Adam Tooze

John, the last serious effort to buy Greenland was made in the 1940s by the people who made that global order.

So the glitch in this is that like at the moment they were creating that order, they had their eye on Greenland because it is a – and in World War II, it had proved important real estate.

And its position within Denmark and the Danish sovereignty is really ambiguous.

It's the product of settler colonialism, right?

So this is not some – But we all are.

Well, many of us, some more than others, right?

But we have to be realistic about the logic of that earlier epoch of power that is celebrated now in retrospect.

And then Exxon shows up and says, we can't invest there.

I think Japan is crucial in this story.

And this is exactly, I mean, if we think of him biographically, that's the key moment.

And that is not a moment which has, you know, say China's globalization or Mexico NAFTA, you'd say American capital benefited on a really gigantic scale from that.

Japan is a more clear-cut case of a national industrial country that really did assert itself.

Now overall, it's probably welfare enhancing because the stuff they made was high quality and cheap.

Wall Street in the end does begin to make footholds in Tokyo.

But I think that experience of the 70s and 80s is really...

is very formative and I think it just sort of reverbs around and he slots new countries into that space one after the other.

And that talk at the time was very commonplace, right?

That zero sum vision.

And there's an element, you know, the Germans and the Japanese did pursue within the fixed change rate system of Bretton Woods.

strategies, which meant their currencies were undervalued.