The current Korean crisis is just a prelude to the tensions and conflicts that will accompany the rise of the ancient civilizations which have a much longer tradition than the Western World. Globalization will inevitably lead to the newly rise of the civilizations which have lost their standing and recognition in the course of Western colonialism and hegemony. What we therefore need is a development of mutual recognition among the great civilizations of the earth, which should transcend a mere parallelism as well as a universal civilization which in the end would just be a kind of universalized Western civilization. While the task of the late 20<sup>th</sup> century was the avoidance of the self-destruction of the planet, the task of our century will be to manage the new rise of the ancient civilizations without falling in the Thucydides trap of a repetition of the First World War – only now in Asia. As the slain former prime minister of Israel highlighted: "You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.” Mutual recognition of the civilizations of the earth has a double perspective: It allows solving conflicts on a rational basis and it is binding the conflict-parties to their own civilizational standards.
