regional power becomes responsible and legitimate when exercised by core states in relation to other members of their civilization.

A core state can perform its ordering function because member states perceive it as cultural kin. A civilization is an extended family, and, like older members of a family, core states provide their relatives with both support and discipline. In the absence of that kinship, the ability of a more powerful state to resolve conflicts in and impose order on its region is limited. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and even Sri Lanka will not accept India as the order provider in South Asia and no other East Asian state will accept Japan in that role in East Asia.

In the post-Cold War world, NATO is the security organization of Western civilization.

Chinese from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore have supplied much of the capital responsible for the growth of the mainland in the 1990s. Overseas Chinese elsewhere in Southeast Asia dominated the economies of their countries. In the early 1990s, Chinese made up 1% of the population of the Philippines but were responsible for 35% of the sales of domestically owned firms. In Indonesia in the mid 1980s, Chinese were 2-3% of the population, but owned roughly 70% of the private domestic capital. In the early 1990s, Chinese were 10% of the population of Thailand but owned 9 out of 10 largest business groups and were responsible for 50% of its GNP. Chinese are about 1/3 of the population of Malaysia but almost totally dominate the economy. Outside Japan and Korea the East Asian economy is basically a Chinese economy.

The emergence of the greater China co-prosperity sphere was greatly facilitated by a “bamboo network” of family and personal relationships and common culture. Overseas Chinese are much more able than either Westerners or Japanese to do business in China. In China trust and commitment depend on personal contacts, not contracts or laws and other legal documents. Western businessmen find it easier to do business in India than in China where the sanctity of an agreement rests on the personal relationship between the parties.

Along a continuum of narrower to broader entities, Western loyalties thus tend to peak in the middle, the loyalty intensity curve forming in some measure an inverse U. In the Islamic world, the structure of loyalty has been almost exactly the reverse.

Tribes have been central to politics in Arab states, many of which are simply “tribes with flags.” The founder of Saudi Arabia succeeded in large part as a result of his skill in creating a tribal coalition through marriage and other means, and Saudi politics has continued to be a largely tribal politics pitting Sudairis against Shammars and other tribes.

In Central Asia historically, national identities did not exist. The loyalty was to the tribe, clan, and extended family, not to the state. At the other extreme, people did have language, religion, culture and lifestyles in common, and Islam was the strongest uniting force among people, more so than the emir’s power.

In the Arab world, existing states have legitimacy problems because they are for the most part the arbitrary, if not capricious, products of European imperialism, and their boundaries often did not even coincide with those of ethnic groups such as Berbers and Kurds. The idea of sovereign nation states is incompatible with belief in the sovereignty of Allah and the primacy of the ummah. As a revolutionary movement, Islamic fundamentalism rejects the nation state in favor of the unity of Islam just as Marxism rejected it in favor or the unity of the international proletariat.

Virtually all states with substantial Muslim populations now belong to the Conference, which is the only interstate organization of its kind. Christian, Orthodox, Buddhist, Hindu governments do not have interstate organizations with memberships based on religion; Muslim governments do.

The rapid 7th-century Arab conquest of North Africa and the Middle East culminated in the Umayyad caliphate with its capital in Damascus. This was followed in the 8th century by the Baghdad-based, Persian-influenced, Abbasid caliphate, with secondary caliphates emerging in Cairo and Cordoba in the 10th century. 400 years later the Ottoman Turks swept across the Middle East, capturing Constantinople in 1453 and establishing a new caliphate in 1517. About the same time other Turkic peoples invaded India and founded the Mogul empire. The rise of the West undermined both the Ottoman and Mogul empires, and the end of the Ottoman empire left Islam without a core state.

The absence of an Islamic core state is a major contributor to the pervasive internal and external conflicts which characterized Islam. Consciousness without cohesion is a source of weakness to Islam and a source of threat to other civilizations.

Turkey could not even become a charter member of the OIC because of the commitment to secularism and its constitution. So long as Turkey continues to define itself as a secular state, leadership of Islam is denied it.

What, however, if Turkey redefined itself? At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.

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

The West, and especially the US, which has always been a missionary nation, believe that the non-Western peoples should commit themselves to the Western values of democracy, free markets, limited government, human rights, individualism, the rule of law, and should embody these values in their institutions. Minorities in other civilizations embrace and promote these values, but the dominant attitudes toward them in non-Western cultures range from widespread skepticism to intense opposition. What is universalism to the West is imperialism to the rest.

The West is attempting and will continue to attempt to sustain its preeminent position and defend its interests by defining those interests as the interests of the “world community.” That phrase has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing “the Free World”) to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the US and other Western powers. The West is, for instance, attempting to integrate the economies of non-Western societies into a global economic system which it dominates. Through the IMF and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate.

Non-Westerners also do not hesitate to point to the gap 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.

The relations of Russia, Japan, and India to the West are likely to fall between those of the other two groups, involving elements of cooperation and conflict, as these 3 core states at times line up with the challenger civilizations and at times side with the West. They are the “swing” civilizations between the West, on one hand, and Islamic and Sinic civilizations, on the other.

Islamic and Sinic civilizations differ fundamentally in terms of religion, culture, social structure, traditions, politics, and basic assumptions at the root of their way of life. Inherently each probably has less in common with the other than it has in common with Western civilization. Yet in politics a common enemy creates a common interest.

The time, effort, and expense required to develop a first-class conventional military capability provide tremendous incentives for non-Western states to pursue other ways of countering Western conventional military power. The perceived shortcut is the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them.

Non-Western states draw the obvious lessons from the Gulf War. For the North Korean military these were: “Don’t let the Americans build up their forces; don’t let them put in air power; don’t let them take the initiative; don’t let them fight a war with low US casualties.” For a top Indian military official the lesson was even more explicit: “Don’t fight the US unless you have nuclear weapons.”

If you have nuclear weapons, the US won’t fight you.

The West promotes nonproliferation as reflecting the interests of all nations in international order and stability. Other nations, however, see nonproliferation as serving the interests of Western hegemony.

One of the “oddities of the North Korean nuclear standoff, from its start several years ago is that the sense of crisis increases the farther one is from Korea.” A similar gap between American security interests and those of regional powers occurred in South Asia with the US being more concerned with nuclear proliferation there than the inhabitants of the region. India and Pakistan each found the other’s nuclear threat easier to accept than American proposals to cap, reduce, or eliminate both threats.

After threatening China with the denial of MFN treatment if it was not more forthcoming on human rights, the Clinton administration first saw its secretary of state humiliated in Beijing, denied even a face-saving gesture, and then responded to this behavior by renouncing its previous policy and separating MFN status from human right concerns. China, in turn, reacted to this show of weakness by continuing and intensifying the behavior to which the Clinton administration objected.

The Japanese government generally distanced itself from American human rights policies: We will not let “abstract notions of human rights” affect our relations with China, PM Kiichi Miyazawa said not long after Tiananmen Square. The countries of ASEAN were unwilling to apply pressure to Myanmar and, indeed, in 1994 welcomed the military junta to their meeting while the EU had to recognize that its policy “had not been very successful.”

Overall the growing economic strength of the Asian countries renders them increasingly immune to Western pressure concerning human rights and democracy. “Today China’s economic power,” Nixon observed in 1994, “makes US lectures about human rights imprudent. Within a decade it will make them irrelevant. Within two decades it will make them laughable.”

Apart from some Latin American countries, other governments were reluctant to enlist in efforts to promote what many saw as “human rights imperialism.”

In the post-Cold War world the choice can be the more difficult one between a friendly tyrant and an unfriendly democracy.

Competitive elections in many Arab countries including Saudi Arabia and Egypt would almost surely produce governments far less sympathetic to Western interests than their undemocratic predecessors. A popularly elected government in China could well be a highly nationalistic one.

The export of people was perhaps the single most important dimension of the rise of the West between the 16th and 20th centuries.

If there is a single “law” in migration, it is that a migration flow, once begun, induces its own flow. Migrants enable their friends and relatives back home to migrate by providing them with information about how to migrate, resources to facilitate movement, and assistance in finding jobs and housing. The result is a migration crisis.

The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.

The parallel concepts of “jihad” and “crusade” not only resemble each other but distinguish these two faiths from other major world religions. Islam and Christianity, along with Judaism, also have teleological views of history in contrast to the cyclical or static views prevalent in other civilizations.

On occasion in the past, Muslim leaders did tell their people: “We must Westernize.” If any Muslim leader has said that in the last quarter of the 20th century, however, he is a lonely figure.

They see Western culture as materialistic, corrupt, decadent, and immoral. They also see it as seductive, and hence stress all the more the need to resist its impact on their way of life. Increasingly, Muslims attack the West not for adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religion, which is nonetheless a “religion of the book,” but for not adhering to any religion at all. In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them. In the Cold War the West labeled its opponent “godless communism”; in the post-Cold War conflict of civilizations, Muslims see their opponent as “the godless West.”

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 DoD. 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.

References to trade wars became common place. American officials, particularly in the Clinton administration, demanded more and more concession from Japan; Japanese officials resisted these demands more and more forcefully. Each Japanese-American trade controversy was more acrimonious and more difficult to resolve than the previous one.

In 1985, 87% of the American public said they had a generally friendly attitude toward Japan. By 1990 this had dropped to 67T, and by 1993 a bare 50% of Americans felt favorably disposed toward Japan and almost two-thirds said they tried to avoid buying Japanese products.

In 1991, for the first time, Americans rated Japan ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to American security, and for the first time Japanese rated the US ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to Japan’s security.

The images of Japan in the media, nonfiction publications, and popular novels became increasingly derogatory. In parallel fashion in Japan a new generation of political leaders appeared who had not experienced American power in and benevolence after WW2, who took great pride in Japanese economic successes, and who were quite willing to resist American demands in ways their elders had not been. These Japanese “resisters” were the counterpart to the American “revisionists,” and in both countries candidates found that advocating a tough line on issues affecting Japanese-American relations went over well with the voters.

By 1995 a broad consensus reportedly existed among the Chinese leaders and scholars that the US was trying to “divide China territorially, subvert it politically, contain it strategically and frustrate it economically.”

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 than future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains.

Whatever Western forecasters say, for the simple reason that it is not a Western free-market economy. The Japanese have invented a type of economics that behaves in ways that confound the predictive powers of Western observers.

Because of the American penchant to identify “good” relations with “friendly” relations, the US is at a considerable disadvantage in competing with Asian societies who identify “good” relations with ones that produce victories for them. To the Asians, American concessions are not to be reciprocated, they are to be exploited.

The agreements were generally so ambiguously phrased that the US could claim a victory in principle, and the Japanese could implement or not implement the agreement as they wished and everything would go on as before. In similar fashion, the Chinese would reluctantly agree to statements of broad principles concerning human rights, IP, or proliferation, only to interpret them very differently from the US and continue with their previous policies.

It’s not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man.

In general, calculations of intent should encourage states to balance. Bandwagoning is risky because it requires trust; one assists a dominant power in the hope that it will remain benevolent. It is safer to balance, in case the dominant power turns out to be aggressive. Furthermore, alignment with the weaker side enhance one’s influences within the resulting coalition, because the weaker side has greater need of assistance.

If the US is not willing to fight against Chinese hegemony, it will need to foreswear its universalism, learn to live with that hegemony, and reconcile itself to a marked reduction in its ability to shape events on the far side of the Pacific. Either course involves major costs and risks. The greatest danger is that the US will make no clear choice and stumble into a war with China without considering carefully whether that is in its national interest and without being prepared to wage such a war effectively.

The US has thus never been a secondary balancer as a great power. Becoming one means playing a subtle, flexible, ambiguous, and even disingenuous role. It could mean shifting support from one side to another, refusing to support or opposing a state that in terms of American values seems to be morally right, and supporting a state that is morally wrong.

European societies went through a phase of absolutism but avoided the sustained bureaucratic empires or “oriental despotisms” that characterized Asia for much of history. Feudalism provided a basis for pluralism and the assumption that some dispersion of power was both natural and desirable. So also at the international level a balance of power was thought natural and desirable, and the responsibility of statesmen was to protect and sustain it. The European model of international society, in short, reflected the European model of domestic society.

The warlords first sought to learn what they could gain by identifying with strength, and only then would they explore the payoffs of allying with the weak. For the Chinese warlords, autonomy was not the ultimate value, rather they based their decisions upon associating with power.

Historically the Chinese did not draw a sharp distinction between domestic and external affairs. Their image of world order was no more than a corollary of the Chinese internal order and thus an extended projection of the Chinese civilizational identity which was presumed to reproduce itself in a concentrically larger expandable circle as the correct cosmic order.

The Chinese have not been sympathetic to multipolar or even multilateral concepts of security. Asians generally are willing to accept hierarchy in international relations, and European-type hegemonic wars have been absent from East Asian history.

In the end, for Vietnam, “the least bad alternative” could be to accommodate China and accept Finlandization, which while it “would wound Vietnamese pride… might guarantee survival.”

Europe and Russia are demographically mature societies with low birth rates and aging populations; such societies do not have the youthful vigor to be expansionist and offensively oriented.

More threatening for Russia is Chinese immigration into Siberia, with illegal Chinese migrants there purportedly numbering in 1995 3M to 5M, compared to a Russian population in Easter Siberia of about 7M. “The Chinese are in the process of making a peaceful conquest of the Russian Far East.”

Its impact on the Islamic world was, in fact, 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 sees as a victory for Islam.

The jihad credentials, religious and political of the Afghan volunteers are impeccable. They beat one of the world’s two superpowers and now they’re working on the second.

Arabs and other Muslims generally agreed that Saddam 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 prevailing view, in short, was: Saddam was wrong to invade, the West was more wrong to intervene, hence Saddam is right to fight the West, and we are right to support him.

President Bush’s frequent rhetorical invocations of God on behalf of the US reinforced Arab perception that it was “a religious war” with Bush’s remarks reeking “of the calculating, mercenary attacks of the pre-Islamic hordes of the 7th century and the later Christian crusades.”

Those Ba’athists of Iraq are our enemies for a few hours, but Rome is our enemy until doomsday.

An external enemy also reduces conflict within a country. In January 1991, Pakistan was reported to be “awash in anti-Western polemics” which brought that country, at least briefly, together.

Instead the prevailing atmosphere was one of intense disappointment, dismay, humiliation, and resentment. Once again the West had won.

Wars between clans, tribes, ethnic groups, religious communities, and nations have been prevalent in every era and in every civilization because they are rooted in the identities of people. These conflicts tend to be particularistic, in that they do not involve broader ideological or political issues or direct interest to nonparticipants, although they may arouse humanitarian concerns in outside groups. They also tend to be vicious and bloody, since fundamental issues of identity are at stake. In addition, they tend to be lengthy; they may be interrupted by truces or agreements but these tend to break down and the conflict is resumed. Decisive military victory by one side in an identity civil war, on the other hand, increases the likelihood of genocide.

Some analysts downplay the significance of this factor. They point, for instance, to the shared ethnicity and language, past peaceful coexistence, and extensive intermarriage of Serbs and Muslims in Bosnia, and dismiss the religious factor with references to Freud’s “narcissism of small differences.” That judgment, however, is rooted in secular myopia. Millennia of human history have shown that religion is not a “small difference” but possibly the most profound difference that can exist between people. The frequency, intensity, and violence of fault line wars are greatly enhanced by beliefs in different gods.

Why do we kill children? Because someday they will grow up and we will have to kill them then.

People who could no longer identify as communists, Soviet citizens, or Yugoslavs, and desperately needed to find new identities. They found them in the old standbys of ethnicity and religion.

As the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia began to come apart, the elites in power did not organize national elections. If they had done so, political leaders would have competed for power at the center and might have attempted to develop multiethnic and multicivilizational appeals to the electorate and put together similar majority coalitions in parliament. Instead, in both the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia elections were first organized on a republic basis, which created the irresistible incentive for political leaders to campaign against the center, to appeal to ethnic nationalism, and to promote the independence of their republics.

Muhammad himself is remembered as a hard fighter and a skillful military commander. (No one would say this about Christ or Buddha.) The Koran and other statements of Muslim beliefs contain few prohibitions on violence, and a concept of nonviolence is absent from Muslim doctrine and practice.

Once started, fault line wars, like other communal conflicts, tend to take on a life of their own and to develop in an action-reaction pattern. Identities which had previously been multiple and casual become focused and hardened; communal conflicts are appropriately termed “identity wars.” As violence increases, the initial issues at stake tend to get redefined more exclusively as “us” against “them” and group cohesion and commitment are enhanced. A “hate dynamic” emerges, comparable to the “security dilemma” in international relations, in which mutual fears, distrust, and hatred feed on each other. Each side dramatizes and magnifies the distinction between the forces of virtues and the forces of evil and eventually attempts to transform this distinction into the ultimate distinction between the quick and the dead.

Psychologically, religion provides the most reassuring and supportive justification for struggle against “godless” forces which are seen as threatening.

In the end the Bosnians felt deep bitterness toward the US, which had talked grandly but delivered little, and profound gratitude toward their Muslim kin, who had come through with the money and weapons necessary for them to survive and score military victories.

Either moderates replace extremists in power or extremists, like Milosevic, find it in their interest to become moderate. They do so, however, at some risk. Those perceived as traitors arouse far more passionate hatred than enemies.

History ends at least once and occasionally more often in the history of every civilization. As the civilization’s universal state emerges, its people become blinded by what Toynbee called “the mirage of immortality” and convinced that theirs is the final form of human society. So it was with the Roman Empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, the Mughal Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. The citizen of such universal states “in defiance of apparently plain facts… are prone to regard it, not as a night’s shelter in the wilderness, but as the Promised Land, the goal of human endeavors.” The same was true at the peak of the Pax Britannica. For the English middle class in 1897, “as they saw it, history for them, was over. And they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them.” Societies that assume that their history has ended, however, are usually societies whose history is about to decline.

The West has, in short, become a mature society entering into what future generations, in the recurring pattern of civilizations, will look back to as a “golden age,” a period of peace resulting from the absence of any competing units within the area of the civilization itself, and from the remoteness or even absence of struggles with other societies outside.

Civilizations decline when they stop the application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases. This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for nonproductive but ego-satisfying purposes, which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide the more effective methods of production. People live off their capital and the civilization moves from the stage of the universal state to the stage of decay. This is a period of acute economic depression, declining standards of living, civil wars between the various vested interests, and growing illiteracy. The society grows weaker and weaker. Vain efforts are made to stop the wastage by legislation. But the decline continues. The religious, intellectual, social, and political levels of the society began to lose the allegiance of the masses of the people on a large scale. New religious movements begin to sweep over the society. There is a growing reluctance to fight for the society or even to support it by paying taxes.

Decay then leads to the stage of invasion when the civilization, no longer able to defend itself because it is no longer willing to defend itself, lies wide open to “barbarian invaders,” who often come from another, younger, more powerful civilization.

Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:

  1. increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally
  2. family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teenage pregnancy, and single-parent families
  3. a decline in “social capital,” that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership
  4. general weakening of the “work ethic” and rise of a cult of personal indulgence
  5. decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the US in lower levels of scholastic achievement

The Clinton administration made the encouragement of diversity one of its major goals. The contrast with the past is striking. The Founding Fathers saw diversity as a reality and as a problem: hence the national motto, e pluribus unum.

Instead of attempting to identify the US with another civilization, however, they wish to create a country of many civilizations, which is to say a country not belonging to any civilization and lacking a cultural core. History shows that no country so constituted can long endure as a coherent society. A multicivilizational US will not be the US; it will be the UN.

Far from being the alternative to Marxism and the reigning ideology at the end of history, liberalism will be then next domino to fall.

“With their trading cloud,” Mahathir warned Asians, “the EU-NAFTA confederation could dictate terms to the rest of the world.”

Descriptively it holds that peoples in all societies want to adopt Western values, institutions, and practices. If they seem not to have that desire and to be committed to their own traditional cultures, they are victims of a “false consciousness” comparable to that which Marxists found among proletarians who supported capitalism. Normatively the Western universalist belief posits that people throughout the world should embrace Western values, institutions, and culture because they embody the highest, most enlightened, most liberal, most rational, most modern, and most civilized thinking of humankind.

In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Wester culture suffers 3 problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous.

The source — the unique source — of the ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights, and cultural freedom… These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption. They make Western civilization unique, and Western civilization is valuable not because it is universal but because it is unique.

In this era, however, the US can neither dominate nor escape the world. Neither internationalism nor isolationism, neither multilateralism nor unilateralism, will best serve its interests.

The security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality.