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If a decade of failed war has taught us to question whether or not the world shares our excitement for American hegemony, and the Arab Spring led us to wonder if American power can in fact be a cause for real harm in the world, then the U.S. financial crisis has humbled even the assumption that the U.S. will stay on top forever. The Kony 2012 video, in which a bunch of eager white kids make transparently self-aggrandizing and short-sighted assumptions about the power and goodness of their own involvement in a far-away society that doesn't really want them, brought all of these anxieties together.

The recent victories in Syria in favor of the Iran- and Russia-backed forces of President Bashar Al-Assad as well as the end to UN sanctions on Iran have the potential to aggrandize newer groups in the military, state, and business elites.

But without democratic oversight, the influx of European business and investment after sanctions has the potential both to increase corruption in state enterprises and to polarize inequality within the upper and middle classes.

The clerics, however, were mostly conservative and sympathetic to the sanctity of property ownership. They dismantled working class organizations and reversed nationalizations. Led by individuals like Rafsanjani, their policies ultimately empowered the middle class bazaari merchants and mid-sized entrepreneurs.

Shortly after the death of founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mansour Moaddel examined the socioeconomic counterrevolution that occurred in the late 1980s against peasant and worker movements for social change unleashed starting in 1978. The revolution shattered the control of western corporations and their foreign agents. Appealing to religious revolutionary ideology, farmers seized land from their landlords and workers organized to support better conditions and nationalizing industries.

Even if President-Elect Trump does not significantly alter the status quo in U.S. and Western diplomacy with Iran, many countervailing factors prevent such a simplification of Iranian politics. Many large Islamic charitable organizations exercise considerable economic and political power semi-independently from state institutions.

Factionalism continues to fire ideological rhetoric, discouraging diplomacy and foreign business engagement in Iran.

Had the wealth siphoned off by Haiti’s national bank stayed in the country, it would have added at least $1.7 billion to Haiti’s economy over the years — more than all of the government’s revenues in 2021.

“Isn’t it funny,” the Haitian politician and economist Edmond Paul wrote of the national bank in 1880, “that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?”

But while Haitians themselves were poor, Haiti could make you rich. As a British diplomat, Spenser St. John, wrote in 1884: “No country possesses greater capabilities, or a better geographical position, or more variety of soil, of climate, or of production.”

Slaveholders had taken that wealth for themselves, first with the whip, then with a flotilla of French warships, demanding compensation for plantations, land and what France considered its other lost property: the Haitian people. It was the first and only instance in which generations of free people had to pay the descendants of their former slave masters.

Beyond bricks and steel, Haiti earmarked about 20 percent of the French loan to pay off the last of the debt linked to France’s original ransom, according to the loan contract. “The country will finally come out of its malaise,” the Haitian government’s annual report predicted that year. “Our finances will prosper.”

None of that happened. Right off the top, French bankers took 40 percent of the loan in commissions and fees. The rest paid off old debts, or disappeared into the pockets of corrupt Haitian politicians.

The 1875 loan from Crédit Industriel and its partner left two major legacies. First is what the economist Thomas Piketty called the transition from “brutal colonialism” to “neocolonialism through debt.”

Haiti took on millions in new interest, hoping to finally shed the burden of paying its former slave masters. In that way, the loan helped prolong the misery of Haiti’s financial indentureship to France. Long after the former slaveholding families considered the debt settled, Haiti would still be paying — only now to Crédit Industriel.

When a French warship bristling with cannons sailed into the port of the Haitian capital in 1825, an emissary from King Charles X came ashore and delivered an astonishing demand: France wanted reparations from the people it had enslaved.

The demand was for 150 million French francs, to be turned over in five annual payments, far more than Haiti could pay.

So France pushed Haiti to take a loan from a group of French banks to start paying. That Sisyphean weight came to be known as the double debt.

Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper.

For a decade, a quarter of Haiti’s total revenue went to paying debts controlled by National City Bank and its affiliate, according to nearly two dozen annual reports prepared by American officials and reviewed by The Times.

After half a century of crushing payments tied to the double debt, Haitians celebrated the news that at last the country would have its own national bank, the sort of institution that in Europe had financed railroads and factories.

“Isn’t it funny,” one Haitian economist wrote, “that a bank that claims to come to the rescue of a depleted public treasury begins not by depositing money but by withdrawing everything of value?”

When the American military invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915, the official explanation was that Haiti was too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices. Secretary of State Robert Lansing made little effort to mask his contempt for the “African race,” casting the occupation as a civilizing mission intended to end “anarchy, savagery and oppression.”

“I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” the general who led the U.S. forces in Haiti, said years later, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.”

For decades to come, the United States was the dominant power in Haiti, dissolving parliament at gunpoint, killing thousands and shipping a big portion of Haiti’s earnings to bankers in New York while the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived near starvation.

“Neocolonialism through debt,” is how Thomas Piketty, one of the economists we spoke with, put it. “This drain has totally disrupted the process of state building,” he said.

“They were betrayed by their own brothers, and then by foreign powers.”

In an 1875 loan, the French bankers took a 40 percent cut off the top.

The double debt has largely faded into history. Generations of French profited richly from the financial exploits of their forebears, but that is rarely taught in classrooms.

“This is part of my family history I never knew,” said one sixth-generation descendant of Napoleon’s first wife.

Even in Haiti, the full story was long unknown. Then in 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stunned Haitians by denouncing the debt imposed by France and demanding reparations.