Sublime

the Vietnam War, shock waves rattled the marble palaces of Washington.

despite the arrival of

The Second World War left the United States in an extraordinary position. It was rich, it was powerful, and, thanks to its chemists and engineers, it had the means to deal with foreign lands without colonizing them. But the war also conferred another advantage, harder to see and operating on a deeper level. It had to do with standards. Standards—th

The United States wasn’t the only country facing a rubber drought. Germany had the same problem. As a major industrial power whose colonies had been confiscated after the First World War, Germany depended profoundly on foreign markets for crucial raw materials. It held coal and wood in relative abundance, but when it came to rubber, oil, iron, and

The synthetic revolution that began in the 1940s had rewritten the rules of geopolitics. Secure access to raw materials—one of the chief benefits of colonization—no longer mattered that much. One could procure the necessary goods through trade, and if, as in the thirties and forties, the markets closed down, well, that wasn’t the end of the world.