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.
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