Yet Huntington made his case no less strongly, first in a 1993 Foreign Affairs essay and later in his seminal 1996 book. Just two years after the fall of the USSR, he wrote, “It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations.”
Having spent more than a decade working along these cultural fault lines, I can’t help but agree. Civilizational mega-forces are real, and we ignore them to our detriment.
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