The dark silhouette of a large crude oil tanker ship sailing across the open ocean during a spectacular and vibrant sunset (July 4, 2025) | Dmitri T / Shutterstock
Renowned historian Adam Tooze returned to The New School last month to reflect on this moment of dramatic geopolitical rupture. President Donald Trump’s unjustified and unjustifiable war against Iran has shown the fragility of the fossil fuel-based energetic order. At the very same moment, China’s meteoric rise as the world’s renewable energy superpower is no less than reshaping the future of climate politics and the planet. Meanwhile, the stock market continues to perform with a blithe, seemingly irrational lack of concern in the face of chaos and conflict. Tooze, known for his uniquely insightful political-economic and historical analysis, spoke to Public Seminar editor and New School professor Natasha Lennard about making sense of this unsettling conjuncture. Their conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Natasha Lennard: When we were thinking of framing this discussion you raised a particular moment to think about: at the very same time as Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump started their war of aggression, their war of choice on Iran, in Beijing, the CPC [Chinese Communist Party] was announcing the fifteenth Five-Year Plan, for 2026 to 2030. You were struck by that juxtaposition—cartoonish picture of feckless destruction on one side, then seemingly orderly future looking development on the other. What we can take from that moment, and what it says about these powers’ relationship to an historical imagination right now?
Adam Tooze: This juxtaposition which you are alluding to, the simultaneity of this grotesque war on the one hand with the kind of relentless rationalism of the CPC regime in China. It struck me as I was doomscrolling news from the war on a corner of Fifth Avenue and I realized that I was, at the same time, waiting for updates from the Twin Sessions meetings in Beijing, the central political event of the Chinese regime, which for many years we in the West have tended to dismiss as simply a rubber stamp process. And yet at this moment, especially for those of us interested in climate politics, the meetings in Beijing had acquired this extraordinary salience. People were live tweeting the Twin Sessions. It’s an absolutely classic Communist Party orchestrated political event, and yet people were live-tweeting it. This felt like a turning point. This juxtaposition of radically different modes of politics.
It’s very shocking for somebody of my generation who was in Berlin in 1989 when the Wall came down; we fell into a set of assumptions about the way the twentieth century was going to end and the twenty-first century was going to continue. And obviously we find ourselves in a staggering reversal of those assumptions.
China’s system has proven resilient and capable of reinvention. The new Five-Year Plan is the fifteenth in a sequence that stretches back to the Maoist Five-Year Plans of the 1950s, which were themselves descended from the original Soviet plans of the late 1920s, 1930s. But this is not a simple inheritance. In the 2000s the Chinese have actually—I discovered much to my amazement as a new Chinese learner—changed the characters that they used to refer to the “Five-Year Plan”. The original designation translated into English as something like “statistical plan.” Today it is something closer to “strategic plan.” The Western usage of “Five-year Plan” obscures this shift. Nevertheless, there’s a continuity there. Reinvention and the embrace of new agendas take place within a framework, a line of continuity, a self-conscious line. Xi Jinping’s commitment is to refuse what he calls “historical nihilism” i.e. the refusal of the Communist past, warts and all.
In 2026, the reason why many people in the West were so fixated on this arid Communist Party document was that it will play a key role in deciding our planetary future: a document with a lineage that goes back to Stalinism and embraces the key issues of the twenty-first century. This includes issues like climate, and ultra high-tech innovation, but also aging and population health.
I’m a late-middle-aged dude, so I’m preoccupied with the aging of my failing body. Sensing this, twitter bombards me with schemes for life extension. But these are presented as a bourgeois individualist project of health freaks, ripped gym instructors and oligarchs in Silicon Valley. In the USA we are all individually accountable for our life expectancy. It is not a collective project. China’s latest Five Year Plan calls for China’s government to ensure that life expectancy continues to rise over the coming years from 79 to 80 years.
It really is a fascinating, hybrid document. That’s the Chinese side: the remarkable extension and development of a politics once dismissed as obsolete. On the American side, you could say, as a liberal, you’re outraged, of course, at this war and the increasing degeneration into incoherence of what was once called American grand strategy.
Lennard: And if you’re not a liberal?
Tooze: If you’re not a liberal, you are presumably tempted to shrug. You are presumably tempted to say, “Well, now they’re at it again. Once again they descend into imperialist madness.” But, even if you are committed to the idea that America is a country steeped in imperialist violence, the attack on Iran in 2026 is “special.”
After all, military planners in both Israel and the US have clearly been considering this option for decades but experts on the US side have judged that it is too risky. Now they have gone ahead regardless, seemingly without any coherent policy process or substantial planning.
Unlike 2003, no attempt has been made to justify the attack on Iran in any comprehensive way. We’ve had the forever wars, and the Obama drone wars and the long-running campaign that the US waged in Iraq. But the tip of the spear in those actions were special forces—the “Fort Bragg Cartel” story. The attack on Iran by contrast mobilizes hugely expensive air and sea power – carrier groups and hugely expensive air and missile forcers. Everything but boots on the ground so far. So these are the means of great power war, not clandestine special forces operations. And yet, in 2026, the classic modern politics of war are silent. What is this war for? What threat to the United States? The administration struggles to coherently articulate the rationale for what it’s doing.
When I gave the [Hans] Maeder Lecture here in 2024, I hypothesized, under the shadow of Gaza, that we might see something I referred to as a kind of “violent hyper-agency.” I spoke in the weeks after Trump’s election. We were in the first round of indignation about those AI images of “Trump Gaza.” We hadn’t quite gotten used to how insane things were going to get. 2026 is underlining in bold just how disinhibited and almost motiveless this “hyper agency” may be.
Lennard: You pointed me towards Nimrod Flashenberg’s recent piece in Jacobin magazine, which talks about a constellation wherein you can find motive for the attack on Iran: the US neocon plus Israeli right, plus certain Gulf State interests. And it’s not a senseless allegiance in that sense, even though like all wars, it is not perhaps working out as the aggressing forces might have hoped.
Tooze: Nimrod, a friend and comrade from Berlin wrote this nice, short piece in Jacobin. What he’s struggling with is the question of whether in pointing the finger one-sidedly at Netanyahu’s strategic agency, we end up sliding into anti-Semitic modes of argumentation. It is clearly undeniable that for Netanyahu the logic of this war is far clearer than it is for the American side. But I think Nimrod quite rightly points out that it’s far better to think of Netanyahu as the leader of a pack of far flung neoconservatives, which include people like [German Chancellor] Friedrich Merz, who, when push comes to shove will say, “Well, they’re just doing our dirty work for us.”
This is not the first war that this neoconservative, revisionist coalition has waged against Iran. The sanctions regime has hobbled the Iranian economy for years. In June 2025 this escalated to the Twelve-Day War against Iran’s nuclear facilities. How do we get from June 2025 to the present? A series of key steps. At first the Israelis widened their attacks. After Iran, came the attack on the Hamas leadership in Qatar in September 2025. For Washington and the Arab states that went too far. The Americans pulled Israel back, imposing a “ceasefire” in Gaza. Over the following months, the pressure began to build for more aggression against Iran from the Israeli side. By early 2026, it was only a matter of time before Israel was going to resume its efforts to decapitate the Iranian regime. And Rubio, Hegseth and Trump joined the band wagon.
But as you’re saying, and I think Nimrod quite rightly underlines, there is a continuity of neoconservative thinking in the US, which since the late nineties, has been fantasizing about a complete revisionism with regard to the Middle Eastern order. By 2024 I was saying that I thought that the Biden administration, stacked with veterans of the 1990s and 2000s, had reverted to type and was now actively advocating a revisionism on three fronts: first, with regard to Ukraine and Europe, second, with regard to China, and third with regard to the Middle East.
Lennard: People have been talking about historic comparisons, and the Suez crisis is the one that has come up a lot. The idea being that, like the Suez crisis for Britain, this is the last gasp of US empire, and a major miscalculation around a key water channel. How useful is that analogy? I know you don’t like bad historic analogies.
Tooze: What we are referring to here is the Suez crisis of October-November 1956, when the Brits and the French in alliance with Israel sought to punish Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser for his efforts to seize control of and nationalize the Suez Canal. Though the coalition achieved military success, in political terms it was a disaster. Britain and France were forced into ignominious retreat. One can see the parallels, but also the differences to the present.
As you say, I’m the sort of historian, who stresses novelty and difference rather than continuity of cycles. So for me, the comparison between 2026 and 1956 is telling not because of the similarity but the difference. After all, we have to ask, “Why was Suez a humiliation?” It wasn’t a humiliation because the British and the French were fought to a standstill by the Egyptians, as the Iranians are doing now. The British and the French actually landed paratroopers to occupy Port Said and assert control. The Egyptians in ‘56 had no way of countering them. This wasn’t the Egypt of ‘73, armed to the teeth with Soviet missiles. If Suez in 1956 was a humiliation it was because there was a power, outside the conflict which humiliated the belligerents. That third instance was the United Nations. The United Nations by itself is powerless, but when it is backed by the USA it is a different story. The really telling thing about ‘56 is that [President Dwight] Eisenhower, who had presided with the British and the French over D-Day, nevertheless says, “Guys, enough’s enough. This is crazy. We’re going to hand you over to the tender mercies of the Security Council and the General Assembly and see how you do.” And that’s what produces the humiliation of the British and the French. We shouldn’t naturalize the humiliation, in other words. The humiliation is the result of a political architecture. The horrifying thing about 2026 is that today we entirely lack the common international architecture with great power backing that would turn America and Israel’s military frustration into diplomatic humiliation.
There is no one in the world, apart from indignant, rational opinion, that can really call the Americans and the Israelis to account, let alone actually stop them in their tracks. The Chinese might be that instance. But they have no interest in this role. Why should they? It’s a Napoleonic cliché: Don’t interrupt your enemy while they’re in the middle of making a mistake.
China itself is relatively well-protected. Beijing has oil supplies running to about six months time, plus it has a gigantic trade surplus, $1.2 trillion. Higher oil and gas prices are no big threat to China. It would be convenient for them to be able to find something to spend that money on.
The people who pay the cost are the poor Asian economies, the ones which America was trying to rally against China as part of the strategy of the Biden administration. Why isn’t China coming in to support the Iranians? At the end of the day, China I think emerges as a preferred partner [for other BRICS counties] in any case. And in the meantime, they [China] know that if they were to step in hard, it could attract the attention of Washington and Congress in a way that would in fact ramp up the hostility. So, from China’s point of view, why make yourself the target when the Americans are floundering?
Lennard: There also hasn’t previously been anything like the mass production of green technology to then replace or threaten how energy hegemony works, right?
Tooze: Yes. This is another key difference. This is the first energy crisis of the last half-century where there genuinely is an alternative to fossil fuels. An alternative provided by China.
The green energy alternative was not available in ‘73, ‘79, that is, OPEC [the 1973 oil embargo by Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries against the US and Israel during the Arab-Israeli war] and Iran [the 1979 oil crisis triggered by the Iranian Revolution].
Nor were renewables fully competitive in 2008, when we saw the previous big spike in energy prices just before the 2008 crisis. They were not even—and this is a crucial point to understand—available in 2022 when Putin’s invasion triggered a huge surge in gas prices, three or four times worse than what we’re currently experiencing.
The surge in China’s capacity to manufacture solar panels and batteries since 2023 has been utterly extraordinary. It’s so sudden. And that changes the game because it now really is true that for everything you can substitute electricity for, we can roll out solar, above all solar and batteries. Today, the Chinese can basically print electricity infrastructure. The Chinese have the capacity to build at least 1,200 gigawatts of solar capacity per year. That is most of the American electricity system in a single year; that’s five Germanies. The Chinese can print the electrical capacity of Germany in less than three months. Solar is not the same as steady power, obviously. You need the battery backup. Batteries are an even more recent story than solar. Their prices are now tumbling. That addresses the basic issue of the intermittency of renewables.
Altogether this takes something that used to be slow infrastructure and makes it into something that’s “just in time,” like Shein fashion. Like in a textiles supply chain you can order the latest generation of solar panels at scale and add them in a matter of months.
This is game changing for really, really hard hit countries in Asia, like Pakistan. In a matter of 18 months, Pakistan imported 17 gigawatts of electrical generating power. And it wasn’t a government policy, it was just the upper middle class of Pakistan saying, “We want out of this impasse that we’re in.” The FT [Financial Times] correspondent for Pakistan was telling me that Chai salespeople in the uplands of Pakistan are bundling cups of tea with solar panels. So if you round up the price of your tea, they’ll throw in a Chinese solar panel to go with your chai. Clearly this is not comprehensive decarbonization. You’re not solving all the problems, like how you make fertilizer. But you are no longer trapped in fossils without options.
Lennard: How do you see this playing out? Some sort of spheres of influence around an energy divide? And what complicates that story? That seems too simple.
Tooze: It is tempting to distinguish the US and a block of petrostates, Russia and Saudi Arabia are commonly mentioned, from “electrostates” led by China. The electrostates are seen as pursuing comprehensive electrification on a renewable basis. High speed trains replacing regional air travel, or electric vehicles powered by clean electricity replacing internal combustion engine vehicles. And this tendency is clearly visible in China and Europe. And frankly, one can also see it in Texas and Saudi Arabia, the heart of the fossil complex. Both Texas and Saudi Arabia have ambitious green energy plans. Though both are major fossil fuel producers, their diversified economies also benefit from cheap green power. Though they are the number two and three oil producers, both Saudi and Russia must weigh the fact that they are oil and gas exporters. In other words they ultimately rely on foreign demand. This puts a premium on diversification in the long-run. Their fossil power politics can never be self-sufficient.
Where the US is truly unique is that it is not only the largest oil and gas producer but also the largest fossil energy consumer. Of course, the US also likes to export oil and gas. And its oil and gas corporations operate multinationally. But exports of oil and gas from the US itself are relatively new, since the 2010s.
The truly reactionary vision of a fossil fuel future for the US involves a “shutting in” of a fossil fuel circuit of production and consumption, a fossil fuel future “in one country”, or one continent, perhaps including the rest of North America, Canada and Mexico.
This would be remarkable because it would involve reversing the logic of technological development. We would be choosing to be literally burning old dinosaurs and fossilized ferns instead of farming the sun. Of course technology by itself is rarely if ever determinative. Politics and power are always shaping the technological path. But this would be a singular and massive intervention to block the development of green electrotech.
Lennard: I want to talk about your next book a little; you just finished the manuscript. It’s about climate politics and the global energy order? What is the story that this book tells about climate politics, and specifically why do you think it needs to be told?
Tooze: This book has a bit of a checkered history. It started out in one place in 2018/2019, and has ended up in a very different one. 2018/2019 was the moment of the democratic breakthrough in the midterms, during the first Trump presidency, the AOC moment, the Green New Deal moment. And that shaped a huge body of literature, very dynamic, very important, on the relationship between the climate crisis and capitalism in general. It was a great moment of revival of left thinking, somewhat surprisingly. And that’s where I started out thinking about the book.
Seven years, several crises and another book later, it has ended up in a very different place.
I think of this book now as the capstone of a whole series of things I’ve written about, you might say, the rise and fall of American power, or the rise and fall of the modern West, over the course of the long twentieth century.
I wrote books about the aftermath of World War I, about Nazism, about America’s hegemonic role during the financial crisis.
Carbon, the fifth in this series, describes how climate shifted its meaning across time.
It solidified in the late 1980s as a key issue of government, as a central issue of concern for progressives on both sides of the Atlantic. I think it’s reasonable to claim that in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was the chosen issue of the moment. On the one hand, Western science, to its eternal credit, discovered the problem. Then the West realized it was our problem to address, and there was a general assumption that if there was going to be a technology to do this, it was going to come from the West. In the context of the United Nations in the early 1990s, activists of the global South and NGOs around the world confirmed this Western-centric view. They insisted that “Yes, exactly. It is indeed your problem and yours to fix. And the great Satan is the United States and the greatest Satan of all is Exxon.”
Forty years later the world is totally transformed. China, a country which in 1989 counted among the poor developing world, is now by far the dominant CO2 emitter. We now increasingly realize that it isn’t here in the privileged West that the climate crisis is going to impact most severely, but in Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa. And thirdly, it’s also from Asia and above all from China and not just China, but CPC-ruled China, that the solutions have to come.
This is, in short, a total inversion of all of the assumptions of the early 1990s. So this book is about that inversion, that massive transformation. It doesn’t offer any simple answers. But challenges us to ask what does it mean that this political transition has happened?
The politics of this are tough. The analogy I make is to the 1930s and 1940s. Because in the 1930s, many people on the left thought that, and I think were quite rightly convinced, that the only way of countering the threat of fascism was some sort of popular-front politics with the Stalinist Soviet Union, warts and all. To my mind, the climate problem in the current moment poses problems of a similar scale and similar weight, in that we face a global problem and it is not wrong to say as a shorthand that our best hope depends on making the best of the authoritarian environmentalism of China. It is Xi Jinping, who since 2012 has made this issue one of his top personal priorities. A generation of Chinese will look back on this moment and associate environmentalism as one of the clichés of Xi Jinping’s regime, and that—we must make no bones about it—goes hand in hand with outright repression of independent, autonomous environmental politics in China.
There’s no easy way out here. I want us to really confront the scale of this challenge as a political and world-historical shift.
Lennard: What might that mean for a conception of climate justice? If we want to be able to talk about climate decimation as part of the historic injustices of racial capitalism and questions of climate reparations, like in the framework of philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò? Does that get obliviated, with the idea that we can just hand the problem over to China, the “big green state”?
Tooze: My reaction is that of a historian. The climate justice argument emerges precisely in that early 1990s moment. One of the things the book does is to offer a different meaning of the 1990s, because we generally think of that as the unipolar moment when America’s absolutely hegemonic. But if you look at climate, that’s really not the case. What’s actually happening is that climate becomes an arena in which the Global South reactivates. It was organized in the G77, which was itself a descendant of the UN politics of the 1970s, the NIEO [New International Economic Order] etc. The COPs, the climate conference, becomes a huge arena for struggle over the terms of climate justice.
What China does is to totally transform that equation in two ways. The first is that rather than making a rhetorical argument for justice—though it does that too—China’s primary approach to the climate justice question is simply to seize its own share of the carbon budget as quickly as possible on the largest possible scale.
As Deng [Xiaoping] famously declared, development isn’t a right, or a matter of justice, it is “the hard truth.”
The Chinese make development real and the consequences are catastrophic for the environment, both locally and globally. But from 2005 onwards, they begin to say, “Okay, well we’ve got to make this sustainable. We’ve got to make this better.” They stop what was a rolling catastrophe of local pollution of a truly gigantic scale. There has never been a more rapid improvement in air quality than in Chinese cities from the early 2010s onwards, anywhere in the world.
And then, and this is the crucial way in which China further transforms the equation: from the 2010s they start implementing a green industrial policy at scale. And after 2020 this explodes as never seen before. China has built the manufacturing capacity to put not just China but the entire world on a net zero path for electrification.
We are getting a comprehensive global energy transition out of a transformed technological situation in which the justice argument, which was pivotal, but also in a sense froze the conversation in the nineties and the 2000s, has been quite deliberately shunted to the side.
This doesn’t mean that the climate justice argument is not still acute for very, very hard hit parts of Africa. They desperately need help in adaptation. Mitigation isn’t the key for them. Adaptation is the key. That should absolutely be just a matter of course, and it’s clearly warranted by an argument about losses and damages that these areas have suffered.
So this is a book organized less around categories—liberal categories, one might be tempted to say—of rights, or justice, and more around the question of historical efficacy and historical agency. It is about power both in the physical and political sense.
