https://www.scmp.com/rss/322359/feed Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard and a Senior Research Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Great Degeneration, Civilization, The Ascent of Money, and The War of the World. en https://assets.i-scmp.com/static/img/icons/scmp-meta-1200x630.png https://www.scmp.com I picked a fine time to become an American. The finest England football team for a generation had just been beaten by Croatia. And Hurricane Donald Trump was making landfall in London. “I would have done it [Brexit] much differently,” Trump told The Sun . “I actually told Theresa May how to do it, but she didn't agree, she didn't listen to me.” (Sound of breaking glass in Downing Street) “The deal she is striking is a much different deal than the one the people voted on. It was not the deal that... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2155419/land-my-land-whatever-one-thinks-donald-trump?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2155419/land-my-land-whatever-one-thinks-donald-trump?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 16 Jul 2018 07:15:15 +0000 I am an immigrant – a legal one. Over 16 years, I've gone through a succession of work visas, acquired a green card, married an American citizen (herself an immigrant), passed the citizenship test and will very soon take the naturalisation oath, accompanied by my wife and our two American-born sons. Since 2002, I and members of my family have entered the United States umpteen times. Occasionally, those crossings have been fraught. Once, before she got her green card, my British-born daughter was... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2152346/trumps-immigration-u-turn-shows-hes-no-hitler?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/united-states/article/2152346/trumps-immigration-u-turn-shows-hes-no-hitler?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 25 Jun 2018 18:01:14 +0000 Israel Zangwill’s play The Melting Pot, first staged in Washington in October 1908, celebrates the United States as a giant crucible fusing together a single people. It is rather hard to imagine a similar play being written about the European Union in the early 21st century. The influx of migrants would have precisely the opposite effect. Far from leading to fusion, Europe's migration crisis is leading to fission. Increasingly, I believe that the issue of migration will be seen by future... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2151244/immigrant-overload-not-brexit-heralds-end-european-union?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2151244/immigrant-overload-not-brexit-heralds-end-european-union?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 18 Jun 2018 06:30:45 +0000 The death of Tom Wolfe sent me back to The Bonfire of the Vanities. No other book, it is generally agreed, better captured the atmosphere of mid-1980s New York. What no one foresaw at its publication was that, 30 years later, a character from Wolfe's New York would take over the entire United States.  As Maggie Haberman of The New York Times put it recently: “Tom Wolfe envisioned a Donald Trump before the actual one came into tabloid being”. But Trump had already come into being: The Art of the... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2147091/want-better-understand-donald-trumps-presidency-read-tom?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2147091/want-better-understand-donald-trumps-presidency-read-tom?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 21 May 2018 09:00:00 +0000 Some teams – generally the ones I support – tend to win at home and lose away. The same is true of some American presidents. Lyndon Johnson's most enduring victories were legislative (civil rights and the Great Society), yet his presidency was destroyed abroad, in Vietnam.  Woodrow Wilson won abroad – ending the first world war and establishing the League of Nations – but lost at home, failing to get the league ratified by the Senate and suffering a debilitating stroke in the process.  A year... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2144041/trumps-foreign-policy-wins-will-be-his-ticket-re-election?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2144041/trumps-foreign-policy-wins-will-be-his-ticket-re-election?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 30 Apr 2018 10:00:30 +0000 In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the telescreen is the primary tool of totalitarian surveillance. It is, in Orwell’s words, “an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the wall ... The instrument could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. “The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2138961/big-zucker-watching-you-facebook-has-realised-orwells?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2138961/big-zucker-watching-you-facebook-has-realised-orwells?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 26 Mar 2018 10:15:30 +0000 I am a middle-class Scotsman, so at school I played rugby. One day, a new scholarship boy arrived at the Glasgow Academy. He was tall for his age, and his working-class roots had given him an aptitude for verbal and physical violence. He walked with a swagger we looked upon with awe. This magnificent specimen’s only defect was that he knew not a single one of the rules of rugby. In the course of his first appearance in the school’s colours, however, he swiftly proved that this ignorance was no... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2136857/donald-trump-breaking-all-rules-north-korea-and-trade-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2136857/donald-trump-breaking-all-rules-north-korea-and-trade-and?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 12 Mar 2018 10:45:30 +0000 Are we living through the remystification of the world? Much that goes on is baffling these days. Financial market movements seem increasingly mysterious. Why, after close to a decade of sustained recovery from the nadir of early 2009, did global stock markets sell off so sharply this month? We who claim expertise in these matters can tell stories about what just happened, but the feeling persists that we haven’t a clue. Twelve weeks ago I warned that “financial red lights” were flashing again.... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2132985/ai-takes-us-back-future-mystery-dont-blame-machines-stock?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2132985/ai-takes-us-back-future-mystery-dont-blame-machines-stock?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 12 Feb 2018 06:51:10 +0000 Sometimes a facial expression speaks louder than words. As US President Donald Trump delivered his first State of the Union address, the Democratic side was one big rictus of pain. The reason Vice-President Mike Pence and House Speaker Paul Ryan’s faces grew more gleeful had less to do with Trump than with how their opponents were looking. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi was a portrait of acute discomfort. New Jersey Senator Cory Booker was shooting for gold in the frown Olympics. A year... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2132038/trump-makes-democrats-grimace-maybe-republicans-shouldnt?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2132038/trump-makes-democrats-grimace-maybe-republicans-shouldnt?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 05 Feb 2018 07:41:27 +0000 “Once Trump came into the Oval Office with a newspaper folded into quarters showing some story based on a leak from the White House. ‘What the f*** is this?’ Trump had shouted. Presidential flare-ups were common enough, but Trump often would not let an incident go, roaring on for too long before calming down.” “The White House problems … were organisation and discipline. The staff was too often like a soccer league of 10-year-olds.” You are probably thinking that you have read more than enough... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2128259/trumps-fiery-first-year-not-all-unusual-ask-bill-clinton?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2128259/trumps-fiery-first-year-not-all-unusual-ask-bill-clinton?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 15 Jan 2018 06:30:30 +0000 As 2017 draws to a close, the world has seldom been so binary. You love Donald Trump or you loathe him. You adore Brexit or abhor it. This polarisation has been fostered by giant online social networks and the phenomenon students of networks know as “homophily”: birds of a feather flock together. Facebook encourages you to like or not like what you see in your news feed. Twitter allows you to retweet or like other people’s tweets or block users who offend your sensibilities. Pretty soon you are... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2125680/us-security-strategy-falls-short-not-reasons-cited-trump?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2125680/us-security-strategy-falls-short-not-reasons-cited-trump?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 26 Dec 2017 07:54:44 +0000 A little more than three years ago, I made the worst investment decision of my life. “You know, Dad,” my then 15-year-old son said, “you really ought to buy some bitcoin.” Yes, that’s right, bitcoin: the newfangled “cryptocurrency” based on something called blockchain technology, invented in 2008 by a mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto. “Listen, son,” I said, “that is no way to invest my hard-earned pounds ... The governments of the world are not about to let their monopolies on national currencies be... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2123798/three-reasons-bitcoin-fever-will-rage-even-after-bubble?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2123798/three-reasons-bitcoin-fever-will-rage-even-after-bubble?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 11 Dec 2017 07:06:38 +0000 In Alan Bennett’s play The Madness of George III, a political crisis strikes Great Britain when the monarch loses his marbles. You may recall Nigel Hawthorne’s riveting performance in the role of King George in the film version, at first indefatigable, if irascible, in performing his royal duties, then suddenly struck down by wild, raving lunacy. These days, it is in America that the question is asked with increasing frequency: is the head of state off his head? In a new book, The Dangerous Case... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2122783/problem-donald-trump-not-he-crazy-he-crass?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2122783/problem-donald-trump-not-he-crazy-he-crass?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 04 Dec 2017 08:22:56 +0000 In June 2006, I observed that interest rate increases by the US Federal Reserve would sooner or later effect heavily indebted American households. In November 2006, I argued that the developed world might end up in the same mess as Japan since the 1990s, fending off deflation with monetary and fiscal expedients and stagnating. Two months later, I found it “perfectly possible to imagine a liquidity crisis too big for the monetary authorities to handle alone ... Governments would need to step in.”... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2120679/another-global-financial-crisis-imminent-and-here-are-four?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2120679/another-global-financial-crisis-imminent-and-here-are-four?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 20 Nov 2017 05:56:45 +0000 An emperor who is a dotard. A population in the grip of opium addiction. An economy held back by bureaucracy and crumbling infrastructure. A culture fixated on past greatness but hopelessly decadent. This was how Westerners in the 18th and 19th centuries regarded China. It is how the Chinese (and most Europeans) now regard the United States. Ever since President Xi Jinping’s triumphant appearance as defender of free trade and champion of globalisation at the World Economic Forum in Davos in... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2117570/westerners-extolling-all-powerful-xi-jinping-are-missing?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2117570/westerners-extolling-all-powerful-xi-jinping-are-missing?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 30 Oct 2017 05:51:11 +0000 Wildfires ravage the vineyards. A hurricane lays waste to an island colony. A great port is submerged by floodwater. Meanwhile, the most powerful citizen of the republic picks quarrels with athletes. He threatens to tear up treaties. He throws tantrums at his staff. In the Senate and courts, old constitutional forms continue to be observed. But the plebeians sense the elites are losing their grip. Every week brings a new revelation about the hypocrisy of those elites. Five days a week, on... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2115545/trump-and-weinstein-depraved-elites-who-symbolise-decaying?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2115545/trump-and-weinstein-depraved-elites-who-symbolise-decaying?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 16 Oct 2017 08:28:40 +0000 Last October, with just a few weeks to go for the US presidential election, I pointed out something strange about Donald Trump’s campaign. At a rally in Pennsylvania, Trump had read out a leaked email he claimed was from Hillary Clinton’s confidant Sidney Blumenthal, which suggested that the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died, could have been prevented by Clinton, then secretary of state. The crowd lapped it up. In fact, as I pointed out, the words Trump read... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2113631/what-facebook-twitter-and-trump-are-telling-us-about-fake?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2113631/what-facebook-twitter-and-trump-are-telling-us-about-fake?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 02 Oct 2017 05:00:45 +0000 In 1985, five European states signed the Schengen Agreement, abolishing border checks between them. In 1996, John Perry Barlow wrote his Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, addressed to the “governments of the industrial world”. He told them: “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders.” Two decades later, borders are back. In his speech last week to the United Nations General Assembly, Donald Trump was unequivocal: “If we aspire to the approval of history, then we must fulfil our... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2112669/trumps-un-speech-and-germanys-election-show-borders-are-back?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2112669/trumps-un-speech-and-germanys-election-show-borders-are-back?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 25 Sep 2017 04:17:07 +0000 Last week was the week the proverbial worm turned. It was the week Donald Trump finally went too far, for all those for whom he had not previously gone too far. People resigned from the president’s various consultative committees so fast that Trump had to scrap them. Internet companies hitherto committed to free expression decided that enough was enough. And numerous Republican politicians stepped forward to denounce the man their party put in the White House, most memorably the former governor... https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/2107614/trump-faces-charlottesville-reckoning-joe-biden-shows-why-america?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/2107614/trump-faces-charlottesville-reckoning-joe-biden-shows-why-america?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 21 Aug 2017 06:45:30 +0000 If you are stuck for a book to read this August, I recommend Stefan Zweig’s Decisive Moments in History. Published in 1927, Zweig’s book is now largely forgotten. My interest was piqued when a friend in Beijing told me it was the latest Western book to be recommended by Wang Qishan (王岐山) to his colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee. (A few years ago it was Alexis de Tocqueville’s The Ancien Regime and the Revolution; more recently John Hirst’s The Shortest History of Europe.) It pays to... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2106735/wang-qishan-reading-about-historys-decisive-moments-and-so?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2106735/wang-qishan-reading-about-historys-decisive-moments-and-so?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 14 Aug 2017 09:14:48 +0000 The US presidential election last year was a choice between two second world war acronyms: snafu (situation normal, all f***** up) and fubar (f***** up beyond all recognition). American voters faced a choice between a candidate who personified the political status quo, and a candidate who promised the disruption of that status quo. With Hillary Clinton, there was the certainty that nothing much would change. With Donald Trump there was the chance of quite a lot of change, but the risk was that... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2104708/trumps-comedy-politics-distracting-humans-age-automation-and?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2104708/trumps-comedy-politics-distracting-humans-age-automation-and?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 31 Jul 2017 04:37:57 +0000 “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Sparta, made war inevitable.” This is the most famous line of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. Will a future historian one day write that the growth in the power of China, and the alarm this inspired in America, made war equally inevitable? Harvard’s Graham Allison fears the answer could be “yes”. Since the election of Donald Trump as US president, the probability of a Sino-American conflict has soared. Trump... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2101960/trump-jfk-how-haters-and-media-are-underestimating-us?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2101960/trump-jfk-how-haters-and-media-are-underestimating-us?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 10 Jul 2017 05:15:00 +0000 When ghastly events occur, the lawyers ask if an individual or entity was culpable. The politicians, by contrast, ask if some new law is needed to prevent similar events from happening again. How should we, the public, respond, other than with prayers for the victims and condolences for their families? Last week, ghastly events happened in both America and Britain. In London, the 24-storey Grenfell Tower caught fire with heavy loss of life. In Virginia, a gunman sought to kill Republican... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2098943/america-right-worry-about-rise-political-violence?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2098943/america-right-worry-about-rise-political-violence?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 19 Jun 2017 05:36:54 +0000 We now know the half-life of populism: it’s 12 months. I think the idea nicely sums up what is happening not only in British politics but also in America. Take yourself back just a year. Politics in mid-2016 was dominated by populist memes devised by the likes of Britain’s “Vote Leave” director Dominic Cummings and Donald Trump’s campaign chief Steve Bannon. “Take back control”; “We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead”;“BeLEAVE in Britain”; and, in the US: “Make America great... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2097945/why-theresa-may-and-donald-trump-are-proof-populism-fools?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2097945/why-theresa-may-and-donald-trump-are-proof-populism-fools?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 12 Jun 2017 07:34:14 +0000 Brinkmanship is back, and the world is back on the brink of war. In the 1950s, the word came to be associated with John Foster Dulles, US president Dwight ­Eisenhower’s secretary of state, who defined it as “the ability to get to the verge without getting into the war”. In his words: “If you cannot master it, you inevitably get into a war. If you try to run away from it, if you are scared to go to the brink, you are lost.” Brinkmanship fell into disrepute after the Berlin and Cuba crises of the... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2088175/us-and-north-korea-each-testing-others-resolve-world?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2088175/us-and-north-korea-each-testing-others-resolve-world?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 17 Apr 2017 08:45:15 +0000 When a president finds his approval rating in the doldrums and Congress slow to enact his domestic agenda, he naturally turns to foreign policy in search of quick wins. That, at any rate, is the cynical interpretation of US President Donald Trump’s decision to launch 59 Tomahawk missiles against a Syrian airfield in Homs, in retaliation for Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons in an attack that killed more than 80 civilians. My view of Trump’s action is more positive. It is not that I think... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2086343/donald-trump-was-right-strike-syrian-regime-now-what?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2086343/donald-trump-was-right-strike-syrian-regime-now-what?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 10 Apr 2017 06:15:20 +0000 Thank God. Never again will those impossible people on the other side of the Channel be able to interfere in our affairs. Now we can take back control and sit back and watch their union fall apart. Those, of course, were the sentiments of European leaders last Wednesday as they opened the envelope containing Theresa May’s notification of Britain’s intention to withdraw from the European Union. Publicly, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, expressed his regret. Jean-Claude... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2084338/dont-call-brexit-divorce-it-will-be-much-much-worse?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2084338/dont-call-brexit-divorce-it-will-be-much-much-worse?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 03 Apr 2017 06:32:06 +0000 Only in China could there already be a museum of internet finance. Though most Britons have barely adopted the term “fintech”, online banking is old hat in Beijing. I toured the museum with its founder, Wang Wei, who delighted in showing me exhibits such as a bitcoin cash machine. The cryptocurrency is eight years old: in today’s China, that’s ancient enough to belong in a glass display case. Some time soon, Europe needs a similarly designed museum of political idiocy. In its glass cases, I... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2080409/how-innovative-china-beating-facebook-google-and-amazon?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2080409/how-innovative-china-beating-facebook-google-and-amazon?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 20 Mar 2017 06:03:54 +0000 The US president has declared war on the press. He cannot forgive the media for saying the crowd at his inauguration was small. He is even picking fights with a comedy show. His press secretary is a laughing stock. Worse, the president is trying to pick and choose between news outlets, excluding some from briefings. And he is trying to deflect criticism by accusing his predecessor of having tapped his telephone. These are among the many, many things journalists like to say are “unprecedented”... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2076416/shades-nixon-why-trump-must-tread-carefully-swamp?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2076416/shades-nixon-why-trump-must-tread-carefully-swamp?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 06 Mar 2017 08:56:13 +0000 It was almost exactly 52 years ago, on March 8, 1965, that the first American combat battalions came ashore at Da Nang, South Vietnam. In the next six months, the US government took the worst strategic decision of modern times: to escalate that military commitment just enough to entangle the United States in the war between North and South Vietnam, but not enough to win it. Half a century later, American society still bears the scars of Vietnam. Visit any major American campus and you will... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2074345/why-america-good-hands-generation-generals?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2074345/why-america-good-hands-generation-generals?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 27 Feb 2017 06:56:51 +0000 The world today is like a giant network on the verge of a cataclysmic outage. The US president tweets that his own intelligence agencies are illegally leaking classified information to The New York Times about his campaign’s communications with the Russian government, but he insists it’s all “fake news”. (Read that again, slowly.) Meanwhile, having interfered in the US presidential election via WikiLeaks and an online army of trolls and bots, the Russians deploy a new cruise missile in breach of... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2072317/trumps-troubles-islamic-state-inroads-networks-can-destroy?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2072317/trumps-troubles-islamic-state-inroads-networks-can-destroy?utm_source=rss_feed Mon, 20 Feb 2017 07:26:36 +0000 “Breaking rocks in the hot sun / I fought the law and the law won.” As a teenage punk rocker with a Thatcherite enthusiasm for the rule of law and harsh penal codes, I first heard those lines from the hoarse larynx of the Clash’s Joe Strummer. It’s a great number but not one that should be sung by presidents of the United States. Unfortunately for Donald Trump, I Fought the Law was last week’s theme tune. On Thursday the federal court of appeals for the ninth circuit ruled against his executive... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2070667/trump-should-pick-fights-he-can-win-law-and-china-arent?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2070667/trump-should-pick-fights-he-can-win-law-and-china-arent?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 14 Feb 2017 03:57:15 +0000 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: it’s one of those stories that hardly anyone ever reads but everyone knows about. You may find it helps you cope with the “Time of Trump”. The past two weeks have almost been too much. Each day produces enough news for a week. The most disorientating thing is that, just as you are all set to loathe something the president has done, he does something you rather like. On January 27, the president signed an executive order on refugees and immigrants that... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2068801/donald-trump-white-house-new-jekyll-and-hyde-tale?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2068801/donald-trump-white-house-new-jekyll-and-hyde-tale?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 07 Feb 2017 09:35:33 +0000 The US is living through a kind of Trumpian Genesis: seven days of high-speed political creation. In the beginning, Trump created heaven (for supporters) and hell (for mainstream media). And Washington was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of CNN. And Trump said, let Obamacare be repealed. And Trump saw the reports of his inauguration, that they were bad: and Trump divided the press from the administration. And Trump called the first day a National Day of Patriotic... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2066800/trump-can-create-new-america-not-through-reality-tv?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2066800/trump-can-create-new-america-not-through-reality-tv?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 31 Jan 2017 08:30:13 +0000 US President Donald Trump’s favourite Twitter hashtag is #MAGA, which of course stands for “Make America Great Again”. His critics often complain that this implies the US is not great now, whereas in fact it is much better than ever in terms of such crucial metrics as the number of community organisers in Chicago, the model shooting-range – sorry, city – of the Obama years. But Trump’s supporters know just what he means: Make It the 1980s Again. For those in the older age groups who broke... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2064908/president-trump-could-trip-not-reasons-liberals-think?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2064908/president-trump-could-trip-not-reasons-liberals-think?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 24 Jan 2017 05:52:48 +0000 “The business of America is business,” said president Calvin Coolidge. “What is good for General Motors is good for the country, and vice versa,” said “Engine Charlie” Wilson, president Dwight Eisenhower’s defence secretary. Americans have always been a little unsure about where to draw the line between public and private interest. In Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, the squadron’s mess officer Milo Minderbender goes all the way: his hugely profitable M&M Enterprises ends up bombing his own... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2050048/trump-businessman-president-man-our-time?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2050048/trump-businessman-president-man-our-time?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 29 Nov 2016 05:26:25 +0000 “It Can’t Happen Here”. That was the title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel in which the fascistic Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip is elected president and within months transforms the US into an American Reich. Well, maybe it just did happen here. The litmus test will be how far Steve Bannon’s appointment as chief strategist to the ­president-elect, Donald Trump, signals the triumph of the will of the so-called alt-right. Are we all doomed to the third world war, only this time with America on the wrong... https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/2048211/alliance-between-us-china-and-russia-world-ready-it?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/2048211/alliance-between-us-china-and-russia-world-ready-it?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 22 Nov 2016 06:33:26 +0000 “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere.” Those were the key words of British Prime Minister Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham earlier this month. My response – as a fully paid-up member of the rootless cosmopolitan class – was: ooh la la! Welcome to the new class war, Brexit edition. On one side, the citizens of the world – the Weltbürger – only citizens in the sense that Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane was a citizen.... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2027025/why-theresa-mays-brexit-class-war-could-channel-rerun-70s?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2027025/why-theresa-mays-brexit-class-war-could-channel-rerun-70s?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 11 Oct 2016 07:44:58 +0000 They should have cancelled United Nations week in New York as soon as the news broke that Angelina was divorcing Brad. Did any family more perfectly embody the hopes of that nebulous but uplifting entity, the international community, than theirs? Angelina Jolie: goodwill ambassador for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. Brad Pitt: founder of Not On Our Watch, which seeks to “bring global attention to forgotten international crises”. There is a Jolie-Pitt Foundation, which has disbursed tens... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2022976/brangelina-dead-so-end-also-nigh-era-globalisation?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2022976/brangelina-dead-so-end-also-nigh-era-globalisation?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 28 Sep 2016 04:00:32 +0000 The word “snafu” originated as a US military acronym in the second world war, standing for “situation normal: all fouled or f***ed up.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was originally “an expression conveying the common soldier’s laconic acceptance of the disorder of war and the ineptitude of his superiors.” In its first published appearance, in 1943, it was “politely translated as ‘situation normal; all fouled up’, to indicate that things are not going too well.” The big question... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2020981/why-risky-donald-trump-looks-better-bet-race-be-us-president?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/2020981/why-risky-donald-trump-looks-better-bet-race-be-us-president?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 20 Sep 2016 10:15:15 +0000 In his brilliant and prophetic 2011 book, Coming Apart, my friend Charles Murray identified the stark social division that is defining this year’s US presidential election. Murray’s book was unabashedly about “the state of white America”. The white population of the US, he argued, is more polarised than at any time in the past half century. On the one hand, there is a “cognitive elite”, who are educated at universities like Harvard and Yale, marry each other, work together and live in the same... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1998150/theres-no-writing-donald-trump-polarised-white-america?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1998150/theres-no-writing-donald-trump-polarised-white-america?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 02 Aug 2016 07:55:30 +0000 “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx and Engels famously declared in their Communist Manifesto. A century and a half later, with communism seemingly buried under the rubble of the Soviet Union, Samuel Huntington predicted a clash of civilisations. But what if the great struggle of our time turns out to be between the generations? Writing in 2001, in a book called The Cash Nexus, I warned of a coming conflict of economic interests between the... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1969199/brexit-us-presidential-election-and-beyond-prepare-clash?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1969199/brexit-us-presidential-election-and-beyond-prepare-clash?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 08 Jun 2016 06:05:45 +0000 Some weeks it is hard to know what to worry about most. Terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists? Mass migration triggered by war and misery across the Muslim world? Or how about the political reactions to these threats, from Donald Trump to Brexit? And yet all this could easily pale into insignificance if the world’s most populous country were to repeat its own history. Any crisis in China has the potential to affect a staggering number of people. So when China watchers worry, we all need to pay... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1953750/china-grip-cultural-revolution-it-has-nothing-do-mao?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1953750/china-grip-cultural-revolution-it-has-nothing-do-mao?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 25 May 2016 03:37:27 +0000 In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky fired a broadside against all the Victorian do-gooders who dreamt of a perfectly rational society. “You seem certain that man himself will give up erring of his own free will,” he fulminated. He foresaw a ghastly future in which “all human acts will be listed in something like logarithm tables … and transferred to a timetable … [that] will carry detailed calculations and exact forecasts of everything to come”. In such a world, his utilitarian contemporaries... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1946176/crackdown-tax-havens-just-another-way-ensure-citizens-cant?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1946176/crackdown-tax-havens-just-another-way-ensure-citizens-cant?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 17 May 2016 09:37:19 +0000 I am not going to underestimate him again. Back in January, in a moment of weakness, I believed the assurance of a supposed expert that Donald Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination would fizzle out when “real voting in real primaries” began. I should have stuck to my view that, after big economic shocks, populism surges. Today Trump is the nominee and the entire American political commentariat looks as useless as the economics profession did in 2008. The “econ” models failed to predict... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1943003/brace-yourselves-donald-trump-presidency?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1943003/brace-yourselves-donald-trump-presidency?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 10 May 2016 05:00:45 +0000 When I was a little boy, my mother liked to quote the following quatrain (sometimes attributed to the New York wit Dorothy Parker): See the happy moron, He doesn’t give a damn, I wish I were a moron, My God! perhaps I am! I often think of the happy moron when I read the International Monetary Fund’s semi-annual publication, the World Economic Outlook. Almost without fail, it acknowledges that its previous projections were too optimistic and need to be revised downwards. The IMF’s intrinsic... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1937064/risks-brexit-are-all-too-real?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1937064/risks-brexit-are-all-too-real?utm_source=rss_feed Tue, 19 Apr 2016 06:44:50 +0000 I have lost track of the number of times I have read that a terrorist network carried out the lethal attacks in Brussels. Terrorists used to belong to “groups” and “organisations”. Increasingly, however, we say they belong to networks. Networks cannot be beheaded, any more than the Hydra of Greek mythology could be killed by a single blow This is more than a matter of semantics. For we stand no chance whatsoever of defeating Islamic State (IS) if we fail to understand the significance of its... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1932885/brussels-bombings-make-clear-terrorist-networks-cannot-be?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1932885/brussels-bombings-make-clear-terrorist-networks-cannot-be?utm_source=rss_feed Sat, 02 Apr 2016 03:18:32 +0000 In our time, women have been gaining political power as never before. There are (by my count) 17 female presidents and prime ministers around the world today. Sixty-three of the world’s countries have now had at least one female head of government or state in the past half century. But it’s not the fact of their being female that is important, so much as the feminine style today’s female leaders have brought to politics. The powerful women of the 1970s and 1980s – Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir,... https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1929340/how-far-can-donald-trumps-fake-machismo-go?utm_source=rss_feed https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1929340/how-far-can-donald-trumps-fake-machismo-go?utm_source=rss_feed Wed, 23 Mar 2016 04:28:38 +0000