The modern State emerged as an organizing principle from the chaos of civil and religious wars in the 16 th and 17 th centuries and the national revolutions of the 18 th . Machiavelli in Italy, Bodin in France, Hobbes in Britain, and Grotius in Holland conceived of the sovereign state as the best protection against the extreme dangers of anarchy and tyranny; Locke, Rousseau and the American Founding Fathers added the principle of popular legitimacy. Machiavelli, the earliest proponent of a secular raison d'etat, or national interest, viewed it as the best means 'To Deliver Italy from the Barbarians' (the title of the last chapter of The Prince ). Similarly, the ranking of states was a function of war: according to Treitschke, 'A state may be defined as a great power if its total destruction would require a coalition of other states to defeat it.' When great powers evolved into superpowers, and nuclear weapons and ideological threats rendered the national interest tenuous if not archaic, a powerful new actor rose to the fore: the national security state, as enshrined in the United States by the National Security Act of 1947, which created the Central Intelligence and National Security Agencies. Then came 9/11 and transnational terrorism, the passing of the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Do threats define the state? Would the state even exist without threats? As the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy wrote: 'And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?/They were, those people, a kind of solution.'