Sir Niall Ferguson

Ferguson's law states that if a great power is spending more on interest payments than on defense, it won't be great for much longer.

The US crossed the threshold last year.

And it's very hard for me to see anything that the Trump administration can do, including Doan, that is going to fix that because the debt dynamics are really quite unhealthy for the US over the next, not just the next three or four years, but over the next 40 years.

Well, I'm not sure you necessarily do get an equilibrium under these circumstances.

After all, what happened in the 20th century was that rival power blocks or empires ended up in two massive configurations.

It was not a self-equilibrating system, was it?

And the danger of unraveling the

what we call the liberal international order, a phrase that I don't like any more than the Holy Roman Empire.

It was like the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire said was neither holy nor Roman or an empire.

The liberal international order wasn't really very liberal.

It wasn't very international and it wasn't very orderly.

But anyway, there was a system that essentially relied on US predominance.

The best way of writing about it, I did a book called Colossus on this, was it's just an American empire, an Albert name, and the United States performs these unusual functions, but it essentially projects military power.

It has complete military power.

ascendancy, it has the reserve currency, and it runs an international system where it buys, it's the consumer of first and last resort, and it sells claims on the US Treasury to finance it.

This was the international order that emerged

during the Cold War triumphed in the 1990s and has persisted really down until the great Trump backlash.

And this raises the question that you've posed what comes next.

Well, I think read George Orwell.

Don't overthink this.