Huntington believed that the ideological conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union — the Cold War era's two superpowers — would not mark the "end of history," as so many believed, but that it would eventually be replaced by a conflict between civilizations in the post-Cold War world. Huntington defined a civilization as the broadest level of shared identity between groups of people, and he divided the world into nine of them: Western, Orthodox, Islamic, African, Latin American, Sinic, Hindu, Buddhist and Japanese. It was these civilizational divides, Huntington argued, that would shape the relationships between states after the Cold War came to a close. Within this broader framework, The Clash of Civilizations described a number of key themes, two of which are especially relevant to the current state of the global system.