How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

28:15Now the thinking is about, from a standing start, how rapidly advanced manufacturing companies can change pace and change what they're doing. But a sense that China is fast and now we are slow. China makes things and now we just skim money off of the top. That China can govern, you know, even if brutally. And we just argue with each other. That fundamental insecurity corroding America's confidence in itself has actually been around now for quite some time. Yeah, I mean, I felt it hanging over your book, if I may. We said it explicitly. I say it in the conclusion. Yeah, exactly. I felt it in the first page.

28:49Yes. Like, I couldn't wait to get to the conclusion that you said it, because that whole book felt like a question about what happened to the future and why is it that other people are making it. But to go back to your original point, it's very interesting, though. When you talk to people in Beijing, they will push back hard on this idea, because they will point to two sources of really extraordinary dynamism in the U.S. economy. One is tech and the other one is fracking. And the other one you might add, thirdly, would be financial engineering. And these are all zones in which American capitalism unfolds an extraordinary dynamism and doesn't encounter much regulation or obstacle and is world-changing, or at least has pretensions to be world-changing.

29:35So that's what you'll hear in Beijing. You know, what are you talking about? We're still learning. Well, the answer you often hear about this in America, put aside fracking for a minute, which has some distinctive qualities. But tech and financial engineering reflects this reality of our system now, which is that we move very freely with bits and bytes and very sluggishly around atoms. Yeah, so the Dan Wang kind of thesis also about we're very good at lawyering. Because financial engineering is sophisticated lawyering with math, right? Basically, you find a legal wrinkle and then you do the math work all the other way around.

30:11You do the math and then find the legal wrinkle. And after all, then the Apple, you know, Apple designed in California made in China is emblematic of that kind of distinction. The other thing is, and this is a point that I think about a lot also as a European, is the American politics in its deep fabric is so static, so afraid of change. So you could say traumatized by the last big, big change, which was the civil rights movement of the 60s. whereas Chinese government though the CCP governs it continuously reinvents what the party is and how it governs right they have this churning innovation around the cell structure that goes down right into literally to household level now the reason why they were able to do COVID lockdowns and the way they're able to is they've built out in private housing estates like you know you think of this as the heart of the Chinese bourgeoisie.

31:05Why is the CCP there? Because the CCP is the beating heart of a large part of the Chinese bourgeoisie, right? So they've managed to continuously innovate. It isn't just a kind of fossilized, Brezhnevite, static party structure. It's very dynamic. And as a European, I have to say there's elements of the EU system, which in all of their frustratedness are also kind of open for change, right? When they, for instance, responded to COVID with a really big green and tech stimulus, they had to invent common debt issuance to be able to do that. And broadly speaking, I think it's healthy for a polity to have to constantly rethink.

31:42Whereas in the US, we did a great big stimulus, but basically it was a simple sugar high because that's the only thing you could politic. And it's the only thing you could administratively engineer because it had to go out basically via the IRS or checks, something as simple as that. You weren't able to do the complex governance architectures that the Europeans and the Chinese produced during the COVID crisis. When this goes wrong in Europe, you get the Eurozone crisis. But in good moments, it's politically dynamic in the way that we don't see in the U.S. It's funny. I think that's in a way too harsh on the U.S.

32:18Okay, fair enough. Two reasons. One, I think about Donald Trump, who has reinvented an entire political party and is governing in a very different way. But two, during the financial crisis and after, and you've tracked a lot of this. I mean, we did some very aggressive things in terms of debt issuance and what the Fed is doing. And I think there are zones of innovation and dynamism in the U.S., but like where was the unemployment insurance innovation that should have happened during the COVID crisis? We both know they couldn't do it, so they ended up just doing checks. Whereas what America actually needs to do is to build a national unemployment insurance system worthy of the name instead of having this extraordinary hodgepodge where New York has a system, but Florida really doesn't.

32:54Like that's unbecoming of 330 million people in an affluent society. But, you know, why would you burn the political capital to try and get that done if you're the Biden administration when you've got so many other things to do? So there's something strange about this conception of China, because it has moved very fast back and forth in the last couple of years, right? You just mentioned Biden. End of the Biden administration, after many years of China hype and China fear, there is a sense that actually China might now be in decline. Xi is wielding terrible authoritarian power. You see Chinese tech CEOs and startup founders suddenly disappearing like Jack Ma, who ends up coming back.

33:32But you have parts of the upper echelons of the Communist Party being marched out of meetings. In fact, just now, the other day, we saw the top general functionally defenestrated. There is a sense that China had effective authoritarian government for quite some time. But now the thing that always happens with authoritarian government is happening. And the leadership is out of touch and it's turning on itself. And the capacity to continue governing this very, very complicated state well and, you know, as a demographics change, is going to weaken. And I remember doing interviews with Jake Sullivan and others at the end of the Biden era.

34:09And one of their big things they would say is, look, America's never been stronger our opponents and antagonists and competitors have never been weaker. Yeah. So Janet Yellen literally said, don't worry about the Thucydides trap because we're not declining so we won't start war with you. If you were going to overtake us and we were declining, dot, dot, dot, you might very well have reason to be concerned. But since we're not, relax. There isn't going to be a war. This is a rapid change around in the conventional wisdom on how to think about China and its governance strength. Which is why you should never trust conventional wisdom on China in this country.

34:40But now this is a conventional wisdom. It's a bear trap. So should I not? Now that they're great and they know what they're doing is now the conventional wisdom. Not great morally, but capacity-wise. I think it's truly difficult for any of us, and I absolutely include myself, coming from the West to steady a stable analytical position on China. And we are torn between a kind of fascination and indeed infatuation with it. And it is, after all, the single most dramatic transformative socioeconomic transformation in the history of our species, but not full stop in history. And on the other hand, a kind of, oh, but it can't possibly work because, because, because, and you can make the list.

35:26And I can sit with my liberal colleagues at Columbia and we can all make the list, right? And I think we basically need to check all our prejudices at the door. and an even deeper level, I think we need to recognize the fact that what's happening in China, one way or the other, it's the big N. All of our history today is small n in terms of sample size by comparison with what they're doing there. This is the fundamental foundation of their belief in what they call 21st century Marxism, is that if politics is experimental and driven, they believe by experience and success and failure, and they right now think they're succeeding, then doing that in a society of 1.4 billion, raising yourself out from the kind of poverty that they were in 50 years ago to where they are right now, is simply the experiment.

36:17This is the actual historical test of all theories about the world. So all of our theories that we have, our middle income trap theory, all of this, is really just the kind of minor preface, right? And where do we even get off placing them alongside some small European country in the data set where we say, oh, well, you could end up like Italy. Famously, Mao said to the Italian Communist Party when they were talking about nuclear war, there's nothing in the scripture that says that Italy survives into the 21st century. So we have to be willing to be humble, frankly, in relation to this experience and not quickly extrapolate one way or the other, either our disappointment of ourselves and our glamorization of what they've done, or the converse, namely our scorn, our fear, our contempt even, mistrust of their politics, and turn that into a kind of social scientific necessity.

37:11It's really difficult to do. There's no safe space here. To me, it's deeply analogous to the dilemmas that many progressives faced in the 1930s and 1940s when faced with Stalinism, which in the end ended up being utterly decisive for the history of World War II and the aftermath. The good world that we built, we, that is the West, built, we think, good, after 1945, depended critically on a war fought with huge sacrifice by both Stalin's Soviet Union and the Chinese. You spent a fair amount of time traveling China in the past couple of years. And as I've tracked your commentary coming back from it, and people could hear it in what you just said, I feel like it has been a bit of a mind-bending experience for you.

37:55Oh, for sure. Yeah. And I've heard you say things like, you know, the whole prehistory of modern industrial organization is just prelude to what is happening there right now. So there's some way in which I'm watching you try to grapple with scale that feels very inhuman. You sometimes sound to me like somebody who's just on psychedelics. Yes. I mean, or I, this summer I had this moment where I realized we're in the position of people watching the pyramids being built, not afterwards. So describe to me what, from where you were four or five years ago, the Adam Tews writing Deluge and Crashed and your pandemic book, what are some things you saw or some numbers that have passed through your chart book?

38:39What helps you convey the sort of portal your own thinking has gone through on China's centrality and power and what it means to absorb that into your view of the world and its order. 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?

39:21You'd have to be an expert to know. In China, it's a railway system unlike any in the world. So there's a drama and scale. I think I have this number in my book. 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. 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. Like, 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.

39:59And 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. I mean, there's also the destruction that's implied by that, right? The erasing of the traditional Chinese city, the thirst and the hunger that you see in Chinese tourists when they come to Europe to actually see something old. And then more and more for me, it's all about climate and the just staggering speed with which China has begun to build out green energy such that now, and this is the thing that the Biden administration, for my mind, this is the central question.

40:47China, 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 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 there's too much subsidy and we cannot right now organize the global politics necessary to fund that to roll it out you know and you've got brian decent 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.

41:40And 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 Bozwash corridor? That's literally providing what we need to farm solar power for the entire planet. So the analogy you're making here, You mentioned the Russians in World War II. As people know, there is no winning World War II without the Soviet Union. Well, there is, but it's really ugly, and it would not have left us feeling good about ourselves, because it would involve nuking a large part of Germany.

42:14So the analogy here is to climate. And if you want to, quote-unquote, win the climate change fight, it would require making China central. Well, who knows? But we're certainly not making a concerted enough effort to explore other options. And this one is literally the$100 bill on the sidewalk. And we're heavily terrifying. America doesn't import any Chinese solar panel. The Europeans, to their credit, take 90 % of their solar panels from China, because where else are you going to get them from? And they are pushing. And you speak to Biden administration veterans, and the honest ones will admit that they knew exactly what they were doing, which was retarding America's energy transition for a political reason, because they didn't think there was a political bargain to be done any other way.

42:57Well, wait, wait, wait. That's not, I think, what they think they were doing. I spoke to him just the other day and that's exactly what they... But the way they describe it to me is not that they don't think there's a political bargain to be made. They actually believed, I think going up to Joe Biden, that it would be losing a key level of geopolitical power to see this to China. That they think there was power in this. You don't buy that. I think there are two different versions and it depends whether you're a more climate-centered person or whether you're ultimately in the Jake Sullivan camp.

43:26I totally agree with you. There is the even narrower version, which is that we actually need to compete in this technological space. I think the Jake Sullivan camp had a view that it was more important to maintain power over China than to accelerate the green transition. And they always saw the green transition. They basically got it from Azekatu, right? So the idea is you need missions around which to organize policy and motivate coalitions. And this was a great mission. Yes. It wasn't in and of itself. I think if you think about Podesta and people like that, who have a much longer track record in the climate space, they're the people who articulate the trade-off.

44:00But they were not the ones driving the policy. They were not calling the shots, no. And so this brings me to something I was asking you at the beginning, which is, what do you think the Trump administration believes power to be based on? 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. Yeah. And for China, which is nevertheless doing a lot of hydrocarbons, but it is in the future. I mean, you describe them as an electrostate. Like part of the fight is going to be energy. That's true on AI, which is going to be rate limited by energy.

44:37No 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. It's fundamentally contradictory, and it's not helped by this concept of energy, which is, in practice, we need oil for one set of issues, mainly transport and some petrochemicals. We need gas for petrochemicals, heating and power generation. And then we've got solar and coal competing head on in the electricity generation space.

45:11And furthermore, America's in this profoundly conflicted position, which is that it's both a huge oil consumer and a huge oil producer. And so unlike the Saudis, who unambiguously have an interest in high oil prices, the only thing that would dial that down is they're worried they put their consumers off. America's like betwixt and between. So you unlock Venezuela, quote unquote, right? And who complains? It's the shale people that complain because the last thing in the world they need is more oil on the market, which would cut the price even further than it currently is at. So there's that dimension of conflict and incoherence.

45:43And then on the other side, you have the whole dilemma if AI is your big play, or just tech is your big play in the industrial policy tech space, the single common denominator is electric power. And it's just a fantasy to think that gas, let alone nuclear, is going to fill that gap because we can't get the turbines, the gas turbines quickly enough. So the pipeline, quite reasonably everywhere in the world, is full of the sort of thing which the Trump administration is trying to anathematize, like solar and wind and battery backup now, which is also affordable. So it's deeply contradictory. And around the edges, you see them shifting.

46:18I mean, the Times had a rather good report on the way in which a quiet battery diplomacy has actually emerged in the Trump administration. Because if you talk to the military people, like modern army guys, carry 20, 30 pounds worth of batteries. Like the actual effective operational range of the special forces is largely determined by when they need to recharge their battery packs. So high-tech battery technology is just crucial increasingly for every dimension of power, and you can't really sustain an economically viable battery industry without the big source of demand, which are electric vehicles.

47:15During the Biden administration, one thing you began to hear a lot from foreign policy hands was that we should understand the world is 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 you know sometimes beyond that even a little bit sometimes you'd hear north korea syria as well was thrown in 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?

48:05It's definitely an unhelpful way to understand the world because essentially it defines the world in a negative term. 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.

48:38And 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? So 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.

49:13And 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 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 Orbitrov is 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, in their view, guts to oust the party people that were aligned with the Tiananmen Square demonstrators and do what was necessary.

49:53It 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.

50:32Beyond 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 CAIDA apparatus, where there is literally a party, you know, official in every single major organization? Of course not. They're not even close.

51:07Like no one in the world has that. So China is unique and they regard Russia increasingly, I think, as a useful wedge. I don't think they really, really need Russia's energy, but it certainly helps to have it there. You were mentioning earlier on, of course, China is hugely advanced in green tech, but it still is a massive, it's the largest fossil fuel consumer we've ever seen, mainly relying on its own coal, But gas and oil are helpful. And if you can get them via Russia, you get them cheap and you get them without Western strings. Not that they would buy from the West anyway. They go shopping in the Gulf and they're only too happy to provide.

51:43But I think that's the level at which that alliance sits tight. They have a sufficiently capacious and coherent and independent view of modern history not to need to define themselves as like Putin cause not like America. Okay. So if communist authoritarian industrial juggernaut is rightly or wrongly the way America often sees China, it's taken our jobs. How now does China see America? I mean, it's a continuously evolving. So on the one hand, as I was saying earlier, they see strength and it's very difficult to persuade them to see anything else. They believe America's, I mean, this is, I mean, I'm speaking from talking from a sample of one, but a central committee member, so top 200 or so type person, highly placed in the party structure and think tank organization, deeply convinced that America has its finger in every pie, deeply convinced of the most conspiratorial views of the Ukraine war, like that this is America's doing ultimately, and they are orchestrating this to tie the Europeans closer to them and all this sort of thing.

52:46And on the other hand, bemused. And they literally said they had a think tank working for the state council that was trying to track Trump on a daily basis. And after a couple of months in, in term two, they gave up. And they just used these really crude sort of psychologizing rules of thumb about what make him tick. And so far, after all, it's kind of worked well for them. Like, you'd have to say that China has come out of this, by contrast with the disciplined, I would say highly ideological kind of position the Biden administration was rolling out on China. They're getting a level of pragmatism and deals making the, even a tariff level, right?

53:21Which is lower than India's. They don't think they imagine that that's how this would play out for them. Why do you think that is? I would not have imagined the tariff on India would be higher than the tariff on China. I mean, I think there's always been two theories of a Trump administration. And we saw them both. Again, I always go back to 2020 because that's where I think we see the seeds of this second Trump administration. And one is the boss wants to do deals. And he loves doing deals with a big guy with a nice palace. And Xi Jinping ticks the box. He's the other really big guy. So if you go do a deal with him, it's the biggest deal you can do by definition.

53:56And that's, I really think, I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I think that's an absolutely fundamental motivation. And we saw it in the phase one deal the last time around, like utterly crude, bizarre, trade economists can't even fathom it. Like it's like soybeans and pigs, like it's bonkers compared to modern trade policy. And then there's another element in the Trump administration, which is more hawkish, more classically neocon. Say it's a kind of Marco Rubio group. And then I think there's a retrenchment, kind of J.D. Vance, let's get the hell out of Dodge, sort of settle back into the Western Hemisphere.

54:26Military people I know who've been reading these documents in the U.S., that is, are struggling to figure this out as well. They can't quite figure out what the position on Taiwan actually is at this point. But we are not seeing the long-range, highly strategic, industrial, economic warfare, I called it. I still think it's essentially that, that the Biden administration was engaged against China. They really thought they could wonk the hell out of this and figure out which chips not to give the Chinese so that we'd ridden the AI race. I think they really believe that. Oh, they believe that? Yeah.

55:00And lots of people at times say that's silly because you can't because people will innovate around whatever blockage you put there. I think that there... But anyway, that's a different mindset. You need a lot of things, but the Trump administration then just coming and being like, here are the chips, was surprising to me. Well, have some crap chips, and then they argue amongst themselves whether they've, like, done a really cunning deal and only given them the rubbish ones. Out loud. Yeah, it's wild to watch. You know, one of the things I began by asking you was the degree to which Davos this year...

55:31It's not that something that happened at Davos ended the old order. It's more that it was a moment, I think, when Trump's performance, Carney's performance, it was a moment of recognition of a thing that had happened. Do you feel that what is coming has shaped? There's another order visible? Or are we just in a possibly quite dangerous interrenium where nothing is quite structured or stable? 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.

56:13And 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?

57:03I 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.

57:39But 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. But I mean, I like the way you put it. Like, I would definitely think 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?

58:13Or 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.

58:46That's how he argues in that paper is that 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 auto-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.

59:29So 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. And that I actually find almost attractive because surely, I mean, we have never been in a planet like this before. We have never had 30 or 40 incredibly highly competent nation state players. This is really novel stuff. Given your sense of awe at what China is doing industrially, The speed with which they're moving, the creation of the electricity they're building. Your view of the situation is not that we are in a mechanical transition from an American order to a Chinese order.

1:00:13It's that we— I think that's not just wrong and implausible. It's also dangerous because it immediately sets the American alarm bells off, right? If we speak in those terms, that's what motivates all of the ultra-hawker position. And, you know, if that is the option, then this sort of spheres of influence kind of model that maybe some people in the Trump administration approve of may be a third or fourth best alternative to the sixth or seventh worst kind of option, which will be flat out confrontation over this question. No, I don't see that. Pervasive influence, sure. Individual network efforts, absolutely.

1:00:47Chinese have got these extraordinary visions of ultra long distance electricity transmission wiring up ASEAN in a single electricity system. But it doesn't add up to global hegemony, to my mind. Apart from anything else, simply, I mean, I'm in the business of learning Chinese, and it is not an obvious lingua franca. It's not like English. I mean, American hegemony in the mid-20th century is extraordinarily unique, and even more the unipolar moment, are extraordinarily unique formations in historical terms. I don't see any reason to derive from that some sort of historical model of where we go next.

1:01:25Then I'll ask our final question. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? So my first is a Chinese classic, not an ancient classic, but a modern classic. Arguably the first modern Chinese novella, Lucian's Diary of a Madman, which is the most extraordinary kind of first-person account of the delirium of a person waking up into a world where they begin to convince themselves that it is a world of cannibalism. And it's a complex metaphor about Chinese society in the early 20th century. They're very short, but utterly brilliant and psychologically compelling. So my second suggestion is Jonathan Chatwin's book, The Southern Tour, which is an extraordinary account of Deng Xiaoping's tour of southern China in 1992, the moment when after the repression of Tiananmen Square in 1989, he revives the reform and opening up projects.

1:02:19So this legendary moment in the economic reform process that has made modern China. And the third suggestion is poetry. I love poetry. I struggle to find time to read novels from start to finish. And I like the compressed power and energy of poetry. And this is by a friend, a Berlin friend, Ryan Ruby. It's called Context Collapse. And it is literally a poem containing a history of poetry. So it is an extraordinary long form poem in which he and I I was asking about it over drinks the other night. Why did he do it? It's this delirious effort to write in poetry a history of the form and the collapse of its context in modern culture.

1:02:57It's truly a tour of the force. Adam Toos, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

1:03:15This episode of The Osso Clown Show is produced by Roland Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Amun Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes

1:03:45The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Royer-Strosser.