The veto exercised over world affairs by America’s conservative caucus was exasperating and profoundly delegitimizing to institutions like the IMF, but it would be fatuous to attribute the impasse on financial assistance for the developing world to this alone. To see the broader array of forces at work, one only has to look at the one measure of debt relief that the international community did agree on in 2020, the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI).
