Niall Ferguson: The Intellectual Underwriter of Trump's American Carnage Idea
Niall Ferguson: The Intellectual Underwriter of Trump's American Carnage Idea
Hatred of the woke is causing this hawk to wildly exaggerate America's decline and make absurd comparisons with the Soviet Union
Did you know that the United States and China have been engaged in a second Cold War? That’s the view that conservative historian, prolific author, documentarian, University of Austin co-founder (along with Bari Weiss), and now a columnist at The Free Press, Niall Ferguson, has taken for several years. In 2019—the year Ferguson insists “future historians will say” Cold War II began—he cited the growing bipartisan consensus in the U.S. on confronting China, the trade war launched by Donald Trump, and the tensions arising over the Chinese government’s abuses of Uighur Muslim minorities as evidence that the two countries were locked in a “classic superpower competition.”
At that time the Glasgow-born Ferguson, who originally gained intellectual notoriety for defending the British Empire, thought this conflict could be “daunting” but good for the U.S. because “its benefits could very well outweigh its costs.” Perhaps Cold War II would encourage Americans to unite around a common enemy and “reduce the notorious internal polarization of recent times.” Maybe the technological threat from China would convince American politicians to “devote serious resources to the development of new technologies, such as quantum computing.” Since then, however, Ferguson’s assessment has taken a more pessimistic turn—not just about how dangerous this second Cold War is but also America’s chances of winning it.
Last month, Ferguson published his debut column in Weiss’ The Free Press titled “We’re All Soviets Now.” In it, he provocatively argues that the U.S. is likely to be on the losing side of this Cold War just like the Soviet Union was in the previous one: “It only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets.”
Ferguson believes China is no longer merely an economic or technological rival but also an ideological one. Whereas he once thought China lacked expansionary aims unlike the Soviet Union, Ferguson now sees China as “asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.” He has also changed his assessment of the relative capacities of the two superpowers. He said then, “China is so inferior to the United States in nuclear weaponry that any confrontation is much more likely to occur in cyberspace.” Ferguson now observes that China has a “navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast.”
This is not the first time that Ferguson has adjusted his view of the U.S.-China relationship. In 2006, before he was writing about Cold War II, he was talking up “Chimerica”—the term he coined along with the economist Moritz Schularick to describe the economic interdependence between the United States and China. However, a decade and a half later, he concluded that the “partnership is dead.”
Moreover, the national unification around the Chinese threat he hoped for near the end of Trump’s first term has failed to materialize. Growing bipartisan concerns over the U.S. trade deficit with China, intellectual property theft, and TikTok haven’t prevented American politics from becoming more divisive and toxic than ever.
And so Ferguson isn't just more concerned about Cold War II than he was a few years ago—he is also convinced that America will lose. Indeed, his Free Press essay reads like an obituary for the American experiment.
In reality, all of this says far more about Ferguson’s own political views than it does about the nature of the U.S.-China confrontation and its final outcome.
The U.S. ≠ The U.S.S.R.
Ferguson presents the United States as a weak, unhealthy, morally compromised, and soon-to-be impoverished society that has lost faith in itself and is bound to be eclipsed by China. He argues that the American economy is stagnant and headed for fiscal disaster. He claims that the United States military, NATO, and other American allies aren’t prepared to confront China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. He sees “eerie foreshadowings of the American present” in the outpouring of discontent from Soviet citizens after glasnost finally allowed them to speak their minds. He believes that the elite commitments to DEI, gender-affirming care, and fighting climate change are comparable to the elite commitment to communism in the Soviet Union.
Ferguson believes the United States’ deficit spending and the Biden administration’s industrial policy are echoes of Soviet central planning. “The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today,” Ferguson writes, “but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s.” The United States currently has a nearly $30 trillion economy, a soaring stock market, a radically innovative tech industry, a historically low unemployment rate, surging per capita income and household wealth, and a massive concentration of human capital with immigrants flocking to its shores rather than Americans clamoring to leave as was—and is—the case with Russians. But Ferguson sees only bloat and decay.
It’s fair to worry about the U.S. deficit and a lack of fiscal discipline in Washington. But comparing the U.S. and Soviet economies isn’t just invidious—it’s historically illiterate. The Soviet economy was a hyper-inefficient and antiquated behemoth that proved insusceptible to even the most basic market reforms. As the historian Stephen Kotkin explains in his 2001 book Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse 1970-2000: “Russia lacked the indispensable liberal institutions that make markets work, while it possessed a plethora of the kinds of institutions that inhibit effective market operation.” The Soviet economy likely would have collapsed much sooner if not for the discovery of huge oil reserves in Siberia. Still, GDP per capita in the United States was around 3.5 times higher than the Soviet Union in 1991—a gap that existed throughout the Cold War and expanded in the 1990s. The gap between the U.S. and Russia today is nearly six-fold, while the U.S.’ overall GDP is 14 times higher.
Ferguson doesn’t specify which aspects of Biden’s industrial policy he takes issue with, but subsidies for high-tech industry like chip manufacturing are hardly comparable to the unbelievable wastefulness and inefficiency of a command economy.
Ferguson asserts that the combined power of the United States and its allies is “not nearly enough to contend with the ‘Coalition Against Democracy’ that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.” His only evidence for this claim is a report released by the office of Sen. Roger Wicker, a Mississippi Republican, that calls for a “generational investment to revitalize our armed forces” and tens of billions more in military spending—never mind that reports of military hawks routinely emphasize a dire lack of preparedness.
The combined GDP of the United States and its allies is several times larger than China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. NATO’s defense expenditures account for 55% of the global total. This adds up to $1.34 trillion—more than three times larger than the expenditure of the “Coalition Against Democracy.” And that figure doesn’t include the United States’ non-NATO allies. NATO defense spending is set to surge by nearly 18% in 2024—up from 9.3% in 2023 and 3.7% in 2022. While just seven NATO allies reached their defense spending target in 2022 (2% of GDP), 23 are expected to do so in 2024. So as Russia remains bogged down in a grinding war of attrition, NATO’s resources are growing, regardless of what one thinks of the alliance.
While military cooperation between China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea is increasing, it comes nowhere near the integrated command and logistical structures that have been built by the U.S. and its allies over the past three-quarters of a century. Ferguson attacks the United States for encouraging allies to “fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning.” While the Biden administration has been slow to provide some forms of vital military assistance to Ukraine, the United States has authorized $175 billion to aid the war effort—more than Russia’s entire defense budget. Although Ukraine’s effort to expel Russian forces has stalled (and reversed in some places), its battlefield performance demonstrates that Russia isn’t as formidable as many in the West had feared. It’s extremely unlikely that Moscow could win a conventional war against NATO without resorting to the use of nuclear weapons.
“I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day,” Ferguson writes, “perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?” But Ferguson doesn’t just believe the answer to this question is “yes” in an economic and military sense—he believes “late Soviet America” bears other similarities to the former U.S.S.R.
Ferguson’s American Declinism
Ferguson compares the Soviets’ doomed commitment to communism to the American “political and cultural elite [doubling] down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.” He outlines the “great lies” of the Soviet system: the monumental hypocrisy of a brutally oppressive communist elite claiming to speak for and defend the peasants and workers; the idea that the “United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis”; the endless justifications for and falsehoods about Soviet imperialism and mass murder. Ferguson summarizes what he describes as the “equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America”:
That the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
For Ferguson, the U.S. government’s DEI priorities, climate change goals, and support for Ukraine are somehow comparable to the horrors and crimes of the largest totalitarian system in human history. The human toll of Soviet communism is staggering: millions of people shot, starved, and sent to the gulag; decades of totalitarian domination in Europe; and a significant share of the planet’s population trapped under a backward social and economic system for much of the 20th century. Books like Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin are terrifying compendiums of the almost-incomprehensible cruelty and callousness of the Soviet system, which killed far more people in peacetime than Nazism.
Ferguson’s argument is a jumble of culture war grievances and complaints about the Biden administration’s foreign policy. In one paragraph, he attacks the “horde of apparatchik DEI ‘officers’” and decries the “mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of ‘gender-affirming surgery.’” In the next, he mocks the United States’ “much-vaunted military” for failing to defeat the “ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort.” He observes that elite opinion diverges from popular opinion on issues such as climate change, education policy, and individual freedom. And in some cases, he slips into pure MAGA apologetics—such as when he summarizes his case that “late Soviet America” is a whole lot like the Soviet Union:
A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? 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. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.
If it wasn’t already obvious that Ferguson’s essay was an appeal to the Trumpist right, this paragraph should dispel any uncertainty. While Donald Trump makes a hundred comments a day that are more grotesque and insulting than Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” remark, Ferguson doesn’t cite any of them. He claims that Covid is America’s Chernobyl—never mind that it was a pandemic which affected every country on earth, and which China handled with a level of incompetence and cruelty that would have made Gorbachev blush. While Ferguson’s article is crammed with criticisms of Biden, he doesn’t have anything to say about how Trump’s mismanagement of Covid in the crucial early days led to thousands of unnecessary deaths.
Ferguson’s declaration that Trump’s conviction by a jury of his peers in a New York courtroom is “Soviet justice” is an echo of the most mendacious MAGA propaganda about how Trump is the victim of a political persecution. Snyder’s Bloodlands contains many harrowing examples of Soviet justice, such as the hundreds of thousands of death sentences issued by NKVD troikas during the Kulak Operations in the 1930s. These sentences were often issued in under a minute and based on nothing—that is, when NKVD officers didn’t simply shove peasants up against the wall and gun them down with no semblance of a judicial process. Regardless of what you think about the charges brought against Trump in New York, the idea that a verdict rendered by the American legal system, which is fully open to appeal, can be smeared as “Soviet justice” is absurd.
One of Ferguson’s central arguments is that “confidence in major institutions” in the United States “is roughly half what it was in 1979.” He proceeds to insist that major institutions like the criminal justice system and the executive branch are, in fact, unworthy of Americans’ trust. Meanwhile, he doesn’t even mention the previous president’s attempt to overthrow American democracy—or that same president’s plan to weaponize the DOJ against his enemies, gut the U.S. government and replace it with an army of his own apparatchiks, abandon Ukraine to Russia, and pull the United States out of NATO. Ferguson sees the shadow of Soviet authoritarianism in the Biden administration’s DEI goals and climate agenda, but not in the plan to use the National Guard to seize voting machines.
Near the end of his essay, Ferguson cites another article recently published in The Free Press by his wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. That piece drew a connection between Soviet efforts to subvert Western societies during the Cold War and what Hirsi Ali views as a similar phenomenon today—only this time, the “subversion” is being carried out by “American Marxists,” radical Islamists, and the Chinese Communist Party. Like Ferguson, Hirsi Ali condemns DEI and wokeness, the decline of the family, and the conviction of the “front-runner presidential candidate on 34 counts of obvious political charges.” She doesn’t entertain the possibility that Trump’s own obsessive efforts to delegitimize the electoral and judicial systems—as well as his endless attacks on the “deep state” and just about every major institution of the United States government—could be subverting American democracy.
Ferguson endorses his wife’s “subversion thesis” and exhorts us “to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves.” In reality, what the United States has done to itself is allow blind partisanship and culture war fixations to enable the rise of a would-be dictator for the second time in under a decade—a process to which Ferguson is now actively contributing. MAGA hat-wearing Trumpists aren’t the only ones to blame for this democratic crisis—as with all other successful authoritarian movements throughout history, there are plenty of intellectuals on hand to rationalize the descent into autocracy.
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Thank you for this response. I read the Ferguson piece in TFP when it came out, and was stunned by its silliness, particularly given how brilliant of a historian Ferguson can be. This is the best, point-by-point response I have read yet. I am still hopeful that Anne Applebaum is preparing her response.
That Ferguson, a transplanted UK citizen, and his wife Hirsi Ali, a transplanted Somalian by way of Kenya and the Netherlands, are spouting this nonsense is particularly troublesome, not only because they are quite intelligent but also because each of them has benefited so much by becoming citizens of the U.S. they decry.
Although it would be a sad statement about them, I can only hope that the allure of wealth is what is driving these two to write these recent articles, and not that they actually believe thus stuff.
Niall Ferguson and Ayaan Hirsi Ali no longer have any objectivity. They put a veneer of respectability but no better than any MAGA influencer yelling silly slogan such as “Go Woke Go Broke”. To say I am disappointed is an understatement.