The Ezra Klein Show - How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

Episode Date: January 30, 2026

The old world order is dying. What new world order — if any — is struggling to be born?I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rupture.”What do people think of America now in Europe? In China? And if American hegemony is coming to an end, what comes after that?Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University and a chronicler of crises. The Guardian recently called him “the crisis whisperer.” He’s written a number of books about the times when systems fall apart and new orders emerge, including “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” And on his Substack, Chartbook, he tracks the unfolding crises and power shifts, in particular the rise of China. He also had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, moderating a panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at the World Economic Forum, how the world’s understanding of the U.S. is changing and how he’s making sense of this moment.Mentioned:Crashed by Adam Tooze“Chartbook” Substack by Adam Tooze“The Empty Chamber” by George Packer“The growing challenges for monetary policy in the current international monetary and financial system", speech by Mark CarneyBook Recommendations:Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu XunThe Southern Tour by Jonathan ChatwinContext Collapse by Ryan RubyThoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [e-mail] can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

There's this quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci that has been making the rounds a lot over the past few years. It goes, The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born. In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. There's also a looser translation of that last line that you hear sometimes. Now is the time of monsters. It sure feels like the time of monsters. It sure feels like a time of morbid symptoms.

In our last episode, we talked about how Davos last week seemed to be this wake-up moment for the world when Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, said in his speech that we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. You then turned on the TV and you watched agents of the American government killing protesters on the streets of Minneapolis. I cannot think of a week when it is felt clearer that not just the old order is dying, but the old order is dead. I cannot think of a week

where it has been more obvious that there are monsters. In our last episode, I spoke to the Foreign Affairs scholar, Henry Farrell, about how the way America operates in the world has changed, what we have done to rupture this order. But for this episode, I wanted to turn to the forward-looking question.

What, if anything, is struggling to be born here? Adam Toos is a story in a Clem University. He is a thinker and chronicler of crisis. The Guardian recently dubbed him The Crisis Whisperer. He's written a number of books about moments when systems fall apart, and new orders emerge, among them crashed, how a decade of financial crises changed the world. He's got the excellent substack chart book.

and he had a front-roceit to the chaos of Davos last week, even moderating this panel with, among others, Howard Lutnik, the Commerce Secretary. But Tews has also been on a personal quest, I've been watching and reading long, to try to understand the role of China in all this. And I really think you cannot understand what has been happening in American politics

over the past 10 or 15 years without getting a better, clearer sense of the pressure China's rise is exerting on both the reality of our country, but also the minds of policymakers and leaders. So I wanted to talk to Tuse about what he saw Davos and how he's making sense of this moment. As always, my email as Recline Show at nytimes.com.

Adam Tews, welcome back to the show. Pleasure to be here. So watching Davos last week felt to be like a moment in which the world was collectively recognizing that some old order of America, some old conception of what America was was over. And something new was beginning.

You were at Davos. To what degree did it feel like that to you? I think there was definitely a sense of that. I mean, most people in the world see American politics only through television clips, even, you know, foreign business people, for instance. They don't get a lot of FaceTime with senior American politicians. And Davos this year was different

because the entire Trump cabinet, if we can call it that, was there. So there was a lot of interaction. And the more interaction there was the more dismaying and devastating. It was, I think, for everyone involved. It was truly shocking. I mean, I as a historian, I have a thesis that this was the first real global showcase of the Trump administration on the global stage, really doing its thing, uninhibitedly lashing out. It was truly sobering. I mean, I sat, I couldn't bring myself to join the horde of people that were queuing. up to actually get into the room. So with quite a lot of other people, I sat in the journalist kind of lounge in the conference center, and we all just solemnly sat and watched this crazy

speech. Well, thank you very much, Larry. It's great to be back in beautiful Davos, Switzerland, and to address so many respected business leaders, so many friends, few enemies, and all of the distinguished guests. It's a who's who, I will say that. You go to Davos, it's one of the places in the world where you can see, you know, politicians stacked up, and you can literally do a beauty contest of who can give a speech.

And so everyone all day had been rating, you know, Wuzul of Underlayan versus Macron versus the Chinese vice premier, versus Kani. And then this just, I know, by the standards of Trump speeches, I think it was pretty, routine, maybe you're more of an aficionado than I am.

The thematic seemed weird. He was very uncomfortable with the script he started delivering. He seemed almost as though he was going to fall asleep. Venezuela has been an amazing place for so many years, but then they went bad. Then he kind of got going, did some ranting, came back. After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? The whole thing was just, it just left you. there was no way out after that. After the letter to the Norwegian Prime Minister at the weekend,

which I still think we don't spend enough time on. The letter saying you did not give me a Nobel Prize. A Nobel Prize, which, of course, Norway's Prime Minister does not manage. It doesn't do. And then now I feel free from any obligation to think about world peace. And now I'm going to do America first. I mean, even in its own terms, it's crazy. This to me is why what I saw happening there was, it seemed very substantive.

I mean, Davos was happening in the context of the Trump administration, threatening possible military action, definitely tariffs over Greenland. And to me, it was in part Mark Carney's speech where another world leader stood up and rather than trying to placate Trump, rather than trying to soften the edges of it, it's a negotiating posture, we're all one alliance, just stood up and said, the old world is over. There has been a rupture. Let me be direct. we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. What, in your view, was he saying, had ruptured? Well, I actually went back and looked at Carney's speeches when he was Bank of England governor in the late 2010s

during the first Trump administration. And why that's interesting is that that makes sense of the transition phrase because at Jackson Hole in 2019, the big central bankers gathering, because he'd been head of the Canadian Central Bank, then he did the British Bank thing. And what was really interesting was he was describing transition there, which is the world is becoming increasingly multipolar. We need to move away from dollar-centricity.

There's a fundamental encemetry in the world, which is the financial system, is dollar-centric, and the actual real economy isn't. And so there is a transition. We need to prepare for it. We need to enter into more complex geometries. Much of what he actually ended up saying in Davos in 2026 was preface there. So for me, the significance of this speech last week was,

folks, it's been more like an earthquake. The transition, if you think of the tectonic plates of the world economy has like jarred. And that is what we now have to reckon with, not just the shift, which we can all agree on or think hard about, but we need to reckon with this shock, which doesn't so much consist, I think, simply in, you know, America repositioning itself geopolitically and, I don't know, maybe retreating in various ways from various positions, accepting spheres of power, you know, division of the world into spheres of power, new monroe doctrine. But actually something more to do with,

if you like, the culture of international community, of international society. And that's as amongst, you know, the violence of the use of force, the use of threats, the bullying, the suicidies, you know, the powerful do as they will and the weak must just simply accept the circumstances.

That shift and the stripping away of the hypocrisy. That's the rupture. You call it a culture. It struck me what was being described was almost characterological. It was people in a family, people in an organization and a company saying, Dad or the boss or whomever isn't just getting angry sometimes. No, there's something going on here. They've become dangerous.

Yeah. And we have to prepare to be endangered. And they're like now other bad guys. So one of the really interesting things about the speech is he doesn't really talk about Trump or America directly. The hegemon. He just talks about hegemon's and great powers. And this is crucial, right, because to go back to old order, after all, there was the Biden interlude. There were four years of the return of a kind of supercharged retroatlanticism.

And what Carney is saying is, oh, God, no, that isn't our world at all. Actually, there are, he doesn't say it, but he clearly means there are three major powers, the United States, Russia and China, who have to be. from the vantage point of middle powers of a liberal disposition regarded as essentially equivalent. They may not in detail be equivalent, but in general, they're equivalent because they all essentially are going to rely on power

to get what they want. And that's what we have to reckon with. You mentioned the Biden interlude. You're a historian. You covered Biden. You were talking to a lot of people in the administration. How now do you regard what the Biden administration meant in the sweep of the history of this era?

I think there were two wings, right? I'm sure you have a more detailed analysis of this than me, but there was the old Atlanticism of the president of Nancy Pelosi, you know, whose dad did Lindley's in 1941, 42. I mean, it's crazy. That was that generation. And then there were the people whose world was turned in 2016 by the loss, Hillary's loss to Trump and to Jake Sullivan's basically and the blink thing. And they converged on this, what I think many of them thought of as a kind of last-ditch effort

to restore both domestically and internationally a version of American liberal hegemony, shall we put it that way. Limited, cold war style, because it no longer encompasses the whole world. This isn't couldn't. This isn't the 90s. But something like that. And it made a lot of promises. It issued a lot of checks.

It couldn't really cash. In the end, it couldn't deliver the domestic. bargains to do, for instance, trade deals. It couldn't do market access. That was just off the table. The only way they could get the IRA done. The big climate bill was by various types of economic nationalism, which offended their allies. So even they were straining to get this done. But critically, the Europeans, notably the Canadians as well, love this because it solves a lot of problems for them. If this is what America's going to be, then they don't have to face a whole bunch of complicated domestic questions about military spending.

The promise was we could go back. Yes, exactly. America can be what you thought we were. Exactly. Some idealized version of, it was a MAGA, it was a make America great again, but just nice and positive and liberal and all of that. But the Biden administration had a theory of American power. It's an older theory.

It's a theory of America as the leader of this international order that is rules-based, and to Mark Carney's point, sometimes America slips out of those rules. But fundamentally, America's strength comes out of a structure of alliances that is both dependent upon our power and dependent upon our restraint. Not just strength, but also in that manifests. I mean, they have a manifest destiny. You know, they were exceptionalist in their own way. They believe America's special in its capacity to do that.

And they will endlessly point to the fact that China can't do that and Russia can't really do that. This is part of the special source of American liberalism. on the Democratic project, that it may not fully generalize, but it generalizes more than other such projects. How would you describe what the Trump administration's vision of American powers? It's much more modest at some level. They don't believe in manifest destiny at a kind of global level. They may have some vision of American greatness and certainly a kind of blunt patronism, but I did a chat with Ivan Krastef, the brilliant Bulgarian thinker of modern politics. And he said the thing about Trump is he's not really even a proper nationalist.

He doesn't even really believe it. He's actually kind of rather put off by the reality of the actually existing America of the present. Because they don't do golf clubs as well as he'd like, and their palaces aren't as good as the ones in the Emirates. And really, it's a bit of an embarrassment. So anyway, to get to a more serious kind of vein, no, I think they think of America as in battle, they also have this extraordinary narrative of the United States as the loser in globalization. I mean, you can break that down, after all, like a Sullivan or so on will tell a story about the American working class as having been victimized. And the Trump people will talk,

but it's not very plausible, right, because that's not who he in any reasonable sense represents. I had a dubious pleasure of chairing a panel with the CEO of Bank of America and CEO of Ernest Young, and Rachel Reeves of the British government. I'm Howard Lutnik, the US Commerce Secretary. The key guy behind the tariffs, he in fact referred to himself as the hammer, gleefully, the enforcer of the Trump administration. And journalists had the temerity to ask the chairman of Bank of America,

the CEO of Bank of America, can you really agree with the Commerce Secretary's characterizations, globalization as having been bad for America? And the obvious answer is, who are you kidding? Like, they genuinely seem to believe, that in some sense the American state, because they're very confused about budgets and who earns what money for where and what tariffs do and the relationship between the private sector and the public sector is quite blurred in their mind. So I think they think that in some general sense,

the vital bodily juices of America were sacked by entering into an openness to the world that extends from trade to globalized universities to large-scale migration. And all of those things were kind of a threat to the containment of American power and American wealth. So, but inside the Trump administration's worldview, if America's been the loser in globalization, if our infrastructure sucks, our airports aren't up to scratch, our palaces are tacky, where does power come from? If we were powerful, what would the pillars of that power be? what do they think the structure of the power competition actually is? It depends really.

There are bits of the Trump team, if you look at the national security strategy, their defense strategy documents. You know, there you get a relatively conventional foreign policy, defense policy, establishment kind of read. They do the obvious things. They count up military capacities. They look at overextended lines. They look at supply chains, all this kind of stuff.

If you're trying to characterize the position of the leading fit, in the Trump administration, it's much less obvious, I think. And what was really extraordinary about the speech was that, amongst many passages, was that one where Trump starts going off about the big battleships? These ships are 100, think of that, 100 times more powerful than those big, big, magnificent pieces of art that you saw so many times ago that you still see on television, and you say, wow, what a force, 100 times. Each ship, 100 times more powerful than the big

battleships of the past. You know, big powerful artifacts seem to be an important part of their understanding of what power is. I think they believe in industrial production as an indicator, but they're not even remotely serious about this isn't the Biden administration actually pursuing an industrial policy. I think that was quixotic in the end, but at least you would have to say they were intensely serious about it. These people aren't. They didn't bring back semi-conductor factories. I mean, there were things that were happening. You mean the Biden people?

The Biden people, yes. And Trump will say the same thing. So one of the things they measure American power by is, and Lutnik was, you know, full of this as he bounced into the green room. Trillion and a half, he started saying. And then what it's about is twisting the world's arm to invest in a really large scale in the United States. That's a measure of power. like will people put money into the US

because they understand globalisation of having drained money out. So they want to bring money back. But could you say that these are people who are really articulating the sort of AI strategy documents that the Biden administration was, you know, organizing itself around?

Obviously not. No, they're not in that game at all. And furthermore, they're pursuing strategies that seem to be dictated rather more by Nvidia's corporate interests to just sell chips to everyone in the name of I sovereignty than, you know, the careful effort by the Biden team to actually map out which chips should go where and who should have them. And, you know, this incredibly arcane in the end effort

to penetrate the supply chains of the modern economy and target the really careful bits. This is this, you know, weaponization of interdependence, which that's a very long way removed from how the Trump people are thinking about it. You're just using tariffs, like these big, blunt instruments. So America was at Davos. Our message there was we own this, we do what we say. The Chinese were Davos too. In a very different configuration, yeah. Tell me a bit about what their message seemed to be

and what their configuration was. So, I mean, the vice premier spoke, and what was astonishing about it was that, you know, if anyone still speaks pure Davos, it's the Chinese. It gives me great pleasure to join you in Beautiful Davos for the World Economic Forum annual meeting. Under the theme, a spirit of dialogue.

It is timely that we listen to each other, learn from each other, and build stronger trust with each other. It's even more pronounced in the summer of us that they have in Dalian and Chenjin. And I always like, I sit and watch people like Tony Blair, of course, he's always set. And these fossils of the 1990s show up. And it's as though you're in this retro time warp where we're in, you know, intelligent industrial policy, joined up government. All of those buzzwords of the 90s just circulate in Chinese technocratic discourse. I've watched the Chinese Prime Minister, no less, pause to explain that the units in which he's giving a GDP number

are purchasing par parity-adjusted dollars of 2015. You have to understand this number I've just given you. The unit is in is this one. Because otherwise what I'm saying wouldn't make any sense. To anyone in the room, if you thought I was just using it, at regular currencies, you'd think I was mad. That is the contrast. Like, it is so, so watching Ursula of Univari,

The Anderleon, the president of the European Commission, followed by the Chinese vice-premier, was kind of like a study in contrast because the Chinese play down their wolf warrior position to do the lovely multilateralist kind of thing at Davos. China advocates a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. We are committed to building bridges, not walls. Multilateralism is the right way to keep the international order stable and promote humanities development. and progress. And Ursula Vandelein, the EU is really structurally dependent on multilateralism. It is itself, you could say, a multilateral institution, plays up that I'm the European Patriot and we can stand up for ourselves. If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently too.

It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe. They converge. I mean, it's so astonishing. And speaking to the Chinese and the ones that know Europe really well, that they know there are two neuralgic issues in the relationship between Europe and China. It's cars. Car industry matters much more to Europe than it does in the US, ironically. Historically, of course, Ford isn't ever anything, but America's moved on. In Europe, the car industry really is, as the Chinese would say, a bottom line issue. Twelve million workers, core of about the whole rising populism,

the employment of the working class, and the Chinese EV invasion is killing the Germans. That's Issue number one, they need to have some politics around that. And the other one's Ukraine. And Beijing's alignment with Putin over Ukraine is the wedge, right? Without that, without Ukraine, Europe would not be at Trump's mercy. It's Putin's threat by way of Ukraine. And China's willingness to line up, both politically and de facto on the Russian supply chains, just drives the wedge in. And in Beijing, they don't really get it. If you speak to Chinese who know Europe well, they'll say, like I spent five years in Munich at the, you know, technical university. It was so eye-opening. I finally understood they feel about Russia the way we feel about Russia,

which is it's a scary neighbor to have. You need to have a policy. Do you buy the theory of Trump that you sometimes here, which is that Trump and the people around him are correct in sensing, maybe even in some ways diagnosing the end of the old era, the weakening of America, the weakening of America, the passing of the, you know, American period, even if they don't know what to do about it, that they're somehow reflective of something real, even if they are a somewhat pathological response to that thing? I mean, at that level, I think there may be more realistic

than some moments of the Biden administration, but, I mean, we have to hold up the Obama administration as the team that really, I think, got this at a much deeper level. I think of the Obama administration, and this is also true, from a European point of view. You know, if the moment where Atlantisism frayed is not, after all, with Trump,

but it freight 2003, there was huge enthusiasm for Obama in 0809 as he came in on the part of some Europe. In 03 around Iraq. And then 08.09, on the part, at least, of some Europeans, there was enthusiasm because American Europeans also like McCain, he was a regular Munich Security Conference,

he was there kind of conservative. But then the actual disillusion around the NSA, say the big struggles that were kept below the radar over the Eurozone crisis and then America's very hands-off approach to Ukraine, already, I think, should have been the wake-up call for Europe. And the Obama administration was already thumping the table and saying, you guys need to spend more on defense, especially after Ukraine.

So this week's summit is the moment for every NATO nation to step up and commit to meeting its responsibilities to our alliance. Estonia does it. Every ally must do it. So I think of this as a progression and so I'm not really going to credit Trump with the original insight that things are shifting.

If you look at Obama, he already had a very stressed view of the fundamental problems of this society and the limits it imposes on what the priorities of any sensible government should be in a much more coherent and reasonable way, focusing on things like healthcare for heaven's sake, maybe that's what we should really do.

One thing that I have come to believe is that China's been exerting a much larger pressure on American politics and American society for much longer at this point than

we give it credit for. We've conceptualized it in weird ways or just stealing, you know, it's all just low-age labor. That's clearly not been true now for some time. And so when we talk about

end of one order, when we talk about transition to another, let's start before, this Trump administration. To you, what has China's role been in not just like the world economy, but in America's changing conception of itself? Yes. One of the astonishing things you realize about the Kyoto, the famous 1997 climate treaty, which America signs but then famously never ratifies, is that the main objection in the Senate to the treaty on climate in 97 is not that it's, you know,

climate denying climate skeptics who don't believe the science. It's that Kyoto exempts China from doing anything about its emissions. And there is literally unanimity in the Senate. The Birdhagel resolution is literally unanimous that America will not sign a treaty like that. Why cause of China? And if you look at the American domestic politics, this shadow that's being cast, I think the combination of NAFTA followed by WTO, followed by Kyoto, was already really stressing out American congressional politics in the 90s.

And it hangs there such that the Bush administration, which is very, very business-oriented, really wants to keep the dynamo of Chinese growth going, you know, has to put a Hank Paulson in there as Treasury Secretary. Why? Because he's like a bona fide China hand. The guy's in China all the time all the way now still. And he's managing this strategic partnership with China. What that consists of is actually tamping down Congress, which already then wants to do protectionist strikes on China because the China threat is there. So I think you're right. To my mind, it's a generational, even like a long generational challenge for the US, which has been held at bay by elite consensus around trade and finance, and by optimistic assumptions about political convergence.

And if you view it from the other side, from the Chinese side, at least by 2003, they already have mapped all this and they are very concertedly pushing back. So what this does is to shrink our sense of the unipolar moment, I think it's much narrow than we generally think. We generally have this kind of idea. We slip over Iraq and we have kind of a unipolar moment that goes from 89 maybe to 2008 or something like that. In the Obama era, I remember a piece. I believe it's by George Packer in the then in the New Yorker. And it's about the Senate and the paralysis and sluggishness of the U.S. Senate. I remember Michael Bennett, still a senator from Colorado, saying in that piece, and I'm paraphrasing him here, but not by much, that he sits in the Senate and looks around at all that they are not doing and he thinks,

I wonder what China is doing right now. And I felt in that period and then escalating from there, a sense that our society was becoming sclerotic. And yet you could see this incredible rapidity like cities coming up in China

what felt like overnight. Now the thinking is about from a standing start, rapidly advanced manufacturing companies can change pace and change what they're doing. But a sense that China is fast and now we are slow. China makes things and now we just skim money off of the top, that China can govern, you know, even if brutally, and we just argue with each other. That fundamental insecurity corroding America's confidence in itself

has actually been around now for quite some time. Yeah, I mean, I felt it hanging over your book, if I may. Like I thought... We said it explicitly. I say it in the conclusion. Yeah, exactly. I felt it in the first. first page.

Yes. Like, I couldn't wait to get to the conclusion that you said it. Because that whole book felt like a question about what happened to the future and why is it that other people are making it. But to go back to your original point, it's very interesting. When you talk to people in Beijing, they will push back hard on this idea because they will point to two sources of really extraordinary dynamism in the US economy. One is tech and the other one is fracking.

And the other one you might add thirdly would be financial engineering. And these are all zones in which American capitalism unfolds an extraordinary dynamism and doesn't encounter much regulation or obstacle and is world-changing, or at least has pretensions to be world-changing. So that's what you'll hear in Beijing. You know, what are you talking about? We're still learning. Well, the answer you often hear about this in America. Put aside fracking for a minute, which has some distinctive qualities.

But tech and financial engineering reflects this. reality of our system now, which is that we move very freely with bits and bites and very sluggishly around atoms. Yeah. So the Dan Wang kind of thesis also about we're very good at lawyering. Because financial engineering is sophisticated lawyering with math, right? Basically, you find a legal wrinkle and then you do the math work all the other way around. You do the math and then find a legal wrinkle. And after all, then the Apple, you know, Apple designed in California made in China is emblematic of that kind of distinction. The other thing is, and this is a point that I think about a lot also as a European, is the American politics in its deep fabric is so static,

so afraid of change. So you could say traumatized by the last big, big change, which was the civil rights movement of the 60s, whereas Chinese government, though the CCP governs, it continuously reinvents what the party is and how it governs. They have this churning innovation around the cell structure that goes down right into, literally to household level now. The reason why they were able to do COVID lockdowns and the way they're able to is they've built out in private housing mistakes. Like, you know, you think of this as the heart of the Chinese bourgeoisie. Why is the CCP there? Because the CCP is the beating heart of a large part of the Chinese bourgeoisie, right?

So they've managed to continuously innovate. It isn't just a kind of fossilized brazen. static party structure. It's very dynamic. And as a European, I have to say, there's elements of the EU system, which in all of their frustratedness, are also kind of open for change, right? When they, for instance, responded to COVID with a really big green and tech stimulus, they had to invent common debt issuance to be able to do that. And broadly speaking, I think it's healthy for a polity to have to constantly rethink, whereas in the US, we did a great big stimulus, but basically it was a simple sugar high because that's the only thing you could

politic. And it's the only thing you could administratively engineer because it had to go out basically via the IRS or checks, something as simple as that. You weren't able to do the complex governance architectures that the Europeans and the Chinese produced during the COVID crisis. When this goes wrong in Europe, you get the Eurozone crisis. But in good moments, it's politically dynamic in the way that we don't see in the U.S. It's funny. I think that's in a way too harsh on the U.S. Okay, fair enough.

Two reasons. One, I think about Donald Trump who has reinvented an entire political party and is governing in a very different way. But two, during the financial crisis and after, and you've tracked a lot of this. I mean, we did some very aggressive things in terms of debt issuance and what the Fed is doing. I think there are zones of innovation and dynamism in the U.S., but like where was the unemployment insurance innovation that should have happened during the COVID crisis. We both know

they couldn't do it, so they ended up just doing checks. Whereas what America actually needs to do is to build a national unemployment insurance system worthy of the name instead of having this extraordinary hodgepodge where New York has a system, but Florida really doesn't. Like, that's unbecoming of 330 million people in an affluent society. But, you know, why would you burn the political capital to try and get that done if you're the Biden administration when you've got so many other things to do. So there's something strange about this conception of China, because it has moved very fast back and forth in the last couple of years, right? You just mentioned Biden. End of the Biden administration. After many years of China hype and China fear, there's a sense that actually

China might now be in decline. She is wielding terrible authoritarian power. You see Chinese tech CEOs and startup founders suddenly disappearing like Jack Ma, who ends up coming back, but you have parts of the upper echelons of the Communist Party being marched out of meetings. In fact, just now, the other day we saw the top general, functionally defenestrated. There is a sense that China had effective authoritarian government for quite some time, but now the thing that always happens with authoritarian government is happening. And the leadership is out of touch, and it's turning on itself. And the capacity to continue governing this very, very complicated state well and, you know, as a demographics change is going to weaken.

And I remember doing interviews with Jake Sullivan and others at the end of the Biden era. And one of their big things they would say is, look, America's never been stronger in our opponents and antagonists and competitors have never been weaker. Yeah. And all of a sudden. And literally said, don't worry about the suicidies trap because we're not declining so we won't start war with you. If you were going to overtake us and we were declining, dot, dot, dot, you might very well have reason to be concerned. But since we're not, relax, there isn't going to be a war. This is a rapid change around in the conventional wisdom on how to think about China and its governance strength.

Which is why you should never trust conventional wisdom on China in this country. But now this is a conventional wisdom. It's a bear trap. So should I not. No, it's a. Now that they're great and they know what they're doing is now the conventional wisdom. Well, I, not great morally, but capacity-wise. I think it's truly difficult for any of us.

And I absolutely include myself coming from the West to steady a, stable analytical position on China. And we are torn between a kind of fascination and indeed infatuation with it. And it is, after all, the single most dramatic, transformative, socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, bar not full stop in history. And on the other hand, a kind of, oh, but it can't possibly work, because, because, and you can make the list. And I can sit with my liberal colleagues at Columbia, and we can all make the list, right? and I think we basically need to check all our prejudices at the door. And at even deeper level, I think we need to recognize the fact that what's happening in China, one way or the other, it's the big N.

All of our history today is small N in terms of sample size by comparison with what they're doing there. This is the fundamental foundation of their belief in what they call 21st century Marxism, is that if politics is experimental and driven, and they believe by experience and success and failure, and they right now think they're succeeding, then doing that in a society of 1.4 billion, raising yourself out from the kind of poverty that they were in 50 years ago to where they are right now, is simply the experiment.

This is the actual historical test of all theories about the world. So all of our theories that we have, our middle-income trap theory, all of this, is really just the kind of minor preface, right? And where do we even get off, placing them alongside some small European country in the data set where we say, oh, well, you could end up like Italy. Famously Mao said, like, to the Italian Communist Party when they were talking about nuclear war, there's nothing in the scripture that says that Italy survives into the 21st century.

So we have to be willing to be humble, frankly, in relation to this experience and not quickly extrapolate one way or the other. Either our disappointment at ourselves and our, like, glamourisation, of what they've done or the converse, namely our scorn, our fear, our contempt even, mistrust of their politics, and turn that into a kind of social scientific necessity. It's really difficult to do. There's no safe space here. To me, it's deeply analogous to the dilemmas that many progressive faced in the 1930s, in 1940s when faced with Stalinism, which in the end ended up being utterly decisive for the history of the World War II and the aftermath, the good world that we built. We, that is the West, built, we think, good after 45, depended critically on a war

fought with huge sacrifice by both Stalin, Soviet Union, and the Chinese. You spent a fair amount of time traveling China in the past couple of years, and as I've tracked your commentary coming back from it, and people could hear it in what you just said, I feel like it has been a bit of a mind-bending experience for you. Oh, for sure, yeah. And I've heard you say things Like, you know, the whole prehistory of modern industrial organization is just prelude to what is happening there right now. So there's some way in which I'm watching you try to grapple with scale that feels very inhuman. You sometimes sound to me like somebody's just on psychedelics. Yes.

I mean, or I this summer I had this moment where I realized we're in the position of people watching the pyramids being built, not afterwards. So describe to me what, from where you were for. five years ago. The Adam 2's writing deluge and crashed and your pandemic book. What are some things you saw or some numbers that have passed through your chart book? What helps you convey the sort of portal your own thinking has gone through on China's centrality and power and what it means to absorb that into your view of the world in its order? I mean, when it comes to 08.0,000, it's just the scale of the stimulus. I mean, you were referring to the electric,

you know, the high-speed rail is built in the aftermath of 0809. That's, you know, when they look back at the stimulus, famously if you look back at the Obama stimulus, though it was large and by historical standards, highly significant, larger than the New Deal, and we think really did make a positive difference. What could you point to in America

that resulted from the Obama stimulus? You'd have to be an expert to know. In China, it's a railway system, unlike any in the world. So there's a drama and scale. I think I have this number in my book. They've built something like 23,000 miles of high-speed rail while we were failing to build the 500 miles of the California project. And when we say high-speed, we're talking 200-plus miles an hour and you can sit with a cup of coffee and it will not move. Like, it's smooth as silk.

I mean, the Europeans can do this too, but the Chinese and the Japanese, but the Chinese have acquired their technologies and done it even larger. Then there's the stimulus of the early 2010s when they built more concrete in three years. than the United States in the 20th century. And when you go there, you see it. 88, I think, maybe 89% of all homes that Chinese people today live in have been built since the early 90s. Every home, every house, every place where people live and reside, all in 30 years, essentially.

I mean, there's also the destruction that's implied by that, right? The erasing of the traditional Chinese city, the thirst and the hunger that you see in Chinese tourists when they come to Europe, to actually see something old. And then more and more for me, it's all about climate. And the just staggering speed with which China has begun to build out green energy, such that now, and this is the thing that the Biden administration, for my mind, this is the central question.

China, by the early 2020s, was in a position to roll out enough solar and increasingly also battery backup to actually get the world onto a climate stabilization track. The Chinese have created the industrial capacity to actually get a key component, not the whole thing, but a key component of climate stabilization on track for the entire planet.

And the fundamental failure of Western politics in the face of that is to say, no, thank you very much. We'd like to argue about this, that, and the other we don't really like this, too much subsidy. And we cannot right now organize the global politics necessary to fund that, to roll it out.

And you've got Brian Deeson, people like that talking about green Marshall plans and they're talking about geothermal engineering and small SMR nuclear reactors. And it's just like, no, in front of your nose, there is the capacity to do about a thousand gigawatts of new solar panels every single year.

And that's without us even helping in in a way. That's just the local Chinese effort. That's utterly transformative. That is industrial policy, not just at the level of, you know, can they do the Boswash corridor? That's literally providing what we need to, farm solar power for the entire planet.

So the analogy you're making here. You mentioned the Russians in World War II. You know, as people know, there is no winning World War II without the Soviet Union. Well, there is, but it's really ugly, and it would not have left us feeling good about ourselves, because it would involve New King a large part of Germany. So the analogy here is to climate. And if you want to, quote unquote, win the climate change fight, it would require making China central. Well, who knows?

but we're certainly not making a concerted enough effort to explore other options. And this one is literally the $100 bill on the sidewalk. And we're heavily terrifying. America doesn't import any Chinese solar panel. The Europeans, to their credit, take 90% of their solar panels from China, because where else are you going to get them from? And they are pushing. And I mean, you speak to Biden administration veterans, and the honest ones will admit that

they knew exactly what they were doing, which was retarding America's energy transition for a political reason because they didn't think there was a political bargain to be done any other way. Well, wait, wait, wait. That's not, I think, what they think they were doing. I spoke to on just the other day and that's exactly what they... But the way they describe it to me is not that they don't think there's a political bargain to be made. They actually believed, I think, going up to Joe Biden, that it would be losing a key level of geopolitical power to see this to China. That they think there was power in this. You don't buy that. I think there are two different versions, and it depends whether you're more climate,

centered person or whether you're ultimately in the Jake Sullivan camp. I totally agree with you. There is an even narrower version, which is that we actually need to compete in this technological space. I think the Jake Sullivan camp had a view that it was more important to maintain power over China than to accelerate the green transition. And they always saw the green transition. They basically got it from Azikarty, right? So the idea is you need missions around which to organize policy and motivate coalitions. And this was a great mission. Yes. It wasn't in and of its I think if you think about pedestrian people like that who have a much longer track record in the climate space, they're the people who articulate the tradeoff. But they were not the ones driving the policy.

And so this brings me to something I was asking you at the beginning, which is what do you think the Trump administration believes power to be based on? And one of the things that I think we can all agree power is based on is energy. But for the Trump administration, it is petrofuels. Yeah, hydrocarbons. hydrocarbons. And for China, which is nevertheless doing a lot of hydrocarbons, but it is in the future. I mean, you describe them as an electrostate. Like, part of the fight is going to be energy. That's true on AI, which is going to be, you know, rate limited by energy. No matter what you look at, energy is going to be key here. And one of the things that is so striking to me about Trump is that they talk a lot about energy, but they're kneecapping the energy sources of the future, even as they are trying to increase the amount of oil we have access to. China seems to be doing something else? It's fundamentally contradictory and it's not helped by this concept of energy, which is in practice we need oil for one set of issues, mainly transport and some petrochemicals. We need gas for petrochemicals, heating and power generation. And then we've got solar and coal

competing head on in the electricity generation space. And furthermore, America's in this profoundly conflicted position, which is that it's both a huge oil consumer and a huge oil producer. And so unlike the Saudis who unambiguously have an interest in high oil prices. The only thing that would dial that down is they're worried they put their consumers off. America's like betwixt and between. So you unlock Venezuela, quote, unquote, right? And who complains? It's the shale people that complain because the last thing in the world they need is more oil on the market, which would cut the price even further than it currently is at. So there's that dimension of conflict and incoherence. And then on the other side, you have the whole dilemma of AI is your big play or just tech.

is your big play in the industrial policy tech space, the single common denominator is electric power, and it's just a fantasy to think that gas, let alone nuclear, is going to fill that gap, because we can't get the turbines. The gas turbines quickly enough. So the pipeline, quite reasonably, everywhere in the world, is full of the sort of thing which the Trump administration is trying to anathematize, like solar and wind and battery backup now, which is also affordable. So it's deeply contradictory. And around the edges, you see them shifting. I mean, the time. had a rather good report on the way in which a quiet battery diplomacy has actually emerged in the Trump administration. Because if you talk to the military people, like modern army guys,

carry 20, 30 pounds worth of batteries. Like the actual effective operational range of the special forces is largely determined by when they need to recharge their battery packs. So high-tech battery technology is just crucial increasingly for every dimension of power. And you can't really sustain in an economically viable battery industry without the big source of demand which are electric vehicles. During the Biden administration, one thing you began to hear

a lot from foreign policy hands was that we should understand the world a split into an axis of democracies and an axis of authoritarian. So do you have this Russia, China, then sometimes it would be expanded to Iran, you know, sometimes beyond that, even a little bit.

Sometimes you'd hear North Korea. Syria as well. was thrown in at times. So to what degree do you think that that tells you something real about China, that it should be understood as an ideologically authoritarian project, and that's what the alliance with Putin is about? And to what degree is that a sort of self-comfiting way for, at least, American liberals,

to view the world that is not helping you understand what the incentives are back and forth? It's definitely an unhelpful way to understand the world, because essentially it defines the world's a negative term. The only thing those people have in common is they're not like us. And so then they must all be the same. And that's just the profoundly unhelpful place to start from. Is it true that Russia and China align and that they will be hard to break apart?

Absolutely. But it's really not a relationship of identity. It's a relationship more of like a common perception of problem. And I was speaking to a central committee member in Beijing and he was going on about the Putin-Puptu. she relationship. And at some point, I interrupted him and said, don't you think the fundamental thing they have in common is their understanding of 1989 and what happened there? And the conversation stopped and he just said, nodded, okay, fine, we get it. We're on the same page.

That's the common thing. Why do you describe what that thing is? So the common thing is that Putin and the Chinese regard the collapse of the Soviet Union as an absolute world historic disaster. Putin has said as much, right? It's the most greatest catastrophe that's happened in modern history. And the Chinese agree. And of course, the Chinese have a diagnosis of the degeneracy of the Soviet party that goes all the way back to Khrushchev's speech where he denounced Stalin's violence. And this for them is what they call historical nihilism, which means a rejection of your own history, even if that history is bitter and violent. The Chinese don't deny that it was, you can't just distance yourself in a moralistic way from it. And so Xi Jinping and his cadres are

fundamentally committed to this idea that there was a degeneracy inside the Soviet regime that led to that moment in 89, that somebody like Gorbachev was weak as him, so infected. by Western thinking could be in power and collapse. By contrast, of course, what happened in China is that in 1989, Deng Xiaoping and the cader around him had, in their view, guts to oust the party people that were aligned with the Cheninman Square demonstrators and do what was necessary. It was a disaster that you ended up in that point, not from the point of view of humanitarian loss of life, but because the party had to turn the guns of the PLA, which is the party's army, on the people, which you never want to have to do. But it was the right thing to do under those circumstances. And that

That common understanding of the world and its subsequent consequences unites China and Russia, because what it does is to create the unipolar moment, the increasing unhinging of American power, which runs by way of Kosovo and the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia and then to 2003 and then on from there, that in their common opposition to that world that emerges from 89, they are deeply, deeply bonded. Beyond that, it's largely pragmatic, and China has deeply ambiguous feelings about the Soviet Union. Union and Russia. The Soviet Union was, after all, highly aggressive towards China at various points. Mao was very serious in his suspicion and fear of the Soviet Union. And no one in the CCP indulges in kind of liberal nonsense about, well, Putin's the same as us, because he's also

not, does Putin have a CCP, a hundred party of a hundred million people organized in the incredibly powerful cater apparatus, where there is literally a party, you know, official in every single major organization? Of course not. They're not even close. Like, No one in the world has that. So China is unique. And they regard Russia increasingly, I think, as a useful wedge. I don't think they really, really need Russia's energy, but it certainly helps to have it there. You were mentioning earlier on, of course, China is hugely advanced in green tech, but it still is a massive, it's the largest fossil fuel consumer we've ever seen, mainly rely on its own coal, but gas and oil are helpful. And if you can get them via Russia, you get them cheap,

and you get them without Western strings. Not that they would buy from the West anyway. They go shopping in the Gulf, and they're only too happy to provide. But I think that's the level at which that alliance, you know, sits tight. They have a sufficiently capacious and coherent and independent view of modern history not to need to define themselves as like Putin, cause not like America.

So if communist authoritarian industrial juggernaut is rightly or wrongly the way America often sees China, who's taking our jobs, How now does China see America? I mean, it's a continuously evolving. So on the one hand, as I was saying earlier, they see strength, and it's very difficult to persuade them to see anything else. They believe America's, I mean, this is, I mean, I'm speaking from talking from a sample of one,

but a central committee member, so top 200 or so type person, highly placed in the party structure and think tank organization, deeply convinced that America has its finger in every pie. deeply convinced of the most conspiratorial views of the Ukraine war, like that this is America's doing ultimately, and they are orchestrating this to tie the Europeans closer to them and all this sort of thing. And on the other hand, bemused, and they literally said they had a think tank working for the state council that was trying to track Trump on a daily basis, and after a couple of months in, in term two, they gave up. And they just used these really

crude sort of psychologizing rules of thumb about what make him tick. And so far, after all, it's kind of worked well for them. Like, you'd have to say that China has come out of this, by contrast with the disciplined, I would say, highly ideological kind of position the Biden administration was rolling out on China. They're getting a level of pragmatism and deals making the, even a tariff level, right? Which is lower than India's. Like, they don't think they imagine that that's how this would play out for them. Why do you think that is?

I would not have imagined the tariff on India would be higher than the tariff on China. I mean, I think there's always been two theories of a Trump administration, and we saw them both. Again, I always go back to 2020, because that's where I think we see the seeds of this second Trump administration. And one is the boss wants to do deals, and he loves doing deals with a big guy with a nice palace. And Xi Jinping ticks the box. He's the other really big guy. So if you go do a deal with him, it's the biggest deal you can do by definition. And that's, I really think, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I think that's an absolutely fundamental motivation.

And we saw it in the phase one deal the last time around, like utterly crude, bizarre. trade economists can't even fathom it. It's like soybeans and pigs. Like it's bonkers compared to modern trade policy. And then there's another element in the Trump administration, which is more hawkish, more classically neocon. Say it's a kind of Marco Rubio group. And then I think there's a retrenchment, kind of J.D. Vance,

let's get the hell out of Dodge, sort of settle back into the Western Hemisphere. Military people I know who've been reading these documents in the US, that is, are struggling to figure this out as well. They can't quite figure out what the position on Taiwan actually is at this point. But we are not seeing the long range, highly strategic, industrial economic warfare, I called it. I still think it's essentially that the Biden administration was engaged against China. They really thought they could wonk the hell out of this and figure out which chips not to give the Chinese so that we'd ridden the AI race. They think they really believe that.

Oh, they believe that. Yeah. And a lot of people at times said that's silly because you can't, because people will innovate around whatever a blockage you put there. I think that they're... But anyway, that's a different mindset. But the Trump administration then just coming and be like, here the chips. Yeah. Was surprising to me.

And then they argue amongst themselves whether they've like, oh, done a really cunning deal and only given them the rubbish ones. Well, out loud. Yeah. It's wild to watch. You know, one of the things I began by asking you was the degree to which Davos, this year. It's not that something that happened at Davos ended the old order. It's more that it was

a moment, I think, when Trump's performance, Carney's performance, it was a moment of recognition of a thing that had happened. Do you feel that what is coming has shaped? There's another order visible, or are we just in

possibly quite dangerous in Duranium, where nothing is quite structured or stable? I think, I mean, I'm like, I'm dying on the hill that we're not even in an interregnum. Because an interregnum implies another regnum afterwards. It implies a vision of history which has this as an ellipse between two. And I don't see why we would feel that we're entitled to make that assumption.

You know, in terms of global financial hegemonst to make it more concrete, we have one example of the transition from a British-centered model to the US model. Why do we assume that we something follows? You can do these weird things where you extend this back to the Dutch and the Genoese, but I just don't buy it. Look at the curve on which we think climate politics. Does it look on that curve? Because it's one way, and it's just going to more extreme levels of disturbance. Like, if we take that vision of history seriously and link it to the fact we have one instance of a financial transition that went reasonably well, why would we think that the most obvious way of thinking what comes next is, oh, well, 20 years down the line will somehow have some kind of new order. I don't get it.

Well, I think the reason people would think it is that there is a desire among many different players simultaneously in a globalized world to have rules that they roughly understand how to play by. Lots of people have their profits bound up in that. Lots of people have their political stability bound up in that. And so you see it with Mark Carney. In a way, you see it with China, which is one of the things to be. be fairly predictable, that there is a desire for predictability. What makes Trump, and in some ways Putin, but I would say specifically Trump, quite unique as a world leader of a major power, is he has no desire for predictability. But most of the global economy, and you talk about the Chinese officials who speak Davos better than even the Davos officials now do, they have a desire, as many others do, as Mark Carney going back to his days as a central banker does, to say, well, we got to figure out

some way of making the transactions make sense. But I mean, I like the way you put it. Like, I would definitely think it's literally desiring thinking. It's literally based on the idea that there's some sort of philosophical anthropology that says people need or a sociology that says people need stability, so therefore stability will somehow emerge, right? Or there will be very powerful people motivated to make it. If that's the level at which you pitch the argument, it's hard to disagree with.

I just don't know what follows from that. what Kani himself argued back in 2019 in this very interesting Jackson whole paper, you should maybe link it in the show notes or something. It's really worth going back to is that it could be the case that a multipolar order, which isn't a single order, but is multiple different orders that are overlapping. So very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a kind of mesh, could have stability properties that, say, a bipolar order doesn't have. That's how he argues in that paper is that, you know, the interests of, of the future will be best served, not by looking for a new unipolar actor, or perpetuating

a bipolar system, but in the proliferation of networks of stability and ordering. So I, you know, when Germans ask me, these Germans are really addicted to this order thinking. There's even a school of German economics called autoliberalism. I always try and like push back on this and say, if you're looking for order, you'll never see it. But if you're looking for ordering attempts, actions, the pragmatic approach, as you say, it's all around us already all the time. So I think that kind of image of the world, I do find a world full of ordering attempts without necessarily any promise that they all add up to a coherent new mesh.

And that I actually find almost attractive because surely, I mean, we have never been in a planet like this before. We have never had 30 or 40 incredibly highly competent nation-state players. This is really novel stuff. Given your sense of awe at what China is doing industrially,

the speed with which they're moving, the creation of the electricity they're building, your view of the situation is not that we are in a mechanical transition from an American order to a Chinese order. It's that we... I think that's not just wrong and implausible. It's also dangerous,

because it immediately sets the American alarm bells off, right? If we speak in those terms, that's what motivates all of the ultra-hawkish position. And if, you know, if that is the option, then this sort of spheres of influence kind of model that maybe some people in the Trump administration approve of, maybe a third or fourth best alternative to the sixth or seventh worst kind of option, which will be flat-out confrontation over this question. No, I don't see that. Pervasive influence, sure.

Individual network efforts, absolutely. the Chinese have got these extraordinary visions of ultra long distance, electricity transmission, wiring up asian in a single electricity system. But it doesn't add up to global hegemony to my mind. Apart from anything else, simply, I mean, I'm in the business of learning Chinese and that it is not an obvious lingua franca. It's not liking this. I mean, American hegemony is, in the mid-20th century,

is extraordinarily unique and even more the unipolar moment. extraordinary unique formations in historical terms. I don't see any reason to derive from that some sort of historical model of where we go next. Then I was our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So my first is a Chinese classic, not an ancient classic, but a modern classic,

arguably the first modern Chinese novella Lusians, Diary of a Madman, which is the most extraordinary kind of first-person account of the delirium of a person waking up into a world where they begin to convince themselves that it is a world of cannibalism. And it's a complex metaphor about Chinese society in the early 20th century. They're very short, but utterly brilliant and psychologically compelling.

So my second suggestion is Jonathan Chatwin's book, The Southern Tour, which is an extraordinary account of Deng Xiaoping's tour of southern China in 1992, the moment when after the repression of Geniman Square in 89, he revives the reform and opening up project. So this legendary moment in the economic reform process that has made modern China. And the third suggestion is poetry. I love poetry.

I struggle to find time to read novels from start to finish, and I like the compressed power and energy of poetry. And this is by a friend of Berlin friend Ryan Ruby. It's called Context Collapse. And it is literally a poem containing a history of poetry. So it is an extraordinary long-form poem in which he in a, I was asking about it over drinks over the night, why did he do it?

It's this delirious effort to write in poetry, a history of the form and the collapse of its context in modern culture. It's truly a tour of the force. Adam Tooze, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. This episode of Isfranches produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb, with additional mixing by Amman Zahota.

Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristen Lynn, Emmett Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amman Zahota and Pat McCusker. Audience Strategy by Christina Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times-pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.