Martin Wolf On The Terrifying Us Superpower Odd Lots

TITLE: Martin Wolf on the ‘Terrifying’ Superpower That the US Wields | Odd Lots CHANNEL: Bloomberg Podcasts DATE: 2026-05-14 ---TRANSCRIPT--- The honest truth. And someone lived in America for ten years. I’m a foreigner, but I live there, I followed closely. The place has become completely bewildering and a completely bewildering superpower is absolutely terrifying. Nobody likes China. Nobody really. But they know what it’s about. It’s predictable. You know how the regime works. You know how the system works. You know what Xi is trying to do that one can live with. It’s very difficult to live with a country with this power, which is as completely bewildering as this one has become. And I’ve tried to give you some sense of how I think about it. And in the end, what I do is see an incoherent movement of people who are full of resentments and hatreds, including amongst one another, but also I am not against other Americans, the rest of the world. And Trump, who is sort of you can make sense of him as long as you accept he doesn’t operate in a way that one would normally think of as rational. So when I think of a ruler, I mean, like him, I mean, I think of Nero. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I’m Tracy Alloway and I’m Joe Weisenthal. Joe we are. We’re back in London. We’re making a tradition back in London. We were here last spring that last year is April and this time it’s May. But I like the idea. Let’s do a recurring spring trip to London. Now, when you’re in London, do you feel the urge to sort of stroke your beard and think about geopolitics? Can I say? Well, yes, for sure. But, as you can confirm, and anytime there’s like some big, you know, there’s something feels pivotal or historical or geopolitical, I turn to you in the office, I say, you know what we really need? We really need, like an episode with. And I ended with a with a guy with a British accent. Like some moments. That’s just what it calls for. You gave the secret away. You gave the secret. All thoughts. But really matter who it is per se. But there’s a certain type of guest that’s like, this is what this moment calls for. So with wisdom, someone with perspective. All right. Well, you’ve given it away at this point, but we are back here for our yearly check in with Martin Wolf, who is, of course, the chief economics commentator over at the Financial Times, one of the most famous geopolitics geo economics commentators of all time. And someone who is really good to talk to when we’re living through these potentially historic capital H historic events on what seems to be more than a yearly basis at this points of the last time we spoke to him was in April of 2025, and it was just after the Liberation Day tariff announcements. Now we’re here in May 2026, and we have the Iran situation going on. We have headlines about further fracturing of U.S. Europe relations. I mean, all of these potential potentially pivotal moments seem to be happening on a sort of monthly, if not weekly basis at this point. Absolutely right. And as you mentioned, when we were here last year, it was in the immediate wake. I mean, I think maybe even just a week after the, or a few days after the Liberation Day tariff schedule had come out. It was still during that period of absolutely insane volatility. And there is a sense in which, I mean, the, the the pure volatility currently is not actually like it was back then, but at the same time, perhaps probably because we’re in the middle of a war. Ceasefire aside, April 2025 feels a little quaint compared to where we are right now. Isn’t that something? I mean, yeah, everything’s relative. I guess. Okay, well, on that note, why don’t we bring in our perfect guest, older gentleman, older British gentleman with a British accent, per Jo’s description. Martin Wolf, thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots. Well, I’m very glad to fill a niche. I didn’t know you had one. You truly are the perfect guest, though, because, you know, again, a lot of people have described you as one of the most important economics commentators of all time. And so I think it’s great that we get you back to opine on some of these very big events that we’re seeing. Speaking of large events, you have described the Iran situation as a nightmare scenario. Walk us through what you’re thinking there, because when I look at some of the headlines around markets at the moment, the S&P 500 closed at a record on Friday. It doesn’t seem like markets are aligned with that particular point of view. What’s going on? Well, I suppose the so many different things aspects of this I’ve been thinking of this wonderful Shakespearean line, of life being a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. So it one feels when markets are looking at this, they feel this is full of sound, of fury, but it doesn’t signify anything. And, I think two possible reasons for that. One is the famous taco line, from my dear colleague Robert Armstrong, that trample which chickens out. So in the end, he’s not going to blow up the world. He’s going to find a way out of this which will have done some damage. It will make I think the US look fairly ridiculous, but it can. It can be forgotten. Declare victory and stop. And I think that’s still perfectly possible. A perfectly reasonable view, because he’s already sort of stopped the fighting, and it feels like he’s looking desperately for an end game. The question is whether the other side will play ball and that is still to be seen. And then there’s the other possibility that in the end, a, if the if the oil were lost, as it were and forever it didn’t, it’s the world will adjust to that. The, I guess the, the output from that goes through the straits is a very large. But in the longer run, a lot of it can go through pipelines, they can build. They simply take, quite a while, and the world can compress this demand in time. It might take a few years. The world growth will be lower. But what we are losing is what, about a fifth world output? Oil is much less important than it used to be. 70 years ago. The prices have risen. But actually, if you look at real terms, over the long history of oil prices since the first oil shock, they’re not sensationally high. And so we will adjust to it. And we’re very good at adjusting to it. The Gulf will end up as a different place because we won’t be exporting the same way, but it’s not enough to derail the world economy. And, incidentally, the country that is likely to be the least damage of the major ones is the US, which is, you know, not a coincidence after all. They wouldn’t have started it if that went at the back of their minds. China will be damaged. Russia is benefiting. But I don’t think that’s going to bother Mr. Trump. So in the end, the losers of Europe and China are not favorite in favorite kind of countries. I think that on the whole, Mr. Trump prefers China to the Europe, but the, and the world economy will continue and there’s this huge technological upheaval going on, which is very much what the markets are talking about, which looks transformative. So I think the market’s assumption that the profitability of companies is going to be fine. The world will have possibly a recession, but that’s not the end of the world. World as recessions. Probably not even zero growth and life goes on. I’m glad that when you referenced Shakespeare and sound and fury signifying nothing, you were not referring to our conversation, etc.. Always something that I’m anxious about with respect to our business because we type and targets like what does it really matter? All that being said. You mentioned the profitability of companies and if profits stay high, the stock say high and it’s all very explicable. We’re recording this May 4th. You have to admit it’s pretty surprising isn’t it? Like if you knew all the headlines over the last year and a half between Liberation Day and a subpoena for, Chairman Powell and this war, that earning sustenance is pretty surprising. Yeah. This is what I don’t get. So I think I mentioned this the last time we spoke, but both Joe and I did international relations at university, and we were told over and over again that the global economy does not like instability. It doesn’t like chaos. And yet here we are in the midst of a lot of chaos, and things are more or less chugging along. There’s there’s discontent, right? Yes, I think that’s right. And and the there’s been a greater disconnect that I would have expected. The and so I have more than once used another famous quote from a British author. It has to be given the intro. Yeah. Adam Smith lively, Adam Smith, come here. There’s a great deal of ruin and, in a country. Yeah. Which was, if I remember correctly, actually said in response to somebody saying that the loss of the American colonies was a tragedy, a catastrophe, for this country. And I think that’s the context. I believe that’s the context in which you said there’s a great deal of ruin in a country. So there’s a great deal of ruin in the world economy. I have a favorite statistic, which I use in many of my presentations, because it surprised me so much when I looked at it. So since 1950, the data from Angus Madison must be right. There have only been two years in which the world economy shrank. To. And the most perfectly obvious one was 2009. That was. And even then it shrank barely. It was close to zero because China was still growing. Lots of countries are still growing. And the other was the pandemic. 2020. Otherwise, the world economy grows and nearly always between 2 and 4%. It’s changed over time. Why? Well, because everybody in everybody matters is in a growth mode. I could go through what, driving it, but if I looked at this actually, after the pandemic, I said, how often is it we’ve had a a genuine recession, a decline in GDP. Now, this isn’t GDP per head. That will be more often times when GDP per head shrank. But basically the world economy is unbelievably robust. And that’s because lots of people are providing stuff people want. There are markets they produce for the markets they invest to produce for the markets. Investment is very important. Is a driver of demand, as Kane said. And so it takes something really enormous to stop it. The I went through the two oil shocks of the 70s. I was already working economist and they were big shocks and we got terrible inflation and all the rest of it. Volcker came along and yes, he did cause a recession in the US, but it wasn’t global. So I think we have to start off by saying the world economy is incredibly resilient. The second thing is that, and that’s why I use that full of sound of fury. If you look at the actual policies that we’ve ended up with, they’re sort of designed. I’m sure they’re not intended, not really to hurt. So the protection is a very uneven. This was part of I wrote about this before Trump got into office. And that creates the opportunity is designed in the system for trade diversion, right. Instead of it, you know, if you just put up an average tariff of 40% or 35%, a lot of trade would disappear. But that’s not what he did. He he ended up with imposing very high tariffs on some some origins. China still had very high tariffs. But it’s the trade diversion has been phenomenal. So trade goes through Vietnam. It goes through Mexico. And the IMF had a very nice chart on that. In the latest World Economic Outlook which basically showed that yes, direct trade between the US and China shrunk direct trade between US Canada has shrunk, but other people have taken its place and in some sense it was designed to be porous. Then there are all sorts of exceptions that he’s negotiated in return for who knows what. With sundry companies like Apple. Apple would have been very badly hit. So it’s all very porous and it’s all negotiable. So it’s not as serious as all that. And then, the now the the shock in the Gulf is significant, but oil isn’t as important as it used to be. As we discussed, the energy system has changed across much of the world and, will continue. This will be accelerated, of course, but that’s for the future. And, prices have gone up. There will be a slowdown. I’m absolutely sure that we might get close, you know, really bad. Really bad. Maybe if the world economy grows at one 1.5%. But it’s not a catastrophe. And finally, profits are robust because, let’s face it, worldwide labor is weak. So companies can manage their affairs in a way to ensure that they survive. I’m sure a lot. So I haven’t looked at this. I’m sure lots of small and medium sized businesses are very badly affected, but the colossi that are generating most of the profits, particularly the tech colossi, they’re not affected by this. Now, this is at least expose, perhaps not a surprising as one might have thought. There’s a great deal of ruin in the world economy. We should see if we can do this entire episode, only referencing British historians and economic thinkers or any of this. You know, I was just, you know, one of the think you mentioned those exceptions that, you know, a little, last week, I think Trump announced that, they made a little carve out for UK, whiskey or something like that on request of the King. So therefore, much like us, Trump is a sucker for the British accent. Clearly it was the king and everything is like, all right, okay. But yeah, I think that is some he yes, he he he’s also a sack of people who have grand positions. Identity. That’s right. Didn’t they have, some sort of maybe it was true social or something else when he referred to that being two kings, together. That was, I’m sure, not a joke. I think he would like to be king, but. But when I think about the king, he would most likely to be immediately come to Henry the Eighth, who was our real king, who made probably the single most important decision made by any, English monarch, namely, to get leave the Catholic Church and make himself the head of the church. I think Donald Trump would quite like that, don’t you think? And the and, and he was an absolute monarch who chopped the heads of one advisor after the other. After I think he quite like that. So, yeah, he, he liked the idea of being a king. Now, Paul, King Charles doesn’t isn’t like that, but, I mean, he’s sort of connected to that. So I can see the dilemma. And he lives in palaces. I mean, don’t you think he’d rather like to, Mr. Trump would like to move Buckingham Palace to Washington and put it in the middle. I think the Oval Office makeover is very reminiscent of a, classic European style palace. I’m thinking of a particular French one. But okay, setting aside interior decorating and Joe. No. So I could certainly talk about this for much longer. But, you know, you mentioned this idea of Trump as as King. And you also mentioned this idea of trade adaptations. And one of the things that’s happened since the Iran situation is Trump has come out and said, well, if you can’t get oil from the Gulf and you’re Europe, why don’t you can come to the U.S and get oil from the US? And I’m very curious how statements like that play on the ground in Europe, given that on the one hand, this is a situation caused by the US. I think it’s fair to say that Europeans regard Trump as somewhat unpredictable, somewhat somewhat. That’s I’m doing an impersonation of British understated ness here. And then his message to Europe is basically, well, you know, trust us for your energy security. Yes. Well, I think the trust us, has definitively gone. That’s hardly, hardly, news. I think that’s, true worldwide. I’m just trying to think. Does anyone actually trust this guy? Because being on trust untrustworthy seems to me, the core of his modus operandi. I mean, he wants to surprise people, and he does, in both directions. So nobody in Europe believes now that there’s any promise that will come for this, administration that is to be believed. And and I think that’s true pretty well for everybody. That’s understandable, because it’s consistent with the evidence and the behavior and even what he says, however, Europe is in, a very, very unfortunate position, which is that he grew so dependent on America for so long that pretty well, all its structures, its defense system, very obviously, but also the things it didn’t bother to produce itself. For instance, the whole tech array, the, the trade relations, the investment relations, and of course, the underlying ideologue ideology, the sort of liberal democracy they imported this it’s all came from America. I mean, we were wrong to say that it wasn’t there. A lot of this wasn’t bad before in different ways. But after the war, which was a obviously the Second World War, the, the first and second together, it was so shatteringly demoralized. This a continent and so damaged, a can go through with the damage done to all the different major countries that the US became the core of every aspect of security and belief, trust. And they were very, very content with this. So whether they were naive or not, very interesting question. It’s all come as a colossal shock. Now Trump one was when they the first administration of Trump what Donald Trump was a wake up call. But in the end it wasn’t so bad. They felt, oh, well, the full of sound of fury, but didn’t signify that much. In the end, he didn’t do much or actually didn’t change trade policy, didn’t withdraw from NATO. He filled his administration with the sort of people we’re familiar with. We like and trust those sorts of Americans. This is a shock. I don’t think it should have been a shock, but this is a shock. And in the first year when suddenly, you know your trusted spouse, as it were, not very much the relationship, turns around and becomes a violent bully. You’re sort of in shock, but worse, you don’t know where to go and live. Who do you get to? Who’s your alternative? Do you want to become friendly with China? Not really. You want to become friendly with Putin? Absolutely not. And are we strong enough to survive on our own in all these different dimensions? Of course not. The vulnerability of Europe is staggering. Just think what would happen if the American administration decided, if it could decide that to just close off our access to the American digital stack, as it were? I would cloud computing all the rest of it. So then the question is, what? What do you do? And I think there really and truly, the Europeans are at an early stage of deciding what they want to do, and they find it difficult to agree, very difficult. There are so many of them with different attitudes, values, historical relations. They don’t trust one another. Very important point, by the way, don’t you know, the European history is not so far beneath the surface? So I think we are there a stage of absolute intellectual, moral confusion. But I don’t trust Trump. I mean, you should have anticipated or I was going to go with my next question because, you know, you’ve written about the threat to democracy that, both in the West, both in Europe and the US, that you perceive the Trump administration as posing. And you mentioned that perhaps Trump actually prefers China to Europe at this point. And it seems like, as you’ve written, the administration seems to have two specific big critiques of Europe. One is a particular conception of free speech, which the administration does not perceive Europe is upholding. And then, of course, immigration, which they would associate with civilizational decline and so forth. Interestingly, in your writing, you acknowledge that, both of those they’re, they’re they’re strange or they’re kernels to both critiques that the European government has to take seriously border control, maintaining those, liberal values around speech. How much harder does it are like, you know, how does your charter path, while also taking into account those factors which may have some grain of reality to them? Well, one of the problems we have is we don’t feel looking at the whole range of what’s going on in the United States, that this administration really does believe in free speech rights. So consumption there, to put it mildly, quite a bit of hypocrisy going on. I don’t think I need just to lay that out for your, audience. But the, there are, I suppose, a number of different elements in this story. The I think that the, administration is right. But I don’t think it’s a, I don’t think they’re honest in their critique, but that some governments, my own included, have gone too far in protecting people from what is called hate speech. And that there is a perfectly good argument that both in private institutions, universities and so forth and in public, you don’t have a right not to be offended, you know, that is clear. However, my view also is that there are some forms of speech that European history where we’ll see where it goes with American history suggests, profoundly dangerous. And the one that I used, in my example of this, is that if you’re lecturing Germans on the import, which is cited in the most notorious start of this was Vances speech in Munich, last year, in 2025. Well, the Germans feel that it really would have been a pretty good thing if they’d stopped Hitler saying some of the things he said. Indeed, if they’d removed him and put him in prison for a very long time and not instead of just, letting him out when he was put in prison. The. So there are questions of what how far you will allow speech to be free. It’s a fine doctrine, but it seems that actually the administration, too, believes there are lots of things we really don’t want people to say. So there’s an issue there. But I think there’s a critique there on the civilizational, thing. I think and I wrote this in my book, that one of the things that define a state, and certainly a democratic state, is the possession of borders, you know, the, a state and, and, citizenship, which is associated with a state in a democratic context, is is exclusive by definition. It is, the values may be universal, but citizenship is not by definition. And, that we get that or going all the way back to the beginning of these ideas and B for our in our ancient world, the Greeks and Roman view of what a republic or a democracy was. So I think that not, controlling your borders and making sure that the people who come to live in it, particularly people who come to live in it permanently, are people you’ve chosen. That’s been a political process in which you’ve chosen them is, essentially in violation of the citizenship, compact. And I wrote that at length. And I think it’s perfectly understandable why many citizens would feel we don’t want everybody in the world to come here. It would create some very, very big problems. And I think the the view on the parts of the left, quote unquote, progressive left that borders should basically be abolished is not compatible with the survival of any form of democratic notion granted citizenship. So I’m very clear that was a big, mistake. What worries me more about the the concept of, of democracy, that is emerging, which you see in the Trump camp and you saw in some of the people admired, like Viktor Orban, is the idea that if you are elected, anything you do, by definition is democratic. And that is absolutely incompatible, inconsistent with obviously, the for the core premises of the Constitution, particularly what we would think of as the Madison principles, that there is such a thing as the terror and tyranny of the majority. So even if somebody has a majority, it’s very rare that they do. That doesn’t entitle them to do whatever they want. Constraining institutions are the core of a republic, the Republican idea. And we are we are. I’m concerned that ideologies that reject that on the left and the right are being have been reborn over the last 20 or 30 years, perhaps a bit longer. And that’s what the Second World War was fought against in a very extreme form. So I’m not comparing them with that. And so, while I agree that there are important elements of the critique which are serious and we should take seriously, which I’ve mentioned that the critique doesn’t seem to me to be coming from an honorable place if the aim is to, preserve republics or, or if it the aim is to preserve ethno national dictatorships, which Mr. Putin would certainly agree with, then that’s something else. But that’s not my side. I feel like it’s become a cliche at this point to, you know, no matter what happens in the world, people always seem to say Europe is like the loser. Yeah, it’s bad for Europe, right? Is there a sliver of hope down the line if we think that one of the things that Europe has struggled with is, you know, strategic autonomy and managing, all these different national interests. And if we think that, you know, maybe the US emerges as a force for Europe to, you know, unite against or maybe, encourage it, motivate it to develop a, some form of like centralize strategy or autonomy. It couldn’t, couldn’t we see like a more united Europe out of the situation? Well, that’s one possibility. And it’s a possibility that pretty much everyone who’s a friend of mine, who’s European and and I suppose I’m one would want to seek, would want to see, I think it’s important to understand why it’s so difficult. And this gets back to the sort of, if you like, the historical tragedy of Europe. And how did it get to be where it is? The, I wrote one column on this, which I’m typically, particularly proud of it. So I will repeat some of the, the argument, the, it was essentially that Europe transformed the world. It’s absolutely under ambiguously the case this, this peripheral, you can call it the continent is really just a promontory of Eurasia. 6 or 700 years ago was pretty irrelevant. And it ended up conquering much of the world and completely transforming the world intellectually, culturally, scientifically, and politically. By creating these vast empires and one product in which the United States. And how did this happen? Well, there are many arguments about this. There was a shared civilization and profound political rivalry that the one, the one core element of European history since the fall, of or the two since the fall of the Roman Empire, is that it was Christian and divided. And so the European states evolved in conflict, and they became very, very, very good at it, extraordinarily good at it, so good at it that once they really got going, they ended up by concrete. So much of the world, it’s still very shocking that they did, you know, I still think think of how, how few thousands of English people succeeded in conquering India in the middle of the 18th century. It’s completely freakish. So this fragmentation was a core of it. And the cultural development, the scientific world was also the core of that, because when there was a problem with one state trying to suppress certain sorts of thinking, people moved everywhere somewhere else, or the ideas moved somewhere else. So there is this idea, which I think is right, that the division of Europe actually made it, I think is very, very powerful idea. And correct. And China’s unity held it back, because it didn’t allow for this competition. The Europe was built around competition among the states, among the rulers, and within them as a result, partly because of this, I won’t go through all that because it takes too long. So then the end of this magnificent process. Not surprisingly, when the modern states were emerging after the Industrial Revolution, nationalism became the way of mobilizing the people for the first time. You really created mobilized societies. Before that, the armies were predominantly professional, or class based, armies. The the French really invented the, the universal conscription state. And this came culminated in the two world wars, which completely shattered Europe. They it shattered, its idea of itself, its confidence in itself and its values. Because look what happened in the, in the, in the, the death camps. So Europe triumph ended up in a catastrophe. And that’s what Europeans are. I’m old enough to remember all this. I was born in just after the war, not the colonies, surely not the colonies. It was actually Europe itself that that destroyed itself in the in the end, by the way, that led to the direct liberation of all the empires because they didn’t have the power anymore to do it. And America was very keen on it. Right? Absolutely right, by the way. So anyway, Europe said after that we have to be something completely different. This is really important. We have to be something completely different. But the most important we need to unite. But we’re still state member states. We have different histories, languages, cultures and so forth. We can’t get rid of that. So we must cooperate. We want someone to look after us. That was the US. We don’t trust ourselves. We’ve lost trust in ourselves. Very important, the British. At least we felt that this because they got through it. So they decided that they would, they feel we can be outside it. We are an island, but the others, the enemies are just across the border everywhere. If you go back to that, the end of the world. So we we left everything to Uncle Sam because he was a kind, generous, uncle. He made a few of the state, but basically, we trusted. That’s how we got to where we are. This is my ten minute history of Europe. Now, now suddenly you’re saying you want us to become a superpower. You want us to be a great power with an army and a will and we don’t trust any of that stuff. The last time we tried to do that, we blew up the world. This is not. This is not nothing. It’s still there in the desire, the will to power. And the famous Dresden isn’t really there. So that gets to the answer your question. What do I think will happen? And I think that’s exactly the struggle now, because you could see in a sense, there are two forces in Europe today. One is a centrist, liberal, rather mild desire to create an effective Europe, which isn’t really a state but is more of one than now. That’s the center and the other side. And the right wing nationalists and the right wing nationalists are nationalists. They’re not European, because when you start going back to who who the nation is, you go back to France, Latin less Germany. But it’s going to happen. Italy’s Italy is a peculiar story. I won’t go into that, but in France, clearly the French right is a nationalist protectionist. It doesn’t see itself as Europe. There aren’t any nationalists in the sense that Vance is a nationalist, or Trump is a nationalist who, European nationalists. It doesn’t. That’s an exciting it. There are, but there aren’t many. And in political will terms then you have this either mild, centralizing desire to pull together, be a more effective club union, which I would like to see. Or it’s yes, we would like to be a great power again, but it’s the nation. And as, one famous European politician once said, in Europe there are small countries and small countries that don’t realize they’re small and so if you honestly ask me how this will play out, I have no idea. I don’t think anyone does. I know what I would like to see, I’ve indicated it, but that may not be what is possible. What you really need is a European shaman or Napoleon and that doesn’t come out of this because there isn’t a European with that. Will the last European ally, a will to make Europe was Hitler. That’s what he wanted to do. It would have been a German Reich, but it would have. And before that was Napoleon. And before that, Louis Quatorze briefly mentioned. So I think the question of what Europe’s future is, what it can be, given its history of fragmentation and the extraordinary life that current came out of this fragmentation, I think it’s just not at all clear. But there’s no doubt that America is helping, if it if it does develop an independent sense of itself with its own institutions, sense of destiny, sense of identity, very difficult in a multinational state like this entity like this, then it will be because the Americans are saying, you can’t trust us. We’re going to beat you around, the head. If you don’t sort yourself out, maybe that will count. The fantastic sort of overview of the history and the court challenge. I’m curious. Look, saying the future is predicting the future is impossible. So maybe we’ll just stick to the present in the past, the UK left Europe. So the the UK left this sort of structure that was put in place to sort of de nationalize the content continent. We did join late join not accidentally, but also like okay, so the UK in theory has more sovereignty now than it had when it was part of the EU. What’s it doing with that sovereignty. Because it doesn’t look like it’s been able to put it, you know, it looks like more or less the struggles of continental Europe and UK are more or less shared. Well, what’s what’s holding the UK? It’s a perfect example of us of a small country that still didn’t realize it was a small country. They thought that the the people who sold this. Yeah, sold this in part because they said this will stop all these immigrants. It turned out, actually, we could do a stupendous job of accepting immigrants from everywhere else in the world as soon as we stopped the Europeans. So that was sort of they were sold a bill of goods on that was pretty obvious. And, they were told we would be able to do all sorts of wonderful deals on our own, and we’ve done a few minor deals. One of the deals we were promised was, was a free trade deal with America. That certainly didn’t happen. And the point is, Britain on its own, is a minor power. So the idea that the liberating ourselves from the EU will mean that we would, suddenly have a few choices to transform ourselves. And our relation to the world was a fantasy. Now, that’s one side. The the other side of it is, of course, that a very large part of what we have in common with Europe, the welfare state. We had a relatively undeveloped one, but we have it in common, the problems of our economy, deindustrialization, the difficulty of coping with Chinese competition, for example, become more obvious. The, the, our weakness in technology. And so what we share with Europe, Britain wasn’t different from and therefore didn’t have completely different options from European countries. We have very similar we the Germans, and they’re all different in a certain ways, have different strengths. But actually in the big picture, Britain is just another European country. How else? What else could it be? Look at its history. The only difference is got these tiny little waterway between us and that’s preserved independence. I’m not saying it’s nothing, but essentially the opportunities and the challenges for, the British economy are essentially those of Europe. And leaving the EU has suddenly given us an enormous number of new opportunities, which allowed, Britain to transform itself and certainly no British political leader. And I can say this with some confidence, looking at the whole not have any fundamentally new ways of operating here, which are going to transform the performance of the country. And that’s become more and more obvious. And it will be even more obvious if, Nigel Farage or Zac Polansky becomes the next prime minister. I think it would be Zac. By the way, just my own prediction. I’m putting I’m putting my marker. I think that’s unlikely. But what the hell? What do I know? Should I ship broker about here? The the the, And I’m confident that either of them will finish the job over here. The there isn’t, a coherent strategy. Nobody offers a coherent strategy for solving the problems of Britain as they are now. And and it’s partly because they’ve actually genuinely become very, very difficult since we’ve been talking sort of broad strokes history, very broad throughout this. Yes. Can you give us your thoughts on, like, what is the world that the US is ultimately working towards in as much as you can try to eke out a coherent strategy from the Trump administration, like what is it that they are working towards? I, I, I’m almost speechless in response to that very, very good question because it’s very difficult. Part of the problem, I think, is, the I see a separation between Donald Trump as a person very. Him obviously charismatic and exciting, and his views of the world from that of the various different elements of the coalition that he’s put together. Which is a pretty strange coalition, pretty intellectually, culturally, and includes, obviously a very large number of spectacularly wealthy and powerful business people, some of whom, have a religious belief in the future. Right. And at the other hand, it includes intellectual elements and people who have a religious belief in the past. I mean, pretty obvious they want to go back to their cratic state or theocratic state structures. They want to establish reestablish patterns of behavior and relations between men and women, between races and so forth, which is sort of old fashioned. So there’s that, there’s a blistering new and, I, I, a crusty old as it were, trying to work together here. There are intellectual elements and then, relatively small numbers, I presume. And a huge mass of very dissatisfied people, particularly, as far as I can see, men and old people, what do these people have in common? So, to answer the question, what do I think America is about? I, I don’t know, because I don’t think the MAGA movement broadly defined, if I can use that, what knows what it wants, because I’m not saying that individuals, people don’t, but they don’t share anything that is other than completely trump what other than their agenda. Okay. So if I understand this view, what they might share, and as long as somebody like Trump is there, Trump wants to be king, I think it’s pretty clear he wants to be a man who says, my word is law. It’s pretty obvious, he wants to rule a state which is free to do anything, which is anything he wants. And he’s bound by no constraint or law or rules, external or internal. And, allocators would have understood this. I mean, it’s perfectly understandable. This is how much of my. I’m, a match of humanity was ruled in since the agrarian age, and the Egyptian pharaoh would have understood that. So he he wants that. He has no ideology, really, beyond that. Except it is very, very important to make clear in every bilateral relations, he thinks bilaterally that he’s the boss and the others aren’t. And so he will throw his weight around, particularly against anybody who thinks he’s essentially not showing in proper respect in various different ways. So Maduro so, the, the mullahs, and he’s and as he put it, might the only constraint on on is my own sense of morality. Well, you work out what that means. So that is what he wants, what he wants to be. And he will naturally respect people who are like him. That’s the, the, the, the movement. I think, has multiple different objectives. Some of them would like the United States, which, coincides with Trump to the United States to be a 19th century great power, that Britain in 1850 promised only in Britain. You know, we have no permanent, friends, no permanent, enemies. We have permanent interests. That would be a more intellectual version of this. And obviously lots of them think that. But some of them pretty well. Obviously, Hegseth is, it’s a Christian crusader. It’s a completely different set of ideological aims. Vance seems to be an isolationist, so there’s nothing coherent there. And so in the end, when I look at this, I think this is Trump’s party. And with Trump, what you will get is action, but not intellectually grounded. Pretty ignorant. He will use a lot of power. And if he doesn’t work, he will withdraw. Thank heavens. That’s what I see. The it doesn’t seem to me that we’re looking at the US under this regime and looking at the people around that has a coherent sense as a whole of what it wants to be and what it wants to do. That’s terrifying, because it is the most important country in the world. It is the guarantor of the system, which I like to point out works sensationally well for the US. So one of the most astonishing thing to me is that if you look at it from outside the US, I mean, I think it makes incredible mess of its own policy and politics. It could do much better. But the U.S. is a spectacular success. Why does everybody want to change everything? It seems very difficult to understand, you know, if you compare it with the Roman Empire, the United States is sort of in the second century. So what’s the problem? But this U.S is what I see now. It could change, presumably, though, I have no idea whether it could change durably. And this is my last point, was very much a part of my new postscript for my, book it. You won’t restore confidence in the rest of the world that the US sort of knows what it’s doing, and what it’s about has a coherent sense of itself just by a defeat in one election, because that’s not it. That’s not over. You have to think that this is as become unthinkable. And it doesn’t seem to me likely looking at it. So the, the, the honest truth. And I’m someone lived in America for ten years as a foreigner, but I live there, followed closely. The place has become completely bewildering and a completely bewildering superpower is absolutely terrifying. Nobody likes China, nobody really. But they know what it’s about. It’s predictable. It. You know how the regime works. You know how the system works. You know what she’s trying to do that one can live with. It’s very difficult to live with a country with this power, which is as completely bewildering as this one has become. And I’ve tried to give you some sense of how I think about it. And in the end, what I do is see an incoherent movement of people who are full of resentments and hatreds, including amongst one another, but also I not against other Americans, the rest of the world and Trump, who is sort of you can make sense of him as long as you accept he doesn’t operate in a way that one would normally think of as rational. So when I think of a ruler, I mean, like him, I mean, I think of Nero. You know, there’s a million ways we could have a million things I could ask you and I isn’t isn’t that your cue to to ask about Roman Empire history? Isn’t that good? We could go. You’re a middle aged guy. Come on. That’s true. You know. And I have a. This is why you’re here. It fails. Yet I have, you know, you said I studied Roman history. You did? I studied classics, and so I so I read, I read a lot of ancient Greek and Latin. I had Oxford, so you you are always, in fact, thinking about the Roman Empire. All right. The first and best column by far. I about Donald Trump. It was in March 2016 when I said, Donald Trump is how great republics meet their end. That was the headline. And it compared him with the Caesars, Julius and Augustus, who, Davison, who basically ended the Roman Empire, but they were far cleverer. You know, you mentioned that. Europe excelled during a period in which the his competition among states, but also the shared, and used the Christian civilization. When I think, you know, you mentioned they did have, 250 years, a religious war along with that period. But I’m curious, you mentioned the sort of like the mild liberal, you know, not quite a European nationalism, but this, like, sort of mild liberal desire for, some sort of Europe that exists. You know, one thing I think, like, is there are like, should there be maybe philosophically, maybe in practice like this would it would a go along well with the revived Christianity in Europe? Because when I think about secular liberal Europeans, I one thing is like nobody goes to church. But historically a lot of liberal ideas were, you know, co-located, so to speak, with Christian ideas, particularly around sort of like equal rights. And there’s a lot of framing. Does that could that underpin or could that be a tailwind for a sort of reinvigorated Europe if it found that sort of spiritual vector? Again, one of the things that, I think is very important in, which I didn’t stress in the, the history of the last, what, 200 years, particularly of the 20th century is, Europe spawned a lot of ideologies, to say the least, spawned all of them. So obviously every variety of Christianity you can imagine, which they happily fought over, for much of their history, Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism, and so forth. And of course, socialism, communism, fascism, the dominant ideologies of the world. And one of the things that happened, as a result of the religious wars, which were devastating and arguably the most destructive single war in European history, though it’s very, it’s in a particular place based in Germany, which the 30 Years War, the early 17th century. And I believe something like 30% of the population was killed, which is what I read. And it was it was many other things, but it was also a religious war. So by that that was the 17th century. Everybody believe the trouble is, when everybody really believes in something, they often find an excuse for killing people who don’t. Yeah. And I won’t even talk about what happened to Jews. And the. And then, of course, the same thing happened with nationalism, which led to some pretty spectacular wars and communism. The that was more mass murder internally. So Europeans became and this is part of, I think, European culture, civilization after the Second World War became exhausted with ideology. Yeah. We wanted to stop that because when we I think it was very widely shared, whenever we got one of these, we ended up with mass murder and the truth is, nothing bad has ever happened to the US except your idiotic civil war, which should never have been fought because the Civil War, because slavery should have just been abolished by then. It wasn’t justifiable. So the point is, but one of the my favorite statistics, I can’t remember the exact figures, but, if you compare the number of Americans who’ve died in war, I think it’s somewhere over a million in, in the, in including the Civil War. Million a half. You can probably give me the exact figures. In Europe, it’s many tens of millions. So the idea of really believing in things, really, really believing things to the point that you actually want to go and kill people who don’t share those beliefs, which is where it seems to go, is very, very frightening. Now, the younger generation now, my now forgotten enough history to started again. So it might it might happen. But that was a dominant part. Yes, we wanted to defend ourselves against communism because it was one of those ideologies, European ideal ideologies that had gone wrong. Obviously, we had realized most of us, what, Stalin’s death camps, Stalin’s, gulag meant in terms of deaths. So Europeans didn’t want that. And we look at I’m, I’m when I say we I, I look at these Americans now with enthusiasm for ideology, and for passionate belief. And also all I see is people who want to come and kill their, their neighbors because they have the wrong views or they’re the wrong color or they’re the wrong, whatever. And that’s Europe, that’s European history. Hecatomb. Now, the problem with that is, if you carefully, is toleration is your dominant mode. You can accept everybody except the intolerant and you crowd them out. That doesn’t last. As you rightly say. Sooner or later, people start getting passionate beliefs again, and we may be moving in that direction. But I’m one of those people who thinks once you’re in that mode, it’s very difficult to find the off switch, because sooner or later everyone around you starts thinking, looking like an enemy and so I don’t want to go to that. And most Europeans of my generation, or even somewhat younger, don’t want to go back because we bear the scars. And I think in a different way. Why do the Chinese, in the end, accept the current regime? Because it works and it doesn’t kill them all? And they don’t want a lunatic again, so we’re not going to become go where you are, because we tend to think where you’re going could ultimately you due to some very, very dark places. I wasn’t expecting this conversation to be so sort of, state centric in many ways, but but since we’ve gone in this direction and since again, we’re talking about the long arc of history here and society, can you talk a little bit about the impact of AI on, you know, if we think about the social contract between a state’s population and its political authority, what does it mean when work starts to be automated, when maybe culture becomes more automated? I realize this is a very general big picture question, but I know your if anyone can respond to this, you can. Well, I think of this is the the the ultimate Faustian bargain. So, the devil promises, infinite, wealth and power to force in return for his immortal soul, which is in some sense his meaning. And he makes the bargain, and it doesn’t end well. So we have been fantastically innovative and creative, and we have, in the process made ourselves vastly wealthier and, wiser in some obvious ways. But we’re always catching the brink of catastrophe as a result. And the loss thing that really motivated people around those lines was nuclear weapons that created, people like Einstein got terribly frightened about what they created. Well, I think of AI that way. We have, we have made a Faustian bargain, and we have created a servant, quote unquote, with the capacity to replace us or even in some way to dominate us, where this will end up, I don’t know, but it seems to me there are a number of absolutely terrifying dangers. I, I, I think and I thought for the first time I read about these 3 or 4 years ago that it was going to prove completely unregulated, but it would the competition, the process and so forth. It would make institutions that used it unaccountable in some profound way, because the decisions were not being taken by anyone you can hold to account. What is a difference in know you? It would create transformation in our society, in our economy, and in our sense of ourselves, which was unavoidable just of an order of magnitude different from anything that had come before. And in the short to medium brand, a lot of this would seem very helpful, a very encouraging. We will we will enjoy it. We will be able to do things we couldn’t do at other otherwise. But if we do get to artificial general intelligence and is absolutely clear that a machine dominates humanity in terms of what it can do intellectually in every possible way, then there is an existential question of what is humanity for and what will human beings think, therefore, so when I thought about this, and I believe you say the other obvious dangers, the creation of pathogens, we can’t possibly manage the creation of armies. I run armies which are completely bot armies which control the human population. We should reject flesh and blood with its agi. All this is absolutely terrifying. And we’re dancing into this, and subsequently, under the direction of 4 or 5 geniuses in their companies. And that’s what’s happening. So my instinct, probably those of an old man with grandchildren, is it should all be closed down. But I’ve got to happen. The interesting I do think it’s transformative. I think it’s going to be transformative in business. It’s pretty clear they’re going to be powerful business models. I can perfectly well understand that ten years from now, there will be no marching boots, because the computer will do it so much better, though that’d be less fun. The. But the, I think we just have to say we are stepping into the unknown. We should do our best to work out what our big dangers are and focus on them. And with our current politics, that’s impossible. Clearly impossible. And the, But I think I think it is a huge moment in human history, possibly the single most important invention. And there have been some very, very important ones, and human humanity will change profoundly. Humanity was changed by writing profoundly. It was transformed by publishing, by, the ability to print it. It was transformed by the internet. I think this is probably more important than all of these put together, but I’m not sure. But my instinct is, I know I’m a great fan of Frank Herbert. The June, the June books and particularly June itself and his idea that at some point in the past there was something called about Leary and Jihad, in which at the end of which machines that think were banned. I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if 100 years from now, people, if there are people still around, will say, we should have done that. Dune references were also not where I was expecting this conversation to go, but, science fiction is better on this sort of stuff than anything else. Yeah, it’s a great science fiction writers. Asimov is another of my fans. My hero. Sorry. He wrote wonderfully the the laws of robotics, and nobody seemed to be thinking about those either. We should get a list of recommended sci fi books from Martin and put it in the newsletter. We’ll follow up with you afterwards. Martin Wolf another amazing conversation. Thank you so much for coming back on Odd Lots But certainly, you know what I expected. Thank you so much, Joe. That was fascinating. Indeed. I feel I feel a little bit like I was back at university getting a history lecture. I also just realized since we’ve come to London from Madrid. Yeah, we could hit maybe four, I want to say four more European cities and get a complete European colonial tour. I got to go to Lisbon. Paris? Yeah, Brussels. That’s three what I need. We need to make a, We need a European tour. We need a, We need to make this a recurring spring trip to London. There was so much in that conversation that was interesting. So I do think Martin hit on something. And it’s funny, because this came up in our conversation from last year as well, where we were talking about the dollar reserve system and the idea that, like, yes, okay, there are downsides to having the world’s reserve currency, but there are also a lot of upsides, including being able to run a massive fiscal deficit. But like his point that it’s difficult to understand why so many Americans in particular are so aggrieved as to want to blow up an existing structure that, compared to the rest of the world, seems to have benefited that enormously, is, I love his point about this sort of like and it raises some questions about the short term future, like just a few years from now of. So like, what is the Trump coalition, for example? There’s a really big difference between the I focused Peter Teal world versus so on. The people who would like a world to go back to the 1950s and so forth. And the other thing that I hadn’t really appreciated until he articulate it on the Europe question, you know, when we joke about the EU and they love their documents and their reports and their studies and regulations and stuff like that, but they’re sort of now just okay, let’s put in some mechanisms to avoid World War Two again or something like that. But the sort of the complete exhaustion of ideology. Yeah, I think, I think to that it’s such an interesting framing. It’s like every time we’ve gotten into some new ideology like and terribly so it’s like, let’s, let’s make the attempt of sort of, creating a post ideological super state of somewhere is such an interesting framing. And like, I don’t know, like maybe it’s that there’s like, maybe that’s an experiment with a finite, finite time span. I guess we’ll find out. Yeah. Shall we leave it there? Let’s leave it there. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I’m Tracy Alloway. You can follow me @tracyalloway And I’m Joe Weisenthal You can follow me @thestalwart Follow our producers Carmen Rodriguez @carmenarmen, Dashiel Bennett @dashbot and Cale Brooks @calebrooks and Kevin Lozano @kevinlloydlozano And if you want more Odd Lots content, you should definitely check out Including potentially Martin Wolfs Sci-fi book reccomendations you should definitely check out our daily newsletter. You can find that@bloomberg.com/oddlots And you can chat about all of these topics 24-7 in our discord, discord.gg/oddlots And if you enjoyed this conversation, then please leave a comment or like the video. Or better yet, subscribe! Thanks for watching.