In a far-reaching conversation with Independence Avenue Media, historian Sir Niall Ferguson argues that the future of global order will be defined less by peace accords in Gaza and more by the grinding war in Ukraine — and how Beijing chooses to play it. Speaking with Editor-in-Chief Ia Meurmishvili, Ferguson dissects shifting U.S. power under President Donald Trump, the endurance of Sino-Russian relations, and fading illusions of diplomacy amid what he describes as a newly resurgent Cold War.
The often controversial Scottish-born scholar says Trump’s efforts to negotiate peace in Ukraine mirror his transactional approach to Gaza — except that the Kremlin isn’t playing along. “The Russians turned up in Alaska and they basically trolled Trump,” he says, recalling the failed summit that led to a harder U.S. line.
He also thinks China’s pivotal role in the war — especially its diplomatic posturing of neutrality — is something the West ignores at its peril.
“The Chinese don’t want Russia to lose,” Ferguson says. “They profit from this war — they sell drones and components to both sides.” That self-interest, he adds, makes peace unlikely in the short term. With rare-earth minerals, industrial diamonds, and advanced manufacturing as tools of leverage, Beijing exerts quiet but decisive influence over global markets — a form of economic coercion rivaled only by its military strength.
Still, Ferguson insists that history favors openness. “Free societies are always more creative, always more innovative,” he says, predicting that democracies will outlast authoritarian states in the long game of innovation and legitimacy.
The following interview, recorded October 16, has been edited for length and clarity.
Independence Avenue Media Editor in Chief Ia Meurmishvili: What does Gaza peace agreement mean? Do you think it is sustainable? What impact do you think it will have on global affairs?
Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University: Well, I think the peace agreement for Gaza was a major success for President Trump’s administration and all credit to Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner—as well as, by the way, Tony Blair, who played an important part—and the various governments that ensured this deal got done. Many hands played a part in this, but without President Trump, I don’t think it would have happened. Because first of all, President Trump has an ability to exert pressure over Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu that [President] Joe Biden clearly lacked. Jared Kushner has a credibility in the Gulf that came into sharp focus in recent weeks.
These men were able to put pressure on the two combatants against [Israel’s Prime Minister] Netanyahu and Hamas to get them to agree. This was an extraordinary achievement and we shouldn’t underestimate it.
Will it produce lasting peace in the Middle East? Of course not. If it produces lasting peace in Gaza, I’ll be amazed. The agreement says Hamas will be disarmed and won’t play a part in the government of Gaza in future. Doesn’t say how that’s going to be achieved and there isn’t much sign of Hamas laying down their weapons right now. They’re using them to conduct reprisals in the area of Gaza they control.
As for the wider region, I think it’s still perfectly possible that we could see renewed hostilities between Israel and Iran before the end of the year. Iran is rebuilding. It’s reconstructing its air defenses. It’s trying to find a way back to having ballistic missiles. Israel can’t sit back and let all that happen. So I think one has to be realistic about where we’re going. But in the short run, it was vitally important to get the surviving hostages back. That’s been achieved. And currently, half of Gaza is not under the control of Hamas because, under the agreement, it’s still under the control of Israel. So there’s a lot that can still happen in Gaza. And I think it’s in that sense a major, major step forward.
Meurmishvili: Do you think President Trump still has levers of pressure to ensure that the peace agreement lasts?
Ferguson: I think President Trump has extraordinary credibility and respect in Israel. I don’t just mean with the Israeli government, I mean with Israelis. So that’s important because there was a moment when Israel seemed to be headed for complete international isolation—almost pariah status. It began to remind me of South Africa in the days of apartheid, and President Trump has helped Mr. Netanyahu get out of that dead end of total isolation, which I think was a real danger for the future of Israel.
At the same time, President Trump is respected in the wider region.
He’s respected in particular in the Gulf. They know that he takes them seriously, partly because he’s a businessman, but also I think because, intuitively, President Trump understands that in the Middle East, there is no way of getting respect other than through strength. So he does have real leverage, not only with respect to Israel, but also with respect to the Arabs. And I think in particular, the Qataris have been crucial here. Qatar has sheltered the leadership of Hamas, played a distinctly ambiguous role, it must be said, over the last two years. But without Qatar, it wouldn’t have been possible to get Hamas to sign this deal.
One has to acknowledge that one of the distinguishing features of Trump’s presidency is that he brings strength and a kind of business sense to every negotiation that he enters into. It’s got a lot harder for his critics and haters to say that’s not real after what we’ve just seen.
Meurmishvili: Do you think Russia and China see that strength?
Ferguson: Well, this is a great question because clearly President Trump has been less successful in trying to end the war in Ukraine by using the same methods. The idea was, as I understand it, that President [Vladimir] Putin and his foreign minister, Mr. [Sergei] Lavrov, would come to Alaska, and a deal would be done. And that deal would involve real estate in Ukraine and Donbas and in return some kind of relaxation of sanctions and deals, deals, deals, deals. You know how this works.
And, the Russians turned up in Alaska and they basically trolled Trump. Lavrov wore a USSR sweatshirt. They never took it seriously. Trump was pretty mad about that [and] made it clear that he was mad. And I think it’s led to a significant change in his posture towards this conflict. I don’t think that President Trump is going to restore the Biden approach, which was aid to Ukraine just enough so they don’t lose, but not enough that they can win. I think we’re seeing something different here where President Trump is saying, conduct your deep strikes, hit the Russians where it hurts, hit their oil refining capacity. Here, we’ll sell the Europeans some Tomahawk missiles and they can give them to you. It’s Europe’s problem. Europe needs to do the aid, but the United States is going to provide weapons for sale, and I think intelligence-sharing, without which Ukrainian deep strikes would be harder though not impossible.
So, I think we’re seeing a change here. And if President Putin hasn’t got the memo yet, his position is significantly weaker than it was at the beginning of this year. If he doesn’t realize that, he soon will.
You asked also about China, and clearly when you’re dealing with [Chinese President] Xi Jinping, you’re dealing with somebody who is an economic equal or near equal, who knows how to play hardball in trade negotiations, and who has with Chinese rare earths exports a really powerful source of leverage, not just in the United States, but in the world. So this is much tougher for President Trump because he’s up against a formidable opponent. I think Xi Jinping understands what President Trump is all about. I think he got the measure of him in the first term. They saw what the trade war looked like, and they’ve done much better this time around in dealing with very aggressive tariffs from President Trump. So it’s a tougher assignment getting the Chinese to accept Trump’s way. We’ll see how successful President Trump is in the coming weeks, [as] we’re getting close to a crunch point when the two leaders are going to meet in South Korea later this month.
Meurmishvili: Do you think Russia is emboldened by China? You just mentioned China using some of the economic levers like rare earth minerals, also industrial diamonds, which we don’t talk about too often, but they are essential for high-tech manufacturing in the United States, and China is not selling those diamonds to the U.S. anymore. Do you think all this emboldens Putin to resist Trump more?
Ferguson: I think it’s impossible to understand the war in Ukraine without understanding that China has Russia’s back. That China in effect gave Putin a green light to launch the full-scale invasion back in February of 2022; that China has massively increased its exports to Russia since then; that without dual-use technology from China, Russia’s war machine would not have been able to sustain the conflict for as long as it has.
And although Chinese diplomats like to talk as if they’re neutral, potentially even peace brokers, the reality is that they are Russia’s allies. There is a partnership or friendship “without limits” between Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. They meet more often than any two world leaders. And I think we’ve seen emerge in the last four years a [new] kind of axis of authoritarian powers — China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. They work together economically and militarily and not only with respect to Ukraine. That is the truth. And in the course of these nearly four years of war, President Putin has allowed Russia to become increasingly dependent on China economically, which, if I were Russian, I would find quite troubling, because it runs against the grain of Russian and Chinese history. But that is what’s happening.
And that means that the Russian war effort goes on until China decides that it’s no longer in Beijing’s interest. [While] I don’t think we’ve reached that point yet, [it] is, of course, one of the challenges that faces President Trump as he tries to figure out a way to end this war. It’s not just about putting pressure on Russia. That’s probably not enough.
Meurmishvili: What does China want to get out of the war in Ukraine?
Ferguson: I don’t think the Chinese imagined that this war would still be going on in 2025. Because they, like more or less everybody, thought that if Russia launched a full-scale invasion, it would all be over quite quickly. That’s what the CIA thought. I have to confess, I rather thought it myself, at least in the initial two or three days. The Chinese can’t have foreseen that the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian government would exceed almost everybody’s expectations in their readiness to defend their country and would inflict a series of remarkable military defeats on Russia, beginning with the Battle of Kyiv in 2022. So now the Chinese find themselves as investors in a bad business, but what they don’t want is for this business to go bust. They don’t want Russia to lose. If Russia loses, then China also loses, or at least loses face. So I think the Chinese at this point want to avoid that scenario. They don’t, I think, particularly care about President Putin’s more ambitious war aims, which of course includes preventing Ukraine from being an independent democratic state and potentially even breaking up NATO. But the Chinese don’t want Russia to lose. They profit from this war. They sell drones and drone components to both sides. In that sense, China is not particularly incentivized to stop the war. It also helps China that Western resources get tied up in a conflict in Ukraine. And so there, too, there’s no obvious reason to seek peace. So it’s difficult to go to Beijing and say, “You should help end this war, you should lean on President Putin to accept a compromise peace,” because there isn’t that big an incentive for Xi Jinping to do that. That’s why the United States is casting around for other people to lean on, and India has been selected for that role. But I don’t think anybody seriously thinks that the road to peace in Ukraine runs through New Delhi. It possibly runs through Beijing, but ultimately it runs through Moscow. And it’s only when President Putin recognizes that the costs to him of continuing this war are greater than the costs of settling that we will get to a real peace negotiation.
I don’t rule this out. I think ultimately the Ukrainians are inflicting meaningful damage on Russia’s energy infrastructure and that will take its toll if it is sustained. On the other hand, Russia is inflicting real damage on Ukrainian cities with nightly air raids, and the drone war on both sides is constantly scaling up. I think Putin still thinks he can win this. I think he still believes he can grind out one of those Russian victories that relies on manpower and readiness to take casualties. That’s why he’s not particularly serious about negotiation. But there comes a point when we can make the costs to him too high for him to continue. And that’s the key, I think, to what President Trump has to do in the remainder of this year and into next year. Real pressure needs to be applied before we get to the spring and summer of next year, because I worry a lot about the manpower imbalance. Russia is recruiting fresh reserves for its infantry. Ukraine is not. A war like this can’t be fought exclusively by drones. You do need infantry and that’s where I think Ukraine is most vulnerable.
Meurmishvili: We’re recording this interview the day before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets with President Trump at the White House. There’s hope that he will not go back to Kyiv empty-handed and that he will get those Tomahawks [long-range missiles] that Ukraine has been asking for so long now. Do you think Ukraine having Tomahawks will change Putin’s calculus in a way that you just talked about?
Ferguson: Well, it’s not a large enough number of missiles to change President Putin’s calculus. You would really need substantially more weapons than that. So I don’t think this is decisive. I think it’s more important that in this meeting, it’s clear that the relationship between President Trump and President Zelenskyy has been entirely repaired after all the damage that it suffered back in the earlier part of this year, and what President Trump says matters a lot.
We’ve seen a big change in his tone towards President Putin, particularly since the fiasco of the Alaska summit. Let’s hope we hear more of that. I don’t think Tomahawks are the key here. I think the key is President Putin understanding that he has blown it, that he is now somebody who’s standing in the White House has been really reduced and that the Trump administration no longer sees him as somebody they need to conciliate. I think if that message is conveyed—”you had your chance and you blew it”—then he’s going have to think very hard about what he does next year.
Meurmishvili: Have we moved on from the fear of nuclear escalation in Ukraine?
Ferguson: Yes, we have. The Biden administration seemed to forget the basics of deterrence in 2022 and thereafter. Because when Russian leaders talked about nuclear weapons, the correct response was to say, “We also have those. A lot of them. And if you use nuclear weapons, we do not rule out using them on you.” That’s the simple playbook. It’s deterrence 101. They failed to do that. They allowed themselves to be intimidated. And that seems to me to be at an end because it’s not going to work with President Trump. President Trump is not going to be scared by threats of nuclear weapons, especially when he knows they’re empty threats. Because even if Russia used a nuclear weapon, what good would it do? Militarily, it would be entirely worthless. It wouldn’t make any significant change to the strategic situation on the battlefield where Ukrainian forces are highly dispersed, it would destroy whatever is left of Russia’s legitimacy in the wider world. And the fallout would all blow in the direction of Moscow, not of Berlin. So I know this is a bluff. I’ve always known it as a bluff. And if President Putin or his predecessor, Mr. Medvedev, try that again on President Trump, they’re going to get a shock. They’re going to get a surprise.
Meurmishvili: From your perspective as a historian, how is global power defined today? And is the US still leading it?
Ferguson: The nature of power hasn’t really changed all that much since the days of Thucydides, which is why we can understand his history of the Peloponnesian Wars. [Why] we can understand the concept of power over time. It’s the technology that changes. We talked a minute ago about nuclear weapons and they still matter. They’re still the ultimate weapons. But there’s been drastic technological change since the first Cold War.
If, like me, you think we’re in a second Cold War, this Cold War is also about artificial intelligence. It’s also about quantum computing. It’s also about the ability to project [power] in space. So we’re in a new technological era, but the fundamental nature of power hasn’t changed. Power is a combination of your material resources, which extends from the number of people in uniform to the number of nuclear missiles you have and your will to use it. And that will, in a democracy, is partly conditioned on the attitude of your people. That’s not something that has to concern President Putin as much as it concerns an American leader, but he can’t entirely ignore that dimension, even as an authoritarian whose elections are a sham. So, that’s the nature of power.
It’s much easier in a world of highly complex weaponry capable of massive destruction to wage economic war because the costs are lower—the casualties, the body count are also lower. And so we now see power being exerted through economic channels rather than through open warfare. That is to say China restricts the export of rare earths, which is highly disruptive to U.S. and indeed global manufacturing. The U.S. restricts the export of high-end semiconductors to China, which is a big problem for Chinese AI companies. Those are the kind of channels through which power is exerted. The choke points in the global supply chain are really the major sources of power today. But behind this economic war is the possibility of hot war. And President Trump reminded us that he’s not reluctant to use American hard power if the time is right. He was the one who gave the order to send the B-2 bombers to take out the Fordow nuclear facility [in Iran], reminding everybody that the United States has the most advanced weaponry in the world. And when it uses that weaponry, you’d better look out.
I think in that sense, the nature of power hasn’t wholly changed. Even when complex economic warfare is being waged, the final result is force—the use of arms. In that domain, although China is building a great military capability and a very large Navy, the United States has an edge. And the edge comes from having fought wars, which China’s army has not done in more than a generation. And that must be why Xi Jinping constantly purges and changes his military leadership, because he senses that if it came to a showdown with the United States, say over Taiwan or the South China Sea, he would be pitting an inexperienced PLA against a highly experienced American military, and that would be a very big risk indeed.
Meurmishvili: To summarize everything that we talked about, where do you see the world going? You must have some best- and worst-case scenario outcomes as we are seeing this transition into a different type of world order. Where do you think we can end up and where do you think we should not end up?
Ferguson: But I think we’ve been in Cold War II for at least seven years. I think we can trace this back to 2018, if not earlier. And like the first Cold War, we go from periods of brinkmanship to periods of détente. I thought we were heading toward something like détente until last Friday when China made clear that it intended to flex its rare earths export licensing system in a way that was clearly, highly provocative.
I think the worst-case scenario of any Cold War is a hot war. The worst-case scenario would be a war between the United States and China, over, say, Taiwan. The best case is that the two superpowers go down the path of detente as they did in the 1970s. And ultimately what happened in the 1980s was that the problems inherent in a one-party state became clear. If you can avoid conflict with China, I believe the problems inherent in that one-party state will become clear. And over a long-term horizon—over 10, 20 or 30 years—my bet will be on free societies over unfree ones, for the simple reason that free societies are always more creative, always more innovative. You see this in the special case of Ukraine-Russia, where you have a democracy fighting an autocracy. And you can see in drone warfare, which is the more innovative of these two countries. It’s the smaller free society that actually has the edge in drone innovation. And all the autocracy can do is churn out Shahids, which are basically copied from the Iranians. In that sense, one should always, I think, place a bet on freedom over unfreedom. Historically, it’s the free societies that are the innovative societies and it’s the innovative societies that tend to win.
