A wide gulf conventionally separates accounts of global geopolitics in the wake of 9/11 from our narratives of the genesis of the financial crisis. But if we listen closely it is clear that the quagmire of Iraq haunted the Washington policy-making elite in the early 2000s, awakening nightmarish memories of Vietnam and the crisis of American power and authority of the 1930s. The rise of China added to the sense of menace. Larry Summers’s description of the Sino-American trade balance as a balance of financial terror was telling. That was not how the Germans or the Dutch thought about their
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