Niall Ferguson: This is what happens if China wins the new cold war

Russian president Vladimir Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping. AP

 

The winter of a new cold war is coming between the US and China, renowned Hoover Institution and Harvard historian Niall Ferguson warned The Australian Financial Review Business Summit this week.

Winning it might decide the 2020 US election. Losing it might be the end of a US dollar-dominated global financial system, if not worse. That’s very scary coming from the man who called the scale of the Soviet communist collapse in 1989 and the US mortgage implosion two years early in 2006.

Why Has Emotion Replaced Reason in America?

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez speaks during the Women’s March in New York on January 19. (DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

 

The answer will surprise you.

“Facts are stubborn things.” That’s what American founding father John Adams famously said. But in modern America, facts are not so stubborn, and you don’t get famous by clinging to them. You get famous by being stubborn with your emotions. In modern America, more stubborn than facts, truth and logic are emotions, feelings and “personal truth.”

Historian Niall Ferguson described the phenomenon in this week’s Sunday Times, writing, “We no longer live in a democracy. We live in an ‘emocracy,’ where emotions rather than majorities rule and feelings matter more than reason. The stronger your feelings—the better you are at working yourself into a fit of indignation—the more influence you have.”

Opinion: Why is the EU so vindictive about Brexit?

Michel Barnier, the European Union’s chief negotiator for Brexit, says the British are going backwards in exit talks with the EU.

 

Voluntary withdrawal from the EU treaty does not have to be painful

In case you’re wondering where the belligerent spirit went that pushed Europe into centuries of warfare, two major conflicts last century, numerous regional skirmishes in recent decades, and a Cold War lasting nearly half a century, rest assured it is alive and well, albeit channeled into a “peaceful” version in the European Union’s remorseless vindictiveness.

After brutalizing Greece for lying to join the euro and then daring to violate the strictures of membership, the EU has now turned its focus to punishing Britain for having the audacity to reject the stifling bureaucracy of Brussels and the increasingly assertive dominance of Berlin.

Muslims Tell Europe: “One Day All This Will Be Ours”

Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán recently said: “Our view is that we must solve our demographic problems by relying on our own resources and mobilising our own reserves, and… by renewing ourselves spiritually”. (Image source: David Plas/Wikimedia Commons)

 

• The Archbishop of Strasbourg Luc Ravel, nominated by Pope Francis in February, just declared that “Muslim believers know very well that their fertility is such today, that they call it… the Great Replacement. They tell you in a very calm, very positive way: One day all this, all this will be ours…”.
• Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán just warned against a “Muslimized Europe”. According to him, “the question of the upcoming decades is whether Europe will continue to belong to Europeans”.
• “In the coming 30 years, the number of Africans will grow by more than one billion people. That is twice the population of the entire European Union… The demographic pressure will be enormous. Last year, more than 180,000 people crossed in shabby boats from Libya. And this is just the beginning. According to EU Commissioner Avramopoulos, at this very moment, 3 million migrants are waiting to enter Europe”. — Geert Wilders, MP, The Netherlands, and leader of the Party for Freedom and Democracy (PVV).

This week, yet another Islamic terrorist attack targeted the Spanish city of Barcelona. As it was for many years under Muslim rule, it is, therefore, like Israel, land which many Islamists believe they are entitled to repossess.

High Debt, Low Integrity

The government shutdown is over. It is back to business as usual – that is, the usual business of out-of-control government spending. As of this writing, the U.S. national debt is over $17 trillion which amounts to $53,764 per citizen, $148,756 per taxpayer (according to USDebtClock.org). The six largest federal budget items are, in order: (1) Medicare/Medicaid ($860 billion); (2) Social Security ($812 billion); (3) Defense/Wars ($607 billion); (4) income security ($349 billion); (5) net interest on the debt ($261 billion); and (6) federal pensions ($229 billion). These sums are astronomical, and signal financial crisis or national degeneracy or both.

Want War? Then Continue Ignoring Iran

Earlier this month, Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a live television broadcast rallied his people to destroy Israel. He called Israel a ‘’cancerous tumor that should be cut and will be cut,” and promised Iranian support of any regime or enterprise that attempts to destroy the Jewish state.

Each of these events actually happened.

Each provides a glimpse into Iran’s true character and ambition.

Each is a harbinger of a greater, more deadly, confrontation.

Each was ignored, marginalized or flatly rejected by many in the West as mere bluster.

But not all have been so ignorant. “The single biggest danger in the Middle East today is not the risk of a six-day Israeli war against Iran,” wrote Harvard historian Niall Ferguson recently. “It is the risk that Western wishful nonthinking allows the mullahs of Tehran to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Because I am in no doubt that they would take full advantage of such a lethal lever.”

Historian Benny Morris agrees. He warned in the Los Angeles Times Tuesday that “if the Iranian nuclear project is not halted … there will be, by miscalculation, Iranian assault or Israeli preemption, a nuclear war in the Middle East.”

These men grasp the reality of what we’re witnessing in the Middle East. They’re not rejecting Iran’s actions as mere bluster. They’re looking at Iran, at its uncompromising drive for nuclear weapons, at its enthusiastic sponsoring of Islamist terrorism, at its constant effort to undermine Western interests, at its promise to utterly annihilate the Jewish state, and simply believing what their eyes and ears are telling them.

Full article: Want War? Then Continue Ignoring Iran (The Trumpet)