Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

Russia’s return to the world stage in the early 2000s owed even more to global economic growth than did the rise of China. Russia poured oil and gas into world markets. Its banks and industrial corporations borrowed enthusiastically in Europe and the United States. Like China it held a huge reserve of dollars, but unlike China its financial and economic interrelationship with the United States was indirect. Russia did not earn its dollars by exporting to the United States. It sold its gas and oil to Europe and Asia. Furthermore, whereas the Chinese Communist Party approached the West with self-confidence, the wounds of the Soviet Union’s defeat in the cold war were still fresh. There were no fond memories of a “Nixon-Kissinger” moment in the Kremlin. It was not by accident, therefore, that it would be Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, the cold war KGB operative, who would pose the question that China and America preferred not to speak out loud. What, Putin demanded to know, were the implications of a rebalanced and reintegrated world economy for the geopolitical order? Putin not only posed the question. In so doing he exposed a deep lack of agreement within the West—inside Europe and between Europe and the United States—over what kind of international architecture should frame economic and financial development, not just in the world at large but in particular on Europe’s very doorstep, in Eastern Europe, the showcase for capitalist transition in the post–cold war world.