Sir Niall Ferguson

There's the maximalist position, which is quite well represented in the National Security Council, which is we're up against an axis of authoritarians, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and we can't give them an inch anywhere, not in Ukraine, not in the Middle East, not in the Far East.

The middle position is, yeah, that's right, but we can't possibly do all of this at once.

We'd better focus on China, and that would be, I guess, Bridge Colby and others.

And

And then the people who think it's Monroe Doctrine, let's go back to the 19th century and just do our hemisphere and just leave everything else to others.

That, Stephen Miller in the White House, I think it's J.D.

Vance, the vice president.

They are the people who really want to focus on the Western Hemisphere.

That's why in the now famous chat group on Signal, it's Vance who says, why the hell are we doing this?

I don't even think we should be bothered to do this because who cares about the Houthis anyway?

He loses the argument, of course, interestingly.

Well, in the last few months, we've gone from the euphoric vibe shift that followed the election to everybody throwing up on Wall Street.

And this 180 degree shift seems worthy of some scrutiny.

Net negative, for sure, if you do tariffs to the extent that Trump may next week, you could take the average American tariff rate back to where it was in 1937.

And I don't know about the 670 people listening to us right now, but I don't think of the 1930s as a particularly great time for the global economy.

So I think that's clearly going to be negative.

It's certainly going to impose meaningful costs.

on American businesses and consumers.

It's highly disruptive, particularly if one thinks of the automobile tariffs as they impact the North American supply chains.

Very, very seriously costly.