Managing them well requires mutual trust, strong supranational institutions and steadfast alliances: precisely the things that the policy of the pendulum puts most at risk.

These are governed by 'self-interest' while international law and supranational institutions embody 'the brotherhood of man'.

But while you can submerge nationhood in a tight web of supranational institutions, you can't destroy the basic allegiances that animate the hearts of men.

This was an anarchic international order in which supranational institutions were too weak and inchoate to stymie the ambitions of the worst of rulers.

Do the multilateral and supranational institutions that oversee today's global trading system have the capacity to adapt to these pressures more successfully than those of the past?