Foud Ajami, a Middle East scholar at Johns Hopkins, had long been a vocal critic of Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, which argued that the basis of future global conflict would not be ideological or economic, but cultural.

In January, 2008, however, Ajami wrote a retrospective on Huntington's work, The Clash , in which he now concedes that Huntington was largely correct. "Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism's conceit (Bernard Lewis being the other").

Unfortunately, Samuel Huntington is now quite ill and has moved into an assisted living facility. I had tried to interview him in recent years for Right NOW Magazine , but he always canceled on me. Now I know why.

According to a surprisingly thoughtful Boston Globe piece on Huntington, a copy of Ajami's "confession" now hangs over Huntington's bed, "and the very mention of it brings a smile to his face, even on days when he doesn't feel like speaking." [The prescient 'Clash of Civilizations', By H.D.S. Greenway, July 8, 2008]