I think, as you can see now in Africa, today and more so in the future countries will simply change their partners when one partner demands things which seem to be unbearable.

That is exactly why this phase in the Long Cycle has always been fairly tumultous ... its been a time when it is much easier for semi-peripheral countries to contemplate playing one core economy off against another, because the prevailing hegemon has lost much of its edge.

Just as, for example, the American colonies played the British and the French off against each other (though as it turned out to the greater eventual damage to the French government that was our ally than to the British government that was our adversary).


I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.