问答题 Charles Dickens observed of revolutionary France that it was the best of times and the worst of times, the spring of hope and the winter of despair. More recently, the US National Intelligence Council borrowed from A Tale of Two Cities for the title page in a report about how the world may look in 2030. You can see why the authors alighted on Dickens’s observation. The tumultuous upheavals in the international system can stir optimism and pessimism in equal measure. The great prosperity that globalization has brought to the east and south sits alongside the risks and insecurities that accompany the passing of an older order. 　　The first instinct is to celebrate the way globalization lifts hundreds of millions of people out of poverty; the second to fret whether the rebalancing of global power will usher in a new era of might is right in international relations. Even Europeans, who have come to look at the world through normative lenses, are beginning to think that soft power may sometimes need a hard centre. 　　The cold war had its drawbacks --- not least the threat of nuclear incineration. The big worries now flow from uncertainty. The uncertainty makes it tempting to turn for advice to the looking glass of history. After all, history, is Alexis de Tocqueville’s metaphor, is a picture gallery stocked with a handful of originals and many more copies.