Ten years after the Cold War ended, we are moving toward the 21st century. In the past decade, the international community has been trying to catch up with fast changes and to establish a viable theory for creating a new order. However, drastic changes in the world have made it impossible for human wisdom to catch up with reality.
In the Cold War era that lasted half a century, theory stayed ahead of reality. The East-West confrontation of the Cold War era started when the Soviet Union sought world hegemony on the basis of communist ideology. U.S. diplomatic expert George Kennan proposed that Western nations pursue a coordinated policy of containing the Soviet Union to win the Cold War. In the past decade, experts have been trying in vain to formulate a theory, comparable to Kennan's in viability, for creating a post-Cold War order. U.S. political scientist Samuel Huntington's theory of cultural conflict attracted wide attention, but most experts agreed that it contained many logical faults and was far from viable.
There are signs that diplomatic relations and the international order being developed depend on nations sharing the same value systems, especially with the United States. Diplomatic relations are controlled not only by value systems, but by a combination of value systems and national interest.