Huntington\u2019s sensitivity to religion-and-world-politics ought to have commended his analysis to the Vatican for thoughtful consideration and serious discussion. Instead, Huntington-the-straw-man-who-prophesied-endless-civilizational-war is dragged out whenever it\u2019s deemed necessary for officials of the Holy See to say that \u201ca war between Islam and \u201d\u02dcthe rest\u2019 is not inevitable\u201d\u009d (true, if the civil war within Islam is resolved in favor of those Muslims who support religious tolerance and pluralism); or that Christian persecution and dislocation in the Middle East must be handled through the United Nations (ridiculous); or that the path to peace lies through dialogue, not confrontation (true, if there is a dialogue partner who is not given to beheading \u201cthe other\u201d\u009d).<\/p>\n
The Huntington proposal is not beyond criticism. But Huntington accurately described the Great Change that would take place in world politics after the wars of late modernity (the two 20th-century world wars and the Cold War); he accurately predicted what was likely to unfold along what he called Islam\u2019s \u201cbloody borders\u201d\u009d if Islamists and jihadists went unchecked by their own fellow-Muslims; and he accurately identified the fact that religious conviction (or the lack thereof, as in Europe) would play an important role in shaping the 21st-century world. Thirteen years after 9\/11, and in light of today\u2019s headlines, is Huntington\u2019s proposal really so implausible?<\/p>\n
There is something very odd about a Holy See whose default positions include a ritualized deprecation of the Huntington thesis married to a will-to-believe about the U.N.\u2019s capacity to be something more than an echo chamber.<\/p>\n