Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Josef Joffe

Last Sunday’s New York Times Book Review ran an essay by Fouad Ajami, in which he doubts his own 1993 critique of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. Prompted by that reflection, we invited MESH member Josef Joffe to revisit Huntington’s thesis.

Civilizational conflicts will supersede ideological conflicts. This is the key idea in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. I did not share this idea then, and I do not believe in it today.

For civilizational clashes to become virulent, said Huntington, a core state within a particular culture must turn into its avant-garde—that is, drape itself in the civilizational mantle to magnify its power in the pursuit of classic state interests. This introduces a potent qualifier that drastically limits the universe of clashes. Take the two risers, Russia and China. Russia resurgent uses energy, not Orthodoxy as “force multiplier.” China does not use “Sinism” to expand its influence; it is doing quite well with its sheer size and mass, with its monetary reserves and its vast market. In the past, European would-be hegemons like Charles V might have invoked Catholicism, but as we know, Habsburg had no compunctions to conspire with the Ottoman Porte against France, or Catholic France with Lutheran Sweden against the “Holy Roman Empire.”

So how far does the theory carry? There is only one contemporary case that fits the bill: Islam, which clashes with the West abroad (e.g., Hezbollah vs. Israel) and within (homegrown terrorism in Britain, Holland, or Spain). But I would like to add another qualifier. It is not Islam as such, though its realm is shot through with seething rage against the West. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the “Gulfies” are allies of the United States, and not only in name, because that bond serves their security interests. Turkey, though turning away from secular Kemalism, remains a member of NATO and wants to join the European Union. True, its fealty to the United States is declining, the most dramatic instance being its denial of a northern invasion route to the U.S. in the 2003 Iraq war. But it is not at all clear that this decision had Islamic roots. It is better explained in terms of state interest, such as not letting the U.S. operate freely in a neighborhood where Turkey has fish to fry against PKK extremists.

So it is hard to pin the clash on Islam as such. Its virulence derives from an old acquaintance: state ambitions. The problem of the U.S. and the West is with Iran first, and with Islam second. It is Iran that is using the civilizational cudgel as mobilizer, legitimizer and force multiplier. And it does so in the service of classic state purposes, which antedate the Khomeinist Revolution and might even be traced all the way back to the Persian kings of antiquity, who in their day sought to impose their hegemony on the Middle East all the way to Greece. Darius and the lot were not Muslims, but great-power mongers.

Iran’s nuclear program was started by Mohammad Reza Shah, the great secularizer. It was the Shah who manipulated the rise in oil prices in the 1979. And it was the Shah who dabbled in regional imperialism when he imposed harsh border treaties on Iraq—for which payback came when Saddam Hussein attacked what he thought was a sorely weakened post-revolutionary Iran in 1980.

It is Iran and its outriggers like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza that energize the Clash. We don’t worry (or not excessively so) about cruelty and repression in the name of the Prophet Muhammad when it occurs in Saudi Arabia, an ally of sorts. But we do worry about shahids, more commonly known as suicide bombers, who serve state or sub-state purposes when they attack the World Trade Center or cafés in Tel Aviv. To repeat, on the state level, our problem is not Islam, but Iran and its regional ambitions.

It is the green flag of the Prophet in the service of a state that turns civilizational rage into a threat to the West. This insight has not only withstood the passage of time since the appearance of the Foreign Affairs article. It has also become more relevant, given the rise of Iran’s ambitions as flanked by its nuclear weapons program.

Two additional key ideas, however, are in need of scrutiny. One is “the West against the rest.” How would we test this? When we think about clashes across the globe, we don’t think first, or even second, about civilizational ones. The West’s conflict with China should better be described as a competitive relationship for resources and trade advantage. There is also an unarticulated power struggle between the reigning superpower, the United States, and the would-be superpower China. But this arena harbors many players. There is Japan, arrayed on the side of the United States. There are the lesser states of East Asia that are happy to huddle under a “Made in U.S.A.” strategic umbrella. The conflict is not a civilizational one, nor one of the “West against the rest.” For there are too many non-Western actors on that particular stage, cooperating with the United States.

Is the West besieged by Africa or Latin America? Mugabe of Rhodesia comes to mind, but he is an enemy of his own people first and foremost. Hugo Chavez? He has stepped into the shoes of Fidel Castro. But it is not “Latinism” that animates him, but bad old ideology and hunger for power. So the idea of a globe-encircling anti-Western alliance does not mesh with the facts. It did not do so in the 1990s, and it does not do so now.

The third key idea is that “Islam has bloody borders.” It was true then, and it is true now. Most violent clashes have an Islamic component: Sudan, Chechnya, Israel/Palestine, Iran. But look again: aren’t most of the clashes internal to Islam?

The worst post-World War Two war was fought between Iraq and Iran—for eight bloody years. One of the worst and longest civil wars erupted in Lebanon, where the Muslim-Maronite conflict was but one dimension, and where a whole slew of Islamic denominations battled against each other. Palestinians may want to eradicate Israel from the map, but their worst threat was directed against two fellow Muslim states: Jordan in 1970, and Lebanon until the early 1980s (when Israel decimated the PLO). More recently, it has been Syria which is killing Lebanese politicians in order to uphold dominance over its neighbor. Egypt has intervened in Yemen and skirmished repeatedly with Libya. Algeria is the arena of an endless civil war between a Muslim government and more rigorously faithful rebels. Wahhabis repress fellow Muslims in Saudi Arabia. Syria’s Alawites lord it over the rest of the country—and, when need be, raze much of a city, Hamah, that used to be the stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood. In Saddam’s days, a Sunni minority oppressed the Shia minority; now both are fighting for turf and control. Pakistan is an explosion waiting to happen, and Afghanistan is a hellhole of intra-civilizational strife, a battle that is barely contained by NATO forces.

Niall Ferguson has made the point very succinctly by reversing Huntington: Islam is a civilization of clashes. The victims of Islamists have numbered in the hundreds in Europe (Madrid, London) and in the thousands in New York. But as horrifying as that slaughter was, it does not measure up to the murder and mayhem Muslims have inflicted on one another since decolonization. They hate the West, but they mainly kill each other. The toll of the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988 is thought to be one million.

Finally, there is a fourth idea, only indirectly related to the Clash as propounded by Huntington: that modernization can proceed without Westernization. Japan comes to mind, and so do China and Russia. In his critique of the Foreign Affairs article, Fouad Ajami took the opposite tack: “The things and ways that the West took to the ‘rest’,” he wrote, “have become the ways of the world.” Which ones? “The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as instrument of welfare.…”

Well, yes and no. As modernization expands, so has resistance to this quintessentially Western gift, and not just in the Muslim world. Multiculturalism with its anti-Western bias (“Eurocentrism,” “Orientalism”) has found a comfortable place in the Western academy and media. Today, we are less confident that secularization is the way the world goes. Nonetheless, what is almost an aside in Huntington’s Clash, raises the most fascinating questions for the future. What is the relationship between religion, culture and modernity? As they say in the academy: “More research and funds are needed.” In this case, the need, though self-serving, is blatantly obvious.

Perhaps this aside about modernization without Westernization is the grandest insight Sam Huntington has contributed. Let’s test it—and thus honor the greatest political scientist of his generation. The exercise will pose a more powerful intellectual challenge than many a rational-choice model so much favored by political science today.