This study critically analyzes the ideas of American political scientist B. Barber, presented in his book “Jihad vs. McWorld.” The scholar attempts to substantiate the concept of the struggle between two forces shaping the world order: Jihad and McWorld . The former is presented as a movement oriented toward the establishment of a society of radical national-cultural isolation - the demarcation of ethnonational living space from the influence of the outside world. The latter implements globalization approaches to create a unipolar world of unified and uniform cultures, which ultimately should lead to the formation of a common transnational personality. According to B. Barber’s predictions, the radical confrontation between Jihad and McWorld should end with the victory of the latter, that is, the complete blurring of intercultural boundaries. The relevance of McWorld's “cultural pressure” in recent decades is confirmed by the vocabulary of modern language, where foreign borrowings, typically international in nature, are displacing lexemes representing an ethnocultural worldview. Examples of contemporary cultural realities objectify the emergence of a form of interethnic relations development different from that proposed by B. Barber - regionalization. Regionalization, when applied to a cultural context, represents a natural process of countering the tendency to erase cultural and ethnic boundaries. Thus, formally, it appears to be in opposition to globalization ( McWorld ) and the related ideas of Jihad . However, it is consistently demonstrated that the doctrine of regionalization has a symbiotic basis: despite its focus on preserving national-ethnic identity, it implements transcultural diffusion through the assimilation of borrowed cultural elements. Examples of “cultural assimilation” in the literary process, the film industry, science, and even the catering industry are cited as supporting examples. Regionalization is realized in its natural form as an individual’s independent desire to escape cultural assimilation, and in extreme forms, as a shift toward cultural separatism. Artificial regionalization is viewed as a subject of national discourse and is found in ideologically oriented communication flows aimed at obtaining, maintaining, or developing statehood. A conclusion is drawn about the expanding manifestations of cultural regionalization based on the principles of ethno-genealogical connections, adjusted for the contemporary political map of the world.