Adam Tooze

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 described them as an electrostate.

Part of the fight is going to be energy.

That's true on AI, which is going to be 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.

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.

So you have this Russia, China, then sometimes it would be expanded to Iran, 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-comforting way for at least American liberals to view the world that is not helping you understand what the incentives are back and forth?

Why don't you describe what that thing is?

So if...