The world is facing a period of great upheaval and change, from the Russian attack on Ukraine to the artificial intelligence revolution. Historian Niall Ferguson, 59, who holds positions at Harvard and Stanford University, calls for extreme vigilance about the many risks posed by this era. In an interview on the sidelines of the Grand Continent Summit, an annual conference organized by Le Grand Continent magazine in Saint-Vincent (Aosta Valley, Italy), Ferguson says he believes that the Joe Biden administration's foreign policy is a failure because it kept the Taliban, This does not stop Putin or Hamas from launching their attacks. He believes that Donald Trump is likely to win the US elections again and warns that Ukraine could lose the war, that Europe must not forget that its security depends on the United States and that artificial intelligence is seriously affecting our cognitive abilities could.
Ask. How do you see the West in this fragmented world with increasingly antagonistic powers? There was a unified response to the invasion of Ukraine, but now support is wavering.
Answer. I think if future historians were to try to summarize the Biden administration's foreign policy, they might do it this way: “These people were very bad at deterrence.” They failed to prevent the Taliban from taking complete control to take over Afghanistan. They have not stopped Putin from further invading Ukraine. They have not stopped Iran from launching attacks on Israel through their proxies. And it remains to be seen whether they will stop China from blocking Taiwan, but I wouldn't be surprised if they fail there too. The West's response to the invasion of Ukraine has become a slightly mythological topic. When the US realized that Putin was serious, it published the plan instead of deterring him. The Americans did not expect Ukraine to hold out. They expected [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky should fly out. Everyone was really surprised at the success of the Ukrainians' defense of Kiev. Only then did we start supplying them with weapons. And from the moment we started supplying them with weapons, we supplied them with enough weapons not to lose, but never enough to win. People in Washington said, “Oh, that's great.” “The Russian military is being demoted and we don't have to fight.” But that posed a greater risk to Ukraine, which is what we're seeing now: it was running out of offensive capabilities. We should have recognized the need for a ceasefire last year when things were going really well for Ukraine. We have created a very bad situation in which Western support is decreasing. The Ukrainians are already running out of ammunition. And possibly a year before Donald Trump moves into the White House. The Biden administration's foreign policy has been extremely unsuccessful. It makes Trump look good.
Q You mentioned the Taiwan issue. Given the threat from China, do you think the European Union should ally itself closely with the US or should it seek its own position?
TO. We are in a cold war. Two superpowers – the United States and China – compete ideologically, technologically, economically and geopolitically. There are only two, because superpower status today is about AI, quantum computing and all these things. And for Europeans it is a complete illusion to believe that there is a choice. Because this continent depends on the United States for its security. It's incredible to me that Europeans think they have a choice. And yet they do it. If the United States elects Donald Trump and he withdraws from NATO, Europeans will discover what strategic autonomy means.
Q What does that mean?
TO. It will be a very unpleasant thing because it will cost a lot of money. It will be very difficult to achieve this within a realistic time frame. And then the Europeans will be quite exposed not only to China, but also to China's proxy, Russia. The situation is actually a lot worse than most Europeans realize. If Ukraine is defeated, Russia will be on the borders of Europe. And Europe, if it doesn't have the United States, has to raise a huge amount of money. And not just money, but also the ability to arm herself, which she currently lacks. All of this can happen quite quickly.
Q What do you think needs to be done?
TO. I think we have to be very, very willing to work extremely hard to keep transatlantic life together. Because when we are divided, we are in a much weaker position. There are currently major doubts on both sides. We are very bad at imagining defeat. It's really one of our big short-sighted problems. We can't quite imagine the day Kiev falls. We can't quite imagine what it would be like if Trump gave a speech in 2025 and said the United States would leave. We can't imagine it [Chinese President] Xi Jinping in Taipei after successfully coming to power. And all of these things can happen. We could be in for a rude awakening.
Q Since 2016 it has been clear that the extreme right is gaining ground in the West. Right-wing extremist parties either outperform moderate groups or shape them with their ideology. Do you think the traditional right can still win in this fight?
TO. Classical liberalism achieved a clear dominance that lasted until the 2010s. It beat the Soviet Union, beat the left, convinced [U.S. president Bill] Clinton and [British prime minister Tony] Blair. Once there, you had no choice but to create a global economy based on free markets, free trade, free movement of capital and, indeed, free movement of people. And that would inevitably cause a backlash because it probably wouldn't benefit everyone. In fact, it was very likely that it would harm the white working class of Western Europe and North America and benefit the working class of Asia. That's the big story. These arguments are still alive. They're still strong, they're still persuasive, and they're still winning elections. But in Europe the populist right ultimately has no solution to the problem of the aging population. There is no solution to the problem of low productivity growth. There is no solution to the economic problem. And in many ways, solving the immigration problem only slightly worsens the economic situation.
Q How should leaders of the traditional right deal with this situation? Should they partly agree with the arguments of the radical right? Or is there a clear, moderate alternative?
TO. I think if you want to get elected as a conservative you have to bring these different elements together. They cannot simply be elected by disaffected working-class nationalists. But you can't expect only free market business people to support you. How do you bring them together? Here's what I think you're saying: We're in terrible financial trouble. This will be a burden for your children and grandchildren. We have to address the problem of low growth, we have to address the problem of high debt. But we are also against open borders, and we are also against cultural relativism, and that is why we combine classical economic principles with a controlled immigration policy. If you can't do both, you will fail.
Q In these difficult times, the artificial intelligence revolution is emerging. It has enormous potential, it could lead to great progress, but it also carries risks. What socio-economic impact will it have?
TO. You're already seeing office jobs being destroyed. There will be a big change in the employment situation of the middle class, as a whole number of jobs will disappear very soon. Adoption is happening fairly quickly, and early data shows that there will be significant productivity gains through large job losses. I think economic history shows that after 20 years you get a lot of new jobs, but in the transition period there is great distress and discontent that will find some form of political outlet. But there is another problem that is even more worrying.
Q What is that?
TO. Artificial intelligence will have unintended consequences for our cognitive abilities. Just as Google destroyed our memory because we no longer had to remember things, I think large language models will actually destroy the way we think because they essentially construct plausible-sounding arguments for us. And because we are very lazy as a species, most people basically allow this to happen and lose the ability to do it themselves. Unless we cut children off from large language models and ensure they are educated without them, we cannot teach children to think. I think they'll just let GPT4 or 5 do the thinking, and that actually worries me more than the impact on employment. If we lose the ability to construct an argument in response to a question because we delegate it to a machine, I don't think we really have much of a future as a species. That's my biggest fear. The large language models are an invitation to mass mental laziness.
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