Theology And The Clash Of Civilizations

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THEOLOGY AND THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Peace will come not when any one terrorist and his network of secret agents have been "surgically" excised but when an authentic alternative vision has emerged within the House of Islam.
JACK MILES, Senior Advisor to the President at the J. Paul Getty Trust and a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is the author of Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (Alfred A. Knopf).
In the 1940s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the United States was George F. Kennan. Kennan, who served briefly in the Truman Administration, was among the first to recognize that the United States could not defeat communism outright but could contain it and the nations infected by it, beginning with the Soviet Union. What came to be called the Cold War seems in retrospect to have been inevitable, but it was not inevitable at all. Instead of the Cold War, the world could all too easily have fought World War III. Containment was the bold and politically creative alternative to that war. The 1947 article in Foreign Affairs in which Kennan, writing as "X," first laid out containment as a strategy remains, unsurprisingly, the most popular article ever published in that periodical.
In the 1990s, the most important foreign policy intellectual in the United States may yet prove to have been Samuel P. Huntington. The second-most-popular article in the history of Foreign Affairs has been his controversial 1993 "The Clash of Civilizations," an attempt to see what lay beyond the end of Kennan's Cold War. What Huntington saw was, on the one hand, economic and cultural globalization and, on the other, resistance to it by those who saw it as merely the latest form of Western, historically Christian, and at this late date specifically American imperialism. Though Huntington noted that many non-Western powers had cast their lot with the emerging global order, it seemed equally clear to him that China and ...