How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze
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What major shifts in global power dynamics are discussed?
My name is Thomas Gibesneff. I'm a journalist at the New York Times. I served in the Marine Corps as an infantryman. When it comes to reporting on the front line, I think nothing is more important than talking to the people involved, hearing their stories and being able to connect that with people thousands of miles away. Anything that can make something like this more personal, I think, is well worth the risk. New York Times subscribers make it possible for us to keep doing this vital coverage. If you'd like to subscribe, you can do that at nytimes.com slash subscribe.
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. But Tuise has also been on a personal quest, I've been watching and reading long, 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 both the reality of our country, but also the minds of policymakers and leaders.
So I want to talk to Tuz about what he saw at Davos and how he's making sense of this moment. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com.
Adam Tuz, 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?
I think there was definitely a sense of that. I mean, most people in the world see American politics only through television clips, even 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 there. 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, 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.
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Chapters
6 chapters
1
What major shifts in global power dynamics are discussed?
0:00–6:14
2
How did the events at Davos reflect changes in America's global perception?
6:14–12:24
3
What insights does Adam Tooze provide on the rise of China?
12:24–19:01
4
How does the Trump administration's foreign policy differ from previous approaches?
19:01–36:47
5
What are the implications of Mark Carney's speech at Davos?
36:47–52:34
6
How do the U.S. and China view their roles in the new world order?
52:34–1:05:16