Political Observer comments.

The regular reader of Mr. Niall Ferguson’s cumbersome , bloated historical panoramas, the word count in this instance is 2596 -The Straussian method is to drown the reader in verbiage, ideas, actors, as a strategy to make a possible reply so onerous a rhetorical task as to render critique mute? This is the descriptor of the Historical/Political project of Ferguson’s Neo-Conservatism!

The opening paragraph is revelatory:

Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came? was the title of cheesy 1970 film that captured the anti-Vietnam Zeitgeist. But suppose they gave a cold war and you couldn’t afford it? Half a century later, that is the question the US needs to ask itself.

Mr. Ferguson is usually a bit more practiced in his refences to books, rather than cinema. As Mr. Ferguson was born in 1964, and the film he references was ‘Suppose They Gave a War and Nobody Came?’ was released in 1970, Mr. Ferguson was six, perhaps his search of the Internet for an Anti-War movie that fits his paradigm landed him here?

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066422/

This is followed by this self-advertisement for he and his political cronies:

The debate on Cold War II is heating up. On Tuesday I chaired a fascinating symposium on “Cold Wars” — plural — at the Hoover Institution in California. We gathered together, in person or over Zoom, a pretty good proportion of the leading historians in the field. After a day of debate, three different schools of thought had emerged.

Editor: note that Ferguson engages in a bit of self-serving prestidigitation! It appears to The Reader, that some of these were active participants, and were present in this symposium, while others are just subject to mention or simply quotation?

Those siding with me in believing that we are already in a second cold war included George Takach, the author of Cold War 2.0, for whom the contest between the US and China is primarily technological; Dmitri Alperovitch, co-founder of the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike and author of World on the Brink, who shares my view that we are approaching a Taiwan Crisis as dangerous as the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; and the Soviet-born historian Sergey Radchenko, whose meticulously researched To Run the World has just been published by Cambridge and argues that the USSR leadership was motivated more by historically rooted psychological insecurities than by Marxist-Leninist ideology. It doesn’t take a huge leap to see similar insecurities at work in the minds of China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin today.

There are two distinct counterarguments. One — which I’ll call the Aspen Strategy Group/Harvard University view — is that the US-China relationship is not as bad as the US-Soviet relationship. That’s the line taken by Joe Nye and his Harvard Kennedy School colleague, Graham Allison, who met with Xi and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on a recent visit to China. “We’re serious about cooperating where we can, but at the same time competing vigorously in almost every dimension,” was how Allison characterized the relationship between Washington and Beijing in a recent interview.

“I am in you, and you are in me,” Xi told Allison, which must have given the translator a nasty moment. “What did I mean?” the Chinese leader went on. “The answer is ‘engagement.’ Through communication and cooperation, the US and China can become closely linked.” It is this aspiration that lies behind the increasingly frequent use in Beijing of the old Soviet phrase, “peaceful coexistence.”

Mr Ferguson’s essay is held afloat buy that prestidigitation that is expressive of bad faith?

Editor: In this section of his essay, is obvious quotation:

Then there is the Yale University/Hoover Institution view. According to Odd Arne Westad, professor of history at the former, and Philip Zelikow, a colleague of mine at the latter, the global situation today more closely resembles the world on the eve of one or the other of the world wars. In an excellent new piece, Zelikow argues that it is a comforting delusion — indeed, “wishful thinking” — to believe we are in a cold war with China. Rather, we confront a new Axis — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — that in many ways poses a bigger threat than the Germany-Japan-Italy Axis of the late 1930s and early 1940s, or the early Cold War combination of the Soviet Union, China and the other communist-controlled states.

“The worst case, in a major crisis,” writes Zelikow, “will be if the United States and its allies commit to victory, animated by their own rhetoric and dutiful but ill-considered military plans, and then are outmaneuvered and defeated. It would be the ‘Suez moment’ for the United States, or perhaps much worse.” Regular readers of this column will know that I sometimes share this fear. For me, Cold War II is the good outcome. An American version of the Suez Crisis of 1956 — the abortive occupation of the Suez Canal by Britain, France and Israel — would be worse, in that such a humiliation over, say, Taiwan would signal the end of American primacy, just as Suez sounded the death knell of Britain’s Empire. Losing World War III would of course be the worst.

Editor: Here Mr. Ferguson reports on ‘interesting arguments I heard’. Neo Conservative Jake Sullivan is quoted. Note the wan invention of ‘The Diet Cold War’: is this akin to that dull-witted ‘Chimerica’. Mr. Ferguson in a ‘Madison Ave’ mode! What also catches The Readers attention, is that Mr. Ferguson is utterly absent of Perry Anderson’s American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers. Yet he is a prominent Neo-Conservative voice, though not an American.

Editor: The next paragraphs are a cobbled together ‘History’. With another appearance of Jake Sullivan

One of the most interesting arguments I heard was that there may have been more than two cold wars. What if the period before July 1914 was another cold war — one between Britain and Germany that ultimately turned hot because of miscalculations on both sides? That, it was cleverly suggested, would justify the designation “Cold War Zero.”

Well, if there’s even the possibility of Cold War Zero, should there also be Diet Cold War? Letting other people do the fighting is, after all, one of the four pillars of National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan’s grand strategy: “Help [fill in the blank] defend itself without sending US troops to war.”

In practice, that means channeling money and arms to key countries — Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan — and hoping they can hold off the new Axis powers without the need for American “boots on the ground.”

Unlike in Cold War I and the global war on terrorism, in other words, this time the US is seeking to avoid sending its own soldiers into battle. And this makes sense. If your debt burden is dauntingly high and set to keep growing even if you cut defense spending relative to GDP, you need Diet Cold War, in just the same way that overweight people opt for Diet Coke (and Ozempic).

This approach has plenty of precedents in European history — for example, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Britain paid substantial subsidies to its allies in its wars against France, encouraging them to do the fighting. The disadvantage is that the “paymaster power” has less control over military events than if the armies were directly under its command. It’s also very problematic if the paymaster succumbs to Ferguson’s Law — which states that any great power that spends more on interest payments than on defense is not going to be great for very long.

The Reader might wonder what Ferguson’s Law might be, beside an expression of his toxic egoism ? Andrew Stuttaford (https://x.com/AStuttaford) in The National Review offers this:

And speaking of reckoning, there’s the small matter of America’s debt, something that prompts Ferguson to remind his readers about “Ferguson’s law”:

Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Hapsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%.

On our current trajectory, this gap will only widen, until it can’t.

Brzezinski’s Prophecy, Ferguson’s Law

Editor: The next question that occurs to The Reader: where are ‘we’ in relation to the whole essay? The Reader is at word 957 with 1689 to go. The How and why of a critical procedure, that might be serviceable does not immediately present itself ! Yet the instance of Leo Strauss’ attempt to re-write The History of Philosophy, a Neo-Conservative’s touchstone, reveals the utterly mendaciousness of the Straussian Project, and its acolytes!

From this Sentence :The British imperial precedent is highly relevant to US policymakers, if they but knew.

To This Sentence: It wasn’t Hessians, but Britons (as well as Dutchmen and Hanoverians) the Duke of Wellington commanded at Waterloo.

Editor: Mr. Ferguson provides a Potted History: Reader, this adds 466 words! : I will quote the most interesting, to me, of the remans of this Political/Historical Monstrosity.

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As a result, the federal debt in public hands is already at 99% of GDP — in what may be the first inning of Cold War II — and projected by the Congressional Budget Office to reach 166% in 30 years’ time.

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 “I’m also concerned about the softening demand to meet supply, particularly from international buyers worried about the US debt picture and possible sanctions.” Me too, Ray. Not many people were saying this kind of thing about Britain in 1789.

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The perfect illustration is the complete inability of President Joe Biden’s administration to get the government of Israel to do what it wants, namely stop killing Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire of its efforts to eliminate Hamas in Gaza.

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“The supply of artillery shells and powerful bombs for offensive operations can no longer be taken for granted,” he wrote last week, “Israel cannot stand alone and [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu knows it.”

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It was not so much that the US fell out of love with Israel: The rapid growth of the Israeli economy drastically reduced the relative importance of American aid.

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Nevertheless, the US lets Israel negotiate large defense contracts under the assumption that the money will keep on coming, which allows Israel to negotiate better terms than might otherwise be the case.

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Perhaps it will suffice to head off a second Israeli war against Hezbollah in Lebanon — clearly a much bigger undertaking than the war against Hamas. But even that is far from certain.

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According to the latest Ukraine Support Tracker published by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between the beginning of the war and this March, the European Union plus its individual members together allocated a total of €89.9 billion in military, humanitarian and financial aid to Ukraine.

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…operations that cannot possibly have been approved by Team Biden, which it seems will (to quote John F. Kennedy) “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship … to assure the survival and success of liberty” — except for higher gasoline prices in an election year.

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Turning off aid to Ukraine has unquestionably encouraged Putin to believe that victory can be achieved in a relatively short time frame. Thanks to Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, we know now that, when their invasion was going badly in early 2022, the Russians were ready to negotiate a peace deal with Ukraine.

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After meeting in Istanbul on March 29, a month after the invasion, the two sides announced that they had agreed to a joint communiqué with the title “Key Provisions of the Treaty on Ukraine’s Security Guarantees.” Why it all fell through in May is still a matter for conjecture.

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One thing is already certain, however: Any chance of a negotiated peace is vanishingly small so long as Putin believes he can win this war because the US has no staying power.

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Finally, a question: Who gets fat on Diet Cold War? The Latin term tertius gaudens is a useful one in this context — the third party who benefits.

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Today, as Gita Gopinath and colleagues at the International Monetary Fund point out, “a set of nonaligned ‘connector’ countries are rapidly gaining importance and serving as a bridge between [the American and Chinese] blocs.”.

^…

Like Diet Coke, Diet Cold War could leave a bitter aftertaste.

Political Observer