The euro crisis thus offers Europe an opportunity to reestablish trust. Its national leaders need to reestablish the trust of their constituents by offering them straight talk.

UMNO is widely believed to have held talks with Anwar before. Now, more than ever, it needs Anwar to reestablish its credibility.

With the economy in steep decline, Poland s rulers began to seek to stabilize the political system and reestablish relations with the West. In 1986, the government released political prisoners a precondition for talks with the opposition.

Israel wants, first and foremost, peace and stability. To this end, Israeli leaders expect Egypt s government to reestablish its authority in Sinai, and, despite the peace treaty s provisions, have agreed to Egyptian requests to increase its military presence in the region.

Foreign military intervention can effect regime change, but it evidently cannot reestablish order based on centralized government. Iraq has been partitioned in all but name into Shia, Sunni, and Kurdish regions, while Libya seems headed toward a similar tripartite, tribal based territorial arrangement.

The Islamic State is attempting to return to an even more distant past. Its adherents espouse a medieval ninth century doctrine to justify their effort to reestablish the caliphate, in which the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organizations becomes null and summary execution and slavery are mandatory.

In fact, regardless of the balance of power between the regime and its opponents, Syria probably will not reestablish a strong, centralized government for decades, if ever. At best, Syria will emerge from the current conflict with a decentralized or federal state at worst, the country will go the way of Somalia.

As Greek officials consider their options, they would do well to bear in mind that there are better and worse ways to default on sovereign debt especially given countries desire to reestablish their creditworthiness as soon as possible. In the coming weeks and months, the Greek government would be wise to consider three guidelines

In the case of Italy, the short leash would dissuade former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi from seeking to topple Mario Monti s new government (which has only a fragile majority), because if Berlusconi precipitated an election, the electorate would punish him. This would help to reestablish political stability and accelerate Italy s return to the market.

For mainstream French politicians, renouncing the European project to buy the time required to restore competitiveness is as unthinkable as is the logical alternative an all out push for full European political union. This would reestablish monetary sovereignty and create a normal central bank (like the Federal Reserve or the Bank of England) at the European level.

Once these steps are put in place, it is extremely difficult for a pro democracy movement to survive but not impossible if counter pressure is applied correctly. History shows again and again throughout the modern era and around the world that people do indeed have some powerful tools to reestablish an open society if they were willing to use them.

This year will offer one more critical opportunity to reestablish hard legality in international negotiations the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris in December. It is widely believed that the conference may well represent the world s last chance to limit the global temperature increase to 2º Celsius over pre industrial levels the threshold beyond which the risks of climate change become particularly daunting.

As Hufbauer and Schott, among others, have illustrated, the effects of sanctions are often fairly disappointing so much so that many scholars have concluded that such measures often are imposed so that governments can appear to domestic audiences to be doing something. Certainly, severe US sanctions on Cuba failed to bring the Castro regime to heel indeed, President Barack Obama s move to reestablish full diplomatic relations may have more effect.

What has trumped these missteps, and enabled each side to focus on opportunities rather than excuses, is that both the US and Russia now understand that they have common interests in Syria. Both sides want not only to preclude the Assad regime s further use of chemical weapons, but also to find a route to sustainable peace in Syria, and to reestablish the authority and utility of the UN in these situations.

Of course, the ambition today cannot be to recreate that world (or to reestablish an anachronistic Westphalian order of religious separation), but rather to devise a new order predicated on different assumptions. Indeed, one of the keys to our current global disorder is that, in contrast to the Congress of Vienna or, for that matter, the parties of 1648 the international system s main actors are not united by a common will to defend the status quo.