During a panel, Thomas Friedman, author of The World is Flat, accused China of being a “free-loader” while the US carried the heavy load of being a “global guardian”. I really love the term “global guardian”; what does it mean? Does it mean that the US is protecting the globe from an attack by Mars? Or Jupiter? Does it mean that Beijing is keeping this a secret from the rest of the world so that it won’t have to publicly acknowledge this enormous debt to Washington DC?