How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze
About this episode
Klein asks historian Adam Tooze what the world makes of Trump's America after a Davos where attendees recognized the U.S.-led order has ruptured. Tooze argues that Canadian prime minister Mark Carney's warning went beyond power shifting: the international culture itself has changed toward bullying and naked force. Joe Biden attempted one last restoration of liberal hegemony, Tooze says, but could not reconcile domestic economic nationalism with allied expectations. Trump, by contrast, casts America as globalization's victim and prefers transactional leverage over strategic industrial policy — a stance China has exploited. China's industrial and electrification rise is real, but Tooze rejects an automatic succession from American to Chinese hegemony; Beijing offers no governing model with broad appeal. China and Russia share a narrative about 1989 and Soviet collapse, yet remain distinct. The likely future, they conclude, is not one coherent new order but overlapping, pragmatic efforts at ordering a fractured world.