The conflicts of the 21st century will be eternal

By: Beatrice E. Rangel - 27/08/2025

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In 1993, Foreign Policy magazine, an organ of the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States, published an essay entitled “The Clash of Civilizations” by Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington.

At the Huntington's, he sought to put an end to the celebration of the end of the Cold War by warning the West that the ideological rivalry that had prevailed for forty-six years was about to give way to a much more difficult rivalry to overcome: the cultural one. Consequently, cultural identity would replace ideological identity, making it much more difficult to achieve the goal of making Western culture the world's great melting pot. For him, from the ashes of the post-war order would emerge a multipolar and multicultural world in which the major confrontations would be cultural in origin and therefore almost impossible to resolve.

At the time, the world's thinking elite rejected Huntington's thesis, preferring to follow the hypothesis of his student Francis Fukuyama, who postulated the emergence of a universal culture based on the West. For the academic world, he was a man with little scientific rigor who extrapolated outdated ideas about the post-war world. But now the stubborn world is proving him right. What are the impenetrable, intractable, and indomitable conflicts the world is experiencing today? Well, there are three: the war in Sudan, where one ethnic group is destroying another for cultural reasons; then the Russian occupation of Ukraine for cultural reasons; and the Holocaust perpetrated by Israel in Gaza after Hamas's brutal attack on its territory, also for cultural reasons.

And when differences emanate from the cultural axis, they abandon the field of rationality because people increasingly identify with their civilization, leading to an "us versus them" mentality. And this is the essence of the zero-sum game. Hence, the central axis of world politics today is the conflict between the West and non-Western civilizations.

And, to the extent that many nations continue their process of economic development, in our multipolar world, modernization is not equivalent to Westernization. This is why, in China, economic progress develops within a confusing logic. In Saudi Arabia, it develops within the logic of Sunni Islam. We also observe how in the Middle East, the leading nations in economic development are Islamic or Jewish, and the religious axes emanating from their cultural axes predominate in politics. And as a fellow analyst from Harvard University rightly puts it: "When religion is part of the decision-making algorithm, conflict resolution becomes extremely difficult because there is no technology capable of intercepting conversations with God."

So, it will truly be virtually impossible to resolve the conflicts in the Middle East or the occupation of Ukraine without a change in political leadership, and even then it will take more than a century to develop codes of understanding between cultures that consider themselves destined to be hegemonic. And this reality escapes Donald Trump's seductive powers.

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