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Chapter 9

The Global Politics of Civilizations

CORE STATE AND FAULT LINE CONFLICTS

Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale. In the emerging world, states and groups from two different civilizations may form limited, ad hoc, tactical connections and coalitions to advance their interests against entities from a third civilization or for other shared purposes. Relations between groups from different civilizations however will be almost never close, usually cool, and often hostile. Connections between states of different civilizations inherited from the past, such as Cold War military alliances, are likely to attenuate or evaporate. Hopes for close intercivilizational “partnerships,” such as were once articulated by their leaders for Russia and America, will not be realized. Emerging intercivilizational relations will normally vary from distant to violent, with most falling somewhere in between. In many cases they are likely to approximate the “cold peace” that Boris Yeltsin warned could be the future of relations between Russia and the West. Other intercivilizational relations could approximate a condition of “cold war.” The term la guerra fria was coined by thirteenth-century Spaniards to describe their “uneasy coexistence” with Muslims in the Mediterranean, and in the 1990s many saw a “civilizational cold war” again developing between Islam and the West. 1  In a world of civilizations, it will not be the only relationship characterized by that term. Cold peace, cold war, trade war, quasi war, uneasy peace, troubled relations, intense rivalry, competitive coexistence, arms races: these phrases are the most probable descriptions of relations between entities from different civilizations. Trust and friendship will be rare.

Intercivilizational conflict takes two forms. At the local or micro level, fault line conflicts occur between neighboring states from different civilizations, between groups from different civilizations within a state, and between groups which, as in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, are attempting to create new states out of the wreckage of old. Fault line conflicts are particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims. The reasons for and the nature and dynamics of these conflicts are explored in  chapters 10  and  11 . At the global or macro level, core state conflicts occur among the major states of different civilizations. The issues in these conflicts are the classic ones of international politics, including:

1. relative influence in shaping global developments and the actions of global international organizations such as the U.N., IMF, and World Bank;

2. relative military power, which manifests itself in controversies over non-proliferation and arms control and in arms races;

3. economic power and welfare, manifested in disputes over trade, investment, and other issues;

4. people, involving efforts by a state from one civilization to protect kinsmen in another civilization, to discriminate against people from another civilization, or to exclude from its territory people from another civilization;

5. values and culture, conflicts over which arise when a state attempts to promote or to impose its values on the people of another civilization;

6. occasionally, territory, in which core states become front line participants in fault line conflicts.

These issues are, of course, the sources of conflict between humans throughout history. When states from different civilizations are involved, however, cultural differences sharpen the conflict. In their competition with each other, core states attempt to rally their civilizational cohorts, to get support from states of third civilizations, to promote division within and defections from opposing civilizations, and to use the appropriate mix of diplomatic, political, economic, and covert actions and propaganda inducements and coercions to achieve their objectives. Core states are, however, unlikely to use military force directly against each other, except in situations such as have existed in the Middle East and the Subcontinent where they adjoin each other on a civilizational fault line. Core state wars are otherwise likely to arise under only two circumstances. First, they could develop from the escalation of fault line conflicts between local groups as kin groups, including core states, rally to the support of the local combatants. This possibility, however, creates a major incentive for the core states in the opposing civilizations to contain or to resolve the fault line conflict.

Second, core state war could result from changes in the global balance of power among civilizations. Within Greek civilization, the increasing power of Athens, as Thucydides argued, led to the Peloponnesian War. Similarly the history of Western civilization is one of “hegemonic wars” between rising and falling powers. The extent to which similar factors encourage conflict between the rising and falling core states of different civilizations depends in part on whether balancing or bandwagoning is the preferred way in these civilizations for states to adjust to the rise of a new power. While bandwagoning may be more characteristic of Asian civilizations, the rise of Chinese power could generate balancing efforts from states in other civilizations, such as the United States, India, and Russia. The missing hegemonic war in Western history is that between Great Britain and the United States, and presumably the peaceful shift from the Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana was in large part due to the close cultural kinship of the two societies. The absence of such kinship in the shifting power balance between the West and China does not make armed conflict certain but does make it more probable. The dynamism of Islam is the ongoing source of many relatively small fault line wars; the rise of China is the potential source of a big intercivilizational war of core states.

ISLAM AND THE WEST

Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists. Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise. The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The twentieth-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity. At times, peaceful coexistence has prevailed; more often the relation has been one of intense rivalry and of varying degrees of hot war. Their “historical dynamics,” John Esposito comments, “…often found the two communities in competition, and locked at times in deadly combat, for power, land, and souls.” 2  Across the centuries the fortunes of the two religions have risen and fallen in a sequence of momentous surges, pauses, and countersurges.

The initial Arab-Islamic sweep outward from the early seventh to the mid-eighth century established Muslim rule in North Africa, Iberia, the Middle East, Persia, and northern India. For two centuries or so the lines of division between Islam and Christianity stabilized. Then in the late eleventh century, Christians reasserted control of the western Mediterranean, conquered Sicily, and captured Toledo. In 1095 Christendom launched the Crusades and for a century and a half Christian potentates attempted, with decreasing success, to establish Christian rule in the Holy Land and adjoining areas in the Near East, losing Acre, their last foothold there, in 1291. Meanwhile the Ottoman Turks had appeared on the scene. They first weakened Byzantium and then conquered much of the Balkans as well as North Africa, captured Constantinople in 1453, and besieged Vienna in 1529. “For almost a thousand years,” Bernard Lewis observes, “from the first Moorish landing in Spain to the second Turkish siege of Vienna, Europe was under constant threat from Islam” 3 . Islam is the only civilization which has put the survival of the West in doubt, and it has done that at least twice.

By the fifteenth century, however, the tide had begun to turn. The Christians gradually recovered Iberia, completing the task at Granada in 1492. Meanwhile European innovations in ocean navigation enabled the Portuguese and then others to circumvent the Muslim heartland and penetrate into the Indian Ocean and beyond. Simultaneously the Russians brought to an end two centuries of Tatar rule. The Ottomans subsequently made one last push forward, besieging Vienna again in 1683. Their failure there marked the beginning of a long retreat, involving the struggle of Orthodox peoples in the Balkans to free themselves from Ottoman rule, the expansion of the Hapsburg Empire, and the dramatic advance of the Russians to the Black Sea and the Caucasus. In the course of a century or so “the scourge of Christendom” was transformed into “the sick man of Europe. 4  At the conclusion of World War I, Britain, France, and Italy administered the coup de grace and established their direct or indirect rule throughout the remaining Ottoman lands except for the territory of the Turkish Republic. By 1920 only four Muslim countries—Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan—remained independent of some form of non-Muslim rule.

The retreat of Western colonialism, in turn, began slowly in the 1920s and 1930s and accelerated dramatically in the aftermath of World War II. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought independence to additional Muslim societies. According to one count, some ninety-two acquisitions of Muslim territory by non-Muslim governments occurred between 1757 and 1919. By 1995, sixty-nine of these territories were once again under Muslim rule, and about forty-five independent states had overwhelmingly Muslim populations. The violent nature of these shifting relationships is reflected in the fact that 50 percent of wars involving pairs of states of different religions between 1820 and 1929 were wars between Muslims and Christians. 5

The causes of this ongoing pattern of conflict lie not in transitory phenomena such as twelfth-century Christian passion or twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalism. They flow from the nature of the two religions and the civilizations based on them. Conflict was, on the one hand, a product of difference, particularly the Muslim concept of Islam as a way of life transcending and uniting religion and politics versus the Western Christian concept of the separate realms of God and Caesar. The conflict also stemmed, however, from their similarities. Both are monotheistic religions, which, unlike polytheistic ones, cannot easily assimilate additional deities, and which see the world in dualistic, us-and-them terms. Both are universalistic, claiming to be the one true faith to which all humans can adhere. Both are missionary religions believing that their adherents have an obligation to convert nonbelievers to that one true faith. From its origins Islam expanded by conquest and when the opportunity existed Christianity did also. The parallel concepts of “jihad” and “crusade” not only resemble each other but distinguish these two faiths from other major world religions. Islam and Christianity, along with Judaism, also have teleological views of history in contrast to the cyclical or static views prevalent in other civilizations.

The level of violent conflict between Islam and Christianity over time has been influenced by demographic growth and decline, economic developments, technological change, and intensity of religious commitment. The spread of Islam in the seventh century was accompanied by massive migrations of Arab peoples, “the scale and speed” of which were unprecedented, into the lands of the Byzantine and Sassanian empires. A few centuries later, the Crusades were in large part a product of economic growth, population expansion, and the “Clunaic revival” in eleventh-century Europe, which made it possible to mobilize large numbers of knights and peasants for the march to the Holy Land. When the First Crusade reached Constantinople, one Byzantine observer wrote, it seemed like “the entire West, including all the tribes of the barbarians living beyond the Adriatic Sea to the Pillars of Hercules, had started a mass migration and was on the march, bursting forth into Asia in a solid mass, with all its belongings. 6  In the nineteenth century spectacular population growth again produced a European eruption, generating the largest migration in history, which flowed into Muslim as well as other lands.

A comparable mix of factors has increased the conflict between Islam and the West in the late twentieth century. First, Muslim population growth has generated large numbers of unemployed and disaffected young people who become recruits to Islamist causes, exert pressure on neighboring societies, and migrate to the West. Second, the Islamic Resurgence has given Muslims renewed confidence in the distinctive character and worth of their civilization and values compared to those of the West. Third, the West’s simultaneous efforts to universalize its values and institutions, to maintain its military and economic superiority, and to intervene in conflicts in the Muslim world generate intense resentment among Muslims. Fourth, the collapse of communism removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each the perceived major threat to the other. Fifth, the increasing contact between and intermingling of Muslims and Westerners stimulate in each a new sense of their own identity and how it differs from that of the other. Interaction and intermingling also exacerbate differences over the rights of the members of one civilization in a country dominated by members of the other civilization. Within both Muslim and Christian societies, tolerance for the other declined sharply in the 1980s and 1990s.

The causes of the renewed conflict between Islam and the West thus lie in fundamental questions of power and culture. Kto? Kovo? Who is to rule? Who is to be ruled? The central issue of politics defined by Lenin is the root of the contest between Islam and the West. There is, however, the additional conflict, which Lenin would have considered meaningless, between two different versions of what is right and what is wrong and, as a consequence, who is right and who is wrong. So long as Islam remains Islam (which it will) and the West remains the West (which is more dubious), this fundamental conflict between two great civilizations and ways of life will continue to define their relations in the future even as it has defined them for the past fourteen centuries.

These relations are further roiled by a number of substantive issues on which their positions differ or conflict. Historically one major issue was the control of territory, but that is now relatively insignificant. Nineteen of twenty-eight fault line conflicts in the mid-1990s between Muslims and non-Muslims were between Muslims and Christians. Eleven were with Orthodox Christians and seven with adherents of Western Christianity in Africa and Southeast Asia. Only one of these violent or potentially violent conflicts, that between Croats and Bosnians, occurred directly along the fault line between the West and Islam. The effective end of Western territorial imperialism and the absence so far of renewed Muslim territorial expansion have produced a geographical segregation so that only in a few places in the Balkans do Western and Muslim communities directly border on each other. Conflicts between the West and Islam thus focus less on territory than on broader intercivilizational issues such as weapons proliferation, human rights and democracy, control of oil, migration, Islamist terrorism, and Western intervention.

In the wake of the Cold War, the increasing intensity of this historical antagonism has been widely recognized by members of both communities. In 1991, for instance, Barry Buzan saw many reasons why a societal cold war was emerging “between the West and Islam, in which Europe would be on the front line.”

This development is partly to do with secular versus religious values, partly to do with the historical rivalry between Christendom and Islam, partly to do with jealousy of Western power, partly to do with resentments over Western domination of the postcolonial political structuring of the Middle East, and partly to do with the bitterness and humiliation of the invidious comparison between the accomplishments of Islamic and Western civilizations in the last two centuries.

In addition, he noted a “societal Cold War with Islam would serve to strengthen the European identity all round at a crucial time for the process of European union.” Hence, “there may well be a substantial community in the West prepared not only to support a societal Cold War with Islam, but to adopt policies that encourage it.” In 1990 Bernard Lewis, a leading Western scholar of Islam, analyzed “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and concluded:

It should now be clear that we are facing a mood and a movement far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations—that perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both. It is crucially important that we on our side should not be provoked into an equally historic but also equally irrational reaction against that rival. 7

Similar observations came from the Islamic community. “There are unmistakable signs,” argued a leading Egyptian journalist, Mohammed Sid-Ahmed, in 1994, “of a growing clash between the Judeo-Christian Western ethic and the Islamic revival movement, which is now stretching from the Atlantic in the west to China in the east.” A prominent Indian Muslim predicted in 1992 that the West’s “next confrontation is definitely going to come from the Muslim world. It is in the sweep of the Islamic nations from the Maghreb to Pakistan that the struggle for a new world order will begin.” For a leading Tunisian lawyer, the struggle was already underway: “Colonialism tried to deform all the cultural traditions of Islam. I am not an Islamist. I don’t think there is a conflict between religions. There is a conflict between civilizations.” 8

In the 1980s and 1990s the overall trend in Islam has been in an anti-Western direction. In part, this is the natural consequence of the Islamic Resurgence and the reaction against the perceived ”gharbzadegi” or Westoxication of Muslim societies. The “reaffirmation of Islam, whatever its specific sectarian form, means the repudiation of European and American influence upon local society, politics, and morals.” 9  On occasion in the past, Muslim leaders did tell their people: “We must Westernize.” If any Muslim leader has said that in the last quarter of the twentieth century, however, he is a lonely figure. Indeed, it is hard to find statements by any Muslims, whether politicians, officials, academics, businesspersons, or journalists, praising Western values and institutions. They instead stress the differences between their civilization and Western civilization, the superiority of their culture, and the need to maintain the integrity of that culture against Western onslaught. Muslims fear and resent Western power and the threat which this poses to their society and beliefs. They see Western culture as materialistic, corrupt, decadent, and immoral. They also see it as seductive, and hence stress all the more the need to resist its impact on their way of life. Increasingly, Muslims attack the West not for adhering to an imperfect, erroneous religion, which is nonetheless a “religion of the book,” but for not adhering to any religion at all. In Muslim eyes Western secularism, irreligiosity, and hence immorality are worse evils than the Western Christianity that produced them. In the Cold War the West labeled its opponent “godless communism”; in the post-Cold War conflict of civilizations Muslims see their opponent as “the godless West.”

These images of the West as arrogant, materialistic, repressive, brutal, and decadent are held not only by fundamentalist imams but also by those whom many in the West would consider their natural allies and supporters. Few books by Muslim authors published in the 1990s in the West received the praise given to Fatima Mernissi’s Islam and Democracy, generally hailed by Westerners as the courageous statement of a modern, liberal, female Muslim. 10  The portrayal of the West in that volume, however, could hardly be less flattering. The West is “militaristic” and “imperialistic” and has “traumatized” other nations through “colonial terror” (pp. 3, 9). Individualism, the hallmark of Western culture, is “the source of all trouble” (p. 8). Western power is fearful. The West “alone decides if satellites will be used to educate Arabs or to drop bombs on them.…It crushes our potentialities and invades our lives with its imported products and televised movies that swamp the airwaves.…[It] is a power that crushes us, besieges our markets, and controls our merest resources, initiatives, and potentialities. That was how we perceived our situation, and the Gulf War turned our perception into certitude” (pp. 146-47). The West “creates its power through military research” and then sells the products of that research to underdeveloped countries who are its “passive consumers.” To liberate themselves from this subservience, Islam must develop its own engineers and scientists, build its own weapons (whether nuclear or conventional, she does not specify), and “free itself from military dependence on the West” (pp. 43-44). These, to repeat, are not the views of a bearded, hooded ayatollah.

Whatever their political or religious opinions, Muslims agree that basic differences exist between their culture and Western culture. “The bottom line,” as Sheik Ghanoushi put it, “is that our societies are based on values other than those of the West.” Americans “come here,” an Egyptian government official said, “and want us to be like them. They understand nothing of our values or our culture.” “[W]e are different,” an Egyptian journalist agreed. “We have a different background, a different history. Accordingly we have the right to different futures.” Both popular and intellectually serious Muslim publications repeatedly describe what are alleged to be Western plots and designs to subordinate, humiliate, and undermine Islamic institutions and culture. 11

The reaction against the West can be seen not only in the central intellectual thrust of the Islamic Resurgence but also in the shift in the attitudes toward the West of governments in Muslim countries. The immediate postcolonial governments were generally Western in their political and economic ideologies and policies and pro-Western in their foreign policies, with partial exceptions, like Algeria and Indonesia, where independence resulted from a nationalist revolution. One by one, however, pro-Western governments gave way to governments less identified with the West or explicitly anti-Western in Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iran, Sudan, Lebanon, and Afghanistan. Less dramatic changes in the same direction occurred in the orientation and alignment of other states including Tunisia, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The two staunchest Cold War Muslim military allies of the United States, Turkey and Pakistan, are under Islamist political pressure internally and their ties with the West subject to increased strain.

In 1995 the only Muslim state which was clearly more pro-Western than it had been ten years previously was Kuwait. The West’s close friends in the Muslim world are now either like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf sheikdoms dependent on the West militarily or like Egypt and Algeria dependent on it economically. In the late 1980s the communist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed when it became apparent that the Soviet Union no longer could or would provide them with economic and military support. If it became apparent that the West would no longer maintain its Muslim satellite regimes, they are likely to suffer a comparable fate.

Growing Muslim anti-Westernism has been paralleled by expanding Western concern with the “Islamic threat” posed particularly by Muslim extremism. Islam is seen as a source of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and, in Europe, unwanted migrants. These concerns are shared by both publics and leaders. Asked in November 1994 whether the “Islamic revival” was a threat to U.S. interests in the Middle East, for instance, 61 percent of a sample of 35,000 Americans interested in foreign policy said yes and only 28 percent no. A year earlier, when asked what country posed the greatest danger to the United States, a random sample of the public picked Iran, China, and Iraq as the top three. Similarly, asked in 1994 to identify “critical threats” to the United States, 72 percent of the public and 61 percent of foreign policy leaders said nuclear proliferation and 69 percent of the public and 33 percent of leaders international terrorism—two issues widely associated with Islam. In addition, 33 percent of the public and 39 percent of the leaders saw a threat in the possible expansion of Islamic fundamentalism. Europeans have similar attitudes. In the spring of 1991, for instance, 51 percent of the French public said the principal threat to France was from the South with only 8 percent saying it would come from the East. The four countries which the French public most feared were all Muslim: Iraq, 52 percent; Iran, 35 percent; Libya, 26 percent; and Algeria, 22 percent. 12  Western political leaders, including the German chancellor and the French prime minister, expressed similar concerns, with the secretary general of NATO declaring in 1995 that Islamic fundamentalism was “at least as dangerous as communism” had been to the West, and a “very senior member” of the Clinton administration pointing to Islam as the global rival of the West. 13

With the virtual disappearance of a military threat from the east, NATO’s planning is increasingly directed toward potential threats from the south. “The Southern Tier,” one U.S. Army analyst observed in 1992, is replacing the Central Front and “is rapidly becoming NATO’s new front line.” To meet these southern threats, NATO’s southern members—Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal—began joint military planning and operations and at the same time enlisted the Maghreb governments in consultations on ways of countering Islamist extremists. These perceived threats also provided a rational for continuing a substantial U.S. military presence in Europe. “While U.S. forces in Europe are not a panacea for the problems created by fundamentalist Islam,” one former senior U.S. official observed, “those forces do cast a powerful shadow on military planning throughout the area. Remember the successful deployment of U.S., French and British forces from Europe in the Gulf War of 1990-1991? Those in the region do.” 14  And, he might have added, they remember it with fear, resentment, and hate.

Given the prevailing perceptions Muslims and Westerners have of each other plus the rise of Islamist extremism, it is hardly surprising that following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, an intercivilizational quasi war developed between Islam and the West. It is a quasi war for three reasons. First, all of Islam has not been fighting all of the West. Two fundamentalist states (Iran, Sudan), three nonfundamentalist states (Iraq, Libya, Syria), plus a wide range of Islamist organizations, with financial support from other Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, have been fighting the United States and, at times, Britain, France, and other Western states and groups, as well as Israel and Jews generally. Second, it is a quasi war because, apart from the Gulf War of 1990-1991, it has been fought with limited means: terrorism on one side and air power, covert action, and economic sanctions on the other. Third, it is a quasi war because while the violence has been continuing, it has also not been continuous. It has involved intermittent actions by one side which provoke responses by the other. Yet a quasi war is still a war. Even excluding the tens of thousands of Iraqi soldiers and civilians killed by Western bombing in January-February 1991, the deaths and other casualties number well into the thousands, and they occurred in virtually every year after 1979. Many more Westerners have been killed in this quasi war than were killed in the “real” war in the Gulf.

Both sides have, moreover, recognized this conflict to be a war. Early on, Khomeini declared, quite accurately, that “Iran is effectively at war with America,” 15  and Qadhafi regularly proclaims holy war against the West. Muslim leaders of other extremist groups and states have spoken in similar terms. On the Western side, the United States has classified seven countries as “terrorist states,” five of which are Muslim (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan); Cuba and North Korea are the others. This, in effect, identifies them as enemies, because they are attacking the United States and its friends with the most effective weapon at their disposal, and thus recognizes the existence of a state of war with them. U.S. officials repeatedly refer to these states as “outlaw,” “backlash,” and “rogue” states—thereby placing them outside the civilized international order and making them legitimate targets for multilateral or unilateral counter-measures. The United States Government charged the World Trade Center bombers with intending “to levy a war of urban terrorism against the United States” and argued that conspirators charged with planning further bombings in Manhattan were “soldiers” in a struggle “involving a war” against the United States. If Muslims allege that the West wars on Islam and if Westerners allege that Islamic groups war on the West, it seems reasonable to conclude that something very much like a war is underway.

In this quasi war, each side has capitalized on its own strengths and the other side’s weaknesses. Militarily it has been largely a war of terrorism versus air power. Dedicated Islamic militants exploit the open societies of the West and plant car bombs at selected targets. Western military professionals exploit the open skies of Islam and drop smart bombs on selected targets. The Islamic participants plot the assassination of prominent Westerners; the United States plots the overthrow of extremist Islamic regimes. During the fifteen years between 1980 and 1995, according to the U.S. Defense Department, the United States engaged in seventeen military operations in the Middle East, all of them directed against Muslims. No comparable pattern of U.S. military operations occurred against the people of any other civilization.

To date, each side has, apart from the Gulf War, kept the intensity of the violence at reasonably low levels and refrained from labeling violent acts as acts of war requiring an all-out response. “If Libya ordered one of its submarines to sink an American liner,” The Economist observed, “the United States would treat it as an act of war by a government, not seek the extradition of the submarine commander. In principle, the bombing of an airliner by Libya’s secret service is no different.” 16  Yet the participants in this war employ much more violent tactics against each other than the United States and Soviet Union directly employed against each other in the Cold War. With rare exceptions neither superpower purposefully killed civilians or even military belonging to the other. This, however, repeatedly happens in the quasi war.

American leaders allege that the Muslims involved in the quasi war are a small minority whose use of violence is rejected by the great majority of moderate Muslims. This may be true, but evidence to support it is lacking. Protests against anti-Western violence have been totally absent in Muslim countries. Muslim governments, even the bunker governments friendly to and dependent on the West, have been strikingly reticent when it comes to condemning terrorist acts against the West. On the other side, European governments and publics have largely supported and rarely criticized actions the United States has taken against its Muslim opponents, in striking contrast to the strenuous opposition they often expressed to American actions against the Soviet Union and communism during the Cold War. In civilizational conflicts, unlike ideological ones, kin stand by their kin.

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power. The problem for Islam is not the CIA or the U.S. Department of Defense. It is the West, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the universality of their culture and believe that their superior, if declining, power imposes on them the obligation to extend that culture throughout the world. These are the basic ingredients that fuel conflict between Islam and the West.

ASIA, CHINA, AND AMERICA

The Cauldron of Civilizations. The economic changes in Asia, particularly East Asia, are one of the most significant developments in the world in the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1990s this economic development had generated economic euphoria among many observers who saw East Asia and the entire Pacific Rim linked together in ever-expanding commercial networks that would insure peace and harmony among nations. This optimism was based on the highly dubious assumption that commercial interchange is invariably a force for peace. Such, however, is not the case. Economic growth creates political instability within countries and between countries, altering the balance of power among countries and regions. Economic exchange brings people into contact; it does not bring them into agreement. Historically it has often produced a deeper awareness of the differences between peoples and stimulated mutual fears. Trade between countries produces conflict as well as profit. If past experience holds, the Asia of economic sunshine will generate an Asia of political shadows, an Asia of instability and conflict.

The economic development of Asia and the growing self-confidence of Asian societies are disrupting international politics in at least three ways. First, economic development enables Asian states to expand their military capabilities, promotes uncertainty as to the future relationships among these countries, and brings to the fore issues and rivalries that had been suppressed during the Cold War, thus enhancing the probability of conflict and instability in the region. Second, economic development increases the intensity of conflicts between Asian’ societies and the West, primarily the United States, and strengthens the ability of Asian societies to prevail in those struggles. Third, the economic growth of Asia’s largest power increases Chinese influence in the region and the likelihood of China reasserting its traditional hegemony in East Asia, thereby compelling other nations either to “bandwagon” and to accommodate themselves to this development or to “balance” and to attempt to contain Chinese influence.

During the several centuries of Western ascendancy the international relations that counted were a Western game played out among the major Western powers, supplemented in some degree first by Russia in the eighteenth century and then by Japan in the twentieth century. Europe was the principal arena of great power conflict and cooperation, and even during the Cold War the principal line of superpower confrontation was in the heart of Europe. Insofar as the international relations that count in the post-Cold War world have a primary turf, that turf is Asia and particularly East Asia. Asia is the cauldron of civilizations. East Asia alone contains societies belonging to six civilizations—Japanese, Sinic, Orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim, and Western—and South Asia adds Hinduism. The core states of four civilizations, Japan, China, Russia, and the United States, are major actors in East Asia; South Asia adds India; and Indonesia is a rising Muslim power. In addition, East Asia contains several middle-level powers with increasing economic clout, such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia, plus a potentially strong Vietnam. The result is a highly complex pattern of international relationships, comparable in many ways to those which existed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, and fraught with all the fluidity and uncertainty that characterize multipolar situations.

The multipower, multicivilizational nature of East Asia distinguishes it from Western Europe, and economic and political differences reinforce this contrast. All the countries of Western Europe are stable democracies, have market economies, and are at high levels of economic development. In the mid-1990s East Asia includes one stable democracy, several new and unstable democracies, four of the five communist dictatorships remaining in the world, plus military governments, personal dictatorships, and one-party-dominant authoritarian systems. Levels of economic development varied from those of Japan and Singapore to those of Vietnam and North Korea. A general trend exists toward marketization and economic opening, but economic systems still run the gamut from the command economy of North Korea through various mixes of state control and private enterprise to the laissez-faire economy of Hong Kong.

Apart from the extent to which Chinese hegemony at times brought occasional order to the region, an international society (in the British sense of the term) has not existed in East Asia as it has in Western Europe. 17  In the late twentieth century Europe has been bound together by an extraordinarily dense complex of international institutions: the European Union, NATO, Western European Union, Council of Europe, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and others. East Asia has had nothing comparable except ASEAN, which does not include any major powers, has generally eschewed security matters, and is only beginning to move toward the most primitive forms of economic integration. In the 1990s the much broader organization, APEC, incorporating most of the Pacific Rim countries came into existence but it was an even weaker talking shop than ASEAN. No other major multilateral institutions bring together the principal Asian powers.

Again in contrast to Western Europe, the seeds for conflict among states are plentiful in East Asia. Two widely identified danger spots have involved the two Koreas and the two Chinas. These are, however, leftovers from the Cold War. Ideological differences are of declining significance and by 1995 relations had expanded significantly between the two Chinas and had begun to develop between the two Koreas. The probability of Koreans fighting Koreans exists but is low; the prospects of Chinese fighting Chinese are higher, but still limited, unless the Taiwanese should renounce their Chinese identity and formally constitute an independent Republic of Taiwan. As a Chinese military document approvingly quoted one general saying, “there should be limits to fights among family members.” 18  While violence between the two Koreas or the two Chinas remains possible, cultural commonalities are likely to erode that possibility over time.

In East Asia conflicts inherited from the Cold War are being supplemented and supplanted by other possible conflicts reflecting old rivalries and new economic relationships. Analyses of East Asian security in the early 1990s regularly referred to East Asia as “a dangerous neighborhood,” as “ripe for rivalry,” as a region of “several cold wars,” as “heading back to the future” in which war and instability would prevail. 19  In contrast to Western Europe, East Asia in the 1990s has unresolved territorial disputes, the most important of which include those between Russia and Japan over the northern islands and between China, Vietnam, the Philippines, and potentially other Southeast Asian states over the South China Sea. The differences over boundaries between China, on the one hand, and Russia and India, on the other, were reduced in the mid-1990s but could resurface, as could Chinese claims to Mongolia. Insurgencies or secessionist movements, in most cases supported from abroad, exist in Mindanao, East Timor, Tibet, southern Thailand, and eastern Myanmar. In addition, while interstate peace exists in East Asia in the mid-1990s, during the previous fifty years major wars have occurred in Korea and Vietnam, and the central power in Asia, China, has fought Americans plus almost all its neighbors including Koreans, Vietnamese, Nationalist Chinese, Indians, Tibetans, and Russians. In 1993 an analysis by the Chinese military identified eight regional hot spots that threatened China’s military security, and the Chinese Central Military Commission concluded that generally the East Asian security outlook was “very grim.” After centuries of strife, Western Europe is peaceful and war is unthinkable. In East Asia it is not, and, as Aaron Friedberg has suggested, Europe’s past could be Asia’s future. 20

Economic dynamism, territorial disputes, resurrected rivalries, and political uncertainties fueled significant increases in East Asian military budgets and military capabilities in the 1980s and 1990s. Exploiting their new wealth and, in many cases, well-educated populations, East Asian governments have moved to replace large, poorly equipped, “peasant” armies with smaller, more professional, technologically sophisticated military forces. With doubt increasing concerning the extent of American commitment in East Asia, countries aim to become militarily self-reliant. While East Asian states continued to import substantial amounts of weapons from Europe, the United States, and the former Soviet Union, they gave preference to the import of technology which would enable them to produce at home sophisticated aircraft, missiles, and electronics equipment. Japan and the Sinic states—China, Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea—have increasingly sophisticated arms industries. Given the littoral geography of East Asia, their emphasis has been on force projection and air and naval capabilities. As a result, nations that previously were not militarily capable of fighting each other are increasingly able to do so. These military buildups have involved little transparency and hence have fostered more suspicion and uncertainty. 21  In a situation of changing power relationships, every government necessarily and legitimately wonders: “Ten years from now who will be my enemy and who, if anyone, will be my friend?”

Asian-American Cold Wars. In the late 1980s and early 1990s relationships between the United States and Asian countries, apart from Vietnam, increasingly became antagonistic, and the ability of the United States to prevail in these controversies declined. These tendencies were particularly marked with respect to the major powers in East Asia, and American relations with China and Japan evolved along parallel paths. Americans, on the one hand, and Chinese and Japanese on the other, spoke of cold wars developing between their countries. 22  These simultaneous trends began in the Bush administration and accelerated in the Clinton administration. By the mid-1990s American relations with the two major Asian powers could at best be described as “strained” and there seemed to be little prospect for them to become less so. *  In the early 1990s Japanese-American relations became increasingly heated with controversies over a wide range of issues, including Japan’s role in the Gulf War, the American military presence in Japan, Japanese attitudes toward American human rights policies with respect to China and other countries, Japanese participation in peacekeeping missions, and, most important, economic relations, especially trade. References to trade wars became common place. 23  American officials, particularly in the Clinton administration, demanded more and more concessions from Japan; Japanese officials resisted these demands more and more forcefully. Each Japanese-American trade controversy was more acrimonious and more difficult to resolve than the previous one. In March 1994, for instance, President Clinton signed an order giving him authority to apply stricter trade sanctions on Japan, which brought protests not only from the Japanese but also from the head of GATT, the principal world trading organization. A short while later Japan responded with a “blistering attack” on U.S. policies, and shortly after that the United States “formally accused Japan” of discriminating against U.S. companies in awarding government contracts. In the spring of 1995 the Clinton administration threatened to impose 100 percent tariffs on Japanesse luxury cars, with an agreement averting this being reached just before the sanctions would have gone into effect. Something closely resembling a trade war was clearly underway between the two countries. By the mid-1990s the acrimony had reached the point where leading Japanese political figures began to question the U.S. military presence in Japan.

During these years the public in each country became steadily less favorably disposed toward the other country. In 1985, 87 percent of the American public said they had a generally friendly attitude toward Japan. By 1990 this had dropped to 67 percent, and by 1993 a bare 50 percent of Americans felt favorably disposed toward Japan and almost two-thirds said they tried to avoid buying Japanese products. In 1985, 73 percent of Japanese described U.S. Japanese relations as friendly; by 1993, 64 percent said they were unfriendly. The year 1991 marked the crucial turning point in the shift of public opinion out of its Cold War mold. In that year each country displaced the Soviet Union in the perceptions of the other. For the first time Americans rated Japan ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to American security, and for the first time Japanese rated the United States ahead of the Soviet Union as a threat to Japan’s security. 24

Changes in public attitudes were matched by changes in elite perceptions. In the United States a significant group of academic, intellectual, and political revisionists emerged who emphasized the cultural and structural differences between the two countries and the need for the United States to take a much tougher line in dealing with Japan on economic issues. The images of Japan in the media, nonfiction publications, and popular novels became increasingly derogatory. In parallel fashion in Japan a new generation of political leaders appeared who had not experienced American power in and benevolence after World War II, who took great pride in Japanese economic successes, and who were quite willing to resist American demands in ways their elders had not been. These Japanese “resisters” were the counterpart to the American “revisionists,” and in both countries candidates found that advocating a tough line on issues affecting Japanese-American relations went over well with the voters.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s American relations with China also became increasingly antagonistic. The conflicts between the two countries, Deng Xiaoping said in September 1991, constituted “a new cold war,” a phrase regularly repeated in the Chinese press. In August 1995 the government’s press agency declared that “Sino-American relationships are at the lowest ebb since the two countries established diplomatic relations” in 1979. Chinese officials regularly denounced alleged interference in Chinese affairs. “We should point out” a 1992 Chinese government internal document argued, “that since becoming the sole superpower, the United States has been grasping wildly for a new hegemonism and power politics, and also that its strength is in relative decline and that there are limits to what it can do.” “Western hostile forces,” President Jiang Zemin said in August 1995, “have not for a moment abandoned their plot to Westernize and ’divide’ our country.” By 1995 a broad consensus reportedly existed among the Chinese leaders and scholars that the United States was trying to “divide China territorially, subvert it politically, contain it strategically and frustrate it economically.” 25

Evidence existed for all these charges. The United States allowed President Lee of Taiwan to come to the United States, sold 150 F-16s to Taiwan, designated Tibet an “occupied soverign territory,” denounced China for its human rights abuses, denied Beijing the 2000 Olympics, normalized relations with Vietnam, accused China of exporting chemical weapons components to Iran, imposed trade sanctions on China for sales of missile equipment to Pakistan, and threatened China with additional sanctions over economic issues while at the same time barring China’s admission to the World Trade Organization. Each side accused the other of bad faith: China, according to Americans, violated understandings on missile exports, intellectual property rights, and prison labor; the United States, according to the Chinese, violated agreements in letting President Lee come to the United States and selling advanced fighter aircraft to Taiwan.

The most important group in China with an antagonistic view toward the United States was the military, who, apparently, regularly pressured the government to take a tougher line with the United States. In June 1993, 100 Chinese generals reportedly sent a letter to Deng complaining of the government’s “passive” policy toward the United States and its failure to resist U.S. efforts to “blackmail” China. In the fall of that year a confidential Chinese government document outlined the military’s reasons for conflict with the United States: “Because China and the United States have longstanding conflicts over their different ideologies, social systems, and foreign policies, it will prove impossible to fundamentally improve Sino-U.S. relations.” Since Americans believe that East Asia will become “the heart of the world economy…the United States cannot tolerate a powerful adversary in East Asia.” 26  By the mid-1990s Chinese officials and agencies routinely portrayed the United States as a hostile power.

The growing antagonism between China and the United States was in part driven by domestic politics in both countries. As was the case with Japan, informed American opinion was divided. Many Establishment figures argued for constructive engagement with China, expanding economic relations, and drawing China into the so-called community of nations. Others emphasized the potential Chinese threat to American interests, argued that conciliatory moves toward China produced negative results, and urged a policy of firm containment. In 1993 the American public ranked China second only to Iran as the country that posed the greatest danger to the United States. American politics often operated so as to produce symbolic gestures, such as Lee’s visit to Cornell and Clinton’s meeting with the Dalai Lama, that outraged the Chinese, while at the same time leading the administration to sacrifice human rights considerations for economic interests, as in the extension of MFN treatment. On the Chinese side, the government needed a new enemy to bolster its appeals to Chinese nationalism and to legitimize its power. As the succession struggle lengthened, the political influence of the military rose, and President Jiang and other contestants for post-Deng power could not afford to be lax in promoting Chinese interests.

In the course of a decade American relations thus “deteriorated” with both Japan and China. This shift in Asian-American relations was so broad and encompassed so many different issue areas that it seems unlikely that its causes can be found in individual conflicts of interest over auto parts, camera sales, or military bases, on the one hand, or dissident jailings, weapons transfers, or intellectual piracy, on the other. In addition, it was clearly against American national interest to allow its relations simultaneously to become more conflictual with both major Asian powers. The elementary rules of diplomacy and power politics dictate that the United States should attempt to play one off against the other or at least to sweeten relations with one if they were becoming more conflictual with the other. Yet this did not happen. Broader factors were at work promoting conflict in Asian-American relations and making it more difficult to resolve the individual issues that came up in those relations. This general phenomenon had general causes.

First, increased interaction between Asian societies and the United States in the form of expanded communications, trade, investment, and knowledge of each other multiplied the issues and subjects where interests could, and did, clash. This increased interaction made threatening to each society practices and beliefs of the other which at a distance had seemed harmlessly exotic. Second, the Soviet threat in the 1950s led to the U.S.-Japan mutual security treaty. The growth of Soviet power in the 1970s led to the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China in 1979 and ad hoc cooperation between the two countries to promote their common interest in neutralizing that threat. The end of the Cold War removed this overriding common interest of the United States and the Asian powers and left nothing in its place. Consequently, other issues where significant conflicts of interest existed came to the fore. Third, the economic development of the East Asian countries shifted the overall balance of power between them and the United States. Asians, as we have seen, increasingly affirmed the validity of their values and institutions and the superiority of their culture to Western culture. Americans, on the other hand, tended to assume, particularly after their Cold War victory, that their values and institutions were universally relevant and that they still had the power to shape the foreign and domestic policies of Asian societies.

This changing international environment brought to the fore the fundamental cultural differences between Asian and American civilizations. At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, “saving face,” and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.

These differences had particular consequences for the relations between the United States and the major Asian societies. Diplomats made great efforts to resolve American conflicts with Japan over economic issues, particularly Japan’s trade surplus and the resistance of Japan to American products and investment. Japanese-American trade negotiations took on many of the characteristics of Cold War Soviet-American arms control negotiations. As of 1995 the former had produced even fewer results than the latter because these conflicts stem from the fundamental differences in the two economies, and particularly the unique nature of the Japanese economy among those of the major industrialized countries. Japan’s imports of manufactured goods have amounted to about 3.1 percent of its GNP compared to an average of 7.4 percent for the other major industrialized powers. Foreign direct investment in Japan has been a minuscule 0.7 percent of GDP compared to 28.6 percent for the United States and 38.5 percent for Europe. Alone among the big industrial countries, Japan ran budget surpluses in the early 1990s. 27

Overall the Japanese economy has not operated in the way the supposedly universal laws of Western economics dictate. The easy assumption by Western economists in the 1980s that devaluing the dollar would reduce the Japanese trade surplus proved false. While the Plaza agreement of 1985 rectified the American trade deficit with Europe, it had little effect on the deficit with Japan. As the yen appreciated to less than one hundred to the dollar, the Japanese trade surplus remained high and even increased. The Japanese were thus able to sustain both a strong currency and a trade surplus. Western economic thinking tends to posit a negative trade-off between unemployment and inflation, with an unemployment rate significantly less than 5 percent thought to trigger inflationary pressures. Yet for years Japan had unemployment averaging less than 3 percent and inflation averaging 1.5 percent. By the 1990s both American and Japanese economists had come to recognize and to conceptualize the basic differences in these two economic systems. Japan’s uniquely low level of manufactured imports, one careful study concluded, “cannot be explained through standard economic factors.” “The Japanese economy does not follow Western logic,” another analyst argued, “whatever Western forecasters say, for the simple reason that it is not a Western free-market economy. The Japanese…have invented a type of economics that behaves in ways that confound the predictive powers of Western observers.” 28

What explains the distinctive character of the Japanese economy? Among major industrialized countries, the Japanese economy is unique because Japanese society is uniquely non-Western. Japanese society and culture differ from Western, and particularly American, society and culture. These differences have been highlighted in every serious comparative analysis of Japan and America. 29  Resolution of the economic issues between Japan and the United States depends on fundamental changes in the nature of one or both economies, which, in turn, depend upon basic changes in the society and culture of one or both countries. Such changes are not impossible. Societies and cultures do change. This may result from a major traumatic event: total defeat in World War II made two of the world’s most militaristic countries into two of its most pacifist ones. It seems unlikely, however, that either the United States or Japan will impose an economic Hiroshima on the other. Economic development also can change a country’s social structure and culture profoundly, as occurred in Spain between the early 1950s and the late 1970s, and perhaps economic wealth will make Japan into a more American-like consumption-oriented society. In the late 1980s people in both Japan and America argued that their country should become more like the other country. In a limited way the Japanese-American agreement on Structural Impediment Initiatives was designed to promote this convergence. The failure of this and similar efforts testifies to the extent to which economic differences are deeply rooted in the cultures of the two societies.

While the conflicts between the United States and Asia had their sources in cultural differences, the outcomes of their conflicts reflected the changing power relations between the United States and Asia. The United States scored some victories in these disputes, but the trend was in an Asian direction, and the shift in power further exacerbated the conflicts. The United States expected the Asian governments to accept it as the leader of “the international community” and to acquiesce in the application of Western principles and values to their societies. The Asians, on the other hand, as Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said, were “increasingly conscious and proud of their accomplishments,” expected to be treated as equals, and tended to regard the United States as “an international nanny, if not bully.” Deep imperatives within American culture, however, impel the United States to be at least a nanny if not a bully in international affairs, and as a result American expectations were increasingly at odds with Asian ones. Across a wide range of issues, Japanese and other Asian leaders learned to say no to their American counterparts, expressed at times in polite Asian versions of “buzz off.” The symbolic turning point in Asian-American relations was perhaps what one senior Japanese official termed the “first big train wreck” in U.S.-Japanese relations, which occurred in February 1994, when Prime Minister Morihiro Hosokawa firmly rejected President Clinton’s demand for numerical targets for Japanese imports of American manufactured goods. “We could not have imagined something like this happening even a year ago,” commented another Japanese official. A year later Japan’s foreign minister underlined this change stating that in an era of economic competition among nations and regions, Japan’s national interest was more important than its “mere identity” as a member of the West. 30

Gradual American accommodation to the changed balance of power was reflected in American policy toward Asia in the 1990s. First, in effect conceding that it lacked the will and/or the ability to pressure Asian societies, the United States separated issue areas where it might have leverage from issue areas where it had conflicts. Although Clinton had proclaimed human rights a top priority of American foreign policy toward China, in 1994 he responded to pressure from U.S. businesses, Taiwan, and other sources, delinked human rights from economic issues, and abandoned the effort to use extension of most favored nation status as a means of influencing Chinese behavior toward its political dissidents. In a parallel move, the administration explicitly separated security policy toward Japan, where presumably it could exert leverage, from trade and other economic issues, where its relations with Japan were most conflictual. The United States thus surrendered weapons it could have used to promote human rights in China and trade concessions from Japan.

Second, the United States repeatedly pursued a course of anticipated reciprocity with the Asian nations, making concessions with the expectation they would induce comparable ones from the Asians. This course was often justified by reference to the need to maintain “constructive engagement” or “dialogue” with the Asian country. More times than not, however, the Asian country interpreted the concession as a sign of American weakness and hence that it could go still further in rejecting American demands. This pattern was particularly noticeable with respect to China, which responded to the U.S. delinkage of MFN status by a new and intensive round of human rights violations. Because of the American penchant to identify “good” relations with “friendly” relations, the United States is at a considerable disadvantage in competing with Asian societies who identify “good” relations with ones that produce victories for them. To the Asians, American concessions are not to be reciprocated, they are to be exploited.

Third, a pattern developed in the recurring U.S.-Japan conflicts over trade issues in which the United States would make demands on Japan and threaten sanctions if they were not met. Prolonged negotiations would ensue and then at the last moment before the sanctions were to go into effect, agreement would be announced. The agreements were generally so ambiguously phrased that the United States could claim a victory in principle, and the Japanese could implement or not implement the agreement as they wished and everything would go on as before. In similar fashion, the Chinese would reluctantly agree to statements of broad principles concerning human rights, intellectual property, or proliferation, only to interpret them very differently from the United States and continue with their previous policies.

These differences in culture and the shifting power balance between Asia and America encouraged Asian societies to support each other in their conflicts with the United States. In 1994, for instance, virtually all Asian countries “from Australia to Malaysia to South Korea,” rallied behind Japan in its resistance to the U.S. demand for numerical targets for imports. A similar rallying simultaneously took place in favor of MFN treatment for China, with Japan’s Prime Minister Hosokawa in the lead arguing that Western human rights concepts could not be “blindly applied” to Asia, and Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew warning that if it pressured China “the United States will find itself all alone in the Pacific.” 31  In another show of solidarity, Asians, Africans, and others rallied behind the Japanese in backing reelection of the Japanese incumbent as head of the World Health Organization against the opposition of the West, and Japan promoted a South Korean to head the World Trade Organization against the American candidate, former president of Mexico Carlos Salinas. The record shows indisputably that by the 1990s on trans-Pacific issues each country in East Asia felt that it had much more in common with other East Asian countries than it had in common with the United States.

The end of the Cold War, the increasing interaction between Asia and America, and the relative decline in American power thus brought to the surface the clash of cultures between the United States and Japan and other Asian societies and enabled the latter to resist American pressure. The rise of China posed a more fundamental challenge to the United States. U.S. conflicts with China covered a much broader range of issues than those with Japan, including economic questions, human rights, Tibet, Taiwan, the South China Sea, and weapons proliferation. On almost no major policy issue did the United States and China share common objectives. The differences go across the board. As with Japan, these conflicts were in large part rooted in the different cultures of the two societies. The conflicts between the United States and China, however, also involved fundamental issues of power. China is unwilling to accept American leadership or hegemony in the world; the United States is unwilling to accept Chinese leadership or hegemony in Asia. For over two hundred years the United States has attempted to prevent the emergence of an overwhelmingly dominant power in Europe. For almost a hundred years, beginning with its “Open Door” policy toward China, it has attempted to do the same in East Asia. To achieve these goals it has fought two world wars and a cold war against Imperial Germany, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the Soviet Union, and Communist China. This American interest remains and was reaffirmed by Presidents Reagan and Bush. The emergence of China as the dominant regional power in East Asia, if it continues, challenges that central American interest. The underlying cause of conflict between America and China is their basic difference over what should be the future balance of power in East Asia.

Chinese Hegemony: Balancing and Bandwagoning. With six civilizations, eighteen countries, rapidly growing economies, and major political, economic and social differences among its societies, East Asia could develop any one of several patterns of international relations in the early twenty-first century. Conceivably an extremely complex set of cooperative and conflictual relations could emerge involving most of the major and middle-level powers of the region. Or a major power, multipolar international system could take shape with China, Japan, the United States, Russia, and possibly India balancing and competing with each other. Alternatively, East Asian politics could be dominated by a sustained bipolar rivalry between China and Japan or between China and the United States, with other countries aligning themselves with one side or the other or opting for nonalignment. Or conceivably East Asian politics could return to its traditional unipolar pattern with a hierarchy of power centered on Beijing. If China sustains its high levels of economic growth into the twenty-first century, maintains its unity in the post-Deng era, and is not hamstrung by succession struggles, it is likely to attempt to realize the last of these outcomes. Whether it succeeds depends upon the reactions of the other players in the East Asian power politics game.

China’s history, culture, traditions, size, economic dynamism, and self-image all impel it to assume a hegemonic position in East Asia. This goal is a natural result of its rapid economic development. Every other major power, Britain and France, Germany and Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, has engaged in outward expansion, assertion, and imperialism coincidental with or immediately following the years in which it went through rapid industrialization and economic growth. No reason exists to think that the acquisition of economic and military power will not have comparable effects in China. For two thousand years China was the preeminent power in East Asia. Chinese now increasingly assert their intention to resume that historic role and to bring to an end the overlong century of humiliation and subordination to the West and Japan that began with British imposition of the Treaty of Nanking in 1842.

In the late 1980s China began converting its growing economic resources into military power and political influence. If its economic development continues, this conversion process will assume major proportions. According to official figures, during most of the 1980s Chinese military spending declined. Between 1988 and 1993, however, military expenditures doubled in current amounts and increased by 50 percent in real terms. A 21 percent rise was planned for 1995. Estimates of Chinese military expenditures for 1993 range from roughly $22 billion to $37 billion at official exchange rates and up to $90 billion in terms of purchasing power parity. In the late 1980s China redrafted its military strategy, shifting from defense against invasion in a major war with the Soviet Union to a regional strategy emphasizing power projection. In accordance with this shift it began developing its naval capabilities, acquiring modernized, longer-range combat aircraft, developing an inflight refueling capability, and deciding to acquire an aircraft carrier. China also entered into a mutually beneficial arms purchasing relationship with Russia.

China is on its way to becoming the dominant power in East Asia. East Asian economic development is becoming more and more China-oriented, fueled by the rapid growth of the mainland and the three other Chinas plus the central role which ethnic Chinese have played in developing the economies of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. More threateningly, China is increasingly vigorous in asserting its claim to the South China Sea: developing its base in the Paracel Islands, fighting the Vietnamese over a handful of islands in 1988, establishing a military presence on Mischief Reef off the Philippines, and laying claim to the gas fields adjoining Indonesia’s Natuna Island. China also ended its low-key support for a continued U.S. military presence in East Asia and began actively to oppose that deployment. Similarly, although during the Cold War China quietly urged Japan to strengthen its military power, in the post-Cold War years it has expressed increased concern over the Japanese military buildup. Acting in classic fashion as a regional hegemon, China is attempting to minimize obstacles to its achievement of regional military superiority.

With rare exceptions, such as possibly the South China Sea, Chinese hegemony in East Asia is unlikely to involve expansion of territorial control through the direct use of military force. It is likely to mean, however, that China will expect other East Asian countries, in varying degrees, to do some or all of the following:

• support Chinese territorial integrity, Chinese control of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the integration of Hong Kong and Taiwan into China;

• acquiesce in Chinese sovereignty over the South China Sea and possibly Mongolia;

• generally support China in conflicts with the West over economics, human rights, weapons proliferation, and other issues;

• accept Chinese military predominance in the region and refrain from acquiring nuclear weapons or conventional forces that could challenge that predominance;

• adopt trade and investment policies compatible with Chinese interests and conducive to Chinese economic development;

• defer to Chinese leadership in dealing with regional problems;

• be generally open to immigration from China;

• prohibit or suppress anti-China and anti-Chinese movements within their societies;

• respect the rights of Chinese within their societies, including their right to maintain close relations with their kin and provinces of origin in China;

• abstain from military alliances or anti-China coalitions with other powers;

• promote the use of Mandarin as a supplement to and eventually a replacement for English as the Language of Wider Communication in East Asia.

Analysts compare the emergence of China to the rise of Wilhelmine Germany as the dominant power in Europe in the late nineteenth century. The emergence of new great powers is always highly destabilizing, and if it occurs, China’s emergence as a major power will dwarf any comparable phenomena during the last half of the second millennium. “The size of China’s displacement of the world,” Lee Kuan Yew observed in 1994, “is such that the world must find a new balance in 30 or 40 years. It’s not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man.” 32  If Chinese economic development continues for another decade, as seems possible, and if China maintains its unity during the succession period, as seems probable, East Asian countries and the world will have to respond to the increasingly assertive role of this biggest player in human history.

Broadly speaking, states can react in one or a combination of two ways to the rise of a new power. Alone or in coalition with other states they can attempt to insure their security by balancing against the emerging power, containing it, and, if necessary, going to war to defeat it. Alternatively, states can try to bandwagon with the emerging power, accommodating it, and assuming a secondary or subordinate position in relation to the emerging power with the expectation that their core interests will be protected. Or, conceivably, states could attempt some mixture of balancing and bandwagoning, although this runs the risk of both antagonizing the rising power and having no protection against it. According to Western international relations theory, balancing is usually a more desirable option and in fact has been more frequently resorted to than bandwagoning. As Stephen Walt has argued,

In general, calculations of intent should encourage states to balance. Bandwagoning is risky because it requires trust; one assists a dominant power in the hope that it will remain benevolent. It is safer to balance, in case the dominant power turns out to be aggressive. Furthermore, alignment with the weaker side enhances one’s influence within the resulting coalition, because the weaker side has greater need of assistance. 33

Walt’s analysis of alliance formation in Southwest Asia showed that states almost always attempted to balance against external threats. It has also been generally assumed that balancing behavior was the norm throughout most modern European history, with the several powers shifting their alliances so as to balance and contain the threats they saw posed by Philip II, Louis XIV, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, the Kaiser, and Hitler. Walt concedes, however, that states may choose bandwagoning “under some conditions,” and, as Randall Schweller argues, revisionist states are likely to bandwagon with a rising power because they are dissatisfied and hope to gain from changes in the status quo. 34  In addition, as Walt suggests, bandwagoning does require a degree of trust in the nonmalevolent intentions of the more powerful state.

In balancing power, states can play either primary or secondary roles. First, State A can attempt to balance power against State B, which it perceives to be a potential adversary, by making alliances with States C and D, by developing its own military and other power (which is likely to lead to an arms race), or by some combination of these means. In this situation States A and B are the primary balancers of each other. Second, State A may not perceive any other state as an immediate adversary but it may have an interest in promoting a balance of power between States B and C either of which if it became too powerful could pose a threat to State A. In this situation State A acts as a secondary balancer with respect to States B and C, which may be primary balancers of each other.

How will states react to China if it begins to emerge as the hegemonic power in East Asia? The responses will undoubtedly vary widely. Since China has defined the United States as its principal enemy, the predominant American inclination will be to act as a primary balancer and prevent Chinese hegemony. Assuming such a role would be in keeping with the traditional American concern with preventing the domination of either Europe or Asia by any single power. That goal is no longer relevant in Europe, but it could be in Asia. A loose federation in Western Europe closely linked to the United States culturally, politically, and economically will not threaten American security. A unified, powerful, and assertive China could. Is it in American interest to be ready to go to war if necessary to prevent Chinese hegemony in East Asia? If Chinese economic development continues, this could be the single most serious security issue American policymakers confront in the early twenty-first century. If the United States does want to stop Chinese domination of East Asia, it will need to redirect the Japanese alliance to that purpose, develop close military ties with other Asian nations, and enhance its military presence in Asia and the military power it can bring to bear in Asia. If the United States is not willing to fight against Chinese hegemony, it will need to foreswear its universalism, learn to live with that hegemony, and reconcile itself to a marked reduction in its ability to shape events on the far side of the Pacific. Either course involves major costs and risks. The greatest danger is that the United States will make no clear choice and stumble into a war with China without considering carefully whether that is in its national interest and without being prepared to wage such a war effectively.

Theoretically the United States could attempt to contain China by playing a secondary balancing role if some other major power acted as the primary balancer of China. The only conceivable possibility is Japan, and this would require major changes in Japanese policy: intensified Japanese rearmament, acquisition of nuclear weapons, and active competition with China for support among other Asian powers. While Japan might be willing to participate in a U.S.-led coalition to counter China, although that also is unsure, it is unlikely to become the primary balancer of China. In addition, the United States has not shown much interest or ability at playing a secondary balancing role. As a new small country, it attempted to do so during the Napoleonic era and ended up fighting wars with both Britain and France. During the first part of the twentieth century the United States made only minimum efforts to promote balances among European and Asian countries and as a result became engaged in world wars to restore balances that had been disrupted. During the Cold War the United States had no alternative to being the primary balancer of the Soviet Union. The United States has thus never been a secondary balancer as a great power. Becoming one means playing a subtle, flexible, ambiguous, and even disingenuous role. It could mean shifting support from one side to another, refusing to support or opposing a state that in terms of American values seems to be morally right, and supporting a state that is morally wrong. Even if Japan did emerge as the primary balancer of China in Asia, the ability of the United States to support that balance is open to question. The United States is far more able to mobilize directly against one existing threat than it is to balance off two potential threats. Finally, a bandwagoning propensity is likely to exist among Asian powers, which would preclude any U.S. effort at secondary balancing.

To the extent that bandwagoning depends on trust, three propositions follow. First, bandwagoning is more likely to occur between states belonging to the same civilization or otherwise sharing cultural commonalities than between states lacking any cultural commonality. Second, levels of trust are likely to vary with the context. A younger boy will bandwagon with his older brother when they confront other boys; he is less likely to trust his older brother when they are alone at home. Hence more frequent interactions between states of different civilizations will further encourage bandwagoning within civilizations. Third, bandwagoning and balancing propensities may vary between civilizations because the levels of trust among their members differ. The prevalence of balancing in the Middle East, for instance, may reflect the proverbial low levels of trust in Arab and other Middle Eastern cultures.

In addition to these influences, the propensity to bandwagon or balance will be shaped by expectations and preferences concerning the distribution of power. European societies went through a phase of absolutism but avoided the sustained bureaucratic empires or “oriental despotisms” that characterized Asia for much of history. Feudalism provided a basis for pluralism and the assumption that some dispersion of power was both natural and desirable. So also at the international level a balance of power was thought natural and desirable, and the responsibility of statesmen was to protect and sustain it. Hence when the equilibrium was threatened, balancing behavior was called for to restore it. The European model of international society, in short, reflected the European model of domestic society.

The Asian bureaucratic empires, in contrast, had little room for social or political pluralism and the division of power. Within China bandwagoning appears to have been far more important compared with balancing than was the case in Europe. During the 1920s, Lucian Pye notes, “the warlords first sought to learn what they could gain by identifying with strength, and only then would they explore the payoffs of allying with the weak. … for the Chinese warlords, autonomy was not the ultimate value, as it was in the traditional European balance-of-power calculations; rather they based their decisions upon associating with power.” In a similar vein, Avery Goldstein argues that bandwagoning characterized politics in communist China while the authority structure was relatively clear from 1949 to 1966. When the Cultural Revolution then created conditions of near anarchy and uncertainty concerning authority and threatened the survival of political actors, balancing behavior began to prevail. 35  Presumably the restoration of a more clearly defined structure of authority after 1978 also restored bandwagoning as the prevailing pattern of political behavior.

Historically the Chinese did not draw a sharp distinction between domestic and external affairs. Their “image of world order was no more than a corollary of the Chinese internal order and thus an extended projection of the Chinese civilizational identity” which “was presumed to reproduce itself in a concentrically larger expandable circle as the correct cosmic order.” Or, as Roderick MacFarquhar phrased it, “The traditional Chinese world view was a reflection of the Confucian vision of a carefully articulated hierarchical society. Foreign monarchs and states were assumed to be tributaries of the Middle Kingdom: ’There are not two suns in the sky, there cannot be two emperors on earth.’ ” As a result the Chinese have not been sympathetic to “multipolar or even multilateral concepts of security.” Asians generally are willing to “accept hierarchy” in international relations, and European-type hegemonic wars have been absent from East Asian history. A functioning balance of power system that was typical of Europe historically was foreign to Asia. Until the arrival of the Western powers in the mid-nineteenth century, East Asian international relations were Sinocentric with other societies arranged in varying degrees of subordination to, cooperation with, or autonomy from Beijing. 36  The Confucian ideal of world order was, of course, never fully realized in practice. Nonetheless, the Asian hierarchy of power model of international politics contrasts dramatically with the European balance of power model.

As a consequence of this image of world order, the Chinese propensity toward bandwagoning in domestic politics also exists in international relations. The degree to which it shapes the foreign policies of individual states tends to vary with the extent they share in Confucian culture and with their historical relationships with China. Korea culturally has much in common with China and historically has tilted toward China. For Singapore communist China was an enemy during the Cold War. In the 1980s, however, Singapore began to shift its position and its leaders actively argued the need for the United States and other countries to come to terms with the realities of Chinese power. With its large Chinese population and the anti-Western proclivities of its leaders, Malaysia also strongly tilted in the Chinese direction. Thailand maintained its independence in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by accommodating itself to European and Japanese imperialism and has shown every intention of doing the same with China, an inclination reinforced by the potential security threat it sees from Vietnam.

Indonesia and Vietnam are the two countries of Southeast Asia most inclined toward balancing and containing China. Indonesia is large, Muslim, and distant from China, but without the help of others it cannot prevent Chinese assertion of control over the South China Sea. In the fall of 1995 Indonesia and Australia joined in a security agreement that committed them to consult with each other in the event of “adverse challenges” to their security. Although both parties denied that this was an anti-China arrangement, they did identify China as the most likely source of adverse challenges. 37  Vietnam has a largely Confucian culture but historically has had highly antagonistic relations with China and in 1979 fought a brief war with China. Both Vietnam and China have claimed sovereignty over all the Spratly Islands, and their navies engaged each other on occasion in the 1970s and 1980s. In the early 1990s Vietnam’s military capabilities declined in relation to those of China. More than any other East Asian state, Vietnam consequently has the motive to seek partners to balance China. Its admission into ASEAN and normalization of its relations with the United States in 1995 were two steps in this direction. The divisions within ASEAN and that association’s reluctance to challenge China make it highly unlikely, however, that ASEAN will become an anti-China alliance or that it will provide much support to Vietnam in a confrontation with China. The United States would be a more willing container of China, but in the mid-1990s it is unclear how far it will go to contest an assertion of Chinese control over the South China Sea. In the end, for Vietnam “the least bad alternative” could be to accommodate China and accept Finlandization, which while it “would wound Vietnamese pride…might guarantee survival.” 38

In the 1990s virtually all East Asian nations, other than China and North Korea, have expressed support for a continued U.S. military presence in the region. In practice, however, except for Vietnam, they tend to accommodate China. The Philippines ended the major U.S. air and naval bases there, and opposition has mounted in Okinawa to the extensive U.S. military forces on the island. In 1994 Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia rejected U.S. requests to moor six supply ships in their waters as a floating base to facilitate U.S. military intervention in either Southeast or Southwest Asia. In another manifestation of deference, at its first meeting the ASEAN Regional Forum acquiesced to China’s demands that the Spratly Islands issues be kept off the agenda, and China’s occupation of Mischief Reef off the Philippines in 1995 elicited protests from no other ASEAN countries. In 1995-1996 when China verbally and militarily threatened Taiwan, Asian governments again responded with a deafening silence. Their bandwagoning propensity was neatly summed up by Michael Oksenberg: “Asian leaders do worry that the balance of power could shift in China’s favor but in anxious anticipation of the future, they do not want to confront Beijing now” and they “will not join the United States in an anti-China crusade.” 39

The rise of China will pose a major challenge to Japan, and the Japanese will be deeply divided as to which strategy Japan should pursue. Should it attempt to accommodate China, perhaps with some trade-off acknowledging China’s political-military dominance in return for recognition of Japan’s primacy in economic matters? Should it attempt to give new meaning and vigor to the U.S.-Japanese alliance as the core of a coalition to balance and contain China? Should it attempt to develop its own military power to defend its interests against any Chinese incursions? Japan will probably avoid as long as it can any clear-cut answer to these questions.

The core of any meaningful effort to balance and contain China would have to be the American-Japanese military alliance. Conceivably Japan might slowly acquiesce in redirecting the alliance to this purpose. Its doing so would depend upon Japan’s having confidence in: (1) the overall American ability to sustain itself as the world’s only superpower and to maintain its active leadership in world affairs; (2) the American commitment to maintain its presence in Asia and actively to combat China’s efforts to expand its influence; and (3) the ability of the United States and Japan to contain China without high costs in terms of resources or high risks in terms of war.

In the absence of a major and improbable show of resolution by and commitment from the United States, Japan is likely to accommodate China. Except for the 1930s and 1940s when it pursued a unilateral policy of conquest in East Asia with disastrous consequences, Japan has historically sought security by allying itself with what it perceives to be the relevant dominant power. Even in the 1930s in joining the Axis, it was aligning itself with what appeared to be then the most dynamic military-ideological force in global politics. Earlier in the century it had quite consciously entered into the Anglo-Japanese alliance because Great Britain was the leading power in world affairs. In the 1950s Japan similarly associated itself with the United States as the most powerful country in the world and the one that could insure Japan’s security. Like the Chinese, the Japanese see international politics as hierarchical because their domestic politics are. As one leading Japanese scholar has observed:

When the Japanese think of their nation in international society, Japanese domestic models often offer analogies. The Japanese tend to see an international order as giving expression externally to cultural patterns that are manifested internally within Japanese society, which is characterized by the relevance of vertically organized structures. Such an image of international order has been influenced by Japan’s long experience with pre-modern Sino-Japanese relations (a tribute system).

Hence, Japanese alliance behavior has been “basically bandwagoning, not balancing” and “alignment with the dominant power.” 40  The Japanese, one long time Western resident there agreed, “are quicker than most to bow to force majeure and cooperate with perceived moral superiors.…and quickest to resent abuse from a morally flabby, retreating hegemon.” As the U.S. role in Asia subsides and China’s becomes paramount, Japanese policy will adapt accordingly. Indeed, it has begun to do so. The key question in Sino-Japanese relations, Kishore Mahbubani has observed, is “who is number one?” And the answer is becoming clear. “There will be no explicit statements or understandings, but it was significant that the Japanese Emperor chose to visit China in 1992 at a time when Beijing was still relatively isolated internationally.” 41

Ideally, Japanese leaders and people would undoubtedly prefer the pattern of the past several decades and to remain under the sheltering arm of a predominant United States. As U.S. involvement in Asia declines, however, the forces in Japan urging that Japan “re-Asianize” will gain in strength and the Japanese will come to accept as inevitable the renewed dominance of China on the East Asia scene. When asked in 1994, for instance, which nation would have the greatest influence in Asia in the twenty-first century, 44 percent of the Japanese public said China, 30 percent said the United States, and only 16 percent said Japan. 42  Japan, as one high Japanese official predicted in 1995, will have the “discipline” to adapt to the rise of China. He then asked whether the United States would. His initial proposition is plausible; the answer to his subsequent question is uncertain.

Chinese hegemony will reduce instability and conflict in East Asia. It also will reduce American and Western influence there and compel the United States to accept what it has historically attempted to prevent: domination of a key region of the world by another power. The extent who which this hegemony threatens the interests of other Asian countries or the United States, however, depends in part on what happens in China. Economic growth generates military power and political influence, but it can also stimulate political development and movement toward a more open, pluralistic, and possibly democratic form of politics. Arguably it already has had that effect on South Korea and Taiwan. In both countries, however, the political leaders most active in pushing for democracy were Christians.

China’s Confucian heritage, with its emphasis on authority, order, hierarchy, and the supremacy of the collectivity over the individual, creates obstacles to democratization. Yet economic growth is creating in south China increasingly high levels of wealth, a dynamic bourgeoisie, accumulations of economic power outside governmental control, and a rapidly expanding middle class. In addition, Chinese people are deeply involved in the outside world in terms of trade, investment, and education. All this creates a social basis for movement toward political pluralism.

The precondition for political opening usually is the coming to power of reform elements within the authoritarian system. Will this happen to China? Probably not in the first succession after Deng but possibly in the second. The new century could see the creation in south China of groups with political agendas, which in fact if not in name will be embryonic political parties, and which are likely to have close ties with and be supported by Chinese in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. If such movements emerge in south China and if a reform faction took power in Beijing, some form of a political transition could occur. Democratization could encourage politicians to make nationalist appeals and increase the possibility of war, although in the long run a stable pluralistic system in China is likely to ease its relations with other powers.

Perhaps, as Friedberg suggested, Europe’s past is Asia’s future. More probably, Asia’s past will be Asia’s future. The choice for Asia is between power balanced at the price of conflict or peace secured at the price of hegemony. Western societies might go for conflict and balance. History, culture, and the realities of power strongly suggest that Asia will opt for peace and hegemony. The era that began with the Western intrusions of the 1840s and 1850s is ending, China is resuming its place as regional hegemon, and the East is coming into its own.

CIVILIZATIONS AND CORE STATES: EMERGING ALIGNMENTS

The post-Cold War, multipolar, multicivilizational world lacks an overwhelmingly dominant cleavage such as existed in the Cold War. So long as the Muslim demographic and Asian economic surges continue, however, the conflicts between the West and the challenger civilizations will be more central to global politics than other lines of cleavage. The governments of Muslim countries are likely to continue to become less friendly to the West, and intermittent low-intensity and at times perhaps high-intensity violence will occur between Islamic groups and Western societies. Relations between the United States, on the one hand, and China, Japan, and other Asian countries will be highly conflictual, and a major war could occur if the United States challenges China’s rise as the hegemonic power in Asia.

Under these conditions, the Confucian-Islamic connection will continue and perhaps broaden and deepen. Central to this connection has been the cooperation of Muslim and Sinic societies opposing the West on weapons proliferation, human rights, and other issues. At its core have been the close relations among Pakistan, Iran, and China, which crystallized in the early 1990s with the visits of President Yang Shangkun to Iran and Pakistan and of President Rafsanjani to Pakistan and China. These “pointed to the emergence of an embryonic alliance between Pakistan, Iran, and China.” On his way to China, Rafsanjani declared in Islamabad that “a strategic alliance” existed between Iran and Pakistan and that an attack on Pakistan would be considered an attack on Iran. Reinforcing this pattern, Benazir Bhutto visited Iran and China immediately after becoming prime minister in October 1993. The cooperation among the three countries has included regular exchanges among political, military, and bureaucratic officials and joint efforts in a variety of civil and military areas including defense production, in addition to the weapons transfers from China to the other states. The development of this relationship has been strongly supported by those in Pakistan belonging to the “independence” and “Muslim” schools of thought on foreign policy who looked forward to a “Tehran-Islamabad-Beijing axis,” while in Tehran it was argued that the “distinctive nature of the contemporary world” required “close and consistent cooperation” among Iran, China, Pakistan, and Kazakhstan. By the mid-1990s something like a de facto alliance had come into existence among the three countries rooted in opposition to the West, security concerns over India, and the desire to counter Turkish and Russian influence in Central Asia. 43

Are these three states likely to become the core of a broader grouping involving other Muslim and Asian countries? An informal “Confucian-Islamist alliance,” Graham Fuller argues, “could materialize, not because Muhammad and Confucius are anti-West but because these cultures offer a vehicle for the expression of grievances for which the West is partly blamed—a West whose political, military, economic and cultural dominance increasingly rankles in a world where states feel ’they don’t have to take it anymore.’ ” The most passionate call for such cooperation came from Mu’ammar al-Qadhafi, who in March 1994 declared:

The new world order means that Jews and Christians control Muslims and if they can, they will after that dominate Confucianism and other religions in India, China, and Japan.…

What the Christians and Jews are now saying: We were determined to crush Communism and the West must now crush Islam and Confucianism.

Now we hope to see a confrontation between China that heads the Confucianist camp and America that heads the Christian crusader camp. We have no justifications but to be biased against the crusaders. We are standing with Confucianism, and by allying ourselves with it and fighting alongside it in one international front, we will eliminate our mutual opponent.

So, we as Muslims, will support China in its struggle against our mutual enemy.…

We wish China victory.… 44

Enthusiasm for a close anti-Western alliance of Confucian and Islamic states, however, has been rather muted on the Chinese side, with President Jiang Zemin declaring in 1995 that China would not establish an alliance with any other country. This position presumably reflected the classical Chinese view that as the Middle Kingdom, the central power, China did not need formal allies, and other countries would find it in their interest to cooperate with China. China’s conflicts with the West, on the other hand, mean that it will value partnership with other anti-Western states, of which Islam furnishes the largest and most influential number. In addition, China’s increasing needs for oil are likely to impel it to expand its relations with Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia as well as Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Such an arms-for-oil axis, one energy expert observed in 1994, “won’t have to take orders from London, Paris or Washington anymore.” 45

The relations of other civilizations and their core states to the West and its challengers will vary widely. The Southern civilizations, Latin America and Africa, lack core states, have been dependent on the West, and are relatively weak militarily and economically (althouth that is changing rapidly for Latin America). In their relations with the West, they probably will move in opposite directions. Latin America is culturally close to the West. During the 1980s and 1990s its political and economic systems came more and more to resemble Western ones. The two Latin American states that once pursued nuclear weapons abandoned those attempts. With the lowest levels of overall military effort of any civilization, Latin Americans may resent the military dominance of the United States but show no intention of challenging it. The rapid rise of Protestantism in many Latin American societies is both making them more like the mixed Catholic-Protestant societies of the West and expanding Latin American-Western religious ties beyond those that go through Rome. Conversely, the influx into the United States of Mexicans, Central Americans, and Caribbeans and the resulting Hispanic impact on American society also promotes cultural convergence. The principal conflictual issues between Latin America and the West, which in practice means the United States, are immigration, drugs and drug-related terrorism, and economic integration (i.e., admission of Latin American states to NAFTA vs. expansion of Latin American groupings such as Mercosur and the Andean Pact). As the problems that developed with respect to Mexico joining NAFTA indicate, the marriage of Latin American and Western civilizations will not be easy, will probably take shape slowly through much of the twenty-first century, and may never be consummated. Yet the differences between the West and Latin America remain small compared to those between the West and other civilizations.

The West’s relations with Africa should involve only slightly higher levels of conflict primarily because Africa is so weak. Yet some significant issues exist. South Africa did not, like Brazil and Argentina, abandon a program to develop nuclear weapons; it destroyed nuclear weapons it had already built. These weapons were produced by a white government to deter foreign attacks on apartheid, and that government did not wish to bequeath them to a black government which might use them for other purposes. The ability to build nuclear weapons cannot be destroyed, however, and it is possible that a post-apartheid government could construct a new nuclear arsenal to insure its role as the core state of Africa and to deter the West from intervention in Africa. Human rights, immigration, economic issues, and terrorism are also on the agenda between Africa and the West. Despite France’s efforts to maintain close ties with its former colonies, a long-term process of de-Westernization appears to be underway in Africa, the interest and influence of Western powers receding, indigenous culture reasserting itself, and South Africa over time subordinating the Afrikaner-English elements in its culture to African ones. While Latin America is becoming more Western, Africa is becoming less so. Both, however, remain in different ways dependent on the West and unable, apart from U.N. votes, to affect decisively the balance between the West and its challengers.

That is clearly not the case with the three “swing” civilizations. Their core states are major actors in world affairs and are likely to have mixed, ambivalent, and fluctuating relationships with the West and the challengers. They also will have varying relations with each other. Japan, as we have argued, over time and with great anguish and soul-searching is likely to shift away from the United States in the direction of China. Like other transcivilizational Cold War alliances, Japan’s security ties to the United States will weaken although probably never be formally renounced. Its relations with Russia will remain difficult so long as Russia refuses to compromise on the Kurile islands it occupied in 1945. The moment at the end of the Cold War when this issue might have been resolved passed quickly with the rise of Russian nationalism, and no reason exists for the United States to back the Japanese claim in the future as it has in the past.

In the last decades of the Cold War, China effectively played the “China card” against the Soviet Union and the United States. In the post-Cold War world, Russia has a “Russia card” to play. Russia and China united would decisively tilt the Eurasian balance against the West and arouse all the concerns that existed about the Sino-Soviet relationship in the 1950s. A Russia working closely with the West would provide additional counterbalance to the Confucian-Islamic connection on global issues and reawaken in China its Cold War fears concerning an invasion from the north. Russia, however, also has problems with both these neighboring civilizations. With respect to the West, they tend to be more short term; a consequence of the end of the Cold War and the need for a redefinition of the balance between Russia and the West and agreement by both sides on their basic equality and their respective spheres of influence. In practice this would mean:

1. Russian acceptance of the expansion of the European Union and NATO to include the Western Christian states of Central and Eastern Europe, and Western commitment not to expand NATO further, unless Ukraine splits into two countries;

2. a partnership treaty between Russia and NATO pledging nonaggression, regular consultations on security issues, cooperative efforts to avoid arms competition, and negotiation of arms control agreements appropriate to their post-Cold War security needs;

3. Western recognition of Russia as primarily responsible for the maintenance of security among Orthodox countries and in areas where Orthodoxy predominates;

4. Western acknowledgment of the security problems, actual and potential, which Russia faces from Muslim peoples to its south and willingness to revise the CFE treaty and to be favorably disposed toward other steps Russia might need to take to deal with such threats;

5. agreement between Russia and the West to cooperate as equals in dealing with issues, such as Bosnia, involving both Western and Orthodox interests.

If an arrangement emerges along these or similar lines, neither Russia nor the West is likely to pose any longer-term security challenge to the other. Europe and Russia are demographically mature societies with low birth rates and aging populations; such societies do not have the youthful vigor to be expansionist and offensively oriented.

In the immediate post-Cold War period, Russian-Chinese relations became significantly more cooperative. Border disputes were resolved; military forces on both sides of the border were reduced; trade expanded; each stopped targeting the other with nuclear missiles; and their foreign ministers explored their common interests in combating fundamentalist Islam. Most importantly, Russia found in China an eager and substantial customer for military equipment and technology, including tanks, fighter aircraft, long-range bombers, and surface-to-air missiles. 46  From the Russian viewpoint, this warming of relations represented both a conscious decision to work with China as its Asian “partner,” given the stagnant coolness of its relations with Japan, and a reaction to its conflicts with the West over NATO expansion, economic reform, arms control, economic assistance, and membership in Western international institutions. For its part, China was able to demonstrate to the West that it was not alone in the world and could acquire the military capabilities necessary to implement its power projection regional strategy. For both countries, a Russian-Chinese connection is, like the Confucian-Islamic connection, a means of countering Western power and universalism.

Whether that connection survives into the longer term depends largely on, first, the extent to which Russian relations with the West stabilize on a mutually satisfactory basis, and, second, the extent to which China’s rise to hegemony in East Asia threatens Russian interests, economically, demographically, militarily. The economic dynamism of China has spilled over into Siberia, and Chinese, along with Korean and Japanese, businesspersons are exploring and exploiting opportunities there. Russians in Siberia increasingly see their economic future connected to East Asia rather than to European Russia. More threatening for Russia is Chinese immigration into Siberia, with illegal Chinese migrants there purportedly numbering in 1995 3 million to 5 million, compared to a Russian population in Eastern Siberia of about 7 million. “The Chinese,” Russian Defense Minister Pavel Grachev warned, “are in the process of making a peaceful conquest of the Russian Far East.” Russia’s top immigration official echoed him, saying, “We must resist Chinese expansionism.” 47  In addition, China’s developing economic relations with the former Soviet republics of Central Asia may exacerbate relations with Russia. Chinese expansion could also become military if China decided that it should attempt to reclaim Mongolia, which the Russians detached from China after World War I and which was for decades a Soviet satellite. At some point the “yellow hordes” which have haunted Russian imagination since the Mongol invasions may again become a reality.

Russia’s relations with Islam are shaped by the historical legacy of centuries of expansion through war against the Turks, North Caucasus peoples, and Central Asian emirates. Russia now collaborates with its Orthodox allies, Serbia and Greece, to counter Turkish influence in the Balkans, and with its Orthodox ally, Armenia, to restrict that influence in the Transcaucasus. It has actively attempted to maintain its political, economic, and military influence in the Central Asian republics, has enlisted them in the Commonwealth of Independent States, and deploys military forces in all of them. Central to Russian concerns are the Caspian Sea oil and gas reserves and the routes by which these resources will reach the West and East Asia. Russia has also been fighting one war in the North Caucasus against the Muslim people of Chechnya and a second war in Tajikistan supporting the government against an insurgency that includes Islamic fundamentalists. These security concerns provide a further incentive for cooperation with China in containing the “Islamic threat” in Central Asia and they also are a major motive for the Russian rapprochement with Iran. Russia has sold Iran submarines, sophisticated fighter aircraft, fighter bombers, surface-to-air missiles, and reconnaissance and electronic warfare equipment. In addition, Russia agreed to build lightwater nuclear reactors in Iran and to provide Iran with uranium-enrichment equipment. In return, Russia quite explicitly expects Iran to constrain the spread of fundamentalism in Central Asia and implicitly to cooperate in countering the spread of Turkish influence there and in the Caucasus. For the coming decades Russia’s relations with Islam will be decisively shaped by its perceptions of the threats posed by the booming Muslim populations along its southern periphery.

During the Cold War, India, the third “swing” core state, was an ally of the Soviet Union and fought one war with China and several with Pakistan. Its relations with the West, particularly the United States, were distant when they were not acrimonious. In the post-Cold War world, India’s relations with Pakistan are likely to remain highly conflictual over Kashmir, nuclear weapons, and the overall military balance on the Subcontinent. To the extent that Pakistan is able to win support from other Muslim countries, India’s relations with Islam generally will be difficult. To counter this, India is likely to make special efforts, as it has in the past, to persuade individual Muslim countries to distance themselves from Pakistan. With the end of the Cold War, China’s efforts to establish more friendly relations with its neighbors extended to India and tensions between the two lessened. This trend, however, is unlikely to continue for long. China has actively involved itself in South Asian politics and presumably will continue to do so: maintaining a close relation with Pakistan, strengthening Pakistan’s nuclear and conventional military capabilities, and courting Myanmar with economic assistance, investment, and military aid, while possibly developing naval facilities there. Chinese power is expanding at the moment; India’s power could grow substantially in the early twenty-first century. Conflict seems highly probable. “The underlying power rivalry between the two Asian giants, and their self-images as natural great powers and centers of civilization and culture,” one analyst has observed, “will continue to drive them to support different countries and causes. India will strive to emerge, not only as an independent power center in the multipolar world, but as a counterweight to Chinese power and influence.” 48

Confronting at least a China-Pakistan alliance, if not a broader Confucian-Islamic connection, it clearly will be in India’s interests to maintain its close relationship with Russia and to remain a major purchaser of Russian military equipment. In the mid-1990s India was acquiring from Russia almost every major type of weapon including an aircraft carrier and cryogenic rocket technology, which led to U.S. sanctions. In addition to weapons proliferation, other issues between India and the United States included human rights, Kashmir, and economic liberalization. Over time, however, the cooling of U.S.-Pakistan relations and their common interests in containing China are likely to bring India and the United States closer together. The expansion of Indian power in Southern Asia cannot harm U.S. interests and could serve them.

The relations between civilizations and their core states are complicated, often ambivalent, and they do change. Most countries in any one civilization will generally follow the lead of the core state in shaping their relations with countries in another civilization. But this will not always be the case, and obviously all the countries of one civilization do not have identical relations with all the countries in a second civilization. Common interests, usually a common enemy from a third civilization, can generate cooperation between countries of different civilizations. Conflicts also obviously occur within civilizations, particularly Islam. In addition, the relations between groups along fault lines may differ significantly from the relations between the core states of the same civilizations. Yet broad trends are evident and plausible generalizations can be made about what seem to be the emerging alignments and antagonisms among civilizations and core states. These are summarized in  Figure 9.1  The relatively simple bipolarity of the Cold War is giving way to the much more complex relationships of a multipolar, multicivilizational world.

FIGURE 9.1 THE GLOBAL POLITICS OF CIVILIZATIONS: Emerging ALIGNMENTS

2