Like others, I became aware of Helen Thompson’s astounding breadth of knowledge and insight about international political economy through her contributions to the long-running podcast ‘Taking Politics’, which has now sadly ended after six years.

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The good parts is that this book is extremely thorough and detailed analysis of these three areas, mostly in a way that is understandable to the non-specialist. Though only for the non-specialist who is interested in quite complex history and detail. I learnt a lot and for that I rate the book highly. Nonetheless, the move to green energy is very much a part of the present geopolitical competition between the United States and China. I think there is a fear in Washington that, in the same way the age of oil geopolitically belonged to the United States and to some degree the Soviet Union, the age of green energy will belong to China, not least because of China’s dominance in the metals on which non-carbon energy production depends. H elen Thompson appears quite frequently in the public prints, notably the New Statesman, and co-presents the Talking Politics podcast, where she comments sensibly and objectively on the passing scene. By which I mean, of course, that I tend to agree with her. Her day job is at Cambridge, where she is a professor of political economy. In the academic world she has made her name with a series of books and articles on the politics of oil, on which she is undoubtedly an expert. More recently, she has turned her attention to financial markets. the Eurozone debt crises as countries tried to spend their way out of the recessions with borrowed money; There could be no better guide than Helen Thompson to the turbulence of the 21st century, with its successive disruptions, from financial crisis to energy transition, from Brexit to emerging geopolitical conflicts. When history seems to have come for us with a vengeance since the turn of the millennium, this magisterial book brings into focus the key structural forces driving, not only recent events, but also the inevitable changes still to come.the destabilizing inflation and related unemployment of the 1970s when Middle Eastern oil producers used their market power to raise prices; This is a vastly abbreviated summary of the highly complicated history of oil and geopolitics presented in the book. Missing here are the Syrian civil war, NATO actions in Libya in the 2010s, China’s rising demand for energy and the effects on international finance, the US shale revolution, Turkey’s increasingly militaristic claiming of oil and gas resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, amongst other things, but being more recent these might be more familiar to the reader.

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But here’s the thing: I don’t mind working hard to grasp a concept, but the reward needs to be worth it. In other words, if I’m going to spend my precious reading time decoding a challenging text, I’d better walk away with some groundbreaking revelations or at least some unique viewpoints. Thompson's book, however, despite its moments of clarity, often regurgitated ideas and themes that have been discussed elsewhere, and in more digestible formats.The Nation spoke with Thompson about her work on the history of energy, Bretton Woods and the 1970s, and today’s crisis of democracy. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. This book appraises rising instability and fragility in domestic settings in the West and in the global political economy. It offers histories in three overlapping spheres – geopolitical (focused largely on fossil fuels); economic, with global finance in the foreground; and representative democratic politics, whose decay is hastened by forces at play in the first two spheres.

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For me, the book's reward comes in the last section (chapters 7-9) in the discussion on how energy and monetary policies affect politics in the US and Europe. The cumulative effect of more internationalised and financialized economies from the 1970s terminated economic nationhood. It favoured the rich who could move money around to avoid tax. the 1 percent richest got richer and the 0.1 % even richer. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are the epitome and proof of this. Since the Maastricht treaty which gave more power to Brussels, the EU has acted as a divisive force upon democratic politics in its members. The geopolitical story begins with the inherent difficulties the United States faced as an ascendant non-Eurasian power in the early twentieth century, especially in the Middle East, and culminates in the American turn away from China in a world in which the United States is simultaneously a declining military power and a resurgent energy and financial power. Instead, it is taken as given that France had no choice but to tie its currency to Germany’s one way or another. The United Kingdom’s inability to remain within the European Exchange Rate Mechanism that preceded the euro is presented mainly as a story about the eventual inevitability of Brexit rather than as a chance to consider whether the U.K. and other major non-euro economies, such as Poland and Sweden, had significant advantages or disadvantages compared to their neighbors.

Although this thesis does have some explanatory power for the fall of the Roman Republic that Polybius foresaw, it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as a long historical generalization. But I was quite taken with his notion that each form of government is destroyed by its own excess, generated from within itself by its own inherent and particular vice. While we are not accustomed to thinking about democracy in this way, I think we can see this phenomenon quite clearly when we reflect upon the end of various European monarchical regimes—take the ancien régime in France or Czarist Russia. The question then becomes whether we should treat modern democracy as somehow immune to the problem. Now, obviously, many people would argue that it is, following Tocqueville in treating democracy as ultimately irreversible, at least at a certain level of economic development. But I start off as a skeptic on providential claims about democracy. Thompson warns the reader at the outset that she aims to privilege ‘the schematic over forensic detail’. She does not warn, but I must, that her prose is dotted with words like ‘constitutionalized’ and ‘delegitimating’, and that other words are used in a Red Queen sort of way (‘words mean what I say they mean’): ‘Britain joined most of its fellow EC members in eschewing American support for Israel’, for example. In a search for a comprehensive explanation of the last decade’s disruption, this book starts from the premise that several histories are necessary to identify the causal forces at work and a conviction that these histories must overlap,” Thompson writes in her introduction. The tragedy of Europe’s post-2008 experience is that there was no such conflict. Until the war in Ukraine, inflation in Europe had consistently been slower than the central bank’s target, thanks in large part to economic weakness caused by the euro crisis itself. The German government may have been led by scolds who practiced “ pedagogical imperialism,” in the words of Der Spiegel, but ordinary Germans failed to benefit from its austerity. They may have done better than the millions of Spaniards who lost their jobs, but they nevertheless suffered from meager wage growth and degraded public services.

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Thompson frames her analysis in terms of material drivers – control over money, credit, arms, fossil fuels and to a modest extent, the absence of control over the climate breakdown. In the foreground is coercive power, yet the roles of non-material drivers, norms and goals, go largely unmentioned. Neoliberalism, politico-cultural strivings, chauvinisms and other kind of idea-driven politics remain offstage. She trenchantly evaluates the roles of powerful institutions like the IMF and central banks at the behest of Western interests, but not the orthodoxies they insist upon. (Fortunately, however, she does footnote important books about those matters by Slobodian and by Tooze.) Yet while foregoing additional ways to fortify the arguments, her materialist / realist account remains compelling. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich.’The second strand is financial, examining the evolution of the world economy from the collapse of the Bretton Woods settlement through the global financial crisis and the subsequent travails of the European economic and monetary union. The third strand is more straightforwardly political. Here, she relates the changing political landscape in Europe, in particular, to developments in the energy market and the impact of the financial and Eurozone crises on political parties. In most EU countries, the centre ground of politics has splintered and new forces on the far left and far right now play a much more significant role than they did two decades ago. The presidential campaign in France provides a perfect illustration. The Socialist Party has more or less disappeared, and the traditional Gaullists have at times been in fourth position, behind Macron, Marine Le Pen and the far-right Eric Zemmour. The book examines the global political economy with an emphasis on how dollar has become even more important in global transactions weakening American monetary power over America's domestic economy while magnifying the importance of its decisions on foreign nations which need prompt help in tough times which is not always forthcoming. I am not an economist so I am not really able to be super critical of her claims but they seemed reasonable and I found her arguments interesting, especially the critical role of eurodollar markets and the difficult strictures the eurozone is in. The final section is in my opinion the weakest, because it simply isn’t that fresh. For anybody who listened to Thompson on Talking Politics for the last 5 years, you’ll recognise a lot of the points and even events brought up in this section on the problems of democracy in the 21st century. Where this sections brings together the previous threads of oil and finance, however, is where it really shines. Her choice of a tripartite structure for the book I did not like. Of the three, I found her approach towards the analysis of democracy to be the weakest when there are clearly better analytical structures than her chosen one. Although, it can simply be that this area has boundaries beyond which one courts the increasingly repressive forces that would endanger the ability to retain a place in mainstream academic discourse should they be crossed. The analysis of the role of energy was first rate, as well as that of the evolution of the monetary system.