It is the sort of discovery that never seems to occur in Lincolnshire. Recently, it was revealed that a toxic, shrinking lake in southern California has even more lithium dissolved deep beneath its surface than previously thought. Enough, in fact, to produce the equivalent of nearly 400 million electric vehicle batteries. For context, there are roughly 285 million registered cars and lorries in the United States.
If Australia is the lucky country, then America is surely the blessed superpower. Washington may still be mourning the end of the unipolar moment — the period sometime between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Global Financial Crisis, when the US was the world’s sole hegemon — but it still has the natural resources, military might and economic dynamism to act as what the economic historian Charles Kindleberger termed the global “stabiliser”. That is, if it wants to.
