How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

What It Covers

Historian Adam Tooze analyzes the rupture in global order following Trump's 2025 Davos appearance, where Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared an end to the old American-led system. Tooze examines China's industrial transformation, the Biden administration's strategic failures, and the shift from rules-based multilateralism to power-based spheres of influence among major nations.

Key Questions Answered

• •China's Industrial Scale: China built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail while California failed to complete 500 miles. Eighty-eight percent of Chinese homes were constructed since the early 1990s. China poured more concrete in three years than America did in the entire twentieth century, demonstrating unprecedented industrial capacity that reshapes global manufacturing and infrastructure development capabilities.
• •Solar Manufacturing Dominance: China produces 1,000 gigawatts of new solar panel capacity annually, creating the industrial infrastructure needed to stabilize global climate at scale. Europe imports 90 percent of solar panels from China. The Biden administration knowingly retarded America's energy transition through tariffs to maintain geopolitical leverage, prioritizing power competition over climate action despite available technology.
• •Biden's Strategic Contradiction: The Obama and Biden administrations attempted to restore liberal hegemony through Atlanticism and industrial policy, but couldn't deliver domestic trade deals or market access. The Inflation Reduction Act required economic nationalism that offended allies. This represented a last-ditch effort to revive an idealized American leadership model that promised more than it could deliver domestically or internationally.
• •Trump's Power Conception: The Trump administration views America as embattled and victimized by globalization, lacking coherent industrial strategy beyond tariffs. They measure power through investment attraction (1.5 trillion target), large military artifacts, and transactional deal-making with major powers. Unlike Biden's systematic chip export controls, Trump pursues blunt instruments without the detailed supply chain mapping that characterized previous administration's China policy.
• •Sino-Russian Alignment Foundation: China and Russia bond over shared interpretation of 1989 Soviet collapse as world-historic disaster caused by party degeneracy and Western thinking. Xi Jinping's faction believes Deng Xiaoping made the correct choice suppressing Tiananmen demonstrators to prevent Soviet-style collapse. This common historical understanding, not ideological identity, drives their alliance against American unipolarity and creates pragmatic energy and strategic cooperation.
• •Multipolar Stability Architecture: Mark Carney's 2019 Jackson Hole paper argued multipolar overlapping networks could provide more stability than bipolar or unipolar systems. Rather than seeking single hegemonic order, the future involves multiple ordering attempts creating mesh-like stability. With 30-40 highly competent nation-states, the planet faces unprecedented complexity requiring new frameworks beyond historical hegemonic transition models.