In this excerpt from Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson, historian Niall Ferguson examines the US intervention in the Ukraine conflict, prospects for peace, and Kyiv’s stark choices. Watch the full interview here.
Niall Ferguson: Let me try and give you the analogies that will help here. They’re not perfect, because the United States and China are not directly involved in this war. They are supporting proxies: Ukraine on our side, Russia on the Chinese side. But I think it’s quite helpful to think of Ukraine as being somewhere between South Korea and South Vietnam.
I remember saying this to President Zelensky. I was in Kyiv in late 2022, and I said to him and his advisers: “Your nightmare scenario is to be South Vietnam. Your success is to be South Korea.” Let me explain what I mean by that.
In 1950, there is a surprise attack, which takes American policy makers wholly by surprise, on South Korea by the North. It has Stalin’s wholehearted backing. The United States and its allies intervene wholeheartedly, directly. The Chinese also end up intervening on the North Korean side. It’s a really big war. After a year of all kinds of motion, it settles down into a war of attrition. There’s a stalemate and negotiations begin. These negotiations are painful and difficult.
And ultimately, the South Korean president [Syngman Rhee] has to be forced to accept an armistice.
Peter Robinson: Forced by?
Niall Ferguson: By the United States.
Peter Robinson: By Dwight Eisenhower.
Niall Ferguson: By Dwight Eisenhower, who is then president. And this is painful for Rhee. On the other hand, he has his country. Crucially, the United States then provides a permanent military presence in South Korea, which continues to this day. And South Korea goes from being ruined and devastated—it’s a dictatorship, it was not a democracy—to being one of the most successful economies of the late twentieth century and a democracy. So that’s the good outcome.
The bad outcome for Ukraine would be the South Vietnamese outcome, where the United States intervenes but extricates itself after a peace has been painfully negotiated, not least with Henry Kissinger leading the American effort. It looks like he gets peace, but two years later, Saigon falls and South Vietnam vanishes from the map. So, when I’m trying to think about the position of Ukraine, it’s the position that other countries have been in that have had American support. In one case, it’s a huge success story—one of the greatest successes of the late twentieth century, by any measure. And then the other ends in a debacle after a relatively short period of time. And that, I think, is why the Ukrainians have been arguing so forcefully that they really need American security guarantees.
Peter Robinson: We already know roughly what President Putin would receive in the kind of deal that the administration seems to have in mind. He gets to keep the Crimea, he gets to keep the Donbas, and he gets an assurance that Ukraine will never be part of NATO. What is unclear is what the Ukrainians get in this deal.
Niall Ferguson: And this is where my fight with the administration began. My complaint was that in the opening salvo, President Trump appeared ready to give the Russians all that they wanted before the negotiations began. And that struck me as, however much you like The Art of the Deal, not a great negotiating strategy.
The key question, Peter, all along has been, is the United States going to put pressure on Putin, real pressure, in a way that the Biden administration failed to? The Biden administration did kabuki sanctions. These sanctions never meaningfully impacted the Russian economy. We didn’t seriously try to stop them exporting their hydrocarbons—nor, to be fair, did the Europeans stop trading with Russia.
So, a key question for me has been, is it the intention of the Trump administration now to apply the real pressure on Russia? If they do it—and this is the moment of truth—if they now apply real pressure to Russia, then I think Putin will have to concede.
But if they don’t, if there is no serious effort to put Russia under pressure, and I mean both economic and military pressure, then I think Putin will see himself increasingly in the position the North Vietnamese were in in 1972 and 1973. He can fight while talking and talk while fighting and wait for the Ukrainian position to crumble, because the American support for it will simply fade.
And this is really, really important. The Europeans are talking a big game. It’s clear that there’s been a huge shift in sentiment in Berlin, in Paris, in Brussels, not to mention in London. There is a sudden realization that the United States is no longer willing to provide a subsidy to European security in the form of paying the lion’s share of the combined budget of NATO. That has finally sunk in. And I think that was partly what made President Trump so offensively disparage Zelensky in the way that you said. In the same way that it was the reason that J. D. Vance went to the Munich Security Conference and disparaged the Europeans in the calculated way that he did.
Peter Robinson: The audience was not Vladimir Putin; the audience was Europe itself.
Niall Ferguson: Absolutely. Part of the goal here, and this has taken me a while to understand, was to administer a shock to the Europeans that would finally convince them that the United States was not going to provide the backstop to Ukraine and might not necessarily honor Article 5 of the NATO treaty. That that had become a contingent commitment. That’s important because it puts the Europeans in a terrible bind, economically and emotionally. They think, “We can do this. We’re going to stand by Ukraine, we’re going to take the place of the United States, we’re going to have strategic autonomy. Let’s spend hundreds of billions of euros on re-arming.”
But Ukraine needs this to happen tonight. And it’s going to take years. So, there’s a big disconnect between European rhetoric, European pledges, and what the Europeans can do. They cannot take the place of the United States in the defense of Ukraine anytime soon.
And that’s the great weakness of the Ukrainian position.
Peter Robinson: Let me try a quotation on you. “If we have learned anything from the NATO experience, it is the rediscovery of an old truth: dependency corrupts, and absolute dependency corrupts absolutely. To the degree that Europe has been dependent on the United States, the European will has been corrupted and European political vitality has diminished. A reconstructed NATO could reverse that, but it would have to be an all-European NATO with the United States as an ally, but not a member.” Those are the words of Irving Kristol, published in the New York Times in 1983. Was he right?
Irving’s view was NATO made all the sense in the world while the Europeans were rebuilding. But by about the 1970s, they had achieved a standard of living that was about equal to ours. They had reindustrialized; they were just fine. And we ought to have rethought NATO then—that these decades of dependency and ill will had been corrosive to them and to us. So, the big American mistake in NATO is not Donald Trump saying, “We need to rethink this.” It’s that this didn’t happen.
Niall Ferguson: Well, I’m old enough to remember the world of 1983. At that point, it was, of course, a completely deranged idea to suggest that the United States should withdraw from NATO at a time when the Soviet Union still posed a massive threat, not only to European security but to American security. And it would take a long time for the Europeans to have the capability to deter Russia in the way that NATO with the United States can deter Russia with a full arsenal of strategic, intermediate, and other nuclear weapons. So, that’s a very important part of the problem, but there’s another part we have to bear in mind.
Technology has moved a long way since the early 1980s. It’s not just about nuclear power anymore. It’s about artificial intelligence; it’s about space wars; it’s about satellite communications, which are vital to modern warfare. The Europeans aren’t even close in any of those fields. In these fields, they’re entirely reliant on the United States, even more reliant than in the nuclear domain.
So, when the Europeans talked, as they’ve done for years, about strategic autonomy, my response was always, “Do you realize it will take you at least a decade and 5 to 6 to 7 percent of GDP to get even close?” What’s interesting about Trump’s contribution is that he’s finally made them realize that strategic autonomy is not just a line in a speech; it now is a major line in a budget for all these countries.
