Niall Ferguson: “Biden is going to win. I don’t see...

Bright, rebellious and provocative, Niall Ferguson (Glasgow, 1964) is one of the most well-known and influential historians in the world. Stanford and Harvard professor, Kissinger biographer, he is the author of 15 books on foreign policy, history of the economy and British and American imperialisms. Conservative in his views, he was very critical of the Obama Administration and was an advisor to Republican John McCain’s presidential campaign. After a trip to Berlin in the summer of 1989, he predicted the fall of the Berlin wall. At a congress in Las Vegas in 2007, while researching for your book The rise of money (2008, later became an award winning television series), bet against a financier that there would be a recession in less than five years. He won 98,000 dollars (about 585,000 reais). He also warned, after the UK voted for Brexit, that Donald Trump could reach the White House. And in a column in The Sunday Times, in January, wrote: “Get ready for a coronavirus pandemic”. In this conversation with Ferguson for the series of interviews that EL PAÍS is publishing about the US presidential elections on November 3, the first question is therefore mandatory.

Question. Who will win these elections?

Answer. Joe Biden is a much less unpopular figure than Hillary Clinton. The economy is in a hole and, of course, the president has done a very bad job compared to covid-19. So, I believe Joe Biden will win. And it will win with a margin wide enough that there is not that big constitutional crisis that starts to look very exciting for many journalists. I hate to reach that conclusion because four years ago it was fun to be against the current and get it right. But as a historian, I can’t see how a president in such a deep hole can be re-elected. Even if the pandemic had not happened, it seems to me that I would not be in a particularly strong position. The economy followed, but it was doped with steroids due to fiscal and monetary stimuli. Trump will not be re-elected because the economy is in dire straits.

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P. Voters seem to continue to have faith in their economic management …

R. But when you look more closely, there are two reasons to be skeptical. First, the margins in states like Wisconsin are enormous. Second, the elderly, who are concerned about the economy and are crucial to the Republican Party, have lost faith in Trump in a way that is fully explainable by the virus. This seems to me to be a lethal situation for a Republican candidate. We knew he lost young people a long time ago, but if you lose those over 65, especially in disputed states, I don’t see how you can survive that. I believe that Biden’s margin at the electoral college will be quite robust.

P. What will future historians write about Trump’s presidency?

R. First, that the populist counterattack in the United States was slow to arrive, considering how many reasons Middle America had to feel hurt. And that, when he arrived, Donald Trump played a cathartic role in articulating all the frustrations of Middle America. With globalization, with China, with immigration, with liberal elites. There was, therefore, a certain legitimacy to that electoral victory in 2016 against a fundamentally complacent Democratic establishment. Second, Trump’s historical significance lies in the fact that it has changed the course of U.S. policy towards China. It broke with a consensus on China that went back to Kissinger and Nixon. It directed the American public to a completely different mental environment in relation to China, including the Democrats. This is the most relevant part of your presidency. The second Cold War started. The United States woke up to the fact that there was a Chinese challenge and that it could do something about it.

P. Do you believe that Democrats have learned any lessons in four years?

R. They didn’t understand why Trump won. And a sad sign of that is that they chose Joe Biden as a candidate. McCain was defeated long before people started voting, because Democrats had met Barack Obama, who was the personification of rejuvenated change that could be believed. This time, the Democrats really missed. They found a candidate so old and weak that he could actually lose. That this was the best they could find is a terrible indictment for the Democratic establishment. That is why this election is still in the air, because at any moment Biden could lose the election in a debate, in a disastrous performance. As Admiral Jellicoe lost World War I in one afternoon, Biden could lose these elections in one night. It’s fallen. And he was vice president of Barack Obama! The reason Trump was elected is that Obama’s second term completely alienated a huge proportion of people who had voted for him in places like Michigan. That is what they have not learned. People in the Obama Administration believe they will return to power in January. Which indicates that they didn’t understand why they lost in 2016.

P. Will Trumpism survive Trump?

R. What is surprising about Trump is that his approval ratings have barely changed in four years. You are trapped in a narrow popularity corridor and therefore I believe that there will be no lasting trumpism. Trumpism is not really viable as a long-term electoral strategy for obvious demographic reasons. If your nuclear base is made up of white guys who didn’t go to university, it’s a growing force. Whoever comes soon will have to throw Trump’s strategy in the trash and bring something broader in his claim.

P. Something that appeals to the increasingly important Hispanic vote, for example?

R. One of the interesting subplots this year is that Hispanic voters are not chasing the Biden flag, although I can’t think of anything Trump is doing to attract them. I believe that Republicans have the opportunity to increase their support among Hispanics, because there is not much in the Black Lives Matter movement that attracts Latin voters. The Republican Party’s future lies in attracting more Hispanic voters on a range of social issues where the Democratic coalition, I believe, is quite fragile.

P. How did the Republican Party become a cult of Trump?

R. It was like being on a hijacked plane. What happened in 2016 is that Trump snatched the party’s nomination. If I think about 2012, I believe that this country would be in a much less cracked position if Obama had been a single-term president and Mitt Romney had been elected. Romney would not have been a perfect president, but he would have avoided the 2016 revolution among Republican voters, and we would not now be in such a divided country. Without Obama’s second term, it is difficult to see how viable Trump would have been as a candidate. Romney is still there. McCain died, having been terribly insulted by Trump, something I will never forgive because I loved John McCain. Trumpism will be relegated to the Internet or television, it will exist as an entertainment thing. The Republican Party will spend four years recovering and will be greatly helped in this process by the fact that the Biden Government will fail, as will the Obama Administration.

P. You wrote that there is a man who can transform the Second Cold War into the Third World War, and that man is Joe Biden.

R. I have observed over a century of American history that often, when Democratic presidents are elected with an important domestic agenda, they end up in great wars. It happened to Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. And almost also with Jimmy Carter, but he avoided going to war in Afghanistan. It was only in the recent past that Democrats were inclined to avoid wars, in the cases of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. You could see a scenario in which the Biden Administration comes to power ready to do all kinds of spending on social services, education, raising taxes, doing these usual things, and is faced with a crisis in Taiwan. I believe that China will force this issue at some point. And the smart time to do that would be right at the start of Biden’s presidency. The second Cold War is structural, it is not a specific presidency, it is a structural strategic rivalry like the first Cold War, and Biden’s main problem is that the second cold war will not leave him alone to do his domestic agenda. It is necessary to look closely at what is happening in Taiwan, what Xi does to legitimize his position and explore the weaknesses he finds.

P. What should be the strategy with China?

R. I believe that the Trump Administration was not so bad on that front. I particularly would not have used the rates. But I believe that on other issues, such as technology, it was right to prevent Huawei from taking control of the world’s 5G networks. It was agreed to put pressure on China for Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Taken together, my defense of the Trump Administration would be to get it right by taking the hard line with China and changing the course after what had been a kind of Obama fatalistic view that there was nothing you could do to stop China .

P. What about the Middle East?

R. I believe the Trump Administration has also been much more successful here than many Democrats want to believe. Obama’s policy failed because the Iranians put the nuclear deal in their pockets and remained hostile in all other areas. Ending this was the right thing to do, and now we see a new alignment that connects Israel to the Gulf States and increasingly isolates Iran. Therefore, you must give the Trump Administration some points for having stung Obama’s policy and ended in something that looks much better.

P. What is at stake in these elections?

R. I get tired of insisting every four years that they are the most important elections of our lives. It has become a cliché. I do not believe that the republic is in danger and that Trump will entrench himself in the White House. I believe that we will see the classic story of a single-term presidency. What is at stake is whether the norms of American politics can be restored or are permanently damaged by the past, I would say not four, but eight years. What is at stake is that if the Democrats win, which I believe they will, and if they win by much, which I believe they can do, they may be tempted to think that the time has come to fundamentally manipulate the system on their own favor. Then the midterm elections would be won by the Republicans and in 2022 we would have a recreation of what happened to Obama in 2010, which he exaggerated in the first two years and then lost Congress. What is at stake, something much more modest than what many people say, is whether Democrats have learned anything in the past eight years. And I’m afraid not.