Adam Tooze

een hardnekkige oorlog te zijn. En historicus Adam Tooze zei daar in november het volgende over... in een podcast van Foreign Policy.

A lot of people have a strongly vested interest in diagnosing the fragility of the Russian economy. They have been proven wrong several times already. And so I think the most reasonable estimation is to say that yes, there was very likely to be some slowdown in the Russian economy. I wouldn't be counting on any kind of collapse. I wouldn't be counting on any kind of crisis.

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 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 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 Tooze is a historian at Columbia 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 the 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 row seat to the chaos at Davos last week, even moderating this panel with, among others, Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary.