In the book that emerged from his article, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996), Huntington offered a wealth of other insights. He showed that whereas the West has generated ideologies, the East has generated religions—and explained that religion is now the more menacing force on the international scene. He pointed out, counterintuitively, that because communism was a Central European ideology, the Soviet Union was philosophically closer to the West than is the Eastern Orthodox Russia that has succeeded it. He reminded us that the Cold War was a fleeting event compared with the age-old struggle between the West and Islam. In the Middle Ages, Muslim armies advanced through Iberia as far as France, and through the Balkans as far as the gates of Vienna. A similar process of advance, demographically rather than militarily, is now under way in Europe. "The dangerous clashes of the future," Huntington wrote, "are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic [Chinese] assertiveness."
The rest of Kaplan's article is worth reading.
Neither RealClearPolitics nor The Atlantic mentions an article Huntington wrote for Foreign Policy in 2004, "The Hispanic Challenge". In his preface to that article, Huntington wrote:
The persistent inflow of Hispanic immigrants threatens to divide the United States into two peoples, two cultures, and two languages. Unlike past immigrant groups, Mexicans and other Latinos have not assimilated into mainstream U.S. culture, forming instead their own political and linguistic enclaves—from Los Angeles to Miami—and rejecting the Anglo-Protestant1 values that built the American dream. The United States ignores this challenge at its peril.
1On the first page of this essay, Huntington elaborates:
Would the United States be the country that it has been and that it largely remains today if it had been settled in the 17th and 18th centuries not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is clearly no. It would not be the United States; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.
A Brazilian once actually made a similar point to me a few years ago. During a vacation to Brazil I had scheduled a couple of business meetings, the second of which was at the Rio de Janeiro branch of a U.S.-based brokerage. In conversation with the office manager, it came up that a friend and I had visited the old colonial port city of Paraty on our way up from São Paulo. The manager explained the history of the town to me, that it had been the port from which the minerals mined from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais ("General Mining") were shipped back to Portugal. Then he went on to contrast the difference between the original settlers of what became the U.S. with the original settlers of Brazil: "You had a higher quality of settlers," he said. "Yours -- Puritans -- came to build. Ours came to take". Of course in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Brazil attracted some of the same sort of immigrants that the U.S. did, including Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews, and Japanese (Brazil today has the largest ethnic Japanese population outside of Japan).
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