In late January 2025, 10 days after Donald Trump was sworn in for a second time as president of the United States, an economic conference in Brussels brought together several officials from the recently deposed Biden administration for a discussion about the global economy. In Washington, Trump and his wrecking crew were already busy razing every last brick of Joe Biden’s legacy, but in Brussels, the Democratic exiles put on a brave face. They summoned the comforting ghosts of white papers past, intoning old spells like “worker-centered trade policy” and “middle-out bottom-up economics”. They touted their late-term achievements. They even quoted poetry: “We did not go gently into that good night,” Katherine Tai, who served as Biden’s US trade representative, said from the stage. Tai proudly told the audience that before leaving office she and her team had worked hard to complete “a set of supply-chain-resiliency papers, a set of model negotiating texts, and a shipbuilding investigation”.
It was not until 70 minutes into the conversation that a discordant note was sounded, when Adam Tooze joined the panel remotely. Born in London, raised in West Germany, and living now in New York, where he teaches at Columbia, Tooze was for many years a successful but largely unknown academic. A decade ago he was recognised, when he was recognised at all, as an economic historian of Europe. Since 2018, however, when he published Crashed, his “contemporary history” of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath, Tooze has become, in the words of Jonathan Derbyshire, his editor at the Financial Times, “a sort of platonic ideal of the universal intellectual”.
Though he still teaches history, Tooze is also widely acknowledged as an expert on the infrastructure of global finance and the economics of the green-energy transition. He is the rare commentator who can speak credibly about the political economy of Europe, the US and China, and he has been an outspoken advocate on issues ranging from central-bank reform to Palestinian rights. In addition to being the author of five books, he writes regular columns and essays for outlets like the Financial Times and the London Review of Books, hosts podcasts in English and German, and publishes a wildly popular and influential Substack newsletter called Chartbook, which he sends out daily in English to more than 160,000 subscribers, including Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize-winning economist, and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary. Chartbook also goes out in a Chinese-language version that, Tooze estimates, received 30m total impressions last year.
Yet for all that, and despite being motivated occasionally by what he calls “an energy of wanting to put the world to rights”, Tooze is not generally regarded as an eager controversialist. (Last year, Krugman sounded delighted to see “the normally calm Tooze come across as a bit angry” in one of his Chartbook posts.) In person as in his work, Tooze prizes connection and synthesis, a tendency that helps explain why he is equally at home, and equally welcome, talking to activists in South Africa, or senators in Washington, or development economists in the West Bank, or financial executives in London, or Chinese Communist party officials in Beijing, or finance ministers in Berlin.
It was notable, then, that after joining the Brussels panel, Tooze didn’t waste much time before stating flatly that the Biden team had “failed in its absolutely central mission, which was to prevent a second Trump administration”. Not only that, he argued, but the dismantling of the liberal world order – something discussed with much rueful lamentation at the conference – had been hastened, not hindered, by the Biden veterans on stage. As he’d written a few months earlier, Tooze saw Biden no less than Trump aiming “to ensure by any means necessary” – including strong-arming allies – “that China is held back and the US preserves its decisive edge”.
“I feel the need to say something,” Tai said, when Tooze was finished. She recalled a parable Martin Sheen had delivered in front of the White House during the 25th anniversary celebration of The West Wing, the haute-liberal political fantasia that remains a touchstone for professional Democrats. Sheen’s story concerned a man who shows up at the gates of heaven and earns an admonishment from St Peter for his lack of scars. “Was there nothing worth fighting for?” St Peter asked the man. Tai turned the question on Tooze: “Where are your scars, Adam? I can show you mine.”
Recalling this exchange several months later, Tooze was still flabbergasted. “I’d be silly if I didn’t admit that it was a bruising encounter,” he told me recently, in one of three long conversations we had over the past year. Nevertheless, he said, “it confirmed my underlying theory about what was going on. These were a group of entirely self-satisfied American liberal elites who were enacting a morality tale in which Sheen and The West Wing and that whole highly sentimental vision of power and politics is a central device. She says this, I think, meaning to sound tough, like, ‘I’m the warrior. Who are you? You’re just some desktop guy.’ Which just shows how little she understands what I’m saying, which is: ‘You people are a bunch of sentimental schmucks who don’t understand that you lost. If you had any self-respect, you would not be on any podium again, ever, sounding off about anything. Because comrades, if we were in the 30s, I would have taken you out and shot you. You fail like this, you don’t get to come back and show off your wounds.’”
Though it’s difficult to remember now, there was a time when Joseph R Biden was hailed as a president with the transformative potential of a Franklin D Roosevelt or a Lyndon B Johnson. During the 2020 campaign, Biden had positioned himself explicitly as the moderate alternative to both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. After the election, however, he quickly made clear that he did not intend to govern as a doddering centrist placeholder. He seemed particularly keen to flatter the aspirations of the left wing of the Democratic party, which, despite Sanders’ defeat, was experiencing its most significant resurgence in half a century.
The early days of Biden’s presidency saw what appeared to be a new rapprochement between centrist liberals and the rising left. Tooze, a self-described “left-liberal”, was perhaps the representative intellectual figure of this development. Some of this had to do with Crashed, which established him as a leading economic commentator and found an admirer in Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats. Some of it also had to do with Tooze’s longstanding interest in climate policy, which was shaping up to be a central focus of the Biden administration. And some of it, too, had to do with a belated but intense engagement with Twitter, which he joined in 2015 at the urging of his daughter (then a teenager) when he was in his late 40s, where he soon gained a huge following.
Five years after Biden’s inauguration, the political atmosphere in the US could not be more different. Yet Tooze remains no less relevant as an intellectual force. Whereas once he had personified the appeal of high-technocratic expertise – the feeling that if you could just read widely enough and understand deeply enough, you might be able to chart a sensible approach to crises like climate change – today Tooze stands as one of the more eloquent analysts of a new and confusing world order.
“My basic wager in interpreting modern history is to bias toward the thought that it might be unprecedented,” Tooze told me. “I’m interested in the way the present continuously breaks us. It challenges us. It does not, when you’re honest and serious about it, confirm what you know.” In The Deluge, his 2014 book about the legacy of the first world war, Tooze described the way early-20th-century world leaders confronted “the radical novelty” of a world in which the US economy was newly dominant. These days, Tooze spends most of his time tracking a dynamic that he believes is similarly unprecedented and consequential: the rise of China as an economic superpower.
In Tooze’s view, what he calls the “radicalism of the present” keeps many people, including policymakers, from seeing the world as it actually is. Hence his argument to the Brussels panel that Biden and his staff were not the defenders of the liberal world order that they imagined themselves to be. Hence, too, the claim he made in this newspaper, a few weeks before the 2024 election, that “Bidenomics [was] Maga for thinking people”. And hence his belief that – even though the past year has seen the darkest warnings of the Biden and Harris campaigns come to gruesome fulfilment – the American liberal obsession with Trump is too often framed in terms borrowed from decades past. “Why can’t we have new bad things?” he asked me at one point. “Like really new, really bad things?”
Though he only leads two courses a year at Columbia, Tooze still thinks of himself primarily as a teacher. His job, he told me, “is to help people understand the situation that we’re in, as clearly as we can. It’s to go, ‘Look at this, look at this: what does this tell us if we pin our eyes open and don’t flinch and don’t blink?’ And then to say that out loud.”
A glance at Tooze’s family tree or his sterling CV makes it tempting to imagine his career as an untroubled glide among warm updrafts carrying him along from the day he was born. In conversation he does not obscure his many privileges: the fact, as he puts it, that he is “the product of five generations of university-educated women”, or that his mother’s parents were wealthy cosmopolitans who published influential reports on nutrition and took Le Monde as their daily newspaper, or that his father was a prominent molecular biologist.
Yet Tooze’s upbringing was more complicated than that sketch implies. His maternal grandfather, Arthur Wynn, was a civil servant who had also been – as Tooze and his family learned alongside the public in the 1980s – a Soviet spy. Tooze still speaks fondly of Arthur and his wife, Peggy; they are the joint dedicatees of Wages of Destruction, his 2006 book about Nazi economics. But he also describes Arthur as “a tough, tough, mean son of a bitch”.
Tooze describes his father, John, as “a guy that got shit done” and also as someone with a well-deserved reputation for what we now call toxic masculinity: “I regularly would have people come up to me in life-science centres and say, ‘Does your name mean what I think it means?’ And then the reaction would be, ‘I’m sorry,’ or, ‘I hate your father.’”
It was John’s work that took the family to Heidelberg in 1974, when Tooze was six years old. West Germany was reckoning with its Nazi past, and Tooze says that the ambient political atmosphere weighed heavily on his youth. “I spent a lot of time identifying with the perpetrator, asking myself what kind of a Heydrich I would have been.” At that time in that place, the question was far from abstract. “I went to school with Albert Speer’s grandson. We were the big science dignitaries that arrived in the little village outside Heidelberg where the Speers lived, and they made us welcome. My parents were invited to dinner, and the Speers said, ‘Do you need some furniture? Here’s a table.’ Literally the whole time we were in Germany we were eating off Albert Speer’s table.”
The difficult legacy of the difficult men in his family ultimately steered Tooze away from economics, his first academic love. Though he was fascinated by the field, and good at it, he also recognised in it “an absolutely toxic culture”. By the time he graduated he knew he had to leave the discipline. “I had a terrible relationship with my father, and I couldn’t be around that kind of academic man,” he says.
With this resolution in mind, Tooze moved back to West Germany in 1989, just in time to see the Berlin Wall come down. That experience was something other than exhilarating: “I was quite shaken by it, to be honest, because I realised at that point that the West German bubble that I’d grown up with was disappearing before my eyes.” Like Brexit a quarter-century later, Germany’s reunification “massively destabilised” the hybrid identity he’d built for himself.
In the newly unified Germany, Tooze did historical research that ultimately prompted him to undertake a doctorate in history at the London School of Economics. The change in field suited him, but it did not exactly settle his existential unease. It was not until he got a teaching job at Cambridge, after his PhD, that he felt entitled to start assembling a library of his own. “Before that I felt so insecure. I didn’t feel I should own anything permanent.”
Though he was writing books for general audiences, even as late as 2015 Tooze was still, in his self-deprecating description, “a secret name that grad students knew about”. Crashed changed all that. The book had its origins in a seminar on the philosophy of history he taught at Yale, which included a group of students who were involved in left politics. “Working with that cluster really just changed my life,” Tooze says, not least because it reawakened in him a political impulse that had more or less fallen dormant. The class showed Tooze that there was an opening for a comprehensive account that would help his new friends on the left understand what had happened during the financial crisis.
Gillian Tett, Tooze’s fellow columnist for the FT and the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, his alma mater, told me that “before 2008, it was incredibly hard to get a picture of how the entire global financial system worked as a single organic unit”. In Crashed, Tooze analysed the global economy as a matrix of interrelated corporate balance sheets, rather than as a point-to-point comparison of national economies. Tett says that this approach gave him “a very good overarching framework” for analysing how money actually moved around the world, which proved crucial for understanding the crisis.
Joseph Stiglitz, a colleague of Tooze’s at Columbia who won a Nobel prize in Economics in 2001, says that being a historian gave Tooze “a big advantage” in analysing the crisis. Modern economics tends to focus on mathematical models, an approach that, while fruitful in some cases, often struggles with multifaceted events like the financial crisis. “The world is complicated, and when you put all the pieces together, the mathematical model becomes so difficult that you can’t understand it,” Stiglitz told me recently. For Tooze, by contrast, “the freedom from the constraints of writing down a fully articulated mathematical model gave him the ability to give a true story of what was going on”.
Crashed was published in 2018, two years after Trump’s first electoral victory prompted many Democrats to reconsider the party’s longstanding embrace of neoliberalism. Against the foundational neoliberal presumption that the point of politics is to serve the market, Tooze supplied a 600-page demonstration of the “irreducibly political” foundations of the global economic system. Crashed was especially popular among Democrats who wanted to argue that Obama’s fiscal caution in the wake of the 2008 crisis was responsible for the rise of Donald Trump. Tooze thinks the situation was more complicated than that, but he makes no secret of the fact that he wrote Crashed “under the influence of left Dems from whom I’d acquired this narrative of the basic conservatism of the Obama response to the crisis”.
In 2019, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, invited Tooze to Washington DC, to address a caucus luncheon. Schumer’s interest reflected a new determination on the part of Democrats in Washington to test the Keynesian dictum that “anything we can actually do, we can afford”. Tooze recalls the senator engaging him in a conversation after his keynote. “Schumer said: ‘OK, Tooze, am I hearing you right? Are you saying that what we should be doing here is focusing on a massive investment surge? We should not be prioritising debt as a main concern? I said, ‘Yeah.’ He looked around at three people in the audience and said, ‘Do you hear what this guy’s saying? Next time we have a chance, we go big.’ I walked out and went, ‘Jesus Christ, did that just happen?’”
Crashed vaulted Tooze into what he calls a “global existence” that has him travelling frequently and speaking earnestly about the community of people he runs into at conferences and in airport lounges around the world. Though not a journalist – with a few exceptions, his contemporary histories rely on documents more than interviews – Tooze shares the journalistic impulse to see “policy processes reasonably up close”. He also clearly enjoys being a sounding board for people with the power to set national, continental and even global agendas: “They have the sense that you understand the way in which these pieces move. And so you become a point of confidence, somebody they feel they can speak to openly because you clearly get it,” he told me.
When Covid hammered the global economy in March 2020, Tooze recognised echoes of the events he had written about in Crashed. “The crazy thing was,” he told me, “we all knew we were playing a version of 2008, but it wasn’t quite the same and somebody needed to explain how. There’s a handful of people in the world that are going to try to explain this to people, and one of them is me.” A month later, in the Guardian – and later in his book Shutdown, published in 2021 – he did just that, detailing the unprecedented measures central banks deployed to stave off a total collapse. All through the early months of the pandemic, he says, “there were days when I was publishing two things a day: the Guardian, the New York Times, the FT. This was before I was doing Chartbook. I wasn’t sleeping.”
In Germany, when Olaf Scholz was finance minister, Tooze was invited to speak on panels to provide intellectual support for Scholz’s efforts to move the ministry away from its traditional fiscal conservatism. And in the spring of 2020, during the delicate negotiations over an EU pandemic-recovery plan, Tooze acted as an informal messenger between the German and Italian governments.
In the US, meanwhile, Schumer continued to use Crashed as a policy playbook. “In the spring of 21, I started getting these texts from friends on the left wing of the Democratic party going, ‘You’re not going to believe this. I’ve just been in a meeting with Schumer and he said, we all have to read this guy, Tooze, on going big. Schumer was going, like, do you know this guy? T-O-O-Z-E?”
Tooze says that Schumer’s staff stayed in contact with him throughout the drawn-out negotiations over what would become the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate bill. In 2022, he was summoned to the White House for consultations. He accepted the invitation – largely, he says, because “it’s the one and only time I’ll ever get to the White House, so whatever, let’s go and see.”
The encounter was disillusioning. Already by that point Tooze had been frustrated with Biden on a number of fronts, including the compromises of the Inflation Reduction Act, which was vastly smaller than originally intended, “conservative in its political framing”, and “larded with concessions to fossil fuel interests”. Yet nothing seems to have disturbed Tooze quite as much as seeing what he calls the “narcissism” of the Biden team at close proximity. In all his many years of therapy, he told me – he has been seeing a therapist multiple times a week for a decade – there were only two occasions on which he sought help specifically in response to political incidents. One was Brexit – “if there’d been an armed-resistance wing I would have wanted to be Michael Collins,” he says – and the other was his encounter with the Biden administration.
“Part of what motivated the unhinging of my relationship with the Biden people was being invited on to calls with their climate team,” he told me. He cited a conference call with Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, that took place in 2023, not long after a Chinese balloon drifted into US airspace and sparked an international incident that Tooze described in Chartbook as “the first, bona fide war scare of our new era of Sino-US confrontation”. On the phone call, he said, “It was just, ‘Oh Jake, you guys are rock stars.’ This was in the middle of the balloon incident, where we were sliding towards war and everyone in DC knew it.”
One of Tooze’s friends, the novelist Zoe Dubno, told me that Sullivan is often “enemy number one” at Tooze’s dinner parties, where many of the guests, like Sullivan, are products of elite Ivy League educations: “He hurts everyone because they’re like, ‘That could be me. If we decided to be completely compromised fuckheads, that’s the kind of evil that is available to me.’”
Despite his political flirtations on both sides of the Atlantic, Tooze says he has “a very ambiguous relationship to power”, an uneasiness he traces back to his lifelong effort not to be like his father. “The thing that haunts me is that I know perfectly well that I could be that kind of person in the world,” he said. For these reasons, he has tried to maintain an “obliqueness” and a “distance” from power. “I look at myself and say, a system which puts somebody like me in charge is a bad system.”
Not everyone thinks this effort has been successful. In 2019, in the New Left Review, Perry Anderson, the venerable leftist historian, published a scathing 16,000-word review-evisceration of Tooze that took for its formal targets the loose trilogy comprising Wages of Destruction, The Deluge and Crashed, and ended up attacking his entire modus vivendi.
The fiercest aspect of Anderson’s essay addressed Tooze’s politics. All three books, Anderson argued, share a telling fault: namely, a failure to reckon adequately with the deep forces that gave shape to the events he described. In Wages of Destruction and The Deluge, Anderson says Tooze approaches each of his subjects “in medias res, dispensing with a structural explanation of its origins”.
Anderson is a Marxist, and so it’s not particularly surprising that he was unimpressed by Tooze’s self-description as a “left-liberal”, a compound phrase that, he noted, “has often, perhaps typically, proved unstable”. Nor was it difficult to see how someone with Anderson’s theoretical views would decide that Tooze was no true leftist at all.
By the end of the essay, however, that latter judgment has expanded well beyond the content of Tooze’s books into a sneering indictment of his whole public existence. The breadth of interests, audiences and sympathies that for so many of Tooze’s admirers mark his signal virtue stood for Anderson as proof of his political unreliability. “Tooze spreads himself widely, and his accents and formulations vary from place to place,” Anderson wrote. “That’s often the price of a growing reputation [and] shouldn’t be taken too seriously. To criticisms of inconsistency, he can in any case reply quite reasonably that nothing he has written falls outside the parameters of a basic commitment to liberalism as it has developed in the west from the time of Wilson and Lloyd George to that of Geithner and Macron.” (In the context of the New Left Review, these points of comparison could hardly be more damning.)
Anderson’s implication that Tooze is essentially keeping two sets of books – one set of accounts for his lefty graduate students, another for his discussion partners at Davos – becomes the basis for his essay’s bitter final judgment: “In today’s world, the question can be asked: how far does that differ from running with the hare and hunting with the hounds – indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds?”
Tooze does not hide the devastation he felt on reading Anderson’s essay, or the fact that he still thinks about it often. He told me that his disorientation had much to do with his longstanding admiration for his antagonist. Tooze has subscribed to the NLR since his 20s, has written for it several times, and says he always read Anderson’s essays “religiously”.
Perhaps predictably, Tooze rejects much of Anderson’s critique. He is also plainly offended that his attempt to be honest about who he is, and where he’s coming from, was taken by Anderson as a kind of shiftiness, or even hypocrisy. Over the past decade or so, Tooze’s politics have shifted notably leftward. Yet Tooze still feels it imperative to acknowledge “how deeply I am the product of the circumstances I was raised in”. As he put it to me at his office, last April, “I take that more seriously than the average academic leftist. Because I don’t imagine that by virtue of thinking a bunch of radical thoughts, I can get more than a little bit of the way towards escaping my professional upper-middle class identity. I’m a senior professor at an immensely rich private university. Where do I get off kidding myself about this?”
In another conversation, in October, Tooze noted that he had done “a lot of activism around green politics and central banking and naming and shaming the IMF economists”. His voice rose to an exasperated pitch as he imagined a conversation with Anderson: “It’s like, ‘Show me your cards. Where the fuck have you been on any of these issues? What’s your position on climate? Where were you with the Green New Deal? Where have you been on Gaza?’”
More surprisingly, Tooze said that Anderson’s attack helped him clarify his own principles and practices. Anderson used the phrase “in medias res” as a jab at Tooze’s neglect, as he saw it, of the deep political and economic forces that shaped his narratives. Yet Tooze has come to embrace in medias res both as “a very succinct summation of the challenge that I’m particularly interested in” and as a simple but profound description of the basic human situation. In his view, there is no escaping the middle of things: every one of us is born, lives and dies in a rushing flow of events that precedes us and will outlast us.
He told me that he is not a Marxist in part because he thinks treating a body of theory produced in the middle of the 19th century as “the be-all and end-all” – a stable point from which one might stand outside history and discern its hidden forces and patterns – is “a lazy way of dealing with reality”. To accept the radicalism of the present, he says, means acknowledging that you can’t understand history before it happens: “If you’re in the middle of shit, you don’t actually know what the shit is that you’re in the middle of.”
Last spring, Tooze became an American citizen. The decision predated Trump’s return to office and had mostly to do with the precarity Tooze felt previously: “If you’re in a green-card situation, you do not want to be arrested. And it is remarkably easy to get arrested in this country.” Nevertheless, he admits that he considered leaving the US after Trump was re-elected. He was particularly frustrated by the situation at Columbia. On the one hand, he was not eager to watch, as he had during Trump’s first term, another “ding-dong battle between Trump and indignant New York Times-reading liberals” on the faculty. On the other hand, he’d been appalled to see how many of his colleagues, including serious leftists, had gone quiet during the Gaza turmoil on campus.
Tooze himself has been vocal in his defence of the rights of both Palestinians and pro-Palestinian protesters; an online watchlist featured video screenshots that showed him in an orange faculty vest at a 2024 Columbia protest. He acknowledged that he felt a freedom to speak his mind for “thoroughly bourgeois reasons”. Thanks to Chartbook, he said, which brings him more income than his salary at Columbia, “If I get fired from this job, I walk away. I’m totally fine.” Still, he was dismayed at how much the fear of losing their accumulated academic privileges had “constrained people in what they’ve been willing to say. They are so fucking scared of losing that. It’s disgusting how scared they are.”
Tooze says he decided to stay in the US in large part because his daughter lives here. He was confirmed in that decision, however, by news that three of his former colleagues at Yale, Timothy Snyder, Marci Shore and Jason Stanley, were moving to Canada. “Their decision just radically clarified it for me. Because it’s absolutely the wrong decision in every respect: it’s wrong politically, it’s wrong ethically. Even if, as Tim Snyder has claimed, it has nothing to do with politics, the optics are terrible. They should have deferred the move for 12 months.”
Tooze is still reluctant to use the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s government, even as he recognises “the possibility of a kind of escalation here towards something truly catastrophic”. Tooze told me that his increasingly lonely resistance to that term has much to do with not wanting to shoehorn the present into the past. When I pressed him on the question, though, he also admitted a frustration with the kind of people who invoke the analogy, and the reasons they invoke it. He allowed that “fascist” might be a useful way to emphasise the radical character of Trump’s rule but said he still didn’t like the way the analogy encouraged the kind of smug moral satisfaction that he came to despise in the Biden administration. He noted that he keeps several models of Soviet T-34 tanks in his office at Columbia to remind himself, and his visitors, that it was not high-minded western ideals like democracy and freedom that defeated the Nazis in the second world war. “If you’re willing to admit that it was the Red Army that beat fascism,” Tooze said, somewhat grudgingly, “then you can have your fascism analogy.”
Over the past year, in all the many parts of the Toozeosphere – the newsletters, the podcasts, the columns – Tooze has diligently tried to make sense of Trump’s second term. He has covered Trump’s tariffs, his Gaza peace plan, his abduction of Venezuela’s president, and his soya bean deal with Xi Jinping. He has also wrestled publicly with one of the central questions that any analyst of this bizarre period in American history must confront: namely, whether the possibility of “making sense of Trump” is its own kind of delusion – sanewashing, as it’s sometimes called. Tooze doesn’t think so. Though Trump himself is “obviously a degenerate buffoon”, Tooze’s analysis goes further. “If it’s true that the key to decoding what’s going on is facelifts and boob jobs at Mar-a-Lago, why? How do we make sense of that?”
Yet in our conversations as well as in his writing, he often seemed less than energised whenever the subject turned to Trump. He acknowledged as much. Though he sees Trump undertaking a “profound reshaping of American society”, Tooze also made it clear that he interprets Trump as a symptom rather than a cause of the US’s decline. And that decline, while consequential, is far less interesting to Tooze than the concomitant rise of China, which has recently become his all-consuming obsession.
Working on Crashed convinced Tooze that China was on a trajectory to overtake the US as the dominant global economic power, but he says there is also a generational component to his interest. While he travelled frequently to the US with his family as a child, “I just wasn’t twigged into the significance of what was going on in China.” He has lately felt himself rushing to catch up.
This summer and last, Tooze travelled to Tianjin and Dalian for the summer Davos meeting, and lately he has been taking Chinese lessons three times a week. That endeavour, Tooze says, was largely motivated by his relationship with a Chinese journalist and podcaster named Qing Wang: “Her fluency in English expanded this huge emotional world for us, and I really urgently want to reciprocate.” (Tooze has been married twice; he separated from his second wife in 2023.) In a Chartbook published last May, Tooze described using ChatGPT to help him translate Mao’s Little Red Book from Mandarin into Pinyin into English, “a dizzying experience” that ended with him watching DeepSeek, a Chinese AI engine, refuse to translate Mao once its censorship training kicked in: “Hello, I’m unable to answer this question at the moment. Let’s switch topics and continue our conversation!”
Tooze says that learning Chinese has been a lesson in humility: “I am not super good at it. Being in China is hugely irritating if you’re a lower-intermediate level, because there’s so many characters you know you ought to know. It’s like having a mosquito bite on your brain like you’re constantly trying to itch.”
One weeknight in October, Tooze gave a sold-out lecture to about 400 people at the New School, in Manhattan. He opened the lecture by recalling a “silent disco” experience he’d had in China over the summer, when he stood on a street in Chengdu and saw, but did not hear, hundreds of electric vehicles whiz past him. In that moment he realised that China’s transition to electric power was not some future prospect but a fait accompli.
As he flipped through his presentation, which reproduced several graphs and quotations that had appeared in Chartbook, Tooze narrated a winding story about the transition from fossil fuels to green energy. As ever, he brought in an astonishingly wide range of references: quotes from late-20th-century social theorists like Ulrich Beck and Stuart Hall appeared on his slides, as did statistics about Prius sales and American natural-gas production.
Forty-five minutes into his talk, he showed one of his favourite graphs, which charts global coal production going back to 1700 – a summary, as he described it, of “the fossil fuel history of our species”. On the left side of the chart, up to 1850 or so, coal production everywhere is essentially a flat line. Between 1850 and 2000, the period of western industrial development, the lines for Britain, Germany and the US all leap off the baseline. But the point of the graph is the blue line that belongs to China, which ramps up starting in 1950, overtakes the US around 1990, and becomes almost a vertical line for a decade starting in 2000. Since 2010 China has produced at least three times as much coal per year as the US did at its peak.
Tooze likes the graph because it demonstrates, in especially dramatic terms, a point he returns to often. What’s happened in China over the past 70 years – specifically the process of urbanisation powered by all that coal, which brought more than 800 million Chinese into cities – is simply unprecedented. Also unprecedented is the speed and scale of China’s green-energy rollout. As he put it on a slide in his lecture: “China is the climate crisis and its solution”.
Tooze surprised me at one point by suggesting that he’s not even sure that climate is the biggest environmental problem the world is facing: “Biodiversity loss and pollution may do us in first.” Nevertheless, he said, the climate crisis is “happening with increasing speed, and it’s happening all over the world, and in the last 25 years it’s happening with that dramatic force because of China”.
At the New School, Tooze made a similar argument. He cited another favourite statistic: whereas the US’s total installed solar capacity is on the order of 250GW, “China currently has the capacity to churn out 1,200GW of photovoltaic panels in a single year.” In those Chinese solar panels Tooze sees a climate-era analogue to the Soviet T-34 tanks. At development and climate meetings, he said, you can go a long time without hearing anyone acknowledge that China matters vastly more to the climate-change story than anything happening anywhere else, very much including the US. The point of all this, Tooze insists, is not to chasten liberal self-regard – or not only that. The point is to get people to confront our radical new reality.
Tooze told me that the climate book he started working on after Crashed, which is now nearing completion, will argue “that if we’re serious in the west, if you’re serious about climate, then you have to face the popular front question”. In other words, many of the same countries that chose 80 years ago to ally with the Soviet Union to fight Germany will have to decide whether and on what terms they want to work with an economically dominant China on the climate problem.
Tooze thinks there are two available choices. One involves a “truly escalated hard-power competition”. The other option involves finding an accommodation with Chinese partners that, as Tooze puts it, “include Stalinists – proper Stalinists”. He told me that while he sometimes gets accused of being a “useful idiot” for the Chinese Communist party, he is not naive about the regime. In Tianjin this summer, he was overcome by a “sadness” when seeing a massive conference centre that was under construction. “It’s as though you were watching the pyramids being constructed. The pyramids are very impressive, but you don’t get to see the forced labour. China right now is like watching the pyramids being constructed in real time. You see all of the inequality. You see the Pharaonic ambition. All along the edge of it you’ve got these people sleeping in their cars and slumped over their mopeds.
“The moral weight of that is what we have to wrestle with,” Tooze says. Still, it’s clear which option he prefers. “My deep conviction is that the west needs to accept the end of its era of global domination. That doesn’t mean that we have to give up our own values, or not defend our own perfectly legitimate interests in our own system, or that we should not be absolutely clear-eyed about the nature of the Chinese regime.” What it does mean, he says, is embracing a deep realism of a sort that the west – and the US in particular – has never exactly been famous for. Actual progress, he believes, will require us to accept the humbling imperatives of the unprecedented present moment. As he put it in his New School lecture: “Ours is a bit part and not the starring role. We’re not the love interest. This song is not about us.”
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