Sublime

As the example of the late Soviet Union illustrated so well, until a few years ago it was possible for states to exercise great power in the world even while wasting resources on a massive scale. When returns to violence are high and rising, magnitude means more than efficiency. Larger entities tend to prevail over smaller ones. Those governments t

Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old.

If every country depended upon foreign suppliers and customers, the web of mutual dependence would be too strong to break.

underlying imbalances that explained the sources of growth in the global economy,

We have to reconstruct the economy to observe the second- and third-order effects of globalism.