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Nial Ferguson: war of the Worlds - 20th Century history revised

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From an isolationist nation at the end of World war One, the US today has bases in over ninety countries. No other nation has been able to project military power as the US does today. But is such an involvement sustainable? Despite its might, the US is shrinking in terms of population and economic power [...]

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Empires drive history. But the empires of the past 100 years were short lived, none surviving to see the dawn of the new century. Today, there are no empires, at least not officially. But that could soon change if the United States—or even China—embraces its imperial destiny. How can they avoid the fate of those [...]

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The key question is whether something could happen in 2007 to drain away this liquidity. For most investors and policymakers, the nightmare scenario remains that of the post-1929 Depression, when a stock-market crash was followed by a spectacular wave of bank failures and a massive monetary meltdown. However, by blaming the Hungry Thirties on blunders [...]

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Watch this video of a talk by historian Niall Ferguson where he discusses risk in the 21st century.
Learn how today is like the time right before World war I. We could be at risk of a major war breaking out.
What went wrong before World war I? We need to know this because it could happen [...]

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The Middle East looks like Europe circa World war I.
The United States invaded Iraq in April 2003 for multiple reasons, but the most ambitious was a desire to remake a whole region. The Middle East, it was argued, was full of political and economic underachievers, driven to violence by a Muslim/Arab inferiority complex. Replacing Saddam [...]

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Of all the columns I’ve written for this newspaper over the last couple of years, none has elicited a more heated response than the one published in January 2006 about the Great war of 2007. Indeed, it still gets quoted back at me more than a year and a half later.
The column was written in [...]

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With the world population growth outpacing food supply, say goodbye to the era of unlimited improvement.
The great demographer and economist Thomas Malthus was 23 years old the last time a British summer was this rain-soaked, which was in 1789. The consequences of excessive rainfall in the late 18th century were predictable. Crops would fail, the [...]

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Divide and rule was an old maxim of Britain’s Empire. In the Middle East today, there’s certainly no shortage of division. But who is ruling as a result? Any lingering hopes of a two-state solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians evaporated last week as the Islamist extremists of Hamas seized control of [...]

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ST PETERSBURG, Russia (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Sunday called for practical steps to redraw the world economic order to reflect the growing role of fast-growing emerging nations.
He told an economic forum in St Petersburg many global trade and financial institutions tailored to meet the interests of a few key economies were ineffective [...]

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MAKING HISTORY: The Calm and the Storm puts players in control of a global conflict, challenging them to define its outcome. It’s a different kind of WWII strategy game — here, you aren’t just after military success. To win, you have to achieve economic and diplomatic victory, too. Use all the resources at your disposal, [...]

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Seven years ago, the economist Brigitte Granville and I published an article in the Journal of Economic History titled “Weimar on the Volga,” in which we argued that the experience of 1990s Russia bore many resemblances to the experience of 1920s Germany.
No historical analogy is exact, needless to say. Russia’s currency did not collapse as [...]

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Today’s crop of political leaders lacks the military experience to recognize the importance of maritime power.
Yet there is a lot to be said for militarism where military matters are concerned. The besetting problem of Britain and the United States before 1914 and again before 1939 was the tendency to leave decisions about grand strategy to [...]

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BEING HATED IS NO FUN. And few people hate being hated more than Americans. I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve been asked, “Why do they hate us?” — and another for each of the different answers I’ve heard. It’s because of our foreign policy. It’s because of their extremism. It’s because [...]

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Last week, the Harvard academic Niall Ferguson offered an optimistic prediction of how our world could look, 30 years after the September 11 attacks. But is the future really so rosy? Will our society and way of life survive the traumas of war, terrorism and climate change? Here, three leading historians look ahead - to [...]

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Tired of American global dominance? Just consider the alternatives. By Niall Ferguson.
Critics of U.S. global dominance should pause and consider the alternative. If the United States retreats from its hegemonic role, who would supplant it? Not Europe, not China, not the Muslim world—and certainly not the United Nations. Unfortunately, the alternative to a single superpower [...]

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AT AGE 42, Niall Ferguson has become one of the world’s most famous and provocative historians, with high-profile posts ranging from Harvard to Oxford to Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Born in Scotland and educated at Oxford, he is not only a prolific author of books, including Colossus (2004), an examination of American empire, and The [...]

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Lebanon and Iraq show that some long-fought civil wars only have cease-fires.
IT WAS THREE YEARS AGO that a prescient Beirut journalist I know predicted that Iraq would end up as “Lebanon to the power of 10″ � meaning Lebanon during its 16-year civil war between 1975 and 1991. This year, his prophecy has been fulfilled [...]

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Failing to stop North Korea from going nuclear may have been the last straw for the onetime guardian of world order.
LAST WEEK may well be remembered as the beginning of the end for the U.N. Security Council. The institution that has been so central to the post-1945 international order was already tottering under the weight [...]

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The U.S. doesn’t have the necessary military manpower or fiscal solvency of its imperial predecessors in Iraq.
YOU WOULD HAVE thought 300 million Americans would be enough to rule the world � or at least a couple of medium-sized failed states. The population of Iraq is 27 million, that of Afghanistan 31 million. Yet the same [...]

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Ferguson maintains that the United States is unquestionably an imperial power, but because Americans don’t like to think so, the US often fails to fulfill its imperial responsibilities. One crucial case in point for Ferguson is Iraq, where, in his view, an imperial power less in denial about itself would have known that such an [...]

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