War the Nature of Modern Thesis

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This contrasts completely with another theory of modern warfare put forth by Samuel Huntington, who agrees that warfare is transitioning away from its previous incarnation(s) but actually sees war and conflict increasing in its scope, especially from an ideological perspective. In Huntington's view, war in the modern era (beginning in the seventeenth century) has moved from wars between princes or monarchs (wars between individuals in authority, such as the animosity between certain French and English rulers of the period, for instance) to wars between nation-states (wars between peoples, such as the American Revolution as one example) to wars of ideology that involved several or many nations on both sides of the engagement (the two World Wars and even the Cold War serve as examples). Now, Huntington contends, warfare is continuing this trajectory of an increasing scale by becoming wars of civilization: essentially wars between Western and non-Western civilization(s). The commonality of Western civilization in terms of ideology and practical needs/desires now outweighs other bonds and divisions between these nations and the others of the world, to the point that nations cease to matter as the most potent political units -- another point of agreement between Huntington and Kaldor.

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Whereas Kaldor sees localities filling the power void left by the failure of nation-states, however, Huntington sees civilization-wide unity as the natural and empirically observable successor.

The past unquestionably plays a role in shaping contemporary conflicts, yet it is unclear that the recent past is truly the most influential factor in determining the combatants and the shape of war in the modern era. While Kaldor's point that identity groups are forming in a way that purposefully excludes the vast majority of individuals from each group, and that the immutability of many such identities makes conflict that much easier to foment, these identity formations seem more reactionary than causal. War is and has consistently been about resource control, and there is no reason to suspect that as competition for resources increases that local ideologies and identities would supplant this basic driving force behind conflict. Huntington's theory of the clash of civilizations incoporates the commonality of resource needs and the competition for these resources much more clearly and directly, and thus provides a more reasonable assessment of the root of modern and future wars......

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