News Snapshot:
American forces landing at Aguni Island, Okinawa, 1945. The US rightly judged that its greater industrial capacity gave it an insurmountable advantage over Japan in the Second World War. Photo by Keystone/Getty Images In the run-up to the Great Financial Crisis, the Western world was at the zenith of the unipolar moment. American strength and dominance was taken for granted, and the countries that today have become the US’s bitter rivals – Russia and China – were still imagined to be on the path to becoming assimilated into the Western economic and political order. As a result, Western defence planners...
