Is America great again, yet? Well, that didn't turn out quite as promised. China is ascendent as never before, having vanquished a virus that we simply can not get our heads around. China is also putting the screws on its neighbors, assimilating Hong Kong, building island bases in the South China sea, ramping up soft power efforts in its Belt and Road and other diplomatic initiatives, and slowly building the sphere of influence that it merits as the largest nation in the world. In comparison, we are a laughing stock, our incompetent leadership high and low exposed for all to see.
It is quite a different world from that of Francis Fukuyama's "End of History", which imagined that international conflict would disappear with the close of the Cold War and the march of liberal democracy across the globe. Instead, while democracies did advance significantly in the first post-cold-war decade, progress since has stalled. An alternate model of governance has taken root out of the communist ashes- an authoritarian capitalist fusion of the Russian and Chinese types.
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| Numbers of democracies rose after the Cold War, then plateaued. |
Samuel Huntington wrote his "Clash of Civilizations" in response to Fukuyama, offering a conservative, realist view of history as continuing apace in the post-cold-war era on a very traditional basis- that of civilizations, rather than of ideologies. Donald Trump seems to have read (or skimmed, or heard about, or heard about "people" talking about) Huntington with some attention, since his instincts hew quite closely to Huntington's views. Rather than liberal democracy resplendent and ascendent, Huntington proposes that the new world order will be a traditional sphere-of-influence model, centered on the core civilizations of the world- Western, Chinese, Orthodox, Indian, and Islamic. Africa is so far behind that it does not count seriously in Hungtington's scheme, though that may change a few decades on. The Catholic/Hispanic cultures of Central and South America also do not count for very much in his scheme. These civilizations are based on different religions and ethnic histories, and are centered on core states. The US is the core state of the West, (though the EU may take over that role sooner than anticipated!). Russia is the core state of the Orthodox / Slavic civilization, India is virtually the only Hindu state, and China clearly leads the Sinic or East Asian world.
The Islamic world lacks a clear core or leading state, with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan all in contention, a contest that is still nowhere near resolution, and involves starkly different visions for the future of Islamic culture. Islam is a special case not only for its lack of a central or core state that can lead and moderate its civilization at large, but also for its general lack of effective governance, and its peculiar historical position of having had its golden age almost a millenium ago, after which the West gained progressive, and eventually overwhelming, superiority. The bitterness this engenders has not been channeled, as in the Asian tigers, into competition and often superior performance vs the West, but rather into regression, grievance, fundamentalism, and a rededication to its own cultural superiority. Thankfully, Huntington forecasts that by about now, the demographic bulge of Islam, which had been fueling much of its internal discontent and violent lashing-out, would moderate and lead to a less combative general culture- a prediction that I think is slowly coming to pass.
One of the most interesting themes of Huntington's thesis is the clique-like banding together of nations with similar civilizations. Unlike the American ideal of international affairs, where all people everywhere just want democracy and plenty of shopping, Huntington sees nations aligning on cultural terms, like people do in many other settings, like high schools, religions, neighborhoods, and so much else. The Balkan wars are, for Huntington, exhibit A. Each contestant was backed by its cultural kin among the larger countries, with the Muslim Bosnians supported by a variety of Muslim states from Saudi Arabia to Iran, the Orthodox Serbs supported by Russia, and the Catholic Croats supported by Germany, particularly the German Catholic church. Likewise, in the first Gulf war, Huntington writes that, while several Muslim countries were, under Americal pressure, part of the military alliance against Iraq, the Arab street was uniformly anti-West and pro-Saddam. His description of these sentiments and how they sapped their government's respective resolve about the war and its aftermath was sobering, and should have given the next Bush administration pause in its headlong rush into its own crusade against Iraq.
Another corollary of the civilizational world as Huntington sees it is that some cultures are odd nations out. Japan is a prime example. Clearly, Japan exists in the Chinese general sphere of influence. But Japan has been closest to the US since its defeat in World War 2, has adopted many Western attitudes and practices, a highly functional democracy among them. It also, through its wartime and pre-war imperialism, has earned the virtually undying hatred of China and Korea, among other countries in the region. What will its future be like in a world where China takes prime position over all of East Asia? Can it band together with anti-Chinese fellow coutries like Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Australia to create a balancing anti-Chinese bloc? That looks generally unlikely, partly due to negative US leadership, and partly due to the obvious problems it entails, ending in some kind of vast war.
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| China's sphere and local conflicts. |
What China wants as the regional, even global, leader, is actually quite unclear. The history of Korea is instructive in this regard. China has been Korea's big neighbor for at least 2,000 years, and has repeatedly enforced vassalage, favorable trade, and cultural exchange. But it never took over and tried to exterminate Korean culture the way the Japanese did before World War 2. China clearly seeks control over some of its fraternal cultures, like the Tibetan and Uyghur, and now Hong Kong and ultimately Taiwan. But Vietnam? What China wants out of other nearby cultures such as Vietnam, Korea, and Japan is not entirely clear, and some kind of vassalage relationship may suffice. Perhaps seeing the Yuan as the reigning currency, along with other clearly friendly military and trade relations would be enough for long-term stability.
More darkly, some nations in Huntington's system are "torn", in that they partake of more than one culture and therefore face diffcult conflicts, internally and externally. Yugoslavia was an obvious example, but there are many others. Turkey is one, in that it has for decades tried to enter the EU and be a Western country. But with increasing Islamization, this is increasingly off the table, and Turkey is moving towards leadership as a modernizing influence within Islam rather than being a little fish in the EU and lapdog of the US security establishment. Russia has also made its definitive choice, after centuries of conflicting sentiments about the West, turning against a possible turn to NATO and the EU in the post-Soviet moment, and retrenching as leader of the Orthodox civilization. Was it ever realistic to think that Russia might become a normal, Western parliamentary democracy, after its communist collapse? Perhaps not, though our wretched economic advice surely didn't help.
Huntington closes on very Trumpian themes, warning that increasing Hispanic immigration to the US may make us into a "torn" culture, less cohesive in international and other terms. Multiculturalism is clearly the enemy. He spins a truly bravura dystopian scenario towards the end of the book, where China and Vietnam spark a world war (with some blundering US intervention) that spirals out of control, Russia and India allying with the West. The US is hobbled, however, by Hispanic dissention, which causes a lack of fighting resolve, and we settle for negotiation! Yikes!
Much of what Huntington wrote was quite precient, especially in the turns that both China and Russia have taken against the West and towards rebuilding their traditional geographic and cultural spheres of influence in clearly civilizational terms. He warns against American universalism- the idea that everyone wants what we want, we just have to invade their countries and give it to them. That way lies imperialism, pure and simple. And his warning about unity in the US is significant. We need to continue to expect and encourage assimilation of immigrants, not social and political balkanization. But it turns out that the principal risk of disunity in the US comes from the native rich, not the foreign poor. The logic of hyper-capitalism and its related ills of political and media corruption has created a plutocratic class that treats the rest of the country as a vulture capitalist project- a place for tax breaks, pet politicians, flagrant propaganda, and walled compounds served by a feudal workforce. That is what is killing our institutions and destroying our standing in the world.
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