to deny the fact, in the post–cold war world, it was far from geopolitically inert. It entertained complex relations with its neighbors in the Mediterranean and in Eastern Europe that could not easily be disentangled from the hard power of the NATO alliance or coercive border policing. And this would matter, because whereas the EU kept its distance from the Middle East imbroglio and refused to see the rise of China as a geopolitical threat, it would be on Europe’s doorstep that a violent great power confrontation would erupt, and it did so just as the world banking system began to unravel. In
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