Niall Ferguson Profile picture
Jun 18 13 tweets 3 min read Read on X
I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. 1/13 thefp.com/p/were-all-sov…
A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5% of GDP for the foreseeable future. 2/13
The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.” 3/13
We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. 4/13
The share of GDP going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3% of GDP this year to a projected 2.3% in 30 years’ time. 5/13
Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership. 6/13
Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. To reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present. 7/13
The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase "deaths of despair" for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. 8/13
Like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles. 9/13
As in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in. 10/13
A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot ? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. 11/13
I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” 12/13
But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting. 13/13 thefp.com/p/were-all-sov…

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More from @nfergus

Apr 8
"From Deepfakes to Arms Races, AI Politics Is Here." Eight political and geopolitical questions about Artificial Intelligence: 1/9bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
1. Will AI have an adverse impact on the 2024 election? Even when voters are primed to be aware of deepfakes, they do not get better at identifying them—but they do lose trust in real videos. This probably means that the election will generate additional public pressure for regulation, especially if one campaign is seen to be using AI in a nefarious way. 2/9
2. Will AI be curbed by US regulation? Probably not. Congress has a track record of regulating new technologies very slowly. The time between the invention of railroads and the first federal regulation of them was 62 years. For telephones it was 33 years; radio 15; the internet 13. Nuclear energy is the outlier: The lag was just four years. 3/9
Read 9 tweets
Mar 10
We used to imagine humanity populating the galaxy. No longer. The end is now in sight for the great human population explosion: 1/9bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
The UN Population Division’s median estimate is that the global population will reach 10.4 billion by the mid 2080s. According to the @IHME_UW, it will peak at a lower level and earlier, at 9.7 billion in 2064. 2/9
This because, all over the world, the total fertility rate (TFR)—the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime—has been falling since the 1970s. In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 “replacement rate.” 3/9 Image
Read 9 tweets
Feb 24
Two years ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. Most experts underestimated the probability of that event mainly because they just didn't understand Putin. But I'd seen the "Time of Troublemaking" coming. Here's my essay, "The Godfather," from @TIME, Feb. 15, 2007. Quote: "When I saw him speak at the recent @MunSecConf, the Russian President gave a striking impersonation of Michael Corleone in The Godfather--the embodiment of implicit menace." 1/4Image
Ten years later, Don Corleone had morphed into "Peter the Great" in his own imagination. And that was why I was so sure at the beginning of 2022 that war was coming: 2/4bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
What I underestimated was not only the courage, strength and resolve of the Ukrainian army and people, but also the readiness of the U.S. and Europe to send arms after the initial Russian decapitation attempt had failed. 3/4
Read 4 tweets
Feb 11
Are we unable to imagine defeat? It seems clear to me that, if the US allows Ukraine, Israel and/or Taiwan to be overrun by their adversaries, there will be dire consequences for Americans, too. But few people agree. 1/8bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
Re-reading Len Deighton’s novel "SS-GB" made me wish someone would write or film "CCP-US." Because imagining defeat can focus the mind on the burning imperative not to lose. 2/8
Here, then, is the movie nobody is going to make. Sometime this year, the Chinese blockade Taiwan — or maybe it’s the Philippines. Or maybe North Korea launches missile against South Korea. But let’s go with Taiwan. 3/8
Read 8 tweets
Jan 3
It's not easy to found a new university, as Thomas Jefferson discovered — though it is easier than founding a new republic. The two enterprises have certain things in common. In particular, success depends on constitutional design. 1/22nationalaffairs.com/publications/d…
Modern universities have demonstrated considerable variety in institutional structure. And yet, despite these founding ambitions and diverse designs, a striking convergence in campus cultures has taken place in recent years: the dis-invitation campaigns; the cancellations of dissident voices; the denunciations of heterodox scholars; and the violations of academic freedom by an unholy combination of "woke" students, progressive faculty, and inquisitor-administrators. 2/22
The defining feature of the American university is that its governance structure more closely resembles that of a public for-profit corporation than is true of a British or a German one. It has a board of directors (board of trustees), a chief executive (university president), a management team (the provost and deans), and various stakeholders, of whom the most important are stockholders (donor alumni) and the key employees (star professors). 3/22
Read 22 tweets
Dec 31, 2023
Writing in 2003, I was not in principle against a pax americana in succession to the pax britannica of the 19th and early 20th centuries. I took (and still hold) the now heretical position that most history is the history of empires; that no empire is without its injustices and cruelties; but that the English-speaking empires were, in net terms, preferable for the world to the plausible alternatives, then and now. 1/10bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
However, I was skeptical about the neoconservative project to reorder the “Greater Middle East” under the cover of a “Global War on Terror” in retaliation for 9/11. I particularly doubted that the United States would be able to achieve its goals of transforming the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq into its allies — or at least satellites. Had Britain’s imperialists succeeded in taming the wild lands north of the Khyber Pass — much less ancient Mesopotamia? 2/10
The reasons for my skepticism were what I called the “three deficits” of America’s strange empire that dared not speak its own name. The first was the economic deficit ... The second was the manpower deficit ... Finally, and most importantly, there was the attention deficit. All that has happened since 2003 has confirmed that the three deficits remain a powerful constraint on the exercise of American power abroad. 3/10
Read 10 tweets

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