Taps Coogan – June 10th, 2023

Niall Ferguson, Scottish-American historian and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Harvard, recently spoke with Uncommon Knowledge’s Peter Robinson about his view that the US and China are locked into a bona fide Cold War.

The interview doesn’t lend itself to excerpts but the punchline, which would have been much more controversial in 2016 than it is today, is that the US needs to take competition with China as seriously as we did the Soviet Union during the first Cold War, that a conflict over Taiwan is more likely than not, that our odds in such a conflict aren’t great and therefore we should prioritize deterrence, and that the first causality of a US geopolitical miscalculation would be the US Dollar reserve currency status.