True, democracy and the rule of law provide no foolproof security guarantee.

In the end, there is no foolproof method to guarantee that political leaders leave without tears.

As the war in the Caucasus has shown, the global economy does not offer a foolproof guarantee against war.

The new summit is unlikely to produce either a coordinated stimulus package or a detailed blueprint for a foolproof system of financial regulation.

The genuinely naïve or ignorant position is to believe that statesmanship and foolproof controls, rather than sheer dumb luck, have enabled the world to go almost seven decades without a nuclear weapons catastrophe.

If the economy was foolproof, and if so many good policy options existed to deal with crisis and distress, there was less need to avoid mistakes. Things could always be set right retrospectively.

Traditional lab tests for disease diagnosis can be too expensive and cumbersome for the regions most in need. George Whitesides' ingenious answer, at TEDxBoston, is a foolproof tool that can be manufactured at virtually zero cost.

At a time when a growing number of countries were mastering the technologies for the production of fissile materials and nuclear devices, export controls and the safeguards system could never be foolproof in deterring all proliferation.

We know now with multiple revelations about human error and system breakdown on both the American and Russian sides during the Cold War years and since that even the most sophisticated command and control systems are not foolproof.

In the end, there is no foolproof method to guarantee that political leaders leave without tears. What matters is that mechanisms are in place that do make them leave, probably rather too late, and certainly with some pain and unhappiness, but in time for the constitution of liberty to remain intact.