The famous British scholar in economic history, , the director of the Department of History at Columbia University and director of the European Institute, Adam Tooze published the book "Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World" in 2018. It received rave reviews in the West. The New York Times article believes that the book "Crashed" links the 2008 financial crisis to Trump , Brexit, Russian Crimea and other political and social issues, and draws a panoramic global contemporary history. The American " New York Book Review " also published a commentary on the book "Crash that Failed" in the 11th issue of 2018; the British " Guardian " published a comment titled "A Masterful Account of the Financial Crisis". Tuz also won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize from the School of Global and Public Affairs of the University of Toronto. In the book "Collapse", Tuz analyzes the operation of large globally strategically important banks before and during the financial crisis, explores macro-financial theories and financial history, compares the differences between the dollar financial system and the euro zone and the measures taken by the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank, and believes that the financial crisis has strengthened the United States' financial hegemony.
Cédric Durand, a professor of economics at the Thirteenth University of Paris, France, published a review of Tuz's "In the Crisis Cockpit" in the 116/117th issue of the New Left Review. On the one hand, Durand affirmed Tuz's financial theory and the conceptual framework of the book, believing that his works are "a chronicle of the financial crisis" and "full of inspiring details and political nature. It not only explains the causes of the catastrophe, but also describes the aftershocks of the past decade." On the other hand, Durand believes that Tuz does not explain in detail the rapid transformation of the international order, nor criticizes the hegemony of the US dollar in the global financial system, nor does he see the impact of financial remedies in the crisis on ordinary people. Durand believes that "Turz does not want to carefully investigate the deep relationship between politics and economy, which will weaken his explanation of the decade of crisis." The famous historian, Marxist, and long-time host of the "New Left Review", then published this article in the 119th issue of "New Left Review", trying to conduct a deeper analysis and criticism of Adam Tuz's works based on Durand's book review.
Adam Tooze
Adam Tooze's thoughtful thinking about Adam Tooze's Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, Cedric Durand praised Tuz's great achievements—a "landmark explanation" of the mechanisms that caused the economic disaster that swept the West in 2008 and the subsequent remedies and ruins. He said that what is particularly impressive is that the book does not ignore the political dynamics involved in the explanation of "the way financial markets and asset-secured commercial securities operate":
As Tuz wrote: "Political choices, ideology and agency are everywhere, and the results are of great significance, not only unreasonable factors, but also an important reaction to the huge volatility and contingency caused by the failure of huge "systems", "machines" and financial engineering equipment." "Collapse" is indeed a book about politics.
At the same time, Durand observed that its narrative is not a simple empirical track of the crisis and its consequences, but rather, highly complex and intricate. It has a clear "conceptual underpinnings", a term that Tuz himself proposed when acknowledging that Wynne Godley used the "stock-flow consistency" model to describe financial interactions between public and private sectors. In Durand's view, this provides a "self-evident pillar" for Tuz's overall argument. Both judgments of
seem to be correct.But in Durand's explanation, both judgments are contradictory. For Goldley, one of the main advantages of the stock flow consistency approach is that it combines finance with the real economy, while other models do not. However, Durand's comments "do not discuss the specific interweaving between the financial and production sectors in the global economy at all" and therefore "do not place the financial crisis in the context of structural crisis trends in contemporary capitalist economies." This observation in turn creates another problem, which seems to affect Durand’s overall praise for the book. He wrote in his book that Tuz was reluctant to investigate the relationship between politics and economy, and this reluctance ultimately undermined his account of the decade's crisis. Logically, the question arises: do these two obvious contradictions exist in Tuz's work, or in Durand's comments on it? Or can both be consistent in their own way?
1. Conceptualizing finance
Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is to turn to Durand's own work on the transfer of contemporary capitalism (metastases). Although his relationship with "Collapse" is obvious, he did not mention his 2014 French "Fictif" (English version published in 2017). This is a concise study that shows a rare combination in the literature on economic landscapes of the new century: in just 150 pages, the energy of a driving concept is combined with the controlling experience of all major capitalist state statistics. The term "virtual capital" - a history that can be traced back to the war minister of the Northern Government under the leadership of Liverpool's first Earl, George III, and was later used by Ricardo and theorized in different ways by Marx and Hayek - demonstrates the characteristics and logic of the financial system that brought the world into crisis in 2008 and has been developing ever since.
What is the main theme of this book? Instability in the financial system has first triggered continuous crises in the margins of the global capitalist economy and then in the core areas, with its roots in the differences between financial markets and goods and services markets.
In normal times, price increases weaken demand in the real economy, while financial securities are just the opposite: the more the price increases, the greater the demand for these securities. The same goes for the other way around: during the crisis, prices fell leading to big sales, which in turn accelerated price collapse. This particularity of financial products stems from the fact that their purchases (without any value of use) are similar to a purely speculative reason; the purpose is to obtain surplus value by reselling these products at higher prices in the future.
In the process of price increase, "the self-sustaining price increase driven by the agency's expectations was further exaggerated by credit." Liabilities increase prices, and since these securities can act as counterparts to new loans, their increasing value makes the agent bear more debt. As the asset bubble began to burst, during the decline, "economic entities trying to repay debts were forced to sell assets at discounted prices", which triggered "a self-sustaining movement toward depression, which can only be stopped by state intervention."
Since the relaxation of capital flow controls in the 1980s, this general mechanism has accelerated the large-scale expansion of financial markets within the global economic system. It not only greatly expanded the form and scale of private credit, public bonds and stocks (this are the three virtual capitals Marx said), but also further developed new types of transactions, leaving them out of the production process and becoming shadow banking and financial innovation, distorting and extending the debt chain. “Contract swaps, structured products and option contracts are increasing and combined. There is no limit to the imagination of financial actors.” A large amount of speculation is no longer the product of prosperity: due to the flexibility of derivatives, “it becomes an activity independent of the business cycle.” The result is a fundamental change in the relationship between finance and commercial transactions, and the weight of finance in the world economy has increased dramatically. By 2007, the total nominal value of derivatives was about 10 times that of global GDP.By 2013, pure financial transactions were worth 100 times more than the combined trade and investment.
Such an inverted pyramid structure is in crisis in one way or another, and each time it requires the central bank to act as an unlimited lender of last resort, and the government maintains demand by allowing the deficit to soar to save the financial system – the 2008 collapse is by far the latest and most compelling case. But as Durand observed, the success of such rescue operations itself lays the groundwork for the next crisis. If “economic policy has been undeniably successful in efforts to control collapse: all post-war financial crises have been curbed”, the subsequent recovery in confidence will work in due course – financial operators are increasingly willing to take new risks because they know that the central bank “will do everything to prevent systemic risks from becoming a reality.” This is the paradox of government intervention. “As the capacity for crisis management improves, financial actors and regulators become more optimistic”, financial innovation began to recover, regulation was relaxed, resulting in more complex and sophisticated products that expanded credit at the expense of the quality of the purchased assets. This in turn leads to small-scale crises that are quickly overcome as the ability to handle them is improved. This accumulated dynamic creates a financial super-cycle through which the accumulated risks become increasingly greater, that is, the relative weight of speculative finance and Ponzi schemes continues to increase, and the scale and cost of state intervention to curb the crisis. According to the calculations of International Monetary Fund (IMF), from the fall of 2008 to the beginning of 2009, the total support provided by national banks and central banks in developed capitalist countries to the financial sector is equivalent to 50.4% of world GDP.
No cumulative profit?
As we all know, the scale of the expansion of the financial sector in Western economies means that its share of total profits is also increasing. For Durand, this raises the question of where these profits come from, which more or less plagues other people working in the Marxist tradition. But as he pointed out, there is a bigger problem here. Since the 1980s, investment rates in core capitalist areas have steadily declined, and with it, year-on-year growth rates. However, during the same period, profits remained high. In fact, as David Kotz points out, the US accumulated less than any decade since the Reagan era, but profit margins were higher than that during this period. So, where do these profits come from in general? Durand's answer is that they represent an updated version of the future that Hobson (John A. Hobson) had in the early 20th century: that is, to obtain high levels of profit from the production of cheap labor zones around the system, especially in Asia. In this way, the mystery of profits that have not been accumulated will disappear because the business is indeed investing; not in the domestic economy where growth, employment and wages are stagnant, but in overseas regions where they get very high returns.
On the surface, this argument has two difficulties. The first question is, in principle, where is the boundary of “virtual” capital (if defined as “capital circulating without production, representing the requirement for future actual value assessment processes”), because in form, almost all investments meet this standard, that is, capital is laid out for the expected return on profit. The second question is how to estimate the importance of pure financial payments in practice from FDI flowing into cheap labor markets, which are different from profits directly from production activities. He took the US and France study as an example, using dividends from foreign assets as an alternative indicator of these issues. It is unclear how deep it is to Durand re-propose the first puzzle. The knot between financialization and globalization, as he said, exists, and there is no doubt. However, exactly how this connection is analytically elusive.
The conclusions of his book are not such ambiguous.Contrary to the accepted view, while financial instability has negative externalities that affect all actors, this does not mean that no financial instability is a blessing to everyone. Financial stability itself is not a public product that everyone can benefit from. We have seen the rewards of these operations that have allowed it to recover in 2008-09. A year later, the share of government bonds held by the richest 1% of the U.S. population has climbed to more than 40%. Durand's ruling is very sharp: the hegemony of finance - the most admired form of wealth - can only be maintained by the unconditional support of the public authorities. If allowed to develop, virtual capital will collapse and will drag down all our economies. In fact, the financial industry is a master of blackmail. Financial hegemony is disguised as the freedom of the market, but it seizes the old state sovereignty and better exploits social subjects to satisfy their own interests.
2. The interlaced trilogy
has sufficient evidence to show that although Durand appreciates "Collapse", he believes that "Collapse" ultimately fails to fulfill its imagined promises. However, in itself, such restrictive judgments do not provide anything to explain the gap between the two. What kind of method can include the real economy in the scope of financial change? What kind of political factors determine the structure of the subsequent works? The initial clues to these questions can be found in two short articles by Tuz. In the first article, in the review of Geoff Mann's book In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017), Tuz defines Keynes' unique strengths as "situation and tactical awareness" of the liberal democracy inherent in the operation of business cycles in capitalist economies, requiring pragmatic crisis management in the form of precise adjustments, without permanent fantasies. In the second article, in the introduction to The Collapse, he writes that “the tenth anniversary of 2008 is not a comfortable commanding height for a left-wing liberal historian who focuses on England, Germany, Manhattan Island and the EU.”
To understand the relationship between these remarks and the questions raised by Durand, we might as well see The Collapse as the third in the trilogy, before two other works by Tuz: The Great War and The Remaking of Global Order (2014) and The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of The Nazi Economy, 2006). These two works can be said to have made Tuz an outstanding modern economic historian in his group. As a public voice, he has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal , The Guardian, etc., as well as radio and television. These three books now define his career, and they do not go back to a continuous narrative, and their composition is not arranged in chronological order—the first is about 1933-1945, the second is about 1916-1931, and the third is about 2006-2018—and there is no unified focus. However, it shows that a clear theme unity is obvious.
Adam Tuz's "The Great War and The Remaking of Global Order" (2014) and "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of The Nazi Economy, 2006), both works made Tuz an outstanding modern economic historian in his group.
Hitler's war
As a large historical study full of details, the book "The Cost of Destruction" tells the story of the Great Depression of Hitler during the Great Depression of Hitler, after he came to power, inherited the German economy, the Nazi regime achieved a rapid economic recovery through a high-speed reorganization plan, suffered resource restrictions in the late 1930s, and the subsequent military conquest defeated these problems. Their excessive expansion during the invasion of the Soviet Union and the sharp growth of production, they stepped up their dependence on slave labor. At this time, their failure on the Eastern battlefield was imminent, and the allies blocked Nazi Germany's exports in the West. While Tuz exaggerates the relatively backward economy of Germany – an economy dragged down by poorly ill small farmers and ancient landlord agriculture (and underestimated the growth of popular consumption if the Third Reich was still in peace), these stressed issues hardly affect his achievements, especially when his narrative entered a high-speed state, planning the interaction between economic and military decisions during World War II.
However, writing this narrative is an unsettling proposition: one view is that the book is essentially a "formation and disintegration" of the Nazi economy written in the story. Tuz believes that contrary to popular belief, in Hitler's mind, the biggest enemy of his mobilization of the Third Reich to launch the mainland war was not in the prairie to the east, but in the far west across the ocean. It is not the spores of Bolshevism, but the power of the United States, the headquarters of the world's Jewish people, and it is Germany's existence threat that haunts him and dominates his ambitions. Destroying communism and conquering Russia is just a means, not an end, and Operation Barbarossa is nothing more than a transit station - a platform for gaining territory and resources in the war to conquer the world, able to compete with the vast open space of the American giants. Historically, “the United States should be the hub for our understanding of the Third Reich.” The expansionist program in the East, along with the fanatical anti-communism and anti-Semitism, was a general characteristic of post-1918 Germany. Hitler was different because he believed that the central position of the United States in his worldview was "a forming global hegemony" and "the fulcrum of the world's Jewish plot to destroy Germany and other European countries."
What evidence does Tuz build this structure based on? Mainly Hitler calls the "second book", an unfinished, unpublished sequel to "My Struggle" (probably created in 1928), and scattered side comments about war. But neither his words nor his actions provided any unanimous support for this. Like any European of his time, Hitler knew how huge the American population and domestic market were, but in the 900-page "My Struggle", the United States did not even have a page, not even a paragraph; although the word "America" occasionally mentioned is not particularly hostile. In his "second book," Hitler did talk about the future threat to Europe from the United States, because the size and market wealth of the United States, the lower cost of production and the continuous inventions might have made it dominate the Old Continent, but the essence and significance of this idea do not fit into Tuz's description of these ideas.
Because Hitler went on to explain that the key advantage of the United States lies in its racial composition. Nordic immigration to the New World The mainland has created a new national group with the highest racial qualities in the United States, a young, racially selected group, filtering immigration, extracting "Nordic elements" from all European countries, and banning entry of Japanese and Chinese. Russia may have a similar land surface, but its population quality is so poor that it does not pose any economic or political threat to the freedom of the world, and will only allow the disease to sweep the country. The Pan-European program aims to counter the rise of the United States, but hopes to build some kind of alliance by pieced together various races, which is the delusion of Jewish and mixed races.If Germany continues to allow its best lineage to immigrate to the United States, it is destined to become a worthless nation; only a country that can "elevate the racial value of its people to the most practical form of nationality" can compete with the United States. In the future, conflicts between Europe and the United States may not always be a peaceful economic nature, but the country most likely to be threatened by the United States is not Germany, but Britain.
In other words, when Hitler turned his attention to the United States in his only real special paper on the country, he admired and did not deny the United States, not only because the United States is more economically advanced, but also essentially and explicitly, the United States is more Aryan than Germany itself. How important were these ideas in 1928? The attention to the United States lasted for more than a dozen pages, only 5% of the manuscripts of his second book. Hitler had twice the number of pages on South Tyrol. There is also no evidence that the years that follow continue to focus on studying the United States. In the 1930s, far from the heart of his worldview, the United States disappeared from Hitler's perspective, because he believed that the United States was, after all, not the stronghold of Nordic male virtues, but the nest of mixed-race and fallen people, where at best, only half--even one-sixth--the population was decent, with Jews prevailing; the United States was a country that became vulnerable due to unemployment and neutral laws, and would be ignored in international politics (Weltpolitik).
Once in power, Hitler elaborated on the international mission of the Third Reich in the “Four Year Plan” memorandum from August to September 1936. None of it is about the United States. He explained that "politics is the leader and way of conduct in the struggle for the lives of the people." Since the French Revolution, the most extreme manifestation of this struggle has been the determination to "eliminate the traditional human elite and replace it with Jews all over the world" - and declared that no country can retreat or keep a distance from the confrontation that follows, emphasizing in his book that Germany has the responsibility to use all means to ensure its survival in case of imminent disasters. Germany has always been the starting point for the Western world to resist the Bolshevik attacks. "In Germany, the victory of the Bolsheviks will not end with another Versailles, but with the final destruction, in fact, the scale of such a disaster of extinction against the German people is immeasurable. All other considerations become meaningless due to the need to protect us from this dangerous." At the fastest expansion of reorganization of arms, Germany will launch a war within four years.
Here, the lasting fear in My Struggle combines anti-communism and anti-Semitism and becomes the doctrine of the state; in the words of Ian Kershaw, the struggle against Bolshevikism is "a guiding light for Hitler's foreign policy thought." The future of Germany's expansion lies in the East, not the West. In 1939, he invaded Polish , causing Britain and France to declare war on Germany and defeated France in a short time. He hoped that Britain could agree to his request as a submission to the empire. As early as July 1940, he was confused by Britain's refusal and had no ability to invade Britain from sea, so he decided to turn to attack the Soviet Union - ignoring any rational strategic considerations and re-launching the war on the two fronts he had been insisting on was the primary reason for Germany's defeat from 1914 to 1918. Military common sense should have guided the Wehrmacht to the south rather than east, forcing Spain to go to war with Britain, and controlling the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, closing the Mediterranean, blocking the oil fields of Egypt, and Iraq, which is simply a slim compared to Operation Barbarossa. There is no mention of any conquered Russia that could provide a platform to confront the United States in the expected consequences of its success. Hitler's instructions No. 32 "Preparations after Barbarossa" were drafted 11 days before the start of the Soviet campaign, and it did not take into account Washington , but planned to sweep the Mediterranean and surround the Suez Canal - which he expected.
Orphan-like European
In Hitler's vision, the United States did appear in the Far East. He hoped that Japan could restrain the United States and prevent the United States from helping Britain enter Europe. In April 1941, it incited Tokyo to launch an attack on the United States. At that time, Japan was not determined and was not ready to launch an attack. Tuz correctly observed that this “determines Germany’s fate” without noting how important it was to his construction of the United States’ centrality in Hitler’s worldview. The head of state gave Roosevelt a free gift (after the Pearl Harbor incident, Roosevelt had great difficulties in deciphering the war against Germany, as the nationwide anger and calls for revenge were concentrated on Japan) reveals Hitler's astonishing irrationality and ignorance, which was actually related to the United States.
Dylan Riley has respectful but extensive criticism of The Price of Destruction, the most substantial exchange with The Price of Destruction so far. Reilly quotes the calm judgment of Adorno : "The German ruling group went to war because they were excluded from imperial power. But the reason they were excluded was blind and clumsy localism, which made Hitler and Ribbentrop's policies uncompetitive, and their war was a gamble." From 1942, Hitler had more to say about the United States in his endless monologue, and he increasingly accused the United States of being the leader of the world's Jews, but never surpassed the ignorant rants and hobbies. His worldview includes a limited number of “ids”—anti-communist, anti-Semitism, racialized social Darwinism—where sent emotions or fantasies may add to various temporary hobbies and various inconsistent opinions, including vague and contradictory views about the United States.
When formulating "The Cost of Destruction" based on Hitler's relationship with the United States, Tuz did not make arbitrary conclusions. Because the starting point of his narrative is not to study the expected background of the Nazi economy—the Great Depression. Compared to other industrial societies, the recession has had a more devastating impact on Germany, which is taken for granted, without causal explanations. The tragedy that occupied the center of the stage was that the German elite did not stick to the wisdom of the 1920s leader Stresemann, who recognized that the path to recovery after the defeat of World War I was not in futile resistance to the settlement in Versailles, but in signaling that Germany was willing to pay compensation, thus opening the door to a special relationship with the United States and becoming a dominant force in world affairs, both economically and in the future, with the aim of positioning Germany as a key ally of Washington in the Transatlantic Partnership. The result was "the collapse of the United States' hegemony in Europe", making the European continent "an orphan that has never been seen since World War I ", while Germany was at the mercy of Hitler's evil forces. Happily, with the failure of the Third Reich, Adenauer (Adenauer, the first prime minister of West Germany, under his term of economic reconstruction and becoming a NATO member) could realize Strezerman's vision and ultimately asylum to the German parliament democratic politics in a secure US port orphanage.
3. Wilsonian peace?
"Flood" published eight years later is actually a prequel to "The Price of Destruction". Its theme was a new world order that emerged after the First World War between 1914 and 1918, led by the United States and continued until the Great Depression. The beginning of the story is the military stalemate in Europe in 1916 and the decision of Wilson to join the war in the spring of 1917 to support the Allies in , making the struggle "motivated and politically meaningful" rather than just a great power conflict - a "victory of the Crusade" led by the US president, "to defeat autocracy and militarism in order to maintain the rule of international law." With Germany's defeat and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the United States - already a superpower in economic strength - later became the dominant force of peace.However, its post-war hegemony was not merely a replacement for the former British Peace (Pax British Peace). This is a paradigm shift in international relations, a attempt to establish a global economic and political order as conceived by Wilson—a new system: According to a common agreement, there are three main aspects of the new order—a moral authority backed by military power and economic hegemony.
However, sadly, when Wilson returned to the United States, he failed to get Senate approval for the United States to join the league, which was a "heartbreaking defeat", partly due to his personal rigidity, and his physical fragility at the time. However, the deeper root of this disaster lies in the paradox that the United States, as a pioneer in economic and cultural modernization around the world, has not yet achieved the modernization of the domestic political order. Despite the progressive vision of leaders like the First Roosevelt and Wilson, the United States is still confined to its eighteenth-century constitutional matrix. The stale privilege of the Senate requires two-thirds of the vote of approval of any international treaty, which is not available anywhere else in the world, is a manifestation of this lag and the most direct obstacle to Wilson's hopes. The federal government's fiscally underdeveloped areas is another example, which essentially still relies on tariffs and excise tax revenues. The money for the war comes mainly from monetary easing, and bank credit doubled prices. This is actually an inflation tax, not an income tax. In 1920, the U.S. Treasury Department suddenly overturned the inflation tax, causing the United States to fall into deflation and massive unemployment, causing a Republican to return to the White House and become the person with the largest majority in the election this century. Tuz believes that behind Wilson and his domestic opponents’ remarks, and the culprit of the failure of the United States to meet the current challenges, is the recent ideology of the American Exceptionism organization, essentially a higher form of nationalism, contrary to the internationalist demands of global leaders. However, he found in this view the core of Burke’s wisdom that it is necessary to maintain the continuity of American history after the trauma of the Civil War. In fact, this does not mean any decisive retreat in the task of establishing a new world order. Contrary to legend, the Harding administration presided over a more successful demonstration than Versailles: the 1921-1922 Washington Conference, witnessing Wilson defeating Republican rivals in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes, and won internationalist diplomacy in Britain and Japan, completely abandoning the rise of the U.S. Navy. Since then, successive presidents and their envoys, both publicly and privately, have worked hard to stabilize the situation in Europe after tensions left by the Treaty of Versailles reparations, making constructive suggestions to alleviate Germany's financial difficulties, such as the Dawes and Young Plans, and eventually even Hoover's proposed moratorium on France and Britain's war debt to the United States itself. These efforts to appease international relations are not without admirable European counterparts, and for that matter, Asian counterparts. In the UK, Austen Chamberlain in the 1990s, in France, Aristide Briand, in Germany, Gustav Stresemann—everyone is a Nobelian—has a deep belief in the Atlantic, seeing the United States as an indispensable partner in their pursuit of peace; so do the firm Ramsay MacDonald and the brave Taisho reformers in Japan.
So why did these forward-looking politicians' progressive liberal plans eventually deviate from the track? Its flaw is the limitations of American hegemony it requires and embodies. Because what Wilson and his successors have in common is not a refusal to be openly involved in affairs in the rest of the world, but rather to take on the ultimate responsibility of leading a coalition of international powers to safeguard free trade and collective security.Instead, their basic motivation is to “leverage the American status of transcendent privilege, and the dependence of other major warriors on this status, to build a transformation of world affairs” and “better safeguard their ideals for the fate of the United States”—a radical vision abroad linked to the conservative complex at home. Over the past decade, this combination has achieved remarkable achievements. But when the tragic test of the Great Depression came, that was not enough. International cooperation collapsed, and a rebellion against the once hopeful moderateism of the 1920s erupted in the 1930s, something Hitler and Trotsky foresaw differently. But the extreme of this reaction is evidence of the power of the new order they are trying to overthrow.
The violent incidents that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s proved the power the insurgents believed they were facing. The approaching potential force—the future dominance of American capitalist democracy—is the common factor driving Hitler…the Italian fascists and their Japanese counterparts to take this radical action.
However, the vision of a politician like Berian is not in vain. Because the relentless pursuit of a new way to ensure order and peace is not a manifestation of a deceived idealism, but a manifestation of a higher form of realism, which believes that only the alliance and cooperation of the international community can ensure peace and prosperity on the earth. This is a new type of liberal calculation, a progress in real politics. We need this. Tuz sounded the contemporary alarm without hesitation, asking, "Why can't the 'West' better play its winning hands? Where are management and leadership? Given the rise of new economies, these questions have obvious power."
version of Chatham House
For two questions raised by Durand - what are the methods implied in Tuz's work and what political factors are at work - once The Flood and The Cost of Destruction are interpreted as installments on the same topic, these two questions will have clearer answers. In each story, a situational and tactical approach to the subject at hand determines the medium of entry into the story, abandoning the structural interpretation of its origin: in The Cost of Destruction, The Great Depression, The Flood, and The First World War. In both of these issues, the primary theme is the kinetic momentum of American power, the master key to the twentieth century. As described, Tuz's political stances are all left-wing liberal positions. However, each term around the hyphen has a range of meanings, and this compound is often, perhaps typical, proved to be unstable, with one or other elements having a larger atomic valence. The Cost, as a study of the Nazi economy, provides a narrower perspective to consider the balance between them.
The Deluge, created after Tuz moved from Cambridge to Yale, is more outspoken in politics, fully supporting the winners’ self-understanding of World War I and, despite all the differences, that motivates them to work to build a progressive peace in the post-war period. Historically, it can be described as a unique practice of the Chatham Institute’s description of this period and apologizes to Elie Kedourie. By narrating from 1916, Tuz avoids answering the question of what led to the outbreak of the 1914 war, and the nature of the war itself, simply asserting that the United States' participation in the war was caused by German aggression, which turned into a battle for democracy and international law.
Imperialism, in this statement, is a very new phenomenon, with global competition only decades of history - the Seven Years’ War and the conquest of India may never happen - once the war is successfully over, the world faces the question of how to establish a peaceful order "after imperialism". "The narrative is constructed," in other words, as Alexander Zewen wrote in the book, "the reality of structure is that World War I took place not only in the empire, but also for the empire, and between empires."For the extent of this basic fact, refer to the investigation of combatants in a recent comprehensive report, Empires at War, which covers all combatants, including Portuguese detachments in the East African War Zone, where the death toll of the British Empire exceeded the total death toll in the United States in Europe. What contributed to World War I was the uneven distribution of spoils: in a system where every country took the connection between power and property for granted, Germany, the largest and fastest-growing industrial economy, was surrounded by the territory of the three largest powers in the civil war, without a corresponding share of pillage, and Britain gained too much benefit compared to any other empire, as Lenin saw at the time, and as more critical historians later pointed out, it was impossible to achieve international balance.
As Tuz interprets, the "legality" of the Palaeo-Etente during World War I triggered a huge disaster that occurred afterwards. The massacre within imperialism claimed about 10 million lives on the battlefield and caused 40 million casualties. The responsibility for the violence that occurred after the massacre has completely disappeared, replaced by extremists’ resistance to peaceful forces in the post-war settlement. No word even mentions the scale of killing caused by the free civilization of the Belle Époque, not to mention the psychosocial consequences it has caused, even after 1918, the world has become increasingly colder. In Ireland , in 1916, “extreme Irish nationalists launched suicide attacks on the British regime”, undermining Redmond and his party’s responsible support for war efforts, the independence guerrilla war between 1919 and 1921 caused “terrible losses”, coupled with the civil war triggered by Sinn Fein’s “Apocalyptic radicalism”, the result of all this chaos was “violence accumulated over the rest of the century.” About 1,400 people died in the war because of independence, and perhaps 2,000. Thirty thousand Irish people died in the trenches of France, the Balkans and the Middle East. Non-violent? Henry James' reaction to war is something that the Flood does not mention:
In this age we live in, things we are so accustomed to are so empty, notorious, and seem to be a highly refined civilization—although there is a conscious incongruity; discovering it flows with this abominable blood, finding it has always been like a similar shock when suddenly having to recognize a gang of murderers, liars and villains in one of one's own family circles or among a group of best friends.
If the war ends with a victory of democracy and the rule of law, what about the peace that follows? Does it embody democratic rule of law? Tuz believes that there is no particular drawback to the Treaty of Versailles , and he praises Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, who is particularly sympathetic to the latter, because they have understandably different concerns and are willing to reach an agreement to impose a satisfactory common solution on the countries they defeated. Since Germany is an invader, it can be taken for granted that the war crimes clause in the Treaty serves as the formal basis for obtaining indefinite compensation from Germany. It is important that no matter how disliked the Germans of these treaties, they would be forced to accept it for their own benefit. Keynes's rhetoric attack on the Treaty—although perhaps a rhetoric technique—is an irresponsible mischief that not only encourages reckless Germany to resist debt repayment, but also poisons the relationship between London and Paris… No one has done more than he does in undermining the legitimacy of the peace in Versailles, and the freshman German Republic has the courage to reject the Allied ultimatum—it would have to sign the treaty.
Thankfully, extremists like Max Weber (who calls for a boycott of the treaty with guerrilla warfare), and even moderate social democrats like then-German Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann (who advocates taking a position that overemphasizes Trotsky's "neither peace nor war" in Brest-Litauvsk" [Neither Peace Nor War]) accepted the treaty at the last minute. There are still many habitual offenders in Weimar. The Rapallo Pact reached three years later, "a self-indulgent nationalist fantasy" - is inconsistent with the Versailles spirit; the following year, France occupied Rhineland to ensure that Germany pays compensation, which is another high-risk crisis. But unlike Rattenau, Stratzemann has always understood that Germany must rely on the United States to improve its situation.
's judgment naturally comes from the premise that the First World War was the victory over evil by relative justice. Punishment is necessary, and in order to rejoin the decent ranks, the perpetrator must accept punishment, but must not be excessive. No stable peace can be built on a historic event of selfishness, and the entire country forced to accept this fact will refuse to accept it as dishonest and injustice, and this consideration cannot occur within this psychological framework. Similarly, if Germany took the line advocated by Weber or Shederman, rejected the orders of the Allies, and let them see what benefits would be for them to occupy the country, faced with all the inevitable resistance, and how long their own people could endure. In Germany in 1919, this resistance would unite most of the active political states. Through their surrender, the centrist politicians, hailed by Tuz as heroes of the time, secured a banner of complete legitimate opposition and was destined to win in due time, and would be passed only on to the radical right. The foundation of this building built in Versailles has rotted from the beginning and is destined to collapse.
Young hegemony?
As long as Stratzeman is still at the helm, Germany's fate is full of hope, which forms the main line of Tuz's narrative of the new world order that emerged after 1918. But the panoramic range is wide, which is an immeasurable force of the book, covering China, Japan, India, Egypt, South Africa, and even a slide inserted from Patagonia. As Tooz assumes, will the balance sheet of American hegemony emerge from it? If the conceptual context of the Great Flood lies at a point in the political spectrum, at which liberalism no longer has any particular meaning to the left—its description of the Russian Revolution is pure Cold War thinking—the story it then tells is even more blurred. Tuzz didn’t take the risk of painting a full portrait of any of his protagonists, but most of his narrative of Wilson is clearly inconsistent with the role of the main designer who initially gave him the prophet and the secure world built for peace and democracy. Excited by the indirect war between the United States and Spain and the capture of the Caribbean and the Pacific Colonies, Wilson was committed to protecting—in his own words—the supremacy of white men on the planet, not mentioning national self-determination in his Fourteen Points, rejecting discussions about Ireland in Versailles, and not participating in Japan’s call for a commitment to racial equality in the Covenant of the League, but instead pursuing Monroe Doctrine as one of its fundamental principles.
In 1919, Wilson cut off economic aid to Italy, forcing Italy to abolish the treaty with Britain and France, which granted Italy the benefits gained in the Tyrol and Adriatic wars. Within a few days, Wilson told China that the treaty must be abide by - involving the benefits gained by Japan in Shandong and Northeast China - because "the sacredness of the treaty" is one of the principles of war. All of this can be found in The Flood.But this is not the case, and the mass arrests in 1919 were transferred by default to Wilson's attorney general.
In addition to Tuz himself, the bigger question is whether Tuz's description of the United States' global dominance between the two world wars is accurate, that is, during the Great Depression, the United States played a role in the dominance of allies; during the entire Great Depression, the opponent's imagination was accurate. Of course, the advantage of The Flood is that it records the continued influence the United States has exerted on major European countries through the cycle between the war debts owed by Britain, France and Italy by Germany, and the reparations owed by France and Britain, allowing Washington to adjust both in accordance with its own interests. The point of Tuz's explanation of this financial suffocation is that it is a moderate ally (though not always) relationship to ease the sharp edge of the Versailles Agreement and restore Germany to its so-called "international community" today. However, two characteristics of cross-strait relations in Atlantic are underestimated: one is the greedy nature of the United States - one might say that this nature was later nicknamed vulture capitalism - seeking compensation for its support for the Allies despite the relative burden of war; the other is the sleepless fear of the revolution, which leads the United States to support political reaction wherever it needs to crush any threat, and cultivate a good relationship with Mussolini from the beginning.
In addition to the financial arsenal of US power, the Washington Conference also increased the weight of the Navy. But to what extent did these two assets—money and warship—make the role that Tuz always described in the world—"American hegemony"—have existed? This was a period when the size of the US military was smaller than that of Portugal. In 1924, the US Bureau of Foreign Affairs was still a worm pupa. In 48, the United States did not have an embassy in Moscow. The United States' existence in China cannot be compared with Britain. Britain actually controlled the country's fiscal system. In Europe, the United States was a bystander of Locano's Versailles . What is its most well-known initiative? The 1928 Kellog-Briand ‘Peace Pact’ was a useless wish list of self-feelings that left little traces in the history of the 1930s.
All this stems from the reality that Tuz himself described as Wilson's plan to fail when Wilson returned to the United States in 1919: the federal state machine itself is maldeveloped and has only semi-modern characteristics. But after stating and explaining this with force, he forgot that the American hegemony hegemony he dominated—even after the decline—it seemed as if only Washington’s kind parents guided the protection of the old world until the recession. This statement is a bit too hasty. The world of 1919 was by no means a unipolar one. Of course, American hegemony will appear at the right time. But tracing back to Harding and Coolidge's era is an era mistake, an author's negligence, not a historical record.
But in Durand's explanation, both judgments are contradictory. For Goldley, one of the main advantages of the stock flow consistency approach is that it combines finance with the real economy, while other models do not. However, Durand's comments "do not discuss the specific interweaving between the financial and production sectors in the global economy at all" and therefore "do not place the financial crisis in the context of structural crisis trends in contemporary capitalist economies." This observation in turn creates another problem, which seems to affect Durand’s overall praise for the book. He wrote in his book that Tuz was reluctant to investigate the relationship between politics and economy, and this reluctance ultimately undermined his account of the decade's crisis. Logically, the question arises: do these two obvious contradictions exist in Tuz's work, or in Durand's comments on it? Or can both be consistent in their own way?1. Conceptualizing finance
Perhaps the best way to solve this problem is to turn to Durand's own work on the transfer of contemporary capitalism (metastases). Although his relationship with "Collapse" is obvious, he did not mention his 2014 French "Fictif" (English version published in 2017). This is a concise study that shows a rare combination in the literature on economic landscapes of the new century: in just 150 pages, the energy of a driving concept is combined with the controlling experience of all major capitalist state statistics. The term "virtual capital" - a history that can be traced back to the war minister of the Northern Government under the leadership of Liverpool's first Earl, George III, and was later used by Ricardo and theorized in different ways by Marx and Hayek - demonstrates the characteristics and logic of the financial system that brought the world into crisis in 2008 and has been developing ever since.
What is the main theme of this book? Instability in the financial system has first triggered continuous crises in the margins of the global capitalist economy and then in the core areas, with its roots in the differences between financial markets and goods and services markets.
In normal times, price increases weaken demand in the real economy, while financial securities are just the opposite: the more the price increases, the greater the demand for these securities. The same goes for the other way around: during the crisis, prices fell leading to big sales, which in turn accelerated price collapse. This particularity of financial products stems from the fact that their purchases (without any value of use) are similar to a purely speculative reason; the purpose is to obtain surplus value by reselling these products at higher prices in the future.
In the process of price increase, "the self-sustaining price increase driven by the agency's expectations was further exaggerated by credit." Liabilities increase prices, and since these securities can act as counterparts to new loans, their increasing value makes the agent bear more debt. As the asset bubble began to burst, during the decline, "economic entities trying to repay debts were forced to sell assets at discounted prices", which triggered "a self-sustaining movement toward depression, which can only be stopped by state intervention."
Since the relaxation of capital flow controls in the 1980s, this general mechanism has accelerated the large-scale expansion of financial markets within the global economic system. It not only greatly expanded the form and scale of private credit, public bonds and stocks (this are the three virtual capitals Marx said), but also further developed new types of transactions, leaving them out of the production process and becoming shadow banking and financial innovation, distorting and extending the debt chain. “Contract swaps, structured products and option contracts are increasing and combined. There is no limit to the imagination of financial actors.” A large amount of speculation is no longer the product of prosperity: due to the flexibility of derivatives, “it becomes an activity independent of the business cycle.” The result is a fundamental change in the relationship between finance and commercial transactions, and the weight of finance in the world economy has increased dramatically. By 2007, the total nominal value of derivatives was about 10 times that of global GDP.By 2013, pure financial transactions were worth 100 times more than the combined trade and investment.
Such an inverted pyramid structure is in crisis in one way or another, and each time it requires the central bank to act as an unlimited lender of last resort, and the government maintains demand by allowing the deficit to soar to save the financial system – the 2008 collapse is by far the latest and most compelling case. But as Durand observed, the success of such rescue operations itself lays the groundwork for the next crisis. If “economic policy has been undeniably successful in efforts to control collapse: all post-war financial crises have been curbed”, the subsequent recovery in confidence will work in due course – financial operators are increasingly willing to take new risks because they know that the central bank “will do everything to prevent systemic risks from becoming a reality.” This is the paradox of government intervention. “As the capacity for crisis management improves, financial actors and regulators become more optimistic”, financial innovation began to recover, regulation was relaxed, resulting in more complex and sophisticated products that expanded credit at the expense of the quality of the purchased assets. This in turn leads to small-scale crises that are quickly overcome as the ability to handle them is improved. This accumulated dynamic creates a financial super-cycle through which the accumulated risks become increasingly greater, that is, the relative weight of speculative finance and Ponzi schemes continues to increase, and the scale and cost of state intervention to curb the crisis. According to the calculations of International Monetary Fund (IMF), from the fall of 2008 to the beginning of 2009, the total support provided by national banks and central banks in developed capitalist countries to the financial sector is equivalent to 50.4% of world GDP.
No cumulative profit?
As we all know, the scale of the expansion of the financial sector in Western economies means that its share of total profits is also increasing. For Durand, this raises the question of where these profits come from, which more or less plagues other people working in the Marxist tradition. But as he pointed out, there is a bigger problem here. Since the 1980s, investment rates in core capitalist areas have steadily declined, and with it, year-on-year growth rates. However, during the same period, profits remained high. In fact, as David Kotz points out, the US accumulated less than any decade since the Reagan era, but profit margins were higher than that during this period. So, where do these profits come from in general? Durand's answer is that they represent an updated version of the future that Hobson (John A. Hobson) had in the early 20th century: that is, to obtain high levels of profit from the production of cheap labor zones around the system, especially in Asia. In this way, the mystery of profits that have not been accumulated will disappear because the business is indeed investing; not in the domestic economy where growth, employment and wages are stagnant, but in overseas regions where they get very high returns.
On the surface, this argument has two difficulties. The first question is, in principle, where is the boundary of “virtual” capital (if defined as “capital circulating without production, representing the requirement for future actual value assessment processes”), because in form, almost all investments meet this standard, that is, capital is laid out for the expected return on profit. The second question is how to estimate the importance of pure financial payments in practice from FDI flowing into cheap labor markets, which are different from profits directly from production activities. He took the US and France study as an example, using dividends from foreign assets as an alternative indicator of these issues. It is unclear how deep it is to Durand re-propose the first puzzle. The knot between financialization and globalization, as he said, exists, and there is no doubt. However, exactly how this connection is analytically elusive.
The conclusions of his book are not such ambiguous.Contrary to the accepted view, while financial instability has negative externalities that affect all actors, this does not mean that no financial instability is a blessing to everyone. Financial stability itself is not a public product that everyone can benefit from. We have seen the rewards of these operations that have allowed it to recover in 2008-09. A year later, the share of government bonds held by the richest 1% of the U.S. population has climbed to more than 40%. Durand's ruling is very sharp: the hegemony of finance - the most admired form of wealth - can only be maintained by the unconditional support of the public authorities. If allowed to develop, virtual capital will collapse and will drag down all our economies. In fact, the financial industry is a master of blackmail. Financial hegemony is disguised as the freedom of the market, but it seizes the old state sovereignty and better exploits social subjects to satisfy their own interests.
2. The interlaced trilogy
has sufficient evidence to show that although Durand appreciates "Collapse", he believes that "Collapse" ultimately fails to fulfill its imagined promises. However, in itself, such restrictive judgments do not provide anything to explain the gap between the two. What kind of method can include the real economy in the scope of financial change? What kind of political factors determine the structure of the subsequent works? The initial clues to these questions can be found in two short articles by Tuz. In the first article, in the review of Geoff Mann's book In the Long Run We Are All Dead: Keynesianism, Political Economy and Revolution (2017), Tuz defines Keynes' unique strengths as "situation and tactical awareness" of the liberal democracy inherent in the operation of business cycles in capitalist economies, requiring pragmatic crisis management in the form of precise adjustments, without permanent fantasies. In the second article, in the introduction to The Collapse, he writes that “the tenth anniversary of 2008 is not a comfortable commanding height for a left-wing liberal historian who focuses on England, Germany, Manhattan Island and the EU.”
To understand the relationship between these remarks and the questions raised by Durand, we might as well see The Collapse as the third in the trilogy, before two other works by Tuz: The Great War and The Remaking of Global Order (2014) and The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of The Nazi Economy, 2006). These two works can be said to have made Tuz an outstanding modern economic historian in his group. As a public voice, he has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal , The Guardian, etc., as well as radio and television. These three books now define his career, and they do not go back to a continuous narrative, and their composition is not arranged in chronological order—the first is about 1933-1945, the second is about 1916-1931, and the third is about 2006-2018—and there is no unified focus. However, it shows that a clear theme unity is obvious.
Adam Tuz's "The Great War and The Remaking of Global Order" (2014) and "The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of The Nazi Economy, 2006), both works made Tuz an outstanding modern economic historian in his group.
Hitler's war
As a large historical study full of details, the book "The Cost of Destruction" tells the story of the Great Depression of Hitler during the Great Depression of Hitler, after he came to power, inherited the German economy, the Nazi regime achieved a rapid economic recovery through a high-speed reorganization plan, suffered resource restrictions in the late 1930s, and the subsequent military conquest defeated these problems. Their excessive expansion during the invasion of the Soviet Union and the sharp growth of production, they stepped up their dependence on slave labor. At this time, their failure on the Eastern battlefield was imminent, and the allies blocked Nazi Germany's exports in the West. While Tuz exaggerates the relatively backward economy of Germany – an economy dragged down by poorly ill small farmers and ancient landlord agriculture (and underestimated the growth of popular consumption if the Third Reich was still in peace), these stressed issues hardly affect his achievements, especially when his narrative entered a high-speed state, planning the interaction between economic and military decisions during World War II.
However, writing this narrative is an unsettling proposition: one view is that the book is essentially a "formation and disintegration" of the Nazi economy written in the story. Tuz believes that contrary to popular belief, in Hitler's mind, the biggest enemy of his mobilization of the Third Reich to launch the mainland war was not in the prairie to the east, but in the far west across the ocean. It is not the spores of Bolshevism, but the power of the United States, the headquarters of the world's Jewish people, and it is Germany's existence threat that haunts him and dominates his ambitions. Destroying communism and conquering Russia is just a means, not an end, and Operation Barbarossa is nothing more than a transit station - a platform for gaining territory and resources in the war to conquer the world, able to compete with the vast open space of the American giants. Historically, “the United States should be the hub for our understanding of the Third Reich.” The expansionist program in the East, along with the fanatical anti-communism and anti-Semitism, was a general characteristic of post-1918 Germany. Hitler was different because he believed that the central position of the United States in his worldview was "a forming global hegemony" and "the fulcrum of the world's Jewish plot to destroy Germany and other European countries."
What evidence does Tuz build this structure based on? Mainly Hitler calls the "second book", an unfinished, unpublished sequel to "My Struggle" (probably created in 1928), and scattered side comments about war. But neither his words nor his actions provided any unanimous support for this. Like any European of his time, Hitler knew how huge the American population and domestic market were, but in the 900-page "My Struggle", the United States did not even have a page, not even a paragraph; although the word "America" occasionally mentioned is not particularly hostile. In his "second book," Hitler did talk about the future threat to Europe from the United States, because the size and market wealth of the United States, the lower cost of production and the continuous inventions might have made it dominate the Old Continent, but the essence and significance of this idea do not fit into Tuz's description of these ideas.
Because Hitler went on to explain that the key advantage of the United States lies in its racial composition. Nordic immigration to the New World The mainland has created a new national group with the highest racial qualities in the United States, a young, racially selected group, filtering immigration, extracting "Nordic elements" from all European countries, and banning entry of Japanese and Chinese. Russia may have a similar land surface, but its population quality is so poor that it does not pose any economic or political threat to the freedom of the world, and will only allow the disease to sweep the country. The Pan-European program aims to counter the rise of the United States, but hopes to build some kind of alliance by pieced together various races, which is the delusion of Jewish and mixed races.If Germany continues to allow its best lineage to immigrate to the United States, it is destined to become a worthless nation; only a country that can "elevate the racial value of its people to the most practical form of nationality" can compete with the United States. In the future, conflicts between Europe and the United States may not always be a peaceful economic nature, but the country most likely to be threatened by the United States is not Germany, but Britain.
In other words, when Hitler turned his attention to the United States in his only real special paper on the country, he admired and did not deny the United States, not only because the United States is more economically advanced, but also essentially and explicitly, the United States is more Aryan than Germany itself. How important were these ideas in 1928? The attention to the United States lasted for more than a dozen pages, only 5% of the manuscripts of his second book. Hitler had twice the number of pages on South Tyrol. There is also no evidence that the years that follow continue to focus on studying the United States. In the 1930s, far from the heart of his worldview, the United States disappeared from Hitler's perspective, because he believed that the United States was, after all, not the stronghold of Nordic male virtues, but the nest of mixed-race and fallen people, where at best, only half--even one-sixth--the population was decent, with Jews prevailing; the United States was a country that became vulnerable due to unemployment and neutral laws, and would be ignored in international politics (Weltpolitik).
Once in power, Hitler elaborated on the international mission of the Third Reich in the “Four Year Plan” memorandum from August to September 1936. None of it is about the United States. He explained that "politics is the leader and way of conduct in the struggle for the lives of the people." Since the French Revolution, the most extreme manifestation of this struggle has been the determination to "eliminate the traditional human elite and replace it with Jews all over the world" - and declared that no country can retreat or keep a distance from the confrontation that follows, emphasizing in his book that Germany has the responsibility to use all means to ensure its survival in case of imminent disasters. Germany has always been the starting point for the Western world to resist the Bolshevik attacks. "In Germany, the victory of the Bolsheviks will not end with another Versailles, but with the final destruction, in fact, the scale of such a disaster of extinction against the German people is immeasurable. All other considerations become meaningless due to the need to protect us from this dangerous." At the fastest expansion of reorganization of arms, Germany will launch a war within four years.
Here, the lasting fear in My Struggle combines anti-communism and anti-Semitism and becomes the doctrine of the state; in the words of Ian Kershaw, the struggle against Bolshevikism is "a guiding light for Hitler's foreign policy thought." The future of Germany's expansion lies in the East, not the West. In 1939, he invaded Polish , causing Britain and France to declare war on Germany and defeated France in a short time. He hoped that Britain could agree to his request as a submission to the empire. As early as July 1940, he was confused by Britain's refusal and had no ability to invade Britain from sea, so he decided to turn to attack the Soviet Union - ignoring any rational strategic considerations and re-launching the war on the two fronts he had been insisting on was the primary reason for Germany's defeat from 1914 to 1918. Military common sense should have guided the Wehrmacht to the south rather than east, forcing Spain to go to war with Britain, and controlling the two sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, closing the Mediterranean, blocking the oil fields of Egypt, and Iraq, which is simply a slim compared to Operation Barbarossa. There is no mention of any conquered Russia that could provide a platform to confront the United States in the expected consequences of its success. Hitler's instructions No. 32 "Preparations after Barbarossa" were drafted 11 days before the start of the Soviet campaign, and it did not take into account Washington , but planned to sweep the Mediterranean and surround the Suez Canal - which he expected.
Orphan-like European
In Hitler's vision, the United States did appear in the Far East. He hoped that Japan could restrain the United States and prevent the United States from helping Britain enter Europe. In April 1941, it incited Tokyo to launch an attack on the United States. At that time, Japan was not determined and was not ready to launch an attack. Tuz correctly observed that this “determines Germany’s fate” without noting how important it was to his construction of the United States’ centrality in Hitler’s worldview. The head of state gave Roosevelt a free gift (after the Pearl Harbor incident, Roosevelt had great difficulties in deciphering the war against Germany, as the nationwide anger and calls for revenge were concentrated on Japan) reveals Hitler's astonishing irrationality and ignorance, which was actually related to the United States.
Dylan Riley has respectful but extensive criticism of The Price of Destruction, the most substantial exchange with The Price of Destruction so far. Reilly quotes the calm judgment of Adorno : "The German ruling group went to war because they were excluded from imperial power. But the reason they were excluded was blind and clumsy localism, which made Hitler and Ribbentrop's policies uncompetitive, and their war was a gamble." From 1942, Hitler had more to say about the United States in his endless monologue, and he increasingly accused the United States of being the leader of the world's Jews, but never surpassed the ignorant rants and hobbies. His worldview includes a limited number of “ids”—anti-communist, anti-Semitism, racialized social Darwinism—where sent emotions or fantasies may add to various temporary hobbies and various inconsistent opinions, including vague and contradictory views about the United States.
When formulating "The Cost of Destruction" based on Hitler's relationship with the United States, Tuz did not make arbitrary conclusions. Because the starting point of his narrative is not to study the expected background of the Nazi economy—the Great Depression. Compared to other industrial societies, the recession has had a more devastating impact on Germany, which is taken for granted, without causal explanations. The tragedy that occupied the center of the stage was that the German elite did not stick to the wisdom of the 1920s leader Stresemann, who recognized that the path to recovery after the defeat of World War I was not in futile resistance to the settlement in Versailles, but in signaling that Germany was willing to pay compensation, thus opening the door to a special relationship with the United States and becoming a dominant force in world affairs, both economically and in the future, with the aim of positioning Germany as a key ally of Washington in the Transatlantic Partnership. The result was "the collapse of the United States' hegemony in Europe", making the European continent "an orphan that has never been seen since World War I ", while Germany was at the mercy of Hitler's evil forces. Happily, with the failure of the Third Reich, Adenauer (Adenauer, the first prime minister of West Germany, under his term of economic reconstruction and becoming a NATO member) could realize Strezerman's vision and ultimately asylum to the German parliament democratic politics in a secure US port orphanage.
3. Wilsonian peace?
"Flood" published eight years later is actually a prequel to "The Price of Destruction". Its theme was a new world order that emerged after the First World War between 1914 and 1918, led by the United States and continued until the Great Depression. The beginning of the story is the military stalemate in Europe in 1916 and the decision of Wilson to join the war in the spring of 1917 to support the Allies in , making the struggle "motivated and politically meaningful" rather than just a great power conflict - a "victory of the Crusade" led by the US president, "to defeat autocracy and militarism in order to maintain the rule of international law." With Germany's defeat and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the United States - already a superpower in economic strength - later became the dominant force of peace.However, its post-war hegemony was not merely a replacement for the former British Peace (Pax British Peace). This is a paradigm shift in international relations, a attempt to establish a global economic and political order as conceived by Wilson—a new system: According to a common agreement, there are three main aspects of the new order—a moral authority backed by military power and economic hegemony.
However, sadly, when Wilson returned to the United States, he failed to get Senate approval for the United States to join the league, which was a "heartbreaking defeat", partly due to his personal rigidity, and his physical fragility at the time. However, the deeper root of this disaster lies in the paradox that the United States, as a pioneer in economic and cultural modernization around the world, has not yet achieved the modernization of the domestic political order. Despite the progressive vision of leaders like the First Roosevelt and Wilson, the United States is still confined to its eighteenth-century constitutional matrix. The stale privilege of the Senate requires two-thirds of the vote of approval of any international treaty, which is not available anywhere else in the world, is a manifestation of this lag and the most direct obstacle to Wilson's hopes. The federal government's fiscally underdeveloped areas is another example, which essentially still relies on tariffs and excise tax revenues. The money for the war comes mainly from monetary easing, and bank credit doubled prices. This is actually an inflation tax, not an income tax. In 1920, the U.S. Treasury Department suddenly overturned the inflation tax, causing the United States to fall into deflation and massive unemployment, causing a Republican to return to the White House and become the person with the largest majority in the election this century. Tuz believes that behind Wilson and his domestic opponents’ remarks, and the culprit of the failure of the United States to meet the current challenges, is the recent ideology of the American Exceptionism organization, essentially a higher form of nationalism, contrary to the internationalist demands of global leaders. However, he found in this view the core of Burke’s wisdom that it is necessary to maintain the continuity of American history after the trauma of the Civil War. In fact, this does not mean any decisive retreat in the task of establishing a new world order. Contrary to legend, the Harding administration presided over a more successful demonstration than Versailles: the 1921-1922 Washington Conference, witnessing Wilson defeating Republican rivals in 1916, Charles Evans Hughes, and won internationalist diplomacy in Britain and Japan, completely abandoning the rise of the U.S. Navy. Since then, successive presidents and their envoys, both publicly and privately, have worked hard to stabilize the situation in Europe after tensions left by the Treaty of Versailles reparations, making constructive suggestions to alleviate Germany's financial difficulties, such as the Dawes and Young Plans, and eventually even Hoover's proposed moratorium on France and Britain's war debt to the United States itself. These efforts to appease international relations are not without admirable European counterparts, and for that matter, Asian counterparts. In the UK, Austen Chamberlain in the 1990s, in France, Aristide Briand, in Germany, Gustav Stresemann—everyone is a Nobelian—has a deep belief in the Atlantic, seeing the United States as an indispensable partner in their pursuit of peace; so do the firm Ramsay MacDonald and the brave Taisho reformers in Japan.
So why did these forward-looking politicians' progressive liberal plans eventually deviate from the track? Its flaw is the limitations of American hegemony it requires and embodies. Because what Wilson and his successors have in common is not a refusal to be openly involved in affairs in the rest of the world, but rather to take on the ultimate responsibility of leading a coalition of international powers to safeguard free trade and collective security.Instead, their basic motivation is to “leverage the American status of transcendent privilege, and the dependence of other major warriors on this status, to build a transformation of world affairs” and “better safeguard their ideals for the fate of the United States”—a radical vision abroad linked to the conservative complex at home. Over the past decade, this combination has achieved remarkable achievements. But when the tragic test of the Great Depression came, that was not enough. International cooperation collapsed, and a rebellion against the once hopeful moderateism of the 1920s erupted in the 1930s, something Hitler and Trotsky foresaw differently. But the extreme of this reaction is evidence of the power of the new order they are trying to overthrow.
The violent incidents that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s proved the power the insurgents believed they were facing. The approaching potential force—the future dominance of American capitalist democracy—is the common factor driving Hitler…the Italian fascists and their Japanese counterparts to take this radical action.
However, the vision of a politician like Berian is not in vain. Because the relentless pursuit of a new way to ensure order and peace is not a manifestation of a deceived idealism, but a manifestation of a higher form of realism, which believes that only the alliance and cooperation of the international community can ensure peace and prosperity on the earth. This is a new type of liberal calculation, a progress in real politics. We need this. Tuz sounded the contemporary alarm without hesitation, asking, "Why can't the 'West' better play its winning hands? Where are management and leadership? Given the rise of new economies, these questions have obvious power."
version of Chatham House
For two questions raised by Durand - what are the methods implied in Tuz's work and what political factors are at work - once The Flood and The Cost of Destruction are interpreted as installments on the same topic, these two questions will have clearer answers. In each story, a situational and tactical approach to the subject at hand determines the medium of entry into the story, abandoning the structural interpretation of its origin: in The Cost of Destruction, The Great Depression, The Flood, and The First World War. In both of these issues, the primary theme is the kinetic momentum of American power, the master key to the twentieth century. As described, Tuz's political stances are all left-wing liberal positions. However, each term around the hyphen has a range of meanings, and this compound is often, perhaps typical, proved to be unstable, with one or other elements having a larger atomic valence. The Cost, as a study of the Nazi economy, provides a narrower perspective to consider the balance between them.
The Deluge, created after Tuz moved from Cambridge to Yale, is more outspoken in politics, fully supporting the winners’ self-understanding of World War I and, despite all the differences, that motivates them to work to build a progressive peace in the post-war period. Historically, it can be described as a unique practice of the Chatham Institute’s description of this period and apologizes to Elie Kedourie. By narrating from 1916, Tuz avoids answering the question of what led to the outbreak of the 1914 war, and the nature of the war itself, simply asserting that the United States' participation in the war was caused by German aggression, which turned into a battle for democracy and international law.
Imperialism, in this statement, is a very new phenomenon, with global competition only decades of history - the Seven Years’ War and the conquest of India may never happen - once the war is successfully over, the world faces the question of how to establish a peaceful order "after imperialism". "The narrative is constructed," in other words, as Alexander Zewen wrote in the book, "the reality of structure is that World War I took place not only in the empire, but also for the empire, and between empires."For the extent of this basic fact, refer to the investigation of combatants in a recent comprehensive report, Empires at War, which covers all combatants, including Portuguese detachments in the East African War Zone, where the death toll of the British Empire exceeded the total death toll in the United States in Europe. What contributed to World War I was the uneven distribution of spoils: in a system where every country took the connection between power and property for granted, Germany, the largest and fastest-growing industrial economy, was surrounded by the territory of the three largest powers in the civil war, without a corresponding share of pillage, and Britain gained too much benefit compared to any other empire, as Lenin saw at the time, and as more critical historians later pointed out, it was impossible to achieve international balance.
As Tuz interprets, the "legality" of the Palaeo-Etente during World War I triggered a huge disaster that occurred afterwards. The massacre within imperialism claimed about 10 million lives on the battlefield and caused 40 million casualties. The responsibility for the violence that occurred after the massacre has completely disappeared, replaced by extremists’ resistance to peaceful forces in the post-war settlement. No word even mentions the scale of killing caused by the free civilization of the Belle Époque, not to mention the psychosocial consequences it has caused, even after 1918, the world has become increasingly colder. In Ireland , in 1916, “extreme Irish nationalists launched suicide attacks on the British regime”, undermining Redmond and his party’s responsible support for war efforts, the independence guerrilla war between 1919 and 1921 caused “terrible losses”, coupled with the civil war triggered by Sinn Fein’s “Apocalyptic radicalism”, the result of all this chaos was “violence accumulated over the rest of the century.” About 1,400 people died in the war because of independence, and perhaps 2,000. Thirty thousand Irish people died in the trenches of France, the Balkans and the Middle East. Non-violent? Henry James' reaction to war is something that the Flood does not mention:
In this age we live in, things we are so accustomed to are so empty, notorious, and seem to be a highly refined civilization—although there is a conscious incongruity; discovering it flows with this abominable blood, finding it has always been like a similar shock when suddenly having to recognize a gang of murderers, liars and villains in one of one's own family circles or among a group of best friends.
If the war ends with a victory of democracy and the rule of law, what about the peace that follows? Does it embody democratic rule of law? Tuz believes that there is no particular drawback to the Treaty of Versailles , and he praises Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau, who is particularly sympathetic to the latter, because they have understandably different concerns and are willing to reach an agreement to impose a satisfactory common solution on the countries they defeated. Since Germany is an invader, it can be taken for granted that the war crimes clause in the Treaty serves as the formal basis for obtaining indefinite compensation from Germany. It is important that no matter how disliked the Germans of these treaties, they would be forced to accept it for their own benefit. Keynes's rhetoric attack on the Treaty—although perhaps a rhetoric technique—is an irresponsible mischief that not only encourages reckless Germany to resist debt repayment, but also poisons the relationship between London and Paris… No one has done more than he does in undermining the legitimacy of the peace in Versailles, and the freshman German Republic has the courage to reject the Allied ultimatum—it would have to sign the treaty.
Thankfully, extremists like Max Weber (who calls for a boycott of the treaty with guerrilla warfare), and even moderate social democrats like then-German Chancellor Philipp Scheidemann (who advocates taking a position that overemphasizes Trotsky's "neither peace nor war" in Brest-Litauvsk" [Neither Peace Nor War]) accepted the treaty at the last minute. There are still many habitual offenders in Weimar. The Rapallo Pact reached three years later, "a self-indulgent nationalist fantasy" - is inconsistent with the Versailles spirit; the following year, France occupied Rhineland to ensure that Germany pays compensation, which is another high-risk crisis. But unlike Rattenau, Stratzemann has always understood that Germany must rely on the United States to improve its situation.
's judgment naturally comes from the premise that the First World War was the victory over evil by relative justice. Punishment is necessary, and in order to rejoin the decent ranks, the perpetrator must accept punishment, but must not be excessive. No stable peace can be built on a historic event of selfishness, and the entire country forced to accept this fact will refuse to accept it as dishonest and injustice, and this consideration cannot occur within this psychological framework. Similarly, if Germany took the line advocated by Weber or Shederman, rejected the orders of the Allies, and let them see what benefits would be for them to occupy the country, faced with all the inevitable resistance, and how long their own people could endure. In Germany in 1919, this resistance would unite most of the active political states. Through their surrender, the centrist politicians, hailed by Tuz as heroes of the time, secured a banner of complete legitimate opposition and was destined to win in due time, and would be passed only on to the radical right. The foundation of this building built in Versailles has rotted from the beginning and is destined to collapse.
Young hegemony?
As long as Stratzeman is still at the helm, Germany's fate is full of hope, which forms the main line of Tuz's narrative of the new world order that emerged after 1918. But the panoramic range is wide, which is an immeasurable force of the book, covering China, Japan, India, Egypt, South Africa, and even a slide inserted from Patagonia. As Tooz assumes, will the balance sheet of American hegemony emerge from it? If the conceptual context of the Great Flood lies at a point in the political spectrum, at which liberalism no longer has any particular meaning to the left—its description of the Russian Revolution is pure Cold War thinking—the story it then tells is even more blurred. Tuzz didn’t take the risk of painting a full portrait of any of his protagonists, but most of his narrative of Wilson is clearly inconsistent with the role of the main designer who initially gave him the prophet and the secure world built for peace and democracy. Excited by the indirect war between the United States and Spain and the capture of the Caribbean and the Pacific Colonies, Wilson was committed to protecting—in his own words—the supremacy of white men on the planet, not mentioning national self-determination in his Fourteen Points, rejecting discussions about Ireland in Versailles, and not participating in Japan’s call for a commitment to racial equality in the Covenant of the League, but instead pursuing Monroe Doctrine as one of its fundamental principles.
In 1919, Wilson cut off economic aid to Italy, forcing Italy to abolish the treaty with Britain and France, which granted Italy the benefits gained in the Tyrol and Adriatic wars. Within a few days, Wilson told China that the treaty must be abide by - involving the benefits gained by Japan in Shandong and Northeast China - because "the sacredness of the treaty" is one of the principles of war. All of this can be found in The Flood.But this is not the case, and the mass arrests in 1919 were transferred by default to Wilson's attorney general.
In addition to Tuz himself, the bigger question is whether Tuz's description of the United States' global dominance between the two world wars is accurate, that is, during the Great Depression, the United States played a role in the dominance of allies; during the entire Great Depression, the opponent's imagination was accurate. Of course, the advantage of The Flood is that it records the continued influence the United States has exerted on major European countries through the cycle between the war debts owed by Britain, France and Italy by Germany, and the reparations owed by France and Britain, allowing Washington to adjust both in accordance with its own interests. The point of Tuz's explanation of this financial suffocation is that it is a moderate ally (though not always) relationship to ease the sharp edge of the Versailles Agreement and restore Germany to its so-called "international community" today. However, two characteristics of cross-strait relations in Atlantic are underestimated: one is the greedy nature of the United States - one might say that this nature was later nicknamed vulture capitalism - seeking compensation for its support for the Allies despite the relative burden of war; the other is the sleepless fear of the revolution, which leads the United States to support political reaction wherever it needs to crush any threat, and cultivate a good relationship with Mussolini from the beginning.
In addition to the financial arsenal of US power, the Washington Conference also increased the weight of the Navy. But to what extent did these two assets—money and warship—make the role that Tuz always described in the world—"American hegemony"—have existed? This was a period when the size of the US military was smaller than that of Portugal. In 1924, the US Bureau of Foreign Affairs was still a worm pupa. In 48, the United States did not have an embassy in Moscow. The United States' existence in China cannot be compared with Britain. Britain actually controlled the country's fiscal system. In Europe, the United States was a bystander of Locano's Versailles . What is its most well-known initiative? The 1928 Kellog-Briand ‘Peace Pact’ was a useless wish list of self-feelings that left little traces in the history of the 1930s.
All this stems from the reality that Tuz himself described as Wilson's plan to fail when Wilson returned to the United States in 1919: the federal state machine itself is maldeveloped and has only semi-modern characteristics. But after stating and explaining this with force, he forgot that the American hegemony hegemony he dominated—even after the decline—it seemed as if only Washington’s kind parents guided the protection of the old world until the recession. This statement is a bit too hasty. The world of 1919 was by no means a unipolar one. Of course, American hegemony will appear at the right time. But tracing back to Harding and Coolidge's era is an era mistake, an author's negligence, not a historical record.
