According to the elite newspapers and journals of opinion, the future of
foreign affairs mainly rests on ideas: the moral impetus for
humanitarian intervention, the various theories governing exchange rates
and debt rebalancing necessary to fix Europe, the rise of
cosmopolitanism alongside the stubborn vibrancy of nationalism in East Asia
and so on. In other words, the world of the future can be engineered
and defined based on doctoral theses. And to a certain extent this may
be true. As the 20th century showed us, ideologies -- whether communism,
fascism or humanism -- matter and matter greatly.
