Hello and welcome to another episode of Politics Theory Other. My name is Alex Doherty and my guest today is Adam Too's.

In today's episode, I spoke with Adam about the extent to which war with China is increasingly

being treated as a serious prospect in Washington and the Pentagon.

We also talked about how successful or otherwise the Biden administration has been in constructing regional alliances against China during the last four years.

And we went on to talk about why the Chinese Communist Party leadership's decisions over climate policy dwarfed the US presidential election insignificance.

Finally, we discussed the economic slowdown in the country and Adam explained why he disagrees with analysts who see China's economic problems as primarily a consequence of increasing authoritarianism.

Adam Tuse is the Shelby-Cullum-Davis Chair of History at Columbia University and serves as director of the European Institute.

He's the author of many books, including Crash, How a Decade of Financial Crisis

Changed the World, The Wages of Destruction, The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy,

and The Deluge, The Great War and the Making of the Global Order,

1916 to 1931.

His most recent book is Shut Down, How COVID Shook the World's Economy.

So Adam, you've argued that the United States did not actively seek the wars in either

Ukraine or in the Middle East, but you do make the case that the Biden administration has

nevertheless very much sought to take advantage of both conflicts and treated them as windows of

opportunity to advance US goals. In the case of Ukraine, the policy has been to bog down Russia in

a war of attrition that would sap Russian military and economic strength. And we can talk, of course, about the extent to which that may or may not have succeeded,

and to use the war to reinvigorate the NATO alliance.

In the Middle East, the US seems to view Israel's actions as offering a chance to

reorder the region and US interests by degrading US enemies,

such as Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iran,

although we have seen notably a greater degree of caution regarding the latter, because Iran, of course,

...