Meeting in 1993, foreign ministers of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe recognized their inability to stop wars from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Nagorno-Karabakh. No ways had been found to deal with resurgent nationalism. It was recognized that the international community was essentially helpless as far as the causes of conflicts were concerned. Preventive diplomacy, when possible, is often too little and too late.
The Cold War's end has left statesmen in an impenetrable smog of peace. In this new world, there is no central challenge, and therefore there can be no central organizing principle for foreign policy.
The political world has run out of ideas. Many societies are simply muddling through without any clear sense of direction, their political systems increasingly tired and bewildered. Many of the assumptions on which political systems have been founded have become increasingly irrelevant to the tasks faced by policy makers.