Niall Ferguson warns, "Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes," aka, "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts."
Here are some excerpts from his piece on Bloomberg this week.
Joe Biden Could End Up Being a Wartime President
Notwithstanding his pledges of uplift and healing, history suggests post-pandemic peace is rare, and Democratic wars are not.
Successful Democratic candidates for the presidency of the United States invariably campaign with promises of domestic largesse and moral uplift. They nearly always end up taking their country to war. Can Joe Biden be a rare exception to that rule, if he succeeds in defeating Donald Trump on November 3? That will depend not just on how well he and his national security team conduct U.S. foreign policy. It will also depend on how stable the world around them is. The bad news is that post-pandemic peace is another historical rarity.
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Joe Biden's speech on Thursday night was the continuation of a very long tradition in lofty Democratic rhetoric, traceable all the way back to Thomas Jefferson. "If you entrust me with the presidency," declared Biden, "I will draw on the best of us not the worst. I will be an ally of the light not of the darkness. It's time for us, for We the People, to come together. For make no mistake. United we can, and will, overcome this season of darkness in America. We will choose hope over fear, facts over fiction, fairness over privilege." Whoever wrote that speech had done their homework. At times I wondered if an algorithm had mashed it up on the basis of all previous Democratic acceptance speeches.
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One disaster begets another. A pandemic creates a cascade of economic, social and political problems, which in turn can often precipitate cross-border conflicts. Watch, for instance, as COVID-19's disruption of food production all over the developing world, but especially in Africa, leads not just to hunger but to population displacements and political frictions.
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For that matter, look around at what's already happening. Since the outbreak of Covid-19, Russia and Turkey have effectively partitioned Libya, Chinese and Indian soldiers have skirmished hand-to-hand on their border, the port of Beirut has blown up, toppling the Lebanese government, revolution has broken out in Belarus and there has been a military coup in Mali. Is peace at hand? Well, there has been an unexpected breakthrough in the Middle East, with the normalizing of relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates (a deal for which Jared Kushner deserves more credit than he is receiving). But anyone who thinks Iran is going to suspend its nefarious activities in the region just because Joe Biden is in the White House doesn't understand the regime in Tehran.
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The central issue at stake between the United States and China is not Trumps' tariffs, nor his attempt to have a U.S. tech company take over TikTok, nor Xi's suppression of pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, nor his genocidal policies against the Uighurs in Xinjiang — nor even the extent of China's culpability for the Covid-19 pandemic. The central issue is Taiwan and it is due to blow up in a few weeks' time, when new U.S. regulations come into force that will cut off Huawei from all imported semiconductors made with either American technology or software. As my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Tim Culpan argued last week, this really is the "nuclear option," because it "threatens to kill the company, which invites retaliation from Beijing."
Ever wondered why it was that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941? As Harvard's Graham Allison recently reminded us, it was because of intolerable economic sanctions imposed by the United States. Yes, that's right: under the Democratic President Joe Biden most wants to be associated with.
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Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes" is a line from Virgil, usually translated as "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts." I feel the same way about Democrats when they make uplifting speeches full of promises about billions (sorry, make that trillions) of dollars to be spent on public health, education, health care and infrastructure.
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