The Future of War: How Should the West Respond to its Enemies? (Sir Niall Ferguson)

0:00This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau. Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

0:42BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. It's not a poor man's Trump that we need in Britain. What we need is something like a Northern Hemisphere, Javier Millet, the Argentinian president. This is Radical with Amol Rajan. conversations about tomorrow from today, where I explore the deep global trends changing the world and go in search of the radical ideas that might help you to win the future. In this episode, a conversation with historian Professor Neil Ferguson about, well, the shape of the world today. Neil is a man of strong opinions and deep erudition. You're not going to like all of his opinions.

1:24You might agree with some and disagree with others. but he is extremely experienced at using the patterns of the past to explain where we are today. Are we living in a new Cold War? Are we living in a world that's a bit like the late 19th century in the era of great power rivalry? Is Benjamin Netanyahu really Israel's Churchill? Look, this is a podcast all about how the deep, deep trends of today are shaping the world of tomorrow. And to understand the depth of those trends, it's useful to look across modern history. And that's what Neil Ferguson is particularly capable of doing. I think you're going to enjoy this.

2:08Look, loads of you have been in touch to say you subscribe to the podcast after hearing that first episode with Laura Bates. Thank you so much. It's absolutely wonderful to get such generous and excited feedback. We really are incredibly pleased about how many of you are on this journey with us. So thank you. If you want to do the same after hearing this episode, just search for Radical with Amol Rajan on BBC Sounds and hit subscribe. Also, if you do subscribe, make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you'll get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you will never, ever miss out.

2:46I want to tell you that I turn down a hell of a lot of podcasts these days, but I wasn't going to turn you down. Oh, thank you so much. When you were growing up in Glasgow in the 1970s, the son of a doctor and physics teacher, two products of the Scottish Enlightenment, was it not a pretty radical thing to be drawn to Thatcherism, as you were when you arrived in Oxford? Not really, in the sense that I had been indoctrinated and maybe it's better to say steeped in the Scottish Enlightenment, even as a schoolboy. On the rare occasion that my father tolerated me taking a day off school for illness, I remember him handing me the wealth of nations with the words, you'd better read that.

3:28And Thatcherism was appealing to me because it was classical liberalism. It was economic liberalism. It was free trade. It was free markets. It was one of the central components of the Scottish Enlightenment. And it was not at all unusual for someone with my background to be drawn to Thatcher. After all, we'd seen the utter failure of the labor options on Clyde's side over the decades. So I don't think that was so odd. In any case, my father's side of the family had been staunch unionists, even although my mother's side of the family were left-leaning. And so only half the family was shocked, I think, by my conservatism.

4:09And what drew you to history in the first instance? Well, history is physics, only the particles of consciousness. It's, in that sense, much more difficult than physics because the atoms don't have consciousness, but they do in history, the particles of consciousness. And in that sense, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to study in which there aren't equations that give you predictable paths and predictable outcomes. History is the realm of chaos and contingency. I've tried to bring to history a physicist's sense of how things happen, the dynamics, if you like, of human interactions. And also to make it clear that all these human interactions take place in the material world in which, for example, changing energy technology has enormous consequences.

5:06But I always felt that the most interesting thing that you could possibly do was time travel. And as an ardent fan of Doctor Who, the single greatest thing the BBC ever produced, apart from your podcast. I have to say that I discovered time travel was not an option in physics, or at least was highly unlikely to be achievable in my lifetime. So I took the option of time travel through historical study. And that's what I do with the effort of imagining the past, reimagining the experience of the dead and trying to recapture what they experienced, to capture what the past was like when it was the present.

5:53That's the nearest thing to time travel that one can achieve. And it's the nearest thing to being Doctor Who that I'll ever get. The thing is, I've read many, many of your books. And actually, I wonder if today we could start, we'll obviously come to the events which are keeping you up at night in a moment. But I I wonder if we could start a little bit broad with some thoughts on not just history, but the study of history, because that's a useful context for getting us to where we are. And I just wonder, I've been reading a lot of columns about how Netanyahu could be Israel's Churchill. And we're often told we live in the age of autocrats and strong men.

6:27And I wonder the extent to which you, Neil, subscribe to the great man theory of history and the idea broadly that, you know, There might be these underlying deep threatens in technology or demography or geography that shape world affairs. But actually, a few key decisions by, it's tended to be men, but it's increasingly women, can shape our lives. It's a false dichotomy in the sense that both structures and individuals make history. My view is that one has to think of history as the interaction of the material world with human networks. But in any network, there are some nodes that have more importance, higher centrality than others.

7:10Winston Churchill was an absolutely crucial node in the network of the British elite. and having followed his principles into the political wilderness in the 1930s, he was perfectly positioned to lead the country from the extraordinary low point of Dunkirk and the defeat of France back to victory in 1945. That's greatness. But when people talk about great men or women in history, they've got to use that word great with care, because it doesn't mean great in the colloquial sense of this is great, this is awesome. Greatness can also be a terrible thing. And so maybe the word great is the wrong word to use these days.

7:57And what we really mean is momentous because Hitler was a momentous German leader. Without Hitler, there would have been no World War II to make Churchill a hero, but nobody would want to use the word great about Adolf Hitler. So let's think in terms of momentous individuals, key nodes in the network, if you prefer. It's interesting you say nodes and networks because one of your recent books, I think perhaps the most, not the most recent, which I think might have been Doom, The Politics of Catastrophe, but the one before that, which I read was called The Square and the Tower and it was about technology and it was about how networks shape human history.

8:35Can you just, there's a couple of paradigms. One is your paradigm about the second Cold War. Another is the paradigm of the spheres of influence. But I just, I wonder if we could start with a few paradigms and just the key argument of your book, The Square and the Tower. The Square and the Tower argued that we can't understand human history without a good understanding of networks, of social and other networks. Networks are also important because of the tendency of ideas to go viral. And contagion within social networks is an extraordinarily important thing. not only when it comes to, say, a pandemic where an extraordinarily infectious virus spreads, as COVID-19 did, it also can be true of ideas.

9:17An idea like, say, national socialism went viral in Germany in the early 1930s, having previously not been politically nearly as impactful. So studying networks helps us to understand everything from pandemics right the way through to the spread of extreme ideologies. It even allows us to understand the international system. Now, a lot of ink has been spilled on how the international system works, but you can think of it in network terms. In the world today, there is clearly a network of allies and aligned countries around the United States, which is the number one superpower. But there's also a rival network that's emerged in the last four or five years with China as the central node and Russia, Iran, and North Korea aligned with it, the so-called crinks or the axis of authoritarians.

10:12And so the world today is actually representable as a set of networks, an American network, and then a Chinese-centered network, with Europe as in some measure in between these two clusters, though gravitating towards the United States most of the time because Europe relies on the United States for so much of its security. I think this is a helpful way of thinking about the world. It certainly is. And you've helped me in understanding the world. And this actually is implicitly an invitation to me to let you know of a phrase I came up with based on some of your work, which I'm very proud of. I saw a YouTube lecture you did where you talked about the impact on Europe of Johannes Gutenberg's printing press.

10:58And you said one of the things that happens when you get these revolutionary technologies is you massively, as in the case of Gutenberg, decrease the cost of producing content and therefore rapidly increase the dissemination of ideas. And this gave us the Enlightenment and in some ways the modern world. And I've got a bit of a thing, but I rip off your ideas and I say that the difference between what happened in Gutenberg's era and Zuckerberg's era is just timescale. So what took 10 years or 10 minutes in Gutenberg's era will take 10 seconds in Zuckerberg's era. And this is the sense that history itself is speeding up.

11:32And in recent years, lots of people have talked about the period we've lived through as the Great Acceleration. But my sense is that what's happened with the Internet and smartphones and social networks and is about to happen with AI are such enormous wrenches in human history and are doing things at such enormous speed that the great acceleration is insufficient as a phrase. And acceleration is the rate of change of speed. And the rate of change of acceleration is jerks. And I think we're living in the age of jerks. What do you think of that? Well, of course, I wish I'd thought of it. Fantastic, there you go.

12:08I didn't think of crinks. I think the interesting thing about the age we live in is that it does seem to operate on very roughly somewhere between 10 and 100 times faster. If one thinks about how communications function in the 16th and 17th century, in the time when the printing press really spread, we are clearly living at a time when information can move much, much faster. I talk here about the kind of average speed of transmission. The most rapid speed of transmission, say, what goes on at the big hedge funds when they're doing high-frequency trading is not the average speed of communication that ordinary people experience.

12:52And there's still quite a lot of what we call latency in our networks. For example, President Trump still had to get on a plane in Canada and fly back to Washington, leaving the G7 meeting early to get to the National Security Council to decide what they're going to do about Iran. That couldn't happen at the speed of an email. So in some ways, we're moving faster, but we shouldn't be confused about the speed at which we're moving on average when we transmit information and when we transport people. The transportation of people hasn't got much faster in my lifetime. In some ways, it's got a bit slower.

13:33But what's really changed, and here I would perhaps add a nuance, is the volume of information. That has exploded in ways that are almost incomprehensible. And the exponential growth of the volume of information, it seems to me, is more significant than the speed at which information moves. Our problem as individual humans is a data overload problem. It's incredibly difficult to find the signal when the noise is so deafening. It's really hard to find the wheat when there's the deluge of chaff. And the zone is being flooded now not only by human-generated content, but as you know, by AI chatbot-generated content, which will soon dominate the information on the internet, rendering the internet pretty much useless in a relatively short space of time because we won't be able to tell.

14:29Does that speeding up of history, the Great Acceleration or the Age of Jerks, whatever one calls it, does that make part of your job as a historian harder? One of the things I know you've said, you've written often, I've read that you've written often, that history teaches you there is no future singular, there's only futures plural. But you know that one of the reasons people pay your consultancy, read your books, phone you up, invite you onto podcasts, is because they hope that erudition about the past will help us predict the future. Is it getting harder to do that bit of the job of a historian because of the rate of change around the world today?

15:06I don't know if it's getting harder because it's always enormously difficult to predict history in real time. You're engaged in a kind of pattern recognition when you're trying to establish whether, for example, an unknown virus in Wuhan is going to cause a global pandemic. and when I and my colleagues at Greenmantle said in mid-January 2020, this is going to be the biggest pandemic since 1918-19, we were running on an intuition plus data plus lessons of history. And we were very early to that. Similar pattern recognition went on a year later when we said, look, there's a high likelihood of inflation because of the decisions that the new Biden administration is making.

15:57We were engaging in pattern recognition, looking at the trajectory of fiscal policy and monetary policy. A year later, we said with really high confidence, Putin is definitely launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That was the end of 2021, long before most people realized it was for real. So I think the exercise of what I think of as applied history comes from seeing in the pattern of events what the most likely scenario is. And you're all the time trying to attach probabilities. And I don't honestly think that's any easier or harder today than it was when we set up Green Mantle in 2011, even although clearly the speed of life has gone up, your jerk problem is real.

16:46But also, more importantly, the volume of information has become an unmanageable deluge. In the end, it's still about trying to detect the signal and then saying, what's this like? What is this crisis like? I want to ask you about two other patterns and apply some lessons from history. One is this idea of Cold War II. And you've pointed out that the fact of geopolitical bipolarity is different today it's america versus the people's republic of china in alliance with these other crinks as opposed to america versus the soviet union but then there's another pattern which we've discussed in the past when nick and i were doing the today podcast about uh the late 19th century and spheres of influence this idea that you could split the world up into these giant arenas and it's where those spheres clash that you're most likely to see wars why is cold war ii which you've received some pushback on people have said you know i've seen you engage in arguments civilized arguments online about this.

17:40Why is Cold War II a useful paradigm for understanding the world today? Well, this was one of the more obvious insights. I think it was in 2018 that we were sitting looking at maps of the world according to whether countries used Huawei hardware or not. And I remember saying, you know, that map of the world sure does look like a Cold War map. And then around the same time, we noticed, this was working with Chris Miller, the author of Chip Wars, we noticed that China was spending more on importing semiconductors than on importing oil. And it was at that point that I started to think, maybe we just need to think of this as Cold War II, because there are two superpowers in economic terms, but they're engaged in the technological arms race, just as the United States and the Soviet Union were.

18:35But aren't they more interconnected than America and the Soviet Union? Isn't there an entanglement? You coined the phrase Chimerica. Isn't there an interconnectedness, which is a form of security that was not the case with America and the Soviet Union? That's correct, because the Soviets, particularly in the early Cold War, resisted economic entanglements, down and turned down involvement in the Marshall Plan. And even later in the 1970s, when the Soviets started to want to do more trade with the United States, it was still on a tiny scale. So Cold War II is different from Cold War I, but so was World War II different from World War I.

19:10You still want to use this kind of nomenclature to capture that the fundamental geopolitical and technological dimensions are the same. And I think this is preferable to your spheres of influence late 19th century paradigm, because it really isn't a multipolar world. There are only two AI superpowers. There are really only two powers that are capable of waging world war, and those two powers are the United States and China. And I think the other thing that differentiates Cold Wars from previous eras is that nuclear weapons radically raise the price of conflict, of hot war. This is why George Orwell first used the term Cold War all the way back in 1945.

19:53He was the one who coined it. And Orwell said, a Cold War is a peace that is no peace. He wrote this just after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, observing that now that this destructive power existed, war would be difficult in its old form of head-to-head great power conflict. The stakes would be so high that war would take the form rather of proxy wars in the periphery and Cold War between the superpowers. And Orwell also saw, with astonishing prescience, that the Soviets would quickly acquire an atomic bomb. And then at some point, China would too. It's all there in 1945 in Orwell's head.

20:32I think we live in that post-nuclear world in which there are nuclear weapons. And that alters everything because it raises the stakes much, much higher than before for an outright war between great powers.

20:51I really hope you're enjoying my conversation with Neil Ferguson. There is loads more still to come. I just wanted to quickly jump in here to say that if you are enjoying this conversation, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds so you don't miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on. And that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode. And you'll never miss out. Thank you so much. And now, back to Neil. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed.

21:29But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

22:00Why do you see Israel's actions against Iran in the past few days as a reassertion of Western credibility, which is what you wrote about in Barry Weiss's The Free Press website, to which I think you might be a contributing editor. I am a regular contributor to the free press. Cold War II took a turn for the worse under Joe Biden in that the United States made a series of missteps that undermined its deterrent credibility. It really made a hash of withdrawing from Afghanistan, though, of course, that had been planned by President Trump. It utterly failed to deter Putin from the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

22:44And then it took its eye right off the ball in the Middle East and was taken entirely by surprise by the events of October 7th, 2023. And so deterrence was eroded partly because Joe Biden's handlers and advisors preferred the word de-escalation to deterrence. I think they're actually functional opposites of one another, but also because China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea formed an axis for the first time, began to cooperate openly around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So compared with when he left office at the beginning of 2021 and when he returned to it four years later, Trump saw the world change quite significantly for the worse from a strategic point of view.

23:36And I think it's been important in this first year of the second Trump term to see whether or not the United States could regain its credibility and regain deterrence. So we'll see soon how far President Trump is going to go in supporting Israel. But even before that decision is taken or becomes clear, we have seen Israel inflict a crushing defeat on a key member of the axis of authoritarian Iran. And the only thing that Israel cannot do on its own is to destroy the FORDU enrichment facility. For that, it does need the United States to intervene. But with that very important caveat, this has been a devastating demonstration of asymmetrical warfare.

24:33Remember, buy a country that has about one-ninth the population of Iran. It's an extraordinary achievement, a masterpiece of military strategy that will be studied at military academies for many years to come. And from the vantage point of Russia, as well as China, not forgetting a little rocket man in North Korea, it's a shocker to see what an American ally equipped, of course, with American hardware, as well as hardware that it produces itself, is able to do. The air defenses of Iran were pretty much destroyed in October by the Israel Defense Forces. They were unable to restore those air defences even in more than six months.

25:23And so this has been a decisive victory for the West, even if it's not yet complete. Bibi Netanyahu made a direct appeal to the people of Iran using social media and social networks, where he said, basically, you're a great civilization that's been betrayed by theocrats over the past half century following the Islamic Revolution of the late 1970s. But do you think he or anyone else in the West has a realistic idea of what were the regime in Iran to fall might replace it? And is it a sort of liberal delusion or a neoconservative delusion to believe that a liberal democracy will spring up in Tehran?

26:00Well, if anybody has that delusion, it's certainly not the people running Israel. They know full well that there are elements that are even more extreme than the people around Supreme Leader Khamenei. And so there are non-trivial risks associated with regime change if the regime topples. But I think from an Israeli vantage point, the most important thing is simply the destruction of the nuclear weapons capability. Prime Minister Netanyahu said consistently for years, ever since I have known him, and that goes back close to 20 years, that there can never be a nuclear-armed Iran, that that would pose an existential threat to Israel.

26:47That would raise the probability of a second Holocaust unacceptably high. And when at the end of last month, the International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran is in violation of its non-proliferation commitments, that gave a clear-cut casus belli for Israel to act. And I think it's been the right thing to do. It would have been a great mistake to have let Iran get away with it when it was doing nothing in a serious way to address the diplomatic pressure that was being applied by President Trump and showed every sign of trying to cheat its way towards a nuclear armed capability. How should Britain support Israel, if at all?

27:33Well, I think the problem with Sir Keir Starmer's government is that it has perhaps subconsciously picked up the language of the Biden administration. And that dreadful word de-escalation has started to feature in everything the prime minister says. And it's entirely inapplicable in this context, because both sides will clearly have to escalate in what is an existential war. From Israel's point of view, it's of existential importance to prevent Iran's nuclear program from ever producing a nuclear weapon. And the Iranian regime clearly faces outright oblivion because it's incapable of defending its people as well as its military assets from whatever the IDF throws at Iran.

28:25So to talk about de-escalation in this context is just a little bit like going into a Glasgow pub on a Saturday night when the beer glasses are flying and saying, I say, chaps, we really should de -escalate. It's absurd. I just got an image there of what a young Neil Ferguson was doing. Certainly not using the word de-escalate in the wrong context. But I think the other point I'd make is that the government, and I'm thinking not only of the prime minister, but of foreign secretary, David Lammy, is that they've got into this habit of thinking that Gaza is the pivotal central point of the Middle East when it's not.