Huang Yanjie/Interview
Adam Tuz (painted by Shao Shujiong)
A hundred years ago, a new world order was painstakingly established on the ashes of the First World War, and then soon fell apart in the midst of the influx of financial crises, fascist movements and the Second World War. For many years, our historical understanding of the reconstruction of the Post-World War I order has been subject to the hindsight of World War II: the stubborn Clemenceau, the idealistic Wilson, and the god-like Keynes. Adam Tooze is challenging that common sense. He argues that the Post-World War I European political elite judged current events far more than Wilson and Keynes, but the latter represented the long-term trends of history more than the former. He cautioned his fellow European historians that to understand the order of World War I and beyond, we must first pay attention to the rise of the United States, just as contemporary history must pay attention to the rise of China. Externally, the United States already seems to be a giant. World War I made the United States a global political and financial leader, and the U.S. economy has become a challenge that countries around the world must face. Internally, the United States is just a teenager. The scars of the American Civil War have not yet healed, and state power-building is in the ascendant, unable to expand globally. Faced with the challenges of global governance that only emerged before and after World War I, the United States hovered between ideals and reality, and it was not until World War II completely broke the old world that it was able to reconstruct the internal and external order with Keynesianism. Professor Adam Tuz's "The Flood: The First World War and the Reconstruction of the Global Order" seems to bring us back to the historical scene of the late World War I and the post-war period, and to discover the roots of world wars and revolutions in the middle of the last century between structural forces and historical figures, between accidental events and historical trends.
Professor Adam Touz is a Chair Professor and Director of the Institute of European Studies at Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis in the Department of History at Columbia University, specializing in modern Germany, European history and global political and economic history, and has authored Statistics and the German State: The Establishment of Modern Economic Knowledge, 1900-1945, and The Cost of Destruction: The Establishment and Collapse of the Nazi German Economy. The Republic series will soon feature two of his most recent books: The Terrible Flood: World War I and the Rebuilding of the Global Order and The Collapse: How the Global Financial Crisis Reshaped the World. As an expert on world order and crisis, Professor Tuz's understanding of the ins and outs of the liberal order is combined with the insights of historians and the acumen of political and economic analysts. In this interview, Professor Touse systematically expounded his understanding of the history and reality of the "American Century" since World War I, starting from the theme of "The Terrible Flood".
The Flood: The First World War and the Reconstruction of the Global Order, by Adam Tuz, translated by Chen Tao and Shi Tianyu, published by Overseas Chinese Publishing House of China, Republic of China, May 2021, 744 pp. 148.00 yuan
This book, The Terrible Flood: The First World War and the Reconstruction of the Global Order, is your third monograph. Your first two books are all about modern German history, but The Terrible Flood is about the First World War, the failure of the international order, and its global implications. Since The Terrible Flood, you have begun to study extensively the various problems of the world order. Can you tell us what led you from Germany's national technology to the world order?
Adam Tuz: You're quite right, my first two books were indeed about Germany. But I would like to say that in both books I have begun to think about German history in the context of global trends. The reason why my first book on the history of German economic statistics was to study Germany precisely to avoid falling into the trap of the history of economic thought, that is, Anglo-American economic thought. I trained in economics at the University of Cambridge in england and have always been fascinated by the history of the Keynesian revolution. But I've always wanted to get rid of that influence. I wanted to find interesting countries outside the influence of the Keynesian tradition. The country had to be completely different from Britain and the United States, and at the same time experience the crisis of modernity in order for me to explore the development of modern economic knowledge. In short, my PhD thesis aimed to go beyond an Anglo-American perspective and examine how modern nations are putting economic knowledge into action. I happened to be studying abroad in Germany when I was considering the topic of my dissertation. Not only does Germany also happen to be where I lived as a teenager, but I can speak English and German. Therefore, it is most appropriate for me to use Germany as a case. The German academic tradition lies somewhere between British analytical economics and Russian nationalist economic theory, and its historical experience lies precisely between the Russian Revolution and the Anglo-American constitutional tradition. Therefore, my first book is a history of Germany in the context of global history. German statistics at the beginning of the twentieth century were precisely at the intersection of global currents, or the intersection of global currents. Following this logic, you can also study the history of japan's modern state and national technology. Many Japanese statisticians visited Germany in the 1920s, even before 1914. I think many Chinese scholars also had experience in Germany, because Germany was a center for the development of global domination technology at that time.
My second book, The Price of Destruction, is an economic history of Nazi Germany. This book emphasizes the global historical narrative more than the first, because its purpose is to place the history of the Third Reich in the context of global development. Therefore, I emphasize in particular the significance of the rise of the United States for Hitler's regime, and then examine the experience of Nazi Germany in the context of global history. The rise of the U.S. economy after the Civil War, especially after World War I, posed a challenge to the political and economic systems of the countries of the world at that time. In a sense, The Cost of Destruction: The Establishment and Collapse of the Nazi German Economy was a logical development of my first book, because what I tried to do in Statistics and the German State: The Establishment of Modern Economic Knowledge, 1900-1945 was to demonstrate how German political and economic knowledge underwent modern transformations, while my study of Nazi Germany focused on the application of this knowledge. As the book The Price of Destruction argues, the post-World War I Soviet, Italian, Japanese, and even British and French rulers and strategists were adjusting their national policies to a world increasingly centered on American economic power. Thus, in The Price of Destruction, I argue that the world impact of the American model is not only a key to understanding the Nazi regime, but also a perspective on the more pervasive global changes of the time. It is therefore no accident that my research interests have shifted from the history of German economic statistics and the history of the Nazi economy to the global crisis between the two world wars.
Cover of adam Tuz's Statistics and the German State: The Establishment of Modern Economic Knowledge, 1900-1945
Cover of the English edition of Adam Tuz's The Cost of Destruction: The Establishment and Collapse of the Nazi German Economy
Scholars who study the history of the interwar period often attribute the global crisis of the time to a variety of factors, such as a lack of global leadership, the economic consequences of World War I reparations, and so on. The purpose of "The Terrible Flood" is also to explain the crisis from a new perspective. What is the core point of "The Terrible Flood" about the origin and nature of the crisis of the 1920s and 1930s?
Adam Tuz: In short, The Flood is a prelude to the story of The Price of Destruction. The central thesis of the book is that the crisis between the two world wars is fundamentally a contradiction between the tilt of the world economy toward the United States during world war I and the institutions of the backward Countries in the United States. On the one hand, as world war I brought the European powers to the brink of bankruptcy, the United States, as the total creditor of the Allies, inevitably came to the forefront of the world. On the other hand, the U.S. state system and political system are not capable of shouldering the burden of hegemonism. In fact, this is in a way an old argument, such as the famous economic historian Charles W. Bush. Charles Poor Kindleberger once used the lack of American leadership to explain the crisis between the two world wars. You can also see similar arguments in the minds of contemporaries, such as Carl Schmidt, who said that the United States was a "absent presence."
What I want to do in this book is to historicize this argument and thus correct certain misconceptions. Scholars such as Kindleberg and Giovanni Arrighi argue that the world economy always needs a hedge, and that the problem between the two wars was that the United States failed in time to fill the position vacated by Britain's weakening power. This is precisely where I think the "hegemonic deficit theory" is fundamentally unconvincing. My basic premise is that the question of global governance, which we understand as hegemonic governance, which was important for most of the twentieth century, was actually an entirely new issue at the time. The problem only popped up to the British about a decade before the First World War. You can see that the British Empire at that time struggled to cope with this challenge. After World War I, the United States tried to fill a position that was difficult for Britain to fill. The culmination of U.S. efforts in this regard was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. The failure of the Washington Naval Treaty proved that the United States was incapable of taking over the baton. All in all, I don't think the problem of global governance is an eternal one, much less an inherent property of the global capitalist system or whatever. It is a series of specific problems brought about by the sharp escalation of economic and military power in the early twentieth century.
The historical narrative of the book "The Terrible Flood" can be said to be closely related to the world role of the United States. In "The Terrible Flood," you highlight the promises and failures of Americans coming to center stage, especially about the tension between its inward-looking politics and its missionary idealism. Given these tensions, it is clear why the United States cannot play the role of a global leader. For example, we can see the limitations of idealism in Woodrow Wilson's failed examples. What do you think is the root cause of Woodrow Wilson's failure? Why did his model of world order construction based on the American experience fail?
Adam Tuz: Before we talk about the American experience, let's talk about the so-called "Sonderweg" that you may be familiar with in the discourse of European history. It is talking about the extreme path that Germany has taken to modernize. The experiences of Japan and Italy are similar. According to this argument, these countries have deviated from the norms of Western democratic modernization. Then the question arises. Is there a so-called normative path to modernization? Will this model be French? The history of the French Revolution is so unique that it is difficult to imitate. So will it be The UK? Britain was in fact a global empire at the beginning of the twentieth century, and frankly, It did not practice democracy for a long time. And then they looked at the United States and said, "Well, that's the model path of modernization." "But the problem is that no country in the world has succeeded in modernizing along America's path." Is this a coincidence? If you look at the history of the United States, the history of the United States is certainly a shocking special experience. America's path to modernization is fundamentally unique. In fact, the United States can only offer a set of ideologies of particularism.
So what I'm trying to say in my book, The Terrible Flood, is that America's leadership role between the two world wars was a failure. So, what kind of country was the United States at that time, and what was its political system like? If you ask an American historian, what was America like in the early twentieth century? The most straightforward answer you get is that this is a country that is still recovering from civil war. So if you think about the United States at the turn of the century, it's actually less like Britain at the time and more like Meiji Japan, the newly reunified Germany or Italy. In some ways, you can think of it as one of the biggest emerging markets up to that point. This is a special stage of development for the United States as a great power, like a border that has just been closed. It was a continental-sized country without a truly centralized government as understood by Europeans at the time. The federal bureaucracy was very small at that time. American society is still deeply torn apart by the tensions left over from the civil war that erupted in the 1860s. If Woodrow Wilson represents anything, he first stands for the ideal of somehow integrating America again after that trauma. Wilson's main task was primarily to reconcile the North and the South on a cultural level, while establishing a modern executive government around Washington's center of power, including the Federal Reserve's National Income Tax, so that the central government of the United States was sufficient to handle some of the tensions arising from large-scale modernization. Wilson's ideals of international politics must be understood in the same way. My basic question here is: "Who is Woodrow Wilson?" Is he a progressive? Is he a futurist? Or is he a naïve man imagining an international utopia? If we follow his self-orientation, is Wilson a conservative? In fact, Wilson's great intellectual inspiration was Edmund Burke, the conservative interpreter of the famous French Revolution. Wilson had publicly declared himself an advocate of Burke's conservatism. He was hostile to the French, especially radicals like Clemenceau. However, in keynesian subsequent narratives of the history of the Versailles Conference, Wilson became a progressive nationalist and Clemenceau, representing France, became a conservative.
In fact, Clemenceau was a radical leftist. In his youth, he was a cellmate of the revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui (leader of the Paris Commune) and later became a friend and student of Blanqui. After the Franco-Prussian War, he actively participated in the Paris Commune movement as a delegate to the National Assembly of the Montmartre. Clemenceau and Wilson are also distinguished by the fact that their positions are the opposing sides of the American Civil War. Wilson grew up in Atlanta, a typical Southern elite whose father was the head of the Presbyterian Church in the Southern states. Clemenceau practiced medicine and worked as a journalist in New York during the American Civil War. If you read Clemenceau's work, especially his comments on its consequences after the American Civil War, you can see that he has always been a radical. For the Question of the American South, Clemenceau was a Reconstructionist. He wants racial justice in America to be realized. By contrast, Wilson was an important advocate for the Ku Klux Klan. He also produced subtitles for the Ku Klux Klux Klan's most important propaganda film, The Birth of a Nation.
What I'm saying is that if you understand the actual trajectory of American history, you know that Wilson didn't appear on the stage of American history at all as the kind of liberal who saved the world. Of course, he is often considered such an idealist internationally. He is actually a conservative politician dedicated to reconciling an American society torn apart by internal conflict. Of course, all of this has disturbing reverberations in america today. For example, we can see that the wounds of slavery are still not fully healed in American society. Therefore, the key argument in The Terrible Flood is to turn the reality and imagination of Wilson and Clemenceau upside down. You know, in the mainstream narrative of the Treaty of Versailles, Clemenceau was a sophisticated realist, Wilson was a naïve idealist, and Keynes was a wise prophet of uncertainty.
As you mentioned earlier, we have stereotypes about wilson, Clemenceau, and Keynes. Now Wilson and Clemenceau have said that there is still one Keynes left. He is also one of the protagonists of your book. I remember that you held Keynes in high esteem in your Columbia classroom. But in this book, you have a lot of criticism of Keynes's point of view. Can you briefly elaborate on your arguments for or against Keynes?
Adam Tuz: Yes, I disagree with Keynes's pessimistic assessment of Germany's claim for reparations. He believed that excessive claims for reparations against Germany would be the origin of the war. You know, Keynes became famous for being a great critic of the Treaty of Versailles. I don't think the war reparations clause of the Treaty of Versailles was actually that bad, and I am particularly sympathetic to France's position in the treaty negotiations. I don't think Keynes's argument is actually convincing. Keynes didn't like peace because he hated war. Keynes was a staunch anti-war activist. As a high-ranking government official, he could have avoided being involved in the war because of his wartime work. But he chose to be a conscientious opponent of war. Keynes believed that a war could have been avoided. I think at this point, he's wrong. The First World War had its profound legitimacy. This war is inevitable, and Britain must win it. The easiest way to build a secure world after the war is to redouble our efforts to build an order that preserves peace by doing something more like 1945. In fact, the French have a more correct understanding of what Europe needs to do. They advocated a close integration of the Atlantic world around France in order to contain Germany's future threats. Keynes didn't want anything to do with the plan. I think he was wrong.
So why do I still think Keynes was a real figure in world history at this time? Because he accurately diagnosed the problems of liberalism. As you may know, I believe in some kind of liberal political order. For me, Keynes was a key figure in liberalism because he was someone you could call a "new Liberalist." This sounds very much like another "Neoliberalism," but Keynesian liberalism was far greater than later neoliberalism. His system was a twentieth-century liberalism distinct from the classical liberalism of the nineteenth century. I believe that liberalism in the twenty-first century still has to abide by his plan. On the one hand, Keynesianism is a system of rules that maintains order when the years are quiet. On the other hand, it also has a logic of intervention that can guide actors in making difficult political choices in times of crisis. In other words, Keynes had his own set of politics. Liberalism, he argues, cannot simply be depoliticized. If liberalism is only about rules, laws, and morality, then its role is limited to the days of peace. In tough times, it will have nothing to say. Keynes is precisely to say no to this classical liberalism. We need to understand the duality of his thoughts. He is not a dialectical thinker in the classical Marxist sense, because he does not think dialectically about the trajectory of history. He was a thinker who could think of both sides of the coin. He can think about the rules, and he can think about the political actions needed to act, to make decisions, to make the rules. He was both the architect of interventionist policies and the founder of the Bretton Woods system. The Bretton Woods system, though not the later neoliberal order, was, after all, about order, especially similar to that of the German Ordo or Freiburg schools. So Keynes was a key historical figure for me. He had long anticipated that the liberal democracies of the twentieth century would need a different kind of state than before. Such a state must not only continue to provide rules for the order, but must also actively intervene in the economy and society. In addition, it must dare to push the boundaries of morality. Keynes himself was an incredible emancipator. In this respect, he resembled the Nationalist revolutionaries of China in 1919. Of course, Keynes's concern was not a cultural problem such as foot binding, but the stagnation of the Western system. He was the first to argue that liberals must have their own ideas about drugs, family planning, gender, and so on. He understood the entire agenda of twentieth-century liberal politics.
It's really interesting that Keynes was also an observer with a world perspective. He carefully read Dr. Chen Huanzhang, a graduate of Columbia University, "Confucius Financial Management" and published a book review in the Journal of Economics. He seems to have long been interested in the relationship between Chinese civilization and the world order. I found that from the time of The Terrible Flood, almost every book you write about the crisis of liberalism deals with Chinese history. Although China is not the protagonist of "The Terrible Flood", you pay great attention to China in the book. So, how has the crisis of the global order that you discussed in this book affected China?
Adam Tuz: For me, integrating China into the global historical narrative is a long and difficult task. As we said at the beginning, I started out as a European historian. As someone who grew up in Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, I embraced the traditional Western-centric or Eurocentric view. When I was a teenager, China was still in a turbulent period, so China was not in my vision at that time. But China's rise is probably the most important event in world history as an adult. So in this book, I deliberately begin to think, from a European perspective (because I cannot speak in any other way), as a historian centered on the North Atlantic world, how can I rewrite this piece of history that has traditionally been studied so much? You know, for the history after the First World War, the new subjects that European history at that time were concerned with were about the question of Poland and the Czech Republic, or about the middle countries like Belgium. I thought, if I were to rediscover interesting questions from a new perspective of the twenty-first century, what would this history look like? I found an interesting thing in reading the material of the Disputes and Arbitrations at the Versailles Conference. Japanese diplomats were actively involved in arbitration of European territories and even dominated the territorial division of Silesia, as Japan was a key ally of the Entente. Then I found out that China was actually very actively involved in the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. Along these lines, what I'm trying to do in this book is very deliberately forcing myself to think about the role played by countries outside of Europe.
Western readers now generally recognize That China was an ally in World War II. They are particularly interested in how China entered the world order of the twentieth century. In fact, when you explore the history of the formation of the world order, you realize that the West's close attention to China predates the Cold War of the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, Western strategists have included China in their global strategies since the early twentieth century. As early as the beginning of the century, there was no Grand Strategy of the British Empire that did not include China. In the same way, China has always been at the center of Japan's imperial strategic considerations. We can even say that without the China and Japan issues, there would be no GRAND strategy of the United States. However, during the Cold War of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Western intellectuals typically divided the world into first and third worlds. Thus, China was separated from the modern history of the world. The further you get from contemporary history, the stronger this sense of separation, so you can see that the previous historical narrative about World War I was basically European history. Christopher Clark's great work of 1914, for example, does not deal much with the United States, let alone China. Until the publication of Élez Manella's Wilson's Hour, the vast majority of the history of the Treaty of Versailles did not speak of China, and the focus of all new writings was on Russia, about the Russian Revolution, and on the turmoil in Central Europe. Therefore, I deliberately tried to rewrite this history in this book. My efforts include including China in the historical narrative.
What do I have to say to China? As a scholar of European history, I am afraid that I am talking about clichés. My basic argument is that the building of the modern nation-state from the end of the nineteenth century is an important clue to our understanding of Chinese history. We cannot regard the nation-state as a historical necessity. I understand critics of the nation-state paradigm, and we can imagine other futures for China, but overall, the main thread guiding modern Chinese politics is how to build a strong nation-state that can survive an era of imperial competition. I tried to ask, "Where can we relate the warlord melee within China in the 1920s to the revolution and the broader logic of global power politics?" "I see Russia, Japan, Britain, and the United States as the four key empires that are acting against China at this moment. One of the fascinating things you see when you do that is that I can use China as an important case for discussing broader arguments. In the face of China, the imperialist powers of the early twentieth century were faced with a basic choice. In the words of a Japanese imperialist, China is so big that if you want to monopolize your interests, your stomach will break. That's what we saw between 1916 and 1919, then the Washington Conference, then The Northern Expedition of China, and then the gradual loss of control of China's development by the great powers, because any imperialist model is unsustainable. Of course, the great powers have not given up on subjugating, controlling, manipulating, and guiding China in various ways, and in the process inevitably causing humiliation in various ways. However, in fact none of them succeeded. China became a cemetery for various imperial programs.
The U.S. imperialist model in China is mainly through financial means, controlling China's legitimate government while controlling other powers. This is an unacceptable arrangement for other powers. When Americans try to build a lender's cartel around China's central government, few are willing to accept it as a call. In contrast to the United States is the Japanese-style imperialist strategy. Japan tries to embed itself in Chinese politics, finding proxies in China to help them fight dissidents and then reaping the rewards through them. This is an incredibly high-risk strategy. First you have to choose the right side, and then you have to support them to a considerable extent, and anyone you support will immediately become the target of its competitors or Chinese nationalist mobilization. As soon as any one force accepts Japan's support, it will immediately become a political pariah mobilized by other forces against it. So, what other options do the Great Powers have? The options are actually very limited. Most of the strategic choices of other imperialist powers are between the United States and Japan. Some are more conservative, some are more radical. If you choose to develop a sphere of influence in China, will you always be able to rely on local collaborators to support its growth and development, so that it can resist other parties, but will not rebel against you in turn? If you say, well, I'll keep only my limited colonies and spheres of influence; then the outcome may still be chaotic and unsustainable, because you can't influence the outcome of China's internal war. So, you know, the great powers in China are mostly very risky strategic combinations. This is also the point that this book is about China.
Your distinction between the strategies of the great powers is interesting. I think the study of modern Chinese history is most concerned with Japan's imperialist model in China. Sometimes we use the Japanese proxy model to describe the strategy of the Us Empire. In fact, it is necessary to make a distinction between these two or more strategies. In addition to China, you seem to be also concerned about Japan?
Adam Tuz: Yeah, you can see why the Great Powers are adopting these tactics. Because China is very attractive, it makes the great powers salivate. Twentieth-century empires wanted a piece of the pie in China. From Chinese perspective, the strategies of the great powers are similar. Historically, Japan's imperial construction at that time was actually learning from the West. If you look closely, the Japanese are also divided in how to build an empire. That's what I found fascinating about this history. You know, I went from studying Germany to studying the world. One of the things I did was to better understand the choices facing Japan and Germany by comparing them. When you look at Japan from the perspective of the Germans, a lot of the questions become clearer. An interesting feature of the Japanese is that they are constantly discussing the various options for their empire-building. In the committees of the Versailles Conference, they often asked: Should we oppose the United States, whether we should oppose China, whether we should oppose the European Empire. Which way should we go? Should we focus on the Army or the Navy? The dangerous path that Japan chose later was actually gradually formed in a unique way. I have never seen that level of entanglement in the Case of Germany. This may have something to do with geopolitics. If you really want to find a country whose geography forces it to make a series of incredibly difficult and dangerous choices on a regular basis, then the country is clearly not Germany, which, although it is suffering from two sides, is actually in a better position than Japan. You look at Japan's location: its neighbors are Soviet Russia, the United States, and China. I mean, these three countries happen to be the three most enigmatic powers of the twentieth century. Japan was at a loss in the face of the three biggest question marks of the twentieth century.
Crash: How the Global Financial Crisis Reshaped the World, by Adam Tuz, translated by Wu Qiuyu, Published in June 2021 by Shanghai Sanlian Bookstore, Republic, 788 pp. 148.00
From The Terrible Flood to Crash: How the Global Financial Crisis Reshaped the World, all of your recent work is about major global crises. Whether it's a world war or a global financial crisis, your subjects are on the international political and economic order in chaos and change. Today's world is back in a time of crisis. The global economic system, which has been relatively stable for three decades, is disintegrating, and relations between major powers are in a state of accelerated confrontation. What are your observations on the current situation? What lessons can we learn from the crisis history of the twentieth century?
Adam Tuz: Based on my knowledge of the direction of historical development, I am extremely skeptical of any analytical historical deduction and similar comparison. For example, some people say that China and the United States in 2021, like Germany and Britain in 1914, as if the elements of an anglo-German relations at that time have found a counterpart in the Sino-American relationship – I don't think this way of knowing history means much to us. Our world is already a sea of turmoil compared to then. For me, 2008 was the last crisis of the North Atlantic financial system, which originated with the first wave of globalization in the 1850s. This system began to operate around the United States in World War I, and then went through many major crises, and until the beginning of the twenty-first century, it dominated global finance. You can think of the crisis of 2008 as the last great event in the system's global history. Similar to previous crises, this crisis was dominated by the European and American banking systems centered on the City of London and Wall Street, and the ultimate stabilizer was the US Federal Reserve as the lender of last resort. This system brings together world finance in an organic way. But, as I said in Crash, I don't think this will be the case in future financial crises. If The Terrible Flood marked the beginning of an era of america-centered financial systems of the twentieth century, Crash, which describes the global financial crisis a hundred years later, marked the end of the system. In other words, the 2008 financial crisis was actually the end of the historical arc that began after World War I. For a new era that we are entering now, I think it is very different from the twentieth century. In our time, the global financial crisis is no longer an event within the European and American systems, but depends on the interaction between large emerging markets, the dollar system, and the global economy.
China has its own independent logic of development, which is new and unpredictable to modern history. There are some unique features of the Chinese model that I will discuss in my book Shut Down, which will be published in September. I think it's a good idea to call today's situation "the greatest change in a hundred years." I think it's a dramatic expression of current events. What I love about it is that it highlights the novelty and jumps out of the box. Our most common mistake to make now is to understand the growing tension between China and the United States in the light of the Cold War between Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. This European-centric perspective ignores the deep and complex continuity of the Cold War in Asia, especially from 1949 to the present day. It's not hard to see why many American current affairs observers are tempted to use the Cold War to define the present. After all, from their point of view, the last Cold War had a happy ending. So they want to impose the Cold War on the present moment, thus emphasizing the need for confrontation with China now.
I think one of the most worrying points of view in the current situation is to follow the logic of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, that we must now experience a new Cold War. Any conceptualization of the current situation, as long as it transcends stereotypical historical comparisons, seems to me to be an improvement. The tensions in Sino-US relations are real and unquestionable, but I think we should recognize that the current challenges are extremely new and special. From the perspective of world history, the tension between China and the United States is completely different from the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. I think that "the greatest change in a hundred years" is more appropriate than the Cold War's understanding of the current situation. I certainly understand that such a concept serves a strong government. But if you're in that particular confrontational environment, you need strong leadership. As in Keynesianism, crises require strong states. I touched on this issue when I discussed Lenin and the Bolsheviks in The Terrible Flood. If things become chaotic and difficult, then it is difficult to do rational calculations, we can only do what must be done, or we must "do whatever it takes" to say. I think there's some danger in that, but I understand why China looks at this in this way.
Do you have any ideas you would like to share with your Chinese readers at this critical time?
Adam Tuz: I don't want to pretend to be sentimental, but I'm flattered that my work can be translated into Chinese. I think that's what any Western author should feel. First of all, it is a high honor. I believe that China and the United States need to work together to explore new historical narratives in order to better understand the human process of the last century. If this book has any contribution to the common cause of exploring history, if we can follow the threads of the book's thinking further, then I can sleep soundly. I will feel like my task is done. I believe that reconstructing the narrative framework of history is also paving the way for a new politics.
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