HERE’S WHY RUSSIA CAN’T BEAT UKRAINE

SAMUEL Huntington got Ukraine wrong. That’s what a casual reader of “The Clash of Civilizations?” — published in Foreign Affairs 30 years ago this summer — might think. Huntington was at the peak of his career as a political science professor and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University when he wrote “the fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” The Cold War with the Soviet Union was over. American troops easily evicted Saddam Hussein from Kuwait two years earlier. This was meant to be a golden age — a new world order, as President George H.W. Bush called it, even “the end of history.”

But Huntington knew perpetual peace had not arrived. Nor was foreign policy about to become mere police work. The Islamist atrocities of 9/11 confirmed his insights.

The “War on Terror” was really a war between the West and another civilization’s most militant manifestation. The Bataclan Theater in

Paris and the London Underground were as much a battlefield in this war as the caves of Tora

Bora or the deserts of Iraq.

Yet Huntington had his detractors, who claimed civilization itself was a racist term and unscientific.

More recently, some have called out his 1993 assertion that “If civilization is what counts . . . the likelihood of violence between Ukrainians and Russians should be low.”

Ukraine sits atop a fault line between the West and what Huntington called Orthodox civilization.

He expected no earthquakes, however, because Ukraine and

Russia “are two Slavic, primarily

Orthodox peoples who have had close relationships with each other for centuries.”

Did he fail to foresee Putin? Not exactly.

American leaders feared the since Huntington wrote “The Clash of Civilizations?” is that more and more torn countries have made up their minds. Ukraine, torn between Western and Orthodox civilization, chose the West — and Putin invaded.

Russia, civilizationally invested on Serbia’s side in the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s, turned away from the West as NATO intervened in support of Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. Other nations have also made civilizational choices.

Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is still a member of NATO but has rejected the Westernizing secularism of Kemal Ataturk in favor of stronger commitments to Islam. India, likewise, has been moving away from the