When Huntington first came out with his clash of civilizations article I had 2 different reactions. First, he not only had oversimplified the issue and was simply wrong on some important details - eg Latin America is, in his view, not part of the West. Second, this theory predicts. Indeed, that is what theory is supposed to do. Science tends to disprove theory when its predictions are incorrect. The Ptolemaic cosmos predicted well enough until Copernicus showed it to predict wrongly.

So, how does Huntington's theory do as a predictor? So far, it is pretty good at identifying what he called "fault lines." Despite my friend Marct's correctly stated objections, I think we have to take this Huntington theory seriously and seek to test it on its own terms - that is, how well does it predict future events/explain (macro) past events.