Is Harvard geopolitical theorist Sam Huntington the next George Kennan, or just the thinking man's Pat Buchanan?

In American foreign-policy circles, everyone is waiting for the next X. "X" was the byline on the famous 1947 essay in Foreign Affairs, actually written by George Kennan, that analyzed Soviet communism and laid out the post-World War II policy of "containment." Where is a comparably compelling vision of the post-Cold War world, a new lodestar for American foreign policy? Who is the next George Kennan? Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has a suggestion: How about him?

Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order is now hitting the bookstores. The jacket copy says that the germ of the book--Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs essay "The Clash of Civilizations?"--drew more discussion than any Foreign Affairs piece since Kennan's (at least, "according to the editors of that distinguished journal"). Blurbs from Brzenzinski (effusive) and Kissinger (guarded) reinforce the air of eminence.

Huntington's book is devoted to a currently ubiquitous theme: tribalism. In politics, the tribal theme shows up in the rhetoric of Pat Buchanan, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and so on. In the intellectual world, the tribal theme shows up in treatises about the importance of the sentiments aroused by such men. Now that the bipolar order of the Cold War is gone, we're told, the primal bonds of ethnicity, language, and religion will be a central--if not the central--organizing principle in world affairs. Huntington carries this idea to new heights of theoretical elaboration. Surely tribalism has never sounded so cerebral. But it's one thing to analyze a phenomenon and another thing to encourage it. Huntington crosses the line so easily as to make you wonder: How different, really, are the lowbrow and highbrow expressions of the vogue for tribalism?

H untington's 1993 essay was, by design, a downer. The end of the Cold War had inspired such upbeat visions as the inexorable triumph of liberal democracy (Francis Fukuyama's The End of History) and the "New World Order" (global peace mediated by the United Nations). Huntington insisted we recork the champagne. The world would remain strife-torn, he said, only now the main actors would be not ideological blocs or nation-states or superpowers, but distinct "civilizations"--Western, Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, Hindu, and African. (In the book, he adds a ninth civilization, Buddhist.) "Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale," he writes in the book. Relations between nations from different civilizations will be "almost never close" and "often hostile"--"trust and friendship will be rare." Wars will tend to break out along civilizational "fault lines" and will tend to expand along the same lines.

How should we respond to this tribalism? Tribally. The very "survival of the West" depends on Westerners "uniting to renew and preserve" their civilization "against challenges from non-Western societies." Thus, Australia should abandon efforts to mesh with its local Asian milieu and instead should join NAFTA. The United States should de-emphasize engagement with Asia and turn back toward Europe.

How exactly Huntington's diagnosis (perilously deep fault lines) leads to his prescription (further deepen the fault lines) is a puzzle to which we'll return. But first, a word about the diagnosis. Does his notion of "civilizations" as tribes writ large make sense?

Back in 1993, most commentators said no, and this book is unlikely to change their minds. For example, Huntington has renamed "Confucian" civilization "Sinic," but that doesn't tidy up the concept. South Korea, North Korea, Taiwan, China, Singapore, and Vietnam are very motley and definitely not a crew. In fact, the thriving capitalist democracies of South Korea and Taiwan seem to blatantly violate Huntington's logic, showing how fast cultures can switch orientations from one "civilization" to another. Yet Huntington not only sees hidden coherence in the Sinic bloc; he sees the bloc as part of an even larger threat--the "Confucian-Islamic connection." This consists of China and North Korea "cooperating" with Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Algeria to thwart the West on such issues as arms proliferation. But the grab bag of national policies that supposedly add up to this grand transnational "connection" doesn't even include most Sinic or most Islamic states. If we wanted to use one variable to predict whether a nation is involved in Huntingon's Sinic-Islamic "connection," we'd be better off knowing whether it's one of the four remaining Communist dictatorships than knowing whether it's one of the five Sinic nations (50 percent predictive power vs. 40 percent).

I could, as others have, about the civilizational paradigm's lack of analytical elegance. But that's not what really bothers me. Though ancestral cultures aren't the mystical epoxy that Huntington imagines, language, religion, and other aspects of cultural heritage do matter a lot in the post-Cold War world. The "civilizations" part of Huntington's thesis is less troubling than the "clash" part. Why is it an inherent property of intercivilizational relations that they be "usually cool" and "often hostile"? Why, for example, must Western relations with a Sinic bloc be typically tense? Obviously, current Western-Chinese relations are pretty tense. But why can't this change with, say, a new, more cosmopolitan, regime in China, or firmer and more consistent diplomatic signals from Washington?

It isn't enough to say, as Huntington does, that Sinic civilization lacks the West's bent for democracy. The cliché that democracy hobbles the conduct of a coherent foreign policy is true. If Chinese leaders are freed from the burden of domestic pandering, they should be able to calmly find their zones of common interest with the West and cut the appropriate deals. So why does Huntington think we can't do business with these people? Are only Westerners capable of perceiving their rational self-interest and acting on it? Are only Westerners reliable negotiators?

Sometimes Huntington seems to think so. After criticizing naive American attempts at "constructive engagement" and "dialogue" across the Pacific, he writes, "To the Asians, American concessions are not to be reciprocated, they are to be exploited." Ah, yes, those wily Asians. Pat Buchanan couldn't have said it better. (Here, again, Huntington conflates with other explanatory variables.)