The Clash of Civilizations: Revisiting Huntington's Prophetic Vision through the Iran-Israel Conflict

The bulk of the twentieth century witnessed an ideological battle between two primary powerblocs: the liberal democratic order led by the United States of America and the communist order led by the Soviet Union. The last decade of the century began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emergence of a unipolar world led by the United States. Reflecting on this triumph, Francis Fukuyama proclaimed in 1992, the “end of history” with the hope of ushering in an era of ‘liberal world order’, with America as the dominant player. 

Into this moment of Western triumphalism stepped Samuel Huntington with a counter thesis so provocative that it continues to influence debates on the nature of global conflict. On close examination of the geopolitical shifts following the five years from the Cold War, he postulated that civilizations would re-emerge as the principal basis for global conflict; a theme that echoes eerily in contemporary headlines. This civilizational lens provides crucial insights on conflicts that mainstream international relations theories struggle to explain. 

This essay will first lay out one of the core premises of that theory and then test it against the most consequential civilizational flashpoint of our time. When the United States and Israel struck Iran, killing the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei, it triggered a chain of responses across the Islamic world and the Western alliances. Understanding where his framework holds and where it breaks down is a map for navigating the world we are now living in.

Mapping the New Battleground

Huntington builds his theory on three concepts. First, he postulates that religion is the "central defining characteristic of civilization," citing historian Christopher Dawson who called religion the foundation on which great civilizations rest. Second, conflict operates at two levels; micro-level fault line wars between adjacent groups struggling over territory and macro-level competition among core states for power. Third, kin-country syndrome describes how people turn to civilizational allies during times of crisis. 

The Israel-Palestine conflict demonstrates all three concepts. At the micro-level, it represents a fault line war over territory. At the macro-level, civilizational kinship shapes responses more than institutions. Islamic nations from Turkey to Indonesia support Palestine, while the US backs Israel due to Judeo-Christian ties. The UN remains largely sidelined as civilizational blocs assert loyalties. Muslims worldwide often express solidarity for the cause of Palestine, including in India which has a major strategic partnership with Israel. The conflict therefore illustrates how civilizational identities can shape political attitudes across borders, leading to domestic differences when priorities of citizens are not aligned.

Contrary to theories of globalization, Huntington explains the process of civilizational resurgence, which we see happening in real time. Increased interaction through globalization is paradoxically sharpening "civilizational consciousness".

This heightened awareness exacerbates the perception of both internal commonalities and external differences, leading to intensified friction, as seen in the 2024 Dublin riots, French hijab debates, and Sweden's integration struggles. This revival, in turn, intensifies civilizational nationalism. It then manifests in politics- through the rise of Hindu Nationalism in India, the reversal of secularism in Turkey, and the Christian Nationalist appeals in the 2024 US elections. This is because the liberal notion that politics should not engage with religion, overlooks the reality that politics is often an expression of the deeply held cultural and religious sentiments of the citizens it seeks to represent.

Even though it is clear that Huntington was a brilliant diagnostician of identity, how much his civilizational theory of geopolitics applies to global conflicts needs to be examined more carefully. 

The Conflict: Analysis of the Civilizational Theory

The account that follows reflects developments up to early June 2026, during which the conflict has moved through several distinct phases. On 28 February, 2026, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury and Operation Roaring Lion, a coordinated campaign that killed Ayatollah Khamenei and targeted the security infrastructure of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Iran responded immediately through Operation True Promise IV, firing missiles at US bases and Gulf airports across the region. In the opening days it looked as if Huntington’s prophecy had arrived in full, the West and the Islamic world at open war. What followed over the next ten weeks complicated that picture.

From Kashmir to Karbala, protesters poured out carrying Khamenei's portrait as a martyr's image. Pakistan's government expressed condolences over his martyrdom. Hezbollah launched strikes invoking religious duty. Russia and China condemned the operation in the language of sovereignty and civilizational counterweight to the West. 

And then, the Gulf states issued their statements. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait jointly condemned Iran's retaliatory strikes as indiscriminate and reckless attacks against sovereign territories; condemning a fellow Islamic state for defending itself against a Judeo-Christian attack. The civilizational solidarity that had looked so vivid on the streets of Karachi evaporated entirely in the air-conditioned rooms of Gulf foreign ministries. Iranian missiles landing on their airports had clarified their loyalties rather quickly. Turkey positioned itself as a concerned mediator, while Malaysia and Indonesia called for dialogue. Each Islamic state read the same conflict through the lens of its own best interests and arrived at a different conclusion.

Huntington's great Islamic counter-coalition did not show up. The split hardened at the United Nations, where a Bahraini-drafted resolution pressing Iran to halt its attacks, backed by the United States and the United Kingdom, was vetoed by China and Russia, and the Arab League formally condemned Iran’s strikes on fellow Arab states.

The Western bloc proved equally fictional as a unified civilizational force. Spain called the war an extraordinary mistake. France, Germany, and the UK refused to endorse or condemn. Yet Australia backed the operation without hesitation, Canada and New Zealand offered quiet support, and Eastern European states still raw from Russia's aggression found little sympathy for a regime that had been arming Moscow. The clearest indicator of where everyone truly stood came not from any statement but from the market.

The Strait of Hormuz closed, oil prices surged, with Brent crude climbing from about seventy dollars a barrel before the war to a March average above one hundred, and the holdouts began moving one by one. Europe did not rediscover civilizational solidarity, it rediscovered its energy bills.

The conflict did not remain a limited exchange. It lasted for more than two months, reopened the Lebanon front as Hezbollah re-entered the fighting, displaced millions, and triggered a global fuel crisis as traffic through the Strait collapsed. The war ended in a conditional ceasefire brokered by Pakistan in April and later extended, reportedly with Chinese pressure on Tehran to accept. Crucially, the killing of Iran's leadership did not lead to the collapse of the regime. An interim leadership council took charge in Tehran, the question of succession remained unresolved, and early assessments suggested that the strikes had set Iran's nuclear programme back by less than six months while leaving much of its missile capability intact. The Iranian state remained functional despite the scale of the attack.

Huntington's Lens: Where it Holds and Breaks

The question that arises is- even though Huntington's thesis is so strong, how do we determine where it applies and where it does not?

He was right about the architecture of the conflict before the first missile was fired. The Axis of Resistance, the Abraham Accords, the nuclear program, the thirty years of proxy wars fought along civilizational lines. All of it maps onto his framework with uncomfortable precision. The West's deepest fear is not a rival ideology but a rival civilization acquiring the capability to make Western dominance costly. And he was right that when that moment arrived, the world would not organize itself along economic or political lines but along the older, deeper ones. 

Another phenomenon that Huntington talked about was de-westernization, the process by which non-Western states in spite of their own differences cooperate with each other to assert parallel systems of trade, security, and diplomacy that bypass Western dominance. Iran's selective closure of the Strait of Hormuz offers perhaps the most tangible expression of this thesis. By declaring the Strait closed in March and then permitting transit selectively, through negotiated safe-conduct and tolls that favoured its own ships, its partners, and vessels willing to pay, while Western-aligned shipping was effectively shut out, Tehran replaced universal maritime law, a framework built and enforced by American naval power since the 1980s, with a system of bilateral relationships rooted in geopolitical alignment. While Iraq and Pakistan's inclusion can be explained through direct civilizational loyalties, the presence of India, China, and Russia on the approved list is where de-westernization becomes most visible. They are being given this favourable treatment due to a shared interest in operating outside Western-dominated rules.

Where the theory strains is in the gap between how the conflict was felt and how it was handled. The civilizational identity of countries matters, but they go to war or stay out of it based on what is sitting on their doorstep. The Gulf monarchies were not going to mourn a dictator whose missiles had just hit their airports. Europe was initially hesitant to join a war their public opposed, but had to succumb to economic pressure.  Russia and China condemned the strikes in the strongest possible language and then quietly calculated that Tehran was not worth a direct confrontation with Washington. And Iran, for all its civilizational rhetoric, had managed to bomb its way into isolation from the very Islamic neighbors it claimed to be defending.

When we apply his lens to other global conflicts, we get varied answers. The Russia–Ukraine War shows how civilizational identity continues to shape conflict, with Vladimir Putin casting Ukraine as part of an Orthodox Slavic world in resistance to the West, as Ukraine asserts a European future. In contrast, the Afghanistan–Pakistan border tensions expose the limits of this lens, where shared faith and history fail to prevent hostility, and conflict is driven instead by strategy, ethnicity, and territory. The contrast underscores that while civilizational identity can structure certain conflicts, it is neither universal nor sufficient as an explanatory framework.

Conclusion: From Diagnosis to Prescription

The civilizational map he drew in 1996 remains the most useful single lens for understanding why this conflict looks the way it does, who is mourning, who is cheering, and who is pretending. It explains the emotional geography of the war with a clarity that no other framework comes close to matching. But does sentiment transform into strategy? For that you need to know where the oil is, who owns the debt, and whose planes are more powerful.

This is not an argument for discarding Huntington. Mainstream academia has been too quick to do exactly that, embarrassed by the framework's bluntness and uncomfortable with what it implies about the limits of liberal internationalism.  

The current theater of conflict is perhaps better understood as a "realist skeleton" draped in civilizational vestments. Tehran has skillfully navigated this landscape by framing its confrontation with Israel and the United States as an existential struggle between “Islam and infidelity”. But the actual execution of the campaign reveals the cold calculations of power politics beneath the surface. Gulf monarchies, most notably Saudi Arabia and the UAE, have pointedly declined to mobilize behind Tehran, opting instead to prioritize regime stability and sovereign survival over any perceived civilizational kinship. Within Iran itself, persistent domestic unrest over the squandering of national wealth on foreign proxies like Hezbollah underscores a citizenry that does not universally subscribe to the regime's ideological narrative.

Hence, the more precise formulation might be this. Civilizational identity determines how a conflict is narrated and how the populations across the world respond to it. It does not determine what governments do when the cost becomes real. The street and the foreign ministry are reading from different books, whether they act in congruence or not is often dependent on multiple factors like politics, economics, geography, and history.

Huntington also offered a prescription alongside his diagnosis. The Abstention Rule advises the West against intervening in other civilizations' conflicts, a lesson written in blood across Afghanistan and Iraq. The Joint Mediation Rule suggests that core states from rival civilizations should cooperate to contain fault line conflicts before they escalate, which is happening in the current conflict as Pakistan brokered the ceasefire, and China reportedly pressed Tehran to accept it. The Commonalities Rule encourages finding and expanding shared values across civilizational lines rather than fixating on the divisions. These are not perfect rules. But they are useful guidelines, and in a world that has spent thirty years ignoring them, the cost is now visible.

The challenge lies in applying Huntington's framework without succumbing to fatalism. Depending on how civilizations choose to wield this lens, whether emphasizing the commonalities rule or fixating on fault lines, it can lead to cooperation or conflict. Indian foreign policy has succeeded precisely because it prioritizes the former. 

It needs to be remembered that culture ignored does not disappear. It returns, and when it does, it tends to redefine the rules of the game. Understanding global politics requires engaging seriously with civilizational dynamics, recognizing that religious and cultural differences shape international relations as powerfully as material interests. The ultimate takeaway is that culture, if not considered in policy imperatives, will eat all political strategy for breakfast.

Samridhi Seth is a Legal and Policy Consultant at Nation First Policy Research & Change Foundation. She writes on a wide range of issues spanning law, governance, public policy, and international affairs, with a keen interest in the ideas and institutions shaping contemporary society.