Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Niall Ferguson: How Cold War II Turns Hot

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

Historian Niall Ferguson returns to the podcast to look at how the current Cold War could turn hot. Niall has taught at Harvard, Cambridge, Oxford and New York University. He’s authored 17 books. He’s currently at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University where he is the MIllbank Family Senior Fellow, and Managing Director of Greenmantle, a macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory firm. Order Niall’s most recent book, “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe” here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/doom-niall-ferguson/1137713414 Learn more about the University of Austin here: https://www.uaustin.org/ Learn more about Greenmantle here: https://www.gmantle.com/ Email me questions, comments and ideas at [e-mail].

We might think of this as the war in Ukraine or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but maybe it's just the first part of World War III. And part two is going to be in the Middle East when Iran escalates its war against Saudi Arabia. And part three is Taiwan. And if those things happen in roughly the same time frame, then we're looking at something much more alarming than Cold War II. I'm fine with Cold War II. Cold War II is good because Cold Wars, where we don't actually do that much fighting, are an incentive to innovate technologically. It's better for us to recognize we're in Cold War II and that it is primarily a technological race and we can't lose it. But if you end up in World War III,

where you actually have to have an enormous number of shells available, missiles available, where you have to replace the ships that get sunk in the Taiwan Strait very fast, then the United States is at history as well as into the future. We'll do that by focusing on two areas today, China and also the Russia-Ukraine war. Nobody better to do that with than historian Neil Ferguson. If this podcast, going back to its earliest days, has a cast, Neil's been a starring member of it. As a professor, he's taught at Oxford, Harvard, and Stanford. He's a weekly columnist for Bloomberg News. He's published numerous books, 17 in total, including The Square and the Tower, Networks in Power, From the Freemasons to Facebook, and also Doom, The Politics of

Catastrophe, which is a deeply researched history that raises serious questions about whether the West can anticipate and cope with future catastrophes. He also wrote the first of a multi-volume biography of Kissinger. The first one was called Kissinger, 1923 to 1968, The Idealist, and he's currently working on the second volume. Neil's currently at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, where he's the Milbank Family Senior Fellow, and he's also founder and CEO of Greenmantle. A fun and interesting part of this episode is we put some of Neil's earlier predictions to the test. We see how they held up, which is only fair to do for this prophet of doom. And at the end, we also take your listener questions. Here's Neil Ferguson. This is Call Me Back.

And I'm pleased to welcome back to this podcast my longtime friend, the contrarian historian, Neil Ferguson. Neil, thanks for joining. Makes a change from conservative historian, which I've been called for many, many years. And I have no objection to it, except nobody ever says liberal historian or progressive historian about the other lot. Anyway, good to be back, Dan. Neil, I will say that I told Mike Murphy last week that he was one of our top three most requested guests, and he asked me who the others were. And I actually said there were more like

four, but one of them was our mutual friend, Mohamed El-Aryan, and then you, Neil Ferguson, in no particular order. He said the difference between him and the other two most favorite guests of the show is the other two can move markets, whereas he just does rank political punditry. But it's fitting that you're on because we are now, I have been told, we have crossed the one millionth, well past the one millionth download of this podcast series that we've had going since the pandemic. So we're going to do a little bit of a historical look back today, which is fitting. By the way, the one million downloads are not just of the times you've been on, to be clear.

That's spread over a number of... I was not thinking that. Congratulations. Thanks. And I told you that I thought, I didn't want to make a big deal about crossing one million, but you pointed out to me offline that this is America, and we should not be modest.

Always be closing and always be boasting. That's what I've learned. Okay. So with that, I want to talk about this current crisis with China and how you think about it. And one opening you give, which is a great historical comparison, which didn't even occur to me at all until I read about it in your Bloomberg column, which was the story of Matthias Roost. I remember the incident, his little plane landing somewhere near Red Square, but you tell the whole story, Matthias Roost,

May 28th, 1987. Well, tell us what happened, what you were doing at the time, and why you think this is relevant to these balloons or what we're told are flying objects floating seams all over our hemisphere. Well, in May 1987, I was supposed to be researching my doctoral dissertation in Hamburg. And indeed I was. But my scholarship in those days was in pounds. And life in Hamburg was in Deutschmarks and it was it was tight to put it mildly so I eked out my income by writing for the Daily Telegraph and other British papers my main gig at that time was essentially to cover what was then West for the Telegraph. And on that day in May 1987, there were two distinguishing features.

One was that I had my wisdom teeth removed by a rather inept French dentist. I chose a French dentist because I really was afraid of German dentists after the movie Marathon Man. So I went through the phone book until I could find one that wasn't German and and he he removed three out of four wisdom teeth with local anesthetic he gave up after three because I was uh I was such a mess of non-coagulating blood I I staggered out in extreme pain with my face so swollen that I couldn't actually speak. Went back to my nasty little apartment in northeast Hamburg,

lay down to try to recover, and the phone rang. And it was the foreign editor of The Telegraph, whose name was Nigel White. He was from New Zealand, and he was extremely tough. He didn't let me get a word in edgeways. I couldn't speak anyway. We just heard that some young guys landed as plane in Red Square. It's going to be on the front of tomorrow's paper. Don't fuck it up.

And he hung up. And I was in the worst situation i think i'd ever been in it until that point in my life so i i had to i had to find out what happened what had happened was that a 19 year old german amateur pilot had flown a cessessna single prop from Helsinki through Soviet airspace all the way to Moscow and landed it on one of the bridges next to the Kremlin. And I'll tell you the anecdote briefly and then the point. I had to try and first find out what had happened and then get the story to London, which in those days you didn't do by email. You had to phone it in, but I couldn't speak.

So I did everything I could to get the story straight. And then I used a Telex machine for the first and only time in my life in the main Hamburg post office. They're terrifying. Imagine a cross between a steam engine and a typewriter. That was a telex machine. I filed the story. It duly appeared on the front page. And I'll always remember that day as one of the great tests of my strength and tenacity as a human being. And I still hear those words at least once a day, don't fuck it up. I say it to myself. Like it's seared into my memory.

It's also because you're in pain. Being in pain and being told. Yeah, it was a rough day. But the key reason I tell this story is that when the balloon was spotted over Billings, Montana, by a couple of photographers and revealed to the world through the Billings local newspaper, that was what I thought of. ability to fly a single prop Cessna right through Soviet airspace and land it in Red Square revealed that something was terribly wrong with the Soviet Union's air defences and indeed its entire military industrial complex. And the Chinese balloons, and we now must use the plural I think because I don't think these other things that have been shot down over the last few days are unidentified flying objects.

The Chinese balloons have done the same for the United States. It is absolutely extraordinary but true that very obviously large numbers of surveillance balloons, I think they're engaged in surveillance, not posing a direct threat to the United States, have been floating through American airspace, apparently unnoticed in many cases, because whatever air defenses we have left are essentially still tuned to incoming Russian intercontinental ballistic missile rather than Chinese balloon frequency. So I think it's a revelatory moment. I find it astonishing that the Pentagon and the Biden administration still haven't come up with a credible story and that within the last 24 hours spokes people for the administration have failed to clarify what the the other flying objects were if you can't identify flying objects it's a it's an unidentified flying object it's a ufo if there's one thing that americans like to obsess about even more than the possibility of elvis still being alive in patagonia it's ufos so this is

kind of misinformation or disinformation conspiracy theories with the white house seal of approval it's astonishing it actually is worse than the Soviet response to the Rust fiasco, because at least Mikhail Gorbachev, who was then running the Soviet Union, proceeded to fire his defense minister and the person in the military responsible for air defenses. At this point, nobody has been fired, and nobody has given us a credible story. So to wrap the point, I've been saying for five years, as you know, Dan,

we're in Cold War II. This is such a classic Cold War story. It recalls another event, which was Gary Powers' U-2. Yeah, 1960. But you know what? Just a minute on that. So 1960, a US plane flies over Soviet Union, goes down.

Gary Powers. Got shot down. Gary Powers was the U-2 pilot, got shot down. And it derailed what was then an attempt to reset or improve U.S.-Soviet relations. There was a summit similar, right? There was some summit that was supposed to follow. It paid to that summit. And more importantly, within a year, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were eyeball to eyeball in Berlin.

And within two years, they were eyeball to eyeball in Cuba. So the failure of that summit was the prelude to a massive escalation in Cold War I. If we now ask what are the consequences of the balloon fiasco, it's pretty clear that Secretary of State Blinken's trip to Beijing couldn't go on. I think, just to clarify what probably happened, I think the really big balloon we did know about, but I think the administration was so desperate for Blinken to go to Beijing that they decided to pretend not to have seen the balloon and hope that nobody would notice so that Blinken could still go to Beijing, which was an astonishing mistake. But I think that must be what happened because I can't believe they didn't see it. It

was huge. I mean, they can't have not known it was there to give the most generous interpretation of events could you argue in terms of what was happening on the because it seems incredibly brazen by the Chinese government to to do this but but maybe not if they're if they've been doing for a while and there's been no consequence but to think that they did it just at a time that Blinken was about to head to Beijing, as you said, so the timing seems awful. And you sort of, then you start to, your mind starts to wander, like, what were they actually up to on the eve of a very important trip, the U.S. Secretary of State coming to Beijing? Could have just been bureaucratic incompetence, like left hand not talking to the right hand in the Chinese kind of national security apparatus. And like, there's someone working on diplomacy on the diplomacy file in Beijing who's saying, what the hell? Who authorized

the balloon on the eve of the Secretary of State's trip? I mean, could have just been that just messy. One of the great mistakes that we kept making in Cold War I was to imagine that Soviet politics was like American politics. You can come across this if you go into the library and look at the books that were written about Soviet politics during the first Cold War. And they always imagine there are these liberals and there are these conservatives and they're battling it out That's not how totalitarian regimes work And I think it's a mistake to imagine that our dysfunction must somehow be mirrored in

Theirs they have a very different kind of dysfunction Which is that Xi Jinping? purports to have total control Over the system. And that control has been strengthened since the party Congress. So I think it's highly unlikely that some cheerful balloon warfare specialists let this thing loose without checking with the chain of command. It's more likely, in my view, that China is pursuing a classic Cold War strategy, which is to engage in diplomacy while at the same time pursuing a military advantage, which is what the Soviet Union did

for much of the Cold War. It would, for example, in the 1970s, engage in détente, but it never stopped seeking military advantage all around the world. Even when there were negotiations on strategic arms, it was still trying to gain footholds in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere. I therefore think it's much more plausible that they knew exactly what they were doing and don't really attach as much importance to improving relations

as the Biden administration now does. I think that's a more, to me, more credible interpretation than they're just as chaotic as we are. In the context of your argument on Cold War II, on this podcast in the past and elsewhere, you've argued that if you had to compare between the U.S. and China,

you'd much rather be the U.S. today in great power competition. And particularly with COVID in the rear view mirror, if you just look at the China is still dealing one way, and particularly with COVID in the rearview mirror, if you just look at the China is still dealing one way or the other with COVID and coming out of COVID, and they had lackluster vaccines, and they have, you know, civilian, you know, protest against government actions that, you know, was pretty intense and ultimately seemingly somewhat overwhelming for the Chinese government.

And now we know that a shrinking population, so a demography crisis in China. So how do you square this brazen behavior that you say they know exactly what they were doing with what you have argued in the past, China having a much weaker position globally against the United States than the other way around. Because when a totalitarian regime senses that its future is not bright, it's more likely, not less likely, to take strategic risk. Xi Jinping knows as well as we do perhaps better just how serious the problems are that face the Chinese Communist Party. Demographic problems, debt problems, a much lower growth rate than they've been accustomed to now since the 1980s.

And he also knows that in many ways the world has woken up, the United States has woken up to the strategic challenge posed by China. What that means is that the window of opportunity for him to consolidate his achievement to match Mao Zedong is not that wide and it's closing. So I think, and I base this not only on sitting around Stanford reading stuff, but on conversations with people who are much closer to the negotiations than I am, I think that since the party Congress, he has turned his attention to military preparedness in the belief that a showdown with the United States is inevitable. And what is going on at the moment

is a kind of dual-track strategy in which they send Yehud to Davos and they talk the talk of detente But at the same time they are Busy preparing for conflict that I think is the reality and our problem is because we are in so many ways decadent that not only don't we have a coherent response to a campaign of of aerial surveillance, intelligence gathering by balloons and other flying objects? We also struggle to take this seriously. UFOs play to our distinctively American neuroses.

Nowhere else in the world are UFOs spotted more frequently than over the United States. And I don't think that's because aliens are really interested in American football and no other sport. We are therefore highly susceptible to an information warfare that includes this feature. It's been manna from heaven from the sky for comedy writers who will be doing balloon jokes for at least the next two weeks. We can't take seriously the fact that while we were otherwise preoccupied with phantasms like Russia meddling in American politics, the real rival to our power, China, was engaged in a very sophisticated surveillance operation

that we either didn't notice or decided not to talk about. It's a very, to me, very disturbing picture, especially, and here I'm kind of teeing up another topic of conversation, especially when we got ourselves involved in a pretty open-ended proxy conflict in Eastern Europe and have the Middle East gradually approaching another moment of crisis over Iran and its relations with its neighbors and near neighbors. So when I see the global landscape, Cold War II, that's a good outcome. World War III is the bad outcome that we need to be much more worried about. Because if things escalate simultaneously in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Far East,

if we have a crisis over Iran and over Taiwan in the next couple of years, we're going to be extraordinarily thinly spread. In fact, we won't be able to cope with all three crises simultaneously. Campbell's parents used to live in Pensacola, Florida, and we spent a lot of time there. There's a very important Air Force base there, Eglin Air Force Base. And someone from the base once told me that there are more, quote unquote, UFO sightings in the Pensacola area, and I guess Gulf Breeze, which is neighboring, than any part of the country other than Roswell, New Mexico. And he was always amused because he just assumed, as he put it to me, that's because we're doing all this training and people in the community are seeing our flying objects flying and thinking they're UFOs. And that's why there's so many sightings but I was thinking about that as this news is coming out because Eglin Air Force

Base would be a good spot to have flying objects Chinese flying objects flying over just like Billings Montana was a good place with its uh nuclear assets there so it's your mind your mind starts to wonder like how like how much of this is going on everywhere. The answer is a very large amount. And one of the distinctive features of Cold War II is that there's way with, you know, the stratosphere with the balloons somewhere in between. And of course, we're doing it, too. The Chinese were immediately able to say, well, what about your balloons? This is what's so Cold War about our situation, that these efforts are going on all the time and on a much larger scale than happened between the United States and the Soviet Union, not least because the US and China are so intertwined economically and in other ways.

There are just many more ways in which China can gather information about us than were ever open to the Soviets, who had to manage relatively small rings of spies who were quite easy to spot, given that there really weren't that many Soviet citizens. Technologically, if you think about it, Cold War I was the sort of infancy of the satellite era. The first real satellite Sputnik is 1957. And so we're conducting Cold War II in a much more complex environment.

And we're the open society. China's the closed society. It would be very surprising if they didn't have a lot more on us than we have on them at this point though i'm sure we're trying to get as much as we can so why then why they're not level with the american public why why leave it to the eagle-eyed montanans to spot the balloon and why then start shooting stuff down that you can't even Credibly describe I

Mean the briefing so far have been like something out of the X-Files Right where they tell us we don't know what was propelling these things and they interfered with the pilots instruments I mean, it seems to me that if you want to generate unease in the minds of Americans, it'd be hard to beat that. I'm in some ways quite surprised at how low key the public response has been. Maybe at some level, our nerve endings have been blunted, but it is an extraordinary state of affairs. And the key point I would make is, under these circumstances, we should not expect Cold War II to stay cold. It is going to heat up. Because I sense that from the Chinese side, from Xi Jinping's side, they are on a path to war. And we don't yet realize that. We still think that

this is just about speeches at Davos and sending Secretary Blinken to Beijing. But if they're preparing for war, if the point of the balloon is, let's just take a really close look at Montana, and you were looking at the British Empire's experience during the interwar years and why, in many respects, what the British Empire was dealing with should have been an early tell that there was going to be certainly end of empire and begin in potentially a world war. And you compared it to America's situation today, to your point, could we go from Cold War II to World War III, God forbid. So I wanna just play the clip of something you said during that podcast in late 21, and then have you react to it? 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. Okay, that little riff there gave me chills because of when you said it, which was a while ago, it was before these Chinese balloons. How worried are you about US capabilities? Very concerned. The last time we talked was before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which I remember the military-industrial complex we used to grumble about has withered away to a really shocking extent. We have decided, and we certainly didn't plan this, we decided it on the fly as it became clear that Ukrainian resistance was stiffer than we had foreseen, we have committed ourselves to an escalating supply of hardware to the Ukrainians to prevent Russia's invasion from succeeding. But as we do that, we are depleting very rapidly our stocks of ammunition and certain very important kinds of precision missile. The war in Ukraine is not a huge war by mid-20th century standards,

but it's a much bigger war than any of the conflicts of the last 20 or even 30 years in terms of the consumption of artillery. The two sides have quickly moved into a mid-20th century playbook of very, very heavy bombardments of one another. And we are, it turns out, not in a position to supply that kind of conflict from our own stockpiles indefinitely. And this is the thing that really needs to be discussed much more widely. Point one, China has overtaken the United States as a manufacturing superpower.

It is now the number one manufacturing economy. That wasn't true if you go back to, say, 2004. It is true now. In terms of manufacturing value added, China's double that of the United States. Secondly, because we essentially allowed our defense industrial base to diminish, we are running very low of certain kinds of munitions. There was a very interesting report published by the Center for Strategic and International Studies just the other day entitled The Empty Bins Crisis. This is Seth Jones' piece or paper? That's right. Seth Jones' nice paper shows, and I'll just quote him,

the U.S. defense industrial base, including the munitions industrial base, is not currently equipped to support a protracted conventional war. Fact, quantities of javelins transferred to Ukraine through late August last year represented seven years of production at the 2022 rates. That's one of many killer facts that I put in my most recent Bloomberg column. And whether you look at Javelins or HIMARS, which of course is a much more formidable weapons system, it is startling how much capacity has been already expended by Ukraine and how long it will take to replace it. So this is a huge concern because, and this is, of course, the critical point, If we ended up in a conflict with China over Taiwan, we would run out of certain categories of weapon extraordinarily quickly. So we would run out of what are called LRASMs, long-range anti-surface missiles, within a week.

A week. It takes two years to produce a joint air-to-surface standoff missile. Two years. So from my vantage point, the significance of balloons and Unidentified flying objects is that if China's on a path to war? Which I think it is We are not ready for primetime We are only barely keeping up with Ukraine's expenditure of weapons against Russia a far less formidable opponent with a manufacturing base

one-tenth that of the United States. All the tough talk that one hears on Capitol Hill about Taiwan these days, those who say, ah, the hell with strategic ambiguity. let's just be unambiguous in our commitment to Taiwan that's that's something we've heard even from the president himself though his spokespeople have tried to walk it back all of this is entirely at odds with the reality that we would find it very difficult indeed to defend Taiwan and I don't just mean in the event of a Chinese invasion because I don't think that's the most likely scenario Be very difficult for the People's Liberation Army to Invade Taiwan. It's a tough assignment for a for an army that really hasn't done any real fighting in decades But if they were to blockade

the island and defy the United States to send naval and air support to break the blockade, we would really be gambling. Because if China were prepared to fight, it would be a short war. And therefore, do you believe that China is, ironically, we're not focused on this, a net beneficiary of the war we're supporting or fighting by proxy on behalf of Ukraine?

The fundamental strategic error that's been made was this. When the war broke out, when Putin, against the expectations of most pundits, actually did invade Ukraine, and the Ukrainians, against the expectations of nearly all pundits actually did invade Ukraine. And the Ukrainians against the expectations of nearly all pundits didn't collapse. By the way, I was wrong about that. I never expected Ukraine to put up such tenacious resistance. And it's important to own that mistake. I was in good company, but it was a mistake. Once we saw that, our calculation was, great, we can supply the

Ukrainians and, in a kind of extended attrition, erode Russia's military capability. And that's why I think the United States has not made any very serious effort to stop this war since it began. Some people, at least, not everybody, but some people in the administration thought, let's let it run. They failed to see that China is the bigger beneficiary of this. And that's because, from China's vantage point, it gets Russia's oil and soon gas at a pretty steep discount because the Russians can't sell it anywhere else much. And China's exporting like crazy to Russia right now. And China gets to export everything short of military grade hardware to Russia, which is now entirely a dependent of China in economic terms. Of course, you might say,

but I thought Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were besties, and he can't be happy to see Putin's war going wrong. I mean, as President Biden likes to say, come on, man. From a Chinese point of view, it's far from unsatisfactory that Putin's in this hole. It makes Russia, which is historically a strategic rival of China, weaker and increases its dependence on Beijing. So this is one of the things that I think was wrong about the calculations made last year. And it's why the United States now realizes it needs to get this war to stop. It's too late. It's really hard to stop the war now.

And why is that? Because both sides think, I mean, both Russia, Zelensky and Putin both think they'll win. Their populations both think they'll win. Yeah. But also because when a war has lasted about six months, it's really, really hard to get it to stop within the next six months historically. Wars are much easier to stop when they've lasted days or weeks. But once you get into half a year plus, then it's really hard to stop, partly because of sunk costs.

You just have body counts that are really high on both sides, and everybody is filled with hatred towards the other side. The mood in Ukraine is implacable. I was there back in the fall of last year, and there's a kind of red mist mood when you talk to people, not surprisingly given that war crimes have been committed all over the country, not just in the east, but in the suburbs of Kiev and Mariupol and elsewhere. So I think it's very hard to stop the war now. I think if I view the conflict from a Ukrainian point of view,

the commitment from the United States seems remarkably good. And if you keep asking, you get somewhat better hardware each time you ask. So you get the tanks. So then you ask for the jet planes. You'll get the jet planes and what next from a Russian vantage point Putin is counting on the West not to have stamina He's counting on there being divisions between Europe and the United States He's counting on Americans getting distracted because we are Americans and at some point

You know, there'll be, there'll be the presidential election circus to get started. That's coming up next year. So both sides think that they have time on their side. And that's why both sides are preparing or have already launched offensive operations. I don't think the Russian offensive that's currently underway will be decisive, nor do I think the Ukrainian counteroffensive or spring offensive will be decisive. I think the war will drag on, and I don't see how any outside pressure is going to stop it. I also don't see how the U.S. can credibly say to Zelensky, well, you have to

settle now or we stop giving you weapons, because Zelensky is a master of social media and mainstream media, and he will lose no time in naming and shaming whichever official tries to make that argument. So it's going to drag on. And the longer it lasts, the less able we are to deal with a crisis over Taiwan, which could blow up next year. Let us play. I want to play for you from that same conversation, November of 21. To be clear, you may not have predicted that Ukraine would have the, you know, the will to defend itself the way it has. But you did predict that Russia would go into Ukraine. So we're getting up close to the one year anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Let's listen to what you said back in November of 21 on this podcast. 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 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. So first of all, that's sort of, you know, I mean, pretty amazing that they're going to have a major foreign policy test before the 24 election. Here we are, we're in the thick of it. And while they were sort of slow moving and a little hapless at the beginning of the crisis. Now they're in the thick of it. And, you know, Maggie Haberman was on this podcast recently, and she said she thinks one of the reasons Biden wants to continue to be president, aside from the fact that most presidents want to continue being president, is this issue, the Russia-Ukraine war, which he personally feels very committed to and wants to see through. Are you surprised by the administration seeming stick-to-it-edness despite the slow moving and, you know, tanks should have been

sent a while ago and the javelin should have been sent sooner than they were sent, but by and large they're sticking to it? Yeah, I've been impressed by Jake Sullivan's performance as National security advisor. I think Bill Burns has played an impressive role at CIA. I think those are the two key players in many ways. Of course, people who'd been, including the president himself, in the Obama administration know how badly it failed. And not only with respect to Ukraine,

also with respect to Syria. So part of what's going on here is the once bitten twice shy phenomenon in which previously appeasement oriented people become hawks because they know the appeasement was shameful. So they've done better than i foresaw when we we had that conversation the problem is that the creeping stepwise increase in support is something that the united states has done before it's exactly how the United States became bogged down

in Vietnam. And I think Lyndon Johnson and Joe Biden have comparably bad track records on foreign policy. And when you, just to be clear, the Vietnam comp is just escalation, but like trying to keep a handle on it. Escalate, but keep a handle on it. Escalate. And always be constrained by domestic political calculations. And always be constrained by fear that if you escalate too rapidly, then you'll precipitate a major hot war. remember all along in the case of Vietnam that behind the North Vietnamese governments stood the Soviet Union as well as to some extent the People's Republic of China and that also inhibited our readiness to to escalate so I've said to my friends in Kyiv you you don't want to be South

Vietnam actually I've said to them you want to be North Vietnam. Actually, I've said to them, you want to be North Vietnam. You've got to try and make sure that you are North Vietnam and that you at some point do what they did, which is fighting while talking. And you want to put Putin in the position of being the United States and Vietnam. But it's not yet clear that we're going to get there. Meanwhile, the United States is in its familiar posture of, we'll do just enough to stop the Ukrainians from losing, but not enough for them to win, which means the war just keeps going. And the longer it lasts, the more likelyowness of the Republican win in the House of Representatives, who think that this war is the kind of thing that he would

have kept out of and he would end where he re-elected. These are not, I think, insignificant variables. And if I'm Putin, I know I just need to get through this year and let the American domestic politics do its crazy thing, which, you know, we never need Russians to help us be crazy in a presidential election. We'll be crazy all by ourselves. And that's when we will likely make mistakes. So I wish I could see a way for this war to be brought to an end, but I can't see one now. And I wish I could see a way of our avoiding getting drawn into another crisis between now and, let's say, the 2024 election. But I think that will be really hard. Before we even talk about Taiwan, which I think is a potential issue for next year, given the Taiwanese election that will happen in January, just remember, and you don't need me to

tell you this, Dan, but just remember what's going on in the Middle East. The attempt to resuscitate the nuclear deal with Iran is completely dead. The Iranian regime has been radicalized by the threats from within. It is perfectly ready to continue its various proxy wars in the region. Israel has a new government, which is decidedly hawkish on the question of Iran's nuclear program. Anybody who thinks the Middle East is going to just stay quiet between now and November of next year, I think is a seriously delusional optimist. And the extent to which those governments are coordinating Tehran, Moscow, and Beijing, which is... Well, right.

So this is a really important point that I tried to make recently, that when David Frum used the phrase axis of evil for, I think, the State of the Union 2002, for George W. Bush, there was no axis then. Those powers that were named

were not in any way confederates. What was it? Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. North Korea, yeah. The real axis is today, and it's Russia, China, and Iran. And that axis is real. They are not only economically intertwined, but Iran has become a crucial source of drones and other supplies for the Russian war effort. This is a very concerning development because if they act together as the axis of World War II acted together, they can exploit the overstretched American position.

Remember, Britain's problem in the 1930s was enormous pile of debt, much of it a hangover from the previous conflict, deep division about whether there was even desirable to have an empire, inability to rearm sufficiently rapidly to deter the Axis powers, and the Axis powers were able to take advantage of Britain's position to launch conflicts that together posed an existential threat to Britain. And that's the scenario I worry about. You know, I've written books about both world wars, about the first and second. and what you realize when you write their histories is that what we retrospectively call a world war is in some ways a kind of agglomeration of different conflicts that just happened at the same time it's the version of victor david hansen's theory about world war ii

yeah well this is what i argued in in the war of the world published back in the distant 2006 um and that that that argument i think is a troubling one, because it means that we might think of this as the war in Ukraine or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but maybe it's just the first part of World War III. And part two is going to be in the Middle East, maybe when Israel strikes Iran's nuclear facilities, maybe when Iran escalates its war against Saudi Arabia, and part three is Taiwan. And if those things happen in roughly the same time frame, then we're looking at something much more alarming than Cold War II. I'm fine with Cold War II. Cold War II is good because Cold Wars, where we don't actually do that much fighting, are an incentive to innovate technologically. And from the vantage point of the United States,

it ought to win Cold War II over China because we have edges in a bunch of different technological domains. And we are still in a position to use economic warfare to slow down their growth, particularly in the area of semiconductors. So Cold War II, I've always argued, is desirable. It's better for us to recognize we're in Cold War II and that it is primarily a technological race and we can't lose it. That's fine. That's how we should be. But if you end up in World War III, if you end up in a hot war where you actually have to have an enormous number of shells available, missiles available,

high-mass systems available, where you have to replace the ships that get sunk in the Taiwan Strait very fast, then the United States is in a very weak position, I think. And the kind of argument that I hear from, say, Bob Kagan, that it's fine because, well, just what we do what we did in World War II. I don't think we can do that. I don't think we have the industrial capacity that we had during World War II to very rapidly scale up production when the hot war kicks off or when the hot war comes to us. Before we let you go, Neil, speaking of another cold war that sometimes gets hot, you've been very eloquent and very directly involved in what's happening on

American college campuses. Another cold war, Cold War III maybe. And you've spoken about it on this podcast. And when we mentioned that you were going to be on, we got a bunch of questions, a number of which related to topics we talked about already about global affairs. But we did get a question about your view of the current, what's going on now on American college campuses. So I'm going to play you a question from Elisa from New York. Hi, Neil.

Wondering if there's been any improvement in terms of academic freedom on university campuses. We've seen the appointment of Ben Sasse at University of Florida, the new School of Civic Life at North Carolina, and hoping that that means there's a trend away from this repression of ideas on college campuses? Well, I'm always told that there is a pendulum that will swing back into the center. History doesn't support that hypothesis. What tends to be true in universities is that any political skew, whether it's to the left or to the right, because sometimes universities skew to the right. The German universities of the 1920s and 30s come to mind.

But if there's a political skew, it's more like going down a ski slope. You pick up speed. The good news is, as your question made clear, there is a much greater awareness of this problem, and there's a lot better organization in defending academic freedom. Greg Lukianoff's FIRE, the Academic Freedom Association, the creation of a new university which I'm involved with in Austin, the University of Austin, and there are other examples I could cite, the Heterodox Academy, for example. Compared with 10 years ago, there is a much better set of institutions for upholding academic freedom. But I wouldn't want to depict that as victory.

It's certainly not the beginning of the end. It might be the end of the beginning. We might actually now be in a position to push back. There's, for example, an encouraging sign, which my friend Sam Abrams just wrote about, that here at Stanford University, when a crazy set of speech guidelines came out, in which terms like American citizen and you guys were to be prescribed because they might trigger people. I'm glad to say that some of my colleagues who are represented on the faculty senate, Hoover fellows or not, but those who are, are pushed back and forced, I think, the university leadership to distance itself from this onion level lunacy. But I wouldn't want to say the tide has really turned. I would just say that

the believers in academic freedom have got a lot better organized, and it's now harder to pick us off one by one with cancellation campaigns. That's the most I could say. Well, there's more addresses to go if you think there's insanity, right? University of Austin and other organizations. And the crazy has gotten crazier. So even people who may have been tolerant of the first wave of crazy think that at the – like what you just cited, you can't say you guys. Even like people who

may have tolerated the early stages of crazy are starting to say wait a minute yeah it's no longer that situation in which a relatively small number of conservatives are being persecuted it's no longer charles murray right uh it's jk rowling uh you know So I think liberals who thought, oh, well, these progressives are just like I was when I was young. I should give them their due. And anyway, I don't like my conservative colleague. I don't really give a damn. I don't think that attitude now is very prevalent. I think the liberals have realized that the woke red guards are coming for them too. And so I think we will put up a better fight than we did before. Does that mean that within my lifetime, Harvard will have returned to the political center ground? No.

Within my son's lifetime? Probably not. These things are extraordinarily difficult to undo because once the administration has been captured by the ideological people, and it's a very bloated administration, administrators outnumber students in many of these universities, and once the tenured faculty are overwhelmingly to the left, how do you undo that? There's no president in any university I know of powerful enough to dissolve the bureaucracy or restaff the departments. So I'm not too optimistic about how quickly this can change. Last thing, Alain, can we just play that next question on counter-globalization? Hello, Dr. Ferguson. You are definitely a fan favorite.

My question is, we noticed that globalization created huge opportunities for industries like financial services and technology that could easily cross borders. What will the coming protectionism, especially anti-Chinese sentiment, do to reshape our economy? and technology that could easily cross borders. What will the coming protectionism, especially anti-Chinese sentiment, do to reshape our economy?

I was in a debate about this at the World Economic Forum last month. By the way, there's nothing better. I've been at the WEF with Neil. There's nothing better than Neil at Davos because he's totally the skunk at the garden party. I mean, it's a unique role. It's a unique contribution you make. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it.

All right, anyways. So the whole question was deglobalization and is this the end of globalization and a new age of protectionism and populism and pandemicism. And I'm reduced to pointing out that globalization hasn't declined at all. I mean, it's just not happening. There's been a leveling off of cross-border trade in relation to gross domestic product, but it's not declined in any significant way when you look at the global data

trade in services Continues to grow Extraordinarily ahead of of output and so globalization is alive and kicking When you get away from you know manufacturers commodities, etc so I think this is something of an optical illusion, the result of narrative-dominating data. The end of globalization is intuitively plausible because of all that's happened since the financial crisis,

the populist backlash, the tariffs that Trump imposed, et cetera, et cetera, the pandemic that stopped the travel, and the trade war between the US and China goes on and will doubtless escalate because I'm quite sure that Congress will- And Biden has extended a number of these Trump trade policies. Oh, yes. And the industrial policy that the Biden administration has pursued with respect to infrastructure, with respect to the CHIPS Act, et cetera,

it's just another form of protectionism, but on a much larger scale than anything Trump did. I mean, it's America first, but with progressive rather than populist optics. And increasingly aggressive against Chinese tech. Exactly. And I'm sure that will continue. And I have no doubt that in addition to restricting

the export of semiconductors and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China, we'd also start limiting US firms ability to invest in in China. That's going to get more and more difficult. All of that will continue and so the the US-China relationship economically will will change. I say change because I don't think it will suddenly end. What's really striking to me is that US-China trade is at all-time highs. China's as large a share of the U.S. trade deficit as it was, say, 10 years ago. So I think even with all these policy efforts to achieve decoupling, not much decoupling has in fact happened. Apple used to produce 100% of its

iPads and iPhones in China. Now it's like 90%. That's the deglobalization we're seeing. And it's not like they're manufacturing that other 10% in the United States. No. What's happening is that the supply chains are being moved, whether it's to Vietnam or to India or to Indonesia or to Mexico, which is a really very convenient place for US firms to do manufacturing. I think rumors of the death of globalization, like the death of Mark Twain, have been exaggerated. And we shouldn't expect a colossal amount of so-called reshoring or friendshoring to transform the US economy. I think the US can do some semiconductor fabs, but ultimately, it's a pretty expensive place to manufacture stuff. And it's also a really difficult place to get stuff built. And that's

why our industrial capacity is reduced. That's why the US doesn't have a military industrial complex like it did in the 20th century, because a lot of the industrial operations of US firms are now elsewhere. And I don't think they're all coming home. That was always a kind of fantasy. It was Trump's fantasy, and he couldn't do it. And it would probably be a mistake just in terms of building in redundancies. We don't exactly yeah one of well you can do all that and you can do all that but don't pretend that it won't have inflationary consequences because it will right all right neil uh you like i said we're past a million downloads your your episodes have been a big contributor of that you you you will have a

fan following with our listeners so hopefully we'll get you on before our two millionth download. But thanks for being on and sharing your wisdom as depressing as the implications may be. Well, one must be cheerful in the face of calamity. I think that's something that... I mean, coming from a guy who wrote a book called Doom. I mean, you know, I should have... It's a very lighthearted book, Dan, if you only get past the title. All right. Thanks so much. Take care. Thanks, Dan.

That's our show for today. To keep up with Neil Ferguson, you can follow him on Twitter at N Fergus. That's at N-F-E-R-G-U-S. You can also follow his work at the Hoover Institution and at neilferguson.com. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.