Great power politics Adam Tooze on Bidenomics

We are left asking how this four-year period fits into recent American history and what legacy it leaves. The National Defence Industrial Strategy (NDIS) offers to do some of the work for us. Like other, better-known documents of the Biden era – Jake Sullivan’s speech on ‘Renewing American Economic Leadership’ at the Brookings Institution in April 2023, for instance – the NDIS is historically self-conscious. The basic Biden narrative was of America’s fall from greatness, starting in the 1990s, when the industrial fabric of the nation began to fray and China’s manufacturing capacity surged. Now China and other competitors are rising fast. The home front is undermined by polarisation and social dysfunction. But, with measures such as the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act (which increased spending on semiconductor research), the bipartisan infrastructure law and the NDIS, the Biden administration was attempting a national rebuilding centred on industrial production and a revalorisation of manual work.

Adam Tooze

Read full article by Adam Tooze in London Review of Books