"For a man who is said to have his eye on the Nobel Peace Prize, President Donald J. Trump sure is spoiling for a fight." 1/9 "The latest attempt to start a fight—and by the looks of it, the most successful so far— took place at the usually dull Munich Security Conference on Valentine’s Day, when Vice President J. D. Vance ... accused the Europeans of being the new Soviets." 2/9

The idea that history magically stopped being about empires in 1945 is one of the central conceits of the "liberal international order." This @gideonrachman column suggests that the empire is back. But did it ever go away? The central argument of my book "Colossus" was that the Cold War was a contest between two empires, each of which claimed it was not an empire, but that the other was engaged in imperialism. amazon.com/Colossus-Rise-…

My first essay for @thetimes: "To this day, FDR still holds the record for the largest number of executive orders in the first hundred days of a presidency ... But that record is about to be broken by Trump 2.0." 1/7 "The way to think about Trump 2.0 is as the New Deal reversed. If FDR began the vast expansion of federal agencies that continued in the 1960s and 1970s, DJT is attempting to turn back the clock: to shrink the federal bureaucracy with a barrage of presidential decrees." 2/7

This is a truly brilliant essay by @AllisonPearson It will force you to think again about the epidemic of pedophile rape that so many people, from lowly coppers to mighty ministers, did not want to talk about.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/0… I have long said that the thing people don't understand about England is that class matters more than race. That is one of the things this horrific saga illustrates. Another is that the British Establishment's default setting is still to hush up scandals.

"As immediately becomes clear to anyone in his presence, Trump today is much more than president-elect. He is king. My lords, ladies, and gentlemen, I give you: @realDonaldTrump, American Monarch." @TheFP 1/7 "American liberals have spent nearly a quarter of a millennium fretting that one president or another would institute an 'imperial presidency' in the Augustan or Napoleonic style." Well, the imperial presidency seems to be here. 2/7thefp.com/p/niall-fergus…

"Today, the United States finds itself in at least the sixth year of a second cold war, this time with China, a confrontation that has become even more dangerous under the Biden administration. In his first term, Trump recognized the American need to contain China’s rise and convinced Washington policy elites, despite their initial skepticism, that this required both a trade war and a tech war." 1/8 "In his second term, he should once again begin by piling on the pressure with a fresh show of American strength. But this should not be an end in itself. His ultimate goal ought to be like Reagan’s: to get to a deal with Washington’s principal adversary that reduces the nightmarish risk of World War III—a risk inherent in a cold war between two nuclear-armed superpowers." foreignaffairs.com/united-states/… 2/8

The next Great Awakening is underway. From now on, just tell the “woke” you've been awakened. .... Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.” “It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart. “The fascinating thing about the nightmare is that it reads, to anyone who has been through the twentieth century, like a kind of prophecy.”

I talked to Greg Sheridan of @australian (for the first time publicly) about becoming a lapsed atheist and embracing the Christian faith. I'm afraid it's behind a paywall (unlike Heaven), so here are the quotes in a thread: 1/17 Quietly, but with great commitment, Ferguson has become a religious believer. With his wife, @Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and their sons, he has become a churchgoing Anglican Christian. He is, in his own words, a "lapsed atheist". Much more important, he’s a believing Christian. 2/17theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/how-h…

My new "Rotten Britain" column in @TheFP contains some pretty startling statistics. It may help to summarize them in a thread. 1/16thefp.com/p/niall-fergus… Essex Police—the force responsible for harassing @AllisonPearson—recorded 808 Non-Crime Hate Incidents in 2023, up from 500 in 2018, a rate of 21.5 NCHIs per 100 officers. According to @Policy_Exchange, the British police spent an estimated 60,000 police hours per annum on NCHIs. 2/16

The many people who like to pontificate about Ukraine without knowing a damned thing about it should read this candid and moving interview with my friend @DmytroKuleba in the @FT: ft.com/content/6137b6… The key quotes are not in the headline. 1. "There was no peace settlement to be had in 2022 . . .  Knowing our western partners, who I cherish and appreciate very much, ... if there was the slightest chance in 2022 to end the war, they would have pushed down on our shoulders and said, do it." - @DmytroKuleba

In case the thought crossed your mind, I didn't set out to be provocative for its own sake. I simply can't think of any other cases of a steep decline in public health and public morale in a relatively advanced and powerful state. There's the USSR then, and the USA now.

https://twitter.com/TheFP/status/1805605203409875044

If you still don't believe me about the seriousness of the crisis in the USA, I recommend three recent articles by @jburnmurdoch "Why are Americans dying so young?" - via @FTon.ft.com/3zm12h2

.@JonahDispatch's response to my "Late-Soviet America" piece acknowledges that most of my argument is true but then says: "We're a non-evil empire; people want to come here, not leave; and we could fix all our problems if we just applied our founding principles." It's pure cope. 1/18 A chronic soft budget constraint in the public sector. Constantly growing state intervention in the economy. A military that is vast yet loses wars. Gerontocratic leadership. Millions succumbing to “deaths of despair.” Total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. 2/18 thefp.com/p/were-all-sov…

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

"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

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

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." 1/4 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…

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

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

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 striking thing about last week's Biden-Xi summit was the thinness of the agenda. Today’s superpower leaders might productively have discussed nuclear arms control or peace in the Middle East, as their predecessors did half a century ago. But no. 1/10bloomberg.com/opinion/articl… The really significant thing about the Xi-Biden meeting was what wasn’t discussed, not what was. The summit thus left Cold War II pretty much where it found it. This was détente lite. 2/10

She was a Muslim, then an atheist. Now she is a Christian. This is an extraordinary article by @Ayaan. 1/4unherd.com/2023/11/why-i-… Part of her reason is that atheism is not equal to the geopolitical and ideological threats the free world currently faces. 2/4