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country’s position in a single morning. That day, Senator
     Arthur Vandenberg sadly remarked, “ended isolationism for any realist.” September 11 was a similar shock. The old line that
     “there are no permanent friends in international relations, only permanent interests,” got it half right. Even interests themselves
     can be refigured with incredible speed.
    Realism now falls down in other ways, too. It famously assumes, for instance, that states have a monopoly on violence. But
     in this age of computer hackers, terrorists, and drug cartels, that’s certainly no longer entirely accurate. And, confronted
     with the peculiar nature of a financially interconnected world, where danger, risk, and profit are linked in ways that can
     be impossible to spot and manage, theories that involve only armies and diplomats don’t have much use. Political power is
     spreading more widely than it did when Morgenthau wrote. More than 90 percent of the nongovernmental organizations in the
     world were created in the past ten years, for instance. And recall Morgenthau’s line about the uselessness of morality, that
     only might made right? Even if such an assumption were honest enough, because it can be hard to say who is right or wrong
     in a moral argument, some of the most energetic modern forces, as different in their decency as Hizb’allah and Greenpeace,
     draw power from an explicitly ethical worldview. You might disagree with the morality of such groups, it might look twisted
     when lined up against your own, but their followers are unquestionably driven by lively ethics as much as by a lust for power.
     The classical models shuffled such worries into the footnotes because they were too hard to model. Unfortunately, these worries
     are now among the most important parts of the system.
7. Who’s in Charge?
    The revolutionary physics of our world now has the effect of taking what might have been idle curiosities in one era — the
     charming but simple ideas of journalists, say, or the theories of criminologists who were history buffs — and turning them
     into dangerous weapons of self-destruction, as if one tried to use Newtonian physics to control a nuclear reactor. But this
     is an important reminder before we move on. When confronted now with “experts” giving advice about the international situation
     or proposing to conduct diplomacy on your behalf, it is not unreasonable to ask about their background. What are they rounding
     out or footnoting in their own thinking that they might not even be aware of? In the past we might have believed that the
     best preparation for a career in foreign policy was a fluency with European history, an ability to speak Russian or French,
     an understanding of the roots of world order. The future demands a different résumé. Today the ideal candidates for foreign-policy
     power should be able to speak and think in revolutionary terms. They should have an expertise in some area of the world —
     be it China or the Internet or bioengineering — where fast change and unpredictability are the dominant facts of life. They
     should have experienced the unforgiving demands for precision and care that characterize real negotiation — as well the magical
     effect of risk-taking at the right moments. They should have mastered the essential skill of the next fifty years: crisis
     management. And they should be inclined toward action, even action at times without too much reflection, since at certain
     moments instinct and speed are more important than the lovely perfection of academic models. The recent history of American
     foreign policy is filled with tales of academic or journalistically trained bureaucrats who were paralyzed instead of energized
     by the demand for what Churchill used to call “action this day.” Most of all, however, we need policy makers and thinkers
     who have that intuitive revolutionary feel for the inescapable demands of innovation. We need early adopters, men