This is an edited transcript of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts.
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 and 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, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” You then turn on the TV, and you watch agents of the American government killing protesters on the streets of Minneapolis.
I cannot think of a week when it has felt clearer that not just the old order is dying but that the old order is dead. I cannot think of a week when 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 and what we have done to rupture this order. For this episode, I wanted to turn to the forward-looking question: What, if anything, is struggling to be born here?
Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University. He is a thinker about and chronicler of crisis. The Guardian recently called him the “crisis whisperer.” He has written a number of books about moments when systems fall apart and new orders emerge. Among them is “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” He’s got an excellent Substack, Chartbook, and he had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, even moderating this very controversial panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary.
But Tooze has also been on a personal quest 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 the reality of our country and also the minds of policymakers and leaders.
So I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at Davos and how he’s making sense of this moment.
Ezra Klein: Adam Tooze, welcome back to the show.
Adam Tooze: Pleasure to be here.
Watching Davos last week felt 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. Most people in the world see American politics only through television clips. Even foreign businesspeople, for instance, don’t get a lot of face time with senior American politicians.
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 for everyone involved. It was truly shocking.
As a historian, I have a thesis that this was the first real showcase of the Trump administration on the global stage really doing its thing uninhibitedly, like, lashing out.
It was truly sobering. 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 lounge in the conference center, and we all just solemnly sat and watched this crazy speech.
Archival clip of President Trump: 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 [laughter] 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 politicians stacked up and you can literally do a beauty contest of who can give a speech. Everyone all day had been rating Ursula von der Leyen versus Macron versus the Chinese vice premier versus Carney, and then this just — by the standards of Trump’s speeches, I think it was pretty routine, maybe you are more of an aficionado than I am. The thematics seemed weird. He was very uncomfortable with the script he started delivering. He seemed almost as though he was going to fall asleep —
Archival clip of Trump: Venezuela’s been an amazing place for so many years.
Then he kind of got going, did some ranting and came back —
Archival clip of Trump: After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that?
But the whole thing was just — 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 — which, of course, Norway’s prime minister does not manage.
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.
Even on its own terms, it’s crazy.
This, to me, is why what I saw happening there seemed very substantive. Davos was happening in the context of the Trump administration threatening possible military action, definitely tariffs over Greenland.
To me, it was in part Mark Carney’s speech, where another world leader stood up and rather than try to placate President Trump, rather than try 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.
Yeah.
Archival clip of Mark Carney: Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
What was Carney 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. That’s interesting because it makes sense of the “transition” phrase.
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 central bank thing — and what was really interesting was he was describing a transition that the world is becoming increasingly multipolar, we need to move away from dollar centricity, there’s a fundamental asymmetry in the world, which is the financial system is dollar-centric and the actual real economy isn’t. 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 prefaced there. 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 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.
It doesn’t so much consist simply of America repositioning itself geopolitically and maybe retreating in various ways from various positions, accepting the division of the world into spheres of power and the Monroe Doctrine. But actually, it has something more to do with the culture of the international community, of international society. And that’s among the violence, the use of force, the use of threats, the bullying, the Thucydides — 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 called it culture. It struck me that what was being described was almost characterological. It was people in a family, people in an organization, in a company saying, “Dad or the boss or whoever isn’t just getting angry sometimes.”
No, there’s something going on here.
“They’ve become dangerous, and we have to prepare to be endangered.”
They’re like, now, other bad guys. 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 hegemons and great powers — and this is crucial, right? Because to go back to the old order — after all, there was the Biden interlude. There were four years of the return of a supercharged retro-Atlanticism.
And what Carney is saying is, “Oh, God, no, that isn’t our world at all.” 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 do you now regard what the Biden administration meant in the sweep of the history of this era?
I think there were two wings. I’m sure you have a more detailed analysis of this than me, but there was the old, boomer Atlanticism of the president, of Nancy Pelosi, whose dad did Lend-Lease in 1941. It’s crazy. That was that generation.
And then there were the people whose world was turned in 2016 by Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump — the Jake Sullivans, basically, and the Blinkens. They converged on what I think many of them thought of as a 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 Clinton. This isn’t the ’90s. But something like that. 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 I.R.A., the big climate bill, done was by various types of economic nationalism, which offended their allies.
So even they were straining to get this done. But critically, the Europeans and, notably, the Canadians loved 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 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, they have a Manifest Destiny. They were exceptionalist in their own way. They believe America’s special in its capacity to do that. 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 sauce of American liberalism and 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 power is?
It’s much more modest, at some level. They don’t believe in Manifest Destiny at a global level. They may have some vision of American greatness and certainly a blunt patriotism.
But I did chat with Ivan Krastev, 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 rather put off by the reality of the actually existing America of the present.
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. Really, it’s a bit of an embarrassment.
To get to a more serious kind of vein, I think they think of America as embattled. They also have this extraordinary narrative of the United States as the loser in globalization.
You can break that down — Sullivan will tell a story about the American working class as having been victimized. The Trump people will talk, but it’s not very plausible because that’s not who he in any reasonable sense represents.
I had the dubious pleasure of chairing a panel with the C.E.O. of Bank of America and C.E.O. of E.Y. and Rachel Reeves of the British government and Howard Lutnick, the U.S. 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 the Bank of America, the C.E.O. of Bank of America: Can you really agree with the commerce secretary’s characterizations of globalization having been bad for America?
The obvious answer is: Who are you kidding?
They genuinely seem to believe that 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 — in some general sense, the vital bodily juices of America were sapped by entering into an openness to the world that extends from trade to globalized universities to large-scale migration.
All of those things were a threat to the containment of American power and American wealth.
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 were bits of the Trump team — if you look at the National Security Strategy, their defense strategy documents, there you get a relatively conventional foreign policy, defense policy establishment read, right? They do the obvious things. They count up military capacities, they look at overextended lines, they look at supply chains, all this stuff.
If you’re trying to characterize the position of the leading figures in the Trump administration, it’s much less obvious, I think. What was really extraordinary about the speech was — among many passages — that one where Trump starts going off about the big battleships:
Archival clip of Trump: 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. You say, “Wow, what a force” — 100 times, each ship 100 times more powerful than the big battleships of the past.
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.
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 did bring back semiconductor factories. There were things that were happening.
You mean the Biden people?
The Biden people, yes.
Yes, and Trump will say the same thing. One of the things they measure American power by is — and Lutnick was full of this as he bounced into the green room, “Trillion and a half,” he started saying — twisting the world’s arm to invest on a really large scale in the United States.
That’s a measure of power. Will people put money into the U.S.? Because they understand globalization as having drained money out, so they want to bring money back.
But could you say that these are people who are really articulating the A.I. strategy documents that the Biden administration was organizing itself around? They’re obviously not. No, they’re not in that game at all.
And furthermore, they’re pursuing strategies that seem to be dictated more by Nvidia’s corporate interest to just sell chips to everyone in the name of A.I. sovereignty than the careful effort by the Biden team to actually map out which chips should go where and who should have them and this incredibly arcane, in the end, effort to penetrate the supply chains of the modern economy and target the really careful bits.
This is the weaponization of interdependence. That’s a very long way removed from how the Trump people are thinking about it, who are just using tariffs like these big, blunt instruments.
America was at Davos. Our message there was: We own this. Do what we say.
The Chinese were at Davos, too.
In a very different configuration, yeah.
Tell me a bit about what their message seemed to be and what their configuration was.
The vice premier spoke. What was astonishing about it, if anyone still speaks pure Davos, it’s the Chinese.
Archival clip of He Lifeng: 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 Davos, which alternates between Dalian and Tianjin.
I always sit and watch people like Tony Blair. These fossils of the 1990s show up, and it’s as though you’re in this retro time warp where we’re talking intelligent industrial policy, joined-up government. All of those buzzwords of the ’90s just circulate in Chinese technocratic discourse.
I’ve watched a Chinese vice premier, no less, pause to explain that the units in which he’s giving a G.D.P. number are purchasing-power-parity-adjusted dollars of 2015. You have to understand this number I’ve just given you. The unit it’s 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 regular currencies, you’d think I was mad. That is the contrast.
Watching Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, followed by a Chinese vice premier was a study in contrast.
The Chinese play down their wolf warrior position to do the lovely multilateralist thing at Davos.
Archival clip of He: 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 humanity’s development and progress.
And Ursula von der Leyen — the E.U. is really structurally dependent on multilateralism, you could say it is itself a multilateral institution — plays up the “I’m the European patriot, and we can stand up for ourselves.”
Archival clip of Ursula von der Leyen: 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. It’s so astonishing.
The Chinese and the ones that know Europe really well — they know there are two neuralgic issues in the relationship between Europe and China.
It’s cars. The car industry matters much more to Europe than it does in the U.S., ironically. Historically, of course, Fordism and everything, but America’s moved on. In Europe the car industry really is, as the Chinese would say, a bottom-line issue — 12 million workers, rising populism, the employment of the working class, and the Chinese E.V. invasion is killing the Germans.
That’s issue No. 1. They need to have some politics around that.
The other one is Ukraine. Beijing’s alignment with Putin over Ukraine is the wedge. 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 that just drives the wedge in.
In Beijing, they don’t really get it. If you speak to Chinese who know Europe well, they will come up to you and say, “I spent five years in Munich at the technical university. It was so eye-opening.” I finally understood that they feel about Russia the way we feel about Russia, which is that it’s a scary neighbor to have. You need to have a policy.
Do you buy the theory of Trump that you sometimes hear, which is that Trump and the people around him are correct in sensing, maybe even diagnosing the end of the old era, the weakening of America, the passing of the 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?
At that level, I think they may be more realistic than some moments of the Biden administration. But 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 — as the moment when Atlanticism frayed. It’s not, after all, with Trump. It frayed in 2003. There was huge enthusiasm for Obama in ’08, ’09 as he came in —
In ’03 around Iraq.
Iraq. And then ’08, ’09 on the part, at least, of some Europeans, there was enthusiasm. Europeans also liked McCain. He was a regular at the Munich Security Conference. He was their kind of conservative. But then the actual disillusionment was around the N.S.A., 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.
The Obama administration was already thumping the table and saying, “You guys need to spend more on defense” — especially after Ukraine.
Archival clip of Barack Obama: 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.
I think of this as a progression, and I’m not 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 health care, for heaven’s sake. Maybe that’s what we should really do.
One thing 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.
Yes.
We’ve conceptualized it in weird ways, like: It’s all just low-wage labor.
That’s clearly not been true now for some time. When we talk about the 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 — not just in the world economy but also in America’s changing conception of itself?
One of the astonishing things you realize about the 1997 Kyoto climate treaty — which America signs but then famously never ratifies — is that the main objection in the Senate to the treaty is not climate-denying skeptics who don’t believe the science; it’s that Kyoto exempts China from doing anything about its emissions.
There is unanimity in the Senate. The Byrd-Hagel resolution is literally unanimous that America will not sign a treaty like that. Why? Because of China.
And if you look at the American domestic politics, this shadow that’s being cast — the combination of NAFTA, followed by W.T.O., followed by Kyoto — was already really stressing out American congressional politics in the ’90s.
It hangs there such that the George W. Bush administration, which is very, very business-oriented, really wants to keep the dynamo of Chinese growth going. He has to put Henry Paulson in there as Treasury secretary because he’s a bona fide China hand. The guy’s in China all the time, all the way until now.
He’s managing this strategic partnership with China that consists of actually tamping down Congress, which already then wants to do protectionist strikes on China because the China threat is there.
I think you’re right. To my mind, it’s a generational, even a long generational challenge for the U.S., which has been held at bay by elite consensus around trade and finance and by optimistic assumptions about political convergence.
If you view it from the other side, from the Chinese side, at least by 2003, they have already mapped all this, and they are very concertedly pushing back. So this shrinks our sense of the unipolar moment right down.
I think it’s much narrower than we generally think. We generally have this idea — we slip over Iraq, and we have a unipolar moment that goes from ’89 maybe to 2008 or something like that.
In the Obama era I remember a piece by George Packer in The New Yorker, and it’s about the Senate and the paralysis and sluggishness of the U.S. Senate.
I remember Michael Bennet, 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’re not doing and he thinks: I wonder what China’s doing right now.
I felt in that period and then escalating from there a sense that our society was becoming sclerotic. 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, how 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, that China makes things and now we just skim money off the top, that China can govern, 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 felt it hanging over your book, if I may.
We said it explicitly. I say it in the conclusion.
Yeah, exactly. I felt it in the first page. I couldn’t wait to get to the conclusion where 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 that when you talk to people in Beijing, they will push back hard on this idea. They will point to two sources of really extraordinary dynamism in the U.S. economy. One is tech, and the other one is fracking. And the other one you might add, third, would be financial engineering.
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.
That’s what you’ll hear in Beijing: What are you talking about? We are still learning.
Well, the answer you often hear about this in America — putting aside fracking for a minute, which has some distinctive qualities — but tech and financial engineering reflect this reality of our system now, which is that we move very freely with bits and bytes and very sluggishly around atoms.
Yeah, the Dan Wang thesis that we are very good at lawyering. Financial engineering is sophisticated lawyering with math. Basically, you find a legal wrinkle, and then you do the math work or the other way around: You do the math and then find a legal wrinkle.
And after all, Apple — designed in California and 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 that American politics in its deep fabric is so static, so afraid of change — you could say traumatized by the last big, big change, which was the civil rights movement of the ’60s.
Whereas Chinese government — though the C.C.P. 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 household level.
The reason they were able to do Covid lockdowns and the way they’re able to is they’ve built out in private housing estates — you think of this as the heart of the Chinese bourgeoisie. Why is the C.C.P. there? Because the C.C.P. is the beating heart of a large part of the Chinese bourgeoisie.
They’ve managed to continuously innovate. It isn’t just a fossilized Brezhnev-ied static party structure. It’s very dynamic.
As a European, I have to say, elements of the E.U. system — in all of their frustratedness — are also kind of open for change. 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.
Broadly speaking, I think it’s healthy for a polity to have to constantly rethink. In the U.S. 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 via the I.R.S. 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 a 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.
OK, fair enough.
Two reasons. One, I think about Trump, who has reinvented an entire political party and is governing in a very different way. Two, during the financial crisis and after — and you’ve tracked a lot of this — 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. 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.
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 — that’s unbecoming of 330 million people in an affluent society.
But you know, why would you burn the political capital to try to get that done, if you are the Biden administration, when you’ve got so many other things to do?
There’s something strange about this conception of China because it has moved very fast back and forth in the last couple of years.
You just mentioned Biden. At the end of the Biden administration, after many years of China hype and China fear, there was a sense that actually China might now be in decline.
It is wielding terrible authoritarian power. You see Chinese tech C.E.O.s and start-up 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 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: The leadership is out of touch, and it’s turning on itself, and the capacity to continue governing this very, very complicated state well, as demographics change, is going to weaken.
I remember doing interviews with Jake Sullivan and others at the end of the Biden era, and one of the big things they would say is: Look, America’s never been stronger, and our opponents and antagonists and competitors have never been weaker.
Janet Yellen said: Don’t worry about the Thucydides chat, because we are not declining, so we won’t start a war with you. If you were going to overtake us and we were declining, 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 in the conventional wisdom on how to think about China and its governance.
Which is why you should never trust conventional wisdom on China in this country.
But now this is conventional wisdom. Should I not?
No. It’s a bear trap.
Now “They’re great, and they know what they’re doing” is the conventional wisdom — not great morally but capacitywise.
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.
We are torn between a fascination and, indeed, infatuation with it. It is, after all, the single most dramatic socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, bar none, full stop.
On the other hand, a kind of “Oh, but it can’t possibly work, because, because, because.” I can sit with my liberal colleagues at Columbia, and we can all make the list, right? I think we basically need to check all our prejudices at the door, and on an even deeper level, we need to recognize the fact that what’s happening in China, one way or the other, is 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: If politics is experimental and driven, 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. All of our theories that we have, our middle-income trap theory — all of this is really just the minor preface, 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 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.
I think 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 disappointments of ourselves and our glamorization of what they’ve done or the converse: They’ve made our scorn our fear, our contempt, even mistrust of their politics and turned that into a 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 progressives faced in the 1930s and 1940s when faced with Stalinism — which, in the end, ended up being utterly decisive for the history of World War II and the aftermath.
The good world that we built — that is, the West built and we think good — after ’45 depended critically on a war fought with huge sacrifice by both Stalin’s Soviet Union and the Chinese.
You spent a fair amount of time traveling China in the past couple of years. 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.
I’ve heard you say things like, “The whole prehistory of modern industrial organization is just prelude to what is happening there right now.”
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 who’s just done psychedelics. [Laughs.]
Yes. This summer I had this moment when I realized we’re in the position of people watching the pyramids being built, not afterward.
Describe to me, from where you were four or five years ago, the Adam Tooze writing “The Deluge” and “Crashed” and your pandemic book. What are some things you saw or some numbers that have passed through your Chartbook? What helps you convey the portal your 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?
When it comes to ’08, ’09, it’s just the scale of the stimulus. The high-speed rail is built in the aftermath of ’08, ’09. 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 it 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 other 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.
Yes, 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. It’s smooth as silk.
Many Europeans can do this, too, 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. When you go there, you see it: the fact that 88 percent, I think, maybe 89 percent of all homes that Chinese people live in today 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 — 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.
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 for the Biden administration was 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.
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. We cannot right now organize the global politics necessary to fund that, to roll it out.
You’ve got Brian Deese and people like that talking about green Marshall Plans, and they’re talking about geothermal engineering and small modular 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 any way. That’s just the local Chinese effort. That’s utterly transformative. That is industrial policy not just at the level of “Can they do the BosWash corridor?” That’s literally providing what we need to farm solar power for the entire planet.
In the analogy you’re making here, you mentioned the Russians in World War II. 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 nuking a large part of Germany.
Here the analogy is to climate, and if you want to 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.
Well, and we’re heavily tariffing.
America doesn’t import any Chinese solar panels. The Europeans, to their credit, take 90 percent of their solar panels from China, because where else are you going to get them from? They are pushing.
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. That’s not what, I think, they think they were doing.
Well, I spoke to one just the other day, and that’s exactly what they said.
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 cede this to China. They think there was power in this. You don’t buy that?
I think there are two different versions, and it depends whether you are a more climate-centered person or whether you’re ultimately in the Jake Sullivan camp. I totally agree with you. There is the even narrower version, which is that we actually need to compete in this technological space.
Yes. 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 Mazzucato. 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 itself. I think if you think about Podesta and people like that, who have a much longer track record in the climate space, they’re the people who articulate the trade-offs.
Yes, but they were not the ones driving the policy.
They were not calling the shots, no.
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 power is based on is energy.
But for the Trump administration, it is petro-fuels.
Yeah. Hydrocarbons.
Hydrocarbons. And for China, which is nevertheless doing a lot of hydrocarbons, but in the future, you describe them as an electro-state. Part of the fight is going to be energy. That’s true on A.I., which is going to be rate-limited by energy.
No matter what you look at, energy’s 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’re 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 that 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.
Furthermore, America’s in this profoundly conflicted position, which is that it’s both a huge oil consumer and a huge oil producer.
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’ll put their consumers off.
America’s betwixt and between. You unlock Venezuela, 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 A.I. as 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 gas turbines quickly enough.
The pipeline, quite reasonably, everywhere around the world, is full of the sort of thing that the Trump administration is trying to anathematize, like solar and wind and battery backup, which is also affordable. It’s deeply contradictory, and around the edges, you see them shifting.
The Times had a rather good report on the way in which a quiet battery diplomacy has actually emerged in the Trump administration. If you talk to the military people, modern Army guys carry 20, 30 pounds’ worth of batteries. The actual effective operational range of the special forces is largely determined by when they need to recharge their battery packs.
High-tech battery technology is just crucial, increasingly, for every dimension of power. You can’t really sustain 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 as split into an axis of democracies and an axis of authoritarians. You have Russia, China, then sometimes it would be expanded to Iran. Sometimes, beyond that, even a little bit, you’d hear North Korea.
Syria as well was thrown in at times.
To what degree do you think 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 self-comforting way for 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 in negative terms. The only thing those people have in common is they’re not like us. So then they must all be the same, and that’s just a 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 a common perception of problem.
I was speaking to a Central Committee member in Beijing, and he was going on about the Putin-Xi relationship. 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?”
The conversation stopped, and he just nodded. OK, fine. We get it. We’re on the same page. That’s the common thing.
How do you describe what that thing is?
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. It’s the greatest catastrophe that’s happened in modern history. 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.
This is what they call historical nihilism, which means a rejection of your own history. Even if that history is bitter and violent — and the Chinese don’t deny that it was — you can’t just distance yourself in a moralistic way from it.
Xi Jinping and his cadre 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, as weak as him, so infected by Western thinking, could be in power and collapse.
By contrast, what happened in China is that in 1989, Deng Xiaoping and the cadre around him had, in their view, the guts to oust the party people that were aligned with the Tiananmen Square demonstrators and do what was necessary.
It was a disaster that you ended up at that point — not from the point of view of humanitarian loss of life but because the party had to turn the guns of the P.L.A., 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.
That common understanding of the world and its consequences unites China and Russia. It creates the unipolar moment, the increasing unhinging of American power, which runs by way of Kosovo and the bombing of the Chinese Embassy and Serbia and then to 2003 and then on from there.
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 and Russia. The Soviet Union was, after all, highly aggressive toward China at various points. Mao was very serious in his suspicion and fear of the Soviet Union.
And no one in the C.C.P. indulges in liberal nonsense about “Well, Putin’s the same as us because he’s also not liberal.” Does Putin have a party of 100 million people organized in an incredibly powerful cadre apparatus where there is literally a party official in every single major organization?
Of course not. They’re not even close. No one else in the world has that. China is unique.
They regard Russia, increasingly, 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 the largest fossil fuel consumer we’ve ever seen.
They’re mainly reliant on their 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’d go shopping in the gulf, and they’re only too happy to provide.
But I think that’s the level at which that alliance sits tight, and they have a sufficiently capacious and coherent and independent view of modern history not to need to define themselves as “like Putin because not like America.”
If Communist, authoritarian, industrial juggernaut is — rightly or wrongly — the way America often sees China. It’s taken our jobs. How now does China see America?
It’s continuously evolving. On the one hand, as I was saying earlier, they see strength, and it’s very difficult to persuade them to see anything else.
I’m speaking from talking to a sample of one — but a Central Committee member, a top-200-or-so-type person, highly placed in the party structure and think tank organization — but they are deeply convinced that America has its finger in every pie. Deeply convinced of the most conspiratorial views of the Ukraine war, that this is America’s doing ultimately and they’re orchestrating this to tie the Europeans closer to them and all this sort of thing.
On the other hand, bemused. 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 Term 2, they gave up.
They just used these really crude, psychologizing rules of thumb about what makes him tick. So far, it’s kind of worked well for them. You’d have to say that China has come out of this — by contrast with the disciplined, highly ideological position that the Biden administration was rolling out on China — they’re getting a level of pragmatism and deal making, even the tariff level, which is lower than India’s. I don’t think they imagined 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.
There’s always been two theories of a Trump administration, and we saw them both. I always go back to 2020 because that’s where we see the seeds of this second Trump administration.
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. If you go do a deal with him, it’s the biggest deal you can do, by definition.
It sounds ridiculous, but I think that’s an absolutely fundamental motivation, and we saw it in the Phase 1 deal the last time round — just utterly crude, bizarre. Trade economists can’t even fathom it. It’s like soybeans and pigs. 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, kind of Marco Rubio’s group. Then I think there’s a retrenchment, like, with JD Vance: Let’s get the hell out of Dodge, settle back into the Western Hemisphere.
Military people I know who’ve been reading these documents in the U.S. 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, and 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 win the A.I. race. I think they really believed that.
Oh, they believed that.
Lots of people, at times, said, “That’s silly,” because people will innovate around whatever blockage you put there.
I think you need a lot of things. But the Trump administration then just coming in and being like, “Here are the chips,” was surprising to me.
Have some crap chips, and then they argue among themselves about whether they’ve done a really cunning deal and only given them the rubbish ones — out loud.
Yeah. It’s wild to watch.
One of the things I began by asking you was the degree to which Davos this year — it’s not that something had happened at Davos that ended the old order. It’s more that it was a moment, I think, with Trump’s performance, Carney’s performance, of recognition of a thing that had happened.
Do you feel that what is coming has shape? Is there another order visible, or are we just in a possibly quite dangerous interregnum, when nothing is quite structured or stable?
I’m dying on the hill that we’re not even in an interregnum because an interregnum implies another regnum afterward. It implies a vision of history that has this as an ellipse between two. I don’t see why we would feel that we are entitled to make that assumption.
In terms of global financial hegemons, to make it more concrete, we have one example, of the transition from a British-centered model to the U.S. model.
Why do we assume that 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 of climate politics, because it’s one way, and it’s just going to more extreme levels of disturbance.
If we take that vision of history seriously and link it to the fact that 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, we’ll 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.
You see it with Mark Carney. In a way, you see it with China, which has wanted things to 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 that 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 have to figure out some way of making the transactions make sense.
I like the way you put it. It’s literally desiring thinking. It’s based on the idea that there’s some sort of philosophical anthropology or sociology that says people need stability, so therefore stability will somehow emerge.
Or there’ll be very powerful people motivated to make it. If that’s the level at which you pitched the argument, it’s hard to disagree with. I just don’t know what follows from that.
What Carney himself argued, back in 2019 in this very interesting Jackson Hole 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, very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a mesh — could have stability properties that a bipolar order doesn’t have.
He argues in that paper that the interests 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.
When Germans ask me — Germans are really addicted to this order thinking, there’s even a school of German economics called ordoliberalism — I always try to 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, it’s all around us already, all the time.
I do find a world full of ordering attempts without necessarily any promise that they all add up to a coherent new mesh. That I actually find almost attractive. Surely, 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 electro-state 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.
I think that’s not just wrong and implausible; it’s also dangerous because it immediately sets the American alarm bells off. If we speak in those terms, that’s what motivates all of the ultrahawkish positions. If that is the option, then the spheres-of-influence model that maybe some people in the Trump administration approve of may be a third- or fourth-best alternative to the sixth- or seventh-worst 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 ASEAN in a single electricity system.
But it doesn’t add up to global hegemony, to my mind. Apart from anything else — I’m in the business of learning Chinese, and it is not an obvious lingua franca. It’s not like English.
I mean, American hegemony in the mid-20th century is extraordinarily unique and, even more, the unipolar moment — those are 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.
Always our final question: What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?
My first is a Chinese classic, not an ancient classic but a modern classic. Arguably the first, maybe the first modern Chinese short story, Lu Xun’s “Diary of a Madman.” It’s the most extraordinary 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.
It’s a complex metaphor about Chinese society in the early 20th century. It’s very short but utterly brilliant and psychologically compelling.
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.
After the repression of Tiananmen Square in ’89, he revives the reform and opening-up project, 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. I like the compressed power and energy of poetry. This is by a friend, a 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.
I was asking about it over drinks the other 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 de force.
Adam Tooze, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
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. Transcript editing by Sarah Murphy and Jose Fidelino.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze appeared first on New York Times.
