ABSTRACT
Gideon Rose, editor of Foreign Affairs and a former student of Samuel P. Huntington, charted the debate over the value of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Neoconservatism is a political ideology rather than an intellectual school, though the ideas in Clash are central to it. The great neoconservative international project of the post-9/11 era was the “War on Terror,” which was largely based on Huntington’s assumption that the West and Islam would inevitably come into conflict as long as they both existed. In terms of its academic impact, Clash should be remembered as a founding text of neoclassical realism—the school of thought that believes state action can be explained by a combination of structural factors and agent-driven factors. Huntington’s 1993 article titled “The Clash of Civilizations?” was one of the first major works of realism in the post-Cold War era, and one of the first to explicitly reject the scientific methodology of neorealism.
