In 1991, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and with it the Soviet Bloc and Warsaw Pact, the United States and its allies in NATO had won the Cold War. The political scientists of the West’s liberal political establishment theorized that the collapse of the authoritarian, autocratic Soviet Union, with its state-controlled economics, evidenced that liberal free-market democratic states were the final evolution of the global political economy, and that the bipolar global world order of the Cold War would evolve into a unipolar world united by the liberal political thought of globalist institutions, for example, the United Nations or the World Trade Organization, and that the establishment of internationalism would be the basis for a world beyond the concept of a community of independent sovereign nation-states organized in blocs.

Francis Fukuyama was one of the liberalist political scientists who elaborated his interpretation of the said liberal political establishment’s theory in 1992 with a book titled The End of History and the Last Man. Fukuyama theorized, on the presumption of the supremacy of liberal thought, that with the inevitable triumph of liberalism, future political evolution would be an evolution of liberal political thought alone.

In the 19^th Century, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan was the most influential Indian-Muslim personality to have hypothesized the Two-Nation Theory. He theorized that the Muslims of India and the Hindus of India were two separate nations, with their own distinct national identities, cultural traditions, and societal customs on the basis of their different faiths. In 1930, Allama Iqbal presented the Allahabad Address and articulated the politicization of the Two-Nation Theory in an argument that a post-colonial India must arrange for the political accommodation of the Indian-Muslim nation. In 1940, Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the All-India Muslim League would ratify the Lahore Resolution, and in it formalize the Two-Nation Theory as the ideological basis for the Pakistan Movement.

In 1996, Samuel P. Huntington, who had taught Francis Fukuyama, published a counterargument, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington was a realist political scientist and argued that the post-Cold War global world order would evolve, not into a unipolar world, but a multipolar world organized not in ideological blocs, as was the case post-1945, but in civilizational blocs. He elaborated that states would arrange themselves into such blocs on the basis of shared identity, culture, history, and faith, with their own spheres of civilization. Huntington’s counternarrative of future history was, however, criticized as too pessimistic by analysts.

When the Two-Nation Theory was initially conceptualized by a clique of intellectual Indian-Muslim elites, it had a diverse spectrum of critics. It was criticized by the liberal Indian-Muslim intelligentsia who advocated an ideology of Hindu-Muslim unity against the imperial British Raj. It was also criticized by pan-Islamist Indian-Muslim nationalists who advocated for the rejuvenation of Muslim dominance over the Indian subcontinent and the reclamation of their glorious imperial Mughal past.

Huntington died in 2008. By 2008, the post-9/11 era had begun, and the War on Terror had commenced. The idealism of the post-Cold War era could not cope with the geopolitical realities thereafter. The Yugoslav Wars, the Gulf War, and the ill-fated War on Terror were evidence that the West had failed to establish the liberalist vision of world order, most popularly represented by Fukuyama, and that history had not ended after all. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order began to reemerge, as he had tentatively predicted a potential conflict akin to the War on Terror in it, and prospective analysis of his theory of civilizationalism and cultural determinism came under reconsideration.

In 2026, with the ascendancy of the Trump Administration in the United States, the resurgence of the far-right political spectrum in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy, the Russo-Ukraine War, the Americo-Israeli War against Iran, the establishment of a Hindutva India, and a rejuvenating China asserting itself again in its historical sphere of influence, Huntington’s arrangement of the world in civilization blocs may be transpiring. President Trump calls for the protection of Western civilization, rising pan-European far-right populist politicians such as Nigel Farage, Alice Weidel, Marine Le Pen, and Giorgia Meloni represent a popular new wave of united European anti-globalist sentiment against immigration, and President Xi Jinping of China is adamant about China’s place in the Sun.

Israel’s invasion of Gaza, its annexationist policies in regard to the West Bank, and genocide of Palestinians have polarized and alienated the Muslim world. Pan-Islamism has resurged in the Muslim world, and the Makkah Joint Defence Pact may be the result of it, as Muslim nation-states unite against Israeli irredentism and Western dominance.

The Two-Nation Theory preceded Huntington’s theory of civilizations by a century. Both theories are based on the hypothesis that if the global world order is organized by the arrangement of states on the basis of their political ideology, then the ideology of nations within those states, as in their culture, is also a determinant in the world order. The Two-Nation Theory justified the partition of the Indian subcontinent into Pakistan and India on the sole basis that Muslims and Hindus are two different nations. It was thus the first example of a state being born out of the millennia-long clash of the Islamic and Hindu civilizations in India, which continues even today, as the Pakistani political establishment views India as an existential threat, necessitating a hard security state, and the Indian establishment views Pakistan as an obstacle to its resurgence in the form of Akhand Bharat. The 21st century may be the great war between and of civilizations.