Competing Visions of World Order

Speaker: Prof. Niall Ferguson (Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University & Senior Faculty Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard)

Date: 7 October 2021

Speaker Session Summary

SMA hosted a speaker session with Prof. Niall Ferguson (Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University & Senior Faculty Fellow, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard), as part of its SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series. 

There is currently a global competition for political influence between two ideological world orders: the US democratic model and the Chinese authoritarian model. This geopolitical competition is now verging on a second cold war between the US and China, which he refers to as Cold War II. Prof. Ferguson commented that a cold war between the US and China is a favorable outcome for both actors when compared to a conventional, hot war. However, as the US competes geopolitically with China, it must not mirror China’s authoritarian actions. A global authoritarian shift was predicted by British author, George Orwell, who predicted that countries with large nuclear stockpiles would control the international order. He also said the authoritarian shift would occur because these countries could force others to politically comply to avoid a nuclear attack.

Furthermore, cooperation between countries is an illusion; instead, there is only a constant global competition for international influence. In fact, asymmetric interdependence is an antecedent to a state of cold war. The current competition between the US and China is occurring ideologically, economically, geopolitically, and technologically. Prof. Ferguson stated that the US should not avoid entering a second cold because it is well equipped to compete. One way the US has a distinct advantage is in its ability to research artificial intelligence and emerging technologies, which in part is bolstered by the United States graduate and post graduate educational system that attracts more international talent than other countries. The US should be able to revive the Atlantic Alliance, which should strengthen its alliances with its European allies. Also, China’s poor handling of the COVID-19 outbreak combined with its aggressive diplomacy has exposed its authoritarian tendencies and weakened its own political relationships with some countries. 

Speaker Session Recording

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Briefing Materials

Biography:

Prof. Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He is the author of sixteen books, including The Pity of War, The House of Rothschild, Empire, Civilization and Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. He is an award-making filmmaker, too, having won an international Emmy for his PBS series The Ascent of Money. His 2018 book, The Square and the Tower, was a New York Times bestseller and also adapted for television by PBSas Niall Ferguson’s Networld. In 2020 he joined Bloomberg Opinion as a columnist. In addition, he is the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, a New York-based advisory firm, a co-founder of Ualá, a Latin American financial technology company, and a trustee of the New York Historical Society and the London-based Centre for Policy Studies. His latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe, was published in May by Penguin.

The SMA INSS/PRISM Speaker Series description and list of the other sessions in this series can be downloaded here.