If you're talking about the old article by Samuel Huntington, I read it myself and I feel that it's pretty much been discredited since the time he wrote it in the late 90s.  I don't remember all of it, but he talked about a sort of Islamo-Confucian union, pointed to by the increase of weapons sales from China to Middle Eastern countries (the ones that the US won't sell weapons to and that think Russian equipment is too expensive).  I thought it was pretty dumb, but hindsight is something that the author didn't have and won't really have, since he's dead.  There was a book that had his original piece and then about 5 or 6 papers that were critical of the theory, than a rebuttal at the end by Dr. Huntington.

In any case, I don't think it explains much of anything, since we see culturally linked countries against each other all the time.  Since culturally linked countries tend to be next to one another, they often have the same resources to fight over and influence to vie for.  So I would say don't put too much stock in that old paper.

What is the best way of reducing the stress of modern life ?

Stress has a variety of effects on our lives. Although not all kinds of stress are harmful, the stress of modern life is often harmful. You have to worry about everything because everything is changing rapidly. The question is: how we can reduce our stress? People do different things to avoid stress like watching TV, drinking coffee, tea, or alcohol and so on. I think one of the best ways of reducing stress is to analyze the cause of the stress.

Many times we have stress because for imaginary reasons. We just need to think about things more clearly to remove the reasons of the stress. For instance, when I was in university one of my friends was always under a lot of stress. He was scared of what his future might hold. I remember that once he couldn't sleep all night. The next morning I saw him, he was sleepy and was not able to focus on the class. I knew it was because of his sleepless night. When I saw that his stress was affecting him badly, I decided to help him, but I didn't know how.  When he came back to the dormitory, I asked him about things that prevented him from sleeping last night. He said that he was worried about the exam results. I couldn't believe it, he had taken his last exam several days before. I said to him that he couldn't do anything about it, because the exam is over. He said that he knew but he couldn't stop thinking about them. Finally, I told him if he wanted, he could be worried and ruin his grades in his current classes. It seemed like I was able to convince him to focus on his current classes instead of being worried about something that he couldn't do anything about. This experience taught me that stress can be something made in our minds, not by the world around us.