Kurtz, Part I: Huntington was Right!
By ““There’s one thing I don’t understand. The thing that I don’t understand is every motherfucking word you’re saying.”- The Limey
Via Matt Yglesias, this post is worthy of a couple thorough debunkings. I’ll post more on the China military problem later, but let’s take a look at what Stanley has to offer, first.
Kaplan describes the coming competition with China as a second Cold War. Looking at the world today, you’ve got to say Samuel Huntington called it. For decades it’s going to be the West against Islamic terror on the one hand, and China on the other.
Anytime I see the phrase “Huntington called it,” I reach for my revolver. I don’t have one, of course, so I have to resort to my keyboard. Stanley, and presumably Robert Kaplan, would have us believe that we are on the cusp of a Cold War with China, and that the cause of this emerging Cold War is the divide between Confucian and Western culture that Huntington describes in The Clash of Civilizations. Let’s evaluate that for moment, shall we?
For this argument to be plausible, the cause of conflict must be cultural, and not either geopolitical or ideological. If a Cold War is emerging because of China’s expanding military and economic power, then Huntington is wrong; culture doesn’t matter a bit, only power does. Rather than a clash of civilizations, we have old-style realist politics. Indeed, although I haven’t yet read Kaplan’s article in the Atlantic on China, I think this is the argument he holds to. Similarly, if the emergent Cold War is primarily ideological, Huntington is again wrong; systems of governance do not hold to cultural lines, and if democracy vs. tyranny is the main factor, then culture doesn’t make a bit of difference. Indeed, Kurtz can’t manage to hold to one account of the world, and even manages to get Fukuyama and Huntington confused, a tremendous accomplishment for such a pair of simplistic thinkers. In short, for Huntington to apply there must be evidence of conflict based on cultural values, and Kurtz supplies NO evidence that this is the case.
The impending anti-western alliance between Islamic and Confucian cultures in Huntington has always puzzled me. A casual observer might think that the Christian West and the Islamic world have much more in common with each other than either have with the Confucian world. On the other hand, another casual observer might note that Western institutions of governance, from liberal democracy to Marxist dictatorship, have taken deep root in the Confucian world, an outcome which should be troubling to fans of Huntington. In any case, an evaluation of the actual policies maintained by the East and the West should prove confounding to such civilizational theories?
What do I mean? Hey, anyone remember what country tried, rather vigorously, to block US action in Iraq? If you say “China”, you’re wrong. Instead of China, the main foe of the United States was France, our old teammate in Western culture. I suppose that the Huntington-inclined Cornerites could suggest that the French are so overtaken by post-modernism that they have abandoned Western culture, but that hardly explains similar reactions on the part of the Russians, the Germans, and the overwhelming majority of people living in the rest of Western world. The Chinese took no position on Iraq, and the South Koreans and Japanese were supportive. The conflict over Iraq did not follow civilizational lines, and it certainly didn’t lead to the Confucian-Islamic alliance that Huntington expects.
So, instead of inter-civilizational conflict, we see intra-civilizational conflict, which, I will note, has been evident in the Western world for the last, oh, 2600 years. Instead of the Islamic and Confucian worlds lining up together against the West, we see what can only be described as the collusion of the major Confucian powers with the premier power of the West, against, oddly enough, the rest of the West. Call me a skeptic, but I’m not sure Huntington deserves any credit here.
Most importantly, perhaps, we don’t see China, the bugbear that the neo-cons have been worrying about since the 1990s, pursuing any kind of adversarial relationship with the United States. Since 9/11, China has been content to grant tacit support to the War on Terror while taking care of its own Islamic minorities and striking up good relations with South and Southeast Asia. When the time came for confrontation over Iraq, the Chinese demured. More about this later, but if a Cold War is in the offing, the Chinese don’t seem to know about it.