Sir Niall Ferguson

We end up in a world where there are three, not two, but three nuclear superpowers.

Remember, that's Orwell's vision.

He saw this very early on.

But it's taken until now for China to be a nuclear superpower.

And that's different from being a nuclear power.

Nuclear power is you got a couple of nuclear weapons, big deal.

Nuclear superpowers, you've got an absolute ton.

You've got tons and tons of nuclear weapons.

And China's getting there, and it soon will be there.

So that's the world in which three nuclear superpowers are in a dominant position.

Nobody can argue with them.

And if they choose to have spheres of influence...

then that's the world.

It's the world of 1984.

The danger of this is, as in the 20th century, that it's not stable and you end up with a conflict.

And that's the thing that I regard as the biggest risk in all of this.

The miscalculation, whether it's like the miscalculation the Germans made over Belgium in 1914 or the miscalculation that Hitler made about Britain

And Poland in 1939, somebody miscalculates, and then you end up with a conflict.

And as we've seen already in Russia-Ukraine, it's easy to start a war, hard to stop one.

So I think there's a risk that this system that is evolving here