1. A belated intervention on one aspect of the Perry Anderson critique of @adam_tooze . One of the key criticisms that Anderson makes is that Tooze de-emphasizes the role that power politics plays in the story.
2. There's something to this criticism, as Tooze himself has acknowledged in an earlier piece on "clean" and "dirty" accounts of how the system works adamtooze.com/2019/01/20/fra…
3. But Anderson expresses a more specific unhappiness with Tooze's treatment of American power in particular. He complains that Tooze's book almost entirely neglects sanctions, "the inseparable, geopolitical face of the global dollar system whose expansion it records."
4. For Anderson, "global economic governance" is just "[o]ne more cloying euphemism for US control." Tooze's belief that "‘America is gravity" ... is the kink in the arc of his work." The "US always looms too large ... too often ... in the role of salvator mundi"
5. Thus the suggestion that Tooze is effectively engaged in a form of apologetics for US power, and (together with Tooze's claimed indifference to the crushing of democracy), that his book plausibly amounts to "indignant sympathy for the hare, awed admiration for the hounds" 
6. As someone whose own recent collaborative work with @ANewman_forward is on the relationship between coercive aspects of US power, and the geopolitics of the global dollar system - mitpressjournals.org/doi/full/10.11… - ... well, up to a point, Lord Copper. It's trickier than Anderson says
7. A useful alternative lens on this question might be @zeithistoriker distinction between imperium - the world of states, and dominium - the world of property. "The Globalists" is a book about how the latter came to prevail, across many areas of global politics, over the former.
8. What is complicated about the US system of secondary sanctions - and the power of the dollar clearing system that lies behind them - is that they are emphatically imperium rather than dominium. That is not to say that they are _good_ imperium. They are, for the most part, not.
9. As Tooze's former student, @njtmulder has made ruthlessly and emphatically clear - thenation.com/article/sancti…. But Mulder also discusses how the surveillance and coercive power of the US dollar system could be deployed to quite different ends.
10. If OFAC went after the trillions of dollars hidden in tax havens rather than seeking to isolate states, it could have transformative consequences for the world economy. The international corollary of an @ewarren or @BernieSanders crackdown on domestic inequality
11. would be a US weaponization of financial might (perhaps together with other states such as Germany that suffer from tax avoidance) against the global system of tax evasion that has done so much to undermine states domestic power to raise and spend money.
12. This doesn't exonerate US financial imperium by any means whatsoever. But it suggests that Anderson's depiction of it - as effectively solely being an instrument of cruel coercion - evades some difficult questions.
13. How do we play dominium versus imperium and vice versa? What are the cracks and fissures in the current system that can be exploited for a better world? Frankly - I have no very good idea. Which means that I too am running with the hounds and hares.
14. Sometimes wanting to work with those - including businesses - who want to constrain imperium. Sometimes wanting to build out the tools of imperium towards better ends. And these questions become even more urgent in a world of climate change.
15. The EU is floating the idea of carbon adjustment tariffs - . Would it be a good thing if a future US administration turned its coercive powers towards similar ends? I think yes. Perhaps there is an Anderson style argument as to why I'm mistaken.
16. But it would need to engage on a deeper level with US hegemony than the NLR essay does. More broadly - I take Tooze's project as not looking to create either a tacit or explicit defense of US power or the system as it is.
17. But instead as a push to inquire rigorously and systematically into how macrofinance _actually works_ - and hence to build up a more sophisticated understanding of tools, problems and available strategies for intervention.
18. The actual politics and systems of the world we live in shape the strategies that can be adopted. Perhaps hunting with hounds, running with hares is more palatable to some audiences if it is described as a "war of position," but the guidijng insight is much the same. Finis.
