The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Trump’s World Order — Live from Davos, with Niall Ferguson
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What insights does Niall Ferguson provide on Trump's foreign policy?
We're here with a three or four time guest, one of my favorite guests. And also I would, I'm going to go out on a limb here and call you a friend, a historian, public intellectual, and also people who know this about you, you're actually a pretty savvy entrepreneur. Anyways, Neil Ferguson, always good to see you. Great to be with you, Scott. So we're here at Davos at the annual meeting.
By the way, I bet you've been to like 40 Davoses. Do you come here every year? Not every year. I've rather lost count. Yeah, but a lot. It feels like 20 years on and off. I would think you're very much an intellectual support animal for the Davos crowd. So, I'll just simply put, you obviously just saw President Trump's talk. Attack that from any angle you want or compliment it from any angle.
What are your observations around what he said here and how you think the mostly European audience is reacting to it? And kind of set the table for us around this new world order or this new world vision, if you will. Well, President Trump, as you know, is extremely good at leading the news, setting the agenda, and being the number one topic of conversation.
And he's done that extremely well this year by raising the issue of his claim on Greenland, which is carefully calculated as an issue to cause the heads of European leaders to explode, not to mention Canadian leaders. So if the object of the exercise was to dominate the conversation At the World Economic Forum, mission accomplished. 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.
And I think we now see, as usual, President Trump loves the brink. He likes to go up to the brink and he saw how the markets reacted, which was pretty negatively. And as usual, back we go away from the brink. So I think a lot of people would agree with your distraction thesis, but would say it's a distraction from the Epstein files, not from an impending attack on Iran.
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Chapter 2: How does the discussion frame China as a global rival?
Well, none of their commanding officers has ever seen combat, whereas the United States has a great deal of combat experience. So I think part of what's going on here is... is a global reassertion of American power that is ultimately directed at Russia and China. The unfinished business is still the negotiation of an end to the war in Ukraine.
That, as President Trump said today, has proved much harder than he expected. He acknowledges that. But I don't think we should lose sight of that. I'd far rather be talking about Ukraine than Greenland. And I did manage to at least spend some of the time at the Ukraine house today talking about what's happening there, which we should come back to. But then ultimately the big problem is China.
And China is the real adversary in today's geopolitical moment. You used the phrase new world order. It's not a phrase I've ever much liked since I think George H.W. Bush gave it currency. Mm-hmm. What we're seeing is actually a familiar old world order of Cold War. We are in Cold War II. China has taken the place that the Soviet Union used to occupy, and that's the dominant strategic reality.
And I don't think everybody here at Davos fully understands that even yet. And so there's a tendency here to misread Trump. They've been doing that for a decade. But I think also to misread the world and to think it's all about them. But it really isn't all about them. It's not about Europe, except insofar as Europe can't seem to help Ukraine effectively without the United States.
And it's certainly not all about Denmark and Greenland. I think that is a very conscious distraction that President Trump has chosen. And there's an air, I think, of of almost like-heartedness. When you talk to members of the US delegation here, they know that they're driving the Europeans nuts.
And they're quite enjoying it because they're the first American administration in my lifetime that has said out loud what many others have felt and said privately about the Europeans. They're impossible. They're entitled. They're always striking moral attitudes. This international law, that international law. They don't pay their share of the costs of European security.
And I think what's fascinating is to hear an American administration saying out loud what their predecessors used to say privately back in Washington about dealing with the Europeans. So there's some overlap here and then some things we would disagree on. So I think it's hard to argue that what I would argue the greatest performing organization in history is the U.S. military.
And what happened in Venezuela is a flex. I can't imagine it hasn't sent chills down the spine of every world leader. When Madeleine Albright, Secretary Albright said, our reach as far in our memory as long has never been more apparent, right? The issue is in kind of a double-barreled question here. Our adventures or misadventures overseas are like a Bond film. They always start great.
Bond films always nail the opening. And then they go on to be bad, mediocre, amazing films. And oftentimes, we start off, we nail the opening, and then things come off the rails. And already in Venezuela, we're talking about taking their oil. It hasn't been regime changed. Same regime is there. And it doesn't appear there'd be a quote-unquote plan. First barrel of the question. Second...
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Chapter 3: What limits are discussed regarding alliance politics?
And then we have a stock market we'd like to liberalize, etc. I mean, those days are long gone. And I think the Trump administration rather prides itself on not having an idealistic vision, but be entirely realistic. Stephen Miller was boasting about this the other day. We're the ultimate realists.
And insofar as it takes Venezuela out of the Chinese camp and makes it essentially part of the Western sphere of American influence, that is an important alteration. What happens next? Well, I think the issue of the oil is mainly about denying it to China because part of the way that the world has worked lately is that
The sanctions get imposed on bad actors and the Chinese essentially evade the sanctions and then get the oil at a discount. They're doing this with the Russians. They've done it with the Iranians for years. And I think part of the game here is to end that. So it's not a meaningless change that's happened.
It's disappointing if like my friend Ricardo Hausmann, like all my Venezuelan friends, pretty much, you really wanted to see the Chavistas gone and the opposition, the democratic opposition in power. Yeah. We may get there, but I think it was never going to happen in a hurry after the bad experiences of Iraq. Could Iraq be the wrong analogy? Yeah, not perfect. So what else could be said?
When Trump's national security strategy was published in November, was it? Or was it early December? Everybody was very preoccupied with what it said about Europe. I said, that's not the interesting thing. The interesting thing is the Trump corollary, because the Trump corollary was this allusion to the Roosevelt corollary of 1904, Theodore Roosevelt, I should say.
which said, not only is the Monroe Doctrine true, that Europeans can't interfere in the Western Hemisphere and Latin America and the Caribbean, but also we, the United States, reserve the right to change governments we don't like in this part of the world. So we're back to that world. And to go to your movie analogy, the movies back then never turned out that well.
The United States intervened in, let's see, Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico. I'm sure I'm missing Dominican Republic. And it, you know... often ended up with, well, he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch, or it ended up with, ah, the revolution, think Cuba, and then you're really looking at a mess. Can that be the story here?
I think that's the downside risk for the Trump administration, that if they repeat the history of American interventions post-1904, then you either end up having a nasty regime that you kind of own, or you end up with another revolution against it. I think it'll be hard to avoid that because Venezuela has been very deeply and seriously damaged by the Chavistas.
It will take a while to repair, if indeed it can be repaired. Part two, look, the standard view in this part of the world is alliances have been absolutely crucial. The reason the United States won the Cold War was its alliances. And many American secretaries of state have said this. It's almost a standard form for administrations up until this one.
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Chapter 4: How is the war in Ukraine impacting geopolitical dynamics?
Scott, for the last 10 years, I've heard European leaders here and elsewhere talk about strategic autonomy and how important it is that Europe should become a real superpower. But it was all talk. Macron was especially good at giving these speeches. But did the French defense spending meaningfully rise? No.
So I think part of what we're seeing here is a deliberate and conscious effort to provoke the Europeans into getting real about defense spending and rearmament and really taking ownership of the crisis in Eastern Europe that began when Russia invaded or fully invaded Ukraine.
So I'm not so sure that the goal here is to dismantle the alliances any more than it is to dismantle the alliances that the U.S. has in Asia with Japan or with South Korea. Those countries, of course, didn't like having tariffs imposed on them, and it made them very nervous.
But it's not like the US is about to tear up its defense alliances in Asia, especially when China poses an obvious threat to those countries. The truth is that America's allies don't have a better option. Mark Carney may think that he can go to China and make nice with Xi Jinping, and this will somehow impress Donald Trump.
But I don't think it does because is Canada really going to join the Chinese greater East Asian co-prosperity zone? What would that actually imply? Would it really be in Canada's interest to have Chinese Communist Party surveillance of their tech stack? I'm thinking no.
So the truth is the United States can really treat its allies in an almost abusive way, knowing that they don't have anywhere else to go. And that in the final analysis, if it makes them step up and make a bigger effort, particularly a bigger military effort, then it's probably worth trolling them at Davos for a week. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Groons.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of Trump's tactics on European relations?
Another thing that's important when we get to reality is that geopolitics doesn't change that much because the world's geography is pretty constant over time. And whether you're looking at now, or if you want to look at the 1940s, or if you want to go back to the early 1900s, there are really two great geopolitical formations.
This goes back to the early theorists of geopolitics, Mackinder and Spikeman. There's the great Eurasian land mass, which has historically been dominated by large authoritarian empires. And then there are the rimlands, which are kind of Western Europe, the British Isles, the Americas, and then Japan and the Asian equivalents. That's geopolitics.
Nightmare scenario, the great Eurasian authoritarian regimes dominate the whole Eurasian landmass, and you all just left. in the United States with the Western Hemisphere. That would not be a good outcome. It wouldn't have been a good outcome if Hitler had won World War II, which is why, of course, the United States ended up fighting Germany. So I think you can't change that.
You can act in a way that makes the probability of China plus Russia plus Iran plus North Korea winning... or you can work to stop them winning. And I think the Trump administration is doing a better job of stopping them winning than its predecessor did. The Biden administration was really quite unsuccessful in checking the formation of this axis.
Indeed, I would say that the axis didn't really exist in 2020, but it was fully in existence by the end of Joe Biden's term. So whatever we hear when President Trump is riffing as he was earlier today,
or whatever we read in his Truth Social account, which shouldn't really be called that, it should be called Truthy Social, because it's kind of truthy in the way Stephen Colbert used to talk about truthiness. It's truthy social. About half of what he says, he kind of means, and about half, he's just shooting the shit.
If we shouldn't get too fixated on what Trump says, we should be much, much more focused on what the United States does. And what it does seems to me a pretty strong advertisement for American allies staying with America and not contemplating the possibility of joining those lovable guys, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, Supreme Leader Khamenei, Kim Jong-un.
I mean, is that the club we want to be associated with? Not me. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. Thank you. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash prof. Then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com slash prof to post your job for free.
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Chapter 6: How does the conversation address the concept of a 'new world order'?
My sense is, when I read the proposed peace plan that the U.S. outlined, to me it sounded like just scheduling the next war. It sounded to me, or what the president actually has done, is given comfort to our enemy, Russia, while withdrawing. I would argue that NATO right now is a Ukrainian army. If NATO's mission is to repel an invasion of Europe by Russia—
Effectively, the Ukrainian people and the Ukrainian army is in fact NATO, and it feels as if America has withdrawn a lot of at least vibe support from Ukraine, and then I would argue the EU has stepped up. You don't agree with that? Well, let's be clear. The European Union cannot, without American support, provide the assistance that Ukraine needs to survive.
The war is dragging on towards its fifth year. This is going to be harder and harder for Ukraine to sustain. There is a manpower problem at the front. There's an air defense problem in the cities.
Although the Ukrainians have been heroic and also tremendously innovative in the drone warfare and technology, the Russians have more or less managed to keep pace with that so that the Ukrainians have an edge on quality, but the Russians have an edge on quantity. The Europeans, when American aid was first cut off back at the end of Biden's presidency, could not fill the gap.
That was immediately obvious because the minute the American aid stopped, you'll remember that the House cut it off. Then Ukraine started to lose. The United States isn't supplying much aid since President Trump was sworn in, but it's still playing an important part. In technologies. In surface-to-air missiles, yeah. Correct.
It's important to recognize that if that went, then the Europeans would not be able to make up the difference. Europeans have handed a lot of weapons as well as money to Ukraine. They have not built an awful lot of weapons anew yet. The Danes are in especially weak positions because they've given pretty much all of their military hardware to Ukraine.
They don't have actually much defense capability at all at this point. So until the Europeans do serious rearmament, and I especially mean until the Germans do serious rearmament, Ukraine needs the United States to remain engaged or it risks losing the war. I was down at the Ukrainian house earlier today, and there's a fantastic video. You must go and see it.
An AI-generated video imagining Russian drone strikes on a Paris airport. on Brussels and brilliantly on Davos. And the Ukrainian point, which I wholly agree with, is that Europeans just find it really hard to believe what you said earlier, that Ukraine is in fact fighting for Europe.
They just can't imagine that the Russians would ever do to their cities what the Russians are doing to all the major Ukrainian cities every night. to the point that Kyiv at this point has almost no heating and electricity in really large parts of town. I mean, there are people I know whose apartments have no heat in midwinter, and it's bitterly cold there.
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Chapter 7: What are the potential scenarios for peace in Ukraine?
How about that, Putin? Now, if the Germans did that... And they could do it. They have the manufacturing infrastructure. They have the workforce. They have a crying need for it. Since the days of selling automobiles to the Chinese are over, they did that. That would be a game changer, unlike Tomahawk missiles. Because if the Russians saw German rearmament really happening...
that would be the clearest sign, A, that Putin had made a huge strategic blunder, B, that Ukraine had a future. So I think there are ways to solve this problem. They just require far more energy on the European side, far more commitment, and above all, something of what we still see in the United States, an ability when the chips are down to cut through the bureaucracy and do things really fast.
So I just wish we could have sort of Elon Musk-ian rearmament, you know, the SpaceX approach. You could scale what the Ukrainians do. You know what's really tragic is they have fantastic technology. They cannot scale it. They don't, of course, have the space or the security. They're trying to build drones in a war zone under daily bombardment.
If you did all that stuff at scale in Germany, A, you would create meaningful deterrence. B... this is the beauty of the thing, you'd actually see German economic recovery. And that's like a win-win if ever there was one. So I'm getting a bit of a red light here. So I just really crisply, you said something that really resonated.
My sense is there's this historic opportunity to defenestrate, replace, whatever the term, defeat the Islamic Republic. Yes. And I'm really hoping, I've never seen a greater case for greater ROI then limited, whatever you want to call it, strikes on civilian suppression centers and kind of tip over the regime, if you will. Regime alteration. That's what we have to hope is coming.
It will transform the security of the Middle East. It will transform life for Iranians. And I believe it will be a huge contribution towards a peaceful end to Cold War II because it will signal... that whatever Chinese project produced the relationships with Russia, Iran, and North Korea was not a realistic geopolitical project. That's my hope.
What do you think the chances are that the regime holds if there is an intervention, a coordinated intervention, say U.S. and Israel, whatever it might be, intelligence, limited strikes, What do you think is the likelihood that the regime survives without Western military intervention? Very high indeed, like 90%, because they've crushed the protests brutally.
And the regime's repressive apparatus showed no sign of cracking. So if there's no intervention, that regime lasts. I mean, it's like the Soviets had a little bit of a revolt in 1962. They utterly crushed it. 1962 was pretty early in the Cold War, in fact, a dangerous time in the Cold War.
So, no, if we want to get rid of the Islamic Republic, which has been a source of mischief and mayhem and murder since 1979, President Trump has to do what I think he is going to do. Yeah, your lips to his ears. And the most important thing we haven't covered, but we'll have to cover quickly, Scotland's group draw in the World Cup, Neil. We're in with Morocco and Brazil. Is that right?
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Chapter 8: How does the episode conclude regarding U.S. global influence?
I mean, DeepMind's the most important AI company in the end. It's a much more important, historically innovative company, but it's a British company that ended up being acquired by Google, because there was no other way to scale it. So I don't think these are cultural problems. They're institutional problems.
And you can see these as, in a sense, Britain reverting to its 1970s bad habits, which Margaret Thatcher temporarily cured Britain of. If you could bring Margaret Thatcher back to life and redo Thatcherism, then I think there would be a chance, at least, of revitalizing Britain's capital markets, which, you know... are potentially extraordinarily broad and deep. I mean, very liquid.
But institutionally, the incentives are terrible. You know, the way, like, pension funds deploy capital in Britain would make you weep. So I think there are fixes here that the next, and I hope it will be a conservative government, can address. I want Kemi Beidenoch to be Black Thatcher and to do all the things again that we, the hard way we had to do starting in 1979. Yeah.
Neil Ferguson, historian and public intellectual. I love having you on. I disagree with most of everything you say, Neil, and yet I learned so much, and you really do open my mind, and I'd like to think a lot of our listeners' minds, too. You just have this unbelievable ability to thread history with economics and logic, even if you get to a place that kind of sends chills down my spine.
I just love speaking to you. I really appreciate your time, and I appreciate how, quite frankly, like, unfiltered you are. That's really refreshing. So boring if we agreed about everything, but we agree about football. There we go. That's dialogue. All right. Thanks again, Neil. Good to see you. My pleasure.
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