Our political and legal institutions were in tatters, and an entire nation was traumatized, brutalized and reduced to being an extension of a single man.

President Richard Nixon hailed the 1971 Smithsonian agreement as the most significant monetary agreement in the history of the world. But it was soon in tatters, and the world moved to generalized floating.

Turkey has also lost several regional allies, particularly some of the Gulf monarchies, which are angry at the Erdoğan government s unconditional support for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Turkey s much vaunted soft power diplomacy and neighborhood policy now lie in tatters.

Today, a democratic transition that the West sought to portray as a model that other Arab nations could emulate lies in tatters. Egypt s economy, bruised by the outflow of foreign investment and a dearth of tourists, is on life support.

Before the crisis, Europe looked like the most likely candidate to make a successful transition to the first equilibrium greater political unification. Now its economic project lies in tatters while the leadership needed to rekindle political integration is nowhere to be seen.

This is why one can hear many voices opposing the idea of a harmonized EU wide bank levy or tax. This levy, strongly backed by those countries whose financial sectors are in tatters after the crisis, is hard to swallow for EU states that did not intervene to bail out their banks.

Mr. Mercado (Philippines) We welcome Mr. Alvaro de Soto, Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, and thank him for his first briefing to the Council on the latest developments in the region, particularly the recent outbreak of violence that not only claimed the lives of several people and wounded several dozens more, but also left a tenuous ceasefire in tatters.

Tsipras and Varoufakis should have seen this coming, because the same thing happened two years ago, when Cyprus, in the throes of a banking crisis, attempted to defy the EU. The Cyprus experience suggests that, with the credibility of the government s default threat in tatters, the EU is likely to force Greece to stay in the euro and put it through an American style municipal bankruptcy, like that of Detroit.