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The Foreign Policy Of Donald Trump In Historical Perspective Lse Event

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TITLE: 66RTUQULmDk CHANNEL: Unknown DATE: ---TRANSCRIPT--- Let’s go ahead and have a seat. I’ll be back in a sec. Sorry for the delay. Great to see everybody uh here tonight. My name is Peter Troubitz. I’m a professor in the international relations department and the director of the failen United States center which is hosting this evening’s lecture. So tonight’s lecture is the seventh and concluding lecture in our year-long series America’s changing role in the world. Don’t worry, we’ll be back next year because that’s one thing I’m going to go out on a limb here. America’s role in the world will not be settled by next year. uh though it’s possible that tonight’s speaker will try to settle it here and now. Um anyway, for those of you who have joined us uh in previous events, you know that the the series is premised uh on the idea that America is in the throws of a rethink about its foreign policy purposes uh and its priorities. a process that began before Donald Trump uh took office uh but has accelerated uh on his watch uh and often in surprising and uh and unpredictable ways. We very much wanted to bring to bring speakers to the school who had a view on what the Trump administration was about or how to think about the Trump administration and its foreign policy, what it might mean for America’s place in the world uh going forward uh and given America’s outsized power, what it might mean for the world itself. Uh and we are very pleased tonight uh to welcome uh Sir Neil Ferguson uh to the LSC uh who really needs very uh as the ovation when we walked in needs very little by way of an introduction. He’s certainly he’s been here uh at the LSC as a a visitor um a couple of times, visiting professor uh and he’s currently a visiting professor in the school of of public policy. Uh, briefly, Neil is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution in Stanford and a senior faculty fellow at the Belelfur Center for Science uh, in International Affairs at Harvard. He’s a prize-winning author with 16 books under his belt. Uh he’s also an awardwing award-winning uh filmmaker and founder and managing director of Green Mantle uh macroeconomic and geopolitical advisory um firm. I think many of you uh like me uh know him also in his capacity as a contributor uh in the public space uh for many years in outlets such as the Sunday Telegraph, Newsweek, the Financial Times, the Sunday Times, Bloomberg, and now currently uh the Free Press. So here’s the game plan for tonight. Neil is going to speak for roughly 35 uh minutes. Um, we’ll then turn to discussion uh before opening it up to uh your questions uh in the theater here. And for those of you uh online, for those of you online, um you’re going to be able to submit your questions via the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. Uh please be sure to include your your name and your affiliation. And then maybe just the last kind of housekeeping note here. If you haven’t already turned your phone to silent, please do so now so it doesn’t disrupt the proceedings. And with that, please join me in giving uh Neil Ferguson a warm LSC welcome. Well, thank you very much indeed, Peter. It’s a great pleasure to be back here at uh the LSSE. I’m going to uh talk perhaps rather over ambitiously about the foreign policy of Donald Trump in historical perspective. And I’m going to say at least five things with which you will vehemently disagree. uh it may get higher than five but five is my batting average. There are all kinds of historical analogies that can be used to try to understand the historical significance of President Trump. And some of them have been current for more than a decade now. I certainly have been uh reading comparisons uh of Donald Trump with Hitler since 2016 when he burst onto the American political scene as a a candidate for the Republican nomination. Put your hand up if you’ve read It Can’t Happen Here. I always like to give LSE students additional reading. And so that’s the first assignment uh for those of you who haven’t read Sinclair Lewis’s great uh 1930s imagining of a fascist America. And so the character in that novel uh Buzz Windrip is a a populist who becomes president and turns out to be in fact a fascist. back in 2016 when my old friend Andrew Sullivan was saying Trump is Hitler, I told him, let’s use it can’t happen here and if it does happen as Lewis imagines it, then you’ll be January last year, it caught my eye that Dar Spiegel had Trump with a laurel wreath as de I empir my old friend Gideon Rathman wrote uh a good essay in the Financial Times which you can see uh illustrated on the right here depicted President Trump alongside Presidents Putin and see carving up the world like a Christmas pudding uh an illusion to an early 1800’s cartoon of of Napoleon and and and Pit the Younger carving up the world. So there’s the wouldbe emperor analogy. The the odd thing about the Financial Times is that it also uh is the journal that coined the the phrase Trump always chickens out. Taco. So he’s an emperor, but then he always chickens out except when he doesn’t because the problem about Taco is that he doesn’t always chicken out. Uh, in fact, interestingly, President Trump is bluffing roughly half the time on social media and the other half he’s not. So, it’s a coin toss whether he’s going to chickenen out or send stealth bombers to bomb your nuclear facilities as of course he did last year. So, you can see why these analogies are slippery. an emperor who sometimes chickens out. My colleagues in the economics profession have been scratching their heads because they can’t understand why Trump’s tariffs haven’t done more damage. Uh there was a great kathuffle in April of last year. You’ll remember Peter Liberation Day. And you can see that for a brief period all the equity indices sold off but it was a brief period and they subsequently rallied and of course they sold off again at the end of February this year when war broke out uh with Iran and then they rallied again. This is all very difficult uh to explain because tariffs and wars really ought to have been much worse for the economy than these charts would seem to suggest. An even trickier question for economists is why Trump’s America is leaving the competition in the dust. What I’ve done in this chart is track uh the US, German, Japanese, uh UK and Chinese Asia indices back uh to the beginning of the Trump era uh to the point at which he was elected for the first time in November 2016. And you’ll see that the US economy’s uh performance uh at least the US equity market’s performance relative to the competition has been stellar. And indeed, uh, it had its nastiest period under the Biden Harris administration. Up until this point, uh, Donald Trump has been a home run for equity investors. Meanwhile, to confuse the picture still further, the Democratic Party uh lurches ever further to the left, endorsing outright uh socialism in the case of the uh mayor of New York, Zoran Mandani. This is odd because you would have thought if you were a conventional political scientist that with the advent of a figure like Trump, the center ground had been left open and the rational thing in a 1990s framework would have been for the Democrats to occupy that center ground rather than to move further uh to the left. I am here to urge you to resist fasile analogies. Trump is Hitler. Trump is Caesar. These are, I think, somewhat infantile uh analogies that tell us very little indeed about the United States in the 21st century. And they’re not just fasile, they’re superfluous. We don’t need these analogies because there are much better analogies available to us. Uh the analogies that the president himself uses seem like a good starting point. What’s interesting about President Trump, for somebody who clearly doesn’t spend a great deal of time reading history books, is that he nevertheless has historical figures in mind. Uh this was clear in an interview during the 2024 campaign with Bloomberg when he threw in the name William McKinley saying that this was his inspiration because McKinley had been tariff man. And thank you. If if it’s very important to have an alarm set 10 minutes into the lecture in case you’ve fallen asleep. Uh I used to do the same as an Oxford undergraduate. Um so so why why McKinley of all people? Uh the president is attracted partly by McKinley’s reputation when he was in the House of Representatives as a protectionist but also I think attracted by McKinley’s reputation when he was president as a pretty outandout imperialist at least as a president who presided over significant acquisition of territory uh by the United States. But the trouble with this analogy and the others that come from this sort of period is I’m not sure how helpful they are given that the situation of the United States is so different from its situation in the late 19th and early 20th century. The the guilded age, there are many things about America today which are reminiscent of the guilded age. Certainly the significant material inequalities come to mind. power of big business comes to mind. The rampant corruption uh comes to mind. But when it comes to foreign policy, it’s not clear to me how much President Trump or anybody else can really usefully learn from William McKinley or for that matter Theodore Roosevelt. The other very obvious recent illusion to the uh early 20th century was the the Trump corollery which uh cropped up in the national security strategy published late last year which is a straightforward copy and paste from the Roosevelt corollery which was the corollery to the Monroe Doctrine. Now of course it’s the Donro doctrine and the corollery says not only can other countries not interfere in uh the Americas but the United States reserves the right to intervene if it doesn’t like the look of a government in the Americas. I’ll come back to the Trump corollery later. But what I want to begin by showing you is that the situation of the United States is very different today from its situation in the 1890s and early 1900s when it was an extraordinarily dynamic economy. But in terms of great power politics, not even a middle power as uh Mark Carney likes to talk about these days. Today the United States is the dominant anglophone hegeimon or if you uh like empire and it has certain peculiar resemblances to other empires including the last angophone empire particularly in the area of fiscal policy. Ferguson’s law named I want to point out after Adam Ferguson because I’m not an egoomaniac. Um Ferguson’s law is a straightforward proposition that helps people get their heads around public finance who don’t necessarily enjoy that field. It states that any great power that spends more on interest payments on the national debt than on defense won’t be a great power for much longer. And the beautiful thing about Ferguson’s law, and it is a beautiful thing, is that it holds for every empire since the Venetian Empire of the medieval period. It holds for the Castellian or Spanish Empire in the 17th century. It is true uh of the Dutch Empire in the 18th century and the French Empire in that period too of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century and the Austrahungarian Empire in the 19th century. It is also true of the British Empire in the 20th century. And what’s great is that the United States just crossed the threshold began to violate Ferguson’s law in 2024 as you can see from this chart. And it’s on a clearly unsustainable path. Congressional budget office does its best to anticipate the trajectory of American public finance, of the deficit, of the debt. You can back out the likely trajectory of defense spending from CBO projections. Uh and you can also see where interest payments will go. And so what I’ve done in this chart is just to calculate these things as percentages of GDP using the CBO data. And you can see that the interest payments rise uh steadily relative to GDP and the defense budget in fact declines. So that by 2036, 10 years from now, the United States on current trends will be spending twice as much on interest payments on the federal debt as on defense. This is entirely novel from the vantage point of American history, but it is far from novel if you’re a student as I am of empires and history. To add to the challenge, this is happening at a time when the United States faces its most formidable ever economic rival. This chart calculates China’s gross domestic product as a percentage of the United States going back to 1980 when as you can see it was a mere 10% the size of the US economy. It’s now above 70%. According to the international monetary fund that’s on a current dollar basis. Uh the economics nerds in the uh audience will know that on a purchasing power parity basis China overtook the United States at some point in the last decade. But on a current dollar basis, which is kind of what I think matters more, uh the Chinese a are much closer to being equals of the United States than the Soviet Union ever was because the Soviet Union, even our PPP basis never got closer than about 44% of US GDP. It gets worse. China’s rise to dominate global manufacturing is another unprecedented challenge. So if you go back 20 years, 20 years ago, US manufacturing value added was twice that of China. Today, role reversal. Today, China’s is very nearly twice that of the United States. The workshop of the world is no longer the United States. The arsenal of democracy is no longer an arsenal. There’s an arsenal of autocracy and its capital is Beijing. That interesting thing about President Trump’s response to these challenges, the economic challenge and the geopolitical challenge, is how really Nixsonian his answers are. And I don’t think people pay nearly enough attention to the influence of Richard Nixon on Donald Trump. And I don’t know why they don’t. Because the relationship between the young Donald Trump and the elderly, more or less discredited Richard Nixon is well documented. Uh, this is a letter from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump dated December the 21st, 1987. Dear Donald, I won’t do the accent. I did not see the program, but Mrs. Nixon told me that you were great on the Donna Hugh Show. As you can imagine, she is an expert in politics, and she predicts that whenever you decide to run for office, you will be a winner. Here’s Trump with Nixon at a March 1989 fundraiser. So whenever people are trying to tell you that Trump is Hitler or Augustus Caesar or William McKinley, no, he is at some level Richard Nixon’s revenge. They have the same enemies. Harvard, the New York Times, the fake news, the bureaucracy. Nixon called it the bureaucracy. Trump the deep state. The Nixonian parallels are very striking. Let me give you two examples of this. The first is the summer of 1971. Where were you in the summer of 1971? It’s interesting to think back. I was quite young at that point. Uh I wasn’t tracking American politics, especially closely at the age of seven, but Richard Nixon did two remarkable things that summer. He dropped two bombshells. And he dropped those bombshells on America’s allies. The first was to announce to the utter constrnation of his Asian allies that he intended to go to be Beijing. They called it peaking then and meet Maong. And then a month later he dropped another bombshell which was uh to break the link between the dollar and gold the vestigial remnant of the Bretonwood system and impose a 10% acrosstheboard tariff on all imports into the United States. The Japanese still refer to the Nixon shaku the Nixon shock. And I want to suggest to you that what we saw last year was Donald Trump’s version of the Nixon shock. First, the diplomatic blow which was actually delivered by Vice President Vance at the Munich Security Conference. A blow directed at European confidence in the Atlantic relationship. And then of course Liberation Day, the blow of tariffs even higher than 10% across the board, the so-called reciprocal tariffs. Now the problem with what President Trump did last April is firstly that it’s not clear that tariffs can really strengthen the US economy. This might seem self-evident to you, but it is worth dwelling on. The Yale Budget Lab does regular updates on where the effective tariff rate stands. And since the Supreme Court ruling against the AIPA basis for the reciprocal tariffs, they’ve had to update it. But roughly speaking, the average effective tariff rate is now close to 12%. Assuming, which I think is reasonable, that the section 122 tariffs become permanent, it’ll be above 12%. That is 10 times where the effective tariff rate was at the beginning of the Trump era. And it transports us back to the tariff rates last seen in the 1940s, which is a remarkable fact. If you had told 100 economists two years ago that the effective tariff rate would return to where it was in the 1940s, having been where it was in the early 1930s last year, 99 would have said very bad consequences will follow from that. When I was at Oxford, my roommate uh was a brilliant Korean economist named Hunong Shin. It was his misfortune to be next door to one of the most dissolute undergraduates who’d ever studied at Mlin College. That was me. Uh Hunong Shin was for years at the Bank for International Settlements. He’s just been appointed governor of the South Korean Central Bank. He did some fantastic work at BIS on the nature of the global economy. And he showed that if you do network uh architecture of it, it’s a a very complex network of interrelated economic supply chains and balance sheets. And when you look at what he calls the two-step supplier to customer linkages, that is to say the links from China to the United States, for example, that go via Mexico or Vietnam, it’s as interrelated, it’s as interconnected as it ever has been. And tariffs don’t really change that. Tariffs are a blunt instrument, a 19th century policy tool that you’re applying to the extraordinary complex global economy that has evolved uh since the 1980s. And it shapeshifts. It shapeshifts because the goods find the optimal way to the market if they need to make two stops rather than one. That’s what they do. So tariffs can have certain effects. If you look at the uh current account deficit of the United States, one effect is very noticeable in this chart here, you can see that the current account deficit was reduced last year. But what tariffs can’t do is reduce the fiscal deficit. Even although last year the president and his advisers often said that tariffs would be a great source of revenue. They’re our source of revenue no doubt but if you look at the projections for the federal deficit it starts just under 6% of GDP this year and it constantly grows until it’s above 9% of GDP in the 2050s at the end of the Congressional Budget Office’s range of projection. And the other thing about tariffs is despite the rhetoric of making America great again, they don’t restore uh or restore manufacturing jobs. In fact, employment in manufacturing since President Trump’s reelection has declined. Nixon’s strategy uh included not only uh tariffs but also a weaker dollar. That was the real point of the August 1971 announcement. The dollar’s decoupling from gold meant the dollar weakened against the European and Asian currencies. This was the origin of the great uh John Connelly line, our currency, your problem. Now there was some talk of this uh from uh Steven Myron who now is at the Fed but for a time was in charge of the council of economic adviserss. But when you actually look at what the dollar has done under President Trump, it is a nothing burger. This is a chart that covers the entirety of my lifetime as seen through the effective exchange rate of the dollar. That’s the dollar’s exchange rate relative to all of the currencies of its trading partners. And you can see that we’ve had some very big dollar devaluations. The 1970s, for example, which was the Nixon era, there was a big uh devaluation in the late 1980s, there was a big depreciation of the dollar prior to the financial crisis. But look at the Trump era, nothing has really happened. It’s a minimal depreciation, not really enough uh to move the economic needle. But the parallels get better. Now, I want to transport you to 1973. By this time, I was somewhat more uh aware uh at the age of nine and I certainly was becoming aware of inflation. The first publication of my life was a letter to the Glasgow Herald written I think the following year complaining about the excessively high price of school shoes. So in inflation was always an interest of mine. You could say I was precocious or maybe just a typical penny pinching Scotsman. What happened in 1973? Well, here are two New York Times front pages to tell you. Arabs and Israelis battle on two fronts. Egyptians bridge sewers air deals intense. A surprise attack on Israel, the Yamapour war. Egypt and Syria attack Israel. Uh and then we fast forward to November the 10th. Kissinger fails to sway Saudis from oil embargo because President Trump is subconsciously or perhaps consciously reenacting the Nixon presidency. We have to have a war in the Middle East and an oil shock. Now, compared with 1973, the United States is far more militarily dominant in the Middle East. In the 1970s, the Soviet Union could deploy substantial military forces to the region and therefore action in the Middle East was very risky. There was a moment in the Yamapour war when it seemed as if the Soviets were going to intervene and send troops of their own as well as warships into action. It was one of the most tense moments in the Cold War. We don’t have to worry about the Russians in that way anymore. They’ve been drastically reduced as a force in the region, especially in the last couple of years. And as we saw after February the 28th, the United States has the capability to inflict extraordinary military damage on a country such as the Islamic Republic of Iran. In the first days of the war, these charts go up to March 17. So really uh the first two and a half weeks of the war. These are the missiles and the drones that the Iranians were able to fire at their neighbors. Their retaliation strategy was a surprising one. They retaliated more against uh the their Arab Gulf neighbors than against Israel or the United States. But look at the decline. It’s an exponential decline in the capacity to fire missiles. Not quite so drastic in the case of drones. By the standards of any war in history, this is an astonishing achievement. An American blitzkrieg. But now we come to the second problem of Trump Nixon. Despite having been to a vast extent disarmed, the Iranian regime has sufficient firepower, enough of a threat in the form of missiles and drones to close the Strait of Hormuz. You can tell by now that I like charts. One of the reasons I went to the United States was I just found that people like charts there more than they did at Oxford. This is my favorite chart of the moment. This is the number of crossings in either direction uh by boats by tankers of uh uh and ships of varying uh types through the straight of Horus. And this is the war beginning. And this is where we are now. This is a dramatic shock to the global economy the the magnitude of which is quite hard to grasp. So let me try and help you with you guessed it charts. So if we calculate that roughly speaking 20% of the global oil markets going through the straight of Hormuz uh but the Iranians were able to export some despite uh the recently imposed blockade and the Saudis could increase the amount that they sent with their pipeline to the Red Sea u etc etc various ways in which you compensate you lift sanctions uh on the Russian ships etc. It’s still 10% of global oil even after all these adjustments. And here are the oil production changes in percentage terms. This is the 10% I just mentioned compared with all the previous crises in the Middle East including the Yam Kapour war of 73. The Iranian revolution of 7879 which professor Alvandi and I were just discussing. He has a new book coming out about that. I highly recommend it. Nothing that has happened in all the Gulf Wars, in all the Middle Eastern crises since 1973 comes close to what is happening now. If there’s one thing I want to convey to you, it is the scale of the shock to the global economy that is currently unfolding. Because it’s not just oil. Oil inventories are being depleted rapidly. The inventories were a cushion like the strategic petroleum reserves but they are being depleted rapidly. And then we have ura then we have aromatics and nafta. Then we have uh the various prochemicals that are dependent on supply from the straight of foremost. The price action is striking, but this is a crisis that moves at the speed of an oil tanker or a container ship. It’s not like a virus. CO virus SARS KV2 moved at the speed of a jet plane. This thing is moving at the speed of a tanker and it hasn’t yet reached the United States. It’s only really impacted the United States through the price of gasoline which adjusted immediately to the price of crude oil which is a global price. Unless the Strait of Hormuz is reopened very soon, the United States runs the risk not just of higher inflation, but also of recession. Another book for you to read just out by the brilliant Tyler Goodspeed, Recession: The Real Reasons Economies Shrink and What to Do About It. This is an amazing piece of applied economic history by one of the most brilliant people I ever had the good fortune to teach. Very cool data. Of 23 recessions in the US since 1902, nearly half were wholly or partly due to energy shocks. Goodspeed shows. Now you’re all beginning to think. I know what you think. I know what you’re thinking. You acquire the power of telepathy after a certain point. I know what you’re thinking, but just bear with me. The oil shock of 1973-74, which I already told you was less of a shock than the shock we see now, took Henry Kissinger four months to sort, four months of negotiation, actually slightly more than four, to get the Saudis to lift the embargo. And in that period, what you can see is that not only did the price of oil rise by a factor of four, that’s the red line. Uh, and not only did Richard Nixon’s approval continue to fall off a cliff, that actually predated the oil shock for reasons that you probably know about. Begins with W. Um, but here’s the US stock market. That’s the thing I want you to look at. The US stock market has a massive swallow dive. It actually went down 45% peaked to trough in Nixon’s second term. And this is what you were thinking. Why isn’t that happening today? Where is the equivalent stock market crash? So I can show you in this table here that there was a stock market correction. It wasn’t really a big correction. It was a a small downward move in the period in the first four weeks of the war. So peak to trough the NASDAQ is down 5.6%. Compared with the pre-war data Feb 27 before the war begins today the NASDAQ is up 14%. up 14%. This is a puzzle. If the economic shock is as bad as I say, why are stocks up? Because believe me, if they were down, President Trump would be behaving quite differently. There are three possible explanations that I sketch out on this slide. One is investors are geniuses. They just see through the noise and they see the war’s over. It’s actually over and normal service will be resumed just in no time at all. Theory one. Theory two, the markets are as clueless as they were in July of 1914, in September of 1929, December of 1972, in August of 2000, October 2007, February 2020. The markets peaked in all those months and then the shoe dropped. I can still remember wandering around Washington in February 2020 like, “Guys, this is the biggest pandemic since 1918. You are truly in trouble. No, no, no. It’s just the flu. It’ll be over by Easter. Same in 2007. I’m like, “Guys, there’s a huge financial crisis coming. You’re in real trouble here.” Ah, Neil, you academics, always so pessimistic, always so gloom and doom. Okay. Okay. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the biggest energy shock ever is no big deal. So here’s the third explanation. Never mind the straight of hormuz as they used to say feel the AI. So these these are the possible explanations. One, the war is over. It was no big deal. Two, the market’s just completely missing it. Three, AI is more important than the oil shock. Well, I can see why AI is exciting. Exponential growth in annualized recurring revenue is exciting. These are the anthropic model adoption rates which are also exponential. On the other hand, the polling on AI is not exactly warm and fuzzy. So, the investors are in love with AI, the voters not so much. Here’s the other thing about AI. It is cool for Lego videos. I don’t know if any of you have been watching the Iranian Lego videos. They’re kind of cool, actually. It’s impressive to me that the IRGC has a Lego video division. And I like Lego videos as much as the Knicks man. But, you know, it’s not a war-winning weapon. This is not going to turn the tide of the conflict. This brings me to the third problem. And this is the geopolitical problem. Sprig Bjinski, who was Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, wrote a book in the mid1 1990s, The Grand Chess Board, in which he said the worst case scenario, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran. That was the worst case scenario. Hello. So there was no axis of evil in 2002 that was just made up by David from but there actually is an axis of upheaval or authoritarians or you can call them the crinks if you like and it’s actually worse than Bjinsk’s worst case scenario because you got little rocket man who didn’t make it into Bjinsk’s scenario. One really obvious consequence of all these Trump shocks is the American alliance system is in the most profound crisis of our lifetimes. I can hardly convey to you the extent of the alienation between Washington and the European capitals, not to mention London. And the Japanese are not really loving it despite Mrs. Takichi’s forced smile in the Oval Office. But the bigger deal, the bigger deal is how much it benefits the axis. I took these photographs in Kev in September to show you what a cruise missile does to an apartment building when it hits it and kills dozens of people sleeping there, including the woman whose handbags caught my eye. For me, that’s just the pathos of war in one striking image. That’s happening pretty much weekly in Ukraine and the drone strikes are nightly. This chart shows you the frequency of Russian missile and drone strikes. The drones are blue, the missiles are orange. The Russians can carry on doing this for another year with oil at current prices. But the thing I want to leave you with is another straight altogether. You know, the straight of Hormuz is a big deal. I’ve made that clear, but it’s not as big a deal as the straight of Taiwan. The Taiwan Strait is the big deal. Now, a couple of interesting data points about that. Number one, you would be surprised how hawkish the American public is on this issue. So last year, the Chicago Council asked, “Would you favor using the US Navy to break a Chinese blockade around Taiwan, even if this might trigger a direct conflict between the United States and China?” 47% of the sample said yes. 51% of Republicans. Meanwhile, in China, sentiment on the issue is also growing more hawkish. substantially larger numbers than a year ago agree or a year and a half ago agree with the statement uh that Tai Taiwan should be unified by force. The economic consequences of a Taiwan straight crisis be far larger than the economic consequences of the closure of the straight of harmonies for the simple reason that nearly all the advanced semiconductors that’s less than sim nanometers in size are manufactured there on the island of Taiwan by TSMC. sea. And the interesting thing about this island, as you may possibly have heard, is that China says it belongs to China. So, here’s a question that I keep pondering. Why might Xiinping shorten his timeline and make a move against the Strait of Taiwan? Couple of reasons. Number one, the United States has just expended roughly half of its key weapons of offense and defense in its war against Iran. Something like half the tomahawks uh gone. This drastic depletion of already too low stocks of missiles isn’t going to be fixed anytime soon because these things take many months as this chart from the pain institute shows to replace. The empty bins problem which existed before this war. Empty bins of missiles has just got roughly twice as bad. But the other reason that Xiinping might not hang around is that we just told him that we possess a cyber nuke. What Anthropic announced when it announced Mythos is the ultimate cyber weapon with vastly greater capabilities against operating systems and software. Now, OpenAI can say GPT 5.5 is just as good. Deep Seek can’t say that because Deep Seek is clearly significantly behind the frontier models in the United States. So you start off being Richard Nixon, but maybe you end up being John F. Kennedy. conductor crisis if it happens will be the Cuban missile crisis of cold war and it will certainly put an end to the theory that AI is awesome and we don’t need to worry about the geopolitics of straits. Let me leave you with two questions. The straight of Hormuz is closed for how long? It’s struck me that history is a bit different from economics. Rudy Dorbush famously said that in a financial crisis things, you know, take much longer to happen and then they happen very suddenly, much faster than you could imagine. But in history, it’s the opposite. Particularly in the history of war. In the history of war, things start faster than you could possibly imagine, but then they take much, much longer, much longer to end. How many people in this room on February the 24th, 2022 would have predicted that the war in Ukraine would still be going on in May of 2026? Not one. So how long will the straight of Hormuse be closed, two weeks, two months? And how long will the straight of Taiwan be open? How long before that sudden thing happens that currently nobody seems to think is very likely just like nobody or very few people thought it was likely that Russia would invade Ukraine. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for putting up with all my charts. Now, let’s have a conversation. So Neil, that was terrific. I know there’s going to be a lot of questions uh in the audience. Um but I maybe I’ll just open with you’re preaching to the already converted on the Nixon comparison.

Oh, good. Um, so, um, I always tell my students, I teach a course on American grand strategy that that’s the president to focus on if you want to understand Trump. But if we push this a little bit and we think about Trump’s visit, so it was 54 years ago and a few months that Richard Nixon went to to China and you know in the midst of a very unpopular war in the United States and arguably he used that visit to strengthen America’s position internationally. like creating a tacid alliance and so forth and reducing some pressure on the military so it could go to a one and a you know a uh uh a one and a half war strategy than a two-fold war strategy didn’t have to worry about China because Russia would be Soviet Union would be worried about it I take your point that Donald Trump wants to do big things like Richard Nixon did so he’s going to Beijing next week unless it gets cancelled. Uh and with him, you don’t know. But if he if he’s going he’s going at a time when uh well it’s a pretty unpopular war uh that the United States is conducting. I just we were talking about this in the elevator down. There’s a story in the Washington Post that um the CIA was briefing the White House that this war will go on for at least another three or four months. um and before the Iranians are willing to to settle and he would be he’s going to Beijing with um at a well it’s a very different China than than Nixon’s when Nixon was there. This is as you pointed out with all those graphs. Uh they’re pretty formidable. So the scenario I think that people are worried about in the region. I spend a lot of time in the region is that Trump will actually do Xiinping’s work for him. Um that he will make concessions on Taiwan. Not that he will say, “Oh, you can take Taiwan.” But there’ll be new wording about the relationship between the United States and Taiwan or the issue on the issue of Taiwan’s independence and so forth. Uh that you know he’s already kind of curbed arm sales to to Taiwan and there can be other things in the region. So, you know, I’m wondering if like what we, you know, I would like to get your thoughts about what this means for the US China relationship. I mean, one possibility is this very dark scenario, you know, where everybody is really forced, the thing escalates up and, you know, the US and and the Chinese have to make some serious decisions. But the other is that uh you know Xiinping takes advantage of this position, Trump would be going there in a fairly weak position. Um thoughts? Yeah. Well, Peter, uh the the Nixon in China fantasy is just such a good illustration of of where Trump’s head is. this this idea that it would just be one of those capstone moments to to be given the red carpet treatment in Beijing. But of course, it’s a very different China and it’s a very different situation. It made brilliant strategic sense to accept the Chinese invitation that Kissinger secured in 1971 at a time when the Soviet Union and China were in effect at war or extremely close to it and the Chinese were extremely worried that the Soviets were going to in fact launch a nuclear strike against them. uh uh Sergey Radchenko’s brilliant recent book uh to run the world shows that paradoxically the principal strategic rival of the cold war was in fact within the communist block between the Soviet Union of uh socialist republics and the people’s republic of China. So they were divided and all that Nixon and Kissinger had to do was take advantage of that fact and accept the invitation that Mao issued precisely because he felt so insecure. Today the axis between President C and President Putin is the exact opposite. It is very close. They probably meet more frequently than any two world leaders and they have persistently affirmed uh their mutual interest. So it it’s I think misleading to to say as some of Trump’s advisers have that Trump has an opportunity to do a reverse Nixon somehow to to to get either one or other of these countries to come over to the US side. That is not going to happen as long as Putin’s running Moscow and she’s running Beijing. If you go to uh China now, what exactly is on the agenda? Well, you already lost the trade war. This is this is a point that hasn’t often enough, I think, been recognized. That last year, Trump escalated tariffs to a virtual embargo on China. The tariffs were in excess of 100%. The Chinese were the only players in the trade war last year who retaliated and raised tariffs on the US, more or less tit for tat. And then they played an ace which was to restrict the export of rare earth elements on which we largely depend for which we largely depend on China. Collapse of American position and rapid reduction of US tariffs. So are you going to talk about that? It’s hardly worth discussing because you not only lost in the trade war, but you also lost at the Supreme Court and you’re trying to cobble together your tariffs on the basis of various alternative legal bases. Do you talk about semiconductors? The Trump administration is completely divided in this issue. Some people aided and abetted by Jensen Wang of Nvidia want to sell the highest level chips to China. The national security people are like, “Are you absolutely insane? That’s the one thing we’ve got that they don’t have.” So there’s no coherence on the Trump side about that issue. So what are you going to talk about? What what will you talk about? Of course, Taiwan will come up because the Chinese always bring it up. They’ve been bringing it up since

  1. It was the first item on the agenda when Kissinger met Joe and Li. So, if they’re going to bring it up, the president’s going to be sat there with his advisors whispering in his ear, “Don’t change our position. Don’t say that. Stick to the script.” And you’re dealing with the the person least able to stick to a script in the whole world. Like the whole of humanity. Trump is the person least able to stick to a script. So, the probability that he goes off script in Taiwan is not trivial. And I think this is what worries not only the Taiwanese but I think with good reason the Japanese. So I think that the trip to to to to China was always I thought perilous.

I felt that in in January when I talked to US officials when it wasn’t clear what the agenda was except as one of them said the president wants this to be very big right? Like a big photo opportunity but with no content. That’s that’s hard to pull off. It’s now, I think, much more tricky because the US is in a weak position. Uh, China also plays a key role with respect to Iran. Bear in mind, the Chinese didn’t dare send weapons to the Russians because Jake Sullivan told them if you do that, secondary sanctions. But the Chinese are openly providing military assistance to Iran, including targeting assistance, and we’ve done nothing. So the president is going to Beijing in really quite a weak position. I’m not sure what leverage he has. Mhm. And as I said, Xihinping therefore has quite a bit of agency here, and he has to choose the path of least resistance, which I think is what most people expect him to do. is to kind of give Trump a photo opportunity, not really do too much more than that, and just countdown to the Taiwanese election in January of 2028 and continue to smoo the Kwamang and hope that it all just happens without much effort through the political channel, maybe buy some Boeings and then do some trade deals with the executives who’ll be there because the Chinese actually quite want to get back to a more normal business relationship. They’re always trying to get the US to invest more in China. Mhm. But he has an alternative option which I think is the to my mind tempting one which is take advantage of the fact that the United States is clearly not in a position to take military action in the Indo-Pacific theater and take advantage of the fact that you still have time before the United States does the kind of preemptive action against you that it has done against Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela that it tried to do uh against the Iranians. If I’m Xiinping thinking like a Marxist Leninist, you’d be surprised to hear that I can do that. But I have spent a great deal of my career studying Marxist Leninists. If I put myself in his head, he has to assume that the United States has a plan for regime change in China and a preemptive military option. So he can wait till January 2028 and hope that the Taiwanese election goes well. But that’s a lot of time in which all kinds of things can be done including uh using mythos and its capabilities to launch a massive cyber attack on the CCP. If I were him, I wouldn’t hang around. So it’s a damage limitation. Move quickly. I would have the sweetest possible summit. I would smile and talk about win-win cooperation. And the minute Air Force One took off, I’d send Coast Guard vessels to Taiwan and say, “We’re here to collect the customs because this is part of China.” That would be, I think, checkmate. I’m not sure whether he has the appetite to take that risk. We hotly debate this uh in the United States at the Hoover Institution. My former student Ike Fryman has a book just out defending Taiwan which I highly recommend. Another reading recommendation. Uh and he certainly thinks this gray zone option is a real one. So I think this is the big risk that that we aren’t thinking enough about because our minds are focused on the on the front page and and the straight of hormones. Okay, great. I’m going to open it up here. So hands. Um, let’s give a few minutes a few seconds here. I’m leaving the selection to you. Yes, the selection’s going to be mine. Um, how about that gentleman in the Yes, you. You just turned. It’s kind of a I think a grayish jersey. Yeah. Right up there. Twothirds of threequarters of the way up. First question, please introduce yourself. I think on the other side that is that who you met? Yeah. Uh, hi, I’m Ramine, a fellow economic historian and a chart lover. Um, so, uh, another analogy, Nixon analogy comes to my mind and I wanted to know your thoughts on that. The tensions between Nixon and Arthur Burns, the head of the Federal Reserve, right? What are your thoughts on that? I mean, given the chances that we’re going to have possibly a recession and then that could create more tension between Donald Trump and the Fed. Okay, hold on for one second. We’re going to take three questions. So, we’re gonna um looking around. Great question. Ah um I’m looking for a woman out here. So there we go. Right up here in the front. Hi, I’m Harata Kena from Queen Mary University. I’m doing M’s in investment and finance. Uh my question to you is what do you think about UAE exiting the OPEC and what would be the uh economic repercussions? Good question. Especially for the US economy. Another great question. Yeah. and then we’re going to go online here with Chris. So, if you just bring it down to Chris Gillson here. Yeah. Thank you. Just to say that there are more than 350 people watching tonight online from countries including Poland, Canada, India, Mexico, Brazil, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore, Germany, the UK, and the US. The first online question is from Isabelle James who asks, “What would be some signs that China would be preparing to invade Taiwan? And will the West react preemptively or wait? Thank you. Okay, three great questions. Um, as you say, once you start thinking about the Nixon parallels, you just keep thinking of more. Uh, I thought you were going to say something different. I thought you were going to say, “And isn’t there a scandal which is like a cancer in the presidency that is kind of slowly spreading its way into the White House?” I mean when the first lady stood up and made her statement about Epstein I thought this is getting eerily Watergate like uh but you know the the monetary policy issue is is a very important one uh one reason that the United States had a severe stagflation problem in the 1970s was it’s generally recognized Alan Meltzer says this in his great history of the Federal Reserve that in effect the Fed lost its independence or never really uh had that much and it had been eroded since the late60s. It was actually Lyndon Johnson who began beating up on uh on William Mcznney Martin and then you know Burns was a kind of uh academic somewhat easily uh royiled by Nixon. Trump Walsh will be a different story. Full disclosure, Kevin Walsh is a friend of mine and a Hoover fellow. So what I’m going to say now is dispassionate but I know him well. Kevin unlike Arthur Burns is not an academic. Uh he has considerable experience not only uh in the private sector but at the Fed. He was at the New York Fed during the financial crisis and and he’s highly respected in the world of Wall Street. And I think particularly given the Supreme Court’s clear ruling that the Fed is an independent entity, Kevin Walsh’s problem is not going to be the president. Kevin’s problem is going to be the other members of the FOMC, especially former chair Powell, stays on. That will be a hard body to manage if you have 4% inflation, maybe even higher depending on how long the straight stays closed, a real economic slowdown, not necessarily a recession. To get to a recession, you need the straight to be closed until, I’d guess, Labor Day. Then they are going to have a tough job because the hawkish people will say, “We actually need to raise rates.” and the doubbish people will say we just hold them steady. But nobody’s going to be talking about cuts at that point. So I think it’s a very good analogy, but I don’t think it’s I don’t think it’s going to be Kevin Walsh being bullied by Trump on Truth Social. I think it’s more like Kevin struggling to manage an FOMC, which will probably be quite divided in that context. Uh uh the lady from Queen Mary. I had the uh pleasure of interviewing uh the UAE ambassador to Washington uh Yusef altiba earlier this week at the Milin conference and we talked about this uh his father it turned out had been president of OPEC for like six terms. He the longest ever president of OPEC. said, “This must have been kind of a little bit eruption in the family uh when you announced you’re leaving OPEC.” And he said, “No, because my father agreed. This this is the time. It’s it’s served its purpose. OPEC no longer has that larger market share.” Looking behind uh the diplomatic rationalization, this has been coming for a time, but the perfect opportunity is now. do it now when oil prices are high and the pressure is not on to limit your uh production and of course this reflects the deep split that is emerging between the Emiratis and the Saudis. So I read this as part of that drama where the GCC is beginning to fragment under the strains of this conflict but also under previous strains that that predate operation epic fury. And I think the Emiratis have made a very clear decision that their alignment is with the United States and Israel. That is their future. And the Saudis, not so much. I think the Saudis are hedging. NBS is on the phone to Cining. I think there’s a much more complex game being played there and this is just a part of it. Finally, the question that came from uh the online participant, I don’t think invasion is very likely of Taiwan. I think that is the least likely scenario because A, it’s very difficult. B, I’m not sure the People’s Liberation Army is capable of it, especially not having had its ranks, its senior ranks purged by Cinping to the point that the military commission is basically uh has basically been cleaned out. There are other options. There’s a blockade option which they’ve rehearsed. They rehearsed that quite regularly. They did a big rehearsal of blockade back in January, end of last year, beginning of this year. But that too has its risks because the United States has considerable naval capabilities. And when I look at uh Sam Paparro, the commander of interpacific command, I see somebody who would quite enjoy uh fighting a full-scale naval war with China. So I would say the blockade strategy has its risks. That’s why these gray zone options where you don’t actually take military action, you do something that is a sort of legalistic uh warfare move and you say we we this is a province of China. You all agree, right? This is a province of China. Well, we’re just going to collect we’re just going to collect the the customs. Okay? And a lot of governments around the world will not fight that. A lot of corporations will not fight that. And if you want to be really legalistic and nerdy about it, Taiwan had a and still has a special commercial status under the WTO dating back to Chinese accession. And Hong Kong used to have that status too until it was revoked by, drum roll, President Donald Trump in 2020. So the Chinese can say, “Oh, in just the same way that you cease to recognize Hong Kong’s commercial autonomy, we’re doing the same because this a province of China.” Now, if they do that, my colleague Phil Zelico has made this point. Uh, and Ike Fryman writes about it too, then what? Then what do you do? because then it would be the United States that would appear to escalate if it took action to say open a corridor allowing goods to go in and out of Taiwan that the Chinese couldn’t control. Obviously, if the Chinese establish control over Taiwan’s trade, that’s it. Game over. Thanks for playing. Because then they can do export controls on the chips. They can also do import controls in the LNG. They can shut Taiwan down. They would have control. So this is the move that is most concerning to US policy makers because it would be hard to counter other than by appearing to escalate. And I asked a French advisor to President Macron not so long ago, how many European countries would side with the United States in a Taiwan crisis? And he replied, zero. We take another couple questions from uh how about uh the gentleman right there, Melville Rodriguez. Do you draw parallels between the US Iran experience with the Sways crisis? Not only do I, but I have uh I wrote a piece for the free press. It was also published in the London Times which had as its headline American sewers. Uh because it is very similar when you when you think about it. Conservative leader decides to do regime change. Then it was 1956 it was Anthony Eden. The country was Egypt. Yeah. Today it’s trumped the country’s Iran. You do it in partnership with the Israelis. French were also involved in

You achieve military success. Egyptian forces were comprehensively defeated in 1956. But then you discover that the strategic uh waterway has been blocked and then the economic pain kicks in. Now the the economic pain was pretty fast acting in 1956 because the sterling peg uh to gold and to the dollar came under immediate attack and the bank of England had to start uh intervening and that was really when Harold McMillan the chancellor of the excheer realized that it was all unraveling. So that unraveled quite rapidly though it wasn’t really all over until the end of uh the year. Here the the economic pain is slower acting because the United States is a stronger economy than Britain in 1956 and there isn’t another bigger economy that’s waiting to take market share because the United States is the United States. We we were the United Kingdom still an imperial power but the United States was already manifestly a more powerful economy. So the analogy is not perfect. Analogies never are in history. But the way this is going is very American sewers because the United States is now in a significantly weak position in the negotiations that are going on with the Iranians. And the Iranians are clearly incentivized to drag these negotiations out until the economic pain fully hits the United States. And I believe that’s what they will do.

Fellow in the orange right there. I’m hoping we’re getting some questions from students here. We are. Here we go. Unless I’m wrong. Hi. Thanks so much for this talk, Professor Ferguson. I’m Edmund. I’m a PhD student at UCL. Uh my question is uh I I once did some research experience for the late great LSE professor Chris Koker uh who’s argued I think a few years ago that one of the things that China does with the belt and road initiative is use what he calls debt entrapment. means that if a country defaults on its obligations to China, China might reserve the right to repossess a port that it’s built for said country and turn it into a military harbor. And I was wondering if this is, you know, and he also thinks that part of China’s aims might be more maximalist than is traditionally thought. It might even want to go up through the island chains to Hawaii. And I I was wondering if this gets uh you know part of your talk blending the economics and the politics that is it the the problem that America faces is not just that kind of geopolitical with the rise of China but also as you suggest financial that the degree to which America is dependent on foreign credit with a kind of 27 trillion negative international investment position. Does that is that kind of the crux of the crisis? Do you think the rise of China plus international uh credit or is there do you think something else is the the crux of this crisis? Thanks. Well, that’s a a very interesting question. People have been talking for years. I can remember these conversations going on during Barack Obama’s presidency about whether the United States was vulnerable to the Chinese selling US treasuries. that that that was a kind of uh discussion uh back uh in those days and I never found that very plausible uh because the market for US treasuries uh is a a global market. uh they are still seen as the safe asset in the international financial system and even if foreign holdings have somewhat diminished uh and especially of Chinese holdings. The reason for that is to try and reduce the exposure of China to US sanctions not to exert pressure on the United States. Uh the Chinese are probably accumulating gold for that that reason. Uh the United States also has a way of of managing the US Treasury market which is called the Federal Reserve. And since the Fed uh ever since the advent of quantitative easing has essentially had a debt management function in all but name uh the Fed has essentially substituted for foreign sellers. So I don’t think that’s a particular vulnerability right now. I think the lesson of going back to the earlier question of sewers is if you’re a great power and you have that kind of potential vulnerability, the fatal thing is to suffer a major strategic defeat because in conditions of of strategic defeat and they were unmistakable in 1956 for Britain, the rest of the world has less of an appetite for your currency and for your debt. Now, the United States is not yet, it seems to me, visibly defeated. That that’s still an open question because of its enormous military capability. In my view, President Trump’s great mistake was that four or five weeks ago, he had the option to take control of the Strait by force and he blinked. And by blinking, he gave the Iranians leverage that they’d never had before. This was a grave strategic blunder. Is it salvageable? It’s hard now. It’s hard now to restart this war and I’m not sure he will. But in that sense, the United States isn’t manifestly a kind of defeated empire. I wrote this book Colossus quite a long time ago. I always like to sell my own books at the end. It’s kind of the only way historians can really make a buck unless we do shameless podcasts. Um so Colossus made the argument that the United States had these three deficits and that was why its empire was an unstable one that made it quite different from Britain’s imperial project. The three deficits were manpower deficit because Americans really don’t actually want to go and live on the straight of Hormuz. Whereas there were British people who thought that that was an improvement especially Scottish people. It’s like Glasgow straight of Hormuz. I’ll I’ll try the straight of Hormuz. Yeah, sounds good. Sunny, isn’t it? So the manpower deficit. The second deficit was the fiscal deficit which was already an issue back when I was writing the book

And then the attention deficit and that that’s the most important one that the the great American public just loses interest in these dramas abroad and in this case it never had interest because the polling was bad for the war pretty much on day one. So these are the vulnerabilities I think that are significant rather than the one that that you’re pointing out. So we we have a few minutes left here and uh maybe I’ll put one last question to you uh and help us connect to next year’s series. So uh let’s imagine that Xiinping decides to wait for that second election in 2028, the US election, and and let’s imagine that um JD Vance loses in a in a closely fought contest with a really bright, young, smart senator from Georgia who happens to be an LSC alum as well, John Oaf. off. The Democrats have already taken the House by 25 seats in 2026. They take the Senate by a couple of seats. The election has nothing to do really with Iran. It’s about affordability. It’s about regulating AI. It’s about plundering plureaucrats, bureaucrats. and and um so the question I think I’d like to have you address is what from the Trump years in on the foreign policy front sticks? What is it that the Democrats, you know, reverse or soft pedal and what is it that they maybe just quietly accept and move on? Well, in a way, we ran the experiment already in 2021. U many people thought when Joe Biden won the 2020 election that there would be a kind of return to normaly.

That was the expectation amongst many Europeans. The adults were back in the room and it was also the expectation at places like Harvard and Stanford where I spend time and uh this turned out to be quite wrong. Uh the trade policy was more or less unchanged. They they didn’t remove the tariffs those state uh they refined the tech war that had begun when uh Trump went after Huawei but what Jake Sullivan did as national security adviser was to make that tech war somewhat more sophisticated and then of course they did industrial policy uh something that Trump uh in some ways has has sought to do. So the continuities from Trump to Biden were much greater than most people uh anticipated specifically on those issues. Uh of course the Biden administration got into terrible trouble with inflation partly because of its own fiscal recklessness in year one and partly because of the war in uh in Ukraine. Now Trump’s having the exact same problem where he’s taking the one issue about which the public is hyper sensitive affordability and making it worse. So, I think if Trump does become a lame duck because they lose both houses, I mean, I think both chambers. I I mean, I think that still not 100% certain because the Senate is a tough one for Democrats this this year, but I think it’s now in play. I think it’s getting close to 50/50 that that can happen, especially if I’m right about the economic pain only just beginning. Mhm. Then the rest of Trump’s presidency will have that Nixonian quality because he’ll be impeached. This time they have great material to work with. I mean, way better material. The Democrats aren’t going to know where to begin. Is it going to be insider trading or maybe the coin scams or I don’t know, let’s go back to the Epstein files. They have so much material to work with. Uh and that will be it for Donnie from Queens. uh it’ll be really hard for him to do anything under those circumstances and all the enemies will gather around sensing a rerun of the Nixon presidency. After all, the problem about having Richard Nixon is a as a role model is why nobody else has Richard Nixon as a role model. It’s like the series series 2 doesn’t end well, Donnie. Uh but you’re right. I think under those conditions, the Democratic nominee has a pretty good chance uh JD Vance uh has to first be sure of being the Republican nominee judging by Marco Rubio’s current uh behavior. The race is on already. Uh but I think the interesting one will be the Democratic race. And I think you’re right to look for uh somebody who’s not really in the conversation right now. uh somebody who’s not Gavin Newsome, who’s not AOC. Uh there are a bunch of uh contenders from reddish states. Uh Galago in Arizona is one. And and we won’t really have heard of this person until sometime late next year. I mean, in the same way that I really hadn’t got Barack Obama on my radar until November 2007. So, somebody is going to be president of the United States that most people here have not heard of. And that person will then continue many Trump policies while of course using a completely different rhetoric and will deeply disappoint the Europeans just as Joe Biden deeply disappointed the Europeans and will probably disappoint the Harvard professors and the Stanford professors too because that’s American politics. Uh just to kind kind of conclude the thought uh if it is a complete reenactment of the Nixon presidency like a complete reenactment and the stock market completely craters and then all the Republican senators who secretly hate Donald Trump and always have hated him will suddenly be like you know what you know maybe we should impeach this guy which is what ultimately happened to Nixon And then JD Vance gets to be president in the same way that Jerry Ford got to be president. Uh that scenario kind of fascinates me that we might have a complete reenactment. But then the other possibility which I kind of left you with in the talk is maybe we’re not in the 1970s at all. Maybe we’re in the early Cold War and all these attempts to assassinate Trump just kind of keep sending me back to the Kennedy presidency. There are ways that this can end that are not entirely conventional and that is of course why the study of American politics and history is such a tremendously absorbing subject and we have I hope illustrated that in our conversation this evening. Great. Thank you so much.