By 2000, East Asian countries had begun a systematic boycott of the IMF. In 2002, Argentina committed the ultimate sin: they defaulted—and got away with it. Subsequent U.S. military adventures were clearly meant to reestablish the nation’s symbolic, cosmological power—that is, to terrify and overawe (it didn’t really matter whom)—but in that respect do not appear to have been very successful: partly because they demonstrated that the U.S. military was unable to totally overcome far weaker rivals; partly, too, because, to finance them, the United States had to turn not just to its military
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