How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The old world order is dying. What new world order — if any — is struggling to be born? I can’t think of a week when it felt clearer that an era was coming to an end. Whatever people thought America was, at least for a couple of decades, it’s something else now. The killing of Alex Pretti and the fact that it was recorded on video that plainly contradicted the Trump administration’s initial narrative made that clear. Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, also drove home that point when he declared at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world was in the midst of a “rupture.” What do people think of America now in Europe? In China? And if American hegemony is coming to an end, what comes after that? Adam Tooze is a historian at Columbia University and a chronicler of crises. The Guardian recently called him “the crisis whisperer.” He’s written a number of books about the times when systems fall apart and new orders emerge, including “Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.” And on his Substack, Chartbook, he tracks the unfolding crises and power shifts, in particular the rise of China. He also had a front-row seat to the chaos of Davos last week, moderating a panel that included Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary. I wanted to talk to Tooze about what he saw at the World Economic Forum, how the world’s understanding of the U.S. is changing and how he’s making sense of this moment. Mentioned: Crashed by Adam Tooze “Chartbook” Substack by Adam Tooze “The Empty Chamber” by George Packer “The growing challenges for monetary policy in the current international monetary and financial system", speech by Mark Carney Book Recommendations: Diary of a Madman and Other Stories by Lu Xun The Southern Tour by Jonathan Chatwin Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The There's this quote from the Italian theorist Antonio Gramsci that has been making the rounds a lot over the past few years.
0:38.9	It goes, the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying but the new cannot be born.
0:46.5	In this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.
0:51.9	There's also a looser translation of that last line that you hear sometimes.
0:56.2	Now is a time of monsters. It sure feels like the time of monsters. It sure feels like a time of morbid
1:05.0	symptoms. In our last episode, we talked about how Davos last week seemed to be this wake-up moment for the world,
1:12.6	when Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, said in his speech that we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
1:19.6	You then turned on the TV and you watched agents of the American government killing protesters on the streets of Minneapolis.
1:30.4	I cannot think of a week when it is felt clearer that not just the old order is dying,
1:37.5	but the old order is dead. I cannot think of a week where it has been more obvious,
1:42.9	that there are monsters. In our last episode,
1:46.9	I spoke to the Foreign Affairs scholar Henry Farrell about how the way America operates in the
1:52.6	world has changed, what we have done to rupture this order. But for this episode, I wanted
1:58.5	to turn to the forward-looking question.
2:03.5	What, if anything, is struggling to be born here?
2:06.9	Adam Tews is a story in a Clem University.
2:10.9	He is a thinker and chronicler of crisis.
2:14.1	The Guardian recently dubbed him The Crisis Whisperer.
2:18.0	He's written a number of books about moments when systems fall apart, and new orders emerge, among them crashed, how a decade of financial crises changed the world.
2:23.4	He's got the excellent substack chart book, and he had a front receipt to the chaos of Davos last week,
2:28.5	even moderating this panel with, among others, Howard Lutnik, the Commerce Secretary.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from New York Times Opinion, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of New York Times Opinion and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.