Niall Ferguson on What History Teaches Us About Covid-19

hello to everyone from around the world who's joining this intelligent square plus event and it's a huge pleasure to be able to introduce this evening one of britain's best known historians who is of course resident across the pond in the united states where he's joining us from today here's of course neil ferguson neil has taught a variety of distinguished institutions uh that would include my own institution of oxford university but since then he has left out in all sorts of directions at nyu at harvard and most recently at stanford where he is the milbank family senior fellow at the hoover institution he's the author of 15 books time is limited so i won't mention all of them but amongst the many that have attracted a great deal of both scholarly and public attention are the pity of war the house of rothschild uh empire civilization and of course the big biography authorized of course of henry kissinger um the most uh the first volume 1923-268 titled the idealist uh he writes a weekly opinion column for bloomberg and he's the founder and managing director of the advisory firm green mantle llc and his most recent book the square and the tower was a new york times best seller i happen to have a coffee right here and having read and enjoyed it very much i would recommend that you uh watching go and do exactly the same available at all good bookshops and even at some somewhat mediocre ones now tonight we're going to have an hour of conversation the first 30 minutes or so i am going to steal privilege of being able to talk to neil um 101 and the second half we're going to have questions you've just heard from chris but just a quick reminder that you can start asking them at any moment right now if you like on the ask question button just under the video screen and then type in your question if you want your name to be mentioned hello there paris hilton then do type into the box and press send if you'd rather be anonymous that's fine as well but please don't type in green font now today's topic is looking at the way in which history can help us to understand the covid 19 pandemic and neil a huge pleasure to be talking to you and i have to say i couldn't think of a better person to be tackling this topic not least when i was sent in advance what i think you call your pandemic deck of slides which i think is getting up to close to a thousand slides which must make for quite a power point i imagine you have to hold your audience hostage in in a sense but it's part of what you call the pandemic encyclopedia and i'm wondering what were you thinking when you put this together as a historian were you sort of creating your own archive in the moment for when we can look back on this pandemic as a historic event well thanks rana it's great to be with you and uh one of the little silver linings in the cloud of the covert 19 pandemic is that one actually has more exchange with people in distant places than before i've noticed that my my intellectual network has been uh really quite radically changed by the fact that i'm stuck in one place but able to zoom or otherwise just about everywhere the the key to this monstrous powerpoint deck is that it's not intended to be shown as as a powerpoint presentation it's just the way i take notes and it has been the way that i take notes about for about 10 years since the global financial crisis i i found that the way i could best keep track of history in real time was just to use powerpoint and that's because i'm a graphs person as you know ran i'd love to illustrate points with uh with with graphs and so the simple thing is just to grab them wherever i see them and uh and grab text that i think might one day be quotable so these are my notes and i in this particular case i started to compile notes on covert 19 in mid-january because i i was at the world economic forum and i was stunned to find this was in the middle of january that almost nobody there wanted to talk about the impending pandemic they wanted to have the usual conversation about climate change and i had just been in asia in the second week of january i'd been in in hong kong singapore and taipei and it was very clear the conversations that i had there and the things that i was reading that we were in the very early stages of a global pandemic i wrote about it in my column for the sunday times but it was the skepticism um that i encountered at davos that made me start this particular deck so i thought well i i'm gonna write about this i might as well start taking notes and after a while i realized that i was essentially performing a a kind of public function i was doing research pretty intensively every day usually for several hours reading everything that i could get on the subject not just of the virus but more importantly to me the social networks that it was attacking and you mentioned the book the square in the tower that the central theme of that book is that a networked world is is vulnerable to contagions and not just digital ones after a certain point i realized that i was doing something so useful i might as well share it with friends and and so i conducted a kind of experiment in network science which was i just sent it to all my friends and i told them it wasn't for publication because there were lots of copyright material there it's just purely for educational purposes but they were welcome to share it with anybody of their friends that they thought would find it useful and it's now grown to i think it's not quite at 900 slides yet um and i suspended it last weekend because i thought it was taking over my life and it was time to probably call a halt but in fact i continue to add to it rather it's rather addictive and and of course you've probably already guessed this runner i'm going to write a book on the on the basis of at least some of this material it does look very much like history in the making and i have to say if you're ever going to invite people around for an evening viewing the slides uh perhaps i might come in partway through the event rather than at the beginning considering how many there actually are but having had a chance to flick through the the deck i found various things that actually seem very relevant to historical perspective and somewhat surprising so let me give you an example of what i found surprising when you were talking about how to use other pandemics in history as comparators the one that people tend to turn to at the moment certainly seen in a lot of the quality press uh in the last few weeks is the 1919 uh flu pandemic and there's been a lot of discussion about that you say at one point it's one of the notes says at one point that actually thinking about 1957 to 58 the so-called asian flu of that era which is unknown but not nearly as well known a phenomenon as 1919 might be more useful why was that the historical comparator that you wanted us to think about well 1918-19 is a a pretty famous pandemic as you say rana it's the one that's probably come up most often once people realized it wasn't the black death that we were facing and this is probably the moment to clarify for anybody who's not sure that i'm not that neil ferguson n e i l ferguson uh the the epidemiologist at imperial college whose march 16th paper projected that without radical interventions and particularly lockdowns of uh of economic life the the covert 19 death toll could rise as high as half a million in the united kingdom and 2.2 million in the united states now he didn't say it explicitly but that implied that this would be as bad as the 1918-19 influenza which began uh before the end of of the first world war and carried on into into 1919 and indeed even into 1920 in some studies this was a cataclysmic uh pandemic one of the top ten in history up there with uh the black death though not not as lethal in terms of the percentage of the world's population it killed but it probably killed somewhere between two and three percent of of the world's population uh it was a very deadly influenza uh virus it killed a very large proportion of the people that it infected so the infection fatality rate was probably around two maybe even higher and uh and its devastation uh was uh was global it was particularly deadly in india as well as causing havoc in a number of south american and central american countries so when the other neil ferguson the epidemic epidemiologist published that paper implying it was 1918-19 my immediate reaction was it's not it's just not it's not that it can't be that deadly uh it would be obvious by now if it were that deadly in addition to which uh it's not 1918-19 we have medical capabilities that they didn't have then they really had very very few ways of treating people who became ill with that influenza the other thing to know about 1918-19 which is worth mentioning is that like all the influenza pandemics uh in history it killed the very young as much as it killed the very old and it killed a really significant portion of people of prime age in fact one of the really awful things about 1918-19 was it swept through the armies that were contesting the war beginning in the u.s army and and killed more american soldiers than the war it's itself so it was already obvious in mid-march that covert 19 wasn't doing that it was disproportionately killing elderly people that was already clear so i began to suspect that the other neil ferguson had inadvertently drawn a wrong historical analogy if you look back through modern pandemics you can find uh some better analogues and i think the best one is actually the 1957-58 influenza pandemic just in terms of the proportions of people that covet 19 is likely ultimately to kill i think we're much closer to 5758 uh in the sense that uh we're probably going to end up i would guess by the end of this year with roughly 200 000 americans dead of covert 19. that would be my estimate we're a little over halfway there at this point but if you go back to 5758 the death toll according to the centers for disease control was about 115 000. so if you scale for a population it looks like a comparable impact at least in the united states and i think that's also true if you look at the global impact so i think 5758 is a much better analogy a less scary analogy because of course there's a reason we don't remember 1957 1957-58 the reason is that it didn't actually have that big and that disruptive an impact on the world um and so i think it's probably worth trying to learn some lessons from that experience one of them is that in the us they did not do anything remotely like what we've done in response to this pandemic there were no school closures there were certainly no economic lockdowns life went on there was excess mortality but there was almost no real economic shock so that's one of the obvious contrasts that one can one can identify with that comparison i wonder neil how much culture as part of history makes a difference too the reason i ask that is that i had a piece in the spectator magazine here in britain a couple of weeks ago about why south korea has been one of the countries that has been so successful in managing to prevent huge numbers of debts and without um going to huge details about the article amongst the things i looked at were not only the tech side the fact that south korea is so wired for the internet but also the way in which its confucian society i think changed the way that it thought about things like old people's homes and care homes and had a rather different way of putting them into legislation and the care that comes from them so long-term as well as short-term issues coming together what do you think that we have learned about the importance if anything of national culture or regional culture in terms of how the pandemic's been controlled is there more that we could learn well there is some research on this and i touch on it towards the end of the monster deck it's a it's early days in in our thinking about this but uh a number of people have made this argument that there's some kind of difference in culture between say confucian uh east asians and individualistic and not very disciplined americans i think it's not going to work that kind of analysis at least the the studies i've seen so far don't really come to satisfactory results because of course there are english-speaking countries like new zealand for example that have handled uh covert 19 just as well as as a as south korea and i don't think of new zealanders as being especially confucian i'm pretty skeptical about these cultural explanations because there are better ones to hand for example the south koreans like the taiwanese have had learned lessons from the experience of sars and mars they had thought about coronaviruses as a problem and they'd understood that the key response uh to something like this to a novel coronavirus is very very quickly to ramp up testing and contact tracing and indeed the taiwanese did an even better job than the south koreans when it came to contact tracing which is why there have been virtually no fatalities in taiwan i think the number of fatalities from covert 19 is eight at this point south korea had some super spreader events this is a very important concept we should probably come back to but because of its testing and contact tracing it was able to get on top of them pretty quickly and so what you see in countries like taiwan and south korea is that the government is equipped to play whack-a-mole with uh with outbreaks even if some citizens make foolish mistakes as clearly happened in some of the super spreader events what's really striking is the lack of the uh of these capabilities uh in a number of uh important countries uh the united kingdom and the united states stand out but they're not alone in having handled covered 19. badly belgium spain italy have had in relative terms comparably bad uh if not worse experiences so i think uh it it really has much more to do with did you learn the lessons of sars and murders israel is interesting because it seems to have learnt the lessons and i just made the argument earlier today uh in a johns hopkins conference that if you just look at the rankings of countries who performed well but what stands out is not a cultural pattern or for that matter a political pattern what stands out is that these countries are paranoid for a reason israel has reasons to be paranoid taiwan has reasons to be paranoid uh south korea has reasons to be paranoid their neighbors are not the nicest of neighbours and that has just meant that their defenses are superior uh across a whole range of of different uh threat uh types uh and so i think that might be a better explanation than than any cultural or for that matter political explanation for these great vari this great variance and performance it's a good point it would also of course explain the fact that north korea claims i think to this day that it hasn't had a single case of coronavirus on entirely reliable statistics i'm sure in in every uh every form let's they think a moment about policies because you talk about countries that have handled it well and badly and actually the uk which is where i'm sitting now has been controversial because it does have a very relatively pretty high rate per capita but sweden of course just uh north of the continent here took a very very different policy it decided to essentially not have a lockdown at all and has had a high rate but actually not much higher than the uk which did lock down very comprehensively does that uk sweden contrast show us anything that we need to understand yes it does i think the first thing is that the the goal of herd immunity is uh is a questionable objective in the face of a pathogen uh like sars cough ii the virus that causes covert 19. for a variety of reasons one of which is it's just got this very low dispersion factor this is the factor k in epidemiological uh jargon uh a very small proportion of people do a very large amount of the spreading there's also great uh heterogeneity and susceptibility and vulnerability through the population whereas herod immunity sort of assumes a relatively homogeneous population and you just need to get to a certain threshold of having had it and you and you're done this is a very standard epidemiological model but it doesn't really apply very well uh in this case especially not if we find that like other coronaviruses saskoff 2 can give you immunity but not for long and i think there's a growing concern that immunity will be a relatively short lived thing uh even for people who've who've had it and got better this might also be a problem with with vaccinations so herd immunity as as a goal of policy i think was based on some erroneous analogies that the public health experts in a number of european countries including the uk and sweden were playing with the main main one being its influenza and i think what went wrong in in britain and perhaps also in sweden was the belief that we were dealing with something quite similar to an influenza virus as opposed to being something quite different namely a coronavirus the other thing that's really striking here is that and this is something the oxford blavatic school your colleagues just down the road from you have have shown brilliantly that there is no correlation between the stringency of government measures and outcomes none at all there's a correlation between the stringency of government measures and economic outcomes but not outcomes in terms of the containment of the spread the swedish british comparisons fascinating because you end up at a very similar place in many ways certainly in terms of cases relative to population but britain uh conducts a complete u-turn in policy ditches herd immunity reads the other neil ferguson's report and panics and britain goes down the road of really drastic lockdowns shutting down uh the economy as completely as almost any country has done with as as you can imagine huge attendant costs but the payoffs in terms of containment of the contagion have been pretty dismal and if you take a measure like excess mortality which is a pretty good measure i.e how much more death has there been than you would have expected on the basis of say the last five years then april and may in britain stand out as pretty horrendous by the standards of any developed country britain has had one of the highest excess mortality spikes of anywhere apart from countries in latin america like peru that have had really disastrous experiences so i think when we try to learn lessons from what's happened in britain and there really need to be a proper commission of inquiry one of the most obvious lessons will be that the key to success with this particular pathogen was not really a particular strictness of of policy uh it had a lot more to do with the ways in which people adapted their behavior and i think that that's probably where the conversation is going to go certainly in the literature that i read we're seeing that in countries like taiwan and south korea it wasn't just that the government was doing testing and contact tracing well it was also that citizens adapted their behavior mask wearing was very quickly adopted japan is an interesting case here a very big country which has a very very uh limited uh covert 19 trouble uh two orders of magnitude smaller in relative terms why not really because the japanese government did a brilliant job of testing and contract racing it didn't but just because the japanese population adapted very quickly particularly with respect to mask wearing so i think when we come back to understanding what's happened in britain part of the story is really a failure of behavior to adapt and i think we still see that and we've seen the same in the united states the difference interestingly rana is that in the united states people have been itching to get back to normal especially people in red states republican states what i see in britain is actually something quite different people are not in a hurry to get back to normal they've actually been quite scared by what they've been told about the disease and there isn't a great appetite so far as i can see to do anything other than to get back to the beach on a sunny day not to get back to work there may of course be other reasons why people are not uh um tripping over themselves to get back to the office but we perhaps shouldn't uh delve too far into those personal motivations but it does bring up the question which you already mentioned neil of the economy and how that's changed things and you're of course speaking to us from the united states and it does appear that more than any other country and certainly more than the uk or another european country the pandemic has become a partisan issue i mean over here we're reading these reports that essentially mask wearing you've just mentioned it's becoming it's compulsory here in britain on public transport for instance and people are adapting without too much grumbling and you wouldn't be able to i think pin that to any particular type of politics particularly since the current government is in fact a conservative one but that mask issue seems to be symbolic of a much bigger divide in the us between democrats and republicans that's right and it's of course part of our national story at the moment in the united states everything is a partisan issue and covert 19 became one quite early on polling shows and it has shown for several months that democrats worry much more about the disease cropping up in their neighborhood than republicans do the difference is absolutely massive uh and that has uh spread it's from the behavioral changes that there have been so i i have friends in uh various southern states i was speaking to philip bobert who's in texas uh right uh right now only this morning and he said to me he'd just been out in in the neighborhood nobody is wearing masks in texas and nobody's wearing masks in georgia and indeed one of my friends who's in fact a new yorker is spending a plague year in georgia was was commenting that he's harassed he has to deal with with abuse when he wears a mask in the stores it's become a sign of being uh a libtard to use the argo of the far right to wear a mask and that is of course something that uh president trump has only encouraged by declining to wear a mask himself so this this is part of the pathology of modern america that that even responses to a novel pathogen become partisan it's interesting actually rana we we've been doing some work on this at green mantle the the return of of the normal mobility is something that helps us understand how quickly the economy is recovering and thanks to google and apple and companies like safegraf we have amazing high frequency data on how much people are moving around as normal and if you look at returns to retail and recreation destinations which are reasonable proxy for consumer behavior the fascinating thing is that if you go down to the county level counties that lent trump words back in 2016 have returned almost immediately to they're very close to normal in terms of mobility to recreational and retail uh destinations but counties that lent democrat that lent clinton four years ago have not in fact there's there's about a ten percentage point gap and so what we're seeing here is actually a partisan recovery where republicans are recovering economically faster than democrats and consequently a partisan second wave of infections because in the states where these sort of trends are most pronounced you're also seeing second waves of infection and hospitalization and that is i think that's really the big story of the last week or so the realization that americans particularly republicans supporting americans return it to normality are in fact uh igniting a second wave of covert 19. let me pick up on one aspect of that though neil because one of the things that also surprised me from your your monster deck because i think we're learning to call it um was that while you're clearly not particularly impressed by the way in which president trump has been engaging with the covid crisis you're not one of the people who actually puts the blame firmly on him in terms of it spreading as far as it has you see a much more institutional reason in the us for why the disease spread as fast and as destructively as it has so why was that well i think it's worth saying rana that the media on both sides of the atlantic have done a shockingly bad job um sorry to any journalists listening in covering the pandemic they've made it almost all about a handful of personalities donald trump in the united states boris johnson and dominic cummings in the uk and this is just to misunderstand how public health emergency look the critical institutions are not right at the the people right at the top the critical institutions are those responsible for public health there are people with the job in the case of the united states uh the job of pandemic preparedness at the assistant secretary level in the department of health and human services the guy's name is robert cadleck and you've never heard of him because there's been almost no media coverage of his role and what i found fascinating uh and i delved into this with the encouragement of my old friend philip zeliko who who sat on or was involved with the 911 commission philip pointed me to the fact that the institutions whose job this was have failed dhhs failed cdc failed i mean the center for disease control was supposed to be responsible for ramping up testing in a situation like this it did just the opposite it actually held testing back uh in the early phase of the pandemic so i think what most people have missed in their excessive focus on on president trump who's clearly made a series of pretty terrible judgments what they've missed is that the real system failure happened much further down the chain of command with those parts of the bureaucracy we sometimes call it the deep state these days responsible for pandemic preparedness and one of the fascinating things is that on paper the us and the uk were amongst the best prepared countries for a pandemic on paper there were endless reports there were powerpoint decks for that matter in 2018 i think there was a 36-page pandemic preparedness report i've plowed through it it all reads very well but when there actually was a pandemic the bureaucracy failed completely and i that will be the subject again of of future historical and probably also public public inquiry i think this is a really really important point uh the great physicist richard feynman wrote a wonderful account of his role in the investigation into the great space shuttle challenger disaster it's a classic everyone should read it now you couldn't really blame that or at least not very easily on ronald reagan who was president at the time but you have to actually read feynman to see that the point of failure that led to the challenger disaster was the mid-level nasa bureaucrats who ignored the warnings from the engineers who were saying again and again that there was a 101-100 chance that the thing would blow up in the same way there were plenty of people i mean i was one of them warning that there was a real problem back in january um but something went terribly wrong just as it did with the challenger in the department of health and human services and you can't pin that all on trump indeed to take a risk and say something in president trump's defense always a mistake with a predominantly european audience trump's instinct at the end of january was to close off travel from china and he actually banned passengers from china from coming into the u.s there was a huge wave of indignation in the liberal media about this endless pieces in the washington post and the new york times etc saying what a dreadful piece of racism this was the only thing wrong with trump's decision was that it was about two weeks too late he should really have stopped the planes coming from china about two weeks earlier in mid uh in mid-january by the end of january it was too late but on his instincts there were not actually wrong and he was castigated for it well you mentioned china neil and that brings up what looks to me at this moment as if it may be one of the great winners if we could even use that expression of the covert 19 pandemic because three or four months ago in february you will know this very well not because i know you keep an eye on these things chinese social media was really hitting on president xi jinping there were people talking about the fact that it might be possible that his his grip on rule might be loosened in some way four five months later he's now clamping down in hong kong the disease appears as far as we can tell to be broadly under control in china although there are isolated flare-ups china is now exercising what's become known as the the jan lang the wolf warrior diplomacy in which basically is you know shouting at the world doesn't really care what the world says back is it actually china and not the us that may end up coming out of this thinking we are the geopolitical masters now well that is certainly the consensus view i wish i had a bitcoin for every article i've read in the last two months saying it's all over for the united states kishore marbabani was right the asian century is here china is the winner we've all had to learn from china authoritarian regimes turn out to be better than democracies all this stuff has been said by many people including very eminent people in fact i i see a kind of revival of declinism in american journalism lots and lots of arguments almost cyclical theories of history predicting the downfall of of the united states and the triumph of xi jinping and i'm absolutely sure this will turn out to be wrong uh for a couple of reasons uh one i think that the damage that this has done to china is a good deal greater than meets the western eye not just in terms of the damage it has done to xi jinping's legitimacy which i agree has ceased to be a major talking point but actually i think it's more profound than that i think that it's very difficult indeed now for china to sustain growth at the rates uh it was planning to and indeed they had to as you know rana scrap their growth target for this year which means they can't meet the the cherished objective of doubling gdp in 10 years and in order to make the unemployment numbers look better they've just re-legalized street vendors which is hardly the cutting edge of of economic technologies i think there's something quite seriously wrong at the heart of the chinese economy apart from in that high-tech online world where chinese companies are in many ways the equals of the big tech companies of silicon valley the rest of the chinese economy is i think in serious trouble and the fact that they just about had to shut down beijing last week because of a new outbreak should not be dismissed likely whack-a-mole is going to make it very hard for the chinese economy to have anything like a v-shaped recovery and they're going to be playing whack-a-mole with this virus i think into next year the second thing i'd i'd say is that the wolf warrior diplomacy which you alluded to this extraordinary shrill tone that some younger chinese diplomats have adopted i think it's a sign of a dangerous hubris uh it hasn't worked very well in fact they succeeded in alienating the french and the germans completely with their uh their social media antics back at the height of the pandemic in in europe but i think more seriously what worries me at the moment is that they are underestimating the united states uh and they are i think embarking on what could be a very risky strategy not so much with respect to hong kong which i don't think is the key flash point but with respect to taiwan and i think the general tendency which you now see in chinese social media and you will know this better than i do uh is to disparage trump to mock him to suggest that he's a kind of manchurian candidate who's helping china on its way to dominance i think this could lead to some very serious miscalculations i think the second half of 2020 is going to see a major geopolitical crisis probably over taiwan and i think that the chinese are taking a major risk if they think that they could in fact simply take over taiwan solve their problem which is of course that they rely heavily on semiconductors from the taiwanese company tsmc and get away with it because trump has a busted flush i think this is the risk that china runs that it's actually going to make a major geopolitical mistake and i sense that the the atmosphere in beijing is very conducive to that kind of miscalculation i'm sure that's uh that's right we should move in just a moment or two to audience questions but since we're on this subject um i'll add first of all that there are of course voices in china most recently in public uh the foreign vice foreign minister for ying also the uh chinese ambassador in the us who've actually spoken out quite strongly against this very shrill really aggressive wolf warrior rhetoric and i pointed out it's doing china no good so that may indicate at least some level of internal unease about the way in which that's that's going the last question i throw at you because um i think it's one that will be occupying all of us in a few months time whether we want it or not is do you think that a trump victory or a biden victory makes any difference when it comes to the u.s china relationship and just for the kicker on that what do you think that u.s china relationship is likely to be in the next let's say two to three years well i think it's going to make less of a difference than might be assumed by europeans who tend to hate on republican presidents and unlike democrats at the moment uh if anything the biden campaign is trying to sound more hawkish than trump on china they're making much of the obviously very embarrassing revelations of john bolton's uh new book which uh make it clear that uh that trump privately in meetings with xi jinping is prepared to make all kinds of concessions in order to enhance his chances of re-election but i think the most telling piece of evidence in this respect uh is a recent article by michel fluenoy in foreign affairs michelle is likely to be uh if there is indeed a biden victory secretary of defense the tone of this piece uh was if anything more hawkish than some of the things one hears from the republican side it was a very very clear statement that the united states needs to be able to deter china in areas like the taiwan strait of the south china sea and the critique of the trump administration was that it wasn't being tough enough on those issues added to which i think the biden administration would be bound to be more concerned about human rights issues democrats always are think back to bill clinton and the the butchers of beijing so i think that biden will try to run uh as a more hawkish candidate than trump on the china issue and remember the american public is in a hawkish mood and there's been a huge shift in sentiment on china in the last couple of years i think largely in fact because donald trump has led it uh it's ironic that he now finds himself on the defensive on this issue especially given joe biden's record as as vice president uh under uh barack obama who in the end gave up on the idea of a pivot to asia and any real containment of of china's rise so i think the one thing to to emphasize here is that there'll be a change on trade policy i'm pretty sure that the democrats would resurrect the tpp trans-pacific partnership and uh ditched the whole idea of using tariffs as a as a way of achieving any uh any progress with china but on the broader issue of what i call cold war ii which i think has now been going for at least a couple of years i don't think cold war ii is going to end if joe biden is inaugurated in january and it stays cold do you think rather than going further the war well i think the risk of of a cold war is always that it can get hot that was what made the cold war so nerve-wracking when it was the soviet union on the other side and my sense is that there is a potential uh for a hot war uh most likely over taiwan graham allison my former colleague at harvard just published a good piece in national review saying that the sanctions on huawei that the commerce department announced a few weeks back which will come into effect in september are comparable to the oil embargo imposed on japan by the uh by the us in 1941 which of course was the thing that drove japan as you know better than anyone uh to the reckless uh gamble of of war uh that began with pearl harbor i think this is a really interesting analogy and and it's true that when you when you think about the issue that could really trigger a hot war at that taiwan has has all the hallmarks of a kaza's belly not least of which uh is the fact that that the us doesn't really have a credible deterrent strategy here michelle florina is almost certainly right and if you read a book like christian ambrose's new new book the kill chain he basically says the same right now the u.s has a commitment to the defense of taiwan that it can no longer credibly enforce because us aircraft carrier groups would be very vulnerable uh to anti-uh to to anti-ship missiles uh fired from the chinese mainland it's always those situations isn't it rana that lead to war when the the rising power isn't actually adequately deterred by the incumbent power and that's why it's taiwan that worries me the most i think we're another entire audience extremely nervous neil perhaps is just where uh where you want them at this this point and they are certainly firing in questions uh just like uh a uh an assault battery on the coast of taiwan one might say uh at least if things go really really so let's get straight to our audience's questions and the first one comes in from joseph clemo who actually is asking a very historically informed question and the specific is was the black death a possible cause of the renaissance then he follows up and do major social changes uh which presumably caused by disease or other major disasters actually have long lasting effects this is a great question and really requires a medievalist to answer it properly i'll have a go as an an amateur i mean many of the things that that we call the renaissance that we associate with the the italian city-states we're already underway prior to the 1340s uh if you think say of of siena and what has had already been achieved there both in terms of of politics uh as well as political thought uh the renaissance had had started and in that sense uh the black death was a huge interruption uh of of intellectual life uh of course it gave creative opportunity to picacho but i think on on balance the effects of the black death were negative not not positive uh there were whole cities that essentially were were depopulated towns that that had a population collapsed to near zero uh and uh and even the big cities uh uh venice uh and florence for example suffered really heavy uh mortality because of course there was no real understanding of what it was that that was causing uh these outbreaks of bubonic plague so it's hard to believe that on balance uh the black death uh was was somehow good for cultural uh development it had all kinds of important effects uh that i'll mention too uh by creating massive labor shortages it definitely had uh the effect of of at least improving the bargaining power of of europe's uh peasant population uh although efforts to to to resist uh those bargaining efforts uh those bargaining moves led to that's a conflict in in england culminating in the in the peasants revolt all sorts of uh of things that i studied as an undergraduate at oxford and haven't really worked on since so i tread warily and defer to the experts the second the second thing of course is that in trying to understand how to manage a pandemic uh the black death taught city-states in particular but states more generally the importance of being able to enforce uh quarantines the term dates from that that period uh and manage flows of people so some increase in state capacity followed uh followed from the black death but the final part of your question is the broader one which i'm probably better equipped to answer and do pandemics have a big cultural consequences and i i think here you know it's a really interesting question because some do and some don't i know that's a rather lame lame observation but you you'd struggle to find any lasting consequences of the 1957-58 influenza pandemic on the other hand i think there's some evidence that 1918 did have an impact uh one paper i read recently made the point that in countries that had really been hammered by the 1980-19 influenza pandemic levels of trust of social capital were reduced for a generation or or more i'll add one point uh one final point the cultural consequences of the hiv aids pandemic a much slower moving pandemic than covert 19 but a deadlier one to date are i think worth reflecting on if we try to ask ourselves how will our lives be changed by covert 19 for the long term i think the answer will be that covert 19 will be to our social lives what hiv aids was to sexual life uh that is to say it will modify behavior but not enough uh safe sex did not become universal that's why ultimately more than 30 million people have died of aids in the last three decades and i don't think there will ever be safe social life so that as long as covert 19 is around and we don't have a vaccine and we don't have effective therapies then there will be outbreaks and there will be mortality so that that seems like the best answer i can give to that question there's nothing about medieval history by the way um if anyone um hasn't read it an absolute classic from about 40 50 years ago w h mcneil's plagues and people as one of the first books that really set historians on the road to understanding how disease and social change often positive social change could interact and just a reminder to our audience about asking questions we're still very happy to to take them uh just underneath the video screen you'll see a tab saying ask a question click on it text box will be there pop your question in there give us your name if you want it and then click send and we will add it to our queue we probably won't get through all of them but we'll try and get through as many as possible and do tweet us uh using the hashtag iq2 now let's go back to the questions which are coming in here neil and here's one uh now this is much more uh directly on your historical expertise so no no sashaying away from this one i think and it's from harvey toomey the question is i have heard you neil recently draw comparison with china today and imperial germany over a century ago could you expand on this not least because i've seen bob kagan has been using this comparison for quite some time now so over to harvey's question i think neil and not only uh bob kagan but also henry kissinger if you remember in on china kissinger concludes with the air crew memorandum and very explicitly suggests that uh the united states and china might risk replaying the history of uh of the united kingdom and germany uh which produced the the war of 1914 so this is a this is a really interesting uh historical analogy and one that i've written about myself i think this goes back to what we were talking about earlier rana the the the mood in in beijing and that possible hubris uh that that one one sees at least amongst some uh chinese uh diplomats that's very vil hermine and and hermione germany had a number of of rather chinese modern chinese characteristics not only a sort of explicit desire for world policy which i think xi jinping has has made very much a part of his his act uh one belt one road is the the kind of chinese equivalent of of belt politik also this sense that if you have domestic social tensions if inequality is an issue then what better way to distract people's attention than to bestride the globe and assert your uh your geopolitical parity with the dominant uh english-speaking superpower from a british vantage point what made us nervous about germany before 1914 was partly the extraordinary speed of the german economy's growth the the sense that technologically they were pulling ahead the ubiquity of made in germany on the goods that the people purchased in pre-1914 britain well that sounds distinctly familiar for americans made in china has played much the same role and the sense of falling behind china technologically is is i think one of the things that haunts americans when they contemplate the rise of china's i i do think this is a useful analogy maybe the best of the analogies in graham allison's uh book destined for war if there is a thucydides trap uh that the united states and china are heading towards it does look a lot like the one that britain and germany fell into just over a hundred years ago it's on from that neil it's not about rivals but it's about partnership and the question is if china and russia become increasingly dominant and they carve up the globe russia to europe for instance i guess china to asia would they avoid conflict or would an actual conflict emerge between the two of them sooner rather than later this is a great question and it reminds us that the geopolitical consequences of a pandemic are often the hardest to predict historically it's worth saying that that pandemic said were more likely to stop wars than to start them armies that had to throw in the towel because of typhus are very numerous in the history books but i think in the modern era this is less of a constraint and i i do sense that one of the things we're seeing at the moment is geopolitical risk taking by russia as well as by china now they are as close together as as they have ever been from a geopolitical standpoint the relationship between vladimir putin and xi jinping is really one of the strongest though i'm sure it is a marriage of convenience not of love and i do think that the russians have been teaching the chinese a thing or two in the last four years about information warfare because we're seeing the chinese engage in very russian style tactics on social media these days so i think one should assume that they are a very tight partnership right now and the big worry from a u.s point of view is that any move that the chinese may make in east asia would probably be matched by a russian move maybe in the baltic states that would be very risky for putin more likely in north africa in the middle east where the russians are already running riot after all the partition of libya is one of the less well-covered events of 2020 but it's essentially happening between russian proxies and turkish proxies and i think from putin's point of view the discovery which dates back to the urban administration that the post-american middle east was going to be a place where russia could be a power broker has really been a very important development and much underrated by by analysts of the geopolitical scene now i don't think russia are going to triumph i actually think the weaknesses of both these states are going to become much more visible and in a few years time people will say oh that neil ferguson was very prescient when he said that wuhan was china's chernobyl wasn't he but for now i'm going to be the contrarian who says this is doing more damage to china than to the united states i don't actually expect any good to come of russo-chinese risk-taking i think it will backfire on them because they're underestimating the us's capabilities and they're underestimating the alliance systems which will hold up despite donald trump's obvious uh disdain for them ultimately it's very hard to believe that russia and china will be a marriage that lasts there are all kinds of suspicions on each side for obvious historical reasons so one of the other things i would anticipate is that when it all goes wrong and i think it will go wrong for xi jinping and vladimir putin that particular partnership will geopolitically come to an end just one very quick follow-up on that thought which has to do actually something you mentioned earlier uh neil which is the idea of china's belt and road as well politik a large part of the first phase of china's belt and road initiative actually is russia's backyard it's the stands it's central asia and surely that must be a potential conflict point between that well not necessarily in terms of hot war but in terms of that lack of trust that you were mentioning and that's what if you talk to russians privately they most dislike about the she putin bromance uh they sense that uh that really gains that russia made going all the way back to the 19th century are being eroded by by china and because putin has committed himself in ukraine in syria and now in libya he has absolutely nothing that he can do he has to suck it up if the chinese decide to assert themselves in russia's historic backyard and i do think that's the fatal flaw of putin's grand strategy frankly i would just say that when i'm in private conversations with the russians after the third bottle of vodka i remember nothing about what they've said geopolitical or otherwise but moving hastily on to marcelo's question neil i think i'm not breaking any secrets here to say that you are an expert on money and its history and marcella's question is how do you think monetary policy and the concept of money will evolve after the pandemic eg do you think that helicopter money will become an acceptable response uh is there gonna be more virtual more digital where do you see the the next ascent of money from steal your phrase may go well i had a fascinating conversation on this very subject yesterday with raul powell real vision i think this is a kind of financial revolution that we're living through and it predates the the pandemic but the pandemic's accelerating it in various ways let me pick out three uh the first is that uh because of the economic shock that uh the pandemic caused amplified by lockdowns policies that used to be regarded as fringe are kind of uh marginal uh have become mainstream in effect uh we are doing modern monetary theory uh in effect we are doing universal basic income central banks uh are not quite monetizing debt in the old sense because uh what they're doing when they buy bonds as in the financial crisis is to pay with a special kind of money which is uh bank reserves interest bearing bank reserves it's not as if they're really dropping uh the money from the sky metaphorically but we've certainly moved in the direction of dropping money from the sky uh most obviously in in china where citizens are essentially just given digital spending power and told to go off and use it in an attempt to generate consumption the second financial revolution that i think we're seeing is that online banking online financial activity is going to displace traditional branch banking and it's going to do it very rapidly in some places because the truth is you really don't need to go into the branch of nat west to do uh your basic financial transactions you could do it all perfectly well online uh with the decent uh neo bank that that that's definitely being speeded up uh by the by the pandemic and and finally i think the fascinating uh sort of uh development is that cryptocurrencies which uh some people were writing off uh just a few uh years ago after the bitcoin bubble burst uh are in fact uh benefiting uh from the great uncertainty that's been been aroused particularly in some uh in some parts of the world where it's not clear that the basic institutions of of uh of government will withstand the pandemic and so you see that bitcoin has been a pretty good store of value comparable in fact to gold in 2020 uh contrary to the predictions of people who just a couple of years ago uh were were predicting that bitcoin would go to zero that that i knew would be wrong and i i said it would be wrong in my updated ascent of money which was published in 2018. incidentally rana the new edition of the ascent of money which had two new chapters covering the yet the years from lehman brothers all the way to 2018 concluded by predicting correctly that the next big crisis would come from china what i didn't uh foresee that it would take the form of uh of a novel coronavirus well like dominic cummings perhaps you could always go back reprint all the versions and then send them out again as if they'd be in the original it is alleged he says hastily just a reminder to our audience that you can ask a question uh by clicking on the ask question button under the video screen and then press send and don't forget you can also tweet us on iq2 still a bit of time and still definitely questions coming in and actually link to your last point neil there's a rather nice follow-on here that comes from charlie and that is what do you think the political consequences will be for the uk going forward by which he means it's a conservative government or so that's the label on the tin but in fact it seems to be operating post-war socialism-style government and of course we've heard that both michael gove and now i think boris johnson have been citing fdr as their new economic and political pin-up as to where the uk is going next um did you predict that at the end of uh center money [Music] i i didn't i must confess foresee uh that uh the boris johnson my old oxford contemporary would become prime minister and that he would go with remarkable speed from hero to zero uh because of uh of a pandemic originating in wuhan i'm not nostradamus for god's sake but i think what's fascinating about the the consequences for britain is that they don't need to play out politically for such a long time in the united states the day of reckonings just months away but because of the fixed term parliament's act boris can go through a period of intense unpopularity and still be prime minister and unless of course the clearly very ambitious rishi sunak finds out some some way of of knifing him and uh and pushing him to one side i do think if if if i were if i were boris i'd be a little worried about uh having promoted rishi sunak so rapidly one sure way to become popular in the united kingdom is to send people a lot of money for not working and that has been the key i think to rishi sunak's meteoric rise as i mentioned earlier it's not as if the great british public is itching to get back to work unlike their american counterparts so the conservatives have have landed themselves yeah you might say with uh it's tori tori men are not so much wig measures as distinctly progressive uh uh if not in some respects socialist measures and the challenge is going to be how do you wind this down when you can finally say with a sigh of relief that the pandemic is over or at least that you've managed to to contain it and nobody has a good answer to that that question my own view is that sooner or later all countries will will have to reckon with the very large debts that they've accumulated um which which i i think cannot be financed at current uh nominal rates indefinitely just seems to me highly implausible that we'll have these rates forever and at some point we're going to be back to the old arguments that we used to have in the in the days of george osborne remember him about what it was that you would have to do to bring public finances back onto a sustainable path i predict we'll be having those arguments within the conservative party in the next couple of years and let's face it now you know kiyostama has lots of time to practice for the role of tony blair which at some point i suspect he's going to take on the centrist leader uh who's sufficiently uh palatable to the middle class that he can be prime minister but it's frustrating for him he's got a long wait ahead of him and and opposition is just it's just a lot less fun than than government although it does appear that kiersten in his first few weeks is having quite a lot of fun with it perhaps a bit uh a bit more than people came to expect we will see how he and boris johnson uh face off against each other for quite some number of years to come we and our audience here i think could carry on for ages and ages but i think time is going to defeat us so i'm going to thank neil uh neil ferguson very much indeed for having spent an hour with us to give us his insights from history from the present day and even about the future as he's pointed out he's not nostradamus nostradamus had much longer beard than you did neil yours is much more trim and suave and spelt in every way i should add but in terms of giving us food for thought and the material for plenty more intelligence squared conversations and of course books to read we're very grateful to have had your time it's wonderful that so many people from around the world have joined us tonight at intelligent squared and many thanks to intelligence squared who also are in a lockdown of their own they can't uh we can't hold live intelligence squared events at the moment but these online events are becoming a bit of sort of an invented tradition i suppose and it's very very good we have them as well so thank you everyone who's joined us tonight

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 54,337

Rating: 4.6310463 out of 5

Keywords: niall ferguson, intelligence squared, intelligence squared debates, covid-19, coronavirus, covid, oxford, stanford, pandemic, pandemics, china, usa, iq2, history, united states, what is a virus, coronavirus cases, coronavirus update, coronavirus us, world coronavirus

Id: OQ4bfsElVNs

Length: 59min 36sec (3576 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Professor-Reddit]

Historian and international relations expert Niall Ferguson discusses the impact of COVID-19 in relation to historical events, particularly during the 20th century and the Influenza Pandemic (among other lesser known viruses). In this interview with intelligence Squared, Ferguson discusses at length the US, China and Russia’s geopolitical positions in 2020 and the precarious balance of geopolitics at play, with comparisons of modern China to Imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm’s II reign, as well as the effect COVID-19 has so far had to the world compared to prior pandemics. Furguson also elaborates at length his efforts to extensively record and document the pandemic and its effects in a historical context.

While at first, much of the interview discusses and refers to domestic Coronavirus responses across the world with lockdown policies, bureaucracy and its economic impacts, Ferguson shares his views on geopolitics for much of the interview, particularly at 29 minutes in the interview onwards. Criticising the revival of “declinism” tone of Western media in the wake of COVID-19, Ferguson argues that the pandemic’s “damage that this has done to China is a good deal greater than meets the Western eye”. Regarding the CCP’s leadership as troubled and “extraordinarily shrill” under its “wolf-warrior” diplomacy, Ferguson postulates that China’s global ambition could face ‘serious trouble’ within “the next few decades”, caused by China’s antagonistic relationships with its neighbors and a recent rising bipartisan “hawk-ish mood” against China in US politics, combined with a lower rate of economic growth which is now in “serious trouble” with exception to China’s growing tech industry. Quoting Kissinger and other notable foreign policy experts, Ferguson compares modern China to Imperial Germany under the bellicose and combative leadership of Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose leadership contributed to a deterioration of relations with the British Empire and helped lead to WWI.

Ferguson warns that Taiwan could likely become a possible flash-point of war between China and a US-lead alliance, fueled in part by a perceived US vagueness in policy to Taiwan combined with China’s “dangerous hubris” and tendency in Beijing for “serious miscalculations”. He also stresses that China is “underestimating the United States” which could lead to “a major geopolitical mistake”. Ferguson also elaborates on the “tight partnership” between Russia and China, where Russian disinformation tactics are being adopted by China. However he views this partnership as being built more “out of convenience than love for each other”, which could lead to a “backfire” in the face of the complex and strong web of alliances the US holds across the Asia-Pacific and Europe.

“Ultimately it’s very hard to believe that Russia and China will be a marriage that lasts” referring to the competing geopolitical interests in Central Asia. Ferguson views the expansion of China’s sphere of influence through the Belt & Road Initiative into Central Asia as “eroding” Russian interests and could be a potential shifting point in relations between China and Russia in the near or distant future, as Russia has typically viewed Central Asia as its “historic backyard”. This is “the fatal flaw of Putin’s grand strategy” as Russia is in a difficult position on the geopolitical stage, where in the event China asserts its interests in the region, Putin “has absolutely nothing that he can do” so long as he remains committed in Ukraine, Syria, Libya, Georgia and Transnistria expending men, materiel and political clout fighting or holding territory in frozen conflicts against the West.

Niall Ferguson also made remarks that a future Biden administration could see a tougher approach to China than the incumbent Trump Administration, viewing former Obama DoD undersecretary of Defence for Policy Michele Flournoy as a possible Biden Administration’s Secretary of Defense pick in the wake of an article she wrote in Foreign Affairs. Viewing a revival of TPP inevitable under a possible Biden administration in an effort to contain China, Ferguson views the world having been in a ‘Cold War 2’ for “a couple of years” now. In another historical comparison, the recent announcement of banning Huawei in the US “are comparable” to the US embargo of oil to the Japanese Empire in 1941.

This is my first post to /r/Geopolitics so I hope it holds up.