Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Lessons for the 2020s - With Historian Niall Ferguson

Episode Date: November 26, 2021

The first of our two-part conversation with Naill Ferguson is on applied history’s lessons of the 1920s and the 1970s...for the 2020s. Niall is a historian and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and he previously taught at Harvard, NYU and Oxford. He’s the managing director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. Niall is also the author of 17 books including “The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook” and “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe”.

The 1918-19 pandemic was worse in terms of public health, but in terms of economic impact, 2020-21 stands out because the impact on public debt, the impact on the Fed balance sheet, the impact on all kinds of aspects of economic life looks more like the impact of a world war. This decade is barely underway. We've already had a pandemic right into non-transitory inflation, combined with geopolitical power vacuums around the world challenging the influence of the West. Sound familiar? Neil Ferguson thinks so. Does the U.S. today have a lot in common with the 1920s, and more specifically with Britain, a twilight superpower between the two world wars? Neil is also keeping his applied historian's eye on the 1970s, the Carter years. What can we learn

from the Carter presidency about the Biden presidency? This is the first episode of our Call Me Back series. We hope you'll join the new set of conversations. Speaking of conversations, we are dividing this conversation with Neil into two parts, which we didn't plan for when we first sat down with Neil, so apologize in advance for the abrupt ending at the end of today's conversation. The first part we are dropping now and the second part we will drop next week. Today's is a historical look back to understand the period we're in now. Part two will be focused on the crack-up going on in higher education. It's a topic that Neil

has thought a lot about, that he's actually lived, and that he's actually doing something about with the new university he's starting. We didn't want to give short shrift to either topic, so we divided them into two parts. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome historian, best-selling author, Neil Ferguson, to the podcast. Welcome to the new podcast. It's great to be on the new podcast, same as the old podcast. Same, but different. But by the way, you are like the perfect guest for our inaugural episode of the new podcast,

just for our listeners, who Neil was a huge hit on post-corona so he's a logical fit for a variety of reasons for this one he's the author of Doom the Politics of Catastrophe which I highly recommend I devoured it when it came out during the pandemic and it's as relevant today he's also the author of one of my favorite biographies on Henry Kissinger called Kissinger the Idealist, which is volume one of his series of biographies on Kissinger. He's at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, where he's the Milbank Family Senior Fellow. He also is the founder and runs Greenmantle, which I think is one of the most interesting geopolitical, historically sort of applied history, geopolitical risk shops, advisory shops in the country, in the

world. He's taught at Harvard. He's taught at Cambridge. He's taught at Oxford. He's taught at NYU. He's authored 17 books. Neil, what are you doing with your life? Oh, you know, just trying to keep my family from going insane,

like most parents in America today. It's the main challenge. All right, yeah. Okay, so I want to start with a little bit of history, which we'll do a lot on this podcast. And, you know, in The Gathering Storm, Winston Churchill wrote that the victors of the First World War, he wrote about the victors of the First World War, he wrote about the victors of the First World War, and he bitterly recalled, quote, a refusal

to face unpleasant facts, right? So I can't think of anyone better to help us face unpleasant facts today than you. And I want to quote from a piece you wrote for The Economist magazine in this past summer, summer of 2021. Quote, since 1914, the nation, meaning Britain, had endured war, financial crisis, and in 1918-1919, a terrible pandemic, the Spanish influenza. The economic landscape was overshadowed by a mountain of debt, and though the country remained the issuer of the dominant global currency, it was no longer unrivaled in that role.

A highly unequal society inspired politicians on the left to demand redistribution, if not outright socialism. A significant proportion of the intelligentsia went further, embracing communism or fascism. So, Neil, does the period we're in today remind you of that period in Britain? Yes, it does, Dan. And I wrote that piece actually back in May, quite a while before the fall of Kabul that didn't come out for various editorial reasons until later in the summer. But the basic idea is this. Americans prefer, if they're going to learn from history

at all, which by and large they don't, but if they are, they prefer to learn from the history of the United States. But most of the history of the United States is not really relevant to the situation of the US today. You can only get so much out of studying the lives of the founding fathers who created a small breakaway republic on the periphery of the British Empire in the late 18th century. Not even really much comes of studying the 19th century. I don't even think you get much out of studying most of 20th century American history because the United States today is in a situation much more like

the British Empire in the 1920s and 1930s. It is clearly the dominant superpower. It has, however, reached a point of strain both domestically and internationally. It is clearly overstretched internationally with commitments all over the globe. It could conceivably find itself simultaneously in conflicts in East Asia, the Persian Gulf, and Eastern Europe. At the same time, domestically, like Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, it's deeply divided. It's economically weighed down by a very, very large debt, which is rapidly passing the point it reached at its last peak in the US at the end of World War II. And when one looks ahead and asks, how is this situation going to play out? Like Britain in the interwar period, the United States

faces formidable rivals, of which clearly the most formidable is the People's Republic of China. So I argued in that piece that Americans need to take a long hard look in the mirror and say, you know what, I look an awful lot like interwar Britain, and at this point, Winston Churchill is not visible. So as it relates to the pandemic today and the pandemic then, you basically argue that the actual pandemic of 1918, 1919, or even the pandemic, I guess, of 1957, that those were actually much worse than the current pandemic from a public health aspect. But the economic consequences of this pandemic eclipse those pandemics. Can you explain? So the 2020-2021 pandemic, COVID-19, corona, whatever you want to call it, has now eclipsed 1957-58 in terms of the mortality relative to population. It's eclipsed it globally and it's eclipsed it in the United States. It has

not eclipsed 1918-19. Even if you accept the worst possible estimate of the death toll, which is the economist's estimate, that's now close to 20 million, kind of four times what most people would say the death toll is the 1918-19 Spanish influenza was 10 times worse, an order of magnitude worse. And so if you want to compare these pandemics, the striking thing is that the 1918-19 pandemic was worse in terms of public health. But in terms of economic impact, 2020-21 stands out because the impact on public debt, the impact on the Fed balance sheet, the impact on all kinds of aspects of economic life looks more like the impact of a world war. And that's one of the things that isn't widely understood about the COVID-19 pandemic. Its economic consequences are out of proportion to its public health impact. In public health terms, in terms of the death toll, this pandemic isn't even as bad as HIV-AIDS,

which has killed 36 million people to date, because there was no vaccine. We found a vaccine pretty quickly last year. These vaccines have high efficacy. The pandemic would basically be over if everybody would take the vaccine. But it's still coming to an end. And this is where I think the analogy with Britain in the 20s and 30s is good, that the public health shock is the latest of a series of shocks that the United States has had to withstand. The shock of failure, and I think we should call it by that name, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The shock of financial crisis back in 2008-2009 which left long and lingering impact on the economy and the shock of political domestic political crisis which culminated in January the 6th's events in Washington if you go back and look at Britain between the wars

It's a remarkably familiar checklist, beginning with the impact of a pandemic, the impact of enormous military strain, financial problems, which were very serious. Britain had a big inflation bust after the period of the First World War. And I think the most striking thing of all, Dan, just going back to that quotation you read, is the intellectuals who seem on both the left and the right deeply estranged from the founding principles of the American Republic in just the way that intellectuals in interwar Britain were estranged from the British Empire as a project, whether they were on the left, which was where most intellectuals were, or on the right, where a few ended up. The sense of alienation from the core project is really striking. And I think, for me, it's the thing that's almost the most striking resemblance of all.

I want to get back to that because you're focused on a very important project, the University of Austin, and your overall analysis of what is happening at Western universities, I think, tells us a lot about the period we're in in history. So I do want to save time for that. But before we get to that, there's the interwar years in Britain that we could look at. There's also America in the 1970s, which through Green Mantle and in other platforms you've written about. So if you just think about the Carter years, specifically 1979, Carter's obviously his political problems had multiplied both at home and abroad. The Iranian revolution overthrew an American ally we had in Tehran and triggered a,

you know, a second oil shock. I guess it was second oil shock of that decade. And then there was a three mile island, nuclear reactor melted down and inflation skyrocketed to double digits. So the oil crisis and the gas lines and the shortages caused Carter's approval ratings to plummet. I mean, when Carter was elected, he had approval ratings, I think, like in the 70s. By about this point between the midterms in that presidency, relative to this, he was at about, you know, somewhere around the 60s, even much higher than where Biden is today. And then by 79, the numbers started to, a year before he was running for re-election, his numbers started to come way down.

Compare this period to that period, kind of mid to late 70s, 1970s. Well, I'm kind of obsessed with the 70s because I'm writing the Kissinger biography and volume two takes me through all the events that we associate with that period. Watergate, the 1973, the first oil shock that followed the Yom Kippur War, the opening to China, the breakdown of Bretton Woods. By the time you get to the Carter presidency, the U.S. is reeling from a succession of enormous problems, of which Watergate and

the oil shop probably dealt the heaviest blows. I think the parallel with Biden is a telling one. Back at the beginning of this year, there were all kinds of people who'd been imbibing kool-aid Who were saying? This is going to be a transformative presidency on a par with franklin roosevelt or lyndon johnson People I respect john meachum andrew sullivan were making this claim now i'm just a simple historian and the one thing that leapt out at me at that point was these guys had massive majorities in both houses of Congress. Meaning FDR and LBJ had massive majorities, right? Yeah. So the Roosevelt-

They had real mandates. There was a sense that they won their rights. Massive mandates. I mean, honestly, think back to 64 when Johnson destroys Goldwater. He has just huge majorities. He can do what he likes. And Joe Biden, by comparison, started out with next to nothing. The majority had shrunk in the House, and there wasn't one. It was a tie in the Senate. And if you look at his electoral college mandate, there were five states in 2020 that Biden won. There were five states in 2020 that were decided by a point and a half or less.

Biden won four of them. In 2016, there were five states that were decided by a point and a half or less. Trump won four of them. So Biden's electoral mandate was almost identical to Trump's, which means we are still in a very divided country. And I don't think there's any question that the result would have gone the other way if it hadn't been for the pandemic, which is the reason that Biden was elected. Now, I said back when it was unfashionable, the presidency this is most going to resemble will be Jimmy Carter's. And my reasons were A, that like Carter, Biden does not have a strong position in Congress. B, that the problem of inflation is going to become acute, which it has, 6.2% and counting, which has come as a great shock to American consumers, especially

when they realize that their nominal wage increases are less than inflation has been going up. And then foreign policy. So even before the fall of Kabul, my instinct was that this would be a presidency characterized by weakness in just the way that Jimmy Carter's presidency ended up being characterized by weakness. It was clear that much of what they set out to do at the beginning of this year was in fact copied and pasted from the Trump administration. China policy is unchanged except that this administration makes more of an effort to

build alliances. And for that, I give them credit. They try to change the Middle East policy, but that's kind of unraveling before our very eyes for reasons that you know very well, Dan. It's highly unlikely that you can resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal. And while you're trying to do it, whatever was achieved in the Trump administration in the region, particularly the Abraham Accords, becomes vulnerable. But the big issue which the administration tripped over earliest was Afghanistan, where they took over from Trump a commitment to hand the country to the Taliban and concede after 20 years defeat. And they, for reasons that one can only speculate about, they executed Trump's deal with the Taliban in the most shockingly inept way

that did recall, for at least a moment some of the worst episodes of the 1970s, fall of Saigon to the North Vietnamese, and of course, the Tehran hostage crisis. I think they were quite lucky not to end up with a hostage crisis in the wake of the fall of Kabul. For all these reasons, I do think that the 1970s offer a terrible warning to the Democrats that this is likely to be a one-term presidency and it's likely to be remembered not for transformative reform but for malaise, which of course is the word that came to be associated with Carter, even though he didn't use the word in the famously meandering inflation television address that confirmed in most Americans' minds that he was not up to the

job of president. So let's talk a little bit about that. So there's a famous malaise speech addressed from the Oval Office in which Carter, and I want to quote from this speech. He gave this speech on July 15th, 1979. And in the speech, he says, we are experiencing the greatest threat to America is a, quote, crisis of confidence, deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. To your point, Neil, he never used the word malaise.

But he argued, quote, that they're friends of mine in business, whether they're the parents of my kids' friends at school, people in our community, whether it's politicians, friends of mine in politics who are just deciding to retire from politics, not run for office again, they all have, I hate to invoke Carter here, but they all have that sense that,

sure, there's inflation, sure, there's all these Carter here, but they all have that sense that, sure, there's inflation. Sure, there's all these other problems. But our biggest problem is, like, we've just lost a sense of purpose and meaning as fellow citizens in this nation. And it just, it does, I mean, I don't want to say history repeats itself, but that doom and gloom is very pervasive and very resonant, at least to me, in terms of the conversations I'm having today. There are differences. I think one of the most obvious ones is that the polarization in our polity and the politicization of just about every issue, that I think differs from the late 70s. The polarization in America had been much greater in the late 60s and early 70s over Vietnam.

But by 1979, people were doing their best to forget about that debacle. And I don't think the nation was as divided as it is today. I suspect that the sense of malaise was greater. The odd thing about the US today is that it's a contradiction in terms. On the one side, the economy is roaring back as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic. It's not quite over, but there's a palpable sense in the country that it's ending. On top of which, the Biden administration poured kerosene on the barbecue

of an already recovering economy with a massive stimulus bill and yet more multi-trillion dollar bills that they have passed since then. So things are on fire economically with rates of growth really quite impressively high by recent standards, which certainly wasn't the case in 1979. But people don't feel good. And they don't feel good, I think, not just because inflation's eating their nominal wage gains. They don't feel good

because they sense that something is wrong. And they can no longer blame it, whatever it was that they felt was wrong on Donald Trump, which was the 2020 answer to the question, what is wrong with America? The answer that most educated people would tend to give was, well, we have this crazy person in the White House, and that's why the pandemic is going so badly, and that's why everything is a little bit askew. But it's now 2021, nearly the end of 2021. The pandemic isn't over yet. And in fact, more people have died of COVID in 2021 than died in 2020 in the United States. So there's no longer that excuse that a died in 2020 in the United States. So there's no longer that excuse that a crazy man is in the White House. On the contrary, we thought we'd elected

from central casting the most middle-of-the-road, familiar, average kind of person to be president with the longest track record of almost any active politician. We went for politics as usual. We went for pre-Trump politics, and it hasn't worked. And that, I think, is why people are feeling uneasy, because they thought the fix had been achieved with the election. And they thought particularly that it had been achieved when Trump vanished from social media and vanished altogether after January the 6th. But here we are. The year is nearly over, the first year of the Biden presidency, and the country still feels off in various unsettling ways. We've got nobody, we don't have Donald Trump to blame anymore. It's interesting though because one could argue if Biden had just done what he had elected, had been elected to do, you know, which is basically not be Trump.

Right. He was elected to not be Trump. Kind of be sane, be stable, try to bring Washington together. He actually had an early win on that. You could argue with the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the vote in the Senate, where you had 19 Republicans vote for it. Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate leader, voted for it. Try to bring some competence to the management of COVID. And then that's it. Just do that. And people would have said, that's kind of what we elected. But instead, he misinterpreted this mandate. I don't think it was misinterpretation. They had to do more than that because a really significant voters opted for Biden, particularly the ones who had previously voted for Trump because they kind of needed normalcy. And after four years of the wrecking ball, it's like, OK, let's have normalcy. That was great, but can we have normalcy now?

But that's not really what the Democratic Party interpreted the result as meaning. They interpreted it as meaning, we are on for one of the great transformations, a la Roosevelt or Johnson, and let's get out the longest list we can possibly come up with of things to spend money on and go do it. Plan after plan. All these measures had ambitious sounding plan names with the word plan in them and multi-trillion dollar tickets.

That wasn't the only mistake they made. I mean, this was obviously a mistake. You could see that in February when Larry Summers made the prediction there was going to be inflation. That was not, to my mind, a wildly contrarian position. It was just relatively straightforward macro math. The size of the stimulus was just way in excess of the output gap. But there were other things that they got wrong, which I think many people missed at the

time too. But I recall you and I talking about it, and it was certainly the Green Mantle view. They screwed up on the border. They basically sent a signal. The wall was going to be forgotten about, and the border was open. And that signal was received loud and clear in Central America, creating a surge in illegal crossings, the like of which we haven't seen in many years. The second big mistake, which was really a hangover from the summer of 2020, was their association with defund the police as a slogan from the Black Lives Matter movement. The escalation in homicide in American cities that began in the wake of the killing of George Floyd

has just carried on into this year. And that is, I think, an extremely important point of reference when we're talking about the 1970s. Because one thing that people remember about the 70s was urban violent crime. Actually, it got a lot worse in the 80s and into the 90s. But the recollection people have is that that was one of the facets of malaise that they remember from the Carter years. So if you add together inflation, migration crisis, and then the surge in homicide. Oh, and let me add one more. The tendency of the administration to signal at least its sympathy with the woke movement, with the progressives who are waging a culture war on issues of race, gender, and much else.

The more the administration uses the language of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or critical race theory, the more it signals that it's in sympathy with the educationalist left and not with parents, the more I think it's committing political suicide. Because if there's one thing that's very clear from polling data, ordinary Americans have really no sympathy at all with the agenda of the educationalist left. And that, of course, is why Youngkin won in Virginia in the gubernatorial race.

I think it is one of the reasons why the Democrats are going to be in big trouble in the midterms next year. Just on the defund the police, Jonathan Chait wrote an interesting piece in the current issue of New York Magazine in which he basically lays out from the perspective of someone of the left why the Biden presidency is already doomed. And he basically says that, you know, Biden is squeezed between two factions, the hard left and the sort of centrist, more establishment types. Nate Cohn from the New York Times, who's a, you know, straight center, you know, centrist polling analyst, basically, took to Twitter to take on Chait's piece. And he says, and he writes, I just want to quote here,

one thing that's missing from the discussion of the squeeze, meaning the squeeze that Biden's experiencing in the Democratic Party, is the weakness of the very large mainstream liberal center of the Democratic Party. Part of the reason Democrats get tarred with something like defund the police last summer, for instance, is that the party's very large mainstream is often conspicuously quiet, and that's especially true in the Biden era. One manifestation of it, obvious on this website, meaning Twitter, but occurred throughout the Democratic primaries, that liberals tend to argue against the left on electability grounds rather than clearly disagree on the

substance of the issues issues even when they agree or disagree on a particular issue even when i guess he says even when they disagree so his point is what chade and these others argue and including many democrats in congress argue and say defund the police what you brought up is hey don't talk about it it's bad politics hey we got to be careful it's going to hurt us electorally which which is different than like what Bill Clinton did with his sister soldier moment, which is where he turned and basically confronted Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition. Or it's different than Bill Clinton when he corrected in the middle of his first term and came out for welfare reform. It wasn't just that he was addressing the messaging a little bit to appeal to a different

part of the electorate. He took action to send a message, this is not who I am, and took like a concrete step. And I think you look at defund the police, it's not just a messaging thing. It's that people really believe that there's a breakdown in public safety and Democrats, fairly or not, can't be trusted to deal with it i think that's right i mean i haven't i haven't read the chate piece but i i made this point after 100 days of biden that they were going to have a major problem uh with violent crime and their association with the BLM protests and slogans like defund the police because significant numbers of Democrats at the municipal level had embraced those slogans in the heat of the moment following the killing of George Floyd.

One must remember that the protests that were unleashed in mid-pandemic last year were among the largest in American history. There were protests in something like two-fifths of every county in the United States. The protesters were mostly white. This was an almost religious outpouring of expiation by white progressives. But in many places, not most, but many, the protests degenerated into violence and the violence created an atmosphere in which violent crime could spike because the police demoralized, stepped back. Now, that is a major problem for any administration of any stripe. A crisis of public order will lose you voters faster than almost anything I can think of, including a crisis of public health. So this is a big issue. And I think it's important to remember that Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden were in the same position in that the Democratic Party

then, as now, was a pretty broad coalition uniting progressive elements well represented in the House with much more, let's call them establishment centrists. And it was the same problem for Carter on foreign policy. He might be getting advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski to be pretty hawkish on Cold War issues, but that was absolutely not what the progressive wing of the Democratic Party wanted to hear at that time. So I think these resemblances are pretty helpful. And they tell us that the Biden administration has a very serious problem and much earlier than Jimmy Carter had it because most of the things that went wrong for Carter went wrong towards the end of his first term and

only term But this is all happening in year one of the Biden administration Right and I would add just back to your earlier point about how Biden Whatever should have governed. You know, I think you and I spoke at some point during the election when we were talking about the election, and I commented that I thought Biden's dream scenario would be to win the presidential election, maintain the Democratic majority in the House, but lose the Senate so Mitch McConnell could have a one-seat majority.

And then he could turn to his own party in Congress. This whole base of the party that you said is putting pressure on him, where you say it was inevitable the base was going to want to do something transformative. And he could turn to them and say, hey, I'm with you, but I got to deal with Mitch McConnell. After all, Biden was the one who dealt with Mitch McConnell most of the time during the Obama years, whenever we were on one of these fiscal cliffs or whatever it was. It was Biden and McConnell that would kind of quietly work things out. And Biden could say, this is just the situation we're in. And I would love to launch a progressive revolution, but I can't. And I think the Democrats, at least people around Biden, never anticipated that they would win both Senate seats in Georgia.

They thought they were going to lose the Senate seats in Georgia, in which case McConnell would have had a majority. But obviously Trump was angry about the outcome of the presidential election. He was sort of lackluster in trying to turn out the Republican vote in Georgia. Something like 100 plus thousand Republican voters didn't turn out in georgia and then suddenly the democrats were there biden is he's got the majorities in both houses and he can't say to his base hey it's divided government and so he had no excuse even although joe mansion has done an impressive job of taking mitch mcconnell's place and trying to apply the brakes on the spending and taxing side. But you're right, it really did create a quite unexpected situation, I think, for Ron Klain, who is, of course, Prime Minister. It's important to remember that the United States has a very British kind of

governance at the moment. And this is another reason why I like my interwar British analogy. Because although Joe Biden's president, it's an open secret that he can only work a relatively few hours every day because of his age and fading powers. And so Ron Klain is actually the prime minister. And he's a prime minister with a rather unruly majority in the House of Commons, i.e. the House of Representatives. So I think this is a helpful way to think about this. And the reason I think it's important to bring back that British parallel is that 1979 looked bad, but it looked worse for the Soviet Union. And we just weren't really paying attention.

We also had waiting in the wings a very, very compelling solution to America's problems in the form of Ronald Reagan, who had established himself as a national figure during his time as governor of California, had had a shot at the Republican nomination once before, and had established a fantastically coherent intellectual basis for resuscitating the country both in terms of economic policy and in terms of foreign policy. So the situation today is I think much worse in this respect because while we are grappling with all kinds of problems, excessive debt and inflation surprise, the attendant monetary policy headache that is almost certainly going to dominate Jay Powell's second term as Fed chair now that he's been reconfirmed, the principal geopolitical rival

out there is the People's Republic of China, which is not the Soviet Union in 1979 by any stretch of the imagination It has all kinds of problems clearly Demographic debt related its its growth rate is certainly going to come down But it's a far more formidable rival than the United States faced in the tail end of the 1970s We kind of overestimated the Soviet Union back then. Right now, you look at China and you have to ask yourself, if those guys decide to invade Taiwan at some point in the next three years, using all of the new capacity that they are showing off, hypersonic missiles and so forth, is the Biden administration going to fight to preserve Taiwan's autonomy

and uphold the 1979 legislation that obliges the U.S. to prevent a violent change to the status quo with Taiwan? Or is it going to fold? And that is the big question that I keep coming back to when I think about the situation of the United States today. We are approaching, I think, a great test of the morale and strength of the United States as the world's preeminent power. That test is going to come perhaps over Taiwan, perhaps over Ukraine. What will the United States do if, as many people, including the Ukrainian government, fear the Russians invade Ukraine

in an all-out campaign of annexation. Well, the people in the administration today include many of the people who, in 2014, blinked or did next to nothing when Putin annexed Crimea and sent troops into eastern Ukraine. These challenges are coming. I think it's highly unlikely this administration is going to get to the 2024 election without a major foreign policy test. And I look at them and I wonder if they're up to it. And I have my doubts. So, Neil, so in 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, basically ending the decade of detente between the U.S.

and the Soviet Union. Carter responded with a grain embargo and by boycotting the Moscow Olympics, which, you know, many people, both in the United States and around the world, regarded as pretty weak, a pretty weak response. I'm trying to, so when I think about the scenario you presented, like an invasion, all-out invasion of Ukraine or an all-out invasion of Taiwan, I mean, those to me are very, almost like binary events. I'm wondering whether or not take China, there could be kind of a middle-of-the-road action they could take that doesn't obviously provoke a strong U.S. response, but still sends a message to the world that China's testing. I'm trying to imagine what

China could do to Taiwan short of an all-out invasion of Taiwan, where it would make it a lot harder for Lloyd Austin to walk into the Oval Office and say, Mr. President, you know, we need to use American force to respond to this. And the president would be like, respond to what? Yeah. Well, there are clearly all kinds of shades of gray in the world of modern warfare. President Putin has shown that not only in Ukraine, but also in Syria. And so it's plausible that rather than an all-out amphibious invasion, the Chinese government probably, let's assume it's after their party congress next year, so let's assume 2023, annexes, takes over the outlying islands because Taiwan has its outlying islands and imposes not a blockade but a kind of quarantine regime on Taiwan. Controls in effect access to the island.

What then? What if cyber warfare is unleashed on a larger scale than we've hitherto seen? Is that ground for sending aircraft carrier groups? So there's clearly a scenario in which, as with the Ukraine in 2014, the move that the US finds hard to respond to is a partial move, partial annexation, and then a kind of gray psycho ops type strategy designed to undermine the resolve of the Taiwanese people and isolate them, leave them really in a vulnerable position and erode the will of the population to sustain and perhaps fight for their autonomy.

I can well imagine that. And it makes a lot of sense because from Xi Jinping's point of view, the all-out amphibious invasion is a high-risk strategy. If that goes wrong, he and potentially the Chinese Communist Party are in deep trouble. So I think they're learning a lot from their Russian friends. They're trying to get better at information warfare. They have a long way to go, as we've seen in the past year. But they're definitely learning. And that Russian playbook points to something short of all-out war, which the United States will be unlikely

to have a coherent response to. That's all for today's conversation with Neil. Again, we'll pick back up with him next week. Lots of important and provocative insights in there. If you have questions, comments, or ideas for episodes, send them my way. You can email me at dan at unlocked dot fm. That's dan at unlocked dot frank and mary. Please do send in your comments.

We find them very helpful. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.