ENVSCI
ardam
ClashofCivilizations09252023.pdf
Post-Soviet states 1. Armenia 3. Belarus 5. Georgia 7. Kyrgyzstan 9. Lithuania 11. Russia
2. Azerbaijan 4. Estonia 6. Kazakhstan 8. Latvia 10. Moldov 12. Tajikistan
13. Turkmenistan 14. Ukraine 15. Uzbekistan
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process of internal disintegration within the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which began in second half of 1980s with a series of national
unrests and ended on 26 December 1991, when the USSR itself was voted out of existence by
the Supreme Soviet, following the Belavezha Accords. Declaration number 142-Н by the Supreme
Soviet resulted in self-governing independence to the Republics of the USSR, formally dissolving the
USSR. The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created
the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), although five of the signatories ratified it much later
or did not do so at all. On the previous day, 25 December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev,
the eighth and final leader of the USSR, resigned, declared his office extinct and handed over its
powers—including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes—to Russian President Boris
Yeltsin. That evening at 7:32 p.m., the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and
replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag.
Previously, from August to December, all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had either
seceded from the union or at the very least denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. The
week before formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol formally establishing
the CIS and declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist. Both the Revolutions of 1989 and the
dissolution of the USSR also marked the end of the Cold War.
11 March 1990
August 1991
August 1991
1 December 1991
The end of the Cold War
Reagan and Gorbachev forged a constructive relationship that helped the two powers end the half-century-long Cold War in 1989. Then the Soviet Union collapsed altogether in 1991. It was left to Reagan’s successors to formulate America’s foreign policy in the new, but still dangerous post-Cold War world. His immediate successor, George H.W. Bush, called the new dynamic and vaguely defined new policy the New World Order. In a January 1991 State-of-the-Union address, Bush anticipated a New World Order in which diverse nations would be drawn together through a commitment to peace, security, and rule of law. http://sites.austincc.edu/caddis/new-world-order/
The Berlin wall had come down, communist regimes had collapsed, the United Nations was to assume a new importance, the former Cold War rivals would engage in “partnership” and a “grand bargain,” peacekeeping and peacemaking would be the order of the day.
“… the president of, arguably, the world’s leading university vetoed appointment of a professor of security studies because the need had disappeared: “Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more.”
The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and “ethnic cleansing,” the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the “diplomacy of smiles” and “policy of yes” in Russia’s relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China.
The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?", published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In the book, Fukuyama argues that, following the ascendency of Western-style liberal democracy following the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, humanity was reaching "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government".
The end of history means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. There can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.
According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution (May 5, 1789 – Nov 9, 1799), democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives.
The most basic (and prevalent) error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse "history" with "events". Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may suffer "temporary" setbacks (which may, of course, last for centuries).
Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort.
The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
The Clash of Civilizations The Clash of Civilizations is a hypothesis that people's cultural and religious
identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. The
American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington argued that future wars would be
fought not between countries, but between cultures. It was first proposed in a
Bradley Lecture at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington in October of 1992,
which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of
Civilizations? ”, in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The
End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.
The phrase itself was earlier used by Albert Camus in 1946, by Girilal Jain in his analysis of the Ayodhya dispute in 1988, by Bernard Lewis in an article in
the September 1990 issue of The Atlantic Monthly titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage“ and by Mahdi El Mandjra in his book "La première guerre
civilisationnelle" published in 1992. Even earlier, the phrase appears in a 1926 book regarding the Middle East by Basil Mathews: Young Islam on Trek:
A Study in the Clash of Civilizations (p. 196). This expression derives from "clash of cultures", already used during the colonial period and the Belle
Époque.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clash_of_Civilizations
Colonial Period 1607–1776 (1565: St. Augustine is founded by the Spanish; 1607: Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in North
America, is established in Virginia)
The Belle Époque or La Belle Époque was a period of Western history. It is conventionally dated from the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 to the
outbreak of World War I in 1914.
In the summer of 1993 the journal Foreign Affairs published an article of mine titled “The Clash of Civilizations?”. That article, according to the Foreign Affairs editors, stirred up more discussion in three years than any other article they had published since the 1940s. It certainly stirred up more debate in three years than anything else I have written. The responses and comments on it have come from every continent and scores of countries. People were variously impressed, intrigued, outraged, frightened, and perplexed by my argument that the central and most dangerous dimension of the emerging global politics would be conflict between groups from differing civilizations. Whatever else it did, the article struck a nerve in people of every civilization.
Samuel P. Huntington, 1996. “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”
In 1993 Professor Samuel P. Huntington wrote an article entitled "The Clash of
Civilizations?" in Foreign Affairs Magazine. This article generated a
considerable amount of interest and criticism and two follow-up books.
Professor Huntington expanded his original thesis into a book "The Clash of
Civilizations" which was published in 1996. At the same time, his original article,
along with 7 critical responses and a rebuttal of this criticism by Professor
Huntington was also published.
Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) was
the Albert J. Weatherhead III University
Professor at Harvard University, where he
was also the director of the John M. Olin
Institute for Strategic Studies and the
chairman of the Harvard Academy for
International and Area Studies. He was
the director of security planning for the
National Security Council in the Carter
administration, the founder and coeditor
of Foreign Policy, and the president of
the American Political Science
Association. He authored and edited more
than dozen books.
The Clash of Civilizations?
Samuel P. Huntington
Foreign Affairs
Vol. 72, No. 3 (Summer, 1993), pp. 22-49
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
DOI: 10.2307/20045621
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20045621
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
Charlie Rose Interview with
Samuel P. Huntington
on Thursday 01/30/1997
https://charlierose.com/videos/17838 (22:04)
Edward Said: The Myth of the "Clash of Civilizations"
(Lecture given at UMass Amherst) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPS-pONiEG8 (52:03)
Samuel P. Huntington, 1993. The Clash of Civilizations? Foreign Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, p. 22-
49 (Available in the Blackboard).
Samuel P. Huntington, 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
SIMON & SCHUSTER, New York, NY 368 p. (Chapters 1 & 12 available in the Blackboard)
'What Every Person Should Know About War' By Chris Hedges July 6, 2003
https://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/books/chapters/what-every-person-should-know-about-war.html
What is a war?
War is defined as an active conflict that has claimed more than 1,000 lives.
Has the world ever been at peace?
Of the past 3,400 years, humans have been entirely at peace for 268 of
them, or just 8 percent of recorded history.
How many people have died in war?
At least 108 million people were killed in wars in the twentieth century.
Estimates for the total number killed in wars throughout all of human
history range from 150 million to 1 billion. War has several other effects on
population, including decreasing the birthrate by taking men away from their wives. The
reduced birthrate during World War II is estimated to have caused a population deficit of
more than 20 million people.
The first war in recorded history took place in Mesopotamia in c. 2700 BCE between Sumer (modern-day Iraq and Kuwait) and Elam. The Sumerians, under command of the King of Kish, Enembaragesi, defeated the Elamites in this war and, it is recorded, “carried away as spoils the weapons of Elam.” https://www.ancient.eu/war/
What is the period in human life history
where war didn't happen? Barry Brown, Pulitzer Prize-nominated Canadian Journalist
Answered Mar 8, 2019
Originally Answered: Was there ever a time in human history without war? https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-period-in-human-life-history-where-war-didnt-happen
Yes. According to articles in Scientific American (June 29, 2012, Quitting the Hominid
Fight Club) and elsewhere there is no evidence of organized human war anywhere on
Earth before about 6,000 years ago. Here’s some of the evidence. 1) There are prehistoric
cave paintings found all over the world. These drawings are the newspapers and Instragram
records of the prehistoric age. They were created between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago and
are found all over the world. Yet there is no image of human on human violence in any of
them. 2) There are also 3 million years of Stone Age tools that have been found and they are
all hunting and scraping tools. None of them are war weapons. This is not to say that there is
no record of human violence in the prehistoric era, but the fossil evidence is extremely rare.
3) There is evidence of regular, long-distance trade between modern human ancestors in
Southern Africa dating back almost half a million years. These trade networks could only be
established through shared language and that shared language could only grow from a
common culture of honest, friendly trade. If early humans feared and mistrusted each other
language would have developed in isolated groups rather than vast base languages like Indo-
European because early humans and human ancestors would not have been cooperating.
So, it appears that humans were not at war for more than 99.9% of human history - from
the time of “Lucy” more than 3 million years ago to the start of organized warfare about 6,000
years ago. According to my research in my book, Humanity: The World Before Religion,
War & Inequality, the first true war happened in Ancient India about 6,000 years ago
and is recorded in the book the Mahabharata. Like many ancient stories that have been
clouded by later religious beliefs the story in the text has been colored by reports of super
weapons and flying chariots. However, the core of the report is that of a terrible civil war that
destroyed the last pre-war civilization and this appears to be true. Further, this same report of
the world’s first war appears to be the historic event that inspired the 6,000 year old Garden
of Eden story in the Hebrew Bible. Both the story of the war that ends Ancient India’s history
6,000 years ago and the tale of the fall of mankind that begins the Hebrew histories of the
Bible seem to be two halves of the same historical record - the end of “Generation Eden” and
the start of a new period in human history that has been defined by war and greed.
Ancient Egypt: The Archaic Period
(3100-2649 BC)
We have very few records from the Archaic period, but one account tells of a king of Upper Egypt named Menes. Menes sent an army down the Nile and defeated the king of Lower Egypt in battle. In this way Menes united the two kingdoms. Unification means the joining together of two separate parts, in the case, the two kingdoms. Menes, sometimes known as Narmer, became the first pharaoh. He set up his new capital of the united Egypt in the city of Memphis in Lower Egypt.
Ancient Egypt: The Old Kingdom (2649- 2150 BC) - The Time of Pyramid Building
https://www.penfield.edu/webpages/jgiotto/onlinetextbook.cfm?subpage=1525828 the First Egyptian Pharaoh
When a few tribes started rebelling against Xia, Tang of Shang decided that the time had come. He
started his attack on Xia. Upon hearing of Tang's rebellion, Jie sent troops from the smaller
territories of Gu, Wei, and Kuenwu. Yi advised Tang to put off the fight for a year, then conquered
Gu and Wei, and defeated Kuenwu.
Before the army proceeded any further, Yi Yin told Tang that the army needed a boost in morale.
Tang gave a speech, known historically as 'Tang's pledge', before the two armies met in Mingtiao
(present-day North Anyi, Xiyun) around 1600 BC. Tang's generals and soldiers all abhorred Jie, so
they fought bravely. On the contrary, Jie's troops, seeing the power of the Shangs, did not listen to
his commands. They either surrendered or fled. As a result, the Shangs won the battle and set up
the Shang dynasty.
After the battle was won, Jie of Xia sought shelter in Kuenwu. After conquering Kuenwu, Tang of
Shang forced Jie into exile in Nanchao (present day Chao, Anhui). Jie stayed there until his death.
Tang then eliminated the remaining Xia forces and used the Xia peasants as slaves.
According to the traditional chronology based on calculations made approximately 2,000 years ago by Liu Xin, the Shang ruled from 1766 to 1122 BC, but according to the chronology based upon the "current text" of Bamboo Annals, they ruled from 1556 to 1046 BC. The Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project dated them from c. 1600 to 1046 BC based on the carbon 14 dates of the Erligang site.
ANCIENT Neolithic c. 8500 – c. 2070 BC Xia c. 2070 – c. 1600 BC Shang c. 1600 – c. 1046 BC Zhou c. 1046 – 256 BC Western Zhou Eastern Zhou
Spring and Autumn Warring States
IMPERIAL Qin 221–207 BC Han 202 BC – 220 AD
Western Han Xin Eastern Han
Three Kingdoms 220–280 Wei, Shu and Wu
Jin 266–420 Western Jin Eastern Jin Sixteen Kingdoms
Northern and Southern dynasties 420–589 Sui 581–618 Tang 618–907
(Wu Zhou 690–705) Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms 907–979
Liao 916–1125
Song 960–1279
Northern Song Western Xia Southern Song Jin
Yuan 1271–1368 Ming 1368–1644 Qing 1636–1912
MODERN Republic of China on mainland 1912–1949 People's Republic of China 1949–present Republic of China on Taiwan 1949–present
The Battle of Mingtiao was a legendary battle between the Xia dynasty and the Shang dynasty, resulting in a Shang victory which created the circumstances for the elevation of the Duke of Shang to the throne of China.
Battle of Mingtiao鸣条之战 (present-day North Anyi, Xiyun)
8000 - 2205 BC: Early Chinese settlers build small villages and farm along the major rivers (the Yellow River and the Yangtze River).
2205 - 1575 BC: The Chinese learn how to make bronze. The Xia Dynasty becomes the first dynasty in China. 1570 - 1045 BC: Shang Dynasty 1045 - 256 BC: Zhou Dynasty
771 BC: End of the Western Zhou and beginning of the Eastern Zhou. The Spring and Autumn period begins. 551 BC: Philosopher and thinker Confuciusis born. 544 BC: Sun Tzu the author of the Art of War is born. 500 BC: Cast iron is invented in China around this time. The iron plough was likely invented shortly after. 481 BC: End of the Spring and Autumn period.
403 - 221 BC: The Warring States period. During this time leaders from different areas were constantly fighting for control. 342 BC: The crossbow is first used in China. 221 - 206 BC: Qin Dynasty 221 BC: Qin Shi Huangdi becomes the first Emperor of China. He has the Great Wall of China built by extending and connecting existing walls to protect the people from the Mongols.
220 BC: The writing system of China becomes standardized by thegovernment. 210 BC: The Terra Cotta Army is buried with Emperor Qin. 210 BC: The umbrella is invented. 206 BC - 220 AD: Han Dynasty
207 BC: The first Han Emperor, Gaozu, establishes the Chinese Civil Service to help run the government. 104 BC: Emperor Wu defines the Taichu calendar which will remain the Chinese calendar throughout history. 8 - 22 AD: The Xin Dynasty overthrows the Han Dynasty for a short period of time. 2 AD: A government census is taken. The size of the Chinese Empire is estimated at 60 million people. 105 AD: Paper is invented by Imperial court official Cai Lun. 208: Battle of Red Cliffs. 222 - 581: Six Dynasties 250: Buddhism is introduced toChina. 589 - 618: Sui Dynasty
609: The Grand Canal is completed. 618 - 907: Tang Dynasty 868: Wood block printing is first used in China to print an entire book called the Diamond Sutra. 907 - 960: Five Dynasties 960 - 1279: Song Dynasty 1041: Moveable type for printing is invented. 1044: This is the earliest date that a formula for gunpowder is recorded. 1088: The first description of the magnetic compass.
1200: Genghis Khan unites the Mongol tribes under his leadership. 1271: Marco Polo begins his travels to China. 1279 - 1368: Yuan Dynasty 1279: The Mongols under Kublai Khan defeat the Song Dynasty. Kublai Khan establishes the Yuan Dynasty. 1368 - 1644: Ming Dynasty
1405: Chinese explorer Zheng He begins his first journey to India and Africa. He will establish trade relationships and bring back news of the outside world. 1405: The Chinese begin construction on the Forbidden City.
1420: Beijing becomes the new capital of the Chinese Empire replacing Nanjing.
1517: Portuguese traders first arrive in the country. 1644 - 1912: Qing Dynasty https://www.ducksters.com/history/china/timeline_of_ancient_china.php
China’s Historical Role in East Asia:
Chinese Empires and Dynasties
226 AD
Roman Empire (27 BC – 476 AD), c125AD In the history of Europe, the Middle Ages lasted from the 5th to the 15th century
(476 AD – 1492).
Byzantine Empire Map At Its Height
The Byzantine Empire (395–1453), the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium, was the continuation of the Roman
Empire in its eastern provinces during Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, when its capital city was Constantinople
(modern Istanbul, formerly Byzantium). It survived the fragmentation and fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th
century AD and continued to exist for an additional thousand years until it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
Extent of the Byzantine c. 650 CE during the Reign of Constans II (641-668 CE).
Muhammad (c. 570 CE – 8 June 632 CE) was an Arab religious, social and political leader and the founder of Islam. According to
Islamic doctrine, he was a prophet, sent to present and confirm the monotheistic teachings preached previously by Adam, Abraham,
Moses, Jesus, and other prophets. He is viewed as the final prophet of God in all the main branches of Islam, though some modern
denominations diverge from this belief. Muhammad united Arabia into a single Muslim polity, with the Quran as well as his teachings
and practices forming the basis of Islamic religious belief.
Born approximately 570 CE in the Arabian city of Mecca, Muhammad was orphaned at the age of six. He was raised under the care
of his paternal grandfather Abd al-Muttalib, and upon his death, by his uncle Abu Talib. In later years he would periodically seclude
himself in a mountain cave named Hira for several nights of prayer.
When he was 40, Muhammad reported being visited by Gabriel in the cave, and receiving his first revelation from God. Three years
later, in 610, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly, proclaiming that "God is One", that complete "submission" to
God is the right way of life, and that he was a prophet and messenger of God.
Age of the Caliphs
Expansion under the Prophet Muhammad, 622-632
Expansion during the Patriarchal Caliphate, 632-661
Expansion during the Umayyad Caliphate, 661-750
"the Rashidun", is a term used in Sunni Islam to refer to the 30-year reign of the first
four caliphs (successors) following the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad,
namely: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman ibn Affan, and Ali (Ali ibn Abi Talib, a cousin of
Muhammad) of the Rashidun Caliphate, the first caliphate.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in
the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the
period between 1095 and 1291 that were intended to recover Jerusalem and its
surrounding area from Islamic rule. Concurrent military activities in the Iberian Peninsula against
the Moors (the Reconquista) and in northern Europe against pagan Slavic tribes (the Northern Crusades) also became known as
crusades. Through the 15th century, other church-sanctioned crusades were fought against heretical Christian sects, against the
Byzantine and Ottoman empires, to combat paganism and heresy, and for political reasons. Unsanctioned by the church, Popular
Crusades of ordinary citizens were also frequent. Beginning with the First Crusade which resulted in the recovery of Jerusalem in
1099, dozens of Crusades were fought, providing a focal point of European history for centuries.
In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine
emperor Alexios I against the Seljuk Turks and called for an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western
Europe, there was an enthusiastic popular response. The first Crusaders had a variety of motivations, including religious salvation,
satisfying feudal obligations, opportunities for renown, and economic or political advantage. Later crusades were generally conducted
by more organized armies, sometimes led by a king. All were granted papal indulgences. Initial successes established four Crusader
states: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli. The Crusader
presence remained in the region in some form until the fall of Acre in 1291. After this, there were no further crusades to recover the
Holy Land.
Proclaimed a crusade in 1123, the struggle between the Christians and Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula was called
the Reconquista by Christians, and only ended in 1492 with the fall of the Muslim Emirate of Granada. From
1147 campaigns in Northern Europe against pagan tribes were considered crusades. In 1199 Pope Innocent III began the practice of
proclaiming political crusades against Christian heretics. In the 13th century, crusading was used against
the Cathars in Languedoc and against Bosnia; this practice continued against the Waldensians in Savoy and
the Hussites in Bohemia in the 15th century and against Protestants in the 16th. From the mid-14th century, crusading rhetoric was
used in response to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, only ending in 1699 with the War of the Holy League.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crusades
The Mongol Empire during the reign of Möngke Khan (January 11, 1209 – August 11, 1259, the fourth khagan-emperor the Mongol Empire, ruling from 1 July 1251, to 11 August 1259)
Timurid Empire (1370–1507)
Khagan-Emperor
1206–1227 Genghis Khan 1229–1241 Ögedei Khan 1246–1248 Güyük Khan 1251–1259 Möngke Khan 1260–1294 Kublai Khan (nominal) 1333–1368 Toghon Temür (nominal)
• Division of the Mongol Empire 1260–1294 • Fall of the Ilkhanate 1335 • Division of the Chagatai Khanate 1347 • Fall of the Yuan dynasty 1368 • Fall of the Golden Horde 1502
Golden Horde khanate (1242–1502)
Chagatai Khanate 1226–1347 (Whole) 1347–1487 (Moghulistan) 1487–1690 (Turpan Khanate) 1465–1705 (Yarkent Khanate)Ilkhanate 1256–1335
The Ottoman Empire (known in Western Europe as the Turkish Empire, c.
1299–1922/1923) at its greatest extent, under Sultan Mehmed IV in 1683
Extent of the Afsharid
Empire under Nader Shah,
around 1740
The maximum extent
of the Safavid Empire
under Shah Abbas I
Extent of the Sasanian
Empire in 621
Extent of the first
Persian Empire,
the Achaemenid Empire
Dynasties Described as Persian Empire
•Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BC)
•Sasanian Empire (224–651 AD)
•Safavid dynasty (1501–1736 AD)
•Afsharid dynasty (1736–1796 AD)
•Zand dynasty (1751–1794 AD)
•Qajar dynasty (1785–1925 AD)
http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/historical/shepherd/persian_empire.jpg
Persian Empire in the Achaemenid era, about 500 BC
The Safavid Empire was the greatest Iranian Empire established after the
Muslim conquest of Persia. It is often cited as the "rebirth of the Persian
Empire". Safavids also announced Shia Islam as the official religion in the
empire versus the Sunni Islam in the neighbouring Ottoman Empire.
The Age of Discovery, or the Age of Exploration (approximately from the beginning of the 15th
century until the middle of the 17th century), is …
the period in European history in which extensive overseas exploration emerged as a powerful factor
in European culture and which was the beginning of globalization. It also marks the rise of the period
of widespread adoption in Europe of colonialism and mercantilism as national policies. Many lands
previously unknown to Europeans were discovered by them during this period, though most were
already inhabited. From the perspective of many non-Europeans, the Age of Discovery marked the
arrival of invaders from previously unknown continents.
Global exploration started with the Portuguese discoveries of the Atlantic archipelagos of Madeira and
the Azores in 1419 and 1427, the coast of Africa after 1434 and the sea route to India in 1498; and from the
Crown of Castile (Spain), the trans-Atlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas between
1492 and 1502 and the first circumnavigation of the globe in 1519–1522. These discoveries led to
numerous naval expeditions across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans, and land expeditions in the
Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia that continued into the late 19th century, and ended with the
exploration of the polar regions in the 20th century.
European overseas exploration led to the rise of global trade and the European colonial empires, with
the contact between the Old World (Europe, Asia and Africa) and the New World (the Americas and
Australia) producing the Columbian exchange, a wide transfer of plants, animals, food, human
populations (including slaves), communicable diseases and culture between the Eastern
and Western Hemispheres. … It also allowed for the expansion of Christianity throughout the world: with
the spread of missionary activity, it eventually became the world's largest religion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery
European Control of the World, 1500-1950
1800 (37%)
1878 (67%)
1913 (84%)
All areas of the world that were ever part of
the British Empire. Current British Overseas
Territories have their names underlined in red.
During the Age of Discovery in
the 15th and 16th
centuries, Portugal and Spain
pioneered European
exploration of the globe, and in
the process established large
overseas empires. Envious of
the great wealth these empires
generated, England, France,
and the Netherlands began to
establish colonies and trade
networks of their own in
the Americas and Asia. A
series of wars in the 17th and
18th centuries with the
Netherlands and France left
England and then,
following union between
England and Scotland in
1707, Great Britain, the
dominant colonial power in
North America. It then became
the dominant power in
the Indian subcontinent after
the East India Company's
conquest of Mughal Bengal at
the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories ruled or administered
by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It originated with the overseas possessions and trading posts
established by England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest empire in history and,
for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the
world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35,500,000 km2 (13,700,000 sq mi), 24% of the Earth's total land
area. As a result, its political, legal, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 The Florida Purchase Treaty of 1819 The Texas annexation of 1845 The Mexican Cession of 1848 The Gadsden Purchase of 1854
Dutch Guiana at its greatest extent, 1649 Today part of Brazil, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela
Political map of the Americas in 1794
America Has Been at War 93% of the Time – 222 out of 239 Years – Since 1776 By Washington's Blog
Global Research, January 20, 2019
Washington's Blog 20 February 2015
https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-has-been-at-war-93-of-the-time-222-out-of-239-years-since-1776/5565946
First published by Washington’s Blog and Global Research in February 2015
The U.S. Has Only Been At Peace For 21 Years Total Since Its Birth
In 2011, Danios wrote:
Below, I have reproduced a year-by-year timeline of America’s wars, which reveals something quite interesting: since the United
States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there
were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars.
To put this in perspective:
*Pick any year since 1776 and there is about a 91% chance that America was involved in some war during that calendar year.
*No U.S. president truly qualifies as a peacetime president. Instead, all U.S. presidents can technically be considered “war
presidents.”
* The U.S. has never gone a decade without war.
• The only time the U.S. went five years without war (1935-40) was during the isolationist period of the Great Depression.
So we can add 4 more years of war. That means that for 222 out of 239 years – or 93% of the time – America has been at war. (We
can quibble with the exact numbers, but the high percentage of time that America has been at war is clear and unmistakable.)
Indeed, most of the military operations launched since World War II have been launched by the U.S. and American military
spending dwarfs the rest of the world put together. No wonder polls show that the world believes America is the number 1 threat to
peace.
Between 1914 and 1918, more than 100 countries from Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australasia, and Europe were part of the conflict. https://www.thoughtco.com/countries-involved-in-world-war-1-1222074
The Countries Involved in World War I
Key Takeaways: Countries Involved in World War I •Although most of the battles of World War I occurred in western Europe, many other countries were involved in the events. •Some, like Canada and the U.S., declared war, sent troops, and manufactured armaments. •Other countries kept prisoner of war camps or sent infrastructure workers. •Many countries in Africa and Asia were colonies of the large empires and were coerced to help with the war effort.
Map of military alliances of Europe in 1914. historicair
Most of the battles of World War I took place in Europe, and willingly or not, the people of most of the countries were somehow active in the conflict. For the Allies, 5.2 million British men served in the conflict, just under half of the available pool of men aged 18-51; 7.9 million French citizens were called to serve. A total of 13 million German citizens fought in the war between 1914 and 1918. In the occupied territories, Germany and its allies also coerced civilians into labor: citizens from Italy, Albania, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, and Russian Poland all had conscripts fighting or assisting with the Entente efforts.
Green
Blue
Grey
Allies before the Japanese attack
on Pearl Harbor
Axis Powers
Neutral Powers
Nearly every country and territory in the world participated
in World War II (Sep 1, 1939 – Sep 2, 1945). Most were
neutral at the beginning, but only a few nations remained
neutral to the end. The Second World War pitted two
alliances against each other, the U.S having served 16
million men, Germany serving 13 million, Soviet Union
serving 35 million and Japan serving 6 million. With
millions serving in other countries an estimated 300 million
soldiers saw combat. A total of 72 million people died with
the lowest estimate being 40 million dead and the highest
estimate being 120 million dead.
The Axis powers and the Allied powers. The leadingAxis
powers were Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy and
the Empire of Japan; while the United Kingdom, the United
States, the Soviet Union and China to an extent were the
"Big Four" Allied powers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_by_country Only 13 nations ( Portugal, Spain, Ireland, Switzerland, Sweden, Yemen, Afghanistan, Tibet, the Vatican state, Liechtenstein, Andorra, San Marino and Monaco) were neutral in this conflict. The other 89 participated in the war at some point.
Estimates for the total number of casualties in the war vary, because many deaths went unrecorded. Most suggest that some 60 million people died in the war, including about 20 million military personnel and 40 million civilians.
During most of human existence, contacts between
civilizations were intermittent or nonexistent. Then, with
the beginning of the modern era, about A.D. 1500, global
politics assumed two dimensions. For over four hundred
years, the nation states of the West — Britain, France,
Spain, Austria, Prussia, Germany, the United States, and
others — constituted a multipolar international system
within Western civilization and interacted, competed,
and fought wars with each other. At the same time,
Western nations also
colonized, or decisively
expanded,
influenced
conquered,
every other
civilization (Map 1.1).
World War II (Sep 1, 1939 – Sep 2, 1945)
The leading Axis powers were Nazi Germany, the Kingdom of Italy and the Empire of Japan; while the United
Kingdom, the United States, the Soviet Union and China to an extent were the "Big Four" Allied powers.
George F. Kennan, a career Foreign Service Officer, formulated
the policy of “containment,” the basic United States strategy
for fighting the cold war (1947–1989) with the Soviet Union.
Kennan’s ideas, which became the basis of the Truman
administration’s foreign policy, first came to public attention in
1947 in the form of an anonymous contribution to the
journal Foreign Affairs, the so-called “X-Article.” “The main
element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union,”
Kennan wrote, “must be that of a long-term, patient but firm and
vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” To that
end, he called for countering “Soviet pressure against the free
institutions of the Western world” through the “adroit and vigilant
application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting
geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and
maneuvers of Soviet policy.” Such a policy, Kennan predicted,
would “promote tendencies which must eventually find their outlet
in either the break-up or the gradual mellowing of Soviet power.”
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/kennan
George Frost Kennan (1904–2005)
Career Foreign Service Officer
States of Residence: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin
1. Director of Policy Planning
Appointed: May 5, 1947
Termination of Appointment: May 31, 1949
Also served as Counselor Aug 4, 1949-Jul 11, 1951.
2. Counselor
Appointed: June 24, 1949
Entry on Duty: August 4, 1949
Termination of Appointment: July 11, 1951
3. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (Russia)
Appointed: March 14, 1952
Presentation of Credentials: May 14, 1952
Termination of Mission: Left post on September 19, 1952
Commissioned to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
The Government of the Soviet Union declared Kennan
persona non grata on October 3, 1952, and he did not
return to post.
4. Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary (Socialist
Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)
Appointed: March 7, 1961
Presentation of Credentials: May 16, 1961
Termination of Mission: Left Yugoslavia July 28, 1963
Commissioned to Yugoslavia.
During the Cold War global politics became bipolar and the world was divided into three parts. A group of mostly wealthy and democratic societies, led by the United States, was engaged in a pervasive ideological, political, economic, and, at times, military competition with a group of somewhat poorer communist societies associated with and led by the Soviet Union. Much of this conflict occurred in the Third World outside these two camps, composed of countries which often were poor, lacked political stability, were recently independent, and claimed to be nonaligned (Map 1.2).
The Korean War was a war between North Korea and South Korea from 25 June 1950
to 27 July 1953. The war was a result of failed negotiations of which government would
govern a united Korea during the Korean conflict negotiations, and began as an attempt
by North Korean supreme leader Kim Il-sung to unify Korea under North Korea's communist regime through military force. The Korean War was among the most destructive conflicts of the modern era, with approximately 3 million war fatalities and a larger proportional civilian death toll than World War II or the Vietnam War. It incurred the destruction of virtually all of Korea's major cities, thousands of massacres by both sides, including the mass killing of tens of thousands of suspected communists by the South Korean government, and the torture and starvation of prisoners of war by the North Koreans. North Korea became among the most heavily bombed countries in history. Additionally, several million North Koreans are estimated to have fled North Korea over the
course of the war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War
Casualties and losses Total dead and missing: 170,927 dead and 32,585 missing (162,394 South Koreans, 36,574 Americans, 4,544 others) Total wounded: 566,434
Total dead and missing: 398,000–926,000 dead and 145,000+ missing (335,000– 526,000 North Koreans, 208,729–400,000 Chinese, 299 Soviet) Total wounded: 686,500
•Total civilian deaths: 2–3 million (est.) •South Koreans:
990,968 total casualties •North Koreans:
1,550,000 total casualties (est.)
On 1 October 1950, the day that UN troops crossed the 38th Parallel, the Soviet ambassador forwarded a telegram from Stalin to Mao and Zhou requesting that China send five to six divisions into Korea, and Kim Il-sung sent frantic appeals to Mao for Chinese military intervention.
China Involvement:
October 19, 1950-July 27, 1953
The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and
Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina
Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam.
The conflict emerged from the First Indochina War between the French colonial government and a left-wing revolutionary movement, the Viet Minh. After
the French military withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, the US assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state.
North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China, and other communist allies; South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South
Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and other anti-communist allies. The war, considered a Cold War-era proxy war by some, lasted almost 20
years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973, and included the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three
countries becoming communist states in 1975.
Reunification of North and South Vietnam into the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
Casualties and losses • North Vietnam & Viet Cong 30,000–182,000 civilian dead
]
849,018 military dead (per Vietnam; 1/3 non-combat deaths) 666,000–950,765 dead (US estimated 1964–1974) 600,000+ military wounded 300,000+ military missing • Khmer Rouge: Unknown • Pathet Lao: Unknown • China: ~1,100 dead and 4,200 wounded • Soviet Union: 16 dead • North Korea: 14 dead Total military dead: ≈667,130–951,895 Total military wounded: ≈604,200 (excluding GRUNK and Pathet Lao)
• South Vietnam: 195,000–430,000 civilian dead 254,256–313,000 military dead 1,170,000 military wounded ≈ 1,000,000 captured • United States: 58,281 dead (47,434 from combat) 303,644 wounded (150,341 not requiring hospital care) • Laos: 15,000 army dead • Khmer Republic: Unknown • South Korea: 5,099 dead; 10,962 wounded; 4 missing • Australia: 521 dead; 3,129 wounded • Thailand: 351 dead • New Zealand: 37 dead • Taiwan: 25 dead • Philippines: 9 dead; 64 wounded • Total military dead: 333,620–392,364 Total military wounded: ≈1,340,000+ (excluding FARK and FANK) Total military captured: ≈1,000,000+
•Vietnamese civilian dead: 627,000–2,000,000 •Vietnamese total dead: 966,000–3,010,000
•Cambodian Civil War dead: 275,000–310,000 •Laotian Civil War dead: 20,000–62,000 •Non-Indochinese military dead: 65,494
•Total dead: 1,326,494–3,447,494
Americans Are Sick of Endless War
With years of foreign-policy failures, why has so little changed?
By Stephen Miles
JUNE 21, 2018
https://www.thenation.com/article/americans-sick-endless-war/
The Iraq War was a protracted armed
conflict in Iraq from 2003 to 2011 that began with
the invasion of Iraq by the United States–led
coalition that overthrew the Iraqi
government of Saddam Hussein. The conflict
continued for much of the next decade as an
insurgency emerged to oppose the coalition forces and
the post-invasion Iraqi government. US troops were
officially withdrawn in 2011. The United States became
re-involved in 2014 at the head of a new coalition, and
the insurgency and many dimensions of the armed
conflict continue today. The invasion occurred as part
of the George W. Bush administration's War on
terror following the September 11 attacks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War
The War in Afghanistan was an armed conflict
in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021. It began when
an international military coalition led by the United
States launched an invasion of Afghanistan, subsequently
toppling the Taliban-ruled Islamic Emirate and establishing
the internationally recognized Islamic Republic three
years later. The 20-year-long conflict ultimately ended with
the 2021 Taliban offensive, which overthrew the Islamic
Republic and subsequently re-established the Islamic
Emirate. It was the longest war in the military history of
the United States, surpassing the length of the Vietnam
War (1955–1975) by approximately six months. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021)
Ongoing armed conflicts in July 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts
Major wars, 10,000 or more deaths in current or past year
Wars, 1,000–9,999 deaths in current or past year
Minor conflicts, 100–999 deaths in current or past year
Skirmishes and clashes, fewer than 100 deaths
Ongoing armed conflicts in January 2020
14:46, 14 September 2022 29 August 2023
Rank Country Conflict Related Fatalities
1 Syria 49,742
2 Iraq 23,898
3 Afghanistan 23,539
4 Mexico 12,224
5 Somalia 5,575
6 Nigeria 4,684
7 Sudan 3,891
8 South Sudan 3,544
9 Libya 2,865
10 Pakistan 1,803
11 Egypt 1,707
12 Democratic Republic of the Congo 1,565
13 Yemen 1,375
14 Ethiopia 1,114
15 Ukraine 902
The World's Most War-Torn Countries https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/the-world-s-most-war-torn-countries.html
This page was last updated by Oishimaya Sen Nag on June 6, 2019.
COLD WAR • The global balance of economic and
political power shifted after the end of World War II and rapidly evolved into the Cold War.
• The United States and the Soviet Union emerged as superpowers
• Led to struggle between Capitalism and Communism
• Military consequences • new military alliances,
including NATO and the Warsaw Pact
• proxy wars in Latin America, Africa, and Asia
• The dissolution of the Soviet Union effectively ended the Cold War.
Cold War Paradigm of World Affairs it was an essential starting point for thinking about international affairs, it came to be almost universally accepted, and it shaped thinking about world politics for two generations.
The Cold War image of superpower competition depicted the international landscape in terms everyone could understand, and so doing prepared the way for the sophisticated strategy of containment that was soon to follow.
World views and causal theories are indispensable guides to international politics. We need explicit or implicit models so as to be able to:
1. order and generalize about reality; 2. understand causal relationships among phenomena; 3. anticipate and, if we are lucky, predict future developments; 4. distinguish what is important from what is unimportant; and 5. show us what paths we should take to achieve our goals.
Post-Soviet states 1. Armenia 3. Belarus 5. Georgia 7. Kyrgyzstan 9. Lithuania 11. Russia
2. Azerbaijan 4. Estonia 6. Kazakhstan 8. Latvia 10. Moldov 12. Tajikistan
13. Turkmenistan 14.Ukraine 15. Uzbekistan
The dissolution of the Soviet Union was the process of internal disintegration within the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) which began in second half of 1980s with a series of national
unrests and ended on 26 December 1991, when the USSR itself was voted out of existence by
the Supreme Soviet, following the Belavezha Accords. Declaration number 142-Н by the Supreme
Soviet resulted in self-governing independence to the Republics of the USSR, formally dissolving the
USSR. The declaration acknowledged the independence of the former Soviet republics and created
the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), although five of the signatories ratified it much later
or did not do so at all. On the previous day, 25 December, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev,
the eighth and final leader of the USSR, resigned, declared his office extinct and handed over its
powers—including control of the Soviet nuclear missile launching codes—to Russian President Boris
Yeltsin. That evening at 7:32 p.m., the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last time and
replaced with the pre-revolutionary Russian flag.
Previously, from August to December, all the individual republics, including Russia itself, had either
seceded from the union or at the very least denounced the Treaty on the Creation of the USSR. The
week before formal dissolution, eleven republics signed the Alma-Ata Protocol formally establishing
the CIS and declaring that the USSR had ceased to exist. Both the Revolutions of 1989 and the
dissolution of the USSR also marked the end of the Cold War.
11 March 1990
August 1991
August 1991
1 December 1991
The end of the Cold War
Several maps or paradigms of world politics were advanced at the end of the Cold War.
One World: Euphoria and Harmony. One widely articulated paradigm was based on the assumption that the end of the Cold War meant the end of significant conflict in global politics and the emergence of one relatively harmonious world. The most widely discussed formulation of this model was the “end of history” thesis advanced by Francis Fukuyama. “We may be witnessing,” Fukuyama argued, “… the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” To be sure, he said, some conflicts may happen in places in the Third World, but the global conflict is over, and not just in Europe. “It is precisely in the non-European world” that the big changes have occurred, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. The war of ideas is at an end. Believers in Marxist-Leninism may still exist “in places like Managua, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,” but overall liberal democracy has triumphed. The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.
The End of History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his 1989 essay "The End of History?", published in the international affairs journal The National Interest. In the book, Fukuyama argues that, following the ascendency of Western-style liberal democracy following the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, humanity was reaching "not just ... the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government".
The end of history means that liberal democracy is the final form of government for all nations. There can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.
According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution (May 5, 1789 – Nov 9, 1799), democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives.
The most basic (and prevalent) error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse "history" with "events". Fukuyama claims not that events will stop occurring in the future, but rather that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may suffer "temporary" setbacks (which may, of course, last for centuries).
Fukuyama's argument is only that in the future there will be more and more governments that use the framework of parliamentary democracy and that contain markets of some sort.
The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organization. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU's attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a "post-historical" world than the Americans' continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.
Reagan and Gorbachev forged a constructive relationship that helped the two powers end the half-century-long Cold War in 1989. Then the Soviet Union collapsed altogether in 1991. It was left to Reagan’s successors to formulate America’s foreign policy in the new, but still dangerous post-Cold War world. His immediate successor, George H.W. Bush, called the new dynamic and vaguely defined new policy the New World Order. In a January 1991 State-of-the-Union address, Bush anticipated a New World Order in which diverse nations would be drawn together through a commitment to peace, security, and rule of law. http://sites.austincc.edu/caddis/new-world-order/
The Berlin wall had come down, communist regimes had collapsed, the United Nations was to assume a new importance, the former Cold War rivals would engage in “partnership” and a “grand bargain,” peacekeeping and peacemaking would be the order of the day.
“… the president of, arguably, the world’s leading university vetoed appointment of a professor of security studies because the need had disappeared: “Hallelujah! We study war no more because war is no more.”
The illusion of harmony at the end of that Cold War was soon dissipated by the multiplication of ethnic conflicts and “ethnic cleansing,” the breakdown of law and order, the emergence of new patterns of alliance and conflict among states, the resurgence of neo-communist and neo-fascist movements, intensification of religious fundamentalism, the end of the “diplomacy of smiles” and “policy of yes” in Russia’s relations with the West, the inability of the United Nations and the United States to suppress bloody local conflicts, and the increasing assertiveness of a rising China.
Two Worlds: Us and Them The most common division, which appears under various names, is between rich (modern, developed) countries and poor (traditional, undeveloped or developing) countries.
Differences in wealth may lead to conflicts between societies, but the evidence suggests that this happens primarily when rich and more powerful societies attempt to conquer and colonize poor and more traditional societies.
In the current world, decolonization has occurred and colonial wars of liberation have been replaced by conflicts among the liberated peoples.
At a more general level, conflicts between rich and poor are unlikely because, except in special circumstances, the poor countries lack the political unity, economic power, and military capability to challenge the rich countries.
Economic development in Asia and Latin America is blurring the simple dichotomy of haves and have- nots. Rich states may fight trade wars with each other; poor states may fight violent wars with each other; but an international class war between the poor South and the wealthy North is almost as far from reality as one happy harmonious world.
The cultural bifurcation of the world division is still less useful. At some level, the West is an entity. What, however, do non-Western societies have in common other than the fact that they are non-Western? Japanese, Chinese, Hindu, Muslim, and African civilizations share little in terms of religion, social structure, institutions, and prevailing values. The unity of the non-West and the East-West dichotomy are myths created by the West.
184 States, More or Less
To insure their survival and security, states invariably attempt to maximize their power. If one state sees another state increasing its power and thereby becoming a potential threat, it attempts to protect its own security by strengthening its power and/or by allying itself with other states.
States define their interests in terms of power but also in terms of much else besides.
Values, culture, and institutions pervasively influence how states define their interests. States with similar cultures and institutions will see common interest. Democratic states have commonalities with other democratic states and hence do not fight each other. Canada does not have to ally with another power to deter invasion by the United States.
Publics and statesmen are less likely to see threats emerging from people they feel they understand and can trust because of shared language, religion, values, institutions, and culture. They are much more likely to see threats coming from states whose societies have different cultures and hence which they do not understand and feel they cannot trust.
State governments have in considerable measure lost the ability to control the flow of money in and out of their country and are having increasing difficulty controlling the flows of ideas, technology, goods, and people. State borders, in short, have become increasingly permeable.
Sheer Chaos
This paradigm stresses: the breakdown of governmental authority; the breakup of states; the intensification of tribal, ethnic, and religious conflict; the emergence of international criminal mafias; refugees multiplying into the tens of millions; the proliferation of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction; the spread of terrorism; the prevalence of massacres and ethnic cleansing.
The world may be chaos but it is not totally without order. An image of universal and undifferentiated anarchy provides few clues for understanding the world, for ordering events and evaluating their importance, for predicting trends in the anarchy, for distinguishing among types of chaos and their possibly different causes and consequences, and for developing guidelines for governmental policy makers.
In the late 1980s the communist world collapsed, and the Cold War international system became history. In the post-Cold War world, the most important distinctions among peoples are not ideological, political, or economic. They are cultural.
Nation states remain the principal actors in world affairs. Their behavior is shaped as in the past by the pursuit of power and wealth, but it is also shaped by cultural preferences, commonalities, and differences. The most important groupings of states are no longer the three blocs of the Cold War but rather the world’s seven or eight major civilizations (Map 1.3).
In this new world, local politics is the politics of ethnicity; global politics is the politics of civilizations. The rivalry of the superpowers is replaced by the clash of civilizations.
In the post-Cold War world, culture is both a divisive and a unifying force.
People separated by ideology but united by culture come together, as the two Germanys did and as the two Koreas and the several Chinas are beginning to.
In the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Libya provided funds and arms to the Bosnians, not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship.
Societies united by ideology or historical circumstance but divided by civilization either come apart, as did the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Bosnia, or are subjected to intense strain, as is the case with Ukraine, Nigeria, Sudan, India, Sri Lanka, and many others.
For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other.
The years after the Cold War witnessed the beginnings of dramatic changes in peoples’ identities and the symbols of those identities. Global politics began to be reconfigured along cultural lines.
The central theme of this book is that culture and cultural identities, which at the broadest level are civilization identities, are shaping the patterns of cohesion, disintegration, and conflict in the post-Cold War world.
It aspires to present a framework, a paradigm, for viewing global politics that will be meaningful to scholars and useful to policymakers.
“In the emerging era, clashes of civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace, and an international order based on civilizations is the surest safeguard against world war.” Samuel P. Huntington, 1996. “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order”
Part I: For the first time in history global politics is both multipolar and multicivilizational; modernization is distinct from Westernization and is producing neither a universal civilization in any meaningful sense nor the Westernization of non-Western societies.
Part II: The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non- Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures.
Part III: A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other; efforts to shift societies from one civilization to another are unsuccessful; and countries group themselves around the lead or core states of their civilization.
Part IV: The West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations, most seriously with Islam and China; at the local level fault line wars, largely between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate “kin-country rallying,” the threat of broader escalation, and hence efforts by core states to halt these wars.
Part V: The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. Avoidance of a global war of civilizations depends on world leaders accepting and cooperating to maintain the multicivilizational character of global politics.
Huntington contended, in what was perhaps his most forward-looking insight, that clashes between the West and the Islamic
world would intensify with the collapse of the Cold War rivalry. He astutely observed that the fall of the Soviet Union and
much of the global communist movement in the early 1990s "removed a common enemy of the West and Islam and left each
the perceived threat to the other." Huntington argued that the shared universality of the Western and Islamic cultures, which
espouse views that they believe all humans can adhere to, would generate competition and conflict between the two. He even
went so far as to identify the manner in which this conflict would play out: "a war of terrorism versus air power."
Map of the nine "civilizations" from Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations."
From the start of his presidency — literally the first minutes, at the start of his inaugural address — President Biden has framed the central tension of the moment as pitting democracy against autocracy. Last summer, the administration announced that Biden would host a “Summit for Democracy” centered on bolstering democratic political systems in the face of growing authoritarian and autocratic movements around the world. In promoting it, the State Department highlighted a quote from Biden’s speech to the Munich Security Conference the previous February: “Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” By the time the summit arrived in December, its thesis was already becoming alarmingly salient. NATO had begun raising the alarm about Russia’s military movements in mid-November; in early December, The Washington Post reported that Russia planned to invade Ukraine with overwhelming force. The demand that democracy be defended and fought for was suddenly very literal. To some extent, it seems obvious that the administration’s response to Russia’s aggression and eventual invasion was streamlined by the binary that Biden had been presenting. The invasion isn’t nuanced in general, but it was also an explicit demonstration of the contrast between political systems. And in the wake of the invasion, we’ve seen our typical political spectrum explicitly subsumed in significant ways by the one Biden spoke about on Jan. 20, 2021. Democracy vs. autocracy is, in fact, an important political axis in the United States. Biden’s comments at his inauguration were broadly about the rise of autocracy in the world, the expansion of ambition by people like Russian President Vladimir Putin and the retraction of free elections at the hands of people like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban. But he was clearly also speaking explicitly about the attempt by Donald Trump to subvert the results of the election in our own country and the violence that had unfolded two weeks before, where Biden stood as he spoke. Trump does not sit at the far end of the “democracy” side of the axis, though it’s not exactly clear where he sits otherwise. He has, however, helped amplify sympathy for a more-autocratic view of American politics. He’s repeatedly elevated dishonest claims about election security as he endorses new restrictions on the right to vote. He’s lashed out at independent governmental institutions and actors, and advocated repeatedly for infusing apolitical organizations and decision-makers with political considerations. His party has often followed his lead. Republican legislators at all levels of government are questioning how expansive voting access should be. Often, these are small tweaks, ones that they generally believe to be disadvantageous to the left. Sometimes that belief stems from an understanding of who is newly burdened by the changes. Sometimes it's based on the delusion that the left regularly commits rampant fraud in elections, a theory that would seem to be undercut pretty severely by the fact that the Democratic Party's hold on power is so tenuous. These restrictions are not autocratic, certainly, but they are movements away from open democratic elections. As the GOP has become more reliant on the disproportionate power of rural states in the electoral college and the Senate, we hear more direct arguments against democracy crop up at times. Shortly before the 2020 election, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), for example, explicitly argued against the idea that the United States was a democracy but, instead, a system of “carefully balanced power” — one that he praised explicitly as a check on the will of the majority. It was a useful argument given that any second term for Trump would almost certainly depend on winning a majority of electoral votes while losing the popular vote, and it was an argument specifically offered in response to a vice-presidential debate in which Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) amplified her ticket’s concerns about the threat to democracy posed by a Trump victory. The invasion of Ukraine has clarified the differences between the poles of this axis. Numerous figures in American politics and media have emerged as defenders of Putin's attack, either by denigrating Ukraine — often carrying over rhetoric elevated by Trump as he sought to defend himself against impeachment in 2019 — or by excusing Putin's actions. Fox News's Tucker Carlson has repeatedly amplified Putin's position on the situation, to the Kremlin's apparent glee, even as he's at times forced to malign Putin personally. Others, often but not exclusively on the right, have similarly used the invasion as a moment for denigrating the American government or rationalizing Putin's worldview. It's useful to step back and look at the forest here. What are you doing when you rationalize the Russian invasion? You're making excuses for an autocratic nation to subsume or kneecap a democratic one. If your position is that people have a right to self-governance, it's hard to see how such rhetoric is defensible. If, instead, you hold the position Lee used to bolster his argument, that democracy is just a means to an ends, then however you get to those ends is fine. You're somewhere on the axis, but not at the democracy pole. These nuanced cases shouldn’t distract from the fact that there are some who clearly believe that autocratic power would be preferable in the United States to democratic elections. If you asked Trump whether he should get to hold power as long as he wanted or be subject to open elections every four years, what do you think he would say? Perhaps he would pay lip service to elections held on his terms. Autocracies often include elections, after all; Putin has been “reelected,” but not in any election that should be considered credible. Kim Jong Un is the “elected” leader of North Korea, too. But it’s clear that Trump’s sympathies are with the autocratic end of the axis. On Tuesday, he offered an endorsement in an upcoming election. “Now with what’s going on with Russia and Ukraine, among many other things, the great and wonderful people of Hungary need the continued strong leadership of Prime Minister Viktor Orban more than ever,” Trump wrote. “He is TOUGH, SMART, AND LOVES HIS COUNTRY. In the upcoming Election next month, he already has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” That this “endorsement” was identical in tone and content to his endorsements in American elections should not be missed. Nor should the use of Russia’s invasion as a rationale for cementing the power of an emerging autocrat (who, naturally, has been upheld as an ideal in the past by Tucker Carlson). The question of how robust democracy should be in the United States predates the country’s founding, and the tension between democracy and autocracy has been important before, as it was a century ago. But we should not use that history to assuage any worries about how the tension manifests today. The breadth of participation in democracy we see today was born only with the civil rights movement — after the global surge in autocracy at the time of World War II. It is an important fight in the moment, as exemplified in Ukraine. But it’s also a fight, to Biden’s point, that doesn’t only unfold through use of arms.
The newly important American political axis: Democracy vs. Autocracy Analysis by Philip Bump, National correspondent, March 18, 2022 at 12:54 p.m. EDT https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/03/18/newly-important-american-political-axis-democracy-vs-autocracy/
Philip Bump is a correspondent for The Washington Post based in New York.
Red: Summit for Democracy Invited Participants Pink: Dependent and Autonomous Territories of Invited Participants
Host country United States
Dates December 9–10, 2021
Venue(s) Virtual
Participants 111
Website www.state.gov/summit-for-democracy/
The Summit for Democracy was a virtual summit hosted by
the United States "to renew democracy at home and confront
autocracies abroad" on December 9–10, 2021. The three
themes are defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_for_Democracy
Criticism
The summit's guest list was criticized for inviting participants based on the political interests of the United States, not on its
democracy ratings. University of Sydney politics professor John Keane said the guest list was a "cynically drawn up,
bureaucratically crafted, agency-structured invitation list that includes states that by any measure are falling way down the democracy
rankings or aren't democracies at all".
Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, accused of crimes against humanity, accepted President Biden's invitation to join the Summit
for Democracy. According to ICHRP Chairperson Peter Murphy, "Duterte’s reign of terror and mass murder, which have provoked
an ICC investigation of crimes against humanity, would seem to disqualify him from providing advice on anything except fascist
populism, repression and human rights violations."
Despite several democracy watchdogs calling India and Brazil as a backsliding democracies, Indian Prime Minister Narendra
Modi and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro participated in the Summit for Democracy.
Some invited countries, such as Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq, were deemed "not free" in the democracy
watchdog Freedom House’s latest “Freedom in the World” report.
The Soviet Union while ruled by Joseph Stalin Italy while ruled by Benito Mussolini Japan while ruled by Hirohito Germany while ruled by Adolf Hitler China while ruled by Mao Zedong Cuba while ruled by Fidel Castro Venezuela while ruled by Nicolas Maduro Russia while ruled by Vladimir Putin
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/autocratic-countries
An autocracy is a form of government in which one ruler has absolute
control and decision-making power. Autocracies have existed since
ancient times, when kings and emperors ruled over great countries and
tribal lands, and they exist today in the form of absolute monarchies
and dictatorships. Unlike in a democracy, the people living in countries
with autocratic governments have no say in determining the nation’s laws,
or in how those laws are enforced. An autocratic ruler is accountable to no
one; there is no system of checks and balances, no constitutional limit on
the ruler’s power, and the ruler is not held accountable by a cabinet of advisors, a system of courts, the people, or the press.
In autocratic governments, the power of the ruler is absolute; dissent is
not tolerated. For this reason, scholars have often
linked autocracy with totalitarian regimes, such as that of Adolf Hitler in
Germany and Josef Stalin in the Soviet Union. Autocracy is a general
concept rather than a specific form of government. Though autocratic
rulers have complete power over the people of their countries, their methods of governing can be vastly different.
Absolute monarchies and dictatorships still exist in modern times.
Today’s kings and queens, as in ancient times, often rule by right
of succession. Their royal lineage can be traced back to ancient times
when their royal ancestors ruled by divine right—as it was widely believed
that they descended from the gods. Dictators are absolute rulers who
acquire their power rather than inherit it. Most commonly, dictators gain
power as a result of revolution—typically, when a group of rebels rise
up in protest and overthrow the existing government. Then,
the dictator assumes control with the goal of establishing a new
order. Dictators, especially military dictators, acquire their power by force. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/autocracy
•The French Republic and the French Empire from 1799 to 1814 under Napoleon
Bonaparte.
•The Ottoman Empire from 1878 to 1908 under Abdul Hamid II.
•The Soviet Union during the tenure of Joseph Stalin in addition to other Soviet
leaders. The Soviet Union was founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1922 following
the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), and several of its leaders have been considered
autocratic. Political repression occurred in the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991.
•Fascist Italy under Benito Mussolini's rule starting from 1922.
•Empire of Japan under Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial Rule Assistance
Association.
•Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
•India under Indira Gandhi, especially during the infamous period of The Emergency
(India).
•Indonesia under the Suharto's New Order (1966–1998).
•Greece under the military junta of Georgios Papadopoulos (1967–1974).
•Paraguay under the government of Alfredo Stroessner.
•The People’s Republic of China under the leadership of Mao Zedong.
•Cuba under Fidel Castro.
•Iran under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Ruhollah Khomeini.
•Russia under Vladimir Putin.
•Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko.
•Hungary under Victor Orban.
•Venezuela under Nicolas Maduro.
•Afghanistan is officially an autocracy under Hibatullah Akhundzada just as it was
under Mullah Omar; the Taliban claims no limits on the powers of the supreme leader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutocracyAutocratic Countries
Map of the current sovereign monarchs
in the World Absolute Monarchy
Semi-constitutional Monarchy
Constitutional Monarch
Commonwealth Realm
(parliamentary monarchies in personal union)
Sub-state Monarchy
This is a list of current monarchies. As of
2022, there are 43 sovereign states in the
world with a monarch as head of state.
There are 13 in Asia, 12 in Europe, 9 in the
Americas, 6 in Oceania, and 3 in Africa.
Monarchy Title of Head of State Monarch Title of Head of
Government Type of monarchy Succession
Current constitution
Andorra Co-Princes Joan-Enric Vives Emmanuel Macron
Prime Minister
Parliamentary
Ex officio 1993
Antigua and Barbuda King Charles III
Hereditary
1981 Australia King Charles III 1901 The Bahamas King Charles III 1973 Bahrain King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa Semi-constitutional 2002 Belgium King Philippe
Parliamentary Hereditary 1831
Belize King Charles III
Hereditary
1981
Bhutan King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck
Semi-constitutional 2007
Brunei Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Sultan Absolute 1959 Cambodia King Norodom Sihamoni
Prime Minister
Parliamentary Hereditary and elective 1993
Canada King Charles III Hereditary
1982 Denmark Queen Margrethe II 1953 Eswatini King Mswati III Absolute Hereditary and elective 1968 Grenada King Charles III
Parliamentary Hereditary 1974
Jamaica King Charles III 1962 Japan Emperor Naruhito 1947 Jordan King Abdullah II
Semi-constitutional Hereditary and elective
1952
Kuwait Emir Nawaf Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah
1962
Lesotho King Letsie III Parliamentary 1993 Liechtenstein Sovereign Prince Hans-Adam II Semi-constitutional
Hereditary 1862
Luxembourg Grand Duke Henri Parliamentary 1868 Malaysia Yang di-Pertuan Agong Abdullah Parliamentary & Federal Elective 1957 Monaco Sovereign Prince Albert II Minister of State
Semi-constitutional
Hereditary
1911 Morocco King Mohammed VI
Prime Minister
1631 Kingdom of the Netherlands
King Willem-Alexander Parliamentary
1815
New Zealand King Charles III 1907 Norway King Harald V 1814 Oman Sultan Haitham bin Tarik Sultan Absolute 1996 Papua New Guinea King Charles III
Prime Minister
Parliamentary 1975 Qatar Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani Semi-constitutional 2004 Saint Kitts and Nevis King Charles III
Parliamentary
1983 Saint Lucia King Charles III 1979 Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
King Charles III 1979
Saudi Arabia King Salman Prime Minister Absolute Hereditary and elective 1992 Solomon Islands King Charles III Prime Minister
Parliamentary Hereditary
1978
Spain King Felipe VI President of the Government
1978
Sweden King Carl XVI Gustaf
Prime Minister
1974 Thailand King Rama X 2017 Tonga King Tupou VI Semi-constitutional 1970 Tuvalu King Charles III Parliamentary 1986
United Arab Emirates President Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan
Semi-constitutional & Federal
Hereditary and elective 1971
United Kingdom King Charles III Parliamentary Hereditary No codified constitution
Vatican City Pope Francis President of the Pontifical Commission
Absolute Elective 2001
In Wallis and Futuna, an overseas territory of France in the South Pacific, there are three kingdoms, Uvea, Alo and Sigave,
whose monarchs are chosen by local noble families.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_monarchies
The Thucydides Trap JANUARY 31, 2011 2:00 PM https://schott.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/the-thucydides-trap/ The theory that American anxiety about China’s increasing power might evolve into animosity and aggression. (After Thucydides’s account of the causes of the Peloponnesian war.)
“For a superpower, dealing with the fast rise of a rich, brash competitor has always been an iffy thing,” The Times’s David E. Sanger wrote, adding, “Just ask the British”:
Or ask Thucydides, the Athenian historian whose tome on the Peloponnesian War has ruined many a college freshman’s weekend. The line they had to remember for the test was his conclusion: “What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta.” So while no official would dare say so publicly as President Hu Jintao bounced from the White House to meetings with business leaders to factories in Chicago last week, his visit, from both sides’ points of view, was all about managing China’s rise and defusing the fears that it triggers. Both Mr. Hu and President Obama seemed desperate to avoid what Graham Allison of Harvard University has labeled “the Thucydides Trap” – that deadly combination of calculation and emotion that, over the years, can turn healthy rivalry into antagonism or worse.
The Cause of the Peloponnesian War
The formation of the Delian League, or Athenian League, in 478 B.C. united several Greek city- states in a military alliance under Athens, ostensibly to guard against revenge attacks from the Persian Empire. In reality, the league also granted increased power and prestige to Athens. The Spartans, meanwhile, were part of the Peloponnesian League (550 BC- 366 B.C.) of city-states. It was only a matter of time before the two powerful leagues collided.
The two most powerful city-states in ancient Greece, Athens and Sparta, went to war with each other from 431 to 405 B.C. The Peloponnesian War marked a significant power shift in ancient Greece, favoring Sparta, and also ushered in a period of regional decline that signaled the end of what is considered the Golden Age of Ancient Greece. https://www.history.com/topics/ancient-history/peloponnesian-war
Thucydides (c. 460 – c. 400 BC) was an Athenian historian and general. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the fifth-
century BC war between Sparta and Athens until the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history" by
those who accept his claims to have applied strict standards of impartiality and evidence-gathering and analysis of cause and effect,
without reference to intervention by the deities, as outlined in his introduction to his work.
He also has been called the father of the school of political realism, which views the political behavior of individuals and the
subsequent outcomes of relations between states as ultimately mediated by, and constructed upon, the emotions of fear and self-
interest. His text is still studied at universities and military colleges worldwide. The Melian dialogue is regarded as a seminal work
of international relations theory, while his version of Pericles' Funeral Oration is widely studied by political theorists, historians, and
students of the classics.
More generally, Thucydides developed an understanding of human nature to explain behaviour in such crises as plagues, massacres,
and civil war. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides
Thucydides's Trap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison
In the book Destined for War (2017), Allison propounded the phrase Thucydides's Trap to refer to the theory that when an established political power fears a rising foreign power, war is an inescapable outcome, despite genuine intentions on both sides to avoid it. Allison's term follows the ancient text History of the Peloponnesian War, in which Thucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." The term appeared in a paid opinion advertisement in The New York Times on April 6, 2017, on the occasion of U.S. President Donald Trump's meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, which stated, "Both major players in the region share a moral obligation to steer away from Thucydides's Trap." Allison asserts that circumstances at the start of World War I (involving British fears about Germany); and the War of the Spanish Succession, and the Thirty Years War, (involving French insecurity about the Hapsburg empires of Spain and Austria) exhibit the trap. Sinologist Arthur Waldron has criticized the concept of Thucydides's Trap and Allison's application of it to US–China relations, while others have argued that Allison's interpretation ignores many Asian precedents with quite differing implications.
Graham Tillett Allison, Jr. (born March 23, 1940) is an American political scientist and
professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. He attended Davidson College for two years, then graduated from Harvard University in 1962 with an B.A. degree. Allison then completed a two-year B.A. degree at Oxford University as a Marshall Scholar in 1964 and returned to Harvard to earn a Ph.D. degree in political science in 1968. In 1979 Allison received an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Social Sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden. Allison has spent his entire academic career at Harvard, as an assistant professor (1968), associate professor (1970), then full professor (1972) in the department of government. He was dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government from 1977 to 1989 while the School increased in size by 400% and its endowment increased by 700%. He was Director for the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs from 1995 until 2017, when he was succeeded by former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter. Allison remains Douglas Dillon Professor of Government. Allison has also been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Studies (1973–74); consultant for the RAND Corporation; member of the Council on Foreign Relations; member of the visiting committee on foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution (1972–77); and a member of the Trilateral Commission (1974–84 and 2018). He was among those mentioned to succeed David Rockefeller as President of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2009 he was awarded the NAS Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the National Academy of Sciences. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison
"Graham Allison is one of the keenest observers of international affairs around. He consistently brings
his deep understanding of history's currents to today's most difficult challenges and makes our
toughest foreign policy dilemmas accessible to experts and everyday citizens alike. That's why I
regularly sought his counsel both as a senator and as vice president. In Destined for War, Allison lays
out one of the defining challenges of our time--managing the critical relationship between China and
the United States." -- JOE BIDEN, former Vice President of the United States
"Can the US avoid confrontation with China? That is the geopolitical question of our age. In most
cases, Thucydides was right: when a new power arises in the world, it results in a clash with the
dominant power. This important and fascinating book extracts lessons for how we can avoid such a
confrontation."-- WALTER ISAACSON, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators
"One of the most insightful and thought-provoking books I have ever read on the most important
relationship in the world: the US and China. If Graham Allison is right--and I think he is--China and the
US must heed the lessons in this superb study in order to build a strategic relationship that
avoids a war which neither side would win." -- General (Ret.) DAVID PETRAEUS, Chairman of the
KKR Global Institute, former Director of the CIA, and former Commander of US Central Command
"Thucydides's Trap identifies a cardinal challenge to world order: the impact of a rising power
on a ruling power. I read the book with great interest. I can only hope that the US-China
relationship becomes the fifth case to resolve itself peacefully, rather than the 13th to result in
war." -- HENRY KISSINGER, former United States Secretary of State
"A provocative thesis on one of today's most pressing foreign policy issues and a page turner of the first order, Destined For War is a
must read. Professor Allison writes with the propulsive narrative drive appropriate for such an immediate and danger fraught topic. I
can only hope that all senior policy experts read this timely book to prevent our country from falling into the trap Professor Allison so
ably warns us against." -- CHRISTOPHER REICH, bestselling author of Invasion of Privacy , The Patriots' Club, and Numbered
Account
"Do China and America want war? No. Might they be compelled into conflict by severe structural stress? Yes. Thankfully, Allison
charts an essential course to avoid a catastrophic collision. Destined for War will be studied and debated for decades." -- KEVIN
RUDD, former Prime Minister of Australia
Aukus could trigger a 'nuclear arms race', says North Korea https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-58621056
France recalls its ambassadors to the US and
Australia over new national security partnership By Jim Acosta, Kylie Atwood and Maegan Vazquez, CNN Updated 3:22 PM
ET, Sat September 18, 2021 https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/politics/french-ambassador-to-the-us-recalled/index.html
Officials Push U.S.-China Relations Toward Point of No Return By Edward Wong and Steven Lee Myers Published July 25, 2020Updated Dec. 8, 2020 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/25/world/asia/us-china-trump-xi.html?.?mc=aud_dev&ad-keywords=auddevgate&gclid=EAIaIQobChMInb702cOQ8wIVx8fICh2FcQeuEAMYAiAAEgKT-_D_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
“Step by step, blow by blow, the United States and China are dismantling decades of political, economic and social engagement, setting the stage for a new era of confrontation shaped by the views of the most hawkish voices on both sides.”
Biden’s Dangerous Doctrine By Jonathan Tepperman, a former editor in chief of Foreign Policy Six months into U.S. President Joe Biden’s term, the race is already on to identify a Biden Doctrine: an organizing principle that can explain the president’s overarching foreign policy. In the last few weeks, several pundits have zeroed in on the global contest between democracies and autocracies—and, more specifically, on America’s intensifying showdown with China. As Hal Brands, Thomas Wright, and others have rightly pointed out, only that struggle can explain and link together the administration’s various foreign-policy moves and pronouncements: its emphasis on serving the U.S. middle class, on cooperation among democracies, on defending human rights, on boosting U.S. competitiveness through investment in infrastructure and research and development, and on trade protectionism and industrial policy. Biden’s choice of target is no surprise. China is the closest thing to a peer competitor the United States has faced in 30 years. It’s led by an increasingly abusive, aggressive, and tyrannical regime.
China’s actions, in manufacturing, technology, trade, or cybersecurity, directly affect millions of Americans every day, in a way you can’t say about Russia or any other country. So Biden’s decision to confront Beijing and make that confrontation central to his foreign policy makes political sense. Whether it makes strategic sense, however—especially given the provocative way he’s going about it—is far less clear. U.S.- China relations are already at their worst point in decades, and the administration’s strikingly confrontational approach is likely to make things worse, while damaging other U.S. interests in the process. As it reveals itself, the nascent Biden Doctrine is turning out to be far more dangerous than most analysts—or the administration—seem to appreciate.
What are nuclear-powered submarines that Australia will acquire under first AUKUS initiative RAGHAV BIKHCHANDANI 19 September, 2021 8:00 am IST https://theprint.in/theprint-essential/what-are-nuclear-powered-submarines-that-australia-will-acquire-under-first-aukus-initiative/735854/
A US nuclear-powered submarine (representational image) | Wikimedia commons
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/07/21/bidens-china-doctrine-decoupling-cold-war/
UN chief warns of potential new Cold War between US, China BY JOSEPH CHOI - 09/20/21 09:16 AM EDT https://thehill.com/policy/international/572978-un-chief-warns-of-potential-new-cold-war-between-us-china
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that the U.S. and China could be headed towards a new
Cold War in an interview with The Associated Press published Monday.
“Unfortunately, today we only have confrontation,” Guterres told the AP, saying that the U.S. and China should
instead be focusing on cooperating on issues like the environment, trade and technology.
“We need to re-establish a functional relationship between the two powers,” Guterres said, saying that it is
“essential to address the problems of vaccination, the problems of climate change and many other global challenges
that cannot be solved without constructive relations within the international community and mainly among the
superpowers.”
The AP noted that Guterres has previously warned of the two major economic powers splitting the world in two with
their competition, creating their own currencies, internets and financial rules.
“We need to avoid at all cost a Cold War that would be different from the past one, and probably more
dangerous and more difficult to manage,” he said, referring to the decades-long period of heightened tension
between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.
According to Guterres, the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was less perilous than a potential one with
China as it had a clear understanding of the risk of nuclear destruction and established rules “to guarantee that things
would not get out of control."
“Now, today, everything is more fluid, and even the experience that existed in the past to manage crisis is no
longer there,” Guterres said.
This warning from Guterres comes just shortly before the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly is set to take
place in New York. The session is scheduled to start Tuesday.
Today, only nine countries own the entirety of the roughly 14,500 nuclear weapons on Earth. That’s down from the peak of about 70,300 in 1986, according to an estimate by Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris of the Federation of American Scientists. Two countries account for the rise and fall in the global nuclear stockpile: Russia and the United States. They currently possess 93 percent of all nuclear weapons, with Moscow holding 6,850 and Washington another 6,450 (which is smaller than the 40,000 that Russia, then known as the Soviet Union, had in the 1980s and the roughly 30,000 the US had in the mid-1960s through mid-70s). https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2018/10/19/17873822/nuclear-war-weapons-bombs-how-kill
Status of World Nuclear Forces Who owns the world's nukes? Despite progress in reducing nuclear weapon arsenals since the Cold War, the world’s combined
inventory of nuclear warheads remains at a very high level: nine countries possessed roughly 12,700
warheads as of early-2022.
Approximately 90 percent of all nuclear warheads are owned by Russia and the United States, who
each have around 4,000 warheads in their military stockpiles; no other nuclear-armed state sees a
need for more than a few hundred nuclear weapons for national security.
Globally, the overall inventory of nuclear weapons is declining, but the pace of reductions is slowing
compared with the past 30 years. Moreover, these reductions are happening only because the
United States and Russia are still dismantling previously retired warheads.
In contrast to the overall inventory of nuclear weapons, the number of warheads in global
military stockpiles––which comprises warheads assigned to operational forces––is
increasing once again. The United States is still reducing its nuclear stockpile slowly. France and
Israel have relatively stable inventories. But China, India, North Korea, Pakistan and the United
Kingdom, as well as possibly Russia, are all thought to be increasing their stockpiles (see map):
https://fas.org/issues/nuclear-weapons/status-world-nuclear-forces/
United States nuclear forces, 2020 By Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, January 13, 2020
https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/united-states-nuclear-forces-2020/
The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by Hans M.
Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project with the
Federation of American Scientists, and Matt Korda, a research
associate with the project. The Nuclear Notebook column has
been published since 1987. This issue examines the status of the
US nuclear arsenal. The US nuclear arsenal remained roughly
unchanged in the last year, with the Defense Department
maintaining an estimated stockpile of approximately 3,800
warheads. Of these, only 1,750 warheads are deployed, while
approximately 2,050 are held in reserve. Additionally,
approximately 2,000 retired warheads are awaiting
dismantlement, giving a total inventory of approximately 5,800
nuclear warheads. Of the approximately 1,750 warheads that are
deployed, 400 are on land-based intercontinental ballistic
missiles, roughly 900 are on submarine-launched ballistic
missiles, 300 are at bomber bases in the United States, and
150 tactical bombs are at European bases.
Two missile maintenance
personnel perform an electrical
check on a Minuteman III
intercontinental ballistic missile in
its silo, 1980.
Photo credit:
Bob Wickley/Wikimedia Commons.
Are China and the United States destined for conflict or cooperation? US- China 2039: The Endgame? looks at the next two decades of China and America in a unique way and gives a view of “what it will be like then”. Then the reader is given 12 concrete US Macro-Policy recommendations for those 20 years to avoid future conflict and confrontation, with the hope that a constructive relationship, possibly even partnership, could be developed between the world’s two largest economies. The rise of China, and how the United States responds to it in the coming decades, will be salient for not only the people in both countries but also the world at large. China’s rise generates the specter of great power rivalry with the United States. The Chinese economy is providing the resources to develop military power to challenge the United States in the future and possibly to “win”. The US Armed Forces are shifting force structure, creating new operational concepts, and developing weapons. The People’s Liberation Army is doing the same creating a deadly spiral of instability as both militaries prepare for the worst. Bill Owens, former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has been advancing a constructive U.S-China relationship for decades. In this book, Owens combines his considerable military experiences, deep knowledge of the inner working of the national security apparatus, and insights from serving in leadership positions in several Fortune 500 companies, including being the CEO of a Fortune 100 company.
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation Publication date: 08/29/2021 Pages: 464
Winston E. Langley is Professor Emeritus of Political Science & International Relations and Senior Fellow at the McCormack Graduate School for Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is also former Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs of that university from 2009 to 2017. In the latter positions he was instrumental in defining and developing UMass Boston’s identity as a student-centered, urban public research university with a teaching soul. Dr. Langley's scholarly interests include human rights, alternative models of world order, religion, and politics. His publications include “While the U.S. Sleeps,” “Kazi Nazrul Islam: The Voice of Poetry and the Struggle for Human Wholeness,” “Women’s Rights in the United States,” “Human Rights in Turkey: Assaults on Human Dignity,” and the “Encyclopedia of Human Rights Issues Since 1945,” which won the Choice Outstanding Academic Book Award.
Dedication
To the young people of the world, who should not be forced to experience World War III.
In truth, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order represented in its policy implications a grand warning. Almost a decade before 9/11, Huntington’s message was that in today’s politically awakened world, our consciousness of several civilizations’ mandates requires—as nuclear weapons with their unprecedented scale of danger already require—that we rely on cross-civilizational coalitions based on reciprocal rationality, respect, and restraint in order to manage the relations between nations. Thus, Huntington’s work is not only intellectually pioneering; it dares to be politically wise.
—Zbigniew Brzezinski April 2011
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” “The greatest
Statue of Sun Tzu in
Yurihama, Tottori, in Japan
Statue of Sun Tzu in Shandong, China
Zhou Dynasty (c. 1046 – 256 BCE)
Western Zhou (1046-771 BCE)
Eastern Zhou (770-221 BCE)
Spring and Autumn period 770- 476 BCE
Warring States period 475 to 221 BCE
victory is that which requires no battle.”
— Sun Tzu (544-496 BC), The Art of War
Confucius (551–479 BC)
Joseph Samuel Nye Jr. (January 19, 1937 - ) is an American political scientist, has been a member of the Harvard faculty since 1964, and the former Dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, where he currently holds the
He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and a foreign fellow of The British Academy. Nye is also a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy. The 2011 TRIP survey of over 1700 international relations scholars ranks Joe Nye as the
years. He was also ranked as most influential in American foreign policy. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine named him to its list of top global thinkers. The magazine's valued reporter Daniel Drezner wrote: "All roads to understanding American foreign policy run through Joe Nye." In September 2014, Foreign Policy reported that the international relations scholars and policymakers both ranked Nye as one of the most
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs
09/15/1994 – 12/16/1995
President Bill Clinton
Chair of the National Intelligence Council
02/20/1993 – 09/15/1994
Education Princeton University (BA) Exeter College, Oxford (MA) Harvard University (PhD)
influential scholars. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Nye
Harry S. Truman had been vice president for 82 days when President Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945. Truman, presiding over the Senate as usual, had just adjourned the session for the day and was preparing to position of University Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus. In October 2014,
have a drink in House Speaker Sam Rayburn's office Secretary of State John Kerry appointed Nye to the Foreign Affairs Policy Board. He is
when he received an urgent message to go immediately also a member of the Defense Policy Board.
to the White House, where Eleanor Roosevelt told him that her husband had died after a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Truman asked her if there was anything he could do for her; she replied, "Is there anything we can do for you? For you are the one in trouble now!" He sixth most influential scholar in the field of international relations in the past twenty
At a press conference with the Japanese press in Tokyo, Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki stated that the Japanese policy towards the declaration would be one of mokusatsu ( 黙殺 , "killing with silence"), which the United States interpreted as meaning "rejection by ignoring", leading to a decision to drop the two atomic bombs. However, the word mokusatsu can also mean "withholding comment". Since World War II, it has been alleged that the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were attributable to English translations of mokusatsu having misrepresented Suzuki as rejecting the terms of the Potsdam Declaration; however, this claim is not universally accepted.
was sworn in as president at 7:09 pm in the West Wing of the White House, by Chief Justice Harlan F. Stone.
In August, the Japanese government refused surrender demands as specifically outlined in the Potsdam Declaration (July 26, 1945). Truman approved the schedule for dropping the two available bombs. Truman always said attacking Japan with atomic bombs saved many lives on both sides; military estimates for the invasion of mainland Japan were that it could take a year and result in 250,000 to 500,000 U.S. casualties. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, and Nagasaki three days later, leaving 105,000 dead. The Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 9 and invaded Manchuria. Japan agreed to surrender the following day.
He did not use the third atomic bomb in Japan; rejected
General Douglas MacArthur’s request for authorization
to use 25-40 atomic bombs in China when the Korean
War was not going well.
The assassination of Jamal Khashoggi—a Saudi dissident, journalist for The Washington Post, and former general manager and editor-in-chief of the Al-Arab News Channel—on 2 October 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey; killing of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a January 3, 2019 drone strike at Baghdad’s airport in Iraq
Executive Order 11905 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on February 18, 1976, by President Gerald R. Ford as an attempt to reform the United States Intelligence Community, improve oversight on foreign intelligence activities, and ban political assassination. Much of this EO would be changed or strengthened by Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 in 1978. Executive Order 12036 is a United States Presidential Executive Order signed on January 24, 1978, by President Jimmy Carter that imposed restrictions on and reformed the U.S. Intelligence Community along with further banning indirect U.S. involvement in assassinations. The EO was designed to strengthen and expand Executive Order 11905, which was originally signed by Gerald R. Ford in 1976.
War & the Rise of Nations Throughout history, individuals, states, or political factions have gained sovereignty over regions through the use of war. The history of one of the earliest civilizations in the world, that of Mesopotamia, is a chronicle of nearly constant strife. Even after Sargon the Great of Akkad (2334-2279 BCE) unified the region under the Akkadian Empire, war was still waged in putting down rebellions or fending off invaders. The Early Dynastic Period of Egypt (3150-2686 BCE) is thought to have risen from war when the Pharaoh Manes (or Menes) of the south conquered the region of northern Egypt (though this claim is disputed). In China, the Zhou Dynasty gained ascendancy through battle in 1046 BCE and the conflict of the Warring States Period (476-221 BCE) was resolved when the State of Qin defeated the other contending states in battle and unified China under the rule of emperor Shi Huangti. This same pattern holds for other nations throughout time whether one cites the success of Scipio Africanus (236- 183 BCE) in the defeat of Carthage (and so the ascendancy of Rome) or that of Philip II of Macedon (382-336 BCE) in uniting the city-states of Greece. Contending armies of opposing nations have historically settled political disputes on the battlefield even though, in time, these armies changed in formation and size. https://www.ancient.eu/war/
Causes of global conflicts • Imperialist expansion by European powers and Japan
• Competition for resources
• Ethnic conflict
• Great power rivalries (U.S. versus USSR)
• Nationalist ideologies
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Colonies_in_Africa_in_1914.jpg
Colonies in Africa in 1914
• Western Europe had dominated the world political order at the beginning of the 20th
century and was soon joined by The U.S., Russia, and Japan
• Over time, people and states around the world challenged this order in effort to achieve recognition
• Anti-Imperialist/Nationalist movements
Imperial Colonies held by maritime empires achieved independence either by negotiation or violence British India, Ghana – non-violent negotiations French Indochina, Algeria – armed struggles
Nationalist movements challenged Imperialism Mohandas Gandhi – India Ho Chi Minh – Vietnam Kwame Nkrumah – Ghana
• Decolonization
• Ethnic and religious conflicts Regional ethic religious movements
Mohammed Ali Jinnah – Pakistan Quebecois separatist movement – Canada
Ethnic violence Armenian genocide The Holocaust Rwanda (Hutu vs. Tutsi) Cambodia (Khmer Rouge)
What causes wars in the world today?
What role does GEOGRAPHY play in world
conflicts? Modified from Pam Merrill, Edmond Public Schools
Conflict is a state of discord caused by the
actual or perceived opposition of needs, values and interests.
Conflict can refer to wars, revolutions
or other struggles, which may involve
the use of force.
What causes conflict among nations or
regions? Among the world’s
peoples?
Basically, all types of international and regional conflicts can be categorized
as developing from 1. ECONOMIC
2. POLITICAL, or 3. CULTURAL causes.
ECONOMIC CAUSES:
Some nations wish to expand their lands
by taking over territory owned by their neighbors.
Often, nations seek more territory because they need
more natural resources.
Such resources might include fossil fuels or valuable minerals,
good agricultural lands, water resources,
even access to the sea for trading purposes.
In 1990, Iraq invaded its neighbor Kuwait in an attempt to takeover the rich oilfields located there…
Over the past decades, Peru and Chile engaged
in border disputes and lawsuits in international courts over fishing rights
off the Pacific coastline.
Disputes are ongoing between Israel and its neighbors, Lebanon and Syria,
over use of water resources from shared river and aquifer systems.
Major land disputes around the world
POLITICAL CAUSES: Other times, nations and people wish to takeover neighboring lands purely to exercise their power.
Often these causes for conflict are referred to as “nationalist” or
“political” reasons.
People of a region or nation are proud of their heritage
and believe they possess the right to takeover and rule
another group of people just because they are powerful
enough to do so!
Another type of “political” conflict might arise between those in power (control of the government) and citizens within the country who feel they have not been treated fairly.
Such citizens might have been denied political or civil rights, such as the right to vote, to speak freely, or to
receive fair treatment in courts of law.
Two times in the 20th century, the nation of Germany invaded its European
neighbors in an attempt to takeover their territory;
these attempts led to World War I and II.
In the 1980s, the Soviet Union sent troops into Afghanistan, in an
attempt to support a Communist government there, while the
United States sent aid and military support of rebels against the
Soviet-backed government.
The British Professor Carole
Hillenbrand concluded that the Taliban
have arisen from those US-Saudi-
Pakistan-supported mujahideen: "The
West helped the Taliban to fight the
Soviet takeover of Afghanistan".
CULTURAL CAUSES: Many of today’s international conflicts begin because of differences in culture.
Such cultural differences are often religious
differences.
Unfortunately, some religious groups feel their particular religion is superior to others’ and such intolerance leads to conflict.
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin
Church in the medieval period. The term refers especially to the Eastern Mediterranean campaigns in the
period between 1096 and 1271 that had the objective of recovering the Holy Land from Islamic
rule. Wikipedia
In 1095, Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military support for Byzantine Emperor Alexios I against the Seljuk Turks and an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Across all social strata in western Europe there was an enthusiastic popular response. Volunteers took a public vow to join the crusade. Historians now debate the combination of their motivations, which included the prospect of mass ascension into Heaven at Jerusalem, satisfying feudal obligations, opportunities for renown, and economic and political advantage. Initial successes established four Crusader states in the Near East: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli. The crusader presence remained in the region in some form until the city of Acre fell in 1291, leading to the rapid loss of all remaining territory in the Levant. After this, there were no further crusades to recover the Holy Land.
Religious and cultural differences between Muslim and Hindu citizens of India in the 1930s and 1940s led to the partitioning of India, creating the Muslim nations
of Pakistan (1947) and Bangladesh (1971).
These two nations are still involved in border disputes.
The European wars of religion were a series of religious wars which were waged in Europe in the 16th, 17th and early 18th
centuries. The wars, which were fought after the Protestant Reformation began in 1517, disrupted the religious and political order in
the Catholic countries of Europe. However, religion was not the only cause of the wars, which also included revolts, territorial
ambitions, and Great Power conflicts. For example, by the end of the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), Catholic France was allied with
the Protestant forces against the Catholic Habsburg monarchy. The wars were largely ended by the Peace of Westphalia (1648),
establishing a new political order that is now known as Westphalian sovereignty.
The conflicts began with the minor Knights' Revolt (1522), followed by the larger German Peasants' War (1524–1525) in the Holy
Roman Empire. Warfare intensified after the Catholic Church began the Counter-Reformation in 1545 against the growth
of Protestantism. The conflicts culminated in the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), which devastated Germany and killed one-third of its
population. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) put an end to the war by recognising three separate Christian traditions in the Holy
Roman Empire: Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. Although many European leaders were "sickened" by the
bloodshed by 1648, religious wars continued to be waged in the post-Westphalian period until the 1710s, including the Wars of the
Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) on the British Isles, the Savoyard–Waldensian wars (1655–1690), and the Toggenburg War (1712) in
the WesternAlps. Lowest
estimate Highest
estimate Event Location From To Duration Main opponents* Character
3,000,000 11,500,000 Thirty Years' War Holy Roman Empire 1618 1648 30 years Protestants (mainly Lutherans, Reformed and Hussites) against Catholics
began as a religious war; quickly became a French-Habsburg political clash
2,000,000 4,000,000 French Wars of Religion France 1562 1598 36 years Protestants (mainly Reformed) against Catholics began as a religious war, and largely remained such
315,000 868,000 (616,000 in Ireland)
War of the Three Kingdoms
Great Britain and Ireland 1639 1651 12 years Protestants (Anglicans, Reformed, various other nonconformists), Catholics distributed in various fractions of the war
civil, religion-state relation and religious freedom issues, with a national element
600,000 700,000 Eighty Years' War Low Countries in the Holy Roman Empire
1568 1648 80 years Protestants (mainly Reformed) against Catholics conflicts over religion (and taxes and privileges) evolved into a war of independence
100,000 200,000 German Peasants' War Holy Roman Empire 1524 1525 1 year Protestants (mainly Anabaptists), Catholics against Protestants (mainly Lutherans), Catholics
mixed economic and religious reasons, war between peasants and Protestant/Catholic landowners
The wars listed were the most severe in casualties; the remaining religious conflicts in Europe lasted for only a few years, a year, or less and/or were much less violent. Huguenot rebellions were possibly the most damaging conflict after the German Peasants' War and may have taken up to 100,000 lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wars_of_religion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Christian_denominations_by_number_of_members
List of Christian denominations by number of members
Catholic Church – 1.285 billion
Protestantism – 920 million
Anglicanism – 85 million
Eastern Orthodox Church – 270 million
Oriental Orthodoxy – 80 million
Non-trinitarian Restorationism – 35 million
Independent Catholicism – 18 million
Minor branches – 3 million
According to a 2011 Pew Research Center survey, there were 2.2 billion Christians around the
world in 2010, up from about 600 million in 1910. By 2050, the Christian population is expected
to exceed 3 billion. According to a 2012 Pew Research Center survey Christianity will remain
the world's largest religion in 2050, if current trends continue.
Today, about 37% of all Christians live in the Americas, about 26% live in Europe, 24% live
in sub-Saharan Africa, about 13% live in Asia and the Pacific, and 1% live in the Middle East
and North Africa. About half of all Christians worldwide are Catholic, while more than a
third are Protestant (37%). Orthodox communions comprise 12% of the world's Christians.
Other Christian groups make up the remainder. Christians make up the majority of the
population in 158 countries and territories. 280 million Christians live as a minority.
Mormonism is the predominant religious tradition of the Latter Day Saint movement of
Restorationist Christianity started by Joseph Smith in Western New York in the 1820s and 30s.
The Russian Orthodox Church,
alternatively legally known as the Moscow
Patriarchate, is the largest autocephalous
Eastern Orthodox Christian church. It has
194 dioceses inside Russia.
Founded: December 15, 1448
Headquarters location: Moscow, Russia
Members: 110 million (95 million in Russia,
total of 15 million in the linked autonomous
churches)
“For forty-five years the Iron Curtain was the central dividing line in Europe. That line has moved several hundred miles east. It is now the line separating the peoples of Western Christianity, on the one hand, from Muslim and Orthodox peoples on the other.” Samuel P. Huntington, 1996
In the 1970s and 1980s, violence broke our between Catholic and Protestants in Northern Ireland.
Religious differences between the two sides extended to social,
economic, and political discrimination, as well.
Iran, and the Forty-Year
Rivalry That Unraveled
Culture, Religion, and
Collective Memory in the
Middle East Hardcover – January 28, 2020
“[A] sweeping and authoritative history" (The New York Times Book Review), Black Wave is an unprecedented and ambitious examination of how the modern Middle East unraveled and why it started with the pivotal year of 1979.
Kim Ghattas seamlessly weaves together history, geopolitics, and culture to deliver a gripping read of the largely unexplored story of the rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, born from the sparks of the 1979 Iranian revolution and fueled by American policy.
With vivid story-telling, extensive historical research and on-the-ground reporting, Ghattas dispels accepted truths about a region she calls home. She explores how Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, once allies and twin pillars of US strategy in the region, became mortal enemies after 1979. She shows how they used and distorted religion in a competition that went well beyond geopolitics. Feeding intolerance, suppressing cultural expression, and encouraging sectarian violence from Egypt to Pakistan, the war for cultural supremacy led to Iran’s fatwa against author Salman Rushdie, the assassination of countless intellectuals, the birth of groups like Hezbollah in Lebanon, the September 11th terrorist attacks, and the rise of ISIS.
Ghattas introduces us to a riveting cast of characters whose lives were upended by the geopolitical drama over four decades: from the Pakistani television anchor who defied her country’s dictator, to the Egyptian novelist thrown in jail for indecent writings all the way to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. Black Wave is both an intimate and sweeping history of the region and will significantly alter perceptions of the Middle East.
Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Kim Ghattas (born 1977 in Beirut, Lebanon) is a
Dutch-Lebanese journalist for the BBC and author
who covered the US State Department. She is a
scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International
Peace. She attended the American University of Beirut, studying political science. At the same time, she worked as an intern at an English-language newspaper in Beirut. Ghattas then worked for the Financial Times and the BBC from Beirut. After reporting from the Middle East, in early 2008 she moved to Washington, D.C., to take up her post covering the US State Department. In 2013 Ghattas wrote a book, The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power, about her travels with Hillary Clinton during Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State. She later covered Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign for the BBC.
Ghattas interviewing U.S. Secretary
of State John Kerry in 2014
Other cultural conflicts are based on ethnic or racial differences between groups of people living near one another.
One ethnic or racial group may feel superior to others.
This may lead to prejudice and discrimination against the
minority ethic or racial group.
Violence or warfare might eventually break out when minority groups attempt to
fight for their individual rights or liberties.
In the mid 1990s, civil war in Rwanda broke out between two major ethnic groups, each side seeking power and
committing horrible crimes against civilians.
The war, which lasted
from 1990 to 1994, arose
from the long-running
dispute between
the Hutu and Tutsi groups
within the Rwandan
population.
Several times in the 1980s and 1990s, civil war broke out within the former nation of Yugoslavia as ethnic groups sought to
establish their own sovereign nations.
“In the Yugoslav conflicts, Russia provided diplomatic support to the Serbs, and Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, and Libya provided funds and arms to the Bosnians, not for reasons of ideology or power politics or economic interest but because of cultural kinship.” Samuel P. Huntington, 1996
https://religiousfreedomandbusiness.org/2/post/2014/10/religious-freedom-linked-to-peace-finds-new-global-study.html
IS RELIGION THE MAIN CAUSE OF CONFLICT TODAY?
Religion is not the main cause of conflicts today.
Whilst religion has evidently been a cause of many
conflicts throughout history it is by no means the only
reason for conflict. Surveying the state of 35 armed
conflicts from 2013, religious elements did not play a
role in 14, or 40 per cent.
It is notable that religion did not stand as a single
cause in any conflict; however 14 per cent did have
religion and the establishment of an Islamic state as
driving causes. Religion was only one of three or more
reasons for 67 per cent of the conflicts where religion
featured as a factor to the conflict.
