The speakers offered policies that they hoped would serve as counterweights to Obama's focus on income inequality.
It is a 700ft ballet of precisely considered mechanisms, where even the counterweights, set within coloured frames, resemble works of art.
Africa should look to its past when there were councils of elders and other counterweights to royal or chiefly power for political structures that suit its society, say some.
In democracies, governments have to be the arbitrators, the counterweights to powerful private groups.
But almost any extension of Chinese influence in the area around its borders will be met with deep suspicion, at the very least, by the country with which it has the longest border.Arms and the MandarinsThe fear that China might one day turn against Russia, or against Russian interests, has led Russia to place strategic counterweights here and there.
"Without counterweights and a separation of power, Putin may end up under the influence of the people around him, always consulting him and telling him he is the master of everything," says Yevgeny Yasin, head of the Higher School of Economics.
But in fact the men were brothers under the skin and worthy counterweights to each other: big thinkers who took subjects too often synonymous with platitudes and gobbledygook, and, by dint of a lot of hard twisting, wrung some sense out of them.
The mere existence of a constitution would tend to elevate the European Court of Justice to the status of a constitutional court, which could operate much as the Supreme Court does in America, but without the counterweights of a strong federal legislature or an elected executive.
The job is made easier by counterweights.
Thus, engineers thus used a complex system of counterweights, pendulums, and steel-truss girders to allow the bridge to withstand winds of up to 180 miles (290 km) per hour.
The vertical lift also relies on counterweights; the entire bridge roadway is elevated by counterweights and machinery in two towers.
