This article was produced by and originally published in Noema magazine.
Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson recently sat down with Noema magazine editor in chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the Trump agenda, the conflict with China, polarization in America, and his own conversion to Christianity. This interview is excerpted from a forthcoming Berggruen Institute podcast, and has been edited for length and clarity.
Nathan Gardels: Under the Trump administration’s radical sovereigntism, it appears America is joining the other axes of upheaval, China and Russia, in seeking to build its own sphere of influence, one that challenges the liberal world order founded by the U.S. after World War II.
How do you see this unfolding?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I don’t agree that the United States is somehow aligning itself in any way with the axis of whatever you want to call it, authoritarians, upheaval, or ill will.
What’s odd about the last four years before Trump is that the Biden-Harris administration came in and was welcomed by liberals around the world. “The adults were back in the room.” American foreign policy was going to respect alliances again, and it all went disastrously wrong. The allies have been sorely disappointed. The net result of the Biden administration’s foreign policy was that an axis formed that didn’t exist in 2020, an axis that brought together Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea. And unlike the axis of evil of 2002 around the Iraq War, it actually exists. It’s not just an idea for a speech. These powers cooperate together, economically and militarily.
What went wrong? The answer is a disastrous failure of deterrence that really began in Afghanistan in 2021, got a lot worse in February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, and got even worse in 2023 when Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad attacked Israel. So I think one has to understand the reelection of Donald Trump as partly a public reaction against a very unsuccessful Democratic administration, a little bit like what happened in 1980 when Americans voted for Ronald Reagan and repudiated Jimmy Carter during the Iran hostage crisis.
I don’t think Donald Trump’s reelection is a big win for China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Quite the opposite. I think it’s bad news for them.
President Donald Trump delivers remarks on reciprocal tariffs in Washington, D.C., on April 2, 2025. (Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images)
Let’s just break it down briefly. Many people wrongly thought that it would be beneficial to Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump were reelected. I don’t think this war is going to be ended on Putin’s terms, if it’s going to be ended. Secondly, maximum pressure is now back on Iran. That’s important. Thirdly, tariffs have been increased on China, so the pressure is on China. Little Rocket Man in North Korea is still waiting to get whatever is coming to him, but I don’t think it’s going to be a love letter from the Trump administration.
In short, for the axis of ill will, it’s bad news that Trump is back.
NG: I didn’t mean it in that sense. I meant upheaval in the sense of the liberal international order of free trade and trusted alliances across a unified West. America is moving toward a way of governing itself that is unencumbered by a rules-based system in global affairs that takes into account the interests of others. Trumpist America is leveraging its mercantile might to get its way.
NF: I am always reminded when people talk about the liberal international order of what Voltaire said about the Holy Roman Empire: It was neither holy nor Roman, nor an empire. And the same is true of the liberal international order. It was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly. It’s actually an illusion that such a thing ever existed after 1945.
There was a cold war in which two empires, an American and a Soviet, struggled for power, and the United States at no point ceased to exercise power in the classical sense.
I read so many commentators saying, “How terrible and shocking it is that the United States is reverting to empire after the wonderful time of the liberal international order.” I wrote a book 20 years ago called Colossus, making the point that the United States has been an empire for many years and didn’t stop being an empire in 1945.
The interesting thing about the Cold War was that both empires accused the other of imperialism, each claiming that it wasn’t imperial. But they both, in fact, functionally were empires.
The United States today has much in common with the empires of the past, particularly in its ability to project military and naval power all around the world. So I think we should probably be a little bit more skeptical about the concept of a liberal international order.
What’s interesting about Trump is that he’s open about it. He wants Greenland. He wants to retake the Panama Canal. And so, in a sense, we’ve gone back to the era of President William McKinley at the turn of the 20th century. But that’s not surprising, because Trump told us in the campaign back in the summer that McKinley was his hero, and that was not just the “tariff man” McKinley, but clearly also the McKinley who acquired, after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines with an option on Cuba. So I think we are just back in a late 19th-century mode with Donald Trump.
One of the points I made in Colossus was that the United States is not actually very good at being an empire by the standards of, say, Britain in the 19th century. There’s a structural problem with an American empire, which is worth spelling out.
There are deficits that make it hard to be an effective empire. There’s a deficit in terms of manpower. I mean, America imports people. It doesn’t really export people. Very few Americans want to spend large amounts of time in hot, poor, dangerous places. Hence, the six-month tour of duty for the military abroad.
A parade is held for the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in Moscow, USSR, on November 7, 1967. (via Getty Images)
There’s another kind of deficit, which is the fiscal deficit. America can’t afford to occupy zones across the planet the way the British or the French did.
Presently, there is also the problem that America is now spending more on debt interest payments than on the defense budget for the first time in its history. When that is the case, you’re probably in trouble. That’s been true, more or less, of every empire since 16th-century Spain.
And finally, there’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly, and that makes it very hard to complete them, whether it’s in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan.
All these are structural problems. The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business, and this causes American power to oscillate. There are periods of strength, then there are periods of retreat. And after Trump overreaches, which he doubtless will, there’ll be another bout of retreat. We’ve seen this movie several times.
NG: How do you see the constellation of powers evolving going forward?
NF: We’re in Cold War II, and we’ve been in it for at least six years.
The People’s Republic of China is playing the part of the Soviet Union, and the United States is the United States. First of all, you can tell it’s a cold war because there are only two superpowers.
The second is that there’s a clear ideological difference between the two, and it’s become more pronounced since Xi Jinping became the Chinese leader and emphasized the Marxist-Leninist roots of the People’s Republic of China.
The United States, even with Donald Trump as president, is fundamentally different. It’s a two-party system, not a one-party system. It’s a system in which the rule of law is real in the sense that even the president is constrained by the law. He may not like it, but he is, and he will be, and that’s fundamentally different from China.
And as in the first cold war, they’re engaged in a technological race as well as in classic geopolitical contests over Taiwan and the South China Sea.
Cold War II is still at a relatively early stage. Yet, already, more or less everything that’s going on in the world can be seen in that context. For example, the war in Ukraine was like the Korean War in 1950, the moment that a hot war made it clear that the world was now a world of two blocs.
If you look at who supports Ukraine and who supports Russia, it is basically the same as who supported South Korea and who supported North Korea in the early 1950s. The Middle East was also a Cold War theater. The Yom Kippur War in 1973 was probably the most important in those days, and here we are again. Fifty years later almost to the day, there’s a surprise attack on Israel, and we all have to focus, once again, on the Middle East.
Taliban security personnel stand guard along a street at a checkpoint in the Badakhshan province of Afghanistan on April 4, 2023. (Omer Abrar/AFP via Getty Images)
So, I think it’s easier to figure this out if one just thinks that we had an interwar period from about 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, until 2012, when Xi Jinping came to power, and certainly until 2016, when Donald Trump came to power.
In that interwar period between the two cold wars, we all had a great time. Give or take the odd financial crisis or terrorist attack, there was relative peace.
Importantly, being back in a cold war is no guarantee that the outcome will be the same, that the U.S. somehow wins all cold wars.
China is a much more formidable opponent than the Soviet Union ever was. So this is a tougher cold war for the United States. Let’s just understand that we had a very nice interwar period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and now there’s a new Marxist-Leninist superpower that is an even bigger challenge than the last one.
NG: So it’s basically a bipolar order going forward?
NF: Yes. And you can see that if you spend time in Europe.
Europeans would like to be players, but they’re not. They can’t exercise strategic autonomy. The war in Ukraine was thrust upon them as a result of the failure of American deterrence. Once that deterrence failed and Russia launched its invasion, it was the American decision to support [Volodymyr] Zelensky when he refused to flee. That, in turn, forced the war and the European allies. Essentially, Europe has been a passenger. European leaders have talked for years about strategic autonomy. The war in Ukraine revealed that they are very far from having it, and it will take many years for them to have it. They are also not contenders in the AI race, and that is pretty fundamental.
“The liberal international order was never very liberal, very international, or very orderly.” —Niall Ferguson
NG: China and Russia regard themselves these days as “civilizational states,” a way to legitimize their power through the continuity of history. In response to that, you have a lot of people in the West—Elon Musk, [Italian prime minister] Giorgia Meloni, [Hungarian prime minister] Viktor Orbán—saying what they are about is defending their own civilization.
For the Italian prime minister, Western civilization means, as she has put it: Greek philosophy, Roman law, and Christian humanism. So this is kind of a mirror reaction to the claims of Russia and China. Do you see this as an element of the conflict? That it’s a cultural and civilizational clash as well as an ideological one?
NF: Yes, I do. I wrote a book called Civilization quite a few years ago. The subtitle was The West and the Rest. The argument of the book was that something very extraordinary happened in the world around 1600. People from Western Europe started to leap ahead of the rest of the world in a variety of different ways. They evolved different systems of governance predicated on competition rather than political monopoly. That’s important.
They also pioneered a scientific method that was different from anything that had been done before, and far more effective at establishing ways of managing the natural world as well as understanding it. They also built systems of law—common law and civil law—based on the idea of private property as the foundation. They pioneered modern medicine. They had a different attitude toward consumption and work.
All these different ideas and institutions evolved over time, uniquely in the West, by which I mean Western Europe and the places where people from Western Europe settled in large numbers, like North America.
Other civilizations existed around the world, such as Islamic civilization, but that was fundamentally different. It achieved a great many things, but it didn’t achieve what I’ve just described. Chinese civilization was far more advanced in, say, the year 1000 than anything in Western Europe. But for most of the next millennium, China stagnated.
That is history. Now we are living through the end of that period of Western ascendancy.
An employee packages garments for the online Chinese e-commerce company Temu at a clothing factory in Guangzhou, China, on April 16, 2025. (Jade Gao/AFP via Getty Images)
Why is that? It is because the rest of the world finally realized, if you can’t beat them, join them. And so, people in non-Western societies, beginning in Japan, downloaded the killer apps of Western civilization. It’s amazing that it took so long. It took into the late 20th century for China to accept that there really was only one path to prosperity, and it involved markets, it involved science. You couldn’t rig those because of Mao’s ideological predilections. Once they finally recognized this, the Chinese caught up and they caught up really quickly.
If you think of history as starting in 1600, there is not a huge difference between Chinese and European incomes. But it diverges spectacularly all the way until 1979, when, on a purchasing power basis, the average American was 22 times richer than the average Chinese. Now, in 2025, it’s maybe three times because there’s been a dramatic reconvergence. That’s the story of our time.
The problem for the Chinese is that they did not download all the killer apps. They were never willing to download the political competition app; that is to say, the idea that there should be competition between institutions, branches of government, and parties. Without that, they can’t really have rule of law, because you can’t have rule of law if there’s no accountability through a system of justice.
So what the Chinese did was to say, “Yeah, we’ll take science, and we’ll certainly take modern medicine, we’ll have a consumer society, and we’ll have a work ethic, but we just don’t want those institutions that presuppose competition and private property rights.” That is why, in my view, their system can’t succeed. It is incomplete and thus fundamentally doomed. Over the next 10 or 20 years, it will unravel.
Still, in the short term, China poses a grave threat not only to the U.S. but to its allies. There is, first of all, the dramatic race for military parity. And the threat is especially dangerous right now because the United States and its allies are terribly overstretched and underfunded. We are in a situation in which, because of the end of the first Cold War, we thought we owed ourselves a peace dividend that led to a drastic decline in investment in defense technology. That complacency has left us very vulnerable, especially in the Indo-Pacific region.
“There’s an attention deficit disorder, which I think is inherent in American public and political life. People lose interest in complicated, messy foreign adventures rather quickly.” —Niall Ferguson
Right now, there’s a window of great danger, as there was in the 1930s and as there was again in the 1960s and ’70s, when totalitarian regimes had a capacity to wage war on free societies and conceivably could win such a war. We must not allow them to acquire a decisive technological—and particularly military technological—advantage, because if they have it, they’re highly likely to use it. Assuming we do that, over a 10- or 20-year time frame, free societies are likely to prevail because they will be more innovative.
NG: Where does AI fit into all this? It seems a comforting myth in the West that China can’t innovate. But look at the Chinese start-up DeepSeek, which matches the best of the West in generative AI, no less, as an open-source model.
NF: A great deal of confusion has come into this debate because people use terms like artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) interchangeably. Large language models are a part of AI, but not, in my view, the most important part.
Much of what they do is, in a sense, fake human discourse and allow us quickly to generate texts that seem human, though they’re not generated through human intelligence. This is a toy, really. It’s a toy that allows you to generate books in seconds. It allows you to generate images in seconds. These things are essentially fake human content. There’s some use for this. It probably poses a mortal threat to search engines like Google’s. But that’s not what matters about AI.
What matters is its ability to do scientific research on a scale never before possible and, because of the harnessing of enormous computational power, to discover and design, for example, new viruses. It’s the power of the scientific AI that should worry us.
Chinese president Xi Jinping looks on during a ceremony to mark China’s 10th Martyrs’ Day at Tiananmen Square on September 30, 2023, in Beijing, China. (Ken Ishii/Pool/Getty Images)-
It’s also clear that you can have AI-enabled weapon systems in which decisions about targeting and shooting are not taken by human actors, but are taken much more rapidly by artificial intelligence. What worried Henry Kissinger in the later years of his life were not the LLMs but the applications of AI to scientific research, and particularly to weapons systems.
Whatever we may say about how we’ll restrain ourselves, I don’t think there’s any guarantee that China will restrain itself. We know the kind of work they were already doing on viruses before AI, the “gain-of-function research” that very likely was connected to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in Wuhan. I shudder to think what kind of experiments are going on now with AI that makes it possible to conduct far more radical scientific exploration of virus structures. That’s just one example of why we should be worried.
For most of history, things that went on in the natural world were unintelligible to human beings, so we attributed them to gods or other extraterrestrial forces. The thing that’s interesting about AI is that it has created a new possibility of bewildering outcomes that we cannot explain. And we won’t attribute them to gods. We’ll attribute them to large language models. We’ll attribute them to AI. What worried Kissinger was the sense that things were going to become as unfathomable as they had been to medieval peasants.
NG: So all those advances in knowledge take us back to a kind of ignorance.
NF: Yes, they basically demote us. Artificial intelligence is the creation of an alien and superior intelligence in our midst, not coming from far away in another universe. In our imagination, we always assumed aliens would come from another world. But it turns out that we’re going to build them ourselves and endow them with intelligence that will ultimately be superior to us.
We should be very wary of where that is likely to lead. At the very least, we risk sharing the fate of the horses. Now, horses still exist, and very picturesque they can be. But long ago, they ceased to be the main form of transportation for human beings who needed to get somewhere in a hurry. Just as they were replaced, we are in danger of replacing ourselves the way we once replaced the horses.
“The American empire is one of these strange cases of cognitive dissonance: Functionally, the United States has many of the characteristics of an empire, but Americans themselves don’t really want to be in the empire business.” —Niall Ferguson
NG: We’ve had this kind of extremely liberal open society in America that accommodates radical woke thought. Now things seem to have shifted to the prevailing ascent of what some call “the strong gods—family, faith, and nation,” that hearkens back to traditionalist Christian values. Are we witnessing the last sigh of liberalism as the dominant philosophy, or just going through another cycle that will turn again?
NF: I think what was striking about the Great Awokening, the last diffusion of extreme progressive ideology, was how intolerant it was. It made life extremely unpleasant on university campuses because the intolerance of radical progressives for any ideas to the right of themselves was a distinguishing feature of their brief reign of moral terror. In truth, for most of the last 60 years, most people retained considerable allegiance to faith and to nation and to family. You might have been flying over them between Los Angeles and New York, but that was, broadly speaking, the case.
What happened in the 1960s was that the elites, beginning in the English-speaking world, embraced a quite radical social change in which sexuality was far less strictly controlled, in which a whole range of different beliefs were given legitimacy and the gods of the Victorians of the 19th century were ridiculed and mocked.
What happened in the last 10 years was that the radical left, having been entirely defeated in the field of economics, decided to adopt a radical identity politics, aiming to transform our understanding of American history and of today’s American society in a way that was deliberately divisive and hostile to individual identity. It reemphasized racial difference, abandoning the notion that a society could be color-blind. It weaponized categories like “transgender,” a tiny minority of people.
All of these things were calculated to create a new and revolutionary cultural environment. This was achieved to a large extent in many universities, but it didn’t really extend very far. And in fact, when one looks at the polling around the last election, you realize that the left of the Democratic Party on a whole range of issues, like, for example, the rights of transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, diverged so far from mainstream opinion that they were almost off the charts. Mainstream opinion, regardless of whether it was the opinion of a white person or a brown person, hadn’t moved nearly as far on those identity issues as the left wanted to go.
So what has happened isn’t really a profound backlash, just a repudiation of those ideas by ordinary Americans.
Ukrainian servicemen conduct a field training exercise in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on February 16, 2025. (Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images)
NG: So this silent majority, culturally and politically, has basically reemerged.
NF: It never went away, but simply reasserted itself in the face of a very intemperate, radically progressive movement that had detached itself from social reality. When Richard Nixon used the phrase “silent majority,” it was in response to anti-war protests in 1968-69. He understood that if you just did the numbers, the people protesting were a tiny minority of Americans. Most Americans were not actually with them, and so the appeal to a silent majority was a shrewd move by Nixon to exploit the fact that most people are, in fact, quite socially conservative and are not particularly interested in revolutions in their norms.
But the left forgot that again, and it walked into the same trap that the left walked into in ’68, which was to go too far in radicalizing relations between the sexes and relations between the races. If you go too far in that direction, the silent majority says, “Hang on, we’re going to stop being silent as long as it takes to shut you up.”
NG: In your personal life, both you and your wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have converted to Christianity. Does that fit into this larger cultural moment?
NF: My parents left the Church of Scotland before I was even born. My mother, as a physicist, was a strict rationalist, long before anyone had heard of Richard Dawkins or Steven Pinker. I was brought up in a household in which the official line was that life was a cosmic accident.
I abandoned atheism, which is a form of faith in itself, in two steps. First, through historical study I understood that no society based on atheism had been anything other than disastrous. In fact, the correlation between repudiation of religion and extreme violence is very close. The worst regimes in history engaged in anticlerical activity, the Bolshevik regime, or say, Mao’s regime in China, not to mention the Nazis. Like [Alexis de] Tocqueville, I didn’t have any religious faith, but I felt it would be good if people generally did.
The second step that led me to become a Christian was the realization that one couldn’t organize one’s life as an individual or as a family without religious faith, and that the teachings of Christ are an extraordinarily powerful and revolutionary solution to some of the central problems of human existence.
“A revival of religious faith is probably the only way that we in the West will be able to withstand the challenges that we currently face.” —Niall Ferguson
We haven’t come up with anything better. Indeed, all attempts to come up with alternatives have, I think, been failures. So, for very personal reasons, my wife and I arrived at Christianity because there seemed to be no other way for us to live good, fulfilled lives and be effective parents.
A revival of religious faith is probably the only way that we in the West will be able to withstand the challenges that we currently face. It’s simply not feasible for us to have the strength to withstand the challenges from the Communist regimes in China and North Korea, the challenges from the nihilistic fascist regime in Russia, the challenge from Iran, the challenge from radical Islam. We can’t withstand those challenges with the scriptures of Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. That’s not enough.
NG: President Trump has launched a tariff war, as promised, mostly aimed at China. Your thoughts?
NF: Donald Trump in 2016 was the first politician in a generation to stand up to the Chinese challenge. That was one of the reasons he won. And in his mind, tariffs were an important instrument for that return to a more combative approach. But it is not the only instrument. I don’t think we can separate the tariffs from the tech war. They weren’t separate in 2018-19, and they won’t be separate now.
The United States then not only imposed tariffs on Chinese exports to the U.S.; more importantly, it imposed export controls on critical technology, particularly semiconductors going to China. We can trace that back to Trump, but it was stepped up by Joe Biden.
That is actually more important than the tariffs in the U.S.-China rivalry, because they strike at China’s ability to compete technologically, particularly in AI. That’s why this isn’t just going to be a tit-for-tat game about tariffs. It will also involve measures relating to technology, including the kind of rare earth minerals that China has considerable control over. Those things matter, not least because of their importance to technology in the West.
NG: You wrote a book a few years ago, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power from the Freemasons to Facebook.
What we have today is a social media ecosystem that both concentrates control—the tower—but also empowers a multitude of voices—the square. Republics have always put in place checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place. One of the impacts of this diversity of voices and fragmentation of the body politic is that different tribal silos don’t speak to each other.
NF: It occurs to me now that Americans are in much the same place as people in Glasgow when I was growing up. In Glasgow, there were two completely separate communities, Catholics and Protestants, Celtic and Rangers. They did not intermarry. They barely spoke when they met. They fought.
Americans have arrived at a Glaswegian state of polarization along partisan lines. Republicans and Democrats occupy separate cultural spaces, separate networks. Soon, there won’t be Democrats on X; they’ll all have gone to Bluesky. And this means that the two communities are becoming entirely separate, to the point that there is no longer intermingling across the partisan divide.
“In our imagination, we always assumed aliens would come from another world. But it turns out that we’re going to build them ourselves and endow them with intelligence that will ultimately be superior to us.” —Niall Ferguson
That’s quite dangerous, I think, for a republic, not because there’s no public sphere. It still exists. It’s just that the two rival clans or rival sects refuse to engage with one another in good faith.
I don’t know how you fix that. It may be inherent in the way that the internet has evolved structurally that we have ended up in a giant Glasgow. I’m not quite sure where that leads, probably just to a kind of schizophrenic politics, in which small changes at the margins in a small number of counties in a small number of states cause the politics to swing radically from Rangers to Celtic, from Republicans to Democrats.
And each time this happens, we see more of the pathological behavior we saw at the end of the Biden administration, with the wild, preemptive pardoning of family members.
If I could strike a very pessimistic note for a moment, there is some sense of being in the late republic in America today, by which I mean that the institutions of the republic are being corroded by a latent civil war in which the stakes of political defeat become too high. That’s something of what eroded the Roman Republic and paved the way to the Empire.
My sense is that history has always been against any republic lasting 250 years. So this American republic is in its late republican phase with the intimations of empire, to bring our conversation back to where it began. That is the thing I worry about most as an American.
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