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Podcast

How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

The Ezra Klein Show

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  • Davos As A Global Reality Check
    • Davos exposed how the Trump administration’s global performance shattered assumptions of U.S. steadiness.
    • Adam Tooze says the administration’s uninhibited lashing out left many foreign observers dismayed and shocked. Transcript: Ezra Klein Adam Tooze, welcome back to the show. Pleasure to be here. So watching Davos last week felt to me 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? Adam Tooze 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 face time 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 have 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, like, 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. (Time 0:03:49)
  • Rupture Not Transition
    • Mark Carney argued we face a rupture, not a gradual transition, in global order.
    • Tooze says the rupture strips away the old culture of international restraint and hypocrisy. Transcript: Ezra Klein 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? Adam Tooze 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 symmetry 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 prefaced 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 of, you know, division of the world into spheres of power, New Monroe Do but actually something more to do with, if you like, the culture of international community, of international society. And that’s amongst, you know, the violence of the use of force, the use of threats, the bullying, the Thucydides, you know, the powerful do as they will, and the weak must just simply Accept the circumstances. (Time 0:07:22)
  • Biden’s Limited Restoration
    • Tooze argues the Biden era tried to restore a rules-based Atlantic order but overpromised.
    • He says the administration couldn’t deliver domestic bargains and strained allies with economic nationalism. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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 Lendley 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 the Jake Sullivan’s basically and the Blinkens 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 Clinton, 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. (Time 0:10:55)
  • Power As Big Artifacts And Money
    • Trump-era thinking measures power by visible industrial artifacts and money flows.
    • Tooze says their approach uses blunt tools like tariffs rather than targeted industrial strategy. Transcript: Ezra Klein 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. Adam Tooze Like, there are bits of the Trump team, if you look at the national security strategy, their defense strategy documents. You 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 figures 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. You say, wow, what a force. 100 times, Egypt 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. They 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 bring back semiconductor factories. I mean, there were things that were happening. You mean the Biden people? (Time 0:15:50)
  • China’s Polished Davos Performance
    • At Davos, China’s vice premier delivered polished Davos-style multilateral rhetoric.
    • Tooze notes China still presents retro technocratic industrial-policy language in that forum. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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 Davos that they have in Dalian and Qianjin. And I always like, I sit and watch people like Tony Blair, of course, he’s always, 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 power 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. Like, to anyone in the room, if you thought I was just using a purchase, you know, regular currencies, you’d think I was mad. Like, that is the contrast. Like, it is so… (Time 0:19:13)
  • China’s Long Shadow On U.S. Politics
    • China’s rise cast a long shadow over U.S. domestic politics well before Trump.
    • Tooze traces U.S. Senate resistance to Kyoto and trade shifts back to fears about China. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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 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, 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 orientated, 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. (Time 0:25:34)
  • Scale Shows In Built Infrastructure
    • Tooze emphasizes China’s sheer scale and rapid infrastructure creation compared with the U.S.
    • He highlights high-speed rail and mass housing as visible outcomes of Chinese stimulus. Transcript: Adam Tooze I mean, when it comes to 08,09, 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 08-09. 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, right? So there’s a drama and scale. I think I have this number in my book. Ezra Klein 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. Adam Tooze 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, 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. (Time 0:39:26)
  • China’s Green Industrial Advantage
    • China built industrial capacity that could materially accelerate global climate stabilization.
    • Tooze says Western politics failed to coordinate to leverage that capacity sufficiently. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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 Deese and 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 any 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 (Time 0:41:18)
  • Beyond A Simple Axis Framing
    • Framing the world as democracies versus authoritarians is unhelpful and reductive.
    • Tooze says China-Russia alignment is pragmatic and rooted in shared views of 1989, not ideological identity. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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. 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-Xi 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 don’t 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, 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. And 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 As 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 caterer around him had the, in their view, 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 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 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 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 party of 100 million people organized in the incredibly powerful KEDA apparatus, where there is literally a party you know, official in every single major organization? Of course not. They’re not even close. (Time 0:49:32)
  • Expect Overlapping Ordering Attempts
    • Don’t assume a neat successor order will appear after current ruptures.
    • Tooze advises expecting many overlapping ordering attempts rather than a single coherent new order. Transcript: Adam Tooze 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 hegemons, 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 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? Ezra Klein 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 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 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. Adam Tooze But I mean, I like the way you put it. Like, I would definitely think it’s, 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 sociology that says people need stability. So therefore, stability will somehow emerge, right? Or there’ll 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 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. 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 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, Germans are really addicted to this order thinking. There’s even a school of German economics called order liberalism. 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. (Time 0:57:27)