Clash of Civilizations Thesis

The Clash of Civilizations Thesis is rejected as a poor account of the conflicts discussed in the book. Rather than dividing the world into fixed religious blocs, Noam Chomsky (interviewee) points to shifting alliances, state interests, and selective judgments about political violence. His examples make the proposed civilizational boundary unstable: the United States has supported actors across those supposed divisions, while the label of terrorism changes with political alignment. The result is not a clash between coherent civilizations, but a warning against turning history and power into a simple cultural opposition.

The thesis tested against political history

The interviewer raises the idea of a clash between civilizations, and Chomsky answers that it is fashionable but makes little sense. He tests it against cases that disrupt its apparent categories. Indonesia, the most populous Islamic state, had been a favored partner of the United States since Suharto took power in 1965. The ensuing army massacres killed hundreds of thousands, mostly landless peasants, with U.S. assistance and Western approval. Chomsky notes that the scale and circumstances of this support became so inconvenient in retrospect that the episode was largely erased from public memory. Suharto remained what the Clinton administration called “our friend,” despite the crimes of his government.

Saudi Arabia supplies a different contradiction. Chomsky describes it as the most extreme and fundamentalist Islamic state apart from the Taliban, yet also as a U.S. client from its founding. The relationship does not fit a simple opposition between a Western civilization and a unified Islamic adversary: strategic partnership has crossed the very line the thesis treats as decisive.

The history of U.S. support for Islamist forces in the 1980s further unsettles that line. Working with Pakistan’s intelligence services, and with assistance from Saudi Arabia, Britain, and others, the United States recruited, armed, and trained highly extreme Islamist fighters to inflict damage on the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Simon Jenkins’s account, as cited by Chomsky, describes the result as the destruction of a moderate regime and the creation of a fanatical one; most of the funding may have come from Saudi Arabia. Osama bin Laden was among the indirect beneficiaries of this effort. Here, the later language of a civilizational confrontation obscures an earlier arrangement in which the same kinds of forces were supported for strategic purposes.

A parallel example is Saddam Hussein. During the 1980s, the United States and the United Kingdom gave substantial support to their ally, whose government was more secular but still belonged on the Islamic side of the thesis’s imagined divide. The support continued during the period of his worst atrocities, including the gassing of the Kurds. The contrast between religious identity and political alignment matters: the account stresses the alliance and its timing, not a stable cultural boundary that reliably determines who receives support or condemnation.

Conflicts that cross the proposed boundary

Chomsky extends the test beyond the Middle East and Afghanistan. In Central America during the 1980s, the United States waged a major war that left roughly two hundred thousand people dead, millions orphaned or displaced as refugees, and four countries devastated. He identifies the principal target of the U.S. attack as the Catholic Church, which had taken the side of the poor. The example reverses the expected civilizational map: a religious institution in Latin America stood against U.S. policy, while the political alignments cannot be reduced to a conflict between Christianity and Islam.

In the early 1990s, the United States chose Bosnia’s Muslims as favored clients in the Balkans, largely for cynical reasons of power and, Chomsky argues, not necessarily to their benefit. That choice supplies another instance of alliances formed through strategic calculation rather than a consistent division between religious civilizations. Taken together, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Central America, and Bosnia make the proposed opposition appear less like an explanation of events than a frame that selectively hides relationships among them.

Chomsky asks what follows if opposition between civilizations can be found everywhere. A supposed global clash would then have to encompass the Catholic Church in Latin America on one side and the United States and the Muslim world on the other, including its most fanatical and criminal religious elements. He rejects this as absurd rather than accepting it as a useful conclusion. The point is not that these actors form a coherent alternative bloc; it is that the thesis cannot explain political conflict merely by assigning actors to cultural camps.

Terrorism, power, and changing labels

The critique of civilizational division is connected to the book’s wider argument about terrorism. Chomsky invokes the official U.S. definition: the calculated use or threat of violence for political, religious, or ideological purposes, including actions that intimidate, coerce, or instill fear. By that definition, the attacks against the United States were unquestionably terrorism and an appalling terrorist crime. He distinguishes that literal definition from the propagandistic convention in which “terrorism” means violence committed by an enemy against the speaker or an ally. The distinction matters to the thesis because political identity can determine the label even when the underlying conduct is comparable.

Chomsky argues that official definitions of terrorism overlap with the United States’ own doctrine of low-intensity warfare, which directs coercive methods against civilian populations for political or other aims. In this account, terrorism is not simply the weapon of the weak; it can be part of state action. He also says that counterinsurgency programs drew explicitly on the Nazi model, with Wehrmacht officers consulted and their manuals used in the design of postwar programs. The same actors and methods, he argues, can be called terrorists, freedom fighters, or criminals as political circumstances change. That instability makes a civilizational explanation especially suspect: it can turn a changing political designation into an apparent cultural essence.

The Kosovo Liberation Army illustrates the shift. The United States officially condemned the group as terrorist in 1998 over attacks on Serbian police and civilians. By January 1999, British officials reportedly considered it responsible for more deaths than Serbia, a judgment Chomsky notes with skepticism while treating it as evidence of how senior NATO figures assessed the situation. He argues that there had been no tangible change on the ground before the withdrawal of the Kosovo verification mission and the NATO bombing at the end of March 1999, but U.S. and British policy had changed: they had decided to attack Serbia, and the former “terrorists” became “freedom fighters.” After the war, the same actors and their allies were again described as terrorists, thugs, and criminals when they undertook similar actions in Macedonia, a U.S. ally. The sequence gives concrete form to the book’s point that labels follow political alignments more readily than fixed civilizational identities.

Strategic interests behind the frame

The challenge to the Clash of Civilizations Thesis also directs attention to material interests. Chomsky describes the major energy reserves of the world as concentrated especially in Saudi Arabia and the wider Persian Gulf, with significant reserves in Central Asia. Afghanistan, he says, was a minor piece on that board, but pipeline proposals had for years made it relevant to U.S. efforts to control Central Asian resources. He situates the country among unstable neighboring states and describes regional alliances and rivalries as part of the surrounding strategic landscape. In this account, geography, energy, and military positioning help explain policy where a civilizational label cannot.

After the September 11 attacks, the United States established major military bases in Central Asia for the first time, according to Chomsky. He links them to the expansion of U.S.-dominated multinationals, control over the region’s resources, and the wider effort to encircle the world’s most important energy reserves in the Gulf. Before the war in Afghanistan, Diego Garcia was the most secure base available for targeting the Gulf; the new bases, he argues, improved the position from which intervention could be carried out. The change in military geography gives a concrete consequence to the policy shift, and makes the region’s strategic significance more than a matter of cultural symbolism.

Chomsky interprets the post-September 11 phase of the War on Terror as an opportunity for the Bush administration to consolidate overwhelming military superiority and promote global dominance. During a visit to the United States in April, Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia urged the administration to take more account of Arab responses to U.S. support for Israeli repression. Chomsky recounts that U.S. officials answered that they did not care what he or other Arabs thought. A senior official compared the force demonstrated in Afghanistan with Operation Desert Storm, and a former military official suggested that firmness would earn respect and end further objections. In the book’s argument, such statements reveal an intended demonstration of power, not an effort to bridge a civilizational divide.

Chomsky says he has no access to confidential documents, and presents as an inference, not a documented fact, the possibility that these strategic effects were calculated as a principal aim of the Afghanistan bombing. He compares the interpretation with the NATO bombing of Serbia, whose stated purpose, as Tony Blair and Bill Clinton explained it, was to secure NATO’s credibility. Chomsky reads that credibility as primarily the credibility of the United States and its leading arms client, rather than that of Norway or Italy. The comparison places Afghanistan and Serbia within a recurring logic of alliance power and deterrence, which the Clash of Civilizations Thesis would obscure if it treated them chiefly as episodes in a religious struggle.

What the thesis leaves out

Chomsky’s criticism is not that the examples resolve every cause of conflict, but that they expose the cost of a frame that makes civilizational identity do too much explanatory work. The history he recounts includes U.S. support for Suharto, Saudi Arabia, Saddam Hussein, and Islamist forces in Afghanistan; a devastating U.S. war in Central America; and a strategic preference for Bosnia’s Muslims. These relationships do not form a neat counter-story in which religion alone determines policy. They show alliances made and revised around power, and condemnations that can change while the actors’ methods remain substantially the same.

That criticism also carries a normative consequence. Chomsky says no civilized society should tolerate the conduct he has described, which he characterizes only as a small sample of U.S. history, while adding that European history is worse. Nor, in his view, should a civilized world plunge the planet into a major war instead of using methods supported by international law and its substantial body of precedent. His alternative to civilizational simplification is therefore both analytical and political: apply judgments consistently, attend to the history of support and intervention, and distinguish legal procedures from strategic justifications.

The text ultimately presents the thesis as a diversion from the questions its examples raise. Who supports whom, for what strategic purpose, and under what definition of violence? How do energy resources, military access, and alliance credibility shape policy? And why do the same actors move between the categories of terrorist, ally, and freedom fighter? Chomsky does not claim that culture or religion is absent from conflict; he argues that those categories cannot bear the explanatory weight placed on them. The central pattern is not a stable war of civilizations but political power repeatedly crossing, redrawing, and exploiting the boundaries the thesis treats as fixed.