In the post–Cold War intellectual landscape, two grand theories emerged as competing visions of the global future: Francis Fukuyama’s optimistic notion of the “end of history” and Samuel P. Huntington’s darker thesis of a looming “clash of civilizations.” More than thirty years after their seminal texts—The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996)—it is increasingly clear that Huntington’s framework has prevailed, not necessarily because it is more accurate, but because it resonates more deeply with the prevailing climate of fear, distrust, and geopolitical rivalry. As global tensions mount—especially in the current escalation between Israel and Iran—Huntington’s framework has reasserted itself as a dominant interpretive lens. It is as though the West, unable to come to terms with its relative decline, has embraced a worldview grounded in perpetual civilizational conflict as a way of simplifying and rationalizing complexity.
In his 1992 book, Fukuyama famously declared the end of ideological history. Drawing on Hegelian dialectics and liberal political philosophy, he argued that liberal democracy—alongside market capitalism and individual rights—constituted the final form of human government. History, in this sense, had reached its philosophical culmination. As Fukuyama wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This provocative vision had a powerful appeal: it evoked a world finally moving beyond ideological conflict, one in which freedom and prosperity might spread through consensus rather than conquest.
But history did not oblige. The conflicts of the 1990s—from the Balkan wars to the failures of humanitarian interventions—revealed deep structural fragilities. Markets did not necessarily bring democracy; Western intervention often generated instability; and liberalism, far from being universally embraced, frequently encountered resistance, both ideological and cultural. Fukuyama’s teleology came under increasing strain. In this context, Huntington’s thesis began to take root. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington argued that the central conflicts of the post–Cold War era would not be primarily ideological or economic, but civilizational. Civilizations—defined as large cultural entities grounded in religion, language, and historical memory—would become the main actors and antagonists of global politics. “The fault lines between civilizations,” he wrote, “will be the battle lines of the future.” His claim that “Islam has bloody borders” was widely criticized but undeniably influential.
The Civilizational Frame and the Israel–Iran Crisis
Today, the confrontation between Israel and Iran starkly illustrates how Huntington’s civilizational paradigm has been absorbed into Western strategic thinking and media discourse. The conflict is no longer framed in terms of regional rivalry or state interests, but in moral and cultural binaries. Israel is portrayed as the outpost of modernity, reason, and Western values; Iran, in contrast, is cast as a bastion of irrationality and ideological extremism. Diplomatic language gives way to metaphysical moralism. The narrative no longer centers on deterrence or negotiation, but on good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism. This binary rhetoric evokes all the symbolic traits of a crusade: a salvific mission, an existential threat, and the duty to protect the “free world.” The term “crusade” may not be explicitly used, but its logic pervades Western discourse. Such framing delegitimizes complexity and compels a simplistic moral choice: one must either stand with order and progress or with chaos and regression.
This rhetoric has real political consequences. By framing conflicts in civilizational terms, it becomes easier to justify military interventions, economic sanctions, and diplomatic isolation. The Iran–Israel rivalry is stripped of its historical and geopolitical intricacies and reduced to a moral imperative. Huntington’s model provides a moral vocabulary that simplifies the world into familiar binaries. In doing so, it delegitimizes alternative readings of international relations and erodes the space for negotiation or compromise.
Why Huntington’s Model Prevailed
Huntington’s framework has triumphed not because of its analytical depth, but because it offers a convenient cognitive shortcut in a time of ideological disorientation. In contrast, Fukuyama’s liberal optimism demanded faith in dialogue, reform, and gradual convergence. His belief in soft power and normative attraction underestimated the persistence of resentment, inequality, and wounded identities. The West’s liberal model, once seen as aspirational, began to be viewed as hegemonic and coercive. Humanitarian wars in Iraq and Libya, democracy promotion in Afghanistan, and regime-change rhetoric in Syria revealed a pattern of intervention that was often destabilizing. In response, Western powers increasingly abandoned the language of pluralism in favor of strategic moralism. Rather than adjusting to a multipolar and culturally diverse world, the West doubled down on its exceptionalism, rebranding power politics as civilizational defense.
The current rhetorical deployment of “values,” “freedom,” and “rights” often serves less to protect those principles universally than to delineate geopolitical allegiances. Non-alignment or dissent is recast as backwardness or hostility to progress. Sanctions, embargoes, and selective isolation are justified in the name of moral clarity. Iran is only the most recent target in a long sequence of adversaries framed not as rational actors but as ontological threats: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Russia all occupy this space of exception. Huntington’s victory is thus symbolic and discursive: he provides a moral universe where the world is neatly divided between friends and enemies, civilization and its adversaries. This moral simplification facilitates policy choices that would otherwise require democratic accountability or international consensus.
Toward a Reaffirmation of Peaceful Politics
Yet a world governed by crusades—secular or otherwise—is one destined for perpetual instability. Crusades do not produce order but hysteria; they do not foster peace but polarization. Above all, they foreclose the possibility of shared political construction. If diplomacy becomes unthinkable and compromise is equated with betrayal, then war becomes the default language of politics. The task of critical thought today is to resist this tendency—to recover complexity, to accept the plurality of worldviews, and to reconstruct the legitimacy of peaceful engagement. History has not ended, nor will it. But it can take more just and inclusive paths—if, and only if, we resist the fatalistic allure of the clash. The question is not whether Fukuyama or Huntington was right, but whether we have the courage to imagine alternatives beyond both. This does not require utopianism, but political imagination and intellectual honesty: the ability to hold firm to the idea that peace is not an illusion, but a difficult, fragile, and yet possible construction.
Bibliography
Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Mearsheimer, John J. The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018.
Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979
