Recommended: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations

Ayaan Hirsi Ali has written an interesting Op Ed in today's Wall Street Journal: How to Win the Clash of Civilizations. She argues that those who predicted a post-Cold War world in which every nation gravitated toward a liberal, Westernized democracy (Fukuyama's "The End of History") are wrong. Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" is proving to be a more accurate prediction, in which nations coalesce into groupings around shared religious and cultural backgrounds, and then struggle with other groupings for power and influence. I find her arguments persuasive, and certainly recent history supports this view. More than that, world history supports this view. World history has been an almost unremitting struggle of competing civilizations and religions and ideas for dominance, and although some progressives would like to believe we have outgrown that phase, there is absolutely no evidence for that view.

I like her lead sentence: "The key advantage of Huntington's famous model is that it describes the world as it is—not as we wish it to be."