Niall Ferguson

So that's, I think, the obvious thing to say first.

Why?

So why would he do that?

I mean, there are a couple of reasons, most of which I think are missed in the conversation here.

One is to distract us from something else.

This is something that President Trump has a record of doing.

We weren't talking about Iran immediately before the bombing of Fordow last June.

And I think most people here have completely forgotten that the Iranian regime has just killed between 10,000 and 15,000 of its own people.

That President Trump threatened to take action if they did that.

And that the USS Lincoln aircraft carrier group is not far away from the Persian Gulf.

So one distinctly obvious point, in my view, is...

that this is maskirovka, as the Russians say, is a huge distraction operation, which has ensured that the Europeans don't spend the week saying, please de-escalate in the Middle East, which is what they would be saying if we were still talking about Iran.

So that's point number two.

And the third point I would make is that, as usual...

President Trump delivers the key message very, very carefully wrapped in so much riffing and joshing and trolling that you almost miss it.

But the message was, oh, I'm not going to take military action over Greenland.

Don't be silly.

That was the message.

The markets picked it up because the markets were a little bit.

unhappy yesterday about this escalation in US-Europe tensions.