Al Jazeera: Between 1814 and 1815, ambassadors from five great European countries sat together in the Congress of Vienna to find a balance of power in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. They succeeded, and set a model for diplomacy and managing state interests that persists to this day. The paradigm included territorial trade-offs, and the premise that rational men - and it is almost always men - trading interests can find answers to contests of power.
Two hundred years later, in a far less august setting,...