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The nuclear physicist Leo Szilard once remarked that the fall of the Soviet system would eventually lead to the fall of the American system. He said that in a two-element structure, the interrelationship and interdependence are such that the one cannot survive without the other.

This comment has been relayed by a friend, and as Szilard has passed to his reward I am in no position to explain his reasoning, but it is possible to restate it in political terms, and we are seeing the result in finance and in war. I think that Szilard was implying what a very intelligent opponent of the United States also said when the Cold War ended. Georgi Arbatov, former head of the U.S.A. and Canada Institute of the Soviet Union, said to an American interlocutor: We are about to do something truly terrible to you. We are going to deprive you of your enemy.

Without the enemy, the machinery of power begins to race, with nothing to resist it; megalomania sets in. The end of the Cold War coincided with the beginning in the United States of globalized finance, launched under the Clinton administration.