CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Justifying Civilizational Warfare: the Rubio Doctrine and Huntington’s Ghost

Copyright World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org)swiss-image.ch/Photo by Peter Lauth

Marco Rubio’s speech of February 14 of this year to the Munich Security Conference was greeted by high praise on the right, mild criticism on the left, and sighs of relief in most European capitals.  Many diplomats and pundits feared that the U.S. Secretary of State would echo Donald Trump’s cold devaluation of the Atlantic Alliance and his apparent contempt for most European leaders. But, although he rehearsed some characteristic Trumpian tunes, Rubio’s tone was warm, and his dominant theme was one of civilizational unity and pride.

“We are part of one civilization, Western civilization,” he declared.  “We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir.”

When the speech received a standing ovation in Munich, it was clear that its real significance as a new and dangerous turn in global policy had not been recognized.

Philosophically, Rubio’s speech represents the triumph of the ideas of Samuel P. Huntington, the Harvard professor who wrote The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order in the 1990s. Huntington declared that from now on, global conflicts would not be based on differences of nationality, social class, or political ideology, but rather  on cultural differences embodied and expressed by competing “civilizations.”  Civilizations he defined as large multi-national units united by shared cultural and religious values – for example, “Western,” “Islamic,” Serbo-Orthodox,” “Hindu,” and “Sinic” or “Chinese” civilizations.  For tactical reasons, one suspects, he did not call Western civilization “Christian” – but Marco Rubio is not constrained by any such inhibition.

Huntington’s vision was not a peaceful one.  Because their values and interests were often incompatible, he said, these civilizations would inevitably engage in violent conflict. The most important struggle, he asserted without much explanation, would feature “the West against the rest.”  This being the case, Westerners would be well advised to prepare themselves militarily and psychologically to do battle against their civilizational enemies – particularly the dreaded “Sino-Islamic” axis.

Huntington wrote his first article expressing these views in 1993 for the magazine Foreign Affairs.  A few months later, Jarle Crocker and I wrote a response in Foreign Policy called “Challenging Huntington” which made three major criticisms of the theory:

First, Huntington’s “civilizations” were nowhere near united. Islam,........

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