How Europe and US stumbled into spat

Brussels - Sometime geopolitical shifts happen by accident rather than design.

Historians may record March 2015 as the moment when China's chequebook diplomacy came of age, giving the world's number two economy a greater role in shaping global economic governance at the expense of the United States and the international financial institutions it has dominated since World War Two.

This month European governments chose, in an ill-coordinated scramble for advantage, to join a nascent, Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in defiance of Washington's misgivings.