Adam Tooze

On 20 January 2025 Donald Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States. At the time of writing, it seems likely that the Republicans will win control of the House as well as the Senate. For the Democrats it is a major defeat. Never before has so much money been spent on a US election, to so little avail. For all Trump’s hobnobbing with billionaires, Harris...

As sparks​ fly up from the welding rods, the beak of a bald eagle emblazoned on the welder’s mask curves menacingly towards the viewer. With comic-book subtlety the image screams: American industrial power at work. It’s an image of industrialism more redolent of socialist realism or the New Deal than of the 21st century. And yet there is nothing tongue in cheek about it. The...

Given the reality of the underlying conflict, division and strife are not to be regretted, but embraced – an essential Leninist lesson. To adopt an antagonistic stance is to do no more than respond adequately to the situation. As Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective conclude in White Skin, Black Fuel, ‘if nothing else, the anti-climate politics of the far right should shatter any remaining illusion that fossil fuels can be relinquished through some kind of smooth, reasoned transition ... A transition will happen through intense polarisation and confrontation, or it will not happen at all.’ From this point of view, the question isn’t whether liberal activists do or don’t want to engage in sabotage. If we keep to our current course, sabotage is coming. If it isn’t directed from the top, it will bubble up from below. The question is whether the mainstream climate movement can ready itself for the agonising dilemmas to come. Can it sustain its coherence and momentum in the face of crisis, violence, division and, quite likely, defeat?

‘If it were announced that we faced a threat from space aliens and needed to build up to defend ourselves,’ Paul Krugman said in 2012, ‘we’d have full employment in a year and a half.’ If 21st-century America needed an enemy, China was one candidate. On foreign policy, Krugman is perhaps best described as a left patriot. Where he had once downplayed the impact of Chinese imports on the US economy, he now declared that China’s currency policy was America’s enemy: by manipulating its exchange rate Beijing was dumping exports on America. But to Krugman’s frustration Obama never turned the pivot towards Asia into a concerted economic strategy. You might argue that in Covid we have found an enemy of precisely the kind Krugman was imagining. As far as Europe is concerned, an alien space invasion isn’t an implausible model for Covid. This novel threat broke down inhibitions in Berlin, and the Eurozone’s response was far more ambitious than it was after 2008. But America isn’t the Eurozone. For all Krugman’s gloom, it didn’t take a new world war to flip the economic policy switch. 

The mistake in thinking that we are in a ‘new Cold War’ is in thinking of it as new. In putting a full stop after 1989 we prematurely declare a Western victory. From Beijing’s point of view, there was no end of history, but a continuity – not unbroken, needless to say, and requiring constant reinterpretation, as any live political tradition does, but a continuity nevertheless. Although American hawks have only a crude understanding of China’s ideology, on this particular matter they have grasped the right end of the stick. We have to take seriously the CCP’s sense of mission. We should not comfort ourselves with the thought that because nationalism is the main mode of Chinese politics today, Xi’s administration is nothing more than a nationalist regime. China under the control of the CCP is, indeed, involved in a gigantic and novel social and political experiment enrolling one-sixth of humanity, a historic project that dwarfs that of democratic capitalism in the North Atlantic.