Choc des civilisations

“Clash of Civilizations” is a political framing that Noam Chomsky (interviewee) argues explains little about the conflicts it purports to describe. Against a story of fixed religious or cultural blocs, he sets a record of shifting alliances, state violence, and strategic interests; the phrase, he contends, distracts from who exercises power and to what ends.

The Frame and Its Limits

Asked whether events were producing a clash between two civilizations, Chomsky calls the formulation fashionable but not very meaningful. His challenge is not simply that the labels are imprecise: the supposed division fails when tested against the alliances and policies invoked to support it. The same governments move between partners across the proposed civilizational boundary, while political violence and state interests resist being sorted into two coherent camps.

Chomsky’s examples make that instability concrete. Indonesia, the most populous Islamic state, had been a favored partner of the United States since Suharto took power in 1965, despite the mass killings and other abuses associated with his rule. Saudi Arabia, which he identifies as an especially fundamentalist Islamic state outside Taliban rule, was also a longstanding U.S. client. These cases turn the clash thesis back on its advocates: the states supposedly situated on one side of a cultural divide were also partners of the power said to stand on the other.

Alliances Across the Supposed Divide

The Afghan conflict supplies another counterexample. In the 1980s, the United States worked with Pakistan’s intelligence services, alongside Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others, to recruit, arm, and train hardline Islamist forces against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Chomsky cites Simon Jenkins’s assessment that the effort helped destroy a moderate regime and create a fanatical one; Osama bin Laden was among its indirect beneficiaries. In this account, later conflict cannot be understood as an ancient civilizational opposition detached from recent policy: the forces cast as an external cultural threat had also emerged within a history of strategic sponsorship.

A parallel inconsistency appears in U.S. support for Saddam Hussein. During the 1980s, the United States and Britain backed their ally through years in which his worst atrocities included the gassing of Kurds, and continued that support afterward. Chomsky notes that Saddam Hussein was more secular, but treats that difference as no answer to the clash thesis: he still belonged, in the framework’s terms, to the same Islamic side. The relationship demonstrates how strategic alliance could outweigh the supposed cultural boundary.

Chomsky widens the comparison beyond the Middle East and Afghanistan. He recalls U.S. wars in Central America that left around two hundred thousand people dead, millions of orphans and refugees, and four countries devastated; he identifies the Catholic Church, which had taken the side of the poor, as the principal target. In the Balkans in the early 1990s, the United States selected Bosnian Muslims as favored clients, a choice he says was made chiefly for cynical reasons of power and was not necessarily to their benefit. These examples make the proposed division difficult to sustain: the actors and alignments do not fall into stable, opposing civilizational camps.

Power, Resources, and the Uses of Force

For Chomsky, the contrast between cultural explanation and strategic interest matters because policy has material stakes. He describes Afghanistan as a minor piece on a larger geopolitical board, while noting longstanding interest in pipelines through the country and U.S. efforts to influence control of Central Asian resources. The major energy reserves, he argues, lie chiefly in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region, with significant resources in Central Asia as well. That geography complicates any account that treats conflict primarily as a collision of civilizations.

He also links the aftermath of September 11 to an expansion of U.S. military reach. The United States established major bases in Central Asia for the first time, which Chomsky connects to multinational investment under U.S. dominance, competition over regional resources, and the broader military network surrounding the Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, he says, Diego Garcia was the safest U.S. base for this purpose; the new positions improved the capacity for intervention. The strategic argument is his interpretation of the consequences, not a claim that the phrase “clash of civilizations” itself explains the military decisions.

Chomsky further interprets the Afghanistan bombings as a demonstration of U.S. power and a warning about the consequences of defying its rules. He compares this reading with the NATO bombing of Serbia, which Tony Blair and Bill Clinton publicly connected to preserving NATO’s credibility. In both cases, he argues, the language of civilizational conflict risks drawing attention away from the politics of military credibility and dominance.

A Different Conclusion

Chomsky’s counterargument culminates in a deliberately destabilizing comparison: if every conflict involving different religious or cultural actors counted as a civilizational clash, one could describe the Central American Catholic Church as opposed to the United States and the Muslim world, including its most fanatical and criminal elements. He rejects that conclusion as absurd. The point is that the framework can be made to produce contradictory camps, and therefore does not offer a sound explanation of the conflicts.

His alternative is both historical and moral. Rather than treat violence as the expression of an immutable cultural divide, he directs attention to alliances, state policy, and the material interests that shape them. He argues that no civilized society should tolerate the conduct he has cited, and that international law offers an established body of jurisprudence as an alternative to plunging the world into a major war. The expression’s significance in the interview lies in this reversal: what appears to name the cause of conflict becomes, in Chomsky’s account, a frame that conceals the power relations and policy choices requiring scrutiny.