The Clash of Civilizations 2018

Is the world set for a Clash of Civilizations? According to William S. Smith it’s already there. With the West repudiating its own heritage, and elites welcoming and even facilitating mass Islamic migration into Europe, Smith says the culture is threatened. Smith points to Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations as the explanation for the post-Cold War phenomenon that has eroded the West. Unless Western leaders get serious about protecting their culture, it could be destroyed for good. Smith writes (abridged):

Why should Americans participate in an alliance in which a general—from a minuscule military power that spends 1 percent of its GDP on defense—hosts a meeting that is more likely to provoke a catastrophic U.S.-Russia war than to prevent one? As Ted Galen Carpenter recently explained here at TAC, this is the dangerous calculus that results from interlocking the United States with so many NATO nations, including some that Moscow regards as within its sphere of influence.

At the end of the Cold War, the late Harvard historian Samuel Huntington pointed out that the world was reorganizing itself along civilizational lines and that cultural commonalities were replacing Cold War alliances.

Because Western elites, the “Davos men,” do not cherish or even particularly admire the unique Western cultural inheritance—Christianity in particular—they did not see civilizational criteria as a basis upon which the West should form post-Cold War alliances.

We have thus done precisely the opposite of what Huntington recommended: we have meddled, sometimes aggressively, in other civilizations, and we have repudiated more and more of our own heritage, replacing it with a mishmash of multiculturalism, universalism, globalism, and anti-Christianity. And with our worldwide meddling and fading fondness for civil liberties has come the national security behemoth, weakening our commitment to freedom, privacy, and the rule of law.

But nothing highlights the civilizational cluelessness of Western elites quite like the deliberate facilitation of mass Islamic migration into Europe. When a leader such as Angela Merkel defends Islamic migration on economic and multicultural grounds, she shows herself to be simply ignorant about what made Western civilization distinctive and successful and what is now threatening it.