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THE DECADE IN REVIEW:IT WAS THE AGE of bluster and fragility. Looking back from the serene distance of the future, historians will surely be struck by the great paradox of the first decade of the 21st century, the way hubris and nemesis seemed to be utterly entwined, writes FINTAN O'TOOLE

On the one hand, this was the era of the greatest assertion of the power of the West – of American military might, of hyper-charged global capitalism, of the values and culture of the Anglophone world. On the other, the very aggression with which all those things were asserted seemed to be a silent acknowledgement of how precarious they really were. The louder the insistence on the familiar forms of power, the clearer it became that those forms were falling apart.