If you’re a consumer of the standard fare on cable news, you’ve assuredly seen historian and British conservative talking head Niall Ferguson, whose current titles include Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University, opining on global events. Ferguson isn’t generally terrible; sometimes he’s had quite good takes on geopolitics. In his several books and other writings, he takes a quite correct position that the British Empire did far more good than harm and that Islamism being foisted on Europe courtesy of runaway immigration from North Africa, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent is a dire threat to the future of the West.
Those are good takes and Ferguson has been subjected to much opprobrium and ridicule from the global “smart set” for them.
But Ferguson is a neocon. There has never been any doubt about that.
And as a neocon, he popped off on X earlier this week to trash the Trump administration’s foreign policy shift away from endless war in Ukraine. Here’s what he said…
“‘This will not stand. This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.’ — George H.W. Bush on August 5, 1990. Full quote from Jon Meacham’s biography. Future history students will be asked why this stopped being the reaction of a Republican president to the invasion of a sovereign state by a dictator.”
I’ll direct the reader to yesterday’s column about Bari Weiss’s scolding of the MAGA movement and the ratio it received by noting that once again we see the plaintive wail of the Third Era intellectual class at the re-examinations of its failed consensus — because that’s what this certainly is.
But the Fourth Era, the one which began with the Trump–Vance ticket’s electoral landslide back in November, has answers for all of the Third Era’s griping. Melissa and I talked about this very subject in one of the segments of this week’s Spectacle Podcast.
And it was JD Vance who supplied a masterful answer to Ferguson’s moaning with this blistering rebuke…
This is moralistic garbage, which is unfortunately the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say.
For three years, President Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn’t have started if President Trump was in office;… https://t.co/xH33s6X5yf
— JD Vance (@JDVance) February 20, 2025
It’s a long X post, but here’s a taste…
This is moralistic garbage, which is unfortunately the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say.
For three years, President Trump and I have made two simple arguments: first, the war wouldn’t have started if President Trump was in office; second, that neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory. This was true three years ago, it was true two years ago, it was true last year, and it is true today.
And for three years, the concerns of people who were obviously right were ignored. What is Niall’s actual plan for Ukraine? Another aid package? Is he aware of the reality on the ground, of the numerical advantage of the Russians, of the depleted stock of the Europeans or their even more depleted industrial base?
Instead, he quotes from a book about George HW Bush from a different historical period and a different conflict. That’s another currency of these people: reliance on irrelevant history.
And if that wasn’t enough of a sledgehammer, Vance brought more…
Number one, while our Western European allies’ security has benefitted greatly from the generosity of the United States, they pursue domestic policies (on migration and censorship) that offend the sensibilities of most Americans and defense policies that assume continued over-reliance.
Number two, Russians have a massive numerical advantage in manpower and weapons in Ukraine, and that advantage will persist regardless of further Western aid packages. Again, the aid is *currently* flowing.
Number three, the United States retains substantial leverage over both parties to the conflict.
Number four, ending the conflict requires talking to the people involved in starting it and maintaining it.
Number five, the conflict has placed — and continues to place — stress on tools of American statecraft, from military stockpiles to sanctions (and so much else). We believe the continued conflict is bad for Russia, bad for Ukraine, and bad for Europe. But most importantly, it is bad for the United States.
If anybody has offered a serious refutation to Vance’s points, I’ve not seen it.
What’s happened is that the Ukrainians have copycatted the rest of the European elite in throwing a temper tantrum about Vance and Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and their statements about Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO — not to mention their critiques of the current state of European democracy, liberty, economics, and military defense. Volodymyr Zelenskyy has appeared to melt down amid Trump’s criticism.
And the idea, broached by the Russians and the Trump administration at the peace-talk discussions in Riyadh earlier this week, that there ought to be an election in Ukraine by which the people of that country should have the right to decide how much further they want to take this war, has set off paroxysms of rejection.
Of course, as Vance noted in his Munich speech, these “defenders of democracy” in the European capitals don’t seem to be any friendlier toward it than the Biden administration was, seeing as though they’ve been subverting the will of the people in places like France, Germany, and Romania. Why would anyone think they would have faith in, or respect for, Ukrainian elections? (RELATED: Stop the Steal in Romania: A Sinister Case)
It’s obvious who the clear-eyed thinkers are on this issue.
We aren’t selling out the Ukrainians. We’re trying to put a stop to mass carnage such as Europe has not seen since 1945. We’re attempting to remedy a diplomatic failure for the ages, both by Trump’s predecessor and the European Davos elite, and salvage a country for the Ukrainian people. (RELATED: A Better Alternative To the Davos Elites)
The answer to Trump’s attempts to make peace is, what? An endless war, Afghanistan-style, against the world’s largest nuclear stockpile? There aren’t enough Ukrainians to prosecute such a conflict.
Are the Niall Fergusons of the world then suggesting American kids be fed into that meat grinder? That’s mighty generous of him toward the Ukrainians. Ferguson is British — why won’t he begin by demanding his country follow the lead of its authoritarian would-be dictator Keir Starmer, in office with all of a third of the vote last year, and begin with British troops sent to fight the Russians on behalf of “democracy.”
Perhaps Starmer can begin by conscripting all of the new inmates of British jails he put there for the crime of shitposting on the internet. (READ MORE: Great Britain Is Neither Great Nor Free, and Might Not Even Be Britain for Long)
All of this is absurd. None of these people have serious solutions for Ukraine. It’s been three years and if any of them have offered so much as a plausible victory strategy I sure haven’t seen one. I’ve yet to see so much as an exposition of why it’s a vital U.S. national interest to save the Crimea and the Donbas for Ukraine (which would almost certainly run counter to “democracy,” as the residents of those areas certainly seem to favor Russian control over Ukrainian).
None of this changes the fact that Vladimir Putin is the villain in this conflict. He is. He shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. He’s a bastard for having done it, regardless of the — ahem — “mistakes” that were made which some might say provoked him to start the war. But you don’t get to preach about the “morality” of continuing a hopeless war when you don’t have a plausible solution for doing so. And neither Niall Ferguson nor the rest of the neocon choir have one. As Vance noted, what they have is moralistic garbage that won’t save a single Ukrainian life.
And by the way, for those of you who think Trump is selling out the Ukrainians, feel free to explain Joe Biden’s efforts to squelch the growth of liquified natural gas exports to Europe which otherwise would have displaced the Russians’ sales of that product and therefore stopped the Europeans from helping to finance both sides of the war. Let’s not make Trump the bad guy for trying to wash his hands of this whole thing after three years of that atrocious failure — intentional or not — of strategic geopolitics. (RELATED: The Biden Trap)
Enough already.
Let’s turn the page on the failed foreign policy of a bygone era and do something that serves our own interests and saves lives; namely, get the best deal available to end the war. Vance is correct on this, and he’s beginning to look more and more like the future of American leadership working as an understudy to its present titan.
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