Inside @JMilei's radical plan to make Argentina “the world’s freest country.” The @JMilei I met was not what I had expected. On social media, he presents himself as a rock star. In the presidential office, he is soberly attired, a little formal. Only when Milei begins to answer my questions does it become clear that he is no ordinary president.

'The phrase “luxury beliefs” was coined by the brilliant @robkhenderson to sum up the more preposterous ideas that progressives can afford to hold — “Defund the police!” “Open borders!” “Men can become women!” — because they are largely sheltered from the consequences when such ideas are put into practice.' 1/8 'Accusing Israel of genocide and recognising a non-existent state are the luxury beliefs of western foreign policy, elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality.' 2/8

"While the world fixates on Donald Trump’s populist cocktail of reciprocal tariffs and big, beautiful deficits, @JMilei is delivering a man-made miracle that should gladden the heart of every classical economist and quicken the pulse of all political libertarians." 1/5 "@JMilei has brought monthly inflation down from 13% to 2%. The economy is now growing at an annual rate of 7%. Investors no longer shun Argentine bonds and stocks—indeed, they were among the best investments you could have made over the past two years. After a brief upward jump, the poverty rate has fallen from 42%, when Milei was elected, to 31%" 2/5

"Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance." However worried you were about the impact of AI on education, you weren't worried enough. Here is the new and disturbing @MIT paper: media.mit.edu/publications/y…

That scraping sound you hear is @RachelReevesMP moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic. What’s that big white thing we’re sailing towards? The answer is an unsustainably high national debt. 1/13 On the eve of the financial crisis in 2007-08 the gross national debt was 42 per cent of gross domestic product. Twenty years on, according to the OBR, it will have more than doubled to 105 per cent. The worst part is the rising cost of interest payments on the debt: adjusted for inflation, rates are likely to exceed growth in the next five years. 2/13

"There’s realpolitik. And then there’s reality TV politik. There’s foreign policy realism, of the kind associated with Henry Kissinger. And then there’s Donald Trump’s twist: real estate-ism." 1/11 "That week in February when Trump hosted—and, to varying degrees, humiliated—the French president, the British prime minister, and the Ukrainian president introduced to great-power politics the unmistakable style of The Apprentice." 2/11

@realDonaldTrump returned to power with the most consequential to-do list in American history. And, in his first 100 days back in the White House, Trump has crushed that list. 1/8 You are entitled to criticize President Trump—and I do, regularly. But you cannot accuse him of overpromising and underdelivering. 2/8

"The reality is that the agreement that didn’t get signed on Friday is more a matter of symbolism than economics. The mineral rights Ukraine would give the United States are worth not very much; the security guarantees America would give Ukraine are worth even less." @nkumleben and I take a close look at the much misunderstood U.S.-Ukraine deal on minerals (the one that didn't get signed last Friday). Yes, it's a material world, but rare earths aren't all that rare, and some minerals are a lot more critical than others.

"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