The Ezra Klein Show · New York Times Opinion

How the World Sees America, With Adam Tooze

January 30, 2026·1 hr 4 min·5 clips

While the US failed to build 500 miles of California high-speed rail, China built 23,000 miles — and poured more concrete in three years than America did in the entire 20th century.

The frame begins with Gramsci. The episode treats the crisis as an interregnum, not just a sour political mood: the old order is fading, and the next one has not shown up yet. Davos gives the conversation its first scene. Mark Carney's speech lands as a rupture speech, a sign that people are talking less about smooth transition and more about something breaking. China makes the question sharper. The guest argues that American elites were slow to see the challenge because they still believed trade, finance, and political convergence would do their work. That belief now looks thin. From China's side, the pushback was being mapped and pursued by at least 2003, which makes the supposedly long unipolar age feel a lot shorter. Iraq matters, but it is not the whole break. The host brings back an Obama-era anxiety: the United States Senate looked stuck while China seemed to be building cities almost overnight. The comparison is meant to sting. America looks procedural, slow, and jammed up. China looks fast, industrial, and able to turn manufacturing in a new direction from a standing start. The episode keeps the caveat in view: China's capacity to govern can also be brutal, so the contrast never turns into simple admiration. The anxiety underneath is about America itself. The fear is not only that China is rising. It is that the United States has become sclerotic and no longer knows what kind of power it is. Finance carries the moral charge. America is skimming money off the top while China is making things. When the book enters the exchange, the host says that question seemed to hang over it from the first page, and the guest says the conclusion makes it explicit. That is where the episode settles: on American confidence, and how quickly it corroded once the old order stopped looking settled.

As heard by us

A measured look at American power, Chinese pressure, and a confidence story that no longer quite fits.

The conversation frames American power with care and a quiet sense of unease. It works best when it leaves abstraction behind and settles into the slower drift of confidence, where the argument feels less like theory and more like a problem that has been building for years.

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Why you'd press play

Press play if you want the U.S.-China power story made concrete.

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