Niall Ferguson: Cold War Two is underway

“Cold War Two is underway,” according to the historian Niall Ferguson. Speaking at the Defence of Europe conference, co-hosted by Reaction and King’s College London, he added: “One cannot understand what is happening in Ukraine today without seeing it through the lens of Cold War Two between the US and China.” By contrast to the first Cold War, he said, China is now the “senior partner” and Russia “the junior.”

In conversation with John Bew, Professor in History and Foreign Policy at King’s College London and the Prime Minister’s Special Advisor for Foreign Policy, Niall Ferguson commented that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine had powerfully illustrated Russia’s perilous position in the international order. Observers had overestimated Russia’s battlefield capabilities and underestimated the degree to which western aid had shifted the terms of conflict in Ukraine’s favour.

Ferguson told the conference: “Russia is increasingly fighting a 20th century war against 21st century defenders.” He also praised Ukrainian efforts to establish strong resistance and indicated that Ukraine has shown that post-conflict, it may be able to build a strong state and defeat the problems of corruption that have dogged its history: “A nation is being born,” he said. “If ever there were any doubt about Ukrainian national identity, its viability as a state, that doubt has been extinguished.” He added: “There will be a positively revolutionary spirit in Ukraine after this war is brought to an end.”

As a result, Putin would have to recalculate his position in future peace negotiations: “Time is clearly not on Vladimir Putin’s side… Right now, the most we can hope for is some kind of ceasefire, which will come about mainly because of Russian exhaustion rather than any military breakthrough.”

Ferguson criticised US President Joe Biden for his speech in Warsaw during which he called for Vladimir Putin to be removed from the Russian leadership. It was a “very reckless” thing to do. If we are at the beginning of Cold War Two, the implication is that we are at as dangerous a period as the first stages of the First Cold War: “If the interwar era is over and Cold War Two has begun, we are at the most dangerous phase of that struggle… It was mainly lucky that Cold War One didn’t turn into World War Three.”

Ferguson criticised the Biden administration for its “extraordinarily risky” stance. “It’s almost as if the Biden administration wants the war to keep going.” He continued: “The big concern is not so much mission creep as for a tendency for the aims of the United States to become ambiguous.”

In the Cold War, only careful leadership prevented ultimate catastrophe. At today’s conference, one of Britain’s leading historians sounded a note of caution.