In the emerging world, the relations between states and groups from different civilizations will not be close and will often be antagonistic. Yet some intercivilization relations are more conflict prone than others. At the microlevel,

Civil warrior: In the battle for Kabul last October, this Taliban soldier fought to create an Afghan government that would adhere to strict Islamic principles. Photograph by John Moore - AP Wide World

the most violent fault lines are between Islam and its Orthodox, Hindu, African, and Western Christian neighbors. At the macrolevel, the dominant division is between "the West and the rest," with the most intense conflicts occurring between Muslim and Asian societies on the one hand, and the West on the other. The dangerous clashes of the future are likely to arise from the interaction of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and Sinic assertiveness.

The West is attempting and will continue to attempt to sustain its preeminent position and defend its interests by defining those interests as the interests of the "world community." That phrase has become the euphemistic collective noun (replacing "the Free World") to give global legitimacy to actions reflecting the interests of the United States and other Western powers. The West is, for instance, attempting to integrate the economies of non-Western societies into a global economic system which it dominates. Through the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other international economic institutions, the West promotes its economic interests and imposes on other nations the economic policies it thinks appropriate. In any poll of non-Western peoples, however, the IMF undoubtedly would win the support of finance ministers and a few others but get an overwhelmingly unfavorable rating from almost everyone else, who would agree with Georgi Arbatov's description of IMF officials as "neo-Bolsheviks who love expropriating other people's money, imposing undemocratic and alien rules of economic and political conduct and stifling economic freedom."

Non-Westerners also do not hesitate to point to the gaps between Western principle and Western action. Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue with China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle.

Having achieved political independence, non-Western societies wish to free themselves from Western economic, military, and cultural domination. East Asian societies are well on their way to equaling the West economically. Asian and Islamic countries are looking for shortcuts to balance the West militarily. The universal aspirations of Western civilization, the declining relative power of the West, and the increasing cultural assertiveness of other civilizations insure generally difficult relations between the West and the rest. The nature of those relations and the extent to which they are antagonistic, however, vary considerably and fall into three categories. With the challenger civilizations, Islam and China, the West is likely to have consistently strained and often highly antagonistic relations. Its relations with Latin America and Africa, weaker civilizations which have in some measure been dependent on the West, will involve much lower levels of conflict, particularly with Latin America. The relations of Russia, Japan, and India with the West are likely to fall between those of the other two groups, involving elements of cooperation and conflict, as these three core states at times line up with the challenger civilizations and at times side with the West. They are the "swing" civilizations between the West, on the one hand, and Islamic and Sinic civilizations, on the other.

Islam and China embody great cultural traditions very different from and in their eyes infinitely superior to that of the West. The power and assertiveness of both in relation to the West are increasing, and the conflicts between their values and interests and those of the West are multiplying and becoming more intense. Because Islam lacks a core state, its relations with the West vary greatly from country to country. Since the 1970s, however, a fairly consistent anti-Western trend has existed, marked by the rise of fundamentalism, shifts in power within Muslim countries from more pro-Western to more anti-Western governments, the emergence of a quasi war between some Islamic

Aggressive army: Chinese soldiers maneuver along the coast opposite Taiwan, March 1996.Photograph by Xinhua - AP Wide World

groups and the West, and the weakening of the Cold War security ties that existed between some Muslim states and the United States. Underlying the differences on specific issues is the fundamental question of the role these civilizations will play relative to the West in shaping the future of the world. Will the global institutions, the distribution of power, and the politics and economies of nations in the twenty-first century primarily reflect Western values and interests or will they be shaped primarily by those of Islam and China?

The realist theory of international relations predicts that the core states of non-Western civilizations should coalesce together to balance the dominant power of the West. In some areas this has happened. A general anti-Western coalition, however, seems unlikely in the immediate future. Islamic and Sinic civilizations differ fundamentally in terms of religion, culture, social structure, traditions, politics, and basic assumptions at the root of their way of life. Inherently each probably has less in common with the other than it has in common with Western civilization. Yet in politics a common enemy creates a common interest. Islamic and Sinic societies which see the West as their antagonist thus have reason to cooperate with each other against the West, even as the Allies and Stalin did against Hitler. This cooperation occurs on a variety of issues, including human rights, economics, and most notably the efforts by societies in both civilizations to develop their military capabilities, particularly weapons of mass destruction and the missiles for delivering them, so as to counter the conventional military superiority of the West. By the early 1990s a "Confucian-Islamic" connection was in place between China and North Korea, on the one hand, and in varying degrees Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Algeria, on the other, to confront the West on these issues.

The issues that divide the West and these other societies are increasingly important on the international agenda. Three such issues involve the efforts of the West: (1) to maintain its military superiority through policies of nonproliferation and counterproliferation with respect to nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and the means to deliver them; (2) to promote Western political values and institutions by pressing other societies to respect human rights as conceived in the West and to adopt democracy on Western lines; and (3) to protect the cultural, social, and ethnic integrity of Western societies by restricting the number of non-Westerners admitted as immigrants or refugees. In all three areas the West has had and is likely to continue to have difficulties defending its interests against those of non-Western societies.