The World In 2024 With Niall Ferguson: Crisis, Conflict And The New Axis of Evil

[Music] [Applause] good evening everyone welcome to those of you in the Conway Hall and welcome also to everyone watching online now it was Bobby Kennedy who claimed that there's a Chinese curse which says may he live in interesting times turns out no one could actually stand up the curse uh he might have made it up I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere but I'll leave it hanging um it's the second part though of the quote that interests me now he went on and remember this was 1966 like it or not we live in interesting times there are times of danger and uncertainty but they're also more open to the Creative Energy of men than any other time in history the two things I might take away from that then are that we often think that the moment we're living through is the big one um and also danger or crisis doesn't preclude creativity or perhaps even advancement a little bit of Opp opportunity perhaps within the bitter GRL of reality it certainly feels right now though as if the scale and pace of global events means we're living through interesting times and if we're going to think about crisis conflicts and consequences and maybe that's where the optimism Creeps in with the consequences then Neil Ferguson is an excellent guide Neil's a distinguished historian and well-known commentator he's currently a senior fellow at the Hoover institution at Stanford University and and a senior faculty fellow of the belfa Center for Science and international Affairs at Harvard he's also the author of 16 books my goodness uh most recently doomed the politics of catastrophe and he's also the co-founder of the new University of Austin Texas which describes itself as dedicated to The Fearless Pursuit Of Truth well welcome Professor Ferguson thank you let's begin with the biggest question of them all in a way Russia Ukraine Israel Hamas Iran and prickly China are we on the brink of World War I well first of all it's a great pleasure to be back at intelligence Square I turned 60 the other day so it's kind of intelligence halved at this point uh as I descend into my dotage uh and when you get asked a question of of that magnitude uh you have to to try to apply some history I don't think that the 2020s are the 1930s yet but I think they're much more like the 1930s than I would have expected maybe 10 years ago and uh I prefer Cold War II right as an analogy to World War I but when I argued we're in Cold War II that always implied there's some possibility of World War I because that's the point about Cold War when Bobby Kennedy was making up his chines ches uh prophecy I I should make one up tonight if I can think of one uh maybe we'll have one at the end yes uh it was also uh a very dangerous time uh it was in some ways uh the high Cold War uh just after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin crisis the argument I've been making since 2018 is we're in Cold War II we just didn't notice it and some people still haven't noticed it and the reason that I make that case is that really since 1991 we had an interwar period now Cold War I and Cold War II aren't the same World War I and World War II weren't the same but they were similar enough for the the numbering to make sense Cold War II represents a new version of of Cold War in which China takes the lead role from what was the Soviet Union and that I think has been building since Shian ping became the Chinese leader the thing that people struggle with maybe just because it's been a while since the cold war is that if there is a two superpower world with ideological difference which there clearly is yeah with uh economic and technological competition which they clearly is uh if they are contesting particular regions which they clearly are then certain things will follow from that as they did in Cold War I for example there will be multiple regions and there will be alliances that will form around the superpowers so when you mention the crisis of our time Ukraine uh Israel uh and the the Palestinians and you could also mention the the question mark that hangs over Taiwan or the South China Sea you've got to realize that they're connected they're connected because over time China and Russia and Iran and North Korea have begun to work together to coordinate their actions when David from an old friend of mine wrote about an axis of Evil in 2002 he was making it up there was no Access of Evil in 20012 there is an us now in the sense that Russia's war effort in Ukraine would not be sustainable without Chinese economic support and Iran supplies of drones and North Korea's supplies of ammunition and Iran is now likely receiving air defense systems from Russia at the same time as Iran sells its oil supposed to be under sanction to China as in Cold War I we are in a global competition in which there are are proxy conflicts and one or more of these proxy conflicts has the potential to get very dangerous indeed the most dangerous one is Taiwan that's the analogy and let me just finish the the thought if you had a full-blown crisis between the United States and China over Taiwan if for example China blockaded Taiwan tomorrow that would be very like the Cuban Missile Crisis that Bobby Kennedy lived through uh that's I think the way to think about it and of course they avoided World War III in 1962 but by the Skin of Their Teeth I mean Bob McNamara came out saying that they'd been essentially uh inches away from World War II and the trouble is with any cold war you are quite close to that nightmare scenario of Armageddon because the superpowers have superpower they have nuclear power and people make mistakes and people make mistakes or they or they deliberately take strategic risk and underestimate the consequences but just briefly then when you're thinking about great power alliances isn't the parallel with World War I and this idea that there could be a mistake you know an arch Duke gets shot and everybody suddenly decides to to take up arms isn't that the more powerful parallel perhaps than the 1930s I I honestly don't think it is and I I began my career working on that period i wrote the pity of War many years ago trying to think about World War I in a new way the thing about 1914 is there are multiple Empires and they're not that distinguishable from one another in terms of military capability and economic resources whereas we're in a two superpower world I mean there only are two AI superpowers to give you just one example and so it seems to me rather unhelpful to worry about Arch duuk France further equivalence being assassinated by gabrio prip equivalent I don't think it's 1914 we have to worry about in 1914 the decision makers did not have to worry about nuclear weapons once nuclear weapons exist the risks of great power War become far higher and this is why George Orwell In This Very City coined the phrase Cold War one of the things that was for me a complete Epiphany when I started thinking about this back in that in 2018 was to read the original essay in Tribune magazine because as a as a well-known uh covert Marxist I always like to go back to read back num sources well I I I I've said before I'm a Marxist I'm just on the side of the bourjois I I love allwell Orwell's essay uh on the atomic bomb written just shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima Nagasaki is astonishingly brilliant he says now there can't be those Wars that we've just lived through and so there will be a peace that is no peace between two or three he actually estimates three Atomic Powers remember at that point there was only one but all El sees that there will quickly be more than one that the Soviet Union will become one and he predicts also brilliantly that China will become one and he says in this world where you can't have full scale War because it's too catastrophic you will have something that is is not not really peace either where he also argues the regimes will become increasingly totalitarian and this of course is a sketch for 1984 it's all there in that one article so I think you got to go back and remind yourself what the early Cold War was like cuz we're kind of in the early Cold War now so let's use that as the backdrop for this conversation and think about in a bit more detail about the conflicts that we face and I going to begin with the Middle East because we talk about it all the time the horror and the shock of hamas's attack on October the 7th was you know Indescribable but do you think in the six months subsequently that Israel has overplayed its hand if you see the protests that are taking place the fact that even someone like Joe Biden who has been a very a profound and vocal supporter of Israel has found himself reigning in Netanyahu and perhaps sometimes finding you know Finding himself saying okay take the win take the win what does that tell us about Israel's action well first just let's put it in the Cold War context one of the Striking features of Cold War I was that the Middle East became an absolutely crucial Battleground between the superpowers and uh there were multiple Wars uh one of them in 1973 began with a surprise attack on Israel and it was almost 50 years to the day later uh that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad launched their attack on Israel I think it's worth beginning any conversation like this by reminding ourselves what we saw that day because in its brutality indeed its sadism the attacks to my eyes and I know a lot of my Jewish friends felt the same way were like a rehearsal for a second Holocaust and that is how I think many Israelis and many non-israeli Jews reacted since those attacks I think there has been a tremendous battle to misrepresent Israel's response and this battle has been waged in the media all over the world and for a Time Israel comprehensively lost the battle because we went very quickly from uh public sympathy with the Israeli victims including the hostages who are still in captivity to condemnation of uh the Israeli Defense Forces re retaliation and I found that disconcerting because it happened so quickly there was then a period in which uh Hamas seemed able to relay directly to the BBC casualty numbers which were then pretty much uncritically read out it's not just the BBC is it though it's the media all over the world and new yor if reporters can't get into Gaza then they have to take the information they're giving given if one actually talks to the IDF a very different picture emerges in which there were civilian casualties but they were not wildly disproportionate relevant relative to the casualties of Hass Fighters now I went to uh Israel about four weeks ago and spent time meeting with uh me MERS of the government and members of the public people from the left people on the right two really strong Impressions that Israelis remain as politically divided as ever but they are socially United as I have never known them and that is because there has been a realization that the enemy of Israel is really out to kill them to destroy their state and that what is being aimed at by all Iran's proxies is the destruction of of Israel and that that represents this is what Hamas demonstrated the potential for a second Holocaust second second Point let me just let me just make a second point because it's really really important to to see this the other source of unity is I met very few people who doubted that Hamas deserved to be destroyed and could not be left in charge of G anymore I met very few Israelis who questioned the logic of destroying Hamas so for me it was very striking compared with previous visits how much more cohes cohesive Israeli Society felt at this point and Hamas is almost completely gone it soon will be completely gone and considering how difficult that operation was the war wargs were issued about how difficult would be given the tunnel systems given the use of civilians as human Shields it will I think in future be seen as a major success for the IDF particularly since the IDF has suffered strikingly few casualties so nobody denies for a second that there were civilians killed and that's a tragedy but relative to comparable battles in history this was a well executed operation which I think was necessary there is there is so much to unpack in what you've just said so let me just talk about some of them some of those things that's that's based on on my observation and my conversations trying to understand what was going on let me begin at the end you say that you think Hamas has been all but destroyed can we be sure of that can you destroy an ideology you might you might perhaps have killed a senior military leader eliminated a certain number of battalions but is it possible to lose that ideology and is there an argument which goes if 34,000 people have been killed in the in the process of destroying Hamas some of them Hamas Fighters some of them civilians um actually are you strengthening the ideology in the minds of those who've been left behind and where there is no uh no answer to who is going to fill the power vacuum two two things are becoming very clear one is that the Israeli government has been right in saying behind Hamas Palestinian Islamic Jihad Hezbollah the houthis stands Iran and if you doubted it it's now quite open because the Iranians directly attacked Iran with by launching the biggest uh drone swarm and missile assault the first direct attack by Iran on Israel so that's important second thing that's important is that the process of reconciliation between Israel and its Arab neighbors has not been derailed by these events on the surely surely to get it back on track and we can talk about the Abraham Accords and the progress that they made there would have to be a solution to the question of Palestinian statehood or at least the future of the Palestinians post Hamas if Israel wants to secure its borders yes but that solution certainly is not to create a Palestinian state run by Hass and that is now off the table and you won't find alterative you've got a situation where you're interrupting me rather more than it is I think needed at this early stage in our conversation [Applause] I let's not do the today program we're here to talk about history this is a very historic moment that people I don't think get if if if they you know if they if they follow this on the UK media the tectonic plates have shifted decisively over the past 10 years away from the centrality of the Palestinian question to the much greater importance of how can the Middle East have a future in which Israel with all its technological sophistic ation can be a partner of the Arab states and there is nobody in Riyad there is nobody in Abu Dhabi who thinks that the fate of the Palestinians and their claim to a state are more important than that bigger question of what is the future of this region and in that sense to me the Striking historical future October the 7th will be that it does not put the Palestinians back at the center of the debate because there is no appetite to do that in the Arab capitals and that's that's the reality and I don't base this on the BBC I base this on the conversations that I have with Saudis with emiratis I've also been in the Gulf recently it is striking the extent to which the Abraham accord's process which Now predates by some time the Biden Administration is going to carry on this is a huge detour from it and that was why it happened it wasn't surprising to me that something happened last year at my advisory business greenmantle the brilliant J men's our Middle East director kept warning that there would be something to try to derail the Israel Saudi Rosal and sure enough it happened we couldn't tell whether it would be West Bank or Gaza or somewhere else it happened but I don't think Hamas which is basically being thrown under the bus by Iran has a future I don't think Palestinian Islamic Jihad has a future it's very hard for anybody to say now how Gaza is going to be run but it's not going to be run by them that's clear and I think what's becoming increasingly apparent to me the people in the Gulf region realize they've got to come up with some better answer for the future of the Palestinians because it clearly can't simply be that Israel takes it over and polies it that's not going to work either so I think the shifts are going to continue in the direction that we saw pre 2021 and that at the end of of it the situation of Israel will be decisively improved I asked a veteran of 1973 a general uh who had been a a junior officer in 73 is the situation of Israel Better or Worse strategically than it was 50 years ago and he said much better which surprised me this was not so long ago but I was I was surprised because I was still under the impression I just arrived and in Jerusalem that Israel would was entirely isolated that the world was against it and I came to realize in the course of the week that he was right that compared with 73 Israel essentially has far better relations with its Arab neighbors and near neighbors and they understand what the Israelis have been saying for some time that Iran is the problem so I learned a lot on that trip and it's not I think the conventional view of what's happening my prediction would be that it gets worse before it gets better because Hezbollah still has to be reckoned with and I think everybody here should be well aware that there is likely to be a a bigger and harder battle the IDF has to fight against Hezbollah on the Lebanese border before we get to the next phase of the Abraham Accords but I think we will get there okay one quick last question a big question though a two-state solution then given everything you say Hamas can't be allowed to move back in uh that the Arab states want a good relationship with Israel a two-state solution more or less likely now than it was before October I think it's far less likely far far less likely I was at the Munich security conference with a large group of of Arab and and indeed Palestinian uh friends and I said it may well be that the real significance of October the 7th was that it buried the possibility of a Palestinian State because not everybody gets a state in history they don't all get States you had two great opportunities in the past to make that happen and the PLO and subsequently uh Hamas walked away from those opportunities and I think in history you're going to get so many chances to achieve statud I think this was a catastrophic error first it was an error to put Hamas in power uh and the people who' paid the price for that have been the Palestinian people I think it's extremely hard to to make a Palestinian State flying now because I don't see many Israelis in favor of it I mean it's you don't get many people in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem saying oh yes no there's a clear case for it so I don't know I'm I'm struggling to see that in my lifetime maybe in my children's lifetime but this point the probability is way down and we as historians shouldn't be surprised not everybody gets a state but inse insecurity and instability continues unless Iran suddenly capitulates well I wouldn't rule that that out Iran's very weak uh essentially it relies on cheating on sanctions with China's help Iran was in a very weak position at the end of 2020 and I thought it was a huge mistake by the Biden Administration to relax the pressure uh offer sanctions relief try to Res resuscitate the Iran nuclear deal which had been a failure at the time I don't know why they did that I remember asking Jake suon why did you do that it seemed like a really like you're resuscitating the dead parrot in the Monty Python sketch with this nuclear deal and it's only going to take the pressure off Iran I mean after the suani assassination after suani was killed there was absolutely zero blow black from Iran worth talking about because they're weak more or less other security forces are deployed outside Iran in places like Syria uh and um I I mean I think Iran is weak and so over a 10year Time Horizon I think its weakness can be exploited uh and over time it isolation will be the real the real story plus the regime is hated by ordinary Iranians I mean the ordinary Iranian people are the most liberal people in the entire Middle East apart from the Israelis the regime is rotten to the core uh so I'm an optimist that ultimately despite the Relentless Doom mongering of of Western media coverage things are much better than they were 50 years ago Israel of course is in a stronger position since the Iranian attack cuz now it's clear it wasn't just some figment of BB netanyahu's imagination there really is an octopus in tran and its tentacles really do stretch out in all directions that's no longer something that you can deny and I mean in that sense one can be relatively bullish about where the region is is going and I I think if if you haven't traveled recently uh to the region and you go to the gulf if you talk to people about what's the future of your region talk to the Saudis what's the what's your vision of the future I promise you they do not begin by saying well we really have to have a Palestinian State okay in fact the Striking thing is they never mention that that never comes up because that's not part of Muhammad bin soloman's vision for Saudi Arabia well there you go I told you there would be glimmers of optimism from Neil in what many people might see as quite a bleak picture okay well let's let's tackle another really difficult and on the face of it depressing situation which is Russia UK Ukraine it's costing lives and money we heard uh Rishi sunak today say that you know he's going to re renew that commitment to defense spending going up to 2.5% by the end of the decade um it has reframed Global relations in some way to get back to your idea of an axis of ill will do you think that the NATO alliance was rather overoptimistic in the early days about what Ukraine could achieve no I think we went through a sequence of uh of erroneous assessments the first erroneous assessment was actually in 2021 when the Biden Administration reduced arms shipments uh to keev took the sanctions Off northstream 2 and said to Putin if you do anything more because of course he'd begun aggression against Ukraine in 2014 there will be sanctions I mean then Putin is like make my day that was the first mistake because as I said at the time Putin's article on the quote historic Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people published July of that year it was a manifested to Annex Ukraine and I was in keev in September that year I said you have to understand war is coming and the American Administration doesn't get it the next erroneous assessment uh was in the January 2022 phase when most supposed experts thought that Putin was bluffing we certainly didn't Chris Miller uh agreement manal correctly said in January 80% probable this is a full-blown Invasion that was dead right and when it happened there was the third erroneous assessment we should just get zalinski the plane ticket and get him out of there because this is over and zilinski in a historic moment said no I need ammunition not a ticket and gave that Unforgettable speech you know I am here ministers are here that was a defining historical moment in our time because it was the moment that the Ukrainian leadership and people said we are going to fight against Russian colonialism and we're going to fight for independence we're going to fight for democracy and finally when it was clear that the Russians had utterly bungled The Assault on Kev then the Biden Administration and other NATO members started to support them but it was pretty late in the day the main decisive effort that salvaged the situation was not based on Western support ukrainians won the Battle of ke themselves and I remember touring the battlefield uh in September 2022 realizing how astonishing it was that the reservists cu the crack troops were elsewhere in donbass the reservist of the Ukrainian Army held off uh the elite special forces of Russia and prevented the Breakthrough to Kiev we gave Ukraine substantial Aid after that but not enough to win we gave them enough not to lose but not enough to win and my consistent complaint in 2022 was that if you drip feed the support two things will happen there'll be a stalemate militarily and the American public will start to lose interest because the attention deficit disorder kicks in pretty fast in the country uh that I've adopted and so a huge opportunity was lost when the Russians were in flight from K and Heron to finish the job and we didn't act out of a I think misplaced uh fear of Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons uh which uh we unfortunately were we were deterred by and that was a great mistake because the correct response when somebody threatens to nuclear to use nuclear weapons if you have them yourself is yes we have them too if you use them we will use them and ours will probably work better than yours and that was what should have happened happened but Joe Biden and his team have forgotten the lessons of the Cold War in in the Cold War we learned about deterrence people who use nuclear threats have to be counted with nuclear threats otherwise they have escalation dominance everybody forgot that stuff and that's why Ukraine didn't win the war when it had a chance is there a different way of looking at this um which is perhaps stalemate is a better outcome if you're watching from Washington what happens in a Russia without Putin where Russia has lost is he gone did I miss that I mean at this point Putin is not going anywhere and there is no stal meate there Wars don't tend to produce draws you know sometimes in the event of a defeat I'm saying in the event of a defeat isn't a wound of Russia of Ukraine or defeat of R defeat of Russia isn't that a potentially a worse outcome no it would be a fantastic outcome it would it would have been a wonderful outcome if in late 2022 the Russian army had cracked and it nearly did remember remember how incredibly weak they were there were mutinies uh by early 2023 we had them and we failed to follow through we did not supply the weapons that the ukrainians begged for cuz they knew that they weren't going to be able to achieve a counter offensive without air superiority you just can't do that I infantry counter defenses without air superiority nobody does that and we would I think naive or cynical some people were naive of course the ukrainians can break through and some were cynical we don't really care if they don't as long as they kill lots of Russians the big mistake was to think it's okay to let it drag on it was never a good idea to let it drag on because a Russia is a lot bigger than Ukraine it has a lot more raw resources the longer the war lasts the more advantageous uh to Russia there isn't going to be a draw in this war where it's like final score 22 it won't go to penalties it's not like football in this war if Russia is not defeated it will win it will win because Ukraine is not big enough enough to defeat Russia without sustained support and sustained Western support has been shown to be questionable since late last year so I think we we made some terrible errors I say we I think the Western Alliance which is us-led made some grave mistakes when Russia was on the ropes and now we have to rectify well spoken today Rishi sunak that was an excellent speech and I hope very much that European leaders will listen to it and understand that the time for talking about strategic autonomy is passed it is now time to deliver it that means increased defense spending and it means really accelerating the aid to Ukraine so the ukrainians can stabilize the situation which is fragile in certain parts of the line and crucially make it clear to the Russians that there is no easy win coming this year there are pressures on Putin too a full-blown War economy is hard to sustain for any length of time so we just have to make the cost to Russia significantly higher than it has seemed in the early part of this year and then I think we get somewhere what do you make of the sustained support for Russia within pockets of the Republican party you know margerie Taylor Mar they were useful idiots in the Cold War theyve held up they've held up the the aid package which was finally well thankfully speaker Mike Johnson made the right call and it's interesting that he who had been with them and indeed voted against Ukraine Aid before came out and made a spirited speech in favor of Aid Ukraine and got the bill through why did he do that because he had the intelligence briefings and they frightened The Living Daylights out of him because Mike Johnson suddenly realized what I began by telling you that there is a large scale Global axis operating not only in Ukraine but also in the Middle East and in the Far East and elsewhere too by the way and it poses a major threat to everyone who believes leaves in the ideals of democracy self-government of the rule of law and individual liberty so if Mike Johnson can see that reality I think over time the isolationists will flake just as they did in the 30s it's going to look like a really terrible call to have been an isolationist Tucker Carlson has destroyed his own reputation he was a talented broadcaster he's made himself a laughing stalk a lord whor figure by his trip uh to Moscow in his scantic interview of Putin I think the isolationist position is crumbling and Republicans are realizing uh it's quite interesting to follow this since the attack was on Israel as well as on Ukraine a lot of Republicans are rethinking their position once you realize that these things are connected and you can't just cherry-pick you can't sort of throw the ukrainians under the bus but give Aid to Israel once you realize they're connected then the isolationist position collapses do you think that would be sustained in the EV of a second Trump presidency I do actually I do actually you know two things on this I I currently don't think he's going to win I think at this point he'll narrowly lose for reasons we can discuss but if he it's very close pretty coin toss 50/50 at this point but if he is reelected it's not like Tucker Carson's going to be Secretary of State Marjorie Taylor green is not going to be National Security advisor either the people who will staff a trump administ rtion will be Mike Pompeo Matt pottinger there's a bunch of people who we can more or less confidently expect to be involved maybe Bridge kby these people are more hawkish than the Democrats they are actually criticizing the Democrats for not having been supportive enough of Ukraine and Israel and Taiwan if you read Mike Galler and Matt pottinger's piece that just came out in foreign affairs it criticizes the Biden Administration for not being hawkish enough and I don't think that Trump although he's in some ways an isolationist is a true isolationist Trump believes in making America great again he thinks that tariffs are the way to do that but we already saw in the first Administration that when he was shown that the tech War would be more effective than the trade War he got it so I don't think it's right to expect as people have often expected a re-election of trump to Doom Ukraine I remember discussing this with the Ukrainian uh well I won't say which minister a Ukrainian Minister who said uh you know people have been warning us about Trump for a better part of a year but you'll notice he said that the aid stopped coming under Biden and I have to tell you a great many Ukrainian soldiers have died because of Biden don't escalate so it doesn't look quite the way it looks in London when you're in Kev and they odly less worried about Trump than people in Western Europe and why do you think Trump might not win if you look at the swing States I mean this gets decided in maybe five or six states uh like Arizona and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin uh very very close in recent polling Trump would win if the election were held tomorrow but then you ask voters what if he is a criminal conviction and that flips the Independence really strikingly and this has been pulled consistently if the stormmy Daniels uh New York criminal case results in a conviction which I think it will then I think he has a real problem because a lot of middle American middle of the road independent voters they still think the rule of law is quite an important thing and I think it hurts him that's the polling so a lot can happen between now November 5th that could change that the economy for example could change uh direction or there could be a major episode you God knows one can't help but fear terrorist attacks in the wake of the destruction of M I think what often happens with the destruction of these organizations is that they then pop up somewhere else I mean look at the way Isis reconstituted itself in Africa so I worry that if there were a major terrorist attack between now and the election that might change things but on the current trajectory with the criminal case as a dominant theme I think he'll narrowly lose come November which of course creates all kinds of other risks that people don't talk nearly enough about but that's how I currently think about it uh I I think there are downside risks to another Biden term that are not trivial not least not the least of which is that we would quite possibly face president Harris at some point and that from an Actuarial point of view is just a a reality I worry about that I mean I worry about that because I don't think she's really ideally suited to the job something that Republicans and Democrats possibly the only thing agree on is the concerns about China the Biden Administration has pretty much continued the sort of policies that were initiated under Trump you're the biographer of Kissinger um famously he reestablished ties with China the visit by Nixon in 71 uh sorry his secret visit in 71 the visit by Nixon in 72 um and he but last year was really quite gloomy about us China relations before his death he though applied the idea of dayon to the Soviet Union do you think that idea could be applied to relations with China yes and I've said so repeatedly most recently in a foreign affairs piece following uh Henry Kissinger's death let's talk about him because I'm in the midst of writing the second volume which is the hardest book I've ever written it's enormously challenging I mean everything is documented the phone calls everything it's just like imagine this room filled with documents and that would be some fraction of what I'm plowing through at the moment so what is interesting is that in the later part of his life and I knew him over 20 years he became really concerned about this second Cold War I remember asking him in Beijing in November 2019 are we in a new Cold War I had no idea what he was going to say and he replied uh we are in the foothills of a cold war and that was a great response I thought foothills of a cold war that is absolutely right and then a year later in another interview not with me he raised that to the mountain passes of a cold war and that was even better then in 2022 I think it was yeah just before his 100th birthday I asked him again about it he said you know this second Cold War could be worse than the first I said why because of artificial intelligence and he was deeply preoccupied with the potential weaponization of AI to the extent that after his 100th birthday which which he celebrated with more parties than I've ever known anybody to throw on their birthday and they were at least six he flew to Beijing and met with xiin ping and that was not some kind of farewell tour that was to discuss the question of could there be AI arms limitation talks very much by analogy with theic strategic arms limitation talks of the 1970s so I think dayon is the rational strategy for the United States today with respect to China because the United States is not ready for a hot War over Taiwan or the Philippines or any place else and this is something that isn't widely understood even in Washington there is as you said rightly uh a bipartisan consensus that China's a problem and that that was oddly enough Trump's achievement because prior to 2016 that was not at all the standard view Trump campaigned on the China issue and was initially ridiculed for it when he talked about tariffs most people made fun of him you'll remember but people forget this Ariana Huffington covering the Trump campaign in 2016 on the entertainment pages of The Huffington Post but if you took him literally and seriously you understood that the China issue really resonated with voters more if certainly as much as possibly more than the Border issue and Trump in the very short space of time by emphasizing that China was a threat a rival not you know a partner that we could have a win-win partnership with changed the whole debate the National Security strategy document of 2017 which my friend and colleague HR McMaster drafted completely changed us strategy towards China and the Democrats very quickly fell into line to the point that they realized very quickly I remember Larry Summers saying to me we'll have to run this is even before Biden was the candidate we the Democrats will have to run more hawkish than Trump on China so this is a radical change in the atmosphere the trouble is while you're being hawkish on the wicked CCP Chinese Communist party is the root of all evil you're are not noticing that China has overtaken the United States as a manufacturing power to an extent that you cannot appreciate until I tell you these figures in 2004 China's manufacturing value added was 1 half of the United States today it's very nearly two times that of the United States in two decades a complete reversal of Fortunes and Manufacturing capacity matters in war because you have to make the ammo you have to make the the missiles you have to churn out drones not just in the hundreds but in the thousands potentially in the millions and so it's very risky for the United States to get anywhere close to a shooting war with China when China has the military-industrial base and the US no longer does in addition and this is a point which gets us back to history imagine if there were a Taiwan crisis okay let's just imagine that tomorrow the news you wake up to is that China has blockaded Taiwan which it could do tomorrow they rehearsed it when Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan and they did another rehearsal around the time of the election in January what would that mean well it would mean a kind of inversion of the Cuban Missile Crisis because in 1962 the United States blockaded Cuba and it was the Soviet Union that had to send a naval expeditionary Force across an ocean to run the blockade this time China would be the quarantining or blockading power and the United States would have to send the the aircraft carrier strike groups I remember asking an eminent member of the administration why is it you want Biden to be krof that doesn't seem like an obvious thing to want to be but you'd be in kof's situation where you would have to choose between World War II or appearing to back down so this is a very bad idea especially as Taiwan unlike Cuba exports the most valuable semiconductors on the planet Cuba exports remind me Cigars Cigars like I like cigars okay occasionally but they're certainly not as crucial to the global economy as the gpus that get manufactured by tsmc so if you had a crisis over Taiwan it would be a massive economic selloff it would be Carnage in markets but it would also be like World War III uh in potential uh and that would be an extremely dangerous situation to be in so that's why Dayton against that backdrop Dr that you painted it's not clear to me what Deton would mean and also I think you've acknowledged that on the right the view was in certain quarters that deant in the original Cold War benefited the Soviet Union there were many people who felt it was a a form of appeasement yeah I mean this was in large measure Ronald Reagan's doing and one of the interesting things about writing volume two is that you get a chance to rethink the 70s and the ' 80s now I'm very much a kind of child of the 60s and I was a an undergraduate in in the early 80s and an Ardent thatcherite and reaganite you'll be very surprised to hear that I'm sure and it's kind of interesting to go back and realize the things about Reagan that were not quite as I remembered them I mean two really one the extreme unfairness of the criticism of Dayton which portrayed it as aasan which it really was not Dayton was a deeply cleared attempt to engage the Soviets not to trust them to recognize them for what they were but to try to slow down the arms race and that was rational because particularly after Vietnam the United States couldn't afford to keep extreme uh increasing the defense budget and Dayton bought the United States about 10 years to recover from the disaster of Vietnam after which it was possible to get hawkish as Reagan did but then what's interesting is that Reagan was hawkish initially but only briefly and then very quickly he wasn't that hawkish he was not at all all hawkish when the uh martial law was imposed in Poland and he ended up doing Dayton plus over intermediate nuclear forces with gorbachov in fact it's funny to find in the 1980s Kissinger criticizing Reagan for being too soft on the Soviet Union so you know you realize with hindsight that Dayton was not in fact as Reagan portrayed it and that he ended up doing it himself what Dayton means is you engage with the Communist superpower on a whole range of different fronts you negotiate with them about Arms Control AI Arms Control nuclear arms control you can negotiate with them about anything you like they want to negotiate about semiconductors good do that let's have a negotiation about semiconductors the more of those negot negotiations that are going on the less likely the Taiwan semiconductor crisis is to happen and time time is on our side the West's side much more than it's on China's side China's demographics are a disaster the population will half between now and the end of the century the economy is ground down under mountain of debt so great that they can't really do fiscal stimulus anymore young people are deeply disillusioned I talked to my Chinese friends when they risk it they say things that shock me about their view of the leadership like Iran the Chinese regime is not strong it's not healthy and so the the rational thing for the United States and it's allies must be to play for time and let the pathologies of the one party State play out I think that's the real argument for dayon the thing that would help shping a lot right now would be a great Showdown over Taiwan because then he could mobilize National sentiment Etc so I'm I'm a convert to Dayton as a cleare ryed strategy of playing for time one more from me maybe one and a half I've tried tried not to ask too many questions I know you were all bursting to ask questions too you're a co-founder of the University of Austin which describes itself as being dedicated to The Fearless Pursuit Of Truth why why did you get involved in the project uh well if you look at what's going on at American universities established American universities today uh Harvard post October the 7th Stanford has not been a great deal better what's been going on at Colombia uh in the last few days you realize I think the truth of what I and others have been saying for about 10 years there's something rotten at the heart of American Academia uh you can give it various names wokeism for short but it's a curious phenomenon in which radical ideas Progressive leftism but sometimes islamism have taken more and more control of what can and cannot be discussed and a culture of fear has been created in which one can't speak freely for fear of of cancellation uh this is measurable in all kinds of ways but I'll give you just one example 59% of undergraduates right across the US say they can't speak their minds and class for fear of what might happen that is to me utterly appalling that that universities should be places where there is less Free Speech than in a Saloon bar in Wisconsin I would never have foreseen that in the 1980s when I went into academic life believing that I would have the most intellectual Freedom as a professor that I could have and that has ceased to be true we now have less intellectual Freedom tenur professors have their careers destroyed because they uh are deemed to have said something inappropriate about black lives matter this stinks this is how you kill a civilization if you turn its universities into places that enforce intellectual conformism and Orthodoxy so we reached the point Joe Londale Barry Weiss and I and a few others Pano canel we decided that the only solution was to create a new University because the old ones just couldn't be fixed and the only way to show people that academic freedom is important and matters and that the pursuit of Truth is what universities are for not indoctrination was to create one model it and if we get it right and we've only had two years to do this then I think we'll exert some pressure on the established institutions I mean you've taught at Stanford and Harvard you some of the preeminent institutions in the world did your students turn on you what was your experience well I didn't teach at Stanford because the history Department said that they didn't want somebody so conservative I was a Hoover senior fellow uh when I arrived in 2016 I'd been I think one of the most popular history professors at Harvard for 12 years I was rather shocked to be told that the Stanford history Department didn't really have any need for my services uh my attempts to engage with undergraduates uh by creating a free speech uh series were sabotaged I think it's fair to say and I came to the conclusion that there were structural problems not only there but at the other universities that weren't going to be easy to fix not certainly not by having new presidents and as I thought about it as a historical problem I began to realize that there was something a bit strange about what was happening that a curious Alliance of progressive I don't like that word cuz it's it's actually the opposite but let's call them illiberal academic uh bureaucrats and a relatively noisy minority of of radical students plus a relative minority of radical professors were sort of taking control of Institutions and policing them and determining what could be said and what could not be said and who could be invited with every year more disinvitation more events canel and then people started losing their jobs I mean tenure was supposed to protect you from that kind of thing that was the reason that was created not so that you had a cushy job for life but so that you could say things as a professor without fear of being fired well it turned out to be meaningless for Joshua Katz at Princeton and it pretty meaningless for Roland Fri at Harvard two years suspended without pay for not really anything and so we have to in this country this is really important realize the path to hell for universities has a sign that reads diversity Equity inclusion and you have to understand that I'm sorry because I know these words sound nice and nobody wants to be against them but I have to tell you that in George Orwell's 1984 where it's been the opposite of what they appear to mean so what diversity Equity inclusion turned out to me at Harvard was uniformity of thought no equity no due process for anybody who fell foul of the Inquisition and exclusion of conservatives and indeed anybody who was seem to be too far to the right including classical liberals so British universities British schools please heed my warning there is no excuse for making these mistakes when they've already been made in America over the past 10 years and the consequences are playing for all to see if any institution that you're involved with is doing this stuff point out where it led Harvard when I went to Harvard in 2004 I was extremely excited it was the best university in the world and I really felt that I had arrived Larry Summers was President it was intellectually a vibrant Place fast forward to 2023 24 and it's a laughing stock if that's what you'd like to happen to Oxford and Cambridge then proceed down the Dei path but it is a path to hell and I can't emphasize enough the lamentable Folly of repeating mistakes when they so obviously have these consequen I I feel passionately about this because I was a lucky young person I got to think freely speak freely take risks in classrooms say dumb stuff in tutorials write stupid stuff in student magazines without the thought police uh without the social media without that sense that there would be terrible irreparable consequences for my entire life today's 18 19 20 21 year olds who are in undergraduate programs in the US live in a climate that's almost like a totalitarian light fearful of what their comrades may say to the high authorities worrying if the gene for student affairs or the vice Provost for this or that or the diversity Equity inclusion officer will send them the dread email saying would you please report there's going to be an investigation into the party that you held in which somebody wore an inappropriate costume that stuff is like something out of Stalin Soviet Union the secret letter of denunciation I had one read to me once it's sick and we've allowed it to happen in the greatest universities in North America don't let have it happen here because young people have a a profound entitlement to free thought they have a right to be able to say stupid stuff that's the only way you learn I have said a lot of wrong things I've published articles that were completely wrong you've got to be willing to take some intellectual risk to arrive at truth that's why we say The Fearless Pursuit Of Truth cuz you have to take some risk there's no risk in academic life anymore in America nobody dares step out of line that's so sad I would never have thought that would happen because I thought Ruth I thought that that stuff happened in totalitarian regimes when there was a dictator in place that in a free Society people could volunteer to write letters of denunciation about their classmates that never I never thought that could happen and and yet it has that's been one of the biggest surprises and disappointments of my life there is so much more to say I think we've barely scratched the surface of so much of that I'm going to open up the floor to all of you there will be roving mics down here I think there are fixed mics at the front upstairs and and there are lots of questions coming in from online so whilst we're just getting things moving in the room I'm going to take actually the first question that's that's online and then we'll open it up to the floor um online John says what's the future for Palestine if there's no State well Scotland doesn't have a state I think the Scots you have noticed no it doesn't have a state not a state I mean it has Devolution but Scot Scotland's not a state there's a United Kingdom of Great Britain Northern Ireland and Scotland is part of it and I think given that the Palestinians have blown the chance of statehood which was really pretty much there for the taking if you think back uh 20 plus years I think the only plausible future is uh either they're part uh of an Israel in which they accept the rights and responsibilities that come with uh a democratic uh state in which uh in which there is a special place for Jews because of the historic origins of the state or and this is something I discussed with Kissinger in the final months of his life or we have to think again about Jordan we have to think again about the Palestinians relationship with with uh Israel's Arab neighbors uh including Egypt kiss just said to me something which also is made clear in Martin index's recent book and excellent book on Kissinger's role in the Middle East he said it it was in the end of fatal era to allow the PLO to become the representative the official representatives of the Palestinians and I think that's right I think yasa Arafat led the Palestinians in in a direction that was ultimately disastrous so there are other options but I think if you blow statehood then you end up as part of somebody else's bigger State that's Scotland deal with it I've dealt with it I'm fine in the room okay there's a lady there and a Gentleman here we'll take those two and then I'll come to you and you guys up there NE that's fantastic anyway can I just ask you because you can stop there sorry Miss Henry Kissinger is one of my heroes because he's a realist not an ideal ideologist he's pragmatic and before he died he said that he was full praise for Ukraine's very powerful fight back against Russia but he counseled that actually it was time to negotiate and I would feel I agree with him because I can see even if Ukraine wins um okay she wins but then we will make a mortal enemy of Russia and if Russia wins we go the other way around so when you've got a no win you have a p Victory on either side surely we shouldn't be digging deeper we should be talking because there are Russians in the donbas region okay and so on and so anyway that's negotiation iang want to take one more just want this gentleman here Professor good to see you um I was speaking to my friend who lives in the states and uh he visited me uh last year and and he saw that um seven of your uh 16 books now was on my shelf but but there's a point I want to raise today actually tonight um you said um not everyone gets a state um uh uh when you were referring to Palestine and obviously you've compared Palestine to uh Scotland that'll annoy a lot which is quite uh strange but um are you saying that the Palestinian people uh don't deserve to have their own state but how can you compare uh Scotland to Palestine when the Scottish people live in Freedom and they don't get murdered murdered in in the streets they don't get arrested uh by by the British um police uh and so on so forth so um my point is is actually is why do you think Palestine uh Palestinian people uh don't deserve to get a state of their own like the rest of the world okay thank you so I take the the the question about King Ukraine first Henry went through a series of uh very interesting interventions in that whole Saga including a brilliant essay after the initial invasion of 2014 in which he argued that it would put uh Ukraine and Eastern Europe in an unsustainable position if we promised Ukraine NATO membership but never delivered it and it would be better to have a neutral Ukraine with security guarantees than to create such an unsustainable solution uh He was largely ignored but he was right uh that was an unsustainable situation NATO membership promised but never delivered created a great Jeopardy a great danger for Ukraine later he uh made himself unpopular by arguing I think prematurely for negotiations he was booed at Davos more or less for that but then uh by the end of uh of 20 uh 22 he'd come around to the view that Ukraine had proved itself on the Battlefield a great power a worthy power and a worthy member of uh of the Western Community so there was a series of of interventions ultimately there will be negotiations negotiations of course have gone on secretly as they do uh Sergey renko has a piece about the uh the failed negotiations of 2022 just out and I'm sure that Bill Burns has been trying to get some kind of discussion uh going but it's not going to happen as long as Putin thinks he gets uh he gets an early Christmas present on November 5th and that's why I don't think there will be any meaningful negotiations until after the US election when it becomes apparent whoever wins that there is not going to be an abandonment of Ukraine and that therefore the costs to Russia of continuing the war will be very serious if we can establish that the costs to Russia of P with the war are going to be intolerably high and that some compromised peace is on offer then a negotiation can happen I do not think the ukrainians should seed territory to Russia but I don't think that they can expect to liberate the currently occupied territories by the end of 2025 I think there will be a period of limbo in which those territories are under Russian control but not recognized as seeded and over time as I've said to president zelinsky's advisers you've got to be South Korea not South Vietnam in other words you have to make the Reconstruction of Ukraine happen even while you have a hostile neighbor on your border just as the South Koreans did and over time over time that land will come back to you but only if you prove that it was worth fighting for Independence and democracy because you do something with it do something that the Russians can never do in their occupied territory which will just stagnate and be an economic basket case and then once you've established a that it's extremely expensive to continue the war for Russia B that Ukraine is viable as it stands then I think a negotiation becomes possible in the cerian sense now when I first made the comparison with Scotland and Palestine my editor at Bloomberg said no take that out take that out and I said why well he said people just think it's ridiculous I saidwell listen Sunny you may think it's ridiculous but you don't know any Scottish history let's just go back in time shall we let's go back to the 17 century the 17th century Scotland was like some cross between Gaza West Bank and Afghanistan like mountainous territory in the north full of Clans that did war for fun religious zealots in the lanss like the places I come from it was incredibly dangerous and ungovernable with a homicide rate that was like I don't know four times that of England it's far more of a problem to the English crown than Ireland Scotland was a chronic problem uh and it had had its most dangerous really uh in the in the 17th century and it continued to be a danger and until 1745 with uh a major Revolt that threatened uh that threatened the uh the English throne with the steuart restoration by force so nobody should downplay the violence of Scottish history because the violence of Scottish history is up there with the best of them and what happened in Scotland is a reminder to everybody that anything's possible as Walter Scott writes in the great historical novel Waverly in the space of just 60 years Scotland went from being Afghanistan cross with Gaza and the West Bank to being the fullum of the Enlightenment where all the good ideas that have ever been had were had you don't actually need to have any more ideas they're all there in the thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and that happened in two generations and it's Scott great observation that's amazing it is amazing should give everybody hope that even the most forn looking states can achieve transformation so we have to learn from this what do we learn we learn that Scotland gave up its independence gave it up Scottish Elite gave it up with the Union of parliaments Scotland became entirely subsumed into greater Britain became North Britain and only in my lifetime did Scottish nationalism really become a serious political force but they blew it they blew it cuz they had a referendum and they lost it and since they lost it the extent of their corruption and incompetence has become steadily more visible and so they never will be another successful referend and never will be one because the Scottish nationalist party is a joke stuff happens in history countries go from being basket cases to being Scotland by the late 18th century was certainly the fastest growing economy in the world my former student Tyler goodsby has a great book about this it was like the tiger economy Anything is Possible the Palestinians had two distinct opportunities for a state I think at the time of Barack was the most serious proposition they walked away from it they blew it they blew it and now they've blown it I think so irreparably that it won't be a serious topic of conversation in Israel for the rest of my life and without that I mean if the Israelis don't believe in a two-state solution they basically stopped believing in it some time ago but after October 7 it's like you are kidding me you're going to reward these people for the dress rehearsal of the Holocaust with the state nobody thinks that that's a serious oppos that's not a serious possibility in Israeli politics today so I think we just have to recognize that not everyone gets a state look at a map of Europe in let's say 1914 not that many states there are lots of Empires hapsburg Empire Roman of Empire Holan Empire lots and lots of States remember the Ws who now thinks of the Ws the zorbs been to Zorba Stanley lately not everybody gets to have a state there were lots of new States created after World War II because the Empire's collapsed but there is no real historical World in which every people that claims the right gets a state okay you have to get it right diplomatically you have to get it right politically you have to take the win when it's handed to you as it was and I think the utter failure of the Palestinian Authority Bears comparison with the utter failure of the SNP I'm going to get some more questions in whil we can there's a couple on this side there's a lady there and a Gentleman here if you can put your hands back up again oh there was a lady as well there yeah there's two I'll take two at a time yeah uh very quick one for me uh where did you see post brexit Britain's place in the world okay and take take the other one from that lady hi I'm a man oh so so sorry it's okay it's okay no worries got very pretty face thank you thank you thank you it's all [Laughter] right hi uh Professor Ferguson it's a pleasure um to be here in your talk um I'm Alex andreich I'm a master student at King's College London studying world history um I wanted to ask you probably it's a bit a bit off topic but still connected to your profession as a historian what advice do you have for um PhD maybe uh Master students going into their phds writing their first obviously PhD dissertation and the first steps after they finished that journey to become uh a historian in the first stages writing their first book how how what was your experience in that stage and um what can you give to aspiring young historians today in 2024 thank you very much I'm a big fan thank you Alex um and a very good-look person go around saying things like I'm a man on the Stanford campus you get into a lot of trouble I was a remainer uh not because I had great sentimental attachment to the ways of of the Brussels bureaucracy uh I was a strong opponent of a single currency for example and made many friends in the in the '90s at that time when there was a serious debate about whether Britain should join uh the monetary Union and so uh many of my friends ended up on the other side of the great debate about about brexit uh and I was asked about that earlier today on a on a podcast for uh for Bloomberg and I said the way I feel about my friends who were Pro brexit is a little bit like that line from succession I love you but you are not serious people because it wasn't a serious argument it was not a serious argument that we were going to have a free trade agreement with the United States that was a stupid stupid thing to claim was possible cuz it's like had they never met Bob ligher I know Bob lighthiser Bob ligher is not going to do a Free Trade Agreement in this country for if he's alive for a millennium and so there was this wild economic unrealism unlike with Trump the Trump Administration which of course was another 2016 phenomenon had a coherent economic strategy which was we're going to do tax reform that's going to incentivize investment they did that we're going to put tariffs on China because it's time we stop China overtaking us economically they did that uh we're going to reduce the regulatory burdens on business they did that result US economy has been surging forward since 2017 on Trump's watch median household income adjusted for inflation Rose 10% it had flatlined since 199 99 that was a serious program and despite all the derision that was heaped on Trump by the clever clever people at the New York Times it worked brexit was an unserious economic program in which some hand waving would turn Britain's divorce from its principal trading partners its exit from the European Union into an economic success and it was not difficult to see that there was no way it was going to be anything other than a really expensive divorce now you can make an argument as my wife and others do that it was somehow morally politically ethically constitutionally a marvelous thing but I'm an economic historian I'm here to tell you that's what matters if you're investment is like the patient cannot be resuscitated all the other stuff is not going to matter too much to the voters for too long and so brexit is part of it's not the only thing but it's part of a very serious economic problem this country has a very very serious problem which is apparent when you travel Beyond London and see the state of provincial Britain it's poor to anybody who spent the last quarter Century mostly in the US it's kind of shocking and the fiscal position is terrible and I pity kir starmer and Rachel Reeves they're going to have an extraordinar difficult task because all of the lovely things that Rachel Reeves talks about in the recent speech that were so widely praised are not in fact going to be affordable so this is a very sad State of Affairs but it came out of an unseriousness now the Scots were serious about independence I remember that 2014 debate very clearly and the question was well how much is this all going to cost then when you told them actually quite a substantial percentage of GDP and I don't know if whether you're going to keep the currency and blah blah in that case no and I remember having the same kind of discussions about brexit with people in English pubs and Welsh pubs even in Welsh pubs I'm like it's like it's going to be really quite bad for the growth rate going to be poorer in a counterfactual world we definitely be better off and oh we don't care about that so I think this was the unseriousness about it like there was a fundamental economic unseriousness about it and that's why the country is in this state I don't doesn't give me any satisfaction to say that cuz I I understand the impulse that was at work but it was not serious now Britain is uh at a disadvantage because it is very hard to deliver on what Rishi sunak said today to increase the defense budget 2.5% because all the other stuff is going to cost more simply because of the Aging population and I think it's reasonable to say that large scale immigration doesn't really solve that problem at least not in the way that we're we're currently doing it so Britain is going to struggle to be taken as seriously as we would like to be because of these economic headwinds some of which at least we have decided to create uh for ourselves having said all that I really admire the prime minister's speech today and I think it's good that Britain has in the great crisis over Ukraine consistently been in the Vanguard of the defense of Ukraine and that was one of the things that Boris Johnson got right I almost said one of the few things that Boris Johnson got right so we aren't in as bad a position as I sometimes hear people say we are this is the odd thing about coming home the have G very negative about the country and I feel like saying it's not that bad because Britain still despite all that I've just said has at least three maybe four of the world's top universities no European country can say that by the way and it is in terms of scientific research and technological development one of the players in AI which is again something that very few other countries can say and you know there's one other thing about this country that is deeply deeply moving and you may be surprised to hear me say this and you may not even believe me when I say it but let me try and convince you this country is the most racially tolerant country that I've ever been in it is a truly astonishing thing that we have achieved largescale migration transformation of the capital city from an overwhelmingly White City to one that is uh perhaps the most multi-ethnic major city in the world and the the extent to which we've achieved this without any of the terrible consequences that people like Enoch PO for told should be a cause for national celebration and self- congratulation it's not an issue that the prime ministers are hinding I really feel strong about this and the reason I say this is that when you compare Britain with not just the United States where I mean cities are much more segregated in the United States on the whole but you compare it with France I've just spent a long time in Paris uh I mean Paris is two cities white Paris and then you know go further east not white Paris they complet it's shocking to be in a place like mon Paras and you realize that that you think oh Paris hasn't changed at all that's because there has not been assimilation and integration of the sort that we've achieved here so as somebody who's married to an African woman has two sons who have mixed race is a great relief to come to a country where this isn't the issue it is really really important and that's one reason why I'm very wary of importing American attitudes into our universities and schools because once you start sending out the questionnaire saying are you guilty of implicit bias are you conscious of the color of people's skin that's you start to reintroduce the very things we've succeeded in getting rid of in this country we are quite colorblind we really are and that's great we should really really sustain that keep it up I want my boys to grow up in this country not feeling that the color of their skin is an issue it shouldn't be and thank God at least now it isn't I'm going to very briefly ask you to give the career advice and see if we can get a couple more questions sorry Al I forgot all about I got carried away yeah you have so my first piece of advice is don't get carried away I think it's much harder to go into the academic world today than it was when I was your age it's harder because uh there are relatively few professional uh opportunities there are relatively few as the Americans would say tenure track jobs so the competition is very Fierce the pay in America at British universities is so low that when you quote it to Americans they say a month and it's like no a year so it's very much less attractive I think it's fair to say and it will become even less attractive if we decide to kind of do work on the cheap and make the universities no longer fun places to work I think there's a crisis in British Academia beyond the elite by the elite I really mean Oxford Cambridge you know Imperial LSC Kings but outside that Charmed Circle it's really economically very very tough indeed and all my you know former students who've who've gone into uh Academia and are working in those other universities have a really really really tough time so if I were you I would not try to replicate my career or the career of any of my contemporaries because I think it would be a very very thankless task uh somebody emailed me the other day I spoke to him today out of the blue saying can you give me some advice it wasn't so very different from the question uh that you asked my advice to you is that you don't need to become a professor of History to be a historian I have friends uh I think of Andrew Roberts for example who did not do that and who've made major contributions uh or Simon CAG want to Fury there are ways to be a historian that don't require you to take an academic job and may not even require you to do a PhD though I personally think a PhD is a good idea but if you're going to do it do it thinking the following way I'm going to write a book and this is the first draft and if I make it good enough then I can have a career as an historian and if I'm really good I'll be Tom Holland and and I'll have my own podcast in 10 years make a fortune um you know there there we can see that there are alternative paths and that the most influential historians in Britain today are actually doing podcasts and more strength to their arms more more strength to their arms because I don't think the old model is currently viable for your generation we should we should acknowledge that one more now I haven't asked you guys did anybody want a question do you want to come up to the microphone probably the last one I'm sorry uh can you hear me oh yeah sounds like that I want to premise preface this by saying you know I'm pretty balanced on the Israel Gaza situation and I agree with a lot of what you're saying at the beginning uh especially in terms of it being Holocaust 2 in intent and uh the need to retaliate I think where you lost me though was when you said that the operation from the IDF is a resounding success and when you look at the realities in the ground the the 2,000 bombs the choke hold on Aid the 30 to1 combed uh ratio acceptable it seems as though it's a very angry response a very um punitive one but not necessarily a strategic one so asking as a historian who looks at things you know the big picture you know not the short term but the long term I I I I'd like to ask you to revisit that that point and do you think in 50 years time 100 years time we're going to look back on this and the IDF and say this is the gold standard for how to attack Retaliator for a abhorent crime um and whether or not the IDS actions are going to yield more good than bad okay big question not so you quot you quoted a statistic there that's wrong I mean the the reality is that the ratio of uh civilian to competent casualties was initially 2 to one and it fell to one to one in the later stages of the conflict the extent to which the Israel know who the Hamas Fighters are is very remarkable in the Israeli defense Ministry there's an entire wall of head shots of the Hamas Fighters uh with most of them crossed out it's not been uh a lack of precision that we have seen the use of non Precision uh Munitions is because the Precision ones are needed for Hezbollah Hezbollah is a much much more serious foe than Hamas because Hezbollah has a vast arsenal of missiles pointed at Israel and so the IDF couldn't afford to use its most sophisticated Weaponry against Hamas the bigger fight has still to come you know the Israeli defense minister wanted to fight Hezbollah first on the ground that you have to fight the stronger of your enemies before you fight the weaker one the complexities of War are often lost in the emotional responses that we as civilians and I'm assuming are a civilian field what is this battle for Gaza like that's the right question for a historian to ask when was the last time an army had to fight against an enemy that was not just entrenched but in tunnels deep deep sophisticated tunnel networks with the civilian population on the surface you can't find many examples but one that comes to mind is okanawa if you start making serious comparisons between the Gaza operation and battles like it you could maybe talk in terms of mosul too the the thing that's striking to me is that the Israelis have achieved their objective which was to destroy Hamas at a far lower cost than in comparable battles incomparable situations this is not to say it's all fine this is not to say it's great I have struggled uh to convey in my writing but I've tried the compassion that I feel for all people who get caught up in war including the soldiers including the people who find themselves in the tunnels but that's a recurrent theme of my work that's why I wrote the pity of War that's why I wrote War of the World to try to convey the horror of war I became a historian partly reading the war poets as a school boy in Glasgow and then having to go and drill in the combined Cadet force on a Monday afternoon and the cognitive dissonance was powerful to me one of the things that struck me right in Kissinger's biography was that he had experienced War it firsthand he'd been in the Battle of the Bulge he'd been there he'd been at the liberation of concentration camp when his critics uh HL terms like war criminal and and and genocide at him I think really you think that that that that experience made him somehow numb as opposed to highly sensitized and this will be a theme of the second volume what's happened in Gaza has been hellish hellish if only it had been possible to root Hamas out with no civilian casualties if only if only the same could have been done in okanawa where the civilian casualties were vastly higher and so were the US casualties but that's not war war isn't like that there are no surgical strikes did you know that was a term Kissinger invented it's a kind of ironical term surgical strikes very very hard to make any military action surgical but I think when we consider the situation that we've witnessed in in the Middle East we have to bear in mind that what happened was Israel attempted to create a Palestinian state that was attempted on two occasions and offered to the Palestinians in the end the pales Indians elected the path of violence and when they were dissatisfied with the PLO they turned to Hamas they voted Hamas in Hamas is a criminal organization it's a criminal organization that sacrifices his own young men and then collects the money and sends it to the leadership is sit around Qatar having a good time I mean the depravity of Hamas is hard to overstate that's the tragedy let's not confuse perpetrators and victims especially not in connection with the Jewish people please so it's a grim it's a grim subject I wish there were some cheerful way to to discuss it I wish there was some immediate end in sight except that there isn't there's another War to come with Hezbollah but I passionately believe and everybody in this room should believe whether they're Jewish or not that history has necessitated a Jewish state it has made it clear that the Jewish people cannot take the risk of not having a state again that they have every right to have uh that state in the holy land where the Jewish people have had a presence for centuries and that those who would eradicate them from the river to the Sea must be defeated and we must help in their defeat that's my view and I'm sticking to [Applause] it well plenty to Che over there thank you all so much thank you for your great questions thank you for being here and hope to see you again at another intelligent squar event thank you to Neil thank you [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Intelligence Squared

Views: 273,177

Keywords: intelligence squared, debate, intelligence squared debate, top debates, best debates, most interesting debates, intelligence2, intelligencesquared, iq2, iq2 debate, iq squared, Intelligence Squared +, IntelligenceSquared, Intelligence squared plus, IntelligenceSquaredPlus, IntelligenceSquared+, intelligencesquaredplus, intelligencesquared+, niall ferguson, politics, us politics, trump, gender politics, campuses, israel, gaza, scotland

Id: a4t_4S1h4Zg

Length: 90min 6sec (5406 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 06 2024