Pod Insights The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway Trump’s World Order — Live from Davos, with Niall Ferguson About this episode Live from Davos, Scott Galloway and historian Niall Ferguson examine why today’s geopolitical moment looks less like a “new world order” and more like a return to Cold War power politics.
They discuss Trump’s foreign policy tactics, China as the central global rival, the limits of alliance politics, and why Ukraine’s war may only end through a fragile and imperfect peace.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:23 Scott Galloway? We're here with three or four time guests, one of my favorite guests, and also I'm gonna go out on a limb here and call you a friend.
1:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
1:32 Scott Galloway? A historian, public intellectual, and also people don't know this about you, you're actually a pretty savvy entrepreneur. Anyways, Neil Ferguson, always good to see you.
1:39 Speaker 04 Great to be with you, Scott.
1:41 Scott Galloway? So, we're here at Davos at the annual meeting. By the way, how many Davos? I bet you've been to like 40 Davos's. Do you come here every year?
1:49 Speaker 04 Not every year. I've rather lost count.
1:52 Scott Galloway? Yeah, but a lot.
1:53 Speaker 04 It feels like 20 years.
1:54 Scott Galloway? Yeah, yeah.
1:55 Speaker 04 On and off.
1:55 Scott Galloway? I would think you're very much an intellectual support animal for the Davos crowd. So.
2:02 Scott Galloway? I'll just simply, but you obviously just saw President Trump's talk. Attack that from any angle you want, or compliment it from any angle. What are your observations around what he said here? And how you think the mostly European audience is reacting to it? And kind of set the table for us around this new world order, or this new world vision, if you will.
2:26 Speaker 04 Well, President Trump, as you know, is extremely good at leading the news, setting the agenda and being the number one topic of conversation. And he's done that extremely well this year by raising the issue of his claim on Greenland, which is carefully calculated as an issue to cause the heads of European leaders to explode, not to mention Canadian leaders. So if the object of the exercise was to dominate the conversation at the World Economic Forum, mission accomplished.
2:58 Scott Galloway? Check, right.
3:00 Speaker 04 So that's, I think, the obvious thing to say first. Why? So why would he do that?
3:06 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
3:06 Speaker 04 I mean, there are a couple of reasons, most of which I think are missed in the conversation here. One is to distract us from something else. This is something that President Trump has a record of doing. We weren't talking about Iran immediately before the bombing of Fordo last June. And I think most people here have completely forgotten that the Iranian regime has just killed between 10,000 and 15,000 of its own people. That President Trump threatened to take action if they did that. And that the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier group is not far away from Persian Gulf. So one distinctly obvious point in my view is that this is Maskeevka, as the Russians say, is a huge distraction operation,
3:48 Speaker 04 which has ensured that the Europeans don't spend the week saying, please de-escalate in the Middle East, which is what they would be saying if we were still talking about Iran. So that's point number two. And the third point I would make is that, as usual, President Trump delivers the key message very, very carefully wrapped in so much riffing and joshing.
4:12 Speaker 04 And trolling that you all must miss it. But the message was, oh, I'm not going to take military action over Greenland. Don't be silly. That was the message. The markets picked it up because the markets were a little bit unhappy yesterday about this escalation in US Europe tensions. And I think we now see, as usual, President Trump loves the brink. He likes to go up to the brink and he saw how the markets reacted, which was pretty negatively. And as usual, back we go away from the brink.
4:39 Scott Galloway? So I think a lot of people would say, would agree with your distraction thesis, but would say it's a distraction from the Epstein files, not from an impending attack on Iran. Do you believe that in fact it's a bit of a head fake and that US? And there's some evidence to support this, that US military forces are coordinating and choreographing around a potential military strike. You you understand geopolitics as well as anyone. Do you? Where would you put the odds that there is something resembling some sort of a military strike impending on Iran?
5:10 Speaker 04 Certainly north of forty percent.
5:12 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
5:14 Speaker 04 I mean, I think that the president made a very clear threat to the Iranian regime.
5:21 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
5:22 Speaker 04 I think the Iranian regime has, by the standards of totalitarian regimes, been astonishingly brutal towards its own people. It's hard to think of a single day of repression in any context in which more than ten thousand people have been murdered. But I also think that President Trump has a strategic concept to an extent that people underestimate here. We've already seen that in Venezuela. Venezuela was part of the Axis sphere of influence. By the Axis, I mean China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, the bad guys, the authoritarians, who've been working together very overtly, not only in Ukraine, but elsewhere.
6:03 Speaker 04 And by decapitating the Venezuelan regime, which is only a couple of weeks ago, President Trump sends a very clear signal that he is capable of deploying lethal force
6:14 Scott Galloway? Extraordinary.
6:15 Speaker 04 in a way that nobody else is.
6:16 Scott Galloway? Hundred percent.
6:16 Speaker 04 The Chinese couldn't do this, the Russians certainly couldn't do this.
6:19 Scott Galloway? Well, Putin's tried for thirty five minutes and Putin and Trump did it in thirty five or thirty five months and Trump did it in thirty five minutes.
6:25 Speaker 04 So Putin is approaching year five of a war against Ukraine that he thought would be over in a matter of days.
6:33 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
6:33 Speaker 04 The Chinese love to do demonstrations of their sea and air power in and around Taiwan, but could they actually fight, you know, a war? Well, none of their commanding officers has ever seen combat, whereas the United States has a great deal of combat experience. So I think part of what's going on here is a global reassertion of American power.
6:54 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
6:55 Speaker 04 That that is ultimately directed at Russia and China. The unfinished business is still the negotiation of an end to the war in Ukraine. That that, as President Trump said today, has proved much harder than he expected. He acknowledges that, but I don't think we should lose sight of that. And I'd far rather be talking about Ukraine than Greenland. And I did manage to at least spend some of the time at the Ukraine House today, talking about what's happening there, which we should come back to. But then ultimately, the big problem is is China and and China is the real adversary in today's geopolitical moment. You use the phrase new world order. It's not a phrase I've ever much liked since I think George H W Bush gave it currency.
7:37 Speaker 04 What we're seeing is actually a familiar old world order of Cold War. We are in Cold War Two. China has taken the place that the Soviet Union used to occupy, and that's the dominant strategic reality. And I don't think everybody here at Davos fully understands that even yet. And so there's a tendency here to misread Trump. They they've been doing that for a decade, but I think also to misread the world and to think it's all about them.
8:04 Scott Galloway? Mm hmm.
8:04 Speaker 04 But it really isn't all about them. It's not about Europe, except insofar as Europe can't seem to help Ukraine effectively without the United States. And it's certainly not all about Denmark and Greenland. I think that is a very conscious distraction that President Trump has chosen. And there's an air, I think, of almost like-heartedness when you talk to members of the US delegation here. They know that they're driving the Europeans nuts, and they're quite enjoying it because they're the first American administration in my lifetime that has said out loud what many others have felt and said privately about the
8:44 Speaker 04 Europeans. They're impossible. They're entitled. They're always striking moral attitudes. This international law, that international law. They don't pay their share of the costs of European security. And I think what's fascinating is to hear an American administration saying out loud what their predecessors used to say privately back in Washington about dealing with the Europeans.
9:05 Scott Galloway? So there's some overlap here and then some things we would disagree on. So I think it's hard to argue that what I would argue the greatest performing organization in history is the US military and that what happened in Venezuela is a flex. I can't imagine it hasn't sent chills down the spine of every world leader. When Madeline Albright, Secretary Albright said, "Our reach is far and our memory is long, has never been more apparent," right? The issue is in kind of a double-barreled question here. Our adventures or misadventures overseas are like a Bond film. They always start great. Bond films always nail the opening and then they go on to be bad, mediocre, amazing films. And oftentimes, we start off, we nail the opening, and then
9:47 Scott Galloway? things come off the rails. And already in Venezuela, we're talking about taking their oil. It hasn't been regime change. Same regime is there. And it doesn't appear there'd be a quote-unquote "plan." First barrel of the question. Second, you, my sense is that you see this as sort of like... Bumping up against the EU, it's all, I won't call it good fun, but shouldn't be taken seriously but not literally, or literally not seriously. Whereas I see that our power has come from not being 25% of the world's GDP, but effectively being the leaders of an alliance that was 60 or 70%, and that we're rupturing that alliance and ultimately we're going to be much weaker and unable to promote Western values around the world.
10:30 Scott Galloway? Whereas my sense is you don't see the same level of rupture that I see. So let's start with Venezuela. I'm more worried about the rest of the Bond film. Tell me what you think the prospects are of Venezuela post this unbelievable military operation. And two, I would argue that this rupture or this fraying of alliances is long-term very unhealthy for America and the West. Neil?
10:54 Speaker 04 Well, I think this was never intended in Venezuela to be regime change in the sense that there was regime change in Iraq in 2003. And President Trump very deliberately said the other day, "We aren't going to make the mistake they may then of entirely dismantling the regime and then seeing the country descend into chaos, a chaos that the US owned." This is regime alteration. So it's an alteration. Obviously, it's meet the new boss, more or less the same as the old boss, because it's in effect Maduro's deputy. But the alteration is she doesn't report to Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and the Cubans anymore. She reports
11:38 Speaker 04 to President Trump. And she better report the right things, or she too could have a one-way ticket to a New York courthouse. So I think that's an important change, but it's not to be confused with regime change, where the Americans say, "And now you're going to hold elections, and people we really like are going to win them, and then we have a stock market, we'd like to liberalize, etc." I mean, those days are long gone. And I think the Trump administration rather prides itself on not having an idealistic vision, but be entirely realistic. Stephen Miller was boasting about this the other day, "We're the ultimate realists." And insofar as it takes Venezuela- Out of the Chinese camp and makes it essentially part of the Western sphere of American influence, that is an important alteration.
12:23 Speaker 04 What happens next? Well, I think the issue of the oil is mainly about denying it to China because part of the way that the world has worked lately is that the sanctions get imposed on bad actors and the Chinese essentially evade the sanctions and then get the oil at a discount. They're doing this with the Russians, they've done it with the Iranians for years. And I think part of the game here is to end that. So it's not a meaningless change that's happened. It's disappointing if like my friend Ricardo Hausmann, like all my Venezuelan friends pretty much, you you really wanted to see the chavistas gone and the opposition, the democratic opposition in power. We may get there, but I think it was never going to happen in a hurry after the bad experiences of Iraq. Could Iraq be the wrong analogy?
13:07 Speaker 04 Yeah, not perfect. So what else could be said? When Trump's national security strategy was published in November, was it, or was it early December? Everybody was very preoccupied with what it said about Europe. I said, that's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is the Trump corollary. Because the Trump corollary was this allusion to the Roosevelt corollary of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt, I should say, which said, not only is the Monroe Doctrine true, that Europeans can't interfere in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and the Caribbean, but also we, the United States, reserve the right to change governments we don't like in this part of the world. So we're back to that world.
13:52 Speaker 04 And to go to your movie analogy, the movies back then never turned out that well. The United States intervened in, let's see, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, I'm sure a missing Dominican Republic, and, you know. Often ended up with, well, he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. Or it ended up with, ah, the revolution, think Cuba, and then you're really looking at a mess. Can that be the story here? I think that's the downside risk for the Trump administration, that if they repeat the history of American interventions post 1904, then you either end up having a nasty regime that you kind of own,
14:37 Speaker 04 or you end up with another revolution against it. I think it'll be hard to avoid that because Venezuela has been very deeply and seriously damaged by the Chevistas. It will take a while to repair, if indeed it can be repaired.
14:50 Speaker 04 Part two. Look, the standard view in this part of the world is alliances have been absolutely crucial. The reason the United States won the Cold War was its alliances. And many American secretaries of state have have said this. It's almost a standard form for administrations up until this one. And what distinguished President Trump in both his first and second term is his disdain for allies and his view that they're essentially on the take, that they take advantage of the United States. And he set out to change that. Now, before you say this is terrible and crazy and, you know, we all should prepare for the end of civilization,
15:35 Speaker 04 bear in mind that for 50 years, American presidents have said to the Europeans, hey, you know what? You guys really don't pay like enough. Sure, yeah. Considering that you're as rich as we are, pretty much. Why is it that we bear 60 or more percent of the cost of NATO? The first president to get the Europeans to act, to commit to a significant increase in their defense spending, is President Trump. And that commitment that happened last year, I think, was important, but. It hasn't really translated into much meaningful rearmament so far. Even in Germany, which has certainly voted the means, they've passed very significant fiscal
16:15 Speaker 04 measures, but rearmament is going at a snail's pace and certainly not fast enough to meaningfully alter the situation in Ukraine. So I think part of what we're seeing here is more pressure on the Europeans to make them think, gee, the Americans might really check out a NATO, they might really do that. We really need to get serious. Now, I don't think that President Trump will one day announce, I'm done with NATO, or for that matter, go to war with Denmark. This is all classic Trump bluff. The goal is to force the Europeans to take seriously their own rhetoric. Scott, for the last 10 years, I've heard European leaders here and elsewhere talk
16:55 Speaker 04 about strategic autonomy, and how important it is that Europe should become a real superpower. But it was all talk. Macron was especially good at giving these speeches, but did the French defence spending meaningfully rise? No. So I think part of what we're seeing here is a deliberate and conscious effort to provoke the Europeans into getting real about defence spending and rearmament, and really taking ownership of the crisis in Eastern Europe that began when Russia invaded or fully invaded Ukraine. So I'm not so sure that the goal here is to dismantle the alliances, any more than it is to dismantle the alliances that the US has in Asia with Japan or with South Korea.
17:39 Speaker 04 Those countries, of course, didn't like having tariffs imposed on them, and it made them very nervous. But it's not like the US is about to tear up its defence alliances in Asia, especially when China poses an obvious threat to those countries. The truth is that America's allies don't have a better option. Mark Carney may think that he can go to China and make nice with Xi Jinping, and this will somehow impress Donald Trump. But I don't think it does because is Canada really going to join the Chinese Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Zone? What would that actually imply?
18:21 Speaker 04 Would it really be in Canada's interests to have Chinese Communist Party surveillance of their tech stack? I'm thinking no. So the truth is, the United States can can really treat its allies in an almost abusive way, knowing that they don't have anywhere else to go. And that in the final analysis, if it makes them step up and make a bigger effort, particularly a bigger military effort, then it's probably worth trolling them at Davos for a week.
18:54 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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22:34 Scott Galloway? I think people on both sides of the aisle would acknowledge the point that the EU and NATO, or as it relates to NATO, have been unfairly free riding off the largesse of US military spending. Where I think, where we part company is, I actually thought Mark Carney's talk yesterday was the most powerful. And what I see is Canada, who was basically, 75% of their exports are coming to the US. And I feel like in so many words he said from that great movie Animal House, "Let's be honest, we fucked up, we trusted you." And I'm not as optimistic, Neil, that these other great economies don't have options outside of the US.
23:17 Scott Galloway? And what I actively see is a lot of big economies, purposefully and deliberately, and maybe permanently, or at least for a while, reconfiguring their supply chain and their economic activity around and away from the US. And while China, who I think, I agree with you, could accurately be described as our adversary, while their imports, the percentage of their exports, just dropped from 17% to 10% in the US, their exports into other countries has increased. China just registered its largest export trading surplus. It strikes me that the frang or rupture of these alliances is benefiting China and hurting us.
24:02 Scott Galloway? I haven't seen the uplift or the benefit of us kind of flexing our muscles, other than what you talked about in terms of Venezuela, military might, and getting the EU off the couch, as in terms of the military support. What I see, or what I fear, and I'm not sure I sense the same fear from you... Is they were going to be less prosperous as nations spend a ton of time and energy trying to figure out a way to have the same type of incredible economic alliances that we've enjoyed for a long time. And I would I would say taken for granted. Your thoughts?
24:35 Speaker 04 Well, the difference is that the United States is in a sense, a kind of empire of consumption. And the United States has run for many decades, a current account deficit. The United States is a fantastic market to sell to for foreign companies. Even after the imposition of tariffs, it's still a fantastic market to sell to. The problem about China is it's not really a fantastic market to sell to because what the Chinese are all about is selling used stuff.
25:00 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
25:01 Speaker 04 That's why they have a colossal trade surplus.
25:03 Scott Galloway? Their imports have been flat, their exports are up 40% since Covid.
25:07 Speaker 04 And we're not too far from the most important European economy, Germany, as we sit here in Davos. And the Germans are having their lunch eaten. Their manufacturing sector is being hit extraordinarily hard by Chinese competition. And Chinese competition is now in multiple domains. You know this, Scott. The Chinese have not only made electric vehicles the market that they dominate, not only batteries, not only solar cells, but they're now doing stuff in chemicals, in pharma, that we never thought was possible. And so a huge swathe of the German economy is suddenly feeling a competitive blast from China that poses a really profound threat to the German economy's future prosperity. So it's not
25:51 Speaker 04 a good swap because Xi Jinping really isn't offering you great market access in China, except if you want to come and have your technology stolen. Because market access in China is, remember, you come, you set it up, we clone it, and then we say bye. That's why I don't think there's a really great choice on the table here, no matter how disgruntled Europeans, Canadians, and Asians may feel with President Trump. Remember, President Trump is president for three more years.
26:21 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
26:22 Speaker 04 Probability is that his power wanes, as that tends to happen in a second term, particularly if the Republicans lose the midterms. You know, time passes and the gravitational forces of American politics do what they do. It's still the United States and the next president will doubtless be quite a different person from this president. So would it really make sense to reorientate your entire strategy towards a one-party state run by an avowed Marxist Leninist Maoist, a regime that doesn't have the rule of law, that routinely incarcerates and disappears people that fall foul of it,
27:04 Speaker 04 a regime that has labor camps, indeed, concentration camps in Xinjiang, et cetera. I mean, we can all say that the United States has its faults. But you take it from me, you would not want to live in a world in which China was the dominant power and in which you had to have a subservient relationship to Beijing. That would be a much inferior world, even to the world of Donald Trump's
27:30 Speaker 04 Donald Trump's extraordinary and egotistical style of American leadership.
27:37 Scott Galloway? When I look at this, I don't know if you would call it new framework. I don't want to use the term new world order. It feels to me more less Monroe Doctrine and more, well, maybe it is part of the Monroe Doctrine, but spheres of influence. And I worry that we're withdrawing from, I think the most valuable companies in the world, Apple and Alphabet, are basically operating systems upon which everything else is built and they get a tax for everything and they set the tone. I believe that American economics, policy, rule of law, mostly democracy, has kind of been the operating system for the majority of the of the West. And now people are deciding maybe they'll try and find their own operating system or shifting off of it. And we're moving to these spheres of influence
28:19 Scott Galloway? where we have these regional superpowers, China and the Asia, the US and the Americas. I don't know, they fight it out in Europe. You're not worried or you don't see it as kind of a withdrawal? You see it as flexing, which will ultimately potentially increase US dominance and kind of get the Europeans in line to stop, quite frankly, bitching and moaning and live up to their rhetoric, that music has to match the words. I see it as a withdrawal to a smaller America around spheres of influence that will embolden Russia and China in their spheres. You don't see that?
28:52 Speaker 04 Well, it's conceivable. I guess this is sort of Gideon Rachman's view that in the end Trump's just another strong man who wants to carve up the world with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. But I'm not sure that that's really what we're seeing here. I mean, last I heard, Indo-Pacific Command is still by far the most important of the military commands of the United States. And its role in life is to deter China from seeking to establish itself as in control of Taiwan or extending its power in the South China Sea. It's a real and formidable force. And I don't think if you spoke to Admiral San Pepeparo, the commander of Indo-Pacific Command, he would say, yeah, we're just winding this up because we're all going to the Western
29:37 Speaker 04 Hemisphere. I think we have to distinguish here between rhetoric and reality. The rhetoric of the Trump administration, particularly Trump 2.0, is quite consciously borrowed from McKinley and Roosevelt. It's a sort of circa 1900 vibe. I don't know who gives Trump this stuff because for sure he's not sitting there reading biographies of Theodore Roosevelt. Somebody thinks it's a good idea, maybe it's JD, I don't know, somebody thinks it's a good idea to make these allusions to an America before the New Deal, an America which was an America still on the rise as a power, not even really regarded as a great power
30:17 Speaker 04 by the rest of the world. So this rhetoric has clearly some appeal to members of the administration, maybe to voters. I don't know how many voters have heard of the Roosevelt Corollary, not many I suspect. But the reality remains that the United States is a global power with military capabilities throughout the world. And the international trading system doesn't look remotely like spheres of influence. If you look at Hoon Sung Shin's work on the networks of trade, of supply chains and interlocking balance sheets, it's still a very, very extraordinarily complex global trading system. And when President Trump uses a 19th century tool like tariffs, all that happens is that the supply chains
30:59 Speaker 04 get reconfigured and the Chinese goods get to America with two stops along the way, rather than just the one of 2018. So I think we need to just... Take Trump seriously, but not literally. This was the key insight that Selina Zito had way back in the 2016 campaign when she pointed out that journalists took him literally, but not seriously, voters the other way. So we don't, I think, need to take the national security strategy literally as a document. We just need to look at what the US does. And what it does is to maintain military superiority in all of the major zones of the world, including Europe.
31:43 Speaker 04 So here's the thing that Europeans never want to face, that throughout the period since 1945, certainly from 47, 48, 49, they have relied on the US for their nuclear security. Nuclear deterrence is not really provided by the French Fosse de Frappe, certainly not by a British Trident. It's an American public good that is made available to Europeans. It's not included in the NATO budget. It's America's strategic force that says the Russians can't have Central or Western Europe. And if they try to have it, they risk obliteration. That's been the position really since the late 40s, and that has been the position despite the end of the Cold War.
32:28 Speaker 04 Now, nobody likes talking about this in Europe because strategic autonomy, if it were to be meaningful, would mean that the Europeans would need a proper nuclear arsenal, which they can't remotely afford, and I don't think they would have the political will to build. So what is the alternative, really? There isn't one. The United States is the thing that deters Russia, and as China is now in the midst of building a huge nuclear arsenal that will at some point be as big as the Russians, you really need the United States. Otherwise, you're completely at the mercy of the great Eurasian autocracies, which I don't think even the most Trump-phobic European liberal could regard as a good outcome.
33:09 Speaker 04 Another thing that's important when we get to reality is that geopolitics doesn't change that much because the world's geography is pretty constant over time. And whether you're looking at now, or if you want to look at the 1940s, or if you want to go back to the early 1900s, there are really two great geopolitical formations. This goes back to the early theorists of geopolitics, Macinder and Spikeman. There's the great Eurasian landmass, which has historically been dominated by large authoritarian empires. And then there are the rimlands, which are kind of Western Europe, the British Isles,
33:52 Speaker 04 the Americas, and then Japan and the Asian equivalents. That's geopolitics. Nightmare scenario, the great Eurasian authoritarian regimes dominate the whole Eurasian landmass, and you're just left in the United States with the Western Hemisphere. That would not be a good outcome. It wouldn't have been a good outcome if Hitler had won World War II, which is why, of course, the United States ended up fighting Germany. So I think you can't change that. You can act in a way that makes the probability of China plus Russia plus Iran plus North Korea winning, or you can work to stop them winning.
34:36 Speaker 04 And I think the Trump administration is doing a better job of stopping them winning than its predecessor did. The Biden administration was really quite unsuccessful in checking the formation of this axis. Indeed, I would say that the axis didn't really exist in 2020, but it was fully in existence by the end of Joe Biden's term. So whatever we hear when President Trump is riffing, as he was earlier today...
35:02 Speaker 04 Or whatever we read in his Truth Social account, which shouldn't really be called that, it should be called Truthy Social, because it's kind of truthy in the way Stephen Colbert used to talk about truthiness. It's truthy social. About half of what he says, he kind of means, and about half, he's just, he's just shooting the shit. We shouldn't get too fixated on what Trump says. We should be much, much more focused on what the United States does. And what it does seems to me a pretty strong advertisement for American allies staying with America and not contemplating the possibility of joining those lovable guys, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Supreme Leader Xamenei, Kim Jong-un. I mean, is
35:46 Speaker 04 that the club we want to be associated with? Not me.
35:53 Scott Galloway? We'll be right back.
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38:08 Scott Galloway? So let's talk about what America actually does, and let's use that as a bridge to talking about Ukraine. My sense is, when I read the proposed peace plan that the US outlined, to me, it sounded like just scheduling the next war. It sounded to me, or what the president actually has done, is giving comfort to our enemy, Russia, while withdrawing. I would argue that NATO right now is the Ukrainian army. If NATO's mission is to repel an invasion of Europe by Russia, it is effectively, the Ukrainian people are, and the Ukrainian army is, in fact, NATO. And it feels as if America has withdrawn a lot of at least vibe support from Ukraine. And then, I would argue, the EU has stepped up. You don't agree with that?
38:48 Speaker 04 Well, let's be clear. The European Union cannot, without American support, provide the assistance that Ukraine needs to survive. Yep. The war is dragging on towards its fifth year. This is going to be harder and harder for Ukraine to sustain. There's a manpower problem at the front. There's an air defense problem in the cities. Although the Ukrainians have been heroic and also tremendously innovative Yeah. in the drone warfare and technology, the Russians have more or less managed to keep pace with that.
39:33 Speaker 04 So that the Ukrainians have an edge on quality, but the Russians have an edge on quantity. The Europeans, when American aid was first cut off back at the end of Biden's presidency, could not fill the gap. That was immediately obvious because the minute the American aid stopped, you'll remember that the House cut it off. Then Ukraine started to lose. The United States isn't supplying much aid since President Trump was sworn in, but it's still playing an important part. In technology, it's true, it's air missiles, yeah. Correct. It's important to recognize that if that went, then the Europeans would not be able to make up the difference. Europeans have handed a lot of weapons as well as money to Ukraine.
40:18 Speaker 04 They have not built an awful lot of weapons anew. The Danes are in an especially weak position because they've given pretty much all of their military hardware to Ukraine. They don't have actually much defense capability at all at this point. So until the Europeans do serious rearmament, and I especially mean until the Germans do serious rearmament. Ukraine needs the United States to remain engaged, or it risks losing the war. I was down at the Ukrainian house earlier today, and there's a fantastic video, you must go and see it. An AI-generated video imagining Russian drone strikes on Paris, on Brussels, and brilliantly on Davos.
40:59 Speaker 04 And the Ukrainian point, which I wholly agree with, is that Europeans just find it really hard to believe what you said earlier, that Ukraine is in fact fighting for Europe. They just can't imagine that the Russians would ever do to their cities what the Russians are doing to all the major Ukrainian cities every night. To the point that Kiev, at this point, has almost no heating and electricity in really large parts of town. I mean, there are people I know whose apartments have no heat in mid-winter, and it's bitterly cold there. So I think we don't, and Europeans as well, don't fully understand how fragile the situation is,
41:42 Speaker 04 how overstretched Ukraine is, how hard it is to sustain this war, and how desperately we need the war to stop. Peace in the sense of the Russians all leave and Ukraine gets the Donbass back, maybe even the Crimea. This is a total fantasy. That is not how wars like this end. There are two scenarios. Scenario one, Ukraine loses. Finally, they just can't sustain defence anymore. Morale crumbles. This is how these wars typically end. The line is very long. The Ukrainians don't have as many men. There's a scenario in which they lose, and the Russians, after all the slaughter of the past four years, are able to advance further into Ukraine. That can't be ruled out as a scenario.
42:26 Speaker 04 It's actually the most likely scenario in a historical framework.
42:31 Speaker 04 Or there's a compromise peace that stops the war and gives Ukraine some breathing space. That is the better outcome. Obviously, there is no third possibility. There's no possibility where Ukraine wins.
42:45 Scott Galloway? Well, OK, oh, press pause. A third possibility, we arm them with Tomahawk missiles and the requisite infrastructure and technology to start taking out more of Russia's oil infrastructure, which results in a compromise peace, which isn't as onerous or as one-sided as the current envisioned compromise peace.
43:01 Speaker 04 I think that greatly understates how strong the Russian war economy remains.
43:08 Scott Galloway? So you're, you don't think-
43:10 Speaker 04 Because, just let me finish, Scott.
43:10 Scott Galloway? I'm sorry, go ahead, Neil.
43:11 Speaker 04 Because the Ukrainians already did take out most of the Russians' oil refining capacity last year, and the Russians just kept shipping crude.
43:18 Scott Galloway? That was 13%.
43:19 Speaker 04 No, it got up to 40% and higher. The Ukrainians actually don't need the Tomahawks that much because their own deep strikes with drones are highly successful and have been incredibly effective, except that Russia's big and it has enormous capacity, particularly when it comes to exporting hydrocarbons. You blow up the refinery, they just then ship the crude.
43:43 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
43:44 Speaker 04 And the sanctions regime has failed doubly. It hasn't succeeded in stopping the Russians shipping crude in the so-called ghost fleet, and it also hasn't stopped the Europeans and others trading with Russia through third countries. I mean, European countries export a suspiciously large amount of stuff to Kazakhstan and Tatarstan and Kyrgyzstan. It all goes on to Russia. So under these circumstances, there isn't really a way in which the military balance can decisively be shifted against Russia. The Russians have been held, and it's been an incredibly impressive success. They've been held, they've barely advanced despite casualties on a monthly level that the US suffered in a year in Vietnam
44:28 Speaker 04 at the height of the war. They haven't gained much ground. In fact, somebody told me the other day, he'd calculated that a snail would have got further in the direction of Pogromsk than the Russians did last year. So that's pretty good. But I'm not sure there's much more that can be done with Ukraine's capability. I think greater economic pressure on Russia is still needed to get Putin to the negotiating table, but you also need a deal that he can take, that he can accept. We're talking here, Scott, about a compromise peace. That's the nature of the beast. And for that to happen, Putin is going to have to say, I achieved my victory. He's going to have to be able to sell
45:08 Speaker 04 something to his people to justify all the slaughter. I think that probably involves him abandoning his original goal, which was to take the whole of Ukraine and turn it into another Belarus. I think we've pretty much told him that's impossible. And we've also, I think, pretty much told him, you're not going to destroy NATO either. But I think we have to give him some territorial win to end this war. And that is why I think that the 28-point plan, the original version, was not a bad starting point for negotiation, in that the Russians were prepared to talk about it. And the fact that the Russians were prepared to talk about it so much so that they even claimed off the ship of it, meant
45:51 Speaker 04 that you were getting somewhere. This was why the involvement of Jared Kushner was so important. He is a highly skilled negotiator. Steve Witkoff and his own was not getting very far. Bring Jared in and you start getting results. We've seen that in the Middle East. I think we begin to see it with Ukraine. It's tough. But I don't think the Europeans have helped at all. In fact, what happened was that after that 28-point plan did the rise, the Europeans said, no, no, no, this is far too good for Russia. We insist on changes. And they insisted on changes, that, for example, left the Ukrainian army even bigger. And of course, the Russians said, no. I mean, I can understand some of the American frustration.
46:31 Scott Galloway? Wasn't the original 28-point plan, doesn't it feel like it was written by Lavrov? It felt like a Russian peace plan.
46:36 Speaker 04 It wasn't written by Lavrov. It may have been written by another Russian or co-authored. It certainly wasn't written by American diplomats. But I think it's fair to say that it was agreed between Russians, Ukrainians, Witkoff, Kushner.
46:56 Speaker 04 That's what happened. The Ukrainians were actually ready because they desperately need a break. They need a ceasefire. And then the Europeans were the ones who said, no, no, no, we need, we need to make it much, much tougher. And that killed the negotiation. That's an important point that is not, I think, widely understood. And I think I can speak with some authority on this. So we have to recognize that this peace won't be pretty. It will involve almost certainly territorial sessions. The language of that's important. In the original plan, it wasn't that the Russians acquired de jure ownership of Donbass. It was de facto.
47:35 Speaker 04 The language here matters a lot because if you can put it that way, then you haven't permanently ceded the land to Russia. It's a temporary state of affairs and it recognizes roughly where the line of contact is. So I think this is the only way the war can end well. It can end really badly. If we hold out for the perfect peace that will satisfy the men in Brussels and in Berlin. If we hold out for a really good peace, we could end up with a Ukrainian defeat. And that, that is a nightmare scenario for Europe, which is why I can't really understand the lack of realism here. This is a time when you have to get some breathing space.
48:14 Scott Galloway? Six more minutes and you've said a lot there. Just under the auspices of realism. You don't worry that if Putin is allowed to quote unquote, claim a victory here and not end this with something resembling a black eye. That all we're doing is scheduling with this peace, the next war, that eventually it's the rest of Ukraine, Poland.
48:29 Speaker 04 Of course, if we did nothing, if we, if we did nothing after such a ceasefire or peace, then we only deserve another war. But if you get the breathing space, you can start the reconstruction of Ukraine. Ukrainians are our military powers.
48:43 Scott Galloway? Invest in a Ukraine where we feel like Russia is just going to rearm and then invade again.
48:48 Speaker 04 Invest in Ukraine. They have the best, best defense technology companies in the world.
48:51 Scott Galloway? We'll take their drones, but will anyone invest in the civilian infrastructure thinking that Russia's just going to rearm and take the rest in another war in five or seven years?
48:58 Speaker 04 Ever been to South Korea? So South Korea is interesting because it's a complete heap of rubble in nineteen fifty three. And it has a neighbor who is clearly as dangerous as neighbors get. And yet, here we are. So it's one of the
49:14 Scott Galloway? So you think the West and the US might be willing to participate in that type of 55th parallel, or whatever it's called, that would guarantee some sort of security such that people would be willing to invest and Ukraine would have some sense of autonomy and self governance?
49:27 Speaker 04 And I've said from the outset, I've said it to President Zelensky, your best outcome is to be South Korea. Your worst outcome is to be South Vietnam. That is the nature of the relationship you have. The United States has supported you, but you need to lock in what you've got and then build it, rebuild it.
49:45 Scott Galloway? Yeah.
49:45 Speaker 04 And then you'll be able to show, because on the other side of the line, there'll be continued Putinism, kleptocracy, criminality, poverty. And on the western side, there'll be the European South Korea, which I think is not an unrealistic vision, given the talent there is in Ukraine, given what they've shown themselves capable of, incredible courage, incredible innovative energy. I'm a passionate supporter of Ukraine's bid for freedom, passionate supporter. I do not want to see it fail because Europeans set too high a bar in these negotiations. I believe if you can get a breathing space, two things will happen. First, Ukraine can begin to rebuild.
50:30 Speaker 04 It now has a formidable army, the biggest in Europe, and it has shown itself to have formidable military technology. Now take that and scale it in Germany. If the Germans today, Friedrich Merz, are you listening, did Operation Warp Speed for rearmament instead of what they are doing, which is going through the usual incredibly slow bureaucracy of procurement, if they just did, okay, Gigafactory in Brandenburg, we take Ukrainian drone designs, and we don't just do 3 million a year, we do 20 million a year. How about that Putin? Now, if the Germans did that, and they could do it, they have the manufacturing infrastructure, they have the workforce, they have a crying need for it, since the
51:11 Speaker 04 days of selling automobiles to the Chinese are over. They did that, that would be a game changer, unlike Tomahawk missiles, because if the Russians saw German rearmament really happening. That would be the clearest sign, A, that Putin had made a huge strategic blunder, B, that Ukraine had a future. So I think there are ways to to solve this problem. They just require far more energy on the European side, far more commitment, and above all, something of what we still see in the United States, an ability, when the chips are down, to cut through the bureaucracy and do things really fast. So I just wish
51:51 Speaker 04 we could have sort of Elon Muskian rearmoments, you know, the SpaceX approach. You could scale what the Ukrainians do. You know what's really tragic is they have fantastic technology, they cannot scale it. They don't, of course, have the space or the security. They're trying to build drones in a war zone under daily bombardment. If you did all that stuff at scale in Germany, A, you would create meaningful deterrence, B, this is the beauty of the thing, you'd actually see German economic recovery. And that's like a win-win, if there was one.
52:24 Scott Galloway? So I'm getting a bit of a red light here. So I just really crisply, you said something that really resonated and I, um, my sense is there's this historic opportunity to, uh, defend a straight, replace whatever the term, defeat the Islamic Republic.
52:41 Speaker 04 Yes.
52:41 Scott Galloway? And, and I'm really hoping, I've never seen a greater case for greater ROI than limited, whatever you want to call it, strikes on civilian suppression centers and kind of tip over the regime, if you will.
52:54 Speaker 04 Regime alteration. That's what, that's what we have to hope is coming. It will transform the security of the Middle East. It will transform life for Iranians. And I believe it will be a huge contribution towards a peaceful end to Cold War II because it will signal that whatever Chinese project produced the relationships with Russia, Iran, and North Korea was not a realistic geopolitical project. That's my hope.
53:18 Scott Galloway? What do you, what do you think the chances are that the regime holds if there is an intervention, a coordinated intervention, say US and Israel, whatever it might be, intelligence, limited strikes? What do you think is the likelihood that the regime survives without Western military intervention?
53:32 Speaker 04 Very high indeed, like. Because they've crushed the protests brutally and the regime's repressive apparatus showed no sign of cracking. So if there's no intervention, that regime lasts. I mean, it's like the Soviets had a little bit of a revolt in nineteen sixty two. They utterly crushed it. Nineteen sixty two was pretty early in the Cold War. In fact, a dangerous time in the Cold War. So, no, we need to, if we want to get rid of the Islamic Republic, which has been a source of mischief and mayhem and murder since nineteen seventy nine. President Trump has to do what I think he is going to do.
54:07 Scott Galloway? Yeah, your lips to his ears. And the most important thing we haven't covered, but we'll have to cover quickly. Scotland's group draw in the World Cup, Neil. We're in with Morocco and Brazil, is that right? I mean, come on. Anyways, Scotland, what are our chances?
54:24 Speaker 04 Henry Kissinger was a great football soccer fan. One of his great maxims was every success is an admission ticket to the next crisis. And after Scotland heroically won their qualifying game in one of the greatest football games I've ever watched.
54:39 Scott Galloway? One of the best players in the world right now.
54:40 Speaker 04 It was a fantastic thing. I said to my sons, by the way, every success is an admission ticket to the next crisis. Then the draw came and they said, Dad, we know what you mean. So we got Haiti to beat and the otherwise, I think we just have to do damage limitation against Brazil and Morocco. Yeah, it's too bad, but you know, I think it was a glorious, glorious, glorious game. And we'll all remember Scott McTominay's goal as long as we live.
55:03 Scott Galloway? That, that was one of the greatest matches in football history. And are you back in London?
55:07 Speaker 04 I spend quite a bit of my time in Oxford, more than in London. And between Oxford and Stanford, I'm always just permanently jet lagged, never bored.
55:15 Scott Galloway? It's a rough commute.
55:16 Speaker 04 It is.
55:17 Scott Galloway? And just give me thirty seconds and I talk about this a lot. I always say the difference between Europe and the US is US still the best place to make money. You're the best place to spend it. And the difference between the UK and the US is you're the ones that stayed. The, the risk gene has been starched out of the UK gene pool and it's, it's, it's been very damaging. How would you, as someone who's, who's bi, not bi coastal, but bi country? How would you try to summarize the big difference between the UK and the US and what could the UK learn from it?
55:49 Speaker 04 I'm a dual citizen and I I I look at both and think a lot about this. I I think if you take AI or quantum, uh, take the cutting edge of technology, the UK is is clearly a source of real talent. What's the problem? It's not the lack of talent or entrepreneurship. It's the capital markets are utterly unfriendly to to scaling a really dynamic company, which is why Demis Hassabis and Mustafa Salehman and others have all ended up in the United States because you have brilliant company. I mean, DeepMind is the most important AI company in the end. Uh, it's a much more important, historically innovative company, but it's a British company
56:32 Speaker 04 that ended up being acquired by Google because there was no other way to scale it. So I don't think these are cultural problems. They're they're institutional problems and you can see these as as in a sense Britain reverting to its nineteen seventies bad habits, which Margaret Thatcher temporarily cured Britain of. If you could bring Margaret Thatcher back to life and redo Thatcherism, then I think there would be a chance at least of revitalizing Britain's capital markets, which, you know, are are potentially extraordinarily broad and deep. I mean, very liquid, but institutionally the incentives are terrible. You know, the way like pension funds deploy capital in Britain would make you weep. So I think there are fixes here that the next, and I hope it will be a conservative
57:17 Speaker 04 government, can address. I want Kemih Badenoch to be Black Thatcher and to do all the things again that we learnt the hard way we had to do, starting in nineteen seventy nine.
57:30 Scott Galloway? Neil Ferguson, historian and public intellectual. I love having you on. I disagree with most of everything you say, Neil, and yet I learned so much and you really do open my mind and I'd like to think a lot of our listeners' minds to. You just have this unbelievable ability to thread history with economics and logic, even if even if you get to a place that kind of sends chills down my spine. I just love, love speaking to you. I really appreciate, appreciate your time and appreciate how, quite frankly, like, unfiltered you are. That's really refreshing.
58:00 Speaker 04 It's so boring if we agreed about everything, but we agree about football.
58:04 Scott Galloway? There we go. That's dialogue. All right. Thanks again, Neil. Good to see you.
58:07 Speaker 04 My pleasure.
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Previous Raging Moderates: A Year of Trump 2.0; A Decade of the War on Truth (ft. Heather Cox Richardson) Next What Mayor Mamdani Is Getting Right (and Wrong), Career Risk, and Letting Your Kids Go Page updated October 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
