Uncle Sam: the great debate

Who Are We? America's Great Debate (The Free Press, £18.99)

Eight years ago Samuel Huntingdon published The Clash of Civilisations, which raised the roof with its prediction that for much of this century the liberal West would be locked in mortal conflict with militant Islam and, at a later and unspecified date, the "confucian" Chinese.

With his new book he takes the thesis a step further. America, he says, must establish a clear and coherent identity based on Western Christian values to stand a chance of winning its trial by combat with its Islamicist and Chinese enemies.

The enduring success of The Clash of Civilisations is that it appeared prophetic of the events of 11 September 2001, and the asymmetric campaigns of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and their allies.

For many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic it has become a self-fulfilling argument that war with Islamic terrorist groups and nations is as inevitable as the train heading towards the maiden tied to the railway track in silent movies.

Similarly, Who Are We? appears to be a tract timed to bring comfort to the neo-Conservatives of the Bush administration in their hour of difficulty over the mess in Iraq, pursuing Bin Laden and his pals and managing the tar baby of homeland defence.

From the conflict between civilisations, we have moved to the conflict within civilisations. Huntingdon warns that if America wants to discharge its global obligation as the world's unique super-power, it must get its ideological act together and forge anew a sense of identity and unity based on the old core cultural and religious values of its founders.

These values are enshrined in the American Creed, values articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", the respect for property, the law and individualism. To this Huntingdon adds religion, in the form of the ethics and beliefs of Protestantism.

He rejects the process of "deconstruction" of American identity under Bill Clinton, who moved America away from European cultural values and eroded national identity by his indulgence of minority rights - sexual, religious, ethnic and ideological.

The argument is more subtle than it may first appear. The questions the book poses about the future of civilised communities, and the organism of the state itself, will be debated long after the Neo-Cons and Bush's Vulcans have left office.

Though deeply suspicious of international institutes from Nato and the UN to the big NGOs, Huntingdon realises that America has to work with them and cannot go it alone.

The globalised economy means greater integration. The intriguing question now raised by Iraq and the Gulf crisis is that globalisation may not evolve on America's terms. Furthermore, the process is likely to produce global conflicts not envisaged by the neat formula of the West v Islam cup-tie of the Clash of Civilisations thesis.