Adam Tooze: "AI Was Born Geopolitical" - What That Means for Your Portfolio?

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

At one level that is the game that all history plays. You ask yourself, are these not exactly the problems that we have now? Are these not exactly the same emotions that we feel? Are these people not completely obviously close to us? And I grew up in West Germany in the 1970s and 80s. And for us then, World War II and the Nazi regime was a living memory, and my parents were exposed to the war as many people in this room's parents and grandparents. So the central question that motivated all of us was precisely that question, but in the agonizing form: if I had been in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, who would I have been? Would I have been a resisting person, a bystander? Would I have been a perpetrator? And that question centrally motivated, motivates I think my historical work all the way down to the present day. And I think it's also, of course, a question for us in the contemporary moment, because when you ask that question about the past, you also ask that question about yourself in the present. What am I? Am I somebody that history is happening to? We all are, to an extent. Are we bystanders in historical events, watching as they unfold, or are we people that are actively potentially involved in exacerbating and making the situation worse, right? And those I think are the questions. I feel we can't escape them. I mean, there are certain periods in historical time which are so remote and so far away that that thread breaks, that thread snaps. But I'm a modern historian for a reason, in that I am really preoccupied with that extent of common fate, common entanglement, the sort of nagging questions like that that you can't actually escape.

I picked it up. I didn't invent it; it was there. That's what struck me first as a historian. It was there, it was being used, and it's worth saying so. In writing a book about the COVID crisis, which is the last book I wrote, I was struck by the fact that the three places I was most interested in — China, Europe, and the United States — all had ways of talking about a comprehensive, dramatic historical moment. In China, the line is 'changes not seen in a thousand years' or 'changes not seen in many centuries,' which is a phrase that echoes through CCP thinking about the current moment. You hear it again and again and again. Premier Lee's speech started that way as well. In the United States — it being the United States — it's totally solipsistic. They just think about themselves, and they think about the American republic as being in a massively multifaceted crisis that affects America in every conceivable way, right? That's the American way of thinking about this. The Chinese drama says 'unprecedented not in a thousand years.' The Americans say 'coming at us from every possible direction: the economy, inequality, populism, the constitution, culture, the media, gender, blah blah blah, right?' Multiplicity of different sources. And the Europeans called it a poly crisis. So the president of the European Commission, John, in 2015 started using this phrase, which he picked up from a French philosopher of no particular repute but an interesting guy, Mora. He started using this phrase. And first of all, as a historian, I was just struck by the fact that in each place there seemed to be the need for a concept that described unprecedented, very complex. And then the Europeans actually gave it a name: poly crisis. So what's it about? I ended up thinking, well, let's try and take this seriously. It's always interesting when a world generates an idea to describe itself. And I take it to be about crisis. So it's about challenges which go to identity.

It's poly. So it's polymorphous. It's made up of heterogeneous things. And that's a trivial statement. I mean, everything's made up of heterogeneous things you could say. So then I go to the level of cuisine. Like, you know, cuisines are made up of different things, but a cuisine has a certain logic. Certain things go together in a cuisine. And so then there's fusion cuisine, which is like two types of cuisine nicely married with each other in an intelligent way. And then there is, I gather some young Chinese journalists were telling me, something called dark cuisine, which is the deliberate effort to combine things which are really truly obviously don't go together. And poly crisis is kind of down that end of the spectrum, right? It's when you have to think about a world which simultaneously has a pandemic, a major war, a financial crisis, digital transformation we haven't seen before, and gender relations in a state which means that large parts of the world are not having babies anymore, right? Just for sake of argument. Now the thing about that is that there isn't a good social theory, a good cuisine, an intellectual cuisine that shows how those five things would go together. And that's when I think you reach for a concept like poly crisis to say this is just a kind of really messy breakfast buffet in which like all the different bits really don't go together. And intellectually speaking, that's interesting and challenging because intellectuals think in terms of conceptual cuisines, right? Certain sorts of ideas go together well and others don't. And this is a moment where the tidier your mind, the harder it is to grasp what's going on. And it was then confirmed as I started knocking it around to see what would happen. And then somebody like Larry Summers picked it up and said, 'You know what? You know, Adam and I disagree about practically everything, but this is a useful idea.' And that's really striking for me because another way of thinking about poly crisis would be to say that Larry Summers' ideas have become fundamentally disorganized. And that matters because Larry Summers is obviously the most intelligent, deep thinking comprehensive thinkers of neoliberalism. And so another way of thinking about poly crisis would be the moment where your confidence in a certain sort of well-ordered world snaps and where even somebody like Summers, who is after all extremely self-confident and not given to intellectual modesty, says, 'You know, actually I can't figure this out. This is so heterogeneous.' It doesn't necessarily mean it's the worst or most dangerous situation in the world,

but it's the most confusing and like it the bits don't fit. This menu doesn't work. And I think if you again, if you come back to the climate crisis, if you come back to geopolitics in the current moment, you could add in AI. Maybe there are after all reasons, like I started by saying, for thinking we're totally not in a cyclical moment. This really is a moment of like escalation away from norm. And this is why my great friend colleague Mark Blythe at Brown University coined this great phrase that we are in this one-way trip into the unknown. An accelerating unknown, one-way trip into the unknown. And that's what I think poly crisis is trying to point to, as opposed to the familiar trip towards the end of history or the familiar trip towards convergence or the achievement of the sustainable development goal matrix of like 17 targets that we're all going to approach or net zero by 2050 or 60. All of which are visions of change but it's so programmed, right? It's linear. It's taking us towards a target. And poly crisis is a kind of jog. It's a kind of no when you're feeling that complacent, when you think you understand it, use this term instead and see how it feels. And in unpredictable ways that I think is one of the key elements. It's that it's this experience of being blindsided.

You know, and it's the I mean in again Chinese discourse is quite interesting. There was this phase when everyone was talking about gray rhinos. And gray rhinos are these things which you know are there like it's a rhino after all but somehow it's gray and it's shifting into its background to such an extent that no one takes it seriously until it starts charging at you. And that's the kind of world of poly crisis. I mean, if you, we can all map it, everyone can do it on the back of an envelope, but when it actually converges towards the sort of situations we were seeing in 2020. One of my favorite illustrations of this is California. So, California has wildfires. It has wildfires because of global warming and they're getting worse and worse. They have particularly bad ones because the Californians build out into dangerous places. The Californians generally need volunteer fire services to put them out because they don't pay enough tax. Some of the firemen come from prisons who volunteer to get out. But in 2020, they couldn't use the prisoners because they all had COVID. So, that's a poly crisis, right? You have climate change, under-tax state, reliance on an overcrowded prison system, and then a pandemic that whoops you so that you can't actually put out the fire with the prison labor. That's a poly crisis moment.

I mean, I think there's a poly crisis brewing in US artificial intelligence policy. This is again a kind of like it's moderately scaled and it's not here yet, but it's really telling about how they're going to do this, right? So America, we don't know what AI is going to do with us. The current American policy is not effectively to regulate it. So that builds this growing risk of potentially this could be totally non-aligned and there's no guarantee, unlike in China I think, that it would ever be realigned. Then the Americans suddenly discover that the Chinese innovation model actually does work and DeepSeek is a real challenge. Then the Americans decide their hard answer to that is going to be just massively increased compute power. That's the way they're going to go about it. But for that you need electricity. And the American government right now is committed to climate change denial and is blocking the green energy revolution. So there isn't in fact an abundant supply of modern electricity in the US for the green expansion. So what do you do? Of all places in all the world, you go to the Gulf and you do a 600 billion deal with who? You do it with the Saudis to build your capacity, and then you greenlight massive exports of chips of Nvidia to Saudi Arabia to build your cycles there. And what could possibly go wrong? I mean, what could possibly go wrong, right? So that for me is look at the way in which all of those factors come together: the technology shock, the American impasse over green energy, the move to the outside, the choice of an authoritarian regime with extremely precarious legitimacy in Saudi Arabia of all places as your partner. But this for me is like point at that and you just kind of go, if that doesn't at some point break in an interesting way, it'd be quite surprising. If we look directly at your question and say what is China's role, again it's like highly perspectival, because you could say that China is America's poly crisis, and the way in which China figures in American policy discourse, you might as well just substitute China for poly crisis. And it ranges from the American conviction that sustainable development discourse at the UN is actually a CCP plot to smuggle CCP agenda into global politics, to the belief that the fentanyl crisis was China's reverse opium war on the United States, to the idea that DeepSeek fundamentally challenges American tech supremacy, to the idea that tripolar nuclear competition with China building a credible second strike capacity along with the Russian one means that the American nuclear arsenal, which by any reasonable measure you might think was huge, is not big enough, and so America needs more. And you can go on and go on. So from the American point of view, from the point of view of a certain sort of American view of the world, China is the poly crisis. It's China's growth. It's its historic challenge. It's the nature of China that constitutes for the Americans the pill they can't swallow. A more reasonable construction would be to say China's growth since, really if you look at energy since literally the year 2000, not the late 90s, but the year 2000, the explosive growth of fossil fuel energy consumption in China is the single largest accelerator of the global climate crisis there has ever been. Unlike say the Americans or the Europeans who didn't know what they were doing when they did the fossil fuel boom, the Chinese knew it exactly and they basically said our country deserves the following slice of the global carbon budget and we're going to go take it. And that is a perfectly reasonable, totally justice-based argument. It just does radically narrow the scope for everyone else in managing the climate crisis. And so then the next move that would be an exacerbating argument. The next move would be to say what we're also seeing in China specifically on that thread right is the most gigantic, the first truly adequate large-scale deployment, in terms of scale at least, of green energy sources and new energy. And so in that sense it would be China's growth, not just under the conspiratorial American construction but also by the metric of the climate change dynamic, is on the one hand the greatest accelerator of environmental tension but also, because of the genius of Chinese manufacturing and innovation, increasingly potentially our best hope of an adequately scaled solution. As you said that we all know that US basically built the order of the post World War II and they built this through some things like the Marshall Plan, but do you think it's possible for China to reconstruct the international rules nowadays in different ways, just like the Belt and Road or other cooperation ways.

Well, I think China de facto already does. But I think the thing to do is to step away from the idea of order as though there was something that clearly had existed right before, which was always, not just in moralistic terms, it was always double-sided, two-faced, inconsistent, incoherent. There were rules for some people and no rules for others. There's all of that. But also, even if we start from the premise that America had the power, more often than not what America was doing was actually inventing, reinventing, reproducing, recreating. If you look at NATO, it's been through dozens of iterations. If you look at what the IMF and the World Bank do, they're constantly reinventing themselves. So the thing that we call order and retrospectively look at and put it in the order box and say that was order, was actually more like a flow, right? It was something that had to be made and reproduced and then rethought and reinovated. Like the Marshall Plan was itself plan C. They'd already done A and B, both of which had failed, and then the Americans came out with the Marshall Plan, which also didn't deliver, and then they needed to come up with three further steps before the thing we think of as the postwar order actually existed. And so then the question really isn't can China create an order, because it's not obvious that America really created an order. The question is, can China do ordering things? And the answer to that is unambiguously, obviously yes. And it already does. De facto, China organizes a very significant part of global energy markets because it is by far the most dynamic and largest consumer. Raw material and commodity prices are heavily, heavily shaped by Chinese demand and by the way in which Chinese incredibly competent commodity dealers structure those markets. De facto, Chinese manufacturing standards are increasingly the norm of what manufacturing is. So those ordering steps are all open, all available, and there is really nothing stopping Beijing and other Chinese actors, private Chinese as well, from creating de facto zones of stability, of reliability. What's an order after all? An order is a predictable set of patterns that everyone who is part of it to some extent recognizes and is going to act around. Can China create zones like this? It already does. And so you know, will China ever be the United States in 1945? As soon as you ask that question, you know the answer. No, of course not. Nor would it want to be, because that was the result of a traumatic global war of which China was one of the principal protagonists and also victims. So who would want to start from there? I mean, there are people who literally say we need a kind of shock so we can have an order, and it's like that's totally the wrong way around. Why would you choose to have the shock? No, why don't we just work through the difficult complexity of the current moment and figure out simple things like can you connect China's payment systems to other people's credit cards? Like that's an ordering device. If you can, if those payment systems are actually connectable, they will create a patch of order. Everyone in the west will be happily using WeChat and Alipay for payments operations if they actually smoothly interconnected. Now, for a variety of different reasons, they don't. But you could create that order if you wanted to. And Chinese actors could do that quite powerfully. Would there be people that resist this? Yes, because every ordering move is also an assertion of look, my rules this way. How about it? Would you not want to accept this offer? And people are going to be uneasy about that in various ways. But yes, the answer to your question is China has that capacity, has that power, it has huge leverage in the world right now. I'm really struck by how much Chinese policymakers underestimate the significance of them entering into an arena. Just look what happened when they appeared to be brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Like everyone in the US was talking about it. The fact that China was willing to exert its undoubted influence as the biggest oil buyer over these two players, it's huge. So yes, I do think that China can do that.

Well, the biggest risk is that you get your hands dirty, and that people will point fingers and you get in trouble and you have to pick sides, and um, it can get risky. And the question really is, isn't that happening already anyway? And so at some level you've got to ask yourself, of course there are risks, but there are also risks in pretending that you can avoid them, right? There is a risk in just beginning to lose credibility and becoming to seem increasingly hypocritical. And it would be in a way easier to simply admit yes, there are certain sorts of supplies that we maintain and continue, and we do them for our own reasons. There would be something to be gained by a level of honesty. So the risks are there, but I genuinely believe that China has moved past the point where it's plausible for it to maintain the position of essentially a neutral whose positioning doesn't matter. One of the funnier headlines recently was 'China deploys two aircraft carriers to the Pacific.' And it was just like, if China has aircraft carriers, where do you think they're going to deploy to? The only ocean they can obviously go to is the Pacific, otherwise you just have to keep them in port all the time, right? So at that point you're in the game whether you like it or not. And so that's the point where, when you ask me what the risks are, the counterargument is what are the risks of not engaging? And one of the shocks of the last 10 years, one of the shocks which disoriented somebody like myself or disoriented somebody like Larry Summers, is that isn't our world anymore, right? Politics has come back whether we like it or not. And so then the hard work of doing the ordering does indeed have to begin. Poly crisis is not a fatalistic prediction of disaster, but it is a prediction of hard work. It is going to be harder to hold things together under these kind of circumstances. We are going to have to run faster. We're going to have to be smarter. I also remember that you have said in Financial Times that the climate may be the first big issue for China to overtake the worst.

Well, you know, to set the frame right, the geopolitics is dominated by the question of like the scale of Chinese rearmament versus American rearmament, and America has a huge advantage. Economists argue about the relative position of the Chinese economy and the US economy, and it depends which measure you use. If you use United Nations purchasing power parity figures, China's already substantially ahead. If you use current exchange rates, some economists will convince you that China will never overtake. But if you use a physical measure of production, China's already not just a little bit ahead, but far far ahead. And one physical measure of production and consumption is electricity. And China's electricity system today outputs twice as much power as the United States system. So if electricity is a common denominator of modern material civilization as a first approximation, China's economy is not a little bit bigger, let alone behind, it's twice as big as the US economy. Now that's where we then end up with the statement, well that has implications because what does China generate power from? It generates power from coal, overwhelmingly, certainly in the big push from the late 90s onwards. And so there was a debate in global climate policy circles about the scale and the relative proportion of China and the rest of the world. But in 2006, China's emissions overtook those of the United States and are now at a higher level than any country in the world ever. And that means that de facto, whether we like it or not, whether we're comfortable with it or not, whether China's comfortable with it or not, it is a more decisive player in this one dimension of human future than any other power has ever been. And that is something we have to come to terms with collectively. And it's a big shift and you can track it in the policy. And it's not, you say it's bold. You could say it's just been tracked in policy, which is that China's position in the early climate talks was we have the right to pollute. We're a developing country. We're exempt from measures. The Americans struggled with China over that. China struggled itself. It hit the pollution crisis of the 2010s and then under the sign of Sunnylands and the new model of great power relations, Xi Jinping and Obama came to terms and the Paris conference resulted, which didn't commit China to decarbonization until President Xi of his own volition in the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 2020 announced China's commitment to decarbonize at no later than 60. And at that point, China becomes for the first time in the history of global climate policy both the most polluting country and fully committed to decarbonization. So at no point previously has that ever been the case, because when the Americans were the most polluting country, they refused to commit to net zero. And all the countries which prior to China had committed to net zero were relatively small players like the Europeans. So for the first time in 2020, we have the biggest polluter committed to the science, which China doesn't allow any argument about really, and to a net zero track. And that's really the first time that climate politics globally gets serious, because up to that point we had willing people who were small and recalcitrant big players. And now since 2020 a new era begins. And when you then see that in combination with the scale of China's investment in solar and wind and the rollout of new energy vehicles, this is a scale of transition which is new. The drama of it is though that unlike the west where the energy transition is about bending the curve down from a relatively static level, it's like this and then you go down. China has to do a hairpin bend, right? Because China's emissions are still growing until this spring and then it needs to crash land them. And so it's a whole different scale and drama of energy politics. I think China's carbon neutrality target is too ambitious. Only 30 years to go to carbon neutral. It's much quicker than US and Europe. Do you think it's too ambitious? And how to keep balance from like the carbon neutral and their economic development, you know?

I mean, it is spectacularly ambitious. I don't disagree. It's also absolutely what's necessary if we're to avoid really catastrophic warming. It's as simple as that. And it is of course also true that India's trajectory has to be broken and shifted in a totally different direction. So I think the key then is to think through the ways in which the new energy revolution has in fact become itself a huge driver of growth in China. I mean last year for the first time the green energy component of China's investment was the single largest driver of Chinese growth. Now that's at a rate at 5% not seven or 8%. So it's a slower rate of growth, but I think what China is demonstrating is that that transition, though it does come with costs and those are undeniable and the transition costs are going to be real, is nevertheless also a source of innovation and it's a source of spectacular global leadership. So there are huge, potentially vast global markets for China's new energy exports. But I don't disagree with you. It is jaw-droppingly ambitious. But that's what we mean by saying we are in a moment of truly unprecedented challenge. It's precisely what you've registered, which is can we be serious? And the answer is if we want to stabilize short of three degrees of warming, we have to be serious. And if we aren't, and if you follow through in your logic and simply say this is unrealistic, well then what you have to be realistic about is that this hot weather that we're having in Beijing right now is just a mere taste of what's coming down the pike. So then the question is, is it realistic to think a city like Beijing can thrive if this is actually a cool day? So that's the, you see what I mean? That's the, you're not wrong. It's hugely ambitious. But what is the proposal with regard to the climate crisis otherwise?

I'm curious how to persuade European countries and US to accept us. The thing I hear again and again and again now, and it's new. I remember the first time it arose was two years ago in a Berlin policy forum on green energy and everyone was watching with awe as the Chinese built up the battery capacity because we exactly underestimate how quickly this has happened. Right? So the serious talk starts in Berlin in 2022, and I remember these Berlin bureaucrats going, you know what, what if we propose to the Chinese that we do joint ventures this time where the Chinese invest in Europe and we steal their IP, not the other way round. And it was like this moment of, oh, everyone around the table went, you know that's actually a really good idea. They said this, we might even be able to sell it. And that I think currently, if you're looking for ways to build relationship at the policy level, industrial level, business level with Europe, it's joint ventures. It's a willingness to invest. It's IP sharing. It's the same logic that worked in China in the 90s and the 2000s. And it'll be about the same things. It'll be about how you share IP, the willingness to transfer knowledge, the willingness to nativize over time, to transfer expertise to European humans who are going to do this. It's going to be all those kind of dimensions. And it will require patience and resilience from the Chinese side because the nerves are raw. People are jangling because the green energy story about the shock since 2020 is emblematic of the shift of the last 10 years. It's what people in the west now call the second China shock. And the first China shock was western elites, western policymakers to a very large extent built China into the global economy. China responds massively and it produces a social shock in the west. The second China shock is one that's driven largely from the Chinese side and it isn't Chinese firms being inserted into western supply chains. It's its own supply chains. And this is a huge significant historical shock and the scale now is spectacular. China, when we say China is responsible for roughly a third of global manufacturing and we sort of trot that out as a statistic, this is where the poly crisis thing kicks in. This is a moment where we should just pause and say, 'What did we just say? One country, one-third of everything that's made in the whole world in one country.' What did we just say? Like, are you serious? Is that actually what we're saying? One-third. And it's not cheap stuff. It's now really good stuff. And furthermore, in China you can make virtually everything. So it's not individual bits like in Europe. The individual European countries can make one little bit, but in China you can basically produce everything from start to finish. If you don't take seriously the impact that has on the people that you're dealing with, again, you're just not being realistic because that is intimidating to an extraordinary extent. It leaves everyone else feeling profoundly defensive. Their guard will go straight up. So if they say to you, could we do a tariff deal and do like 20% tariffs on Chinese EVs? My recommendation will be take the offer, and then let Chinese efficiency just outcompete that, and BYD will still, apparently I think insiders think that BYD can handle tariffs which are two or three times higher than that and still compete.

Exactly. So it so when you say how does China overcome fear, hostility, you know, and suspicion, I think it's actually starts by recognizing what China has done to the global division of labor, and then thinking through like how then one assimilates this to everyone else's plans, because it's otherwise you do become the poly crisis. I mean this is the sense in which then, because everything you just look around and you look at everything in your household and go where did it all come from, you know, and it's this staggering, staggering effect.

I think there's an element of typical protectionism about it. There is also an element of the disruption of the global trading system. But another way of thinking about protectionism is like what is it that you're protecting and why does it...

There is also an element of the disruption of the global trading system. But another way of thinking about protectionism is like what is it that you're protecting and why does it matter?

matter? Right? So Japan rice, it's a totem, it's a national totem, right? The Americans run into this problem again. Japan is not going to give ground easily on agricultural protection because the Japanese farmer is an icon of a certain sort of Japanese-ness, right? And so they can't, and it's just a classic problem, and everyone's known this in global trade policy for decades, right?

The thing about cars which Chinese people maybe don't understand is just how culturally significant the car is to the West and notably to Europeans. You might think of the car as essentially an American product, but the Americans don't in the end really care about their cars, not like Europeans do, right? And they drive trucks now. But for Europe, the car, they invented it, the Germans and the French together. For them, car manufacturing is this absolutely totemic industrial sector. And in Germany, it's a really big slice of the manufacturing workforce. So if China kind of blindly comes in and just says, 'Right, we're going to do like 60% of all EVs and they're the future,' that makes perfect sense, but it makes sense to a culture which doesn't really have car culture. And I've heard like BMW executives and they'll kind of look at you and go, 'The Chinese people don't understand about driving, like the pleasure of driving, right? The ultimate driving machine is BMW's slogan.' And one's tempted to say, having spent several weeks on Beijing roads, the answer is no, they really don't care about driving. Like they go from A to B. They don't go to B to B very concertedly. No one's showing off. You don't hear any revving engines. No one's showing off their toxic masculinity by like driving like a maniac or at least not very much on Beijing roads. Whereas that's what BMWs are for ultimately, right? BMWs, literally the secret behind a BMW is it's a weapon for a man. It's a penis extension that you can take onto the autobahn and go 200 km an hour. That's the whole point. And that's why it's so massively overengineered. And so when China comes along and says, 'Look, we've got this incredibly high functioning thing that also accelerates really well,' the Europeans, the policy makers, are really shocked. And unless you understand that kind of cultural significance, you aren't going to get past first base, really. You're going to arrive at some conclusion, but it does involve a degree of mutual comprehension, and there is a comprehension gap. It seems trivial and benign to talk about it, but in the European case, we're talking about millions of jobs, right? Over a million just directly in car manufacturing in Germany.

And they are represented by the most powerful trade union in Germany, the most powerful trade union in the world, IG Metall, and they have a direct line to the Social Democratic Party, and the Social Democratic Party always governs in Germany. And so you cannot make policy past the car industry in Germany. And it's not like BASF which can just simply say bye to Germany and just relocate to China because energy costs are lower. Like, the car industry has to stay. And again, so a smart Chinese policy would say, 'Okay, not very pleasant. These European Democrats are kind of weird, but the way their politics works is they have trade unions that represent workers and that goes to a Social Democratic Party.' Ought not to be too difficult for a party that calls itself Marxist to understand how this works. Workers, trade union, Social Democratic Party in government care about car making. Right? That's the line. And that is how policy would need to be clearly articulated. It needs to be strategic, right? It needs to understand that this is a path that you have to go down and work slowly over. The other thing though about the Europeans is they actually have an existential commitment to WTO rules. Why do they have an existential commitment? Because the EU is held together by rules on trade. That's the essence of the EU. It's a common market. To go back to our earlier conversation, it's ordering. And the ordering that takes place in the EU day to day, what holds it together, are trade rules. And so if you can say to the Europeans, 'Look, we want a trade rule conforming deal that will allow you a steady progression,' you're going to get somewhere with that.

Yes.

Hegeimon.

I'd be tempted to go even one step further, which is that, you know, the energy transition in the end after all involves a new type of state form, because one of the things you're going to do is build everything around electricity. And the thing about electricity is you're not really going to efficiently generate it locally. It's going to be worked. And so you're going to build huge networks. Chinese grid, State Grid, planners would like to build a global network of ultra-high-voltage direct transmission which only they can do. Like if we ever do that, it will be Chinese technology that does it. And at that point the word hegemony becomes completely relevant, right? Because what that is, is a form of, it's a fancy Greek way of saying soft power, right? It's power that is cloaked with consent and support and legitimacy and buy-in. And when you are taking electricity out of a system, you are effectively in a material sense saying, 'I buy into this system. I'm going to organize my daily commute, my school run around something I can plug into a grid. I need that grid. I really need that grid to work. I don't need that grid a little bit to work or just when I pay. It's existential to who I am that I'm able to just do this to go through my world.' And as China builds out the renewable revolution, what it's doing is also building a society organized around electricity more than any other fuel. And this fundamentally changes the politics of, you know, the material conditions of existence, so to speak, in terms of materialism, right? That is where then people's lives will be organized. And if the most ambitious Chinese plans are realized, then the electric vehicles are in a sense just the beginning of a regridding of global power. And their conversations about secret chips in Chinese cars that are used for monitoring moms on their way to school with their children, which is what the Americans are preoccupied with, is just the beginning, right? Because the actual conversation is going to be about who can control those super intelligent mega grids that will sustain this. And that's where hegemony really will be a relevant topic. And to go back to the earlier point, you know, it's no exaggeration. It's just without argument and literally true that China pioneered ultra-high-voltage direct current transmission. The State Grid planners took a look at the problem in 2005 and said, 'You know what, we need to be able to take power from the western provinces to the coast. How are we going to do this efficiently? The only way is to break through to an entirely huge new level of high voltage.' Who can do this in the world? They just took a scan of everyone else's electrical engineering and no one else could do it. So those are the moments where the game is really being changed, and one shouldn't underestimate the significance of that. And hegemony then becomes, I do think, not an exaggerated word.