Niall Ferguson

world, including Europe.

So here's the thing that the Europeans never want to face, that throughout the period since 1945, certainly from 47, 48, 49, they have relied on the US for their nuclear security.

Nuclear deterrence is not really provided by the French force de frappe, certainly not by British Trident.

It's an American public good that is made available to Europeans.

It's not included in the NATO budget.

It's America's strategic force that says the Russians can't have Central or Western Europe.

And if they try to have it, they risk obliteration.

That's been the position really since the late 40s, and that has been the position

despite the end of the Cold War.

Now, nobody likes talking about this in Europe, because strategic autonomy, if it were to be meaningful, would mean that the Europeans would need a proper nuclear arsenal, which they can't remotely afford, and I don't think they would have the political will to build.

So what is the alternative, really?

There isn't one.

The United States is the thing that deters Russia.

And as China is now in the midst of building a huge nuclear arsenal that will at some point be as big as the Russians, you really need the United States.

Otherwise, you're completely at the mercy of the great Eurasian autocracies, which I don't think even the most Trump-phobic European liberal could regard as a good outcome.

Another thing that's important when we get to reality is that geopolitics doesn't change that much because the world's geography is pretty constant over time.

And whether you're looking at now, or if you want to look at the 1940s, or if you want to go back to the early 1900s, there are really two great geopolitical formations.

This goes back to the early theorists of geopolitics, Mackinder and Spikeman.

There's the great Eurasian land mass, which has historically been dominated by large authoritarian empires.

And then there are the rimlands, which are kind of Western Europe, the British Isles, the Americas, and then Japan and the Asian equivalents.