Cold War alliances crossed civilizations but postwar groupings are realigning around civilizational lines.

Evidence

During the Cold War the United States was at the center of a large, diverse, multicivilizational grouping of countries who shared the goal of preventing further expansion by the Soviet Union. This grouping, variously known as the “Free World,” the “West,” or the “Allies,” included many but not all Western societies, Turkey, Greece, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Israel, and, more loosely, other countries such as Taiwan, Thailand, and Pakistan. It was opposed by a grouping of countries only slightly less heterogeneous, which included all the Orthodox countries except Greece, several countries that were historically Western, Vietnam, Cuba, to a lesser degree India, and at times one or more African countries. With the end of the Cold War these multicivilizational, cross-cultural groupings fragmented. The dissolution of the Soviet system, particularly the Warsaw Pact, was dramatic. More slowly but similarly the multicivilizational “Free World” of the Cold War is being reconfigured into a new grouping more or less coextensive with Western civilization. A bounding process is underway involving the definition of the membership of Western international organizations. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 426

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the thesis of the whole book and to the idea that the West-Islam divide replaced the Soviet bloc. Resonates with reading on how alliances form and dissolve around identity rather than ideology. — connects to: The medieval Christian-Muslim divide parallels modern Cold War ideological divisions.; Cold War superpower rivalry froze UN membership and pushed new states to Bandung. — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making…, 1293