Samuel Phillips Huntington (born April 18, 1927) is a political scientist known for his analysis of the relationship between the military and the civil government, his investigation of coup d'etats, and his thesis that the central political actors of the 21st century will be civilizations rather than nation-states.
Huntington charges in his Clash of Civilizations that some in the industrialized world would prefer the non-Western world to stay permanently in a state of development that would not diminish the West's economic influence. Critics (see Le Monde Diplomatique articles) call Clash of Civilizations a covert way to legitimize aggression by the US-dominated West, in order to keep the latter in check and prevent them from rising to the level of economical and social development reached by the industrialized world.
To support this theory, critics point to the recurrent support of western countries for dictatorships in countries like Colombia, Guatemala, Iraq and others, and the selective use of force to change the ruling class in those countries in so called "humanitarian interventions", establishing governments that more closely "comply" with western views (e.g. Indonesia in the 1960s, Chile, and Nicaragua).