Trump’s World Order — Live from Davos, with Niall Ferguson

26:41Scott Galloway:When I look at this, I don't know what to call it, new framework, I don't want to use the term new world order, it feels to me more less Monroe Doctrine and more, well, maybe it is part of the Monroe Doctrine, but spheres of influence. And I worry that we're withdrawing from, I think the most valuable companies in the world, Apple and Alphabet, are basically operating systems upon which everything else is built and they get a tax for everything and they set the tone. I have Elizabeth American economics, policy, rule of law, mostly democracy. It's kind of been the operating system for the majority of the West.

27:16Scott Galloway:And now people are deciding maybe they'll try and find their own operating system or shifting off of it. and we're moving to these spheres of influence where we have these regional superpowers, China and Asia, the U.S. and the Americas, I don't know, they fight it out in Europe. You're not worried or you don't see it as kind of a withdrawal. You see it as flexing, which will ultimately potentially increase U.S. dominance and kind of get the Europeans in line and to stop, quite frankly, bitching and moaning and live up to their rhetoric that music has to match the words. I see it as a withdrawal to a smaller America around spheres of influence that will embolden Russia and China in their spheres.

27:55Scott Galloway:You don't see that. Well, it's conceivable. I guess this is sort of Gideon Rachman's view that in the end, Trump's just another strong man who wants to carve up the world with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. But I'm not sure that that's really what we're seeing here. I mean, last I heard, Indo-Pacific command is still by far the most important of the military commands of the United States. And its role in life is to deter China from seeking to establish itself as in control of Taiwan or extending its power in the South China Sea. It's a real and formidable force. And I don't think if you spoke to Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of Indo-Pacific Command, he would say, yeah, we're just winding this up because we're all going to the Western Hemisphere.

28:42I think we have to distinguish here between rhetoric and reality. the rhetoric of the trump administration particularly trump 2.0 is quite consciously borrowed from mckinley and roosevelt it's a sort of circa 1900 vibe i don't know who gives trump this stuff because for sure he's not sitting there reading biographies of theodore roosevelt somebody thinks it's a good idea maybe it's jd i don't know somebody thinks it's a good idea to make these allusions to an America before the New Deal, an America which was an America still on the rise as a power, not even really regarded as a great power by the rest of the world.

29:22So this rhetoric has clearly some appeal to members of the administration, maybe to voters. I don't know how many voters have heard of the Roosevelt corollary. Not many, I suspect. But the reality remains that the United States is a global power with military capabilities throughout the world. And the international trading system doesn't look remotely like spheres of influence. If you look at Hyun Song-Shin's work on the networks of trade, of supply chains and interlocking balance sheets, it's still a very, very extraordinarily complex global trading system. And when President Trump uses a 19th century tool like tariffs, all that happens is that the supply chains get reconfigured and the Chinese goods get to America with two stops along the way rather than just the one of 2018.

30:11So I think we need to just take Trump seriously, but not literally. This was the key insight that Selena Zito had way back in the 2016 campaign when she pointed out that, you know, journalists took him literally, but not seriously, voters the other way. So we don't, I think, need to take the national security strategy literally as a document. We just need to look at what the US does. And what it does is to maintain military superiority in all of the major zones of the world, including Europe. So here's the thing that the Europeans never want to face. that throughout the period since 1945, certainly from 1947, 1948, 1949, they have relied on the US for their nuclear security.

31:00Nuclear deterrence is not really provided by the French Foster Frap, certainly not by a British Trident. It's an American public good that is made available to Europeans. It's not included in the NATO budget. It's America's strategic force that says the Russians can't have Central or Western Europe. And if they try to have it, they risk obliteration. That's been the position really since the late 40s, and that has been the position despite the end of the Cold War. Now, nobody likes talking about this in Europe, because strategic autonomy, if it were to be meaningful, would mean that the Europeans would need a proper nuclear arsenal, which they can't remotely afford, and I don't think they would have the political will to build.

31:45So what is the alternative, really? There isn't one. The United States is the thing that deters Russia. And as China is now in the midst of building a huge nuclear arsenal that will at some point be as big as the Russians, you really need the United States. Otherwise, you're completely at the mercy of the great Eurasian autocracies, which I don't think even the most Trump-phobic European liberal could regard as a good outcome. another thing that's important when we get to reality is that geopolitics doesn't change that much because the world's geography is pretty constant over time and whether you're looking at now uh or if or if you want to uh look at the 1940s or if you want to go back to the early 1900s there are really two great geopolitical formations this goes back to the uh the early theorists of geopolitics, Mackinder and Spikeman.

32:41There's the great Eurasian land mass, which has historically been dominated by large authoritarian empires. And then there are the Rimlands, which are kind of Western Europe, British Isles, the Americas, and then Japan, the Asian equivalents. That's geopolitics. Nightmare scenario, the great Eurasian authoritarian regimes dominate the whole Eurasian landmass, and you're just left in the United States with the Western Hemisphere. That would not be a good outcome. It wouldn't have been a good outcome if Hitler had won World War II, which is why, of course, the United States ended up fighting Germany.

33:25So I think you can't change that. You can act in a way that makes the probability of China plus Russia plus Iran plus North Korea winning, or you can work to stop them winning. And I think the Trump administration is doing a better job of stopping them winning than its predecessor did. A Biden administration was really quite unsuccessful in checking the formation of this axis. Indeed, I would say that the axis didn't really exist in 2020, but it was fully in existence by the end of joe biden's term so whatever we hear when president trump is riffing as he was earlier today or whatever we read in his truth social account which shouldn't really be called that it should be called truthy social because kind of truthy in the way stephen kolber used to talk about truthiness is truthy social about half of what he says he kind of means and about half.

34:22He's just shooting the shit. If we shouldn't get too fixated on what Trump says, we should be much, much more focused on what the United States does. And what it does seems to me a pretty strong advertisement for American allies staying with America and not contemplating the possibility of joining those lovable guys, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Supreme Leader Khamenei, Kim Jong-un. I mean, is that the club we want to be associated with? Not me.

34:57Scott Galloway:We'll be right back.

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35:46Scott Galloway:We are going to play Truth or Daredevil. What? Oh boy. Fantastic. You guys go hard, man. Daredevil Born Again, official podcast Tuesdays. And stream season two of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again on Disney+.

36:16Scott Galloway:turning complexity into clarity, pressure into precision, and experience into advantage. Legal work isn't just about knowing the law. It's about applying it carefully, consistently, and under real stakes. Harvey is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze large volumes of documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across complex matters. It doesn't replace expertise, it strengthens it, making teams faster, more exacting, and more certain. Today, more than half of the AMLA 100 use Harvey as part of their workflow. Learn more at Harvey.ai.

37:03Scott Galloway:So let's talk about what America actually does, and let's use that as a bridge to talking about Ukraine. My sense is when I read the proposed peace plan that the U.S. outlined, to me, it sounded like just scheduling the next war. It sounded to me or what the president actually has done is given comfort to our enemy Russia while withdrawing. I would argue that NATO right now is a Ukrainian army. If NATO's mission is to repel an invasion of Europe by Russia, it is effectively the Ukrainian people are in the Ukrainian army is is in fact NATO. And it feels as if America has withdrawn a lot of at least vibe support from Ukraine.

37:38Scott Galloway:And then I would argue the EU has stepped up. You don't agree with that? Well, let's be clear. The European Union cannot, without American support, provide the assistance that Ukraine needs to survive. the war is uh dragging on towards its fifth year this is going to be harder and harder for ukraine to sustain uh there is a manpower problem at the front uh there's an air defense problem in the cities uh although the ukrainians have been heroic uh and also tremendously innovative in the drone warfare and technology, the Russians have more or less managed to keep pace with that so that the Ukrainians have an edge on quality, but the Russians have an edge on quantity.

38:33The Europeans, when American aid was first cut off back at the end of Biden's presidency, could not fill the gap. That was immediately obvious because the minute the American aid stopped, you'll remember that the house cut it off then ukraine started to lose the united states isn't supplying much aid since president trump was sworn in but it's still playing an important part in technology service to air missiles yeah it's it's important to recognize that if that went then the europeans would not be able to make up the difference europeans have handed a lot of weapons as well as money to Ukraine.

39:13They have not built an awful lot of weapons anew. The Danes are in especially weak positions because they've given pretty much all of their military hardware to Ukraine. They don't have actually much defense capability at all at this point. So until the Europeans do serious rearmament, and I especially mean until the Germans do serious rearmament, Ukraine needs the United States to remain engaged or it risks losing the war. I was down at the Ukrainian house earlier today. And there's a fantastic video. You must go and see it. An AI-generated video imagining Russian drone strikes on Paris, on Brussels, and brilliantly on Davos.

39:54And the Ukrainian point, which I wholly agree with, is that Europeans just find it really hard to believe what you said earlier, that Ukraine is, in fact, fighting for Europe. They just can't imagine that the Russians would ever do to their cities what the Russians are doing to all the major Ukrainian cities every night, to the point that Kiev, at this point, has almost no heating and electricity in really large parts of town. I mean, there are people I know whose apartments have no heat. In midwinter, and it's bitterly cold there. So I think we don't, and the Europeans as well, don't fully understand how fragile the situation is, how overstretched Ukraine is, how hard it is to sustain this war, and how desperately we need the war to stop.

40:45Peace, in the sense of the Russians all leave and Ukraine gets the Donbass back, maybe even the Crimea, this is a total fantasy. That is not how wars like this end. There are two scenarios. Scenario one, Ukraine loses. Finally, they just can't sustain defense anymore. morale crumbles. This is how these wars typically end. The line is very long. The Ukrainians don't have as many men. There's a scenario in which they lose. And the Russians, after all the slaughter of the past four years, are able to advance further into Ukraine. That can't be ruled out as a scenario. It's actually the most likely scenario in a historical framework.

41:26Or there's a compromise peace that stops the war and gives Ukraine some breathing space. That is the better outcome, obviously. There is no third possibility. There's no possibility where Ukraine wins.

41:40Scott Galloway:Oh, press pause. The third possibility, we arm them with Tomahawk missiles and the requisite infrastructure and technology to start taking out more of Russia's oil infrastructure, which results in a compromise peace, which isn't as onerous or as one-sided as the current envision compromise base. I think that greatly understates how strong the Russian war economy remains. So you don't think... Just let me finish, Scott. I'm sorry, go ahead, Neil. The Ukrainians already did take out most of the Russian oil refining capacity last year, and the Russians just kept shipping crude. I thought it was 13%.

42:14No, it got up to 40%. And higher, the Ukrainians actually don't need the tomahawks that much because their own deep strikes with drones are highly successful and have been incredibly effective, except that Russia's big and it has enormous capacity, particularly when it comes to exporting hydrocarbons. You blow up the refineries, they just then ship the crude. And the sanctions regime has failed doubly. It hasn't succeeded in stopping the Russians shipping crude in the so-called ghost fleet. And it also hasn't stopped the Europeans and others trading with Russia through third countries. I mean, European countries export a suspiciously large amount of stuff to Kazakhstan and Tatarstan and Kyrgyzstan.

42:58It all goes on to Russia. So under these circumstances, there isn't really a way in which the military balance can decisively be shifted against Russia. The Russians have been held, and it's been an incredibly impressive success. They've been held. They've barely advanced, despite casualties on a monthly level, that the US suffered in a year in Vietnam at the height of the war. They haven't gained much ground. In fact, somebody told me the other day, calculated that a snail would have got further in the direction of Pogrovsk than the Russians did last year. So that's pretty good. But I'm not sure there's much more that can be done with Ukraine's capability.

43:41I think greater economic pressure on Russia is still needed to get Putin to the negotiating table. But you also need a deal that he can take, that he can accept. We're talking here, Scott, about a compromise piece. That's the nature of the beast. And for that to happen, Putin is going to have to say, I achieved my victory. He's going to have to be able to sell something to his people to justify all the slaughter. I think that probably involves him abandoning his original goal, which was to take the whole of Ukraine and turn it into another Belarus. I think we've pretty much told him that's impossible.

44:19And we've also, I think, pretty much told him, you're not going to destroy NATO either. But I think we have to give him some territorial win to end this war. And that is why I think the 28-point plan, the original version, was not a bad starting point for negotiation in that the Russians were prepared to talk about it. And the fact that the Russians were prepared to talk about it so much so that they even claimed authorship of it meant that you were getting somewhere. This was why the involvement of Jared Kushner was so important. He is a highly skilled negotiator. Steve Witkoff on his own was not getting very far.

44:58Bring Jared in and you start getting results. We've seen that in the Middle East. I think we begin to see it with Ukraine. It's tough. But I don't think the Europeans have helped at all. In fact, what happened was that after that 28-point plan did the rounds, the Europeans said, no, no, no, this is far too good for Russia. We insist on changes. And they insisted on changes that, for example, left the Ukrainian army even bigger. And of course, the Russians said no. I mean, I can understand some of the American frustration.

45:27Scott Galloway:It wasn't the original 28-point plan. Doesn't it feel like it was written by Lavrov? It felt like a Russian peace plan. It wasn't written by Lavrov. It may have been written by another Russian or co-authored. It certainly wasn't written by American diplomats, but I think it's fair to say that it was agreed between Russians, Ukrainians, Witkoff, Kushner. I think that's what happened. The Ukrainians were actually ready because they desperately need a break. They need a ceasefire. And then the Europeans were the ones who said, no, no, no, we need to make it much, much tougher. And that killed the negotiation.

46:05That's an important point that is not, I think, widely understood. and I think I can speak with some authority on this. So we have to recognize that this piece won't be pretty. It will involve almost certainly territorial sessions. The language of that's important. In the original plan, it wasn't that the Russians acquired de jure ownership of Donbass. It was de facto. The language here matters a lot because if you can put it that way, then you haven't permanently ceded the land to Russia. it's a temporary state of affairs and it recognizes roughly where the line of contact is so i think this is the only way the war can end well it can end really badly if we hold out for the perfect peace that will satisfy the men in brussels and uh in berlin if we hold out for a really good peace we could end up with a ukrainian defeat and that that is a nightmare scenario for europe which is why i can't really understand the lack of realism here that this is a time when you have to get...

47:08Scott Galloway:So I just want to press pause because you have six more minutes and you've said a lot there. Just under the auspices of realism, you don't worry that if Putin is allowed to quote-unquote claim a victory here and not end this with something resembling a black eye, that all we're doing is scheduling with this peace the next war, that eventually it's the rest of Ukraine, Poland, Finland, Lithuania. Of course, if we did nothing after such a ceasefire or peace, then we only deserve another war. But if you get the breathing space, you can start the reconstruction of Ukraine. The Ukrainians are our military power.

47:38Scott Galloway:Who's going to invest in a Ukraine where we feel like Russia is just going to rearm and then invade again? I'll invest in Ukraine. They have the best defense technology companies in the world. We'll take their drones, but will anyone invest in the civilian infrastructure, thinking that Russia's just going to rearm and take the rest in another war in five or seven years? Have I been to South Korea? So South Korea is interesting because it's a complete heap of rubble in 1953. And it has a neighbor who is clearly as dangerous as neighbors get. And yet, here we are. So it's one of the... So you think the West and the US might be willing to participate in that type of 55th parallel or whatever it's called that would guarantee some sort of security such that people would be willing to invest and Ukraine would have some sense of autonomy and self-governance?

48:22Yes. And I've said from the outset, I've said it to President Zelensky, your best outcome is to be South Korea. Your worst outcome is to be South Vietnam. That is the nature of the relationship you have. The United States has supported you, but you need to lock in what you've got and then build it, rebuild it. And then you'll be able to show because on the other side of the line, there'll be continued Putinism, kleptocracy, criminality, poverty. And on the Western side, there'll be the European South Korea, which I think is not an unrealistic vision given the talent there is in Ukraine, given what they've shown themselves capable of, incredible courage, incredible innovative energy.

49:05I'm a passionate supporter of Ukraine's bid for freedom, passionate supporter. I do not want to see it fail because Europeans set too high a bar in these negotiations. I believe if you can get a breathing space, two things will happen. First, Ukraine can begin to rebuild. It now has a formidable army, the biggest in Europe, and it has shown itself to have formidable military technology. Now take that and scale it in Germany. If the Germans today, Friedrich Merz, are you listening? Did Operation Warp Speed for rearmament instead of what they are doing, which is going through the usual incredibly slow bureaucracy of procurement.

49:46If they just did, okay, Gigafactory in Brandenburg, we take Ukrainian drone designs, and we don't just do 3 million a year, we do 20 million a year. How about that, Putin? Now, if the Germans did that, and they could do it, they have the manufacturing infrastructure, they have the workforce, they have a crying need for it, since the days of selling automobiles to the Chinese are over, they did that, that would be a game changer, unlike Tomahawk missiles. Because if the Russians saw German rearmament really happening, that would be the clearest sign, A, that Putin had made a huge strategic blunder, B, that Ukraine had a future.

50:27So I think there are ways to solve this problem. They just require far more energy on the European side, far more commitment, and above all, something of what we still see in the United States, an ability when the chips are down to cut through the bureaucracy and do things really fast. So I just wish we could have sort of Elon Muskian rearmament, you know, the SpaceX approach. You could scale what the Ukrainians do. You know what's really tragic is they have fantastic technology. They cannot scale it. They don't, of course, have the space or the security. They're trying to build drones in a war zone under daily bombardment.

51:05If you did all that stuff at scale in Germany, A, you would create meaningful deterrence. B, this is the beauty of the thing. You'd actually see German economic recovery. And that's like a win-win if ever there was one.

51:19Scott Galloway:So I'm getting a bit of a red light here. So I just really crisply, you said something that really resonated. And my sense is there's this historic opportunity to defend a strait, replace, whatever the term, defeat the Islamic Republic. And I'm really hoping, I've never seen a greater case for greater ROI than limited, whatever you want to call it, strikes on civilian suppression centers and kind of tip over the regime, if you will. Regime alteration. That's what we have to hope is coming. It will transform the security of the Middle East. It will transform life for Iranians. And I believe it will be a huge contribution towards a peaceful end to Cold War II because it will signal that whatever Chinese project produced the relationships with Russia, Iran, and North Korea It was not a realistic geopolitical project.

52:13That's my hope.

52:14Scott Galloway:What do you think the chances are that the regime holds if there is an intervention, a coordinated intervention, say U.S. and Israel, whatever it might be, intelligence, limited strikes? What do you think is the likelihood that the regime survives without Western military intervention? Very high indeed, like 90 percent, because they've crushed the protests brutally. And the regime's repressive apparatus showed no sign of cracking. So if there's no intervention, that regime lasts. I mean, it's like the Soviets had a little bit of a revolt in 1962. They utterly crushed it. 1962 was pretty early in the Cold War.

52:47In fact, a dangerous time in the Cold War. So, no, we need to, if we want to get rid of the Islamic Republic, which has been a source of mischief and mayhem and murder since 1979, President Trump has to do what I think he is going to do.

53:02Scott Galloway:Yeah, your lips to his ears. And the most important thing we haven't covered, but we'll have to cover it quickly, Scotland's group draw in the World Cup, Neil. We're in with Morocco and Brazil. Is that right? I mean, come on. Anyways, Scotland, what are our chances, Neil? Henry Kissinger was a great football soccer fan. One of his great maxims was every success is an admission ticket to the next crisis. And after Scotland heroically won their qualifying game in one of the greatest football games I've ever watched. Got one of the best players in the world right now. It was a fantastic thing. I said to my sons, by the way, every success is admission ticket to the Knicks crisis.

53:41And then the draw came when they said, Dad, we know what you mean. So we got Haiti to beat. And otherwise, I think we just have to do damage limitation against Brazil and Morocco. Yeah, it's too bad. But, you know, I think it was a glorious, glorious, glorious game. We'll all remember Scott McTominay's goal as long as we live.

53:58Scott Galloway:That was one of the greatest matches in football history. And are you back in London? I spend quite a bit of my time in Oxford more than in London. and between Oxford and Stanford, I'm always just permanently jet-lagged, never bored. Yeah, it's a rough commute. It is. And just give me 30 seconds, and I talk about this a lot. I would say the difference between Europe and the U.S. is U.S. is still the best place to make money, Europe the best place to spend it, and the difference between the U.K. and the U.S. is you're the ones that stayed. The risk gene has been starched out of the U.K. gene pool, and it's been very damaging.

54:32Scott Galloway:How would you, as someone who's bi, not bi-coastal, but bi-country, how would you try to summarize the big difference between the UK and the US and what could the UK learn from it? I'm a dual citizen and I look at both and think a lot about this. I think if you take AI or quantum, take the cutting edge of technology, the UK is clearly a source of real talent. What's the problem? is not the lack of talent or entrepreneurship. It's the capital markets are utterly unfriendly to scaling a really dynamic company, which is why Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Saleman and others have all ended up in the United States because you have a brilliant company.

55:18I mean, DeepMind's the most important AI company in the end. It's a much more important, historically innovative company, but it's a British company that ended up being acquired by Google because there was no other way to scale it. So I don't think these are cultural problems. They're institutional problems. And you can see these as, in a sense, Britain reverting to its 1970s bad habits, which Margaret Thatcher temporarily cured Britain of. If you could bring Margaret Thatcher back to life and redo Thatcherism, then I think there would be a chance, at least, of revitalizing Britain's capital markets, which, you know, are potentially extraordinarily broad and deep.

55:59I mean, very liquid. But institutionally, the incentives are terrible. You know, the way like pension funds deploy capital in Britain would make you weep. So I think there are fixes here that the next, and I hope it will be a conservative government, can address. I want Kemi Badenoch to be Black Thatcher and to do all the things again that we, the hard way we had to do starting in 1979.

56:25Scott Galloway:Neil Ferguson, historian and public intellectual. I love having you on. I disagree with most of everything you say, Neil, and yet I learned so much. And you really do open my mind, and I'd like to think a lot of our listeners' minds, to you just have this unbelievable ability to thread history with economics and logic, even if you get to a place that kind of sends chills down my spine. I just love speaking to you. I really appreciate your time and appreciate how, quite frankly, unfiltered, you are. That's really refreshing. It would be so boring if we agreed about everything, but we agree about football.

56:59Scott Galloway:There we go. That's dialogue. All right. Thanks again, Neil. Good to see you. My pleasure.

57:23Scott Galloway:people never see. Practice made perfect is Harvey's belief in relentless refinement, in turning complexity into clarity, pressure into precision, and experience into advantage. Legal work isn't just about knowing the law, it's about applying it carefully, consistently, and under real stakes. Harvey is an AI platform built specifically for legal practice, helping teams analyze large volumes of documents, draft with precision, and collaborate securely across complex matters. It doesn't replace expertise, it strengthens it, making teams faster, more exacting, more certain. Today, more than half of the AMLA 100 use Harvey as part of their workflow.

57:57Scott Galloway:Learn more at Harvey.ai.