Niall Ferguson's Time Machine

Articles

Israel Has Done Most of the Job. Only Trump Can Finish It.

1 week ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

For any U.S. president, the decision whether to intervene in a foreign war is a momentous one. This is the week when President Donald Trump has to make that decision. Should he, or should he not, use American air power to finish the job Israel has very nearly completed, ensuring that Iran never possesses nuclear weapons?
The Cloister and the Starship

1 week ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

Near the beginning of Neal Stephenson’s 1995 novel The Diamond Age, there is a memorable exchange between a computer engineer named Hackworth and an “equity lord”—a tech billionaire, as we would say—with the wonderful surname of Finkle-McGraw. The engineer alludes to some research work he has been doing.
Israel’s Attack Restores the Credibility of the West

2 weeks ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson |Harry Halem

After TACO, now BDCO: Bibi Doesn’t Chicken Out. Early Friday morning, Israel launched a historic wave of attacks against Iran—the latest phase of the Israel-Iran war that effectively began on October 7, 2023. Israel’s Operation Rising Lion included both air strikes and a wave of Mossad-run assassinations across Iran that effectively decapitated the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Reviving Britain will require our version of the chainsaw act

3 weeks ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

That scraping sound you hear is Rachel Reeves moving the deckchairs around on the Titanic. On Wednesday the chancellor announced the reinstatement of winter fuel payments, which she had axed for most pensioners last year. She intends to claw back the money from better-off pensioners through higher tax bills and a higher means test for future payments. How she will pay the additional cost of £700 million will not be revealed until the autumn budget.
America Is In A Late Republic Stage Like Rome

1 month ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is the celebrated historian, commentator and biographer whose many books include “The Ascent of Money,” “Kissinger: The Idealist,” “Civilization: The West and the Rest” and “The Square and the Tower.” A senior fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University and at the Belfer Center at Harvard University, Ferguson recently sat down with Noema Editor-in-Chief Nathan Gardels to discuss the Trump agenda, the conflict with China, polarization in America and his own conversion...
Exposing Harvard's Rot

1 month ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

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Harvard, you’ve got a problem - but Donald Trump’s war will backfire

1 month ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

When a head of state picks a fight with a university, you generally expect the university to lose. Even the richest university — say, Harvard — does not have pockets as deep as the government. And as for armed force, to paraphrase Stalin, “How many divisions does the president of Harvard have?”And yet the pen is sometimes mightier than the sword, the gown more powerful than the crown.
Donald Trump Is Crushing His To-Do List

2 months ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

It always shocks me when people say they are shocked by Donald Trump. The president told us exactly what he was going to do. All you had to do was look. By my count, there were 37 short but tightly scripted videos, recorded between December 2022 and December 2023, in which the then-candidate previewed just about every move he has made since his inauguration 100 days ago.
Of Greenmantle and Me

2 months ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

This is the story of why I decided to call my advisory business after one of John Buchan’s books, Greenmantle. Let me begin by sketching a little bit the background to the founding of Greenmantle LLC back in 2011. If you go back to that period, two things were happening that I watched with increasing concern. One was that universities were increasingly in the grip of a kind of political mania. You could call it “wokeism,” for short.
Donald-25: the new virus that’s devastating the world economy

2 months ago | niallferguson.substack.com | Niall Ferguson

It is five years since the world economy suffered a devastating shock caused by a virus from China. You may think the analogy strange, but we are marking the fifth anniversary of the Covid-19 pandemic with a very similar shock to the world economy, which is manifesting itself in very similar ways. Numbers of passengers flying to the US from abroad have plunged. Ships full of goods bound for America have been halted. All over the US, companies will soon start to raise prices and shed employees.