One of the things I began by asking you was the degree to which Davos this year — it’s not that something that happened at Davos ended the old order. It’s more that it was a moment, I think, when Trump’s performance, Carney’s performance, it was a moment of recognition of a thing that had happened. Do you feel that what is coming has shape? There’s another order visible? Or are we just in a possibly quite dangerous interregnum where nothing is quite structured or stable. I think, I mean, I’m on, I’m like, I’m dying on the hill that we’re not even, not even in an interregnum like. An interregnum implies another regnum afterwards. It implies a vision of history, which has this as an ellipse between two —— Yes —— And I don’t see why we would feel that we’re entitled to make that assumption. You know, in terms of global financial hegemons, to make it more concrete, we have one example of the transition from a British-centered model to the U.S. model. Why do we assume that we, that something follows? You can do these weird things where you extend this back to the Dutch and the Genoese, but I just don’t buy it. Look at the curve on which we think climate politics. Does it look on that curve? Because it’s one-way, and it’s just going to more extreme levels of disturbance. Like, what if we take that vision of history seriously and link it to the fact we have one instance of a financial transition that went reasonably well. Why would we think that the most obvious way of thinking what comes next is, oh, well, 20 years down the line will somehow have some kind of new order? I don’t get it. Well, I think the reason people would think it is that there is a desire among many different players simultaneously, in a globalized world, to have rules that they roughly understand how to play by. Lots of people have their profits bound up in that. Lots of people have their political stability bound up in that. And so you see it with Mark Carney, in a way you see it with China, which has wanted things to be fairly predictable, that there is a desire for predictability. What makes Trump and in some ways Putin, but I would say specifically Trump, quite unique as a world leader of a major power is he has no desire for predictability. But most of the global economy, and you talk about the Chinese officials who speak Davos better than even the Davos officials now do, they have a desire, as many others do, as Mark Carney, going back to his days as a central banker does, to say, well, we got to figure out some way of —— Oh, yeah —— making the transactions make sense. But, I mean, I like the way you put it. I would definitely think it’s wish — it’s literally desiring thinking. Like, it’s literally based on the idea that there’s some sort of philosophical anthropology that says people need, or a sociology that says people need stability. So therefore stability will somehow emerge. Or there’ll be very powerful people motivated to make it. If that’s the level at which you pitch the argument, it’s hard to disagree with. I just don’t know what follows from that. What Carney himself argued back in 2019, in this very interesting Jackson Hole paper — you should maybe link it in the show notes or something, it’s really worth going back to — is that it could be the case that a multipolar order — which isn’t a single order, but is multiple different orders that are overlapping, so very unlike a simple hegemony, more like a kind of mesh — could have stability properties that, say, a bipolar order doesn’t have. That’s how he argues in that paper, is that the interests of the future will be best served not by looking for a new unipolar actor or perpetuating a bipolar system, but in the proliferation of networks of stability and ordering. So I, when Germans ask me — Germans are really addicted to this order thinking; there’s even a school of German economics called ordoliberalism — I always try and push back on this and say, if you’re looking for order, you’ll never see it. But if you’re looking for ordering attempts, actions, the pragmatic approach, as you say, it’s all around us already, all the time. So I think that kind of image of the world, I do find, a world full of ordering attempts without necessarily any promise that they all add up to a coherent new mesh, and that I actually find almost attractive. Because surely, I mean, we have never been in a planet like this before. We have never had 30 or 40 incredibly highly competent nation-state players. This is really novel stuff.
