Ten years from now, what will be the dominant terms of public discourse in politics? At a dinner party in March (2005), I offered a spur-of-the-moment prediction: that the U.S. would have troops in Iraq, all told, for twenty years, by which point we (I spoke as a citizen) would have forgotten why we were there in the first place. Until then, we would stay in Iraq, I continued, in order to keep a Shiite Iraq from growing too close to a Shiite Iran. Another guest countered that the language and cultural barriers between Iraq and Iran would trump shared religious doctrine and practice. On one level, my comment was a watered-down Platonicism—an eyebrow raised at democratic fickleness: democrats, to paraphrase Plato, are people who don't stay the course. On another level, however, our exchange made note of the fact that much of world politics these days is about the interaction not between states but between ethnoi and states.Danielle Allen ([email protected]) is dean of the humanities and professor of political science at the University of Chicago.