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.

Whilst Trump held the White House, the question of trans-Atlantic climate diplomacy did not arise. The advent of the Biden administration has brought the United States back into the Paris climate agreement. The White House insists that climate is “everywhere” in its program. This is welcome. But, after initial excitement the Biden program has stalled. At home, the wrangling over the infrastructure program has slowed progress . The stand-off with China leaves Washington with no leverage over the largest polluter. At the G20 meeting of environment ministers, John Kerry was a prominent presence, but there was no deal. Even with the Europeans, who might be thought of as climate allies, big differences have emerged. So much so that we are hearing talk of a trans-Atlantic carbon trade war. That would be a disaster.

Doing the first Afghanistan report – Chartbook #29 – has rocked my world a little bit. I did not appreciate how complex and ambiguous was the modernization of Afghanistan’s economy and society since 2001. Nor did I appreciate the scale of the 1980s devastation. It is very rare for modern societies with an established pattern of population growth to experience a sudden and prolonged reversal. This points to a disaster of truly enormous proportions.

To drive home how anomalous was Afghanistan’s development, compare it to Iraq. Through the late 1970 they had similar populations on similar growth trajectories. They both fought major wars in the 1980s. But whereas the Iran-Iraq war remained largely confined to the battlefield and Saddam’s atrocities were restricted to the Kurdish and Shia areas, in Afghanistan the battle between the Soviet forces, the regime in Kabul and the resistance disrupted civil society and produced a dramatic demographic collapse. What explains that collapse?

What do you do if you can see the end of your world approaching? Do you flee? Do you resign yourself? These questions were jarred into focus the other day by reports of desperate professional-class Afghans bracing for the likely return to power of the Taliban. For a large part of my adult life, the Western intervention in Afghanistan has been in the background. There was a time at Yale in the early 2010s when I was routinely teaching classes full of aid workers and veterans from Afghanistan. For a while, Stan McChrystal was a colleague. David Petraeus came for lunch. Though I had been fascinated with military history all my life, I had never been that close to a war. When you see the numbers it becomes easier to understand why the footprint of the Afghan war in American society was as large as it was. According to a widely cited shock statistics, the twenty year intervention in Afghanistan has cost the USA over $2.2 trillion dollars.

Chartbook #28 accompanies the cover story I did for the latest issue of the New Statesman on China’s twentieth century history. The New Statesman piece is a bit of a high-wire act suspended btw J.A Hobson and Larry Summers. Check it out here.

One of the most intriguing things I read whilst researching the piece, was the World Bank’s report on China’s Socialist Economic Development from 1983. What is so fascinating is that this was the first time that the World Bank had the chance to do an in-depth analysis of China’s development under Communism. The report asks all the questions one might be tempted to ask at that point. Where was China at after the end of Maoism? What distinguished it from other low-income Asian giants like India or Pakistan or Indonesia. Was China about to take off?

This week’s Newsletter is about the storm brewing over Europe’s environmental policy, carbon prices and the long shadow thrown by the 2018/9 Yellow Vest protests. Who were the protestors and their supporters? What triggered the protests? How is this episode reverberating through climate politics in Europe three years later? … but first, a quick personal note.

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