Most political scientists who are familiar with Samuel Huntington’s brilliant contribution to political science will find Terence McNamee’s attack ignorant and anti-intellectual (New US administration finds political foundation in creaky culture theory, February 15). What he wrote is mostly old hat, regurgitating the arguments against Huntington’s hypothesis of two decades ago. An example of his ignorance is his statement that Huntington’s "empirical evidence was shoddy … mass bloodletting in the 20th century was mostly intracultural". Huntington’s hypothesis did not deal with intracultural strife at all, and he would not have denied it as a phenomenon. His focus was entirely on cultural interaction between and among the major civilisations of the time. Huntington’s predictions proved to be accurate in many instances: 9/11 and the menace of Islamic jihadism; the rise of Islamic State in particular; the clash between nationalism and cosmopolitanism as the pivot of American politics; ...
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