Thank you, Adam Tooze! Fascinating, Summers consulting with Epstein on his amorous or sexual passion and Summers dispensing essential wisdom on China, at the same time, and how do the two connect in one man or in one mind? After the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, triggered, in part, by the contraceptive pill's arrival circa 1960, many people thought unbridled sex was a road to liberation, though that dizzy moment and in part foolish ideology is now largely forgotten or repressed in public memory. The Roman Polanski case, in 1977, was, in a way exemplary, a celebrated film director having sex - statutory rape - with a 13-year-old. New waves of feminism - and bitterness - rose, in part, as a reaction to the excesses of the sexual revolution, a revolution that did not really respond, in all respects, to women's desires and priorities. The question arose, then, but I think was buried in partisan passions and never properly addressed: Of what precisely should one be ashamed? Where should the limits be drawn? Donald Trump is one answer: Be ashamed of nothing! As for politics, Grand Strategy, and Strategies of Seduction, French literature has long been very good on the exercise of power in private sexual relations and in military and political relations. Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, an artillery officer, who was a pioneer in ballistics, and served under Napoleon, published that classic novel of sexual warfare and seduction, Dangerous Liaisons, in 1782, just seven years before the outbreak of the French Revolution: the tactics of sexual conquest overlap with those of battle strategy. Also, with the present stage of bipartisan decadence shining forth in the US ruling class, one wonders: can the revolution be far away? Many other French works, notably the works of Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne, of the Marquis de Sade , of Jean Genet, and of Dominique Aury (The Story of O), but also the works of Balzac and Stendhal and many others, deal with the relationship of the lust for power and the lust for sexual conquest or sexual power, how the two interact in the minutiae of human relationships and in the grand scheme of history. Power, as Henry Kissinger I believe observed, is a great aphrodisiac - infecting both those who possess power - and those who come into contact with it. The powerful often forget that they are mere mortals, and they mistake admiration and acquiesce for desire, infatuation, and, sometimes, even love. This can lead to great cruelty, intentional or inadvertant. Exploiting minors is of course beyond the pale and should be. One anecdote from the distant past. I was having dinner with four friends in a small rustic restaurant on the banks of the Seine in the late 1970s, the fading of the sexual revolution was well advanced. One of those present was a very attractive young journalist, a Communist, from the French Communist daily, l’Humanité. The very conservative - but also in his elite way populist - Gaullist, Jacques Chirac, later prime minister and then president of France, was then a very powerful mayor of Paris. He was know for his quickie sexual adventures, and his nickname was "Monsieur Five Minutes." The young Communist journalist had, she told us, been caught in an elevator for twenty minutes alone with Mayor Chirac. "What was he like?" we asked. She smiled, looked dreamy for a moment, gazed at the sky, and then at us, and grinned, and said, "He's the most charming man in the world!" Truly bipartisan. Silvio Berlusconi's libertinism was openly displayed - often with good humor - and not hidden behind a facade of straight-laced hypocrisy, as is so often the case in the Anglo Saxon world. An Italian friend of mine was at a small dinner party - eight guests - where Berlusconi was one of the guests. My friend was an implacable foe of Berlusconi's policies. She despised what he was doing to Italy. "So, what was he like?" I asked. "Absolutely charming," she said, "He told great jokes and even reverted to being the crooner he had been as a teenager." She paused. "I like him; but I hate his policies." O tempora, o mores! What times, what customs!! Those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end ... It is interesting, instructive perhaps, how a wave of liberation - getting rid of the fear of pregnancy, getting rid of all those repressive unreasonable puritan inhibitions and taboos, getting rid of all the cruel, itchy secrecy and shame, recognizing that man - and women too have sexual desires - and exploring all the multifarious aspects of oneself and of others - can end in decadence, cruelty, and exploitation.