Sir Niall Ferguson

And you're going to one day have to acknowledge that Trump did you a solid because the German economy is going to benefit hugely from rearmament.

But it took Trump to convince the Germans they had to do it because Trump credibly seems to question the future of NATO and therefore the future of Article 5, the all for one, one for all clause.

So this is very transformative of the European scene.

And it also illustrates, last point, always bet against the Davos consensus.

I was there too.

My perception was the same as yours.

European business leaders wandering around saying everything is terrible.

If only we could have Trump, if only we could have Musk.

And I said, in that case, I'm short US, long Europe, because the Davos consensus is always wrong.

And if you had simply taken my advice back there coming out of Davos and gone long European stocks, short US equities, you'd have done very well and you'd have been right.

Oh, it's not hard to figure that out because thanks to the generosity of Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor, and inviting my friend Jeffrey Goldberg into his chat group, we know.

And we know exactly why he and Pete Hegseth, the Defense Secretary, wanted to do those strikes against the Houthis.

Not particularly because of trade in the Red Sea, because of the need to reestablish deterrence, number one, and to send the Iranians a signal, number two.

And so I think this is perfectly reasonable in the sense that the Biden administration was very bad at deterrence.

It was really a group of law school educated people.

advising the president that if anything bad happened, you should de-escalate, above all else de-escalate.

And de-escalation turns out to be the functional opposite of deterrence.

If you de-escalate in Afghanistan by handing it to the Taliban, Putin will decide, hey, I can take Ukraine at low costs.

And if you try to de-escalate there, then the Iranians will say, hmm,

We can do whatever we like in the Middle East.