Adam Tooze, Professor of History and Director of the European Institute at Columbia University, discusses Trump's recent foreign policy moves and the implications. He also weighs America's position in the oil markets in relation to the state of play in the Strait of Hormuz, as well as the possibility of the US putting boots on the ground in Iran.
But I just want to kick things off with the sort of recent development in President Trump's rhetoric. So just a couple of weeks ago he was talking about, okay, with the Iran war we are very much complete or pretty much complete. I think that's what he said. And then he moved on to other countries that need to help out with that situation. Not a lot of people actually stepped up to help out the US. He says it was a great test. What do you make of this?
Well, I mean, the one that we didn't talk about was Greenland. I mean, I was in Davos, and all of the conversation at Davos was about the American apparent threat or the considered and then decided otherwise to use force to seize Greenland. The famous Mark Carney speech about the rupture was made with reference to Greenland, not to Venezuela. So my sense is that the Trump administration is systematically probing the limits of America's power and it's doing so under a relatively diverse range of impulses.
There seems to be a Western Hemisphere Caribbean kind of focus, Central American focus. Cuba, Venezuela would fit in that ticket. I think they're deeply concerned about migration and so it fits into that and the violence we've seen with ICE. There seems also, however, to be a faction that, shall we say, is deeply concerned about the Middle East, is obviously in close alliance with Netanyahu in Israel. And if there's one strategy which would seem to really be executed here in this Iran operation, it's Israel's.
It's a long-standing preoccupation of Netanyahu in particular, who's focused much less on the Palestinian question than on the real geopolitical threat that Iran poses, which is a nation of 80 million people with real power. And so I think Netanyahu must be really feeling that his dreams are coming true, that the Americans are locked in and that other people then don't want to associate themselves with that project because for decades the Europeans in particular have been looking for a negotiated route with Iran. One may think what one will about how successful that's been, but that was the chosen strategy that's been overturned.
Yeah. And of course, Israel's pressure on the United States or the seeming pressure in all this. I mean, that was sort of confirmed by the resignation of the US national counterterrorism head as well. Do you see the scenario where this sort of gets some sort of a frozen war like sort of the situation that we have going on between Russia and Ukraine that it was disruptive at first and then it just keeps going for many years? I know that people are going with this premise that American voters don't like the US going to war, that President Trump may not do that. Well, here we are. He went for it and it may not end just because he wants to end it, right?
But it's one thing to freeze a war in the Donbas, the east of Ukraine, a derelict, you know, rust belt of the Soviet Union, and quite another to freeze a conflict in the Straits of Hormuz, where 20% of the world's fossil fuel supply transits. Not just that, we now know fertilizer, helium, I mean, it's like wars are a way of teaching us all geography, and we're all actually understanding how central this is. This was one of the most well-regarded centers of financial growth, of wealth management. We all know the Gulf stories and the way those were played, and a frozen conflict in this location would be a very different catalog.
And do you think it was about Trump getting energy from the United States and that helps out the dollar situation? Do you think a part of that has to do with that?
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Tooze, A. (2026, March 17). Trump is testing the limits of America's power, says Historian Adam Tooze [Interview transcript]. CNBC International Live. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227752/
MLA
Adam Tooze. "Trump is testing the limits of America's power, says Historian Adam Tooze." CNBC International Live, 17 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227752/.
BibTeX
@misc{tooze2026_1227752,
author = {Adam Tooze},
title = {Trump is testing the limits of America's power, says Historian Adam Tooze},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC International Live. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227752/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
