Easternization: Asia's Rise and America's Decline From Obama to Trump and Beyond

by Gideon Rachman

America’s closest ally breaking ranks and joining the AIIB gave the green light to all the other U.S. allies that also wanted a piece of the infrastructure action. Within weeks, fifty-five other nations, including Australia, South Korea, and Germany, had agreed to join the AIIB. The sole major hold-outs were America and Japan. But rather than looking like the bulwarks of a coherent anti-China front, Washington and Tokyo risked looking isolated and petulant. Observing this spectacle, Larry Summers, Obama’s first treasury secretary and a former president of Harvard, was convinced that he was watching history unfold—and not in ways that advantaged the United States. “The past month,” he wrote in April 2015, “may be remembered as the moment the United States lost its role as the underwriter of the global economic system.