Intercivilizational relations will range from cold peace to violent conflict, rarely warm.

Evidence

Civilizations are the ultimate human tribes, and the clash of civilizations is tribal conflict on a global scale. In the emerging world, states and groups from two different civilizations may form limited, ad hoc, tactical connections and coalitions to advance their interests against entities from a third civilization or for other shared purposes. Relations between groups from different civilizations however will be almost never close, usually cool, and often hostile. Connections between states of different civilizations inherited from the past, such as Cold War military alliances, are likely to attenuate or evaporate. Hopes for close intercivilizational “partnerships,” such as were once articulated by their leaders for Russia and America, will not be realized. Emerging intercivilizational relations will normally vary from distant to violent, with most falling somewhere in between. In many cases they are likely to approximate the “cold peace” that Boris Yeltsin warned could be the future of relations between Russia and the West. Other intercivilizational relations could approximate a condition of “cold war.” The term la guerra fria was coined by thirteenth-century Spaniards to describe their “uneasy coexistence” with Muslims in the Mediterranean, and in the 1990s many saw a “civilizational cold war” again developing between Islam and the West. In a world of civilizations, it will not be the only relationship characterized by that term. Cold peace, cold war, trade war, quasi war, uneasy peace, troubled relations, intense rivalry, competitive coexistence, arms races: these phrases are the most probable descriptions of relations between entities from different civilizations. Trust and friendship will be rare. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 550

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘cold war’/‘cold peace’ taxonomy echoes the ‘uncomfortable coexistence’ spectrum framing in later chapters on fault line conflicts.
• CANDY: The term ‘la guerra fria’ was coined by 13th-century Spaniards for uneasy coexistence with Mediterranean Muslims.