Adam Tooze

The same Western powers that had shamelessly courted the Libyan dictator had turned on him, bombing his military and delivering him to the vengeful mob. One would be a fool to trust them. Medvedev’s appeasement would only invite further aggression. Putin would have to take back control.

was America’s most important ally, the Europeans. The EU would later claim that it “sleepwalked” into the Ukraine crisis. This was part of a piece with its guileless insistence that “the EU does not do geopolitics.”16 That perhaps described the naïveté of some officials in Brussels, but it never really rang true.

Less charitably it might be said that since the 1990s, New Labour, like the Democrats in the United States, had entered into an enthusiastic partnership with the City of London. It was, therefore, no coincidence that it was now Labour in Britain and the Democrats in the United States who were showing such energy in the struggle to fix the banking crisis. It was a monster they had helped to create.