ADAM TOOZE

After Afghanistan, the Biden administration this weeks seems to be facing another pivotal moment over three interlocking political battles: on the infrastructure bill, the larger $3.5 trillion spending package that actually contains most of Biden’s policy agenda and the debt ceiling.

There is a worst case scenario – unlikely but not impossible – in which, by the end of October, both the infrastructure bill and the more ambitious $3.5 trillion package fail to find majorities, the government shuts down and America defaults on some part of its debt. That is unlikely, but it is not impossible.

Dramatic stuff.

But, say for sake of argument, in the last few days you had had your mind on other things – Evergrande in China, for instance, or the German election, or a day job that involved plunging back into Ken Pomeranz on the “Great Divergence” and Quinn Slobodian on the Habsburg roots of neoliberalism …. say you got to Wednesday and needed urgently to make sense of the mounting drama of fiscal politics in the United States … what would you read?

Who voted for whom in 2021? The 2021 election confirms the result of 2017. Since unification and under the impact of dramatic socio-economic stresses of

What have billionaire real estate deals and baby formula got to do with each other? They are both in the crosshairs of the mounting tensions between China and the West.
In the escalation of tension between the US and China, one major counterflow has been the circulation of big money from the West into China.

This is a key theme in Shutdown, where I look at the determined flow of Western capital into China, even in the face of the escalating tension between Trump’s administration and Beijing.

A lackluster battle leaves Europe hanging in the balance. The German election on September 26 to decide the successor to Angela Merkel has been a

The debut of my new weekly podcast with Cameron Abadi and Foreign Policy Today was the debut for Ones and Tooze my new weekly podcast

Placing Isabella Weber and Chris Miller in dialogue. Some time in the next 10-15 years, China’s GDP will likely overtake that of the United States.

The images from Afghan of American retreat sent shock waves around the world.

They sparked anxious talk of a post-American world.

As I argue in a New Statesman long read, a very different picture emerges if you look at the broader stance of the Pentagon.

What the budgets of the world’s largest military superpower tell us is not only that America’s defense effort is running at a historically high levels, but that its priorities are shifting towards high-tech weaponry for the deployment of military force at a planetary scale.

Back in July I was drawn into the Afghan crisis by the shocking question: “What do you do if you can see the end of your world approaching? Do you flee? Do you resign yourself?”

One month on I fear that what we are watching is the lid of the coffin closing, the earth raining down on a society being buried alive.

There is the threat of draconian Taliban rule, but that is compounded by the economic and the financial situation facing Afghanistan in the wake of the foreign evacuation.

As I put it in a short piece published in Foreign Policy Friday: “The Taliban may threaten Afghanis’ freedom and rights, but it is the abrupt end to funding from the West that jeopardizes Afghanistan’s material survival.”

Or, why Keynesianism and functional finance demand politics. Adding up the money spent on the War on Terror in 2001 is a sobering exercise. Summary

This week, two crises taking place simultaneously, affecting some of the most vulnerable people in the world – the Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the earthquake in Haiti.

These two moments in history seem as though they are unfolding on planets that are remote from each other.

They are, of course, very different events.

Telling myself this, helps me to feel less uneasy about the extraordinary amount of attention I am focusing on the events at Kabul airport rather than on the earthquake that has killed at least 1900 people and injured 10,000 in Haiti, a close neighbor in the Caribbean.

I am not, of course, suggesting that an earthquake and a war are the same or should be treated as such. But, I am wondering at the different mental silos into which we place them and the way in which one has eclipsed the other.

On Wednesday National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan made the following statement:

The climate policy powerhouse that goes by the handle Albert Pinto aka @70sBachchan circulated the statement within minutes. If this newsletter causes a few folks to follow his twitter account, it will have been worthwhile. His assessment was bleak:

“RIP Climate Policy”. Depressed as I was, I would not go as far as that. But I do think that Sullivan’s interventions reflects deep and disabling tensions in the Biden administration’s climate policy. I fired off my own response to the Guardian that afternoon.