The teachable moment of Saudi Arabia’s economic threat against the United States

Back in the early days of the Great Recession, there was a lot of foreign policy pundit panic that China would somehow use its holdings of American debt as an economic lever to force Washington to kowtow to Beijing. Also back in those early days, I argued that this was nonsense. Seven years later, I like to occasionally bring up this fact, mostly because it’s one of the rare times I think I was unequivocally right.