Civilization wars shift global power to abstaining southern states

Evidence

Whatever the immediate outcome of this global civilizational war—mutual nuclear devastation, a negotiated halt as a result of mutual exhaustion, or the eventual march of Russian and Western forces into Tiananmen Square—the broader long-term result would almost inevitably be the drastic decline in the economic, demographic, and military power of all the major participants in the war. As a result, global power which had shifted over the centuries from the East to the West and had then begun to shift back from the West to the East would now shift from the North to the South. The great beneficiaries of the war of civilizations are those civilizations which abstained from it. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 885

Categorization

• QUESTION: Huntington’s scenario imagination here — does the north-south power-shift prediction hold any weight or is it pure speculative fiction shaped by 1990s anxieties?
• SEED: Angle: how intellectuals use fictional ‘what if’ scenarios to launder contestable causal theories inside a predictive frame — the speculative payoff reveals the real thesis.