Niall Ferguson Niall Ferguson

The China model: why is the West imitating Beijing?

issue 08 May 2021

‘There’s an osmosis in war, call it what you will, but the victors always tend to assume the… the, eh, trappings of the loser,’ says one of the officers in Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. ‘We might easily go fascist after we win.’

Americans have long been haunted by the notion of the osmosis of war.

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