Niall Ferguson: Well, let's stare reality in the face. Peter Robinson: I'll spend the rest of the show trying to find a note of cheer. Niall Ferguson: I'll give you one more reason for being worried. And so Cold War II is taking place with a great deal more technology, a great deal more firepower than Cold War I. Of course we have superior weapons to the weapons they had at the beginning of Cold War I, but we also have a lot of things that they didn't have in Cold War I from artificial intelligence to maybe quantum computing. From a technological vantage point, it's also worse because we have the nuclear weapons of Cold War I. So purely from an economic vantage point, Cold War II is worse. Their peak was 44% the size of the United States. The Soviets never got close by that measure. Economically, it has all but caught up by one measure, gross domestic product based on purchasing power parity, China overtook the United States in 2014. It ended actually rather sooner than most experts anticipated, but there's no guarantee that Cold War II will last as long because China is a far more formidable adversary than the Soviet Union was. Cold War I was really a four decade affair. Niall Ferguson: Oh, it's much worse than that because you are assuming that it's gonna be very protracted. Am I being melodramatic, or is that a fair summary of what Cold War is?
We'll find ourselves living under nuclear threat again, and the very existence of our civilization is at stake. And now we are in Cold War II." Alright, here's what I take the term Cold War to mean, the conflict with China will last two or three generations.
But they were sufficiently similar for no one to argue about the nomenclature. Niall Ferguson in National Review, "There was a First World War. Ferguson is now completing his second volume of the two volume biography of Henry Kissinger.
Ferguson is the author of more than a dozen major works of history, including "The Pity of War, Explaining World War I", "The Ascent of Money", "Empire, How Britain Made the Modern World", and we come now to today's topic, "Kissinger, the Idealist", the first volume of his two volume biography of Henry Kissinger, one of the most important figures of the first long Cold War.
Before coming here to Stanford, he held posts at Oxford, Cambridge, New York University, Harvard, and the London School of Economics. A fellow at the Hoover Institution, Niall Ferguson received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oxford. Peter Robinson: Welcome to Uncommon Knowledge, I'm Peter Robinson. Historian Niall Ferguson on Uncommon Knowledge now. Peter Robinson: Just how serious is the emerging conflict with China? It has already turned into Cold War II. To view the full transcript of this episode, read below:
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