Strategic Paradigms by Ehsan Ahrari

Samuel P. Huntington died on Christmas Eve at the ripe age of 81.  I never met the man.  But I read most of his work.  I had the occasion of hearing his presentation as a Ph.D. candidate, when he was invited by our Political Science Department at Southern Illinois University around 1974 or 1975.  All the faculty members were present to hear one of their brainiest, if not most famous, counterparts.  Huntington was well known for two books then: 

The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations

(1957), and Political Order in Changing Societies (1968).  The discussion of his presentation revolved around the second book.

 

I also heard Huntington’s presentation in one of the Political Science conferences in the 1990s.  I can’t even remember the topic; I only went there to hear him.  I guess we were all in awe of his brilliance. 

 

As much as I disagreed with his “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, there was some element of truth to it.  When the book came out, I had been a Professor at senior military colleges for a few years.  I still remember how popular his thesis really was at a time when the Pentagon was figuring out who the next enemy of America would be in the post-Cold War years.  The fact that Huntington branded “civilizational antagonism” or even animosity as the next “enemy,” the Pentagon could not have been happier.  That was an intriguing proposition for the military brass, which is not known for its intellectual prowess, but is most willing to follow as gospel, if the idea is about protecting America’s interests and dominance worldwide.  Huntington knew that fact only too well when he wrote about the highly patriotic and conservative nature of a military officer in his book The Soldier and the State.

 

I recall a four-star General visiting the Joint Forces Staff College, where I was teaching then.  He presented Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis not as a highly contentious idea of a Harvard professor, but as valid and substantiated laws of physics in describing the emerging global conflict.  I knew that the younger generation of military officers—most of whom were taking copious notes of the speech by that four-star General—would be passing on his “words of wisdom” to the next generation.  I could not resist challenging the General.  I stated that he was presenting some highly controversial ideas as “facts,” instead of the opinions of an intellectual.  

 

Needless to say, that General was taken aback at my audacity, and did what most senior military officers do when they are challenged on brainy issues.  My apologies if I created that impression, he said.  However, his young underlings were not about to change their mind, even if their god was willing to apply a different spin to his message.  I knew that I was not the most popular person in the auditorium.

 

My chief criticism of Huntington’s brilliant observations is that they were loaded with gross generalizations, which, more often than not, sounded simplistic and even naïve.  The Economist best captured my feelings regarding Huntington’s broad brushed generalizations in his obituary.  It noted: 

 

…his pronouncements often distorted reality rather than imposed order on it.     He skated over the fact that many of the nastiest clashes take place within civilisations rather than between them: more Muslims die at the hands of their fellow Muslims than die at the hands of “Jews or Crusaders”; and Europeans fought the 20th century’s bloodiest conflicts among themselves. He also downplayed the extent to which the American model attracts people the world over: the Chinese business elite are much more interested in Silicon Valley than in their Confucian past. His arguments can produce policies that are just as naive as those he excoriated: policies that drive Muslims together into a single angry mass, rather than prising them apart, for example, and policies that encourage Western self-doubt just as surely as do the hand-wringing of the multiculturalists.

 

Huntington’s book, Clash of Civilizations (1996), was translated into numerous languages and read by the intellectuals and elites all over world, especially by those who make a point of remaining at the cutting edge of “what’s in vogue” at a given time.  In fact, al Jazeera asked Usama Bin Laden the following question:

 

Interviewer :  “What is your opinion about what is being said concerning your analogies and the ‘Clash of Civilizations’? Your constant use and repetition of the word ‘Crusade’ and ‘Crusader’ show that you uphold this saying, the ‘Clash of Civilizations.’”  Bin Laden responded, “ I say there is no doubt about this. This is a very clear matter…”

 

Former Iranian President, Mohammad Khatami, gave the civilizational approach further global publicity by stating that he wished to start a dialogue among civilizations.  He spoke on the subject at the U.N. General Assembly in 1998.  That world body designated the year 2001 as the year of Dialogue Among civilizations.  In 2006, Khatami also spoke on the subject at the University of Virginia. 

 

Through a civilizational dialogue, Khatami wanted to see a change in the power arrangement at the U.N. Security Council, which is dominated by the victors of World War II.  That power structure is brought together after a global war.  It is likely to be replaced only by a conflict of similar proportion.  Khatami was most articulate when he said, “[The] present paradigm regards the interests and values of a select group of elites as the interests and values of the entire world even if at times it clashes with it.” 

 

But no powerful leader or nation was interested in bringing about institutional changes or giving high consideration to the interests and values of the Asian or Muslim community of nations over Western values and interests.  In this sense, the old Harvard Professor was half right.  We are constantly encountering clashes, but not necessarily civilizational.  We have the entrenched interests of nations that are incessantly conflicting.  The West has long epitomized the rich and technologically advanced part of the world.  It is not likely to give up its advantaged status and open its ranks to include the Nouveau riche of the 21^st Century in the name of conciliation among civilizations.  To be fair about the issue at hand, no non-Western country or bloc of countries would have behaved differently.

 

As the United States and the West are encountering economic meltdowns, no one really knows what the status of the U.S. or the West is likely to be.  We don’t even know what types of conflicts are likely to preoccupy nation-states.  Kishore Mahbubani, a former diplomat of Singapore has predicted the shift of power toward Asia.  That is a possibility.  But no Asian country has created its own niche yet, or its own way of being unique or different from the West.  In this sense, being modern still means emulating the United States or the European community in different realms of activities. In other words, being modern still means being Western when the West was in its best form.  Thus, the notion of a clash among nations has become a permanent fixture. 

 

The idea of a clash of civilizations appeared novel when it was first presented.  Huntington presented it at a perfectly suitable time (1993, the year his essay containing that phrase was first published in Foreign Affairs magazine) when the Cold War–a major conflict of the 20^th Century–was just over.  The durability of that concept is proven by the fact that, even to this day, it has not completely lost its charm or attraction as a possible reason for conflict among nations. 

 

Huntington will be missed for generating new concepts, new ideas, and new and iconoclastic paradigms—albeit highly contentious—to explain major issues of our time.  No matter how much one disagreed with him, there is no denying that he was a giant among us.  The intellectual gap that his death has created is not likely to be filled anytime soon.