There's this quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Grocchi 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 indirect, 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. We live in a world in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force. It's hard to call it land. It's a big piece of ice. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Davos last week seemed to be this wake-up moment for the world. You then turn on the TV and you watch agents of the American government killing protesters on the streets of Minneapolis. That is the definition of domestic terrorism. That's the facts. I cannot think of a week when it has 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 Ferrell about 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 Tus is a historian at Columbia University. He is a thinker and chronicler of crisis. He's written a number of books about moments when systems fall apart and new orders emerge. The Guardian recently dubbed him the crisis whisperer and he had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, even moderating this panel with among others Howard Lutnik, the commerce secretary. But Tus has also been on a personal quest I've been watching and reading along 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 policy makers and leaders. So I want to talk to Tus about what he saw at Davos and how he's making sense of this moment. As always my email is
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Adam Tus, welcome back to the show.
Yeah, pleasure to be here.
So watching Davos last week, it 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, you know, foreign business people for instance they don't get a lot of facetime 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 and the more interaction there was the more dismaying and devastating it was I think for everyone involved. It was truly shocking. I mean, 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. I couldn't bring myself to join the horde of people that were queuing up to actually get into the room. So with quite a lot of other people I sat in the journalist kind of lounge in the conference center and we all just solemnly sat and watched this crazy speech.
Well, thank you very much Larry. It's great to be back in beautiful Davos, Switzerland, and to address so many respected business leaders, so many friends, few enemies. And all of the distinguished guests, it's a who's who. I will say that.
And now you're used to — I mean you go to Davos it's one of the places in the world where you can see, you know, politicians stacked up and you can literally kind of do a beauty contest of who can give a speech. And so everyone all day had been rating, you know, was it von der Leyen versus Macron versus the Chinese vice premier versus Carney. And then this, then this just, you know, by the standards of Trump speeches I think it was pretty routine, maybe you're more of an aficionado than I. The thematic seemed weird. He was very uncomfortable with the script he started delivering. He seemed almost as though he was going to fall asleep.
Venezuela has been an amazing place for so many years, but then they went bad with their policies. 20 years ago, it was a great country and now it's got problems, but we're helping them.
Then he kind of got going, did some ranting, came back.
After the war, we gave Greenland back to Denmark. How stupid were we to do that? But we did it. But we gave it back. But how ungrateful are they now?
But the whole thing was just — it just left you. There was no way out after that. After the letter to the Norwegian prime minister at the weekend, which I still think we don't spend enough time on, because the letter saying you did not give me the Nobel Prize, which of course Norway's prime minister has not managed, doesn't do. And then now I feel, you know, free from any obligation to think about world peace and now I'm going to do America first. I mean, even in its own terms, it's crazy. This to me is why what I saw happening there was it seemed very substantive. I mean, Davos was happening in the context of the Trump administration threatening possible military action, definitely tariffs over Greenland. And to me it was in part Mark Carney's speech where another world leader stood up and rather than trying to placate Trump, rather than trying to soften the edges of it, it's a negotiating posture, we're all one alliance, just stood up and said, "The old world is over. There has been a rupture. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition."
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
What was Mark Carney saying had ruptured? Well, I actually went back and looked at Carney's speeches when he was Bank of England governor in the late 2010s during the first Trump administration. And why that's interesting is that that makes sense of the transition phrase because at Jackson Hole in 2019, the big central bankers gathering, because he'd been head of the Canadian central bank, then he did the British bank thing, what was really interesting was he was describing transition there, which is the world is becoming increasingly multipolar. We need to move away from dollar-centricity. There's a fundamental asymmetry in the world which is the financial system is dollar-centric and the actual real economy isn't. And so there is a transition. We need to prepare for it. We need to enter into more complex geometries. Much of what he actually ended up saying in Davos in 2026 was prefaced there. So for me, the significance of this speech last week was folks, it's been more like an earthquake, right? The transition, if you think of the tectonic plates of the world economy, has like jarred and that is what we now have to reckon with. Not just the shift which we can all agree on or think hard about, but we need to reckon with this shock which doesn't so much consist I think simply in America repositioning itself geopolitically and maybe retreating in various ways from various positions, accepting spheres of power, division of the world into spheres of power and Monroe Doctrine, but actually something more. It has something more to do with if you like the kind of the culture of international community, of international society. And that's amongst, you know, the violence of the use of force, the use of threats, the bullying, the sucusidities, the powerful do as they will and the weak must simply accept the circumstances that shift. And the stripping away of the hypocrisy, that's the real — that's the rupture.
You called it culture. It struck me what was being described was almost characterological. It was people in a family, people in an organization, in a company saying, you know, dad or the boss or whomever isn't just getting angry sometimes. No, there's something going on here. Dangerous. And we have to prepare to be endangered.
And there are like now other bad guys. So one of the really interesting things about the speech is he doesn't really talk about Trump or America directly. He just talks about hegemons and great powers. And so — and this is crucial right because to go back to old order, after all there was the Biden interlude. There were four years of the return of a kind of supercharged retro-Atlanticism. And what Carney is saying is oh god no that isn't our world at all. Actually, there are — he doesn't say it, but he clearly means there are three major powers, the United States, Russia, and China, who have to be from the vantage point of middle powers of a liberal disposition regarded as essentially equivalent. They may not in detail be equivalent, but in general, they're equivalent because they all essentially are going to rely on power to get what they want. And that's what we have to reckon with.
You mentioned the Biden interlude. You're a historian, you covered Biden. You were talking to a lot of people in the administration. How now do you regard what the Biden administration meant in the sweep of the history of this era?
I think there were two wings, right? I'm sure you have a more detailed analysis of this than me, but there was the old Atlanticism of the president, of Nancy Pelosi, you know, whose dad did lend-lease in 1941. I mean, it's crazy. That was that generation. And then there were the people whose world was turned in 2016 by the loss, Hillary's loss to Trump, and this — the Jake Sullivans basically and the Blinkens. And they converged on this what I think many of them thought of as a kind of last-ditch effort to restore both domestically and internationally a version of American liberal hegemony, shall we put it that way, limited Cold War style because it no longer encompasses the whole world, this isn't the '90s, but something like that. And it made a lot of promises, it issued a lot of checks it couldn't really cash in the end. It couldn't deliver the domestic bargains to do, for instance, trade deals. It couldn't do market access. That was just off the table. The only way they could get the IRA done, the big climate bill, was by various types of economic nationalism, which offended their allies. So, even they were straining to get this done. But critically, the Europeans, notably the Canadians as well, loved this. This is like they just got straight back on this bandwagon because it solves a lot of problems for them. If this is what America's going to be, then they don't have to face a whole bunch of complicated domestic questions about military spending.
The promise was we could go back. Turn the clock back to what you thought we were.
Exactly. Some idealized version of it was a MAGA. It was a make America great again, but just nice and positive and liberal and all of that.
But the Biden administration had a theory of American power. It's an older theory. It's a theory of America as the leader of this international order that is rules-based. And to Mark Carney's point, sometimes America slips out of those rules. But fundamentally, America's strength comes out of a structure of alliances that is both dependent upon our power and dependent upon our restraint.
And also not just strength, but also in that manifests. I mean, they have a manifest destiny, they were exceptionalist in their own way. They believe America is special in its capacity to do that and they will endlessly point to the fact that China can't do that and Russia can't really do that and America — there's something in this, this is part of the special sauce of American liberalism, the democratic project that it may not fully generalize but it generalizes more than other such projects.
How would you describe what the Trump administration's vision of American power is?
It's much more modest at some level, right? They don't believe in manifest destiny at a kind of global level. They may have some vision of American greatness and certainly a kind of blunt patriotism, but I did a chat with Krastev, the brilliant Bulgarian thinker of modern politics, and he said the thing about Trump is he's not really even a proper nationalist, right? He doesn't even really believe it. He's actually kind of rather put off by the reality of the actually existing America of the present because it — you know, they don't do golf clubs as well as he'd like and their palaces aren't as good as the ones in the Emirates and really it's a bit of an embarrassment. So anyway, to get to a more serious kind of vein, no, I think they think of America as embattled. They also have this extraordinary narrative of the United States as the loser in globalization.
And it isn't — I mean you can break that down, after all a Sullivan or so on will tell a story about the American working class as having been victimized, but the Trump people will talk about it but it's not very plausible right because that's not who he in any reasonable sense represents. I had the dubious pleasure of chairing a panel with the CEO of Bank of America and CEO of Ernest Young and Rachel Reeves of the British government. Howard Lutnik, the US commerce secretary, the key guy behind the tariffs. He in fact referred to himself as the hammer gleefully, the enforcer of the Trump administration. Journalists had the temerity to ask the chairman of Bank of America, the CEO of Bank of America, sir, can you really agree with the commerce secretary's characterization of globalization as having been bad for America? And like the obvious answer is who are you kidding? No one has benefited more. They genuinely seem to believe that in some sense the American state — because they're very confused about budgets and who earns what money for where and what tariffs do and the relationship between the private sector and the public sector is quite blurred in their mind. So I think they think that in some general sense the vital bodily juices of America was sapped by entering into an openness to the world that extends from trade to globalized universities to large-scale migration. And all of those things were kind of a threat to the containment of American power and American wealth.
So inside the Trump administration's worldview, if America's been the loser on globalization, if our infrastructure sucks, our airports aren't up to scratch, our palaces are tacky, where does power come from? If we were powerful, what would the pillars of that power be? What do they think the structure of the power competition actually is?
I mean I wish I thought that it depends really — like there are bits of the Trump team if you look at the national security strategy, their defense strategy documents, you know, there you get a relatively conventional foreign policy defense policy establishment kind of read. They do the obvious things, they count up military capacities, they look at overextended lines, they look at supply chains, all this kind of stuff. If you're trying to characterize the position of the leading figures in the Trump administration much less obvious, I think. And what was really extraordinary about the speech was that amongst many passages was that one where Trump starts going off about the big battleships. These ships are 100 — think of that — 100 times more powerful than those big magnificent pieces of art that you saw so many times ago that you still see on television. You say, "Wow, what a force." 100 times, each ship 100 times more powerful than the big battleships of the past. You know, big powerful artifacts seem to be an important part of their understanding of what power is. They think they believe in industrial production as an indicator, but they're not even remotely serious about this. Isn't the Biden administration actually pursuing an industrial policy? I think that was quixotic in the end, but at least you would have to say they were intensely serious about it. These people aren't — like semiconductor factories and I mean there were things that were happening.
So, you mean the Biden people?
The Biden people. Yes. And Trump will say the same thing. So one of the things they measure American power by is — and Lutnik was full of this as he bounced into the green room — trillion and a half, he started saying. And what it's about is twisting the world's arm to invest in a really large scale in the United States. That's a measure of power — will people put money into the US because they understand globalization as having drained money out so they want to bring money back. But could you say that these are people who are really articulating the sort of AI strategy documents that the Biden administration was organizing itself around? Obviously not. No, they're not in that game at all. And furthermore, they're pursuing strategies that seem to be dictated rather more by Nvidia's corporate interests to just sell chips to everyone in the name of AI sovereignty than the careful effort by the Biden team to actually map out which chips should go where and who should have them. And you know this incredibly arcane in the end effort to penetrate the supply chains of the modern economy and target the really careful bits. This weaponization of interdependence, that's a very long way removed from how the Trump people are thinking about it who are just using tariffs like these big blunt instruments.
So America was at Davos. Our message there was we own this, we do what we say.
Oh, you mean Davos in general or we just — yeah. I think they definitely like to own the city. Yeah.
The Chinese were at Davos, too.
In a very different configuration. Yeah.
Tell me a bit about what their message seemed to be and what their configuration was.
So, the vice premier spoke.
It gives me great pleasure to join you in beautiful Davos for the World Economic Forum annual meeting under the theme of spirit of dialogue. It is timely that we listen to each other, learn from each other, and build stronger trust with each other.
And what was astonishing about it was that, you know, if anyone still speaks pure Davos, it's the Chinese. And it's even more pronounced than the summer Davos that they have in Dalian and Shenzhen. And I always — I sit and watch people like Tony Blair, of course, he's always these fossils of the 1990s show up. And it's as though you're in this retro time warp where we're in, you know, intelligent industrial policy, joined-up government, all of those buzzwords of the '90s just circulate in Chinese technocratic discourse. I've watched the Chinese prime minister, no less, pause to explain that the units in which he's giving a GDP number are purchasing power parity adjusted dollars of 2015. Like you have to understand this number I've just given you, the unit is in this one because otherwise what I'm saying wouldn't make any sense to anyone in the room if you thought I was just using regular currencies, you'd think I was mad. That is the contrast. It is so — watching Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the European Commission, followed by the Chinese vice premier was kind of like a study in contrast because the Chinese play down their wolf warrior position to do the lovely multilateralist kind of thing.
At Davos, China advocates a universally beneficial and inclusive economic globalization. We are committed to building bridges, not walls. Multilateralism is the right way to keep the international order stable and promote humanity's development and progress.
And the EU is really structurally dependent on multilateralism. It is itself, you could say, a multilateral institution. Plays up the "I'm the European patriot and we can stand up for ourselves."
If this change is permanent, then Europe must change permanently, too. It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe.
But in fact, they converge. I mean, it's so astonishing. And speaking to the Chinese and the ones that know Europe really well — they know there are two neuralgic issues in the relationship between Europe and China. It's cars. It's the fact that the EV car industry matters much more to Europe than it does in the US. Ironically, historically, of course, Ford hasn't meant everything, but America's moved on. In Europe, the car industry really is, as the Chinese would say, a bottom-line issue. 12 million workers, core about the whole rising populism, the employment of the working class and the Chinese EV invasion is killing the Germans. That's issue number one, they need to have some politics around that. And the other one's Ukraine and Beijing's alignment with Putin over Ukraine is the wedge, right? Without that, without Ukraine, Europe would not be at Trump's mercy. It's Putin's threat by way of Ukraine and China's willingness to line up both politically and de facto on the Russian side in supply chains just drives the wedge in. And if you speak to Chinese who know Europe well in Beijing, they don't really get it. If you speak to Chinese who know Europe well, they will come up to you and say, "Yeah, I totally was." They'll say, "I spent five years in Munich at the technical university, it was so eye-opening. I finally understood. They feel about Russia the way we feel about Russia, which is it's a scary neighbor to have. You need to have a policy."
Do you buy the theory of Trump that you sometimes hear, which is that Trump and the people around him are correct in sensing, maybe even in some ways diagnosing the end of the old era, the weakening of America, the passing of the American period, even if they don't know what to do about it, that they're somehow reflective of something real, even if they are a somewhat pathological response to that thing.
I mean, at that level, I think they may be more realistic than some moments of the Biden administration, but I mean, we have to hold up the Obama administration as the team that really, I think, got this at a much deeper level. And this is also true from a European point of view. You know, if the moment where Atlanticism frayed is not after all with Trump, it frayed 2003. There was huge enthusiasm for Obama in 08-09 as he came in on the part around Iraq, and then 08-09 on the part at least of some Europeans there was enthusiasm because Europeans also liked McCain. He was regular at the Munich Security Conference. He was their kind of conservative, but then the actual disillusionment around the NSA, the big struggles that were kept below the radar over the Eurozone crisis and then America's very hands-off approach to Ukraine already I think should have been the wake-up call for Europe. And the Obama administration was already thumping the table and saying, "You guys need to spend more on defense, especially after Ukraine."
So this week's summit is the moment for every NATO nation to step up and commit to meeting its responsibilities to our alliance. Estonia does it. Every ally must do it.
So I think of this as a progression. And so I'm not really going to, you know, credit Trump with the original insight that things are shifting. I think this has been — if you look at Obama, he already had a very stressed view of the fundamental problems of this society and the limits it imposes on what the priorities of any sensible government should be in a much more coherent and reasonable way. Focusing on things like healthcare for heaven's sake, maybe that's what we should really do more than Trump will ever do.
One thing that I have come to believe is that China has been exerting a much larger pressure on American politics and American society for much longer at this point than we give it credit for. We've conceptualized it in weird ways or just stealing, you know, it's all just low-wage labor. That's clearly not been true now for some time. And so when we talk about end of one order, when we talk about transition to another, let's start before this Trump administration. To you, what has China's role been in not just like the world economy, but in America's changing conception of itself?
Yes. I mean, I'm finishing a book right now about climate politics, and one of the astonishing things you realize about the Kyoto, the famous 1997 climate treaty, which America signs, but then famously never ratifies, is that the main objection in the Senate to the treaty on climate in '97, is not that it's climate-denying, climate skeptics who don't believe the science. It's that Kyoto exempts China from doing anything about its emissions. And there is literally unanimity in the Senate. The Byrd-Hagel resolution is literally unanimous that America will not sign a treaty like that. Why? Because of China. And if you look at that American domestic politics, this shadow that's being cast, I think the combination of NAFTA followed by WTO followed by Kyoto was already really stressing out American congressional politics in the '90s. And it hangs there such that the Bush administration, which is very business-oriented, really wants to keep the dynamo of Chinese growth going, you know, has to put a Hank Paulson in there as Treasury Secretary. Why? Because he's a bona fide China hand. The guy's in China all the time, all the way now still. And he's managing this strategic partnership with China. What that consists of is actually tamping down Congress which already then wants to do protectionist strikes on China because the China threat is there. So I think you're right, to my mind it's a generational, even a long generational challenge for the US which has been held at bay by elite consensus around trade and finance and by optimistic assumptions about political convergence. And if you view it from the other side, from the Chinese side, at least by 2003, they already have mapped all this and they are very concertedly pushing back. So what this does is to shrink our sense of the unipolar moment right down. I think it's much narrower than we generally think. We generally have this kind of idea, we slip over Iraq and we have kind of a unipolar moment that goes from '89 maybe to 2008 or something like that.
In the Obama era. I remember a piece, I believe it's by George Packer in the New Yorker and it's about the Senate and the paralysis and sluggishness of the US Senate. I remember Michael Bennett, still a senator from Colorado, saying in that piece, and I'm paraphrasing him here, but not by much, that he sits in the Senate and looks around at all that they are not doing, and he thinks, I wonder what China is doing right now. And I felt in that period and then escalating from there, you know, we can't build a train. Think about how many trains China is building right now. A sense that our society was becoming sclerotic and yet you could see this incredible rapidity like cities coming up in China what felt like overnight. Now 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, 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. Like I thought you said — I say it in the conclusion. Yeah, exactly. I felt it in the first page. Like I couldn't wait to get to the conclusion where 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, I think this is very interesting though when you talk to people in Beijing, they will push back hard on this idea because they will point to two things, two sources of really extraordinary dynamism in the US economy. One is tech and the other one is fracking. And these are — 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. So 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. 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, or the other way around. You do the math and then find the legal wrinkle. So I think that seems plausible. And after all, then the Apple, you know, designed in California made in China is emblematic of that distinction. The other thing is — and this is a point that I think about a lot also as a European — is that American politics in its deep fabric is so static, so afraid of change, so you could say traumatized by the last 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. They have this churning innovation around, you know, the cell structure that goes down right into literally to household level now. The reason why they were able to do COVID lockdowns in 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, why is the CCP there? Because the CCP is the beating heart of a large part of the Chinese bourgeoisie. They've managed to continuously innovate, it isn't just a kind of fossilized abrasion 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 policy to have to constantly rethink. Whereas 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 politically and 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 US.
It's funny. I think that's in a way too harsh on the US. For 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.
But I used to say I think there are zones of innovation and dynamism in the US. 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. Like 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 years, right? You just mentioned Biden and the Biden administration. After many years of China hype and China fear, there's a sense that actually China might now be in decline.
She is wielding terrible authoritarian power. You see Chinese tech CEOs and startup founders suddenly disappearing, like Jack Ma who ends up coming back. But you have parts of the upper echelons of the Communist Party being marched out of meetings. In fact, just 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 complicated state well and as demographics change is going to weaken. And I remember doing interviews with Jake Sullivan and others at the end of the Biden era and one of their big things they would say is look, America's never been stronger and our opponents and antagonists and competitors have never been weaker. So literally said don't worry about the Thucydides Trap because we're not declining so we won't start a war with you. If you were going to overtake us and we were declining, 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.
