Today our global policy is largely conducted by elites who are descendants of Morgenthau and disciples of Babst. By definition such people make pretty poor revolutionaries. Why change a system that's been working well for you? This makes it vitally important that they learn to think in terms that can correct the blindness that a Harvard education or decades of living in Washington, D.C., seems to produce. At a time when the major international issues were contests between nations, when those hat-dropping Metternich moments turned the pages of history, putting the winners in society in charge of policy might have been reasonable. Anyhow, it was probably inevitable. (Though it still led to many bloody confrontations.) But in an era when many of the most dynamic forces in society come from outside elite circles, from geeks who in the past might have been thought of as "losers," such an approach is an error of catastrophic proportions.Joshua Cooper Ramo The Age of the Unthinkable - Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It , (p. 37), Little, Brown and Company, 2009