The Clash of Civilizations
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Peter. Michael. Have you ever heard of a book called Clash of Civilizations? I've heard of it. Clash of Civilizations, one of my favorite video games. I'm excited to find out they made a book. Tell me about your relationship with this book. What do you know about it? I actually do know a little bit about it. If you were a professor of international affairs when the Cold War ended, you were contractually obligated to write an entire book explaining why you think you should still be employed.

This is Samuel Huntington's attempt. You never had to read it in school? There's a huge difference between me being told I should read something or have to read something and actually reading it. So it's quite possible. The reason that I ask is that one of the first things that I learned while I was researching this is that Clash of Civilizations is one of the 10 most assigned books at U.S. colleges. Wow.

Among top colleges, among like Ivy League colleges, it's number four. It's just below Plato, but it's above Aristotle and Democracy in America by de Tocqueville. I'm upset and disappointed to hear that international affairs and political science academics are not seriously pursuing truth and are instead championing the hack work of their colleagues, mentors and friends.

This is shocking. So what do you what do you know about Huntington himself? Now, this is all from memory. So give me a little rope here. But I believe that he was a big time international affairs academic, also a statesman. One of those guys who like went to Harvard or Yale back in like 1918. And then that's enough to just sort of be in government.

Yeah, he goes to the University of Chicago. He gets his PhD from Harvard in 1951. And then there's a little tiny interregnum period. But then he becomes a Harvard professor and he stays there for 58 years. He's sort of like a walking who's who.

of every single intellectual movement of the 20th century. Like he's friends with Francis Fukuyama. He's friends with Chef Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger. He founded Foreign Policy Magazine. He worked for LBJ. According to one thing that I read, he is the most cited political scientist in America for like many, many years. That makes sense to me. And again, I'm

I'm someone who didn't try very hard in school and I still remember his name. So I think that says a lot. The book itself comes out in 1996. And the background to the book is this period that we touched on briefly with Fukuyama and the end of history. Basically from like the mid 1980s until the early 2000s, everybody was coming out with their like, what happens after the Cold War book?

Yeah.

There was a lot of just weird cockamamie shit bouncing around at the time. I would have read that book, honestly. So the book itself, first it started as a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, obviously. And just like Fukuyama, it began as an article with a question mark. So it started as The Clash of Civilizations.

And then in 1996, when he expands into a book, it's The Clash of Civilizations. So are you are you aware of like the core thesis of the book? I know a couple of things about it. One is I think that he was saying that the future conflicts, the next big conflicts will be between cultures, not nations. The part of the book that's sort of discussed the most is that he talks about Islam, that like

Yes. The Western values, the Islam is the next big thing. Yes. Most of the book is him laying out this idea that now that the Cold War is over, we can finally reckon with the rise of identities. He explicitly describes like a much more violent, much more conflictual world in the future. Does he have a basis for saying that we are diverging, that like

Our identities are in these certain areas are getting stronger. Or is it just sort of that he's just like spitballing this? Peter, thank you. I'm this transitions perfectly into the quote that I was going to send you. I'm I'm sending you the first four paragraphs of the first chapter. All right.

The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in people's identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines. On April 18, 1994, 2,000 people rallied in Sarajevo, waving the flags of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

By flying those banners instead of UN, NATO, or American flags, these Sarajevans identified themselves with their fellow Muslims and told the world who were their real and not-so-real friends.

On October 16, 1994, in Los Angeles, 70,000 people marched beneath a sea of Mexican flags protesting Proposition 187, a referendum which would deny many state benefits to illegal immigrants and their children. Why are they walking down the street with a Mexican flag and demanding this country give them a free education? Observers asked.

they should be waving the American flag. Booyah. These flag displays ensured victory for Proposition 187, which was approved by 59% of California voters. In the post-Cold War world, flags count, and so do other symbols of cultural identity, including crosses,

crescents, and even head coverings because culture counts. And cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people. Other than the sparkling prose, what do you think? I mean, I would love to do an entire podcast about that prose, which really fucked with my brain in a way I'm not accustomed to. So I'm noticing some little anecdotes being spun into, uh,

symbols of world historical importance. Another thing that jumps out to me is what seems to be a pretty casual xenophobia. What, the thing about how it's Mexicans' fault that California voters took their rights away? Blaming Mexicans for having their rights taken away because they were protesting too mean. Not great. Saying that...

Muslims were announcing who their real and not so real friends were based on whose flags they were waving seems like a dramatic inference to make. I know. You know, saying something like cultural identity is what is most meaningful to most people. That feels like a quantifiable statement of some kind. And yet I do not see it being quantified. Yes. You touched on like one of the main hallmarks of the book, which is that he makes a series of sweeping statements in.

And then he gives as evidence, like, here's these two random things that have nothing to do with each other. Are you sure? Are you sure that people not waving the UN flag is not a super important development that we should be digging into? Usually you go to a protest and there's UN flags. Everyone's waving. Yeah.

This is like a little example of the way that he uses evidence in this book. But to try to take his argument seriously. So his claim is that the fault lines of conflict are going to be quote unquote civilizations.

So if this is your argument, obviously the first thing you have to do is like define a civilization. The definition that he gives is it's the biggest we that every person has. So you are from New York. So you have like some sort of New York identity. You probably have some like New York state identity. You feel sort of more tied to people that live in Buffalo than who live in Albuquerque probably. Yeah.

You probably have some like East Coast pride, like West Coasters are weird Marianne Williamson people and like you're a more down to earth, tell it like it is guy. Like there's probably some sort of identity in there, right? Yeah, I'm an Eric Adams guy. Yeah.

I say that about you all the time. And then zooming out one more level, you probably have some like American shit. You could also say at the sort of most zoomed out level, you also probably consider yourself a citizen of like the West, like whatever that means, right? Like the war in Ukraine is probably more likely to like hit you in the fields than like the bombing in Yemen or something. Sure. That's really what he means by civilization is that like everybody has all of these overlapping identities.

And basically when you take them up to their highest level of abstraction, that's where you find like a small number of civilizations globally that essentially everybody falls under one of these categories. Okay. Okay. You don't sound convinced. Well, I mean, that's one of those things that is not objectionable in like the general sense. Yeah. But also too abstract to build like a really coherent thesis around. It's one of those things where it's like,

Yeah. You know, that probably exists as a concept. Yeah. We all contain probably, I don't know, seven, 12 identities. Right. Those identities can be activated when certain things happen in the world or, you know, tell us to support certain political candidates for whatever reason, etc. The fact that those things exist, I think, is actually fairly unobjectionable. This is the problem that all of these grand historical narrative attempts pose.

Right. And he's also making it like the most important driver and the most important explanation for like all world conflicts. Right. Right.

So, okay, I'm going to send you actual map, the actual civilizations. Oh, wow. There's some real outliers here. Okay. Okay. So this is the world divided by color, color coded into what I believe are civilizations. You have Western, which is Western Europe, US and Canada.

You have Latin American, which is almost everything below that. You have Islamic, which is just a broad paintbrush across North Africa and the Middle East. And then you have like East Asia divvied up into a bunch of different cultures. Sinic, Buddhist, Hindu.

And then in the sort of Russian sphere, the former Soviet Union is labeled Orthodox. And finally, you have Japan, which is its own civilization.

This is where I lost my fucking mind. Oh my God, that's so fucking funny. China and Japan are just their own civilizations. He's like, I'm not going to try to figure this one out. I have no evidence for this. I imagine that his thought process is something like, well, like you can't put Japan with China.

right? Because like these are very distinct cultures. They were at war. He's like, okay, so we're going to carve off Japan. But then in the Chinese civilization, which he calls Sinic, he throws in North Korea. Oh yeah. And it looks like Vietnam too. As soon as he carves off Japan, I'm like, you should carve off all the countries. The Latin, the like giant Latin American lump. And, and then the,

the like the fact that West African countries and Iran are in are in the same civilization, according to this, just because they're Muslim. No differences. You got to be fucking kidding me with this. This is another thing that I also don't think gets enough attention is the fact that a lot of these civilizations are described in different ways. So like there's like Buddhist, Hindu, Orthodox, right? Those are religious distinctions.

But then he's got Africa, which is a geographic distinction. And then he's got the West. There's a very good critique of him that talks about his conception of the West, that most of the things that he talks about as defining the West, like rule of law and free rights and all this kind of stuff. That's a lot of countries. Like the things that he says are unique about the West...

A huge number of other countries should then fall into the West. Like South Korea should absolutely be in the West by that definition. Right. One of the other things that I noticed while I was like, you know, zooming in on various parts of this is that there's there's 14 different countries where he's split them in the middle. And he said that like like Sudan is part Islamic and part African. Right.

But like if what he's trying to explain is foreign policy, like the way that countries act on the world stage, you can't just say that one country is two.

Because then by that definition, then like most countries would be two or three or four or five, depending on like various immigrant groups that they have histories. Right. As as soon as you start chopping up the identities in any given country, all of a sudden you have to concede that that identities don't really map onto borders perfectly. And perhaps you should be using another framework entirely. Right. And that like every country is a bunch of squabbling interest groups. Yeah. It should be fairly intuitive that that's a stupid way to do this. Yes.

He doesn't say this in the book, but I think as a result of getting all of these critiques of the original article, he comes up with a bunch of subgroups of civilizations. In each civilization, there are member states, core states, lone countries, cleft countries, and torn countries. Mm-hmm.

The core countries is like really self-explanatory. It's like the main country. So like China is the main country of the Sinic civilization. He's then got this thing of the cleft country. So something like Ukraine is a cleft country. Like it's halfway in between the West and the Orthodox civilization. A torn country is like something like Turkey. It has one foot in the Islamic world, but then there are large political movements trying to transform it.

into something that is more Western. And then there's lone countries where he says like Haiti is a lone country where like Africa doesn't really want it. And like South America doesn't really want it either. Like it doesn't fit easily into either one of those categories. And like it's its own thing.

OK. There's, of course, inter-civilizational conflicts, right? Like civilizations fighting with each other. But there's also intra-civilizational conflicts where countries are fighting over like who is going to be the core country. Basically, he's done the sort of the responsible scholar thing where he's acknowledged the

all of these caveats, right? He said, like, yeah, you know, civilizations can change over time. And like, they have blurry borders. And there's all these subgroups within them. And like, not every conflict is between civilizations. I'm obviously I'm oversimplifying an unreal amount to the point where anything I say from here on in is completely useless. Exactly. But let's let's plow forward. So you're like 300 pages into this book. And you're like, what is the point of this book then?

If if China goes to war with Iran, it's like, oh, it's like the Sinai civilization versus the Muslim civilization. Ooh, he's right. But then if China goes to war with Vietnam, a neighboring country, it's like, oh, it's an intra civilizational fight. What is an event on the world stage that this wouldn't explain? Right. So he puts out an essay that's basically like, oh, there are these different civilizations. And then a bunch of people are like, well, what about like Iran?

Intra-civilizational conflicts. And so he's like, oh, good point. I'll just put a chapter on that in my book. Right. So like every possible caveat has an avenue. Yes. Your thesis is again so abstract.

And so riddled with caveats that it just doesn't fucking mean anything. Right. Why not drill down to the to the individual level at this point? Right. Fuck it. This is another thing is that like by the time he's come up with these categories of like cleft country, lone country, core country, it's like, well, then you were just back to countries. Right. The civilizational framework is supposed to be an alternative to talking about countries acting in their national interest. Right. Like Paraguay does stuff because of like specific things happening in Paraguay.

And then this guy comes along and he's like, no, no, no, no, no. Paraguay does things because it's Latin American. Right. But then he breaks up Latin America into all of these subgroups.

where it's like actually paraguay is a cleft country it's like yeah that's what i said in the first place paraguay's doing paraguay stuff it should be sort of transparently obvious to anyone just glancing at this that someone who's like writing a 400 page book and just going like region by region country by country and giving descriptions of them is not an expert in any given thing that he talks about oh yeah instead they're just sort of like crafting a language that

that allows them to talk about this stuff as if they are experts, right? Right. Oh, you're talking about Ukraine. That's a cleft country. Right. It's like talking points for different countries when you're at like the big international affairs meeting in Washington, D.C. Exactly. Another thing that I came across in one of the critiques of him that I think is actually really insightful is also that he points out, I think correctly, that all of us have all of these overlapping identities, right? Yeah.

But the core of his thesis is that the identity at the highest level of abstraction is the strongest. If you want to understand Africans, like their African identity is much more powerful to them than like any sub identities.

But when you think about actual world conflicts and the way that like most of world history has happened, it's exactly the opposite. Right. If it comes down to like one of my more proximate identities and this like super abstract highest order identity, I'm going to pick the proximate identity every time. Am I overthinking this or isn't the highest order identity just like being a citizen of the earth? He has like a he has like a sentence on that. He says it's like civilizations are the highest order of identification before human beings.

OK. I mean, but that's also a good point, because like if we're talking about the highest order of abstraction, the highest order of abstraction is human being. Right. Even though Syria is not necessarily in, quote unquote, the West. And like maybe I have closer ties mentally to Ukraine than to Syria. It's not that like all of a sudden, like my my allegiance to the Ukraine is really, really strong. And then my allegiance to Syria is non-existent. Right. I mean, there's something interesting.

In this thesis, that is actually a question of psychology. In what circumstances is a given identity sort of triggered and prioritized in a person's mind? Right. There's research on this, and it's a little bit weird to talk about it as a completely abstract thing. It's clearly more complicated than that. And not just that, but like you're going to need data.

You know, you're going to need data if you want to make these claims. But Peter, some Mexicans were marching with a flag. Didn't you read the paragraph about the Mexicans? Sorry, I forgot about all the data I've been given already. So the next like after he defines all of these civilizations, he then gets into like his vision of the future. OK. So first of all, the West is like fading. OK. Even though the Cold War is over and we won everything.

All these other countries have developed. He specifically talks about indigenization, where basically all of these countries, after they've thrown off the shackles of colonialism, are like getting a lot more confident. China is becoming this like big economic powerhouse. And there's African countries that are like taking on a more African identity and forming trade relationships within themselves, right? I think this is true, right? That like post-colonialism, a lot of countries...

started to have like national pride in a way that was like literally illegal in a lot of places before that. Right. There's there's a weird dynamic in that I saw in Fukuyama's book, too. These guys came up during an era where international affairs from the United States perspective was just bullying everyone. Yes. And then we're sort of entering this period where that's a little bit harder to do.

Smaller countries are accruing political and economic power. These guys, the Huntingtons of the world, are like gazing out upon all of this and thinking like, yeah, this is fucking annoying. Right. Yeah. Why can't I want to do you know, I want the U.S. to be able to do whatever it wants. That's how we've been going about our shit. And now we can't. And it's fucking annoying. And no one's saying thank you. I want to do the bad stuff. And yet here you are telling me it's bad. Right.

This is the part of the book where he completely abandons his civilizational framework. So he does all of this groundwork to talk about like the Latin American civilization, the Buddhist civilization. And then he never talks about them again because he says that once he's established all of these civilizations, he says the real threat comes from two places, Asia and the Middle East. What about cartels? Yeah.

He's leaving cartels on the table. Come on. A lot of the book actually focuses on like the threat from Asia. It's just like the sort of general fears about like Japan, you know, buying up a bunch of American companies, like being better at business than us. He keeps saying that like, you know, Asia is going to want to impose Asian values, which he always puts in quote marks. But then he never actually says like what those values are or like why they're bad. Yeah.

Right. And of course, the second part of that is that Islamic societies are becoming more fundamentalist. Sure. Muslim countries are getting more Muslim and like they're super mad at us. And like you basically can't reason with these people because they're bewitched by their like ancient religion. After everything we've done for them. I know.

He also, okay, one of my favorite things about reading these old books that have like become cultural touchstones is how much random shit in them has been completely memory hold. So he has a whole section about the greatest threat to the world is a Confucian Islamic alliance. That the real threat isn't just the Asians and the Muslims separately. It's that the Asians and the Muslims are going to team up against us. Okay.

So hold on. This whole theory is just like, well, they're both mad at us. Yeah. So maybe they'll team up. And then he has some like, this is one of the places where he does actually use statistics. He has stats on like China selling arms to Pakistan or something. And then like actual regional experts will be like,

China's arms sales to the Middle East account for about 1% of their arms and America accounts for 33% of their arms. Yeah, I was going to say good news. If you think that selling arms to someone makes them your ally, then we have nothing but friends all over the world. He also has a thing with like one of the reasons we can't trust like Middle Eastern countries because like

Islamic countries are like more prone to violence than non-Muslim countries, right? He's like, if you look at the statistics, Muslim countries have higher military spending for their populations. Like, are you really going to do this? Oh, shit. From America? You're writing this in America. OK. So, I mean, look, not only is America's military spending unreal large, but like, you know,

Yeah, we've turned the Middle East into a proxy war zone for 80 years. So like, yeah, some of those countries are arming up pretty reasonably. We're only going to invade two of these countries in the next like 10 years. So come on, everybody relax. So...

This is his vision, right? This is basically his core case of like, this is what the next 50 years of the world is going to look like. This Islamic, Confucian, uppity Asian people and Muslims, right? So, of course, the question that one asks is like, well, what is his evidence for this thesis, right? Because one of the interesting things about the book, this is another place where he caveats himself into oblivion. He's making this bold prediction about the next 50 years, right? Yeah.

But he says that anything that happened during the Cold War doesn't really count because it's not really evidence for his thesis or evidence against his thesis because it was like under the rubric of the Cold War. He also says that anything that happened before the Cold War also doesn't really matter for his thesis because it was before the rise of identity politics.

And it was before the rise of like globalization. Countries weren't as connected back then. There wasn't as much travel. There wasn't as much migration. When you think of something like World War I, you can't really put that in the civilizational paradigm because like there were all these other things going on at the time that were like specific to that period in history.

So his rubric for understanding the entire world does not apply if you go back five years because there are other variables that his rubric does not account for. Exactly. As I'm reading this, I'm like crossing off periods of history in my head, right? Because he's writing the book in 1996.

Anything before 1989 doesn't count. So basically all that leaves him with is fucking 1989 until 1995, essentially. Right? Right. Basically the only options for things that can support his thesis, and he spends like two chapters talking about this, is the Gulf War in 1991 and the Balkan War of 1993, but like kind of throughout the 90s. Right. So I'm going to send you another brick of text about the Gulf War. Okay. This is his case.

for why the Gulf War means that he is correct. Here we go. The Gulf War thus began as a war between Iraq and Kuwait, then became a war between Iraq and the West, then one between Islam and the West, and eventually came to be viewed by many non-Westerners as a war of East versus West. Millions of Muslims from Morocco to China rallied behind Saddam Hussein and acclaimed him a Muslim hero.

75% of India's 100 million Muslims blamed the United States for the war, and Indonesia's 171 million Muslims were almost universally against U.S. military action in the Gulf.

Audacity. I know. Arab intellectuals lined up in similar fashion and formulated intricate rationales for overlooking Saddam's brutality and denouncing Western intervention. King Hussein of Jordan argued, quote, this is a war against all Arabs and all Muslims and not against Iraq alone. Facts. Drop in knowledge. Knowledge. I love that the...

The amount of people worldwide who opposed American intervention is like them taking sides for Islamic civilization or something. Is that that's what that's supposed to be? Like, this is like very interesting in part because if you view the Gulf War as I do, and I think many people do as sort of like a part of a chain of events that ended up with the complete destruction of Iraq, like the rise of ISIS, the war in Syria, etc. Then the idea that like

opposing it is something irrational or something that you would only do if you were sort of like too tied to your muslim identity i mean just insanely wrong insanely fucking wrong yes so reductive okay all right i'll let you go i'm all coiled up waiting waiting to debunk this go ahead go ahead

So, okay. One of the best articles I read, really, really, really good article is called The Clash of Civilizations, an Islamicist Critique by a guy named Roy Mataday. And he has this great section on the Gulf War where he points out that like it's true that Saddam Hussein was like trying to do the like, we're all Muslims here, guys. Yeah.

But then as soon as he invaded Kuwait, the Arab League voted to side with the United States. Yes. Egypt, Syria, Pakistan, Morocco, and Bangladesh all sent troops. Turkey closed a pipeline to fuck with Iraq. Yeah. No, there was a – like this is –

In sort of like Islamic American relations, the Gulf War is an important symbolic turning point because it showed how many Middle Eastern actors had aligned their interests with the United States. Right. To the point where they felt obligated to participate actively in the war effort. Exactly. And so it

It's actually true that like Saddam was pretty popular throughout the Muslim world before the Iraq war. But then all of the Gulf states, 70% of the population opposed Saddam invading Kuwait because they thought it went against Islamic law. Egypt and Morocco both were anti-Saddam. The only country where the majority of the population like thought it was cool for Saddam to invade Kuwait was Jordan.

And Jordan had like some specific stuff going on. There were all these rumors that Israel was going to invade Jordan at the time. Yeah. You know, I mean, first of all, Mike, you're not accounting for the fact that a lot of those countries you just described are torn countries and some of them are also cleft countries. The sort of like attempts to paint that part of the world as monolithic are never ending on the part of like the American elite, right?

And to see it come from someone in this position who is like at least holding himself out as an expert on international affairs generally, it really sort of drives home. This comes down from like the highest levels of academia and government, the idea that like Muslims are one thing. They exist over there and they are sort of representing a singular set of interests. One of the things that I think all of his –

thudding prose can distract you from is that like if you zoom out, this is one of the only pieces of evidence for his thesis, right? We're going to have more clashes of civilizations.

It is a case in which a Muslim country invaded another Muslim country and America intervened on behalf of the Muslim country. Right. And like some Muslim countries supported it and some didn't. That doesn't speak to a existential crisis.

in which the West and Muslims are going to be at war for the next 50 years. Yeah, I mean, ironically, he probably would have had a stronger case in this section if he had waited a few years, right? And you get to build in the 9-11 narrative. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if that's where you're going next, but I'm sort of curious...

How that factors in, in your mind, or if he wrote any follow-up or if anyone else like analyzed it in light of post 9-11 developments, shall we say? Well, one thing that actually bugs me about this is because, of course, I mean, I only heard of this book after 9-11. I think most of the population, it really became canonical for the population after 9-11 because it was supposed to be like, oh, well, we're, you know, this explains what's going on, right? Right. He barely mentions terrorism in the book. Oh.

It's not actually the case that like 9-11 proves him right. He doesn't really mention the possibility of a terror attack in America. His core thesis is that little territorial skirmishes, things like Iraq versus Kuwait, which ultimately on the world stage don't have to become a huge deal. What's going to happen with these things is states are going to step into them on like various teams and these conflicts are going to escalate. He doesn't really mention non-state actors. Right.

He also doesn't mention oil in this book. He doesn't mention like other things that like would cause conflict among countries. Incredible to talk at length about the Gulf War and not mention oil. That's the thing. He doesn't – like most conflicts between countries are between neighboring countries over some resource, right? You want more land, minerals in the ground. Like that's most of world history. That's what the conflicts have been between neighboring states. Yeah.

And that's basically what fucking the Gulf War was. Right. Saddam did it because Kuwait, like he owed Kuwait money and he didn't want to pay them back. And like Kuwait was dumping a bunch of oil onto world markets and keeping prices low. And Saddam was mad because it was like cutting into his profits. It's like petty dictator stuff. Yeah. And we got involved because we are looking to spread freedom and democracy all across the globe. America, the good guys yet again. That's the thing is like this fight is actually like fairly typical. Yeah.

And he's trying to like whip it up into this meringue of like it's something completely different. And like the best way to understand the Gulf War is to see it as like a fight between civilizations. And it's like you look into the specifics and it's like, no, man, the best way to understand it is just like the dynamics of these specific states. You know, there's something interesting about the fact that he doesn't mention terrorism because –

If you start with this idea that in the post-Cold War era, we're going to see slightly more atomized identities, you would think that would lead to the idea that non-state actors are going to play a significant role. But because he's such a fucking basic bitch State Department hack, even when he's sort of saying, oh, the Islamic and Western worlds are going to be in conflict, he totally misses the

on what the nature of that conflict is going to be. But then, okay, it gets much worse with his second example, right? Because the only other like thing that can support his thesis that happens in the early 90s is the Balkans. Yeah. This actually supports his thesis slightly better in that it's Serbs who are Orthodox and Bosnians who are Muslims.

And it is actually true that like a lot of Muslim countries kind of intervened on behalf of the Bosnians and kind of went with team Bosnia. Yeah. And then Serbia was pretty substantially backed by Russia. You know, this Balkan conflict doesn't necessarily need to be a global conflict, but all of a sudden it becomes one. Yeah. So I'm going to send you this is his explanation of.

For like why the Balkan War broke out. Okay. Probably the single most important factor leading to the conflict was the demographic shift that took place in Kosovo. Kosovo was an autonomous province within Serbia. In 1961, its population was two-thirds Albanian Muslim and one-quarter Orthodox Serb.

The Albanian birth rate, however, was the highest in Europe, and Kosovo became the most densely populated area of Yugoslavia. Facing those numbers, Serbs emigrated from Kosovo in pursuit of economic opportunities in Belgrade and elsewhere. As a result, in 1991, Kosovo was 90% Muslim and 10% Serb.

According to Serbs, discrimination, persecution, and violence against Serbs subsequently intensified. Numerous violent incidents took place, which included property damage, loss of jobs, harassment, rapes, fights, and killings.

As a result, the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions and that they could no longer tolerate it. So this entire sequence could have been written by Slobodan Milosevic. Why are there all these tensions in the Balkans in the early 1990s? Huntington's actual explanation is that Muslims were having too many babies. I mean, I thought that I was sort of...

perhaps misunderstanding the point being made here. But this quote at the end, saying that the Serbs claimed that the threat to them was of genocidal proportions,

That is itself being used to defend a genocidal impulse. Am I am I wrong? This this this is the rhetoric that starts to appear before ethnic cleansings. Right. If we don't do it to them, they're going to do it to us. Yeah. And so he says exactly the same thing about Bosnians. He's describing like the Muslim birth rates in Bosnia and like Bosnians are having too many babies. And he actually says this is a real quote. He says.

ethnic expansion by one group led to ethnic cleansing by the other. He literally quotes a Serbian fucking soldier saying we have to do this to them or else they're going to come to our villages and like do it to us because there's too many of them. Jesus Christ. He has this whole section called Islam's Bloody Borders.

where he talks about if you basically draw a circle around the Muslim world, everywhere along that circle, everywhere the Muslim world intersects with other civilizations, you find conflicts. He's using the term conflict very deliberately. So he talks about like the Chechen Muslims. He talks about the fucking Uyghurs in China. And then he has this kind of conclusion that's like, well, we're

wherever you find Muslims, you find conflict. Yeah, that's one way to put it. Right. It's like, well, yeah, there are conflicts in the sense that like Muslims are very obviously facing discrimination. Like you could easily look around the world in the late 1800s and be like, everywhere you find Jews, you just find debates about whether Jews are like really bad for the population. I don't know. We're sort of building towards almost this like

self-fulfilling prophecy. Right. Here you have this deeply influential person saying the next big conflict is between the U.S. or Western interests and the Islamic world. It's hard to know how much of that conflict is shaped by the fact that influential people defined the conflict as us versus Islam. This has been written up in like many an academic paper is like

Once you start believing this shit, you're going to act like it. And once you start acting like the Muslim world is like this monolith, you're going to act like it's a threat. Right. This is actually why I really object to this book still being on so many syllabi because –

The average American undergrad, right, is not going to know enough about the Gulf War or the Balkan War to know how fucking egregious these things are. I didn't quite realize we'd get into like genocide victim blaming in this book. I didn't think that it got that dark.

Right. A lot of like the basic thesis is just sort of obviously wrong. Like it doesn't account for various geopolitical alliances that that sort of like contradict this cultural framing. Right. Like the U.S. has what is now a long standing alliance with Saudi Arabia, despite the fact that it's a hardliner Islamic state. Right. The whole West v. Islam framing. It feels like it's just this convenient thing to convey to the public because like

oh, we're actually constantly maneuvering to find geopolitical leverage and don't really have any particular set of ideals or beliefs other than our own power. Right. That's not like a mission statement that you that people are going to love if you put it out there. My other favorite thing about using this as an example, again, this is a conflict between Muslims and Orthodox people in which America intervened on behalf of the Muslims. Right. America teamed up.

with parts of the Muslim world to help out the Bosnians due to these specific circumstances going on in the Western Balkans, right? Like it makes no sense to see this as civilizational terms. And it especially doesn't make sense to see it in civilizational terms in which America sided with a different civilization. Like there aren't really any Western versus the rest dynamics going on here. If your thesis starts hitting this point where it's just caveat after caveat after caveat...

then maybe the thesis sucks. It's so wild to see these theorists rise to prominence

on the backs of oversimplification, right? Of just like turning every complex situation into a little soundbite. What's also amazing to me is that he oftentimes does actually admit the weaknesses of his arguments, but like he just hand waves them away. So in this section, he says like, yeah, yeah, like America intervened on behalf of the Muslims, but

America did not send ground troops. It's like, well, why is that the important distinction? Right. There's an idea in the law called distinctions without a difference, right? Right, right. When someone is trying to create, differentiate between two things, they start grabbing onto any distinction they can, even if they're not meaningful distinctions. That's what he's doing here. Yes, yes. We intervened on behalf of the Muslims, but like we didn't like super duper intervene. Like, right, but like...

Your theory predicts that we would not intervene. Yeah. And yet we did. So... And, you know, we did put boots on the ground in Kuwait. However, we did not conduct a full-scale invasion of Iraq. So...

Civilizations. There's always a line. There's always a pretend line you can draw. So, okay. So then, all right, last section. The last like two chapters of the book are where he gets into like what he really wants to say. And it's straight up like great replacement. Like it reads like a fucking mass shooter manifesto. Hell yeah. So from this...

unconvincing world system of civilizations which he then completely abandons and is like Asia and Muslims and then he abandons the Asia part and then he's like Muslims are bad right and

And then it's like, what do we do about this? Like, how do we prevent this, like, coming wave of conflict, right? And he basically lands on, like, we need to preserve the values of the West. Oh. So I'm going to send you another. I'm going to send you another, like, little clip from this. Oh, this is a lot of words when you only need 14. Yeah.

Rejection of the American creed means the end of the United States of America as we have known it. It also means effectively the end of Western civilization. If the United States is de-Westernized, the West is reduced to Europe and a few lightly populated overseas European settler countries. This is not just a problem of economics and demography.

Far more significant are the 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.

Three, at least in the United States, a decline in social capital. That is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership. Four, general weakening of the work ethic and rise of a cult of personal indulgence.

Five, decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement. Boom. How do we preserve the West? Just a bunch of deranged conservative boilerplate. Yeah, this is Pat Buchanan shit, right? This is just pure conservative reactionary pearl clutching. Moral decline.

Moral decline. And, well, how do you measure a moral decline? Well, let me just point to several things, some of which exist, some of which don't. I know. Bump it all together. You know, you have increases in antisocial behavior such as crime, drug use, and violence generally, all of which were plummeting at the time he wrote this and continued to plummet for decades. Right. Decline in social capital. That's so abstract that I'm not even going to fucking bother. Right.

weakening of work ethic is just, this is just an old guy, a fucking old guy complaint that old guys have been saying forever. It's like the lazy kids don't work like we used to. I knew Huntington was like a conservative, right? But I didn't think that he was just sort of like your base grandpa Facebook level conservative. I feel like an underrated critique of this book is that its conclusions do not follow from its premises at all.

Yeah.

Right. It's the future of the world is identity politics. So we need to pick ours and I choose white. Right. And like if you think about, you know, the European example where for hundreds of years people in France and Germany would have said we're a totally different civilization from them. Right. And they're like constantly at war with each other, constantly skirmishing over like various resources and territory, etc.,

And then what you have in like a fairly short period over the last 50 years, you have all of this economic integration, free movement, exchange programs where they're studying in each other's country and they're learning each other's language. And now for basically anybody under 50 years old, the idea of France and Germany going to war with each other is this like comical, like sci-fi notion. It makes no sense. Looking back, it's like, oh, what seemed to...

to be a civilizational conflict turns out to be ultimately pretty superficial. And rather than include any historical context or any like mature conflict management strategies, it

He's basically looking around the world and he's like, the problem today is that everyone thinks that their own culture is superior and they're willing to go to war for it. But it turns out that our culture is superior. We need to demonstrate that. That's what's interesting about this is a lot of these complaints are superficial.

symptoms of a liberalizing culture, right? Things like divorce rates. If you're Samuel Huntington and that's your concern, then perhaps check out divorce rates in the Muslim world. Right. The bottom line is that a lot of the complaints about like the Islamic world are

are complaints about these particularly conservative elements of the Islamic world. And to see conservatives make them on one hand and then also make the case for the rise of those conservative elements in our own society, it's transparent. I would think that someone like Huntington would be very slightly above that, but I suppose not. And that's what I get for giving a Harvard guy credit. This is like one of the bullets in my notes.

He says very explicitly throughout the book that like one of the reasons you can tell that like Muslims are less civilized. One of the pieces of evidence he gives for that is he's like, look at the way that they treat women and minorities. Right. Like you wouldn't want to be a Christian minority in a Muslim state. Right, guys. But then we get to this chapter and it's like, what if our immigrants are like uniquely bad?

Shouldn't you be admiring them for cracking down on their minorities? Like maybe their minorities are like going to destroy their civilization, too. This is exactly this is like Islamist rhetoric. Right. What happened to that complaint about Mexicans who were too angry at us for our anti-immigration laws? Also, do you want to know what he says about Mexicans? Because I was wondering, I was like, is he going to return to this?

Sure. He says,

This is my favorite fucking argument when it's like in one breath you admit you're like, well, every previous immigrant group has eventually like within one generation assimilated into American society. But these new immigrants, right, they're not going to assimilate. It's like, well, this is the same thing they said about Italians, Russians, Poles.

And then he has this whole fucking thing of like Mexicans can't assimilate because other immigrants crossed an ocean to get to America. But Mexicans crossed the land. Europeans were coming west. Right. Mexicans are going north. They are they are not going against the wind. Yeah. I love this. Like they did. They cross that ocean thing. You have Guatemalans.

fleeing a civil war around the time that this is being written, walking all the way up through Mexico into the United States. And his position is like, well, that's too easy. They haven't experienced hardship, you know? Get the fuck out. So he ends the book.

This is the closing paragraph. He says, Well, I'm glad that we are not from a culture that is convinced of its own superiority. What?

Could you imagine what that would be like? I know. People who are anxious about losing their relative position in society and who think their culture is best. Oh.

Huh, nope. Don't see anybody like that around. We're only a couple books in on this podcast when it comes to these types of like weird theory of everything books. Yeah, yeah. One day we will have a comprehensive theory of these dudes. Right. There's something so unique going on in their brain.

Where they believe that they are capable of like capturing these complex phenomena, boiling them down to something simple.

And throwing them out in like a quick a book that frankly should be a lengthy essay at most a magazine article, right? I haven't quite figured it out yet, but I fucking will I swear well I I mean this this kind of leads us into the the epilogue of the episode about the books legacy and kind of debunking Yeah, one of the essays about the book and about Huntington specifically that I found really interesting is

was by Edward Said. And what he pointed out is that most Americans don't know very much about different countries. The population to understand world events relies on narratives. We need sort of a story to slot world events into. And oftentimes those narratives are supplied by elites. And

The Cold War was in some way a narrative that was constructed by people like Samuel Huntington. And Saeed has like speeches by Huntington in the 70s and 80s where he just openly talks about he's like, well, to do the things that we wanted to do with American military power, we had to cast every single thing that happened on the world stage as like part of the Cold War. That was partly a social construction. Like it was partly real, too.

But it was a very deliberate effort to create that kind of narrative for people. And that's why this is like so disconcerting because he's almost framing it like a prediction.

But what it is, is like a fucking bat signal to American elites. Yeah. Here's what I think should be next. Edward Said says, it's a brief and crudely articulated manual in the art of maintaining a wartime status in the minds of Americans. That's partly what he's doing here. I don't think Huntington has calculated. I think he believed this stuff, frankly. Yeah. But I think that the reason elites latched onto it, right? Because as we've said, a billion of these books were published, right? The fact that this book

became so canonical is like more interesting than the book itself.

And people latched onto this as like, oh, it's the next justification for us to keep our military this big. There really is this like conservative thing where they need to seek out conflict. Right. I think it was Corey Robin in The Reactionary Mind wrote a bunch about this. In the 1990s, when things were like relatively peaceful, there was like an industry by the end of the decade on the right of just sort of like think pieces about how we needed a fight.

Not even saying like, oh, I think the Islamic world is next or anything like that necessarily. But just saying that like in general, we need a fight. One of the reasons I really like this Edward Said essay, I mean, he wrote a couple of them, but like his overall argument is that it has a very Marge Gunderson at the end of Fargo thing. He talks about how the central tragedy of Clash of Civilizations is

is that it was written at this time when, yes, there was a power vacuum. And he has this, like, very moving section where he talks about, like, you know, humanity was facing at that time a lot of common challenges. Like, yes, there are civilizations, and they do have differences, but...

But there's no inherent reason why those differences have to lead to conflict. Right. You could have looked for something that like, hey, we can all collaborate on building a better world together. We have this wartime nuclear bombs hanging over us curtain that has just been lifted. Right.

And instead of trying to build that world or even like entertain the idea, it's like, who are we fighting next? It's just kind of ugly. And I like that he pointed that out, that it's like, it's not just the factual errors in...

In Huntington's book, it's also just like, why do this? Like, why are you like this? Yeah. And why not? Like, how could you not be if you're like an international affairs guy, a little bit inspired by the concept that like the next era might not be defined?

by like the threat of violence coming from somewhere else and the need for us to match it with force of our own. You know, the Soviet Union falls and rather than looking around for who to punch next,

You could be saying, wow, like maybe I could put my guard down for a bit. Right. Wouldn't that have been a beautiful sentiment to see coming from some of our elites at the time? Right. Like a little Marshall Plan, like a global Marshall Plan of like, let's look at who we can help. Like, let's think about what things we can work together on. Right. Anti-bacterial resistance or something. Yeah.

Find something fun to do together, you know? And, you know, there's something to be said for the fact that these, you know, the two books that we've read that are essentially about this same topic in some form or another come from Fukuyama and Huntington, who are both deeply connected with the State Department. Right. It says something about how our elites think. They come from this Cold War era, right? And that's where they've succeeded, in a world where the U.S. is...

forcibly is very invested in forcibly bullying smaller nations and and asserting itself globally at all times. If you are like an international affairs expert in 1990, that's all you know. Right. You're not an expert in peace. Right.

You're not an expert in like prosperity. You're an expert in fighting. I mean, that kind of speaks to the last thing I want to talk about, which is like where the book is now. Paul Musgrave, who's a political scientist, has written a bunch of essays about like the weird zombie longevity of this book. It's like it's assigned in introductory classes.

He acknowledges the fact that a lot of professors who assign this book would also talk about critiques of it, and they're not necessarily endorsing it. That's kind of what college is for, right, is to talk about paradigms that are no longer relevant. But also, this book is assigned more than Aristotle.

Do we need this book in every introductory class? Right. It's, it's been totally debunked. Like every time you have a book like this in a classroom, it's like there are books that are correct that you're not assigning. Like there's a slot on a syllabus that you,

That you're wasting on a wrong book that, you know, he emphasizes that like no scholars take this seriously. And Samuel Huntington, his next book was called Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity. And he published an excerpt of it in Foreign Policy in 2004 that was headlined The Hispanic Challenge. Oh, boy. He became a total fucking crank.

later in his life. We know this. And like, we're all supposed to pretend that he wrote this book based on his like academic analysis of world affairs and not his like ugly grandpa xenophobia. There's only one circumstance we should be teaching this book. And it's as essentially a proof that there's no such thing as an international affairs expert.

Right. Don't, you know, don't be like Samuel Huntington. This was an embarrassing time for all of us. Let's move on to the real shit. So I want to end with this quote from Paul Musgrave. He says, the longevity of Huntington's thesis becomes more explicable when we treat it not as scholarship aimed at skeptics, but as a sermon to the faithful.

These are not factual assertions. They are unfalsifiable axioms. Trying to fact-check Huntington's more specific claims is useful, but shouldn't lead us to miss the larger point of his project.

Huntington's myriad bigotries are not deviations from a generally sound approach. Rather, they sit at the heart of the book's appeal. Huntington's civilizational paradigm complements his nativism, his hostility to social change, and his profound lack of interest in economics and politics.

As long as a constituency that subscribes to its axioms can be found, clash-style logic will survive, no matter how costly or dangerous its prescriptions may be. Wow, fucking owned. Owned. I do think it's notable that this is in many ways a normative text, right? It's prescriptive. It is not simply that he is trying to say, hey, this is what I think is happening in the world.

He is writing a prescription for a more reactionary and isolated United States. Right. One that's, you know, more defensive, more aggressive towards specific cultures. Right. It's not just him saying, here's the world as I see it. It's here's the world as I want it to be. You sound like somebody in the midst of a dire moral decline, Peter. Typical. Typical.