Twenty-five years ago, the “clash of civilizations” that the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington predicted would emerge in the post–Cold War world was brought home to the United States when Islamists from the Middle East hijacked four commercial airplanes, flying two into New York’s World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon while the fourth plane, destined for another target in Washington, D.C., crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The attacks claimed nearly three thousand lives and awakened a “sleeping giant” to the global Islamist terror threat. President George W. Bush memorably stood among the ruins of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and pledged that the people that knocked down those buildings would soon hear from the United States. 

Huntington understood that the people who knocked down those buildings were from a different culture—a different civilization—than America, which is part of Western civilization. After the end of the Cold War, while other observers suggested that the world was ideologically at the “end of history” and that the United States could enjoy a “peace dividend,” Huntington cautioned that what would likely take the place of the geopolitical and ideological conflict between the West and the Soviet Union was a “clash of civilizations” between the West and the rival Islamic and Sinic (Chinese) civilizations. Like Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Fernand Braudel, and others, Huntington understood that “human history is the history of civilizations” and that “a civilization is a cultural entity.” Civilizations—cultures—have different values, customs, religions, histories, institutions, languages, perceptions, and ways of life.  

Huntington dispelled notions that as other cultures modernized they would also become more Westernized. “Non-Western societies,” he wrote, “can modernize and have modernized without abandoning their own cultures and adopting wholesale Western values, institutions, and practices. . . . Modernization, instead, strengthens those cultures and reduces the relative power of the West.” The world, Huntington warned, “is becoming more modern and less Western.” Indeed, Huntington, echoing Spengler and James Burnham, wrote that the West is a “civilization in decline, its share of world political, economic, and military power going down relative to that of other civilizations.”  

Geopolitics after the Cold War, Huntington prophesied, would involve conflicts between the West and Islamic nations and groups and a rising China. He even foresaw a “Confucian-Islamic” alliance in opposition to the United States and the West. And he warned that those within the United States pushing multiculturalism were attempting to “de-Westernize” the country, effectively undermining American’s commitment to Western civilization.  

After 9/11, Bush rallied the nation to avenge the attacks, speaking in Churchillian tones about waging a global war on terror but downplaying the reality of the clash of civilizations. Islam, he said, was a religion of peace. The terrorist organizations and the countries that harbored and supported them would feel the wrath of American vengeance and the might of American military power. Bush told the nations of the world that they were either for us or against us in the global war on terror.  

Meanwhile, beginning with the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, and continued thereafter by the younger Bush and Obama, China was welcomed into the global community by political, financial, and business leaders who believed that Chinese leaders had abandoned communism in favor of state capitalism and would fit comfortably within what was being called the “rules-based international order.” The United States helped finance China’s economic and military expansion while simultaneously wasting limited resources and lives in its pursuit of a democratic transformation of the greater Middle East and beyond. 

Despite his Churchillian rhetoric, George W. Bush’s model of leadership in the aftermath of 9/11 was not Churchill; it was Woodrow Wilson. Churchill was a foreign policy realist who sought to pursue the interests of his country and its empire during World War II. Bush after 9/11 equated U.S. national security with a crusade for global democracy. Wilson waged World War I to, in his words, make the world safe for democracy. Bush went Wilson one better: The United States could only be secure, he said, if democracy spread throughout the world. In his first formal speech to the nation nineteen days after the attacks, Bush pledged to wage war against al-Qaeda and “every terrorist group of global reach.” He promised that this would be not an age of terror but an age of liberty, and he said that the “advance of human freedom . . . now depends on us.” 

Four months later in his State of the Union address, Bush defined the war on terror as a global conflict between freedom and tyranny, and he pledged that “America will take the side” of those who pursue the values of freedom “around the world.” Bush characterized the war not as a clash of civilizations but as an ideological struggle between freedom and tyranny. Two years later, in his 2004 State of the Union address, as American forces were fighting in both Afghanistan and Iraq, Bush claimed that the “world is changing for the better” because the United States “is pursuing a forward strategy of freedom in the greater Middle East.” He pledged to “finish the historic work of democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, so those nations can light the way for others, and help transform a troubled part of the world.” America’s “mission,” he said, is “to lead the cause of freedom.” 

In his second inaugural address, Bush claimed that America’s “vital interests” required “the expansion of freedom in all the world.” He added that “it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.” He continued: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.” Those statements would have made Wilson blush. 

The Obama administration attempted to scale back the global war on terror, but its approach to Islamists was, if anything, worse than Bush’s. Obama began his administration with a now infamous “apology tour” of the Middle East, professing penance for America’s past sins in the region. Obama didn’t view the Mullahs in Iran or Islamists in general as civilizational enemies but instead people who had justifiable grievances against the United States. Obama welcomed the so-called “Arab Spring,” which only further destabilized the Middle East, and signed a flawed nuclear deal with Iran that enabled the Mullahs to move closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon.  

The Obama administration continued the U.S. “engagement” with China, long after it was clear to many that Chinese Communist Party leaders were intent on replacing the United States as the leading world power. At home, Obama ramped up the promotion of multiculturalism, eroding our government’s commitment to Western civilization. No American leaders, it seemed, remembered Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” And 9/11 became for some ancient history, except for long lines at airport security stations. 

The first Trump administration recognized that the “endless wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq had distracted the United States from focusing on its great power rivalry with China. The 2018 National Defense Strategy refocused U.S. national security policy on great-power competition instead of peripheral conflicts in the Middle East. Trump scrapped the flawed nuclear deal with Iran and strengthened the United States’ strategic relationship with Israel, which had weakened during the Obama years. Trump sought stability, not the spread of democracy, in the Middle East, substituting realism for nation-building. He wisely sought to improve relations with Russia, but those efforts stalled in part because of the Russia collusion hoax perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Obama administration on its way out of office. At home, Trump sought to reverse the institutionalization of multiculturalism. 

The second Trump administration, after the four years of the Biden interregnum, which was staffed mostly by Obama holdovers, has waged war against the country’s most serious Islamist enemy, Iran, while using diplomacy, a military buildup, and geoeconomics to deter China from achieving its regional and global ambitions. At home, Trump has waged political war on woke multicultural institutions and movements as part of his overall America First policy and his administration’s commitment to defending and protecting Western civilization. Twenty-five years after 9/11, there is an administration in Washington that recognizes we are still in a “clash of civilizations.”