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We're all Soviets now, with Sir Niall Ferguson
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Sir Niall Ferguson is arguably the world's greatest living historian. He first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, Sir Niall tried to show how China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival; it’s also a technological competitor, a geopolitical rival, and a military rival.
Sir Niall has recently amended his thesis to something altogether more disturbing. What if, in this new Cold War, the US — and not the Chinese - might be the Soviets?
Follow Will Kingston and Fire at Will on social media here.
Subscribe to The Spectator Australia here.
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Transcript
Introduction to Fire at Will
00:00:20
Speaker
G'day and welcome to Fire at Will, a safe space for dangerous conversations. I'm Will Kingston.
Are We the Baddies?
00:00:27
Speaker
There's a brilliant moment in the British TV sketch show That Mitchell and Web Look. David Mitchell, playing a mild-mannered Nazi soldier, surveys his surroundings in the trenches and can't help but notice that something doesn't feel quite right. Specifically, the soldier's caps have skulls on them. What follows is a period of self-reflection before the German soldiers tentatively ask themselves, are we the baddies?
The New Cold War Dynamics
00:00:56
Speaker
Sir Neil Ferguson had a comparable moment of introspection recently. Sir Neil is, in my opinion, the world's greatest living historian. Since 2018, he has been warning the world that the West is in a second Cold War, this time with China. This view is less controversial now than it was then, in no small part due to Neil's thinking. China is clearly not only an ideological rival firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one party rule, it's also a technological competitor, a military rival and a geopolitical rival.
00:01:33
Speaker
It only recently struck Sunil that in this new Cold War, the US, and not the Chinese, might in fact be the Soviets. He put his thoughts on paper in a typically daring essay for Barry Weiss' at The Free Press, where he is now a columnist. Unsurprisingly, his essay has spurred no little controversy, including an impassioned critique from Jonah Goldberg, who regular listeners will recall was on the show only a couple of months ago.
Hypothetical Trump Assassination Chaos
00:02:03
Speaker
So Neil, welcome to Fire at Will.
00:02:06
Speaker
Great to be with you, Will. It's a real privilege to have you on. but We are recording this on Monday the 15th of July, less than 48 hours after the attempted assassination of former and possibly future President Donald Trump. I'd be remiss not to ask your reflections from what you saw over the weekend. Well, we came within about an inch of a catastrophe because I think if if Donald Trump had been killed in Pennsylvania by the would-be assassin, American politics would be in an almost unimaginable state of turmoil. Now, I'm a historian who's always been interested in what-if questions and counterfactual questions.
00:02:51
Speaker
And some people dismiss those as speculation. But when a bullet is just an inch away from ah killing a man, you realize that history does have forking paths. It has moments when everything can be changed by a single act. If Trump had been killed, first of all, the Republican Party would have been plunged into chaos on the eve of its convention. and they would right now be a battle over who would who would inherit Trump's mantle, who would become the Republican candidate. But at the same time, I think there would be incredible rancor and recrimination directed against the Democratic Party and the liberal media and all those people who have spent the last eight years demonizing Donald Trump, ah portraying him as as Hitler or or Mussolini. And I think there would be
00:03:48
Speaker
fingers of accusation pointed at a great many people who have said things about Donald Trump that would suddenly look terrible had he had he been killed. So it's not just that Donald Trump dodged a bullet. The whole of America dodged a bullet. We would be in a terrible state if if that bullet had had hit its mark if Trump had not turned his head at the vital moment to look at ah the slide, at the chart that he was he was showing the crowd. There's a lot that still is very mysterious about what happened, and there is going to have to be a very serious
00:04:25
Speaker
inquiry into why the Secret Service failed so badly. This was not just ah ah an unforeseeable black swan event. The guy should not have been on that roof and he should not have had clear shots at a ah former president and current presidential candidate, but he did. and i don't think of I can't think of a good explanation for why that happened but let me just for now focus on the point that we just came very very close indeed to a radical deterioration in American political stability and we should thank God that he survived.
Assassination Attempts and Political Impact
00:04:59
Speaker
It's early days as you said but what do you think the early responses have revealed about the United States in 2024?
00:05:08
Speaker
Well, first of all, I think it's important to realize that Trump's response to a near-death moment was courageous. ah Not only did he react quickly, but Rather remarkably, he quickly rose to his feet and, as now everybody has has seen in videos or in still photographs, gave a gesture of of defiance and shouted the word, ah fight, directed himself
00:05:41
Speaker
at his audience, almost brushing his security ah detail to the side. And I think that will have made a profound impression on many people who up until this point might not have been following the election very closely. One can see this rippling through American society and and culture as we speak. And I think it was a defining moment that historians will be writing about 100 years from now. That's the first point I would make. I think the second point that strikes me is that if one looks at the history of assassinations, unsuccessful attempts at assassination and successful ones,
00:06:26
Speaker
There's been a lot of it in American history. And we we remember the famous ah cases like Abraham Lincoln. We forget that there were unsuccessful attempts on multiple presidents, including Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and in my memory, Ronald Reagan. So when Ronald Reagan was very nearly killed in 1981, he'd only been president for two months. The economic situation was pretty bleak. His popularity surged about 10 percentage points in the wake of Hinckley's attempt to shoot him. And I think it changed the direction of travel in the United States in the sense that Reagan somehow was a less partisan figure after that.
00:07:18
Speaker
It would have been a very different America if Reagan had died, because George H.W. Bush would have become president eight years too soon. And we wouldn't have the Reagan years to look back on as a time when the United States really turned it around after the pretty disastrous 70s. So I think a reasonable inference based on that case is that Trump's popularity will significantly surge.
Trump vs. Biden: Popularity Contest
00:07:42
Speaker
At a time when his opponent, Joe Biden, was already in deep electoral trouble because of his poor debate performance against Donald Trump. People were asking questions about the viability of Joe Biden as a candidate before all this, and now it's as clear as could be. There's an old man who's stumbled multiple times, including on platforms where he was speaking, and and there's another man who literally dodged a bullet and leapt to his feet
00:08:14
Speaker
ah Moments later, blood stained and defiant. There's a lot of people who are going to simply say, one of these guys has got the strength to be president and it's not Joe Biden. Yes, the campaign ads script themselves.
US-Soviet Parallels in Modern Times
00:08:29
Speaker
don't they Let's move to your recent thoughts on Cold War II and specifically the role of the US in that analogy. so I listened to your debate with Jonah Goldberg on a flight from New York to London. it was In one respect, it was intellectual heroin. In another respect, it was at times frustrating because I thought that you were
00:08:51
Speaker
on different tracks at points. I think Jonah was focused a lot on the moral foundations of the Soviet Union and of the US today and the innate moral values of the founding of the US. And you were looking at the outcomes of the respective states and some eerie similarities. Before we dive deeper into some of the critiques, let's go to to what are those similarities that you notice that struck you, which led you to get to to that position Well, I think it's clear that ah these two states have very different points of origin. that That's scarcely worth discussing, although both were republics that threw over a monarchical order, so not entirely different points of origin.
00:09:37
Speaker
But the foundation of the United States was an ideal derived from the enlightenment of individual liberty and representative government. The ideals of the Soviet Union, derived from Karl Marx and mid 19th century ideologies, as turned into a totalitarian ideology by Lenin. So profound difference there. But that wasn't the point of my article at all. That's not even worth having a debate about, even for an undergraduate essay. The point is where we are today, where the United States is today, is a very far cry from what the founders had in mind.
00:10:17
Speaker
It's odd that a democracy in 2024 has such old leadership. I'm not just talking about Joe Biden and and Donald Trump as as candidates for the presidency being old. The US Congress is substantially older than other representative assemblies in comparable countries. So that the gerontocratic problem of all leadership is striking. Secondly, if one looks at public morale, disillusionment with American institutions is at an all-time high. Respect for every part of government is
00:11:02
Speaker
really low. Eight percent of people have a favorable view of Congress. Eight percent have a favorable view of the highest legislature in the lab. And it's not a great deal better when you look at the other branches of government. Thirdly, You have an appalling state of public health where life expectancy is going down. Mortality rates amongst various groups, including young men, are going up. It is very hard to think of another country in history that had all these pathologies.
00:11:41
Speaker
gerontocracy, crisis of public morale in the institutions, and this extraordinary deterioration in in health and and life expectancy. So my point is, give me another example of a relatively advanced society. where those things were true. And if you can think of another, other than the Soviet Union in the 1980s and Russia in the 1990s, then dinner is on me because I can't. I took up your challenge in preparation for this interview and I couldn't. So you can ah you can keep your wallet in your pocket. let's
00:12:17
Speaker
look at each of those three observations in turn, but I'll go in reverse order because it was the similarity around deaths of despair, which was the real gut punch in your essay and in how you've spoken about this subsequently. and I think this is under reported on in the US today, the deaths of despair in many of the poorer parts of the United States and the similar deaths of despair in the Soviet Union. Let's go to the Soviet Union first. What did that look like? And then what clicked the switch in your mind to to draw that parallel to what we see in the US today? Part of my advantage here over people who disagreed with the Arctic was that I was actually in the Soviet Union.
00:12:58
Speaker
in its twilight years. and And then in Russia, after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, I was there as a graduate student, as a young academic doing research, traveling, working in archives. And I remember vividly the the scenes of despair, particularly of alcohol abuse that went on. The crisis of belief in the system was a very powerful feature of 1980s Soviet Russia. Cynicism, I remember once being in a bar and in Moscow where where they they did a kind of parody version of the Soviet national anthem.
00:13:44
Speaker
in the style of the stripper, if you can imagine that. So there was this complete disillusionment with what they had been taught to believe, combined with insane levels of drinking. People just drinking vodka like it was water. And this showed up in the data where you had appalling early death, particularly amongst men. When I delved into research, this it was not only that they were drinking themselves to death, they were smoking themselves ah to death. to By the way, one of the characteristic features of the Soviet system was that vodka and cigarettes were really cheap because it was the workers' paradise.
00:14:20
Speaker
so I remember reading Angus Deaton's work on Deaths of Despair, which he began to publish some years ago now for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. And it took me years to get what it reminded me of. If you look at the United States in the last 20 or so years, there's been this unexpected break from the trend. Up until relatively recently, as American incomes went up, a life expectancy improved and mortality rates went down.
00:14:51
Speaker
But that changed in the last 20 or so years. And Deaton is one of the scholars who who spotted this and coined the phrase deaths of despair. Now, there are a variety of things that cause Americans to die prematurely in ways that Europeans and Australians don't. This is not true of any other developed country where there has been continued improvement in life inspect expectancy. The famous thing is the opioid epidemic where a whole variety of things are lumped together, prescription drugs, but then fentanyl. A whole bunch of very lethal drugs have become so prevalent in particularly middle America that you have
00:15:31
Speaker
an amazing, shocking statistic. More people have died of these these overdoses than died of COVID, if one looks over the past decade or so. And they're younger people, so the number of life years lost is actually much higher. I was stunned when I started to to read this literature, and then I discovered it's not just that. There's also alcohol abuse. There is a very serious problem of alcohol abuse in America. It is shortening lives. Then you have suicides, often by gun ah gunshot. And then on top of that, you have obesity leading to very high levels of disease related to obesity, cardiovascular and other diseases. So taken on the whole,
00:16:17
Speaker
there's something terribly wrong with public health in the United States. And it's most obviously wrong when you go down the income distribution. People in the American elite are all living to be 100. Well, not 100, but they're certainly, by and large, living into their 80s. And that's why the political elite doesn't really see anything wrong with a presidential candidate being in his 80s. But if you go down to the bottom quintile, not only do you find these deaths of despair, but you discover that infant mortality is shockingly high, particularly for single mothers. So i finally, the penny dropped. I was asking myself,
00:16:54
Speaker
looking at Biden's candidacy and Trump's lack of youth. What is it about this that's familiar? And then I realized it's not just that we're seeing Brezhnev and Andropov debating, so to speak. It is that we have the deaths of despair syndrome that characterized the late Soviet period here in America. That was the aha or eureka moment for me. And I don't think it's possible to explain away American deaths of despair.
00:17:26
Speaker
as somehow sui generis, nor can one say, we're fine. This is sort of normal. It's not normal. It's completely weird. And the only other case that I can think of is the Soviet case. Let's assume then that that end outcome there is comparable. The underlying reason for deaths of despair in both cases. This is a very difficult question, and it is a multifactor answer, no doubt. but What do you point to when you think of why Americans are killing themselves in ludicrously large numbers, often at younger and younger ages? Why did men in Russia in the 1980s and 90s drink themselves to death? Because they ceased to believe in the future. They ceased to believe the story that they were building the workers' paradise.
00:18:14
Speaker
they realized it was just a scam and the real benefits of the system flowed to the nomenclature, to the new class that had formed, the leaders of the Communist Party who had their dachas and led their good lives and had their luxury goods that they were able to get smuggled in from abroad. The comparable view, I think, is that many Americans, particularly in the former industrial heartland of the country, simply have ceased to believe in the future and feel that the benefits of globalization gone to a tiny percentage of people, in fact, less than 1% of people at the top of the income distribution. And they're right. That is true. The benefits of globalization, if you mean by that term,
00:18:59
Speaker
say China's admission into the World Trade Organization in 2001, the benefits predominantly went to a tiny fraction of the population. Median household income in the United States adjusted for inflation between 1999 and 2016 did not move at all. So I think you've got the same sense of disillusionment, disenchantment, cynicism and pessimism, just pessimism about the future. If you're in that state of demoralization, then why not have another drink or another shot?
00:19:38
Speaker
Why not just escape from the reality you're in to a chemically enhanced alter alternate reality? I think that's what's going on. And it's borne out by the polling data, as well as by the way in which people talk about addiction. And and I do think Here it's necessary to take yourself on a journey into the world of addiction to understand what it is that that drives it. In some ways it's a mental health problem. ah In some ways there's a genetic predisposition.
00:20:10
Speaker
But to understand addiction is to understand the deaths of despair. And i like that's really what motivated me to write the piece. We've got to look in the mirror and say, oh my God, are we the Soviets? are we actually Have we reached the point where our society is as demoralized or parts of our society are as demoralized as Russians were in the 80s and 90s? I'm afraid the answer is yes. You don't notice it if you're in Aspen, Colorado, or if you're in in Silicon Valley. ah You don't notice it if you're on the Harvard campus because you're too busy with your encampment protesting about Gaza. But if you are in middle America and you have gone through de-industrialization and the fentanyl epidemic did way more damage to your society, to your community than COVID, then you do notice it. You can't miss it.
00:21:01
Speaker
The lovely line in that conversation with Jonah, which summed up what you just said very nicely, where you considered that they are radically different systems that have one thing in common, the utter alienation of a large part of the population from the proclaimed purpose of the system that is supposedly meant to support them.
Can the US Revive Its Founding Principles?
00:21:18
Speaker
My question following on from that is, is it possible for a pendulum to swing back in the United States back towards the founding ideals of the country and towards a correction in the system? Or are you more pessimistic about perhaps this being closer to a Soviet ending where there will be a destruction of the system in some way? I think I'm more optimistic that the United States can find its way out of this slow of despond because the system is designed
00:21:46
Speaker
ah was designed ah to be decentralized, ah to be competitive, ah to allow Texas to go a different way from California. And that's a definite and important difference ah between the United States and the Soviet Union, which which was highly centralized and where that the supposedly separate republics were in fact entirely governed from Moscow. So I think the United States has extraordinary powers of self-healing. We've seen that before. in The 1970s were a pretty bad time, although not as bad. You don't see the same crisis of public health in the 70s, but people were pretty
00:22:23
Speaker
Demoralized and despondent in the 70s stagflation a sense of malaise to use a word associated with Jimmy Carter and then under Reagan things bounce back so I think it's highly likely that the United States will find its way out of of this quagmire but A very important part of the problem is, as in the Soviet Union, the perception that the new class is entirely divorced from the interests and aspirations of ordinary people. And the equivalence of the commissars, the equivalence of the nomenclature in America today
00:22:59
Speaker
are the people committed to diversity, equity and inclusion, to the notion that anybody can have any gender that they want. ah The people who believe that above all else ah we must prioritise the threat of climate change, even if that means shutting down factories and getting rid of internal combustion engines. The attitudes of the elite, which are very radically different on these issues from ordinary people, are, I think, part of what's alienating. And the new class, whether it's the Harvard Corporation or faculty or the people who run foundations at the new york or the New York Times, that elite is as divorced from the aspirations of ordinary people.
00:23:38
Speaker
as the Soviet elite was. Somehow their power has to be dislodged if America is to repair itself.
Political Backlash and Elite Culture
00:23:45
Speaker
The difference of course is that we have democracy in America and there is at least a chance that there will be a successful political backlash against what we sometimes call Wokism for short. But that's really ah still to come. We'll see. And of course, there are ways in which any political backlash can go wrong. One of the problems that I notice in American politics is there ah always is this tendency to adopt the tactics of the other side if they seem to work. And so if council culture is working for progressives or liberals, it's really depressing when conservatives start doing council culture right
00:24:24
Speaker
back at them. but If censorship seems to be what the left does, I hate it when people on the right say, well, well we should do censorship too. And there is a way in which this can simply go downhill if we are in some race to the the bottom tactically. I hope that won't be the case. It's possible that in the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump, the the tone of politics will change. We'll see how Trump addresses the Republican National Convention this week. And there's some reason to hope that that he will change his tone compared with eight years ago when you may remember at the convention he struck an extraordinarily dark and foreboding tone. It's possible that he will use the opportunity that's been presented by his narrow escape to appeal for a new spirit of national unity. I very much hope so. But if we just carry on down the path of
00:25:16
Speaker
of polarisation and demonising the other side and hinting in our language that violent options exist, then this will end badly. Yes, I've heard that he has ripped up his convention speech and he is taking a different tack, which is more around a a tone of unity. Time will tell. You mentioned what I thought was one of the more fascinating parallels in the essay, which is between the DEI agenda today and then the, I guess, the socialist agenda in the Soviet Union and a fundamental disconnect between the elites pushing those agendas and then the the people who were subjected to them.
Education's Role in Societal Change
00:25:51
Speaker
My mind here goes to
00:25:53
Speaker
the education system. If there's one commonality in all of the people that I've spoken to on the topic of workism, from Yasha Monk to John Anderson, who I know you've spoken to and and many others, there is a general consensus that this started in the education sector before then moving to the other institutions across society. You are a founding, one of the founders of the University of Austin, which is based on a principle of free thought and free inquiry. My question is, are the existing educational institutions across the West today beyond saving, and we need to therefore build a new in the way that you have, or can you see some way of trying to trying to reform the education sector so we we can try and turn this around? Well, the established institutions are in a bad state.
00:26:43
Speaker
and I wouldn't be building a new university with my friends, Joe Lonsdale, Barry Wise, Panark and Alos and others ah in Austin if i if I thought they could easily be fixed. On the other hand, I think part of what we're trying to achieve with the University of Austin is to model academic freedom and meritocracy and in in so doing to put pressure on the established universities to clean up their act. I came to realize after 12 years at Harvard, nearly eight years at Stanford, that things were not going to be improved or reformed from within. The forces on the other side were far too numerous and well organized. But I think with a new university, we can start from scratch, rethink how universities should be run.
00:27:34
Speaker
and try to address some of the institutional defects that I think explain the descent of the great universities into wokeism, into illiberalism, into anti-meritocracy, and into intersectionality over individual freedom of conscience and speech. One interesting thing to me, and I learned it in the process of creating a new new university, is that the governance of universities is the problem. things go wrong pretty much regardless of your original design. It's a similar point to the one we've just been discussing about the United States and the Soviet Union. There are huge differences between, say, Harvard and and Duke, but they somehow all end up in the same place. Why is that?
00:28:18
Speaker
The answer is that boards of trustees don't effectively constrain presidents and provosts who don't effectively constrain tenure and faculty, who don't effectively constrain the bureaucracy of DEI, who don't effectively constrain radical students. What has caused that breakdown of any kind of authority in university? The answer is that nobody is forced to adhere to the founding principles of their institution. And so at the University of Austin, we have a constitution, which I helped to draw up, which specifies that you can't engage in political activism in the name of the university, that you must adhere to principles of meritocracy, in other words, of promotion according to academic excellence and potential, that you can't discriminate on the basis of race or religion or anything else. We spelt this out in in a constitution
00:29:14
Speaker
And we've created an enforcement mechanism so that that constitution has to be upheld by creating a judicial branch. And this was the key insight that universities don't have a judicial branch. They have an executive branch and they have some kind of legislative branch, but they don't have anything on the judicial side. And so we now have at the University of Austin, a new model of university governance that and includes getting rid of tenure, because if you specify the rights of faculty in your constitution, you don't need tenure. they They've got a constitutional protection to to publish as they see fit. I think all of this is innovative in an exciting way. If we succeed, which I believe we will, the other universities at some point will notice that more and more of the smartest people would rather be our university than at theirs. and It'll take time because there's a lot of stickiness.
00:30:03
Speaker
People want that degree from Harvard, no matter how painful the process of getting it. But over time, we're already seeing smart, ambitious, risk-taking young people would rather have academic freedom than prestige. And that's why ultimately the University of Austin, as a new university, will force the old universities to mend their ways. My next question was going to be, how do you safeguard against ideological illiberalism from a different vantage point, maybe from the right, seeping in?
Crisis in US Political Leadership
00:30:33
Speaker
But I imagine you would say that those mechanisms you put in place guard against that. There's no other way than to have some constitutional instrument that specifies ah the rights and responsibilities of of every member of the community and and then a mechanism to ensure that
00:30:48
Speaker
if somebody violates those, then they're held to account. Sure, it's the standard complaint that and unless an institution is explicitly right wing, it will end up being left wing, that's the ah sullivan's law, sometimes attributed to so John O'Sullivan, though it it may actually go back further. But whatever the origin of that law i think it it misses the problem at least in the academic world that if you explicitly say an institution is conservative it will be marginalized from the outside.
00:31:21
Speaker
ah because you will not be able to attract people from outside a relatively narrow demographic. Hillsdale does that. I mean, it's explicitly Christian as well as conservative, but I don't think Hillsdale can really solve the problem I'm talking about. Just look at what young people think before they go to college. They've already had enough high school indoctrination to be substantially to the left of the average 60-year-old. And so one can't, I think, expect to change higher education with an explicitly conservative institution. Our institution is explicitly committed to academic freedom, to free thought, free inquiry, free publication, and to the principle that if you are academically excellent, if you are both highly intelligent and hardworking and innovative,
00:32:07
Speaker
then you should be promoted over people who are less good. That's it. That's all you need to be a revolutionary institution in America today because the established institutions have deliberately walked away from freedom of inquiry and publication of thought and away from meritocracy. So we don't need, I think, to make some explicitly political commitments. In fact, on the contrary, our Constitution says universities don't engage in political activism. They should not do that. And this is an old point that Max Weber made more than 100 years ago, and he said, there's a difference between politics and science or scholarship. I agree with that. I've always used to think when I was going into the classroom, I want to give this class so that you would not know my politics if you had not gone to my Wikipedia page beforehand. It's not the job of a professor to engage in indoctrination. The job of a professor is to teach people how to think, not what to think.
00:33:04
Speaker
Let's turn to the second parallel that you drew in your essay, which is the gerontocracy. But I want to pull that back to the quality of political leadership across the West more generally today. And I don't think it is controversial to say that the quality of political leaders in the US, but also say in the UK, if you compare a Sunak to ah a Thatcher or a Stama to a Thatcher, or if you compared even an Albanese to a Howard or a Bob Hawke in Australia, There are substantial figures in the 80s and 90s across the West that I don't feel we see today. And my question would be, is that an unfortunate bad trot that we're going through? Or are there systemic reasons that are preventing us from producing quality political leaders in these countries? I think it's important not to engage in unfair comparisons.
00:33:57
Speaker
because not all the politicians of the 1980s were of the stature of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. And there are politicians in our time who have comparable stature with with them. I think of Radek Sikorsky, my contemporary at Oxford, now Poland's foreign minister, who I think is a courageous leader, or Kriakos Mitsutakis, the Greek prime minister, who's I think an extraordinarily skilled politician who's turned Greece around from a basket case to having a better financial situation than Germany. So they do exist. I think we've made politics, having said all that, pretty unattractive to people with talent and courage, because we've created a terrible combination, lousy money,
00:34:46
Speaker
constant public scrutiny, often probing into one's private life. A kind of, what's the word i'm I'm looking for, relentless schedule ah with ah minimal time off. A guarantee that you won't see your children if you have children, except fleetingly. We've made politics a really unattractive career. I mean, you can work as hard as a politician on Wall Street, but you get paid. You can be paid as badly as a politician in academia, but you have time. So in a way, it's it's become an even less attractive activity than it was in the 1980s. And I certainly have never thought seriously about elected office because I just ah wouldn't want to put my family through it. So that's a problem.
00:35:44
Speaker
Kissinger, Henry Kissinger, whose biography I'm in the midst of writing, published not long before his death a book about leadership. And it's a book worth reading because it observes that what characterised the leaders of his generation was that they had nearly all had the experience of World War II and that formative experience in a sense, prepared them to lead, not least because it had exposed them to the ordinary people in their country. Armies are great levelers. No matter what your background, you are in the same trench or in the same foxhole with people who had much less fortunate starts in life. And I think we're have a lot we've come a long way from that era. we're We're seeing the last twitches of the baby boomers in North America. In most of the rest of the Western world, they long ago left the political stage.
00:36:35
Speaker
to be replaced by a people, by and large, younger than me or not much older than me, whose experience is born in the 1960s, grew up in prosperous times. It's all been relatively easy. Not many sacrifices have been asked of that generation. And to become a politician the minute you leave university, as quite a number of recent prime ministers have done, I don't think is the ideal preparation for leadership. In fact, it may be the worst possible preparation ah for leadership. So in that sense, I think there are problems with the way we recruit people into politics, that it would be nice to see fixed. Do I think these things will change? Probably not.
00:37:17
Speaker
Yeah, I agree because any politician that seeks to change them will be viewed as self-serving and it is in our instinct to want to pay politicians. Right. So let's pay politicians badly and then be surprised when we get the kind of people that you get when you pay badly. Yes, it's ah an unfortunate reality. You have in your thesis a couple of very compelling secondary points behind the three that you put forward
Taiwan's Strategic Importance
00:37:41
Speaker
at the start. Let's go to some military similarities or at least echoes. You've talked before about the potential analogy between the Cuban Missile Crisis and a looming threat across the Taiwan Strait, but potentially with the roles reversed. Talk me through that. Well, the most dangerous moment of Cold War I was when
00:38:05
Speaker
an island off the United States was quarantined by the United States. That was a fancy word or a euphemism for blockaded. And the Soviet Union sent a naval expedition force to run that blockade. The island was Cuba and the issue was the Soviet attempt to station nuclear missiles on the island. It came very close to World War III, very close indeed. And in the end, fortunately for all of us,
00:38:38
Speaker
A deal was done. The way that deal was done behind the scenes was that the Cuban missiles were removed by the Soviets and the US withdrew some missiles from Turkey. But that was not made known publicly. So, publicly, it looked as if Khrushchev had blinked and John F. Kennedy had won a ah famous diplomatic victory. But they'd gone to the brink of World War III. Now, in our time, there's an island that is off one of the superpowers that could at any point be quarantined or blockaded and then
00:39:10
Speaker
then the other superpower would have to do what Khrushchev did in 1962 and send a naval expeditionary force to run the blockade, except that this time the island is off China. It's, of course, Taiwan. And in the event of a blockade of Taiwan, the United States would be in the position of the Soviets in 1962 and would have to send a naval expeditionary force across the Pacific or from Japan to the Taiwan Strait. One big difference is that Cuba in 1962 was not economically terribly important. It exported sugar and cigars.
00:39:42
Speaker
Whereas Taiwan exports the most sophisticated semiconductors in the world, nearly all of them, actually. And so if you're running an AI company, you kind of need Taiwan not to be blockaded. So the stakes are economically quite a bit higher. But for me, the interesting thing is, going back to the US-Soviet comparison, that in the Taiwan semiconductor crisis of 2020, or I don't know, shall we say 2027, the United States will find itself in the Soviet role. And it will be Xi Jinping, who will be JFK. So whoever is president, and it looks increasingly likely that it will be Donald Trump, will will find themselves in that quandary that Khrushchev got himself into, especially if President Trump decides to pile armaments into Taiwan, as some of his potential advisors would like him to do. So there is a way in which history could repeat itself, but with the roles reversed.
00:40:37
Speaker
The one thing which there is a blind spot amongst a lot of people in the West is the psychology of the Chinese in this scenario. and There is an argument to say if they were to do this, this goes against their economic self-interest, but that also potentially underestimates the ideological significance of Taiwan. Try and help me understand the the psychology of Xi Jinping and that the Chinese regime in this story, in this context. The Chinese government, Chinese Communist Party, insists that ah Taiwan but belongs to it and should be under its direct control, like any other province of China. And the United States
00:41:20
Speaker
in some measure accepted that claim that Taiwan was part of China in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger negotiated Shanghai communique and ultimately diplomatic relations were established between the US and China. With the caveat that under the Taiwan Relations Act in 1979 the US effectively said you can't change the status quo by force. Now back then, it was the success of American diplomacy to get the CCP, then led by Mao Zedong, to pump the issue into the distant future. The difference today is that Xi Jinping, for I think quite personal reasons, sees his mission as being to close the deal and bring Taiwan under Beijing's control.
00:42:08
Speaker
And increasingly he understands that that is not going to happen peacefully and spontaneously, it's going to require coercion. I think part of this has to do with Xi's ambition to at least match, if not to eclipse Mao, who was no friend to his family. There's a certain personal element to this. But there's also a sense in which Xi's power hinges on it because the reason that he insisted on another term in office rather than accepting the convention of only two terms as president was to end the anomalous situation of Taiwan. It is anomalous if we agree that there is only one China and Taiwan is part of it.
00:42:49
Speaker
but that Taiwan is in effect an autonomous democracy. It's a very anomalous state of affairs. And for Xi Jinping, I think this is the big issue. And having been to Beijing just a couple of months ago, I see every sign that the CCP expects this issue to come to a head in the relatively near future while Xi is in power. That's a problem because I don't think there's a peaceful way in which it can happen. And the United States, both parties ah in the United States, are pretty clearly committed to preventing a forcible change of Taiwan's status. And some American politicians have come quite close in recent years to saying that they actually favor Taiwanese independence as to a rising share of of young Taiwanese. So it's a very combustible and dangerous situation, and in some ways more dangerous than than the Cuban situation in the early 1960s.
00:43:46
Speaker
Well, given that, do you think that the West is taking the threat as seriously as it should be? I think American politicians think and talk a lot about it. The rest of the world not so much. The problem is that American politicians compete to be hawkish on China to see who can out-hawk the other side at a time when the United States is less able to deter China than it ever has been. So we're talking the talk when we're actually relatively unable to walk the walk. And this leads to the kind of failure of deterrence that we've already seen in the case of of Russia invading Ukraine, in the case of Iran unleashing its proxies
US Economic Policies and Superpower Status
00:44:27
Speaker
against Israel. So a big worry to me is that
00:44:29
Speaker
We are on a trajectory where we fail again to deter ah one of the members of the Axis of ill will, which I guess is one way of referring to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. And if we fail to deter China, then China to makes a move against Taiwan, even if it's only a blockade. then suddenly we find ourselves with a choice. Do we fold or do we risk World War III? And that is not the kind of choice that any US president should want to have to make. In the last few minutes that we have, I want to touch on economics. ah You put out a lovely little
00:45:03
Speaker
geopolitical law the other day where you said that any country or any superpower that is spending more on interest on debt than it is on on defense will not be a great superpower for much longer. My understanding is the US is about to cross that threshold this year. Correct. The the thought that goes through my mind is no politician really wants to touch this. They don't want to touch Medicare or they don't want to touch Social Security. Is there any way to make the political argument for budgetary reform better, or does the US need to go through an economic catastrophe for reform to take place?
00:45:39
Speaker
It's not necessarily an economic catastrophe. It can be a geopolitical one because you are found out that you were spending more money on servicing the debt than maintaining your military capability. And that's when you get caught out. And and the United States' is defense budget is on course to shrink over the coming decades down towards the kind of percentages of GDP we see in Europe. It'll be like in that much lower range by, say, 2040. And that at that point, The expenditure on interest payments will be twice the defense budget. On present trajectories, it's possible that a new administration could follow the advice of Republican hawks and increase defense spending, but that money has to come from somewhere because the US s cannot continue borrowing without increasing the cost of debt service.
00:46:28
Speaker
with interest rates at their post-inflation crisis levels. So it's extremely hard for me to see how any ah administration in the near future can fix this because the debt's not going away. Interest rates aren't going to come down to where they were in the period between the global financial crisis and the pandemic. And the cost of entitlements is only going up as the population ages. So this is extremely nasty fiscal arithmetic, to borrow a phrase from a and eminent economist Robert Barrow. And it doesn't really matter whether you're a Democrat or a Republican, the arithmetic stays nasty. It's a very good law of history, Ferguson's law, because it applies to most of the empires for which we have fiscal data. Going all the way back to the Habsburgs in the 16th and 17th centuries, and all the way up to the British Empire in the 20th century. And the United States is definitely in the danger zone. Its fiscal outlook is is extremely concerning.
00:47:24
Speaker
And it will be the number one problem that President Trump has to grapple with, should he be reelected on November 5th. The law opens the door to ask a question about the future. i I think the very best historians, of which you are certainly one, reveal the future through the past. You said in that law, and that power will not stay a great power for long. So my question would be, as you look forward over the next, let's say, 20 years, what do how do you see the future of the West? Are you optimistic, or do you do you think that, that unfortunately, there is we should be more pessimistic in our outlook?
Optimism for US's Future
00:47:58
Speaker
I am over a 20-year time horizon optimistic because I think the weaknesses of the other side, the authoritarian powers, are very great. And by 2044, we'll have played out so that they are no longer capable of matching us in terms of innovation, in terms of of capability. But I have a short run-run fear that we've got ourselves into a dangerous position where we are in some measure of bluffing. And if our bluff is called, then the United States position in the Indo-Pacific could collapse. And China could emerge as the dominant power in that region, which from an Australian point of view would not be a good outcome.
00:48:38
Speaker
So there's a short run risk, which I think has grown quite significantly greater during the Biden administration. And it will be a very dangerous time between now and, say, 2027, the year when Bill Burns, the Director of Central Intelligence, thinks that Xi Jinping has told the Chinese military to be ready for war. 20 years out, I think China's aging population, China's debt dynamics, China's inability to sustain a growth rate above low single digits will will to be as fatal ah to China as as low growth ultimately was to the Soviet Union. And I don't think imperial Russia without a strong China will be a particularly formidable threat. Iran is even weaker. So over 20 years, I don't think these regimes will even be around.
00:49:26
Speaker
But we have to avoid blowing it in the next three years, and we are well capable of blowing it on our present trajectory. That's why it's so important that you are ringing the bells, making sure that we are having these conversations. I think it is a reflection of your contributions to the public debate more generally and that you encourage us through certain daring and intellectual audacity to make us face some uncomfortable truths that other people aren't aren't as willing to bring up. So, Neil, thank you very much for everything you do as a historian and academic and intellectual. Congratulations on your recent knighthood. I should be calling you Sir Neil. And we look forward to the second volume of your Kissinger biography, as well as your biweekly columns for the free press. Thank you for coming on the show today. Thanks very much, Will.