Barack Obama’s first weeks in power have been a heartening contrast to George W. Bush’s troubling and misguided foreign policy. The executive order to close Guantánamo Bay, the condemnation of torture and the willingness to engage in dialogue with the rest of the world are all signs that Obama will seriously reconsider Bush’s War on Terror.

But Obama needs to avoid the discursive patterns of the Bush administration, especially if he is going to usher in a new era of foreign policy that is conscious of the immense complexities of the world.

Let’s consider the last words of Bush and the first words of Obama as presidents of the United States.

In his farewell address, Bush defined his War on Terror as “a broader struggle between two dramatically different systems.” In one, “a small band of fanatics demands total obedience to an oppressive ideology,” while the other is “based on the conviction that freedom is the universal gift of Almighty God and that liberty and justice light the path to peace.” Although Bush tactfully refused to identify these systems, his intentions were clear: the first system is Islam and the second is the West. It doesn’t matter how broad and abstract these categories are; Bush relied on them to make significant foreign policy decisions that have had negative consequences throughout the world.

The foundation of Bush’s dichotomy between the West and Islam comes from Samuel Huntington’s “celebrated” thesis, “The Clash of Civilizations,” published in 1993. Huntington controversially argued that major conflicts of the future would occur between “civilizations.” He proceeded to arbitrarily divide the world into seven major civilizations: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox and Latin American.

Never mind that Arab-Christians, for example, do not fit any of these labels. Huntington’s thesis is a simple, and therefore attractive, way of understanding the world, even if it doesn’t exactly correspond to reality.

The absurdity of Huntington’s thesis is corroborated by his comment that there might be an African civilization. So, not only does he reduce human diversity to seven abstract and arbitrary categories, he also contributed to the antiquated and offensive belief that people in Africa lack any significant form of civilization.

Bush’s foreign policy and discourse inherited a lot from Huntington’s thesis. The “us vs. them” arguments, and the ideas of a monolithic Islam and an unavoidable clash of values are all connected to the broader concept of a “clash of civilizations.”

These ideas have had devastating consequences, such as ignoring distinctions between Sunnis and Shiites. A big part of our problems with the Middle East stem from ignorance and unwillingness to acknowledge that the region is just as diverse as the rest of the world.

Obama’s inauguration speech offered both positive developments and a disappointing continuity of some of Bush’s discourse.

He emphasized diversity and the human capacity to solve “old hatreds.” But he still used the label “Muslim world,” as if it were homogeneous, and connected it to “leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict.” This language is troubling. It helps reinforce the “imagined geography,” to use Edward Said’s term, created by Huntington’s thesis and Bush’s foreign policy.

And it is from Said that Obama should take some advice. As Said wrote in “Clash of Ignorance,” a critique of Huntington’s thesis published in The Nation in 2001, “these are tense times, but it is better to think in terms of powerful and powerless communities, the secular politics of reason and ignorance, and universal principles of justice and injustice, than to wander off in search of vast abstractions that may give momentary satisfaction but little self-knowledge or informed analysis.”

Obama may be in the process of ending the misled War on Terror, but it is also time to end the use of the misleading idea of a “clash of civilizations.”

— De Oliveira is a Belo Horizonte, Brazil, senior in history and journalism.