As Larry Summers, Clinton’s last treasury secretary, put it in 2018: “Can the United States imagine a viable global economic system in 2050 in which its economy is half the size of the world’s largest? Could a political leader acknowledge that reality in a way that permits negotiation over what such a world would look like? While it might be unacceptable to the United States to be so greatly surpassed in economic scale, does it have the means to stop it? Can China be held down without inviting conflict?”78 As Summers suggested, it was all too easy for commercial competition to slide into
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