It seems ironic that the two international relations concepts of the 1990s that most captured the imagination of the world's intellectuals were the “clash of civilizations” and “soft power.” At first sight, they could hardly be more different despite the similar backgrounds of their authors as professors at Harvard and consultants for the Defense Department. Samuel Huntington's 1993 Foreign Affairs article, “The Clash of Civilizations?”, rejected root and branch the idea of cross-cultural understanding and called on the West to circle its wagons against the Muslims and the Confucians. By contrast, Joseph Nye's notion of “soft power,” first suggested in 1990 and developed more recently in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (2004), suggests that American attractiveness in the world can be as important as its carrots and sticks in inducing international compliance. While Huntington viewed cultural contact as the tectonic friction between geologic plates of civilization, Nye sees the encouragement of international exchanges and the better marketing of American foreign policy as necessary accessories to guns and money.