Edward Sapir (1884-1939) was a linguistic Anthropologist and one of the creators of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (amazing how those Klingons have infiltrated our society ). Put simply, the hypothesis states that the nature of a language influences the thought patterns of the users of that language. While it is hotly debated, personally I subscribe to a weak form of it (influence vs. control). I think that this thread is showing that influence.

One of the things that I found fascinating was that St. Carl based his work on Newtonian physics - think about such concepts as "friction", "centre of gravity", etc.; these are all metaphors and analogs grounded in Newtonian physics. In this thread, there is a lot of discussion on the concept of "stability" which is also a concept from Newtonian physics that is, IMO, a very poor metaphor.

As RA has pointed out, SH had a very "stable" system but one that was judged as "unacceptable". So, it isn't "stability" that BPC is engaged in but, as Rob noted, some form of stability that operates to counter opponent interaction.

I suspect that what we are looking for, if we take a ore internationalist perspective and go beyond purely US national interest in the immediate sense, is something closer to quasi-stable or homeostatic systems (these are biological metaphors) that, at the minimum, do not support our opponents while,at the same time, are willing to engage with the West in a non-kinetic form of competition within internationally acceptable conventions.

This is getting back, in some ways, to the distinction I was making in that conference paper about "required" and "desired" institutions. IMO, we should be requiring some form of quasi-stable social system and the acceptance of certain (to be determined) international conventions. While some form of "democracy" (or republic) may be viewed as desirable, I do no consider it to be either useful or even valid to require it. First, democracies are less stable than many other forms of governance and they are even less stable when dealing with a culture that doesn't believe they will actually work to meet their basic needs. Putin's popularity in Russia is a good example. Second, democracies are the simplest form of governance to subvert into dictatorships run either by moronic idiots with a death wish (Mugabe comes to mind) or by demagogues-of-the-day (post-Periclean Athens comes to mind as does the back and forth between Marius and Sulla).