Englund

Is the Iran War America’s Suez or Its Gallipoli? The Iran war is not America’s "Suez moment," but it may well turn out to be America’s Gallipoli moment.  It was there, in 1915, that the British Empire overreached disastrously—underestimating the tenacity of a decadent regime, overestimating its own military capacity, and demonstrating stupendous strategic confusion. All Suez did was to confirm that a bankrupt former empire could no longer project imperial power.  America’s enduring inordinate privileges. Britain never had them. In a world where American hegemony and the wealth of America’s ruling class are inversely related to its citizens’ well-being—which, ironically, is the contradiction that fueled Trump’s rise to the presidency. Yanis Varoufakis Project Syndicate Apr 16, 2026 https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/america-iran-war-resembles-gallipoli-not-suez-by-yanis-varoufakis-2026-04 The Strait of Hormuz remains closed. Yet markets are trading like the war is ov...

  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-09/trump-hunt-for-iran-s-uranium-hindered-by-monitoring-disruption https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2026/04/president-trump-on-wednesday-made-case.html Stock Market Today: Dow up 325 points, S&P 500 and Nasdaq move higher as investors grow confident about Iran war de-escalation and Strait of Hormuz reopening The U.S. stock-market indexes were moving higher Thursday, on the second day of trading after the U.S.-Iran cease-fire. 21:13 https://www.marketwatch.com/livecoverage/s-p-500-dow-jones-nasdaq-oil-prices-iran-war-cease-fire-uncertainty New York-börserna steg för sjunde dagen i rad,  men mjukvarubolagen sjönk tungt https://www.di.se/live/new-york-borserna-steg-for-sjunde-dagen-i-rad/ Conflicts over strategic and commercial waterways—especially straits and canals—are nothing new. Back in 1507, the Portuguese decided to set up a fortress to control the Strait of Hormuz. It taxed commerce for a century before Persia and Bri...

Den nya nationella säkerhetsstrategin  - det definitiva beskedet om att USA inte längre är att räkna med.  Frida Wallnor Ledare DI 8 december 2025 https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/12/the-white-house-said-europe-risks.html

AI is driving markets and GDP growth—but the underlying financing resembles the 19th-century railroad industry, which had its own share of crashes. Financial history can help us here. If you’re unsure if there’s an AI bubble, refer to the historian Charles Kindleberger’s five-stage model: Displacement: Some change in economic circumstances creates new and profitable opportunities for certain companies. Euphoria or overtrading: A feedback process sets in whereby rising expected profits lead to rapid growth in share prices. Mania or bubble: The prospect of easy capital gains attracts first-time investors and swindlers eager to defraud them. Distress: The insiders discern that expected profits cannot possibly justify the now-exorbitant price of the shares and begin to take profits by selling. Revulsion or discredit: As share prices fall, the outsiders stampede for the exits, causing the bubble to burst altogether. We are currently at stage 3. Niall Ferguson The Free Press 17 November 2025...

What Bradbury failed to anticipate is that his native America—and indeed the Western world—might turn away from literacy voluntarily, without the need for political tyranny. The consumer society has turned out to be enough to make us turn away from books. And turn away fast. https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-without-books-we-will-be-barbarians

You can see why, at the time, many commentators saw 9/11 as vindicating the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” had been published in 1993,  as well as the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernize. Yet nonviolent radicalization (what Islam calls dawa as opposed to violent jihad) has advanced significantly everywhere in the Western world, wherever there are Muslim communities.  The critical point—as my wife explained in a book on the subject—is that Islamism as a deeply illiberal political ideology does not need to engage in acts of terrorism to spread. I never cease to marvel at the ingenuity with which the Muslim Brotherhood and other proselytizing organizations spread their network, through mosques, Islamic centers, schools, colleges, and local politics. 09.11.25  Sir Niall Ferguson, MA, DPhil, FRSE, is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbWLE07NGcw Psychologist and Historian Discuss the End of the World | Dr. Niall Ferguson and Jordan B Peterson  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZn55uYytd0 Popular mythology in Germany has it that the Weimar hyperinflation of 1922-23 led directly to the rise of Hitler. This is not true.  The Nazis only won 32 Reichstag seats in the election of May 1924, and just 12 in 1928.  The Nazi party did not become a popular political force until long after the hyperinflation period ended. https://www.internetional.se/econusabub.htm#hitler https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2024/11/varfor-kollapsade-weimarrepubliken.html

  The historian and Free Press columnist on why America makes a terrible imperial power, how we got ourselves into Cold War II, and why the real culture war has only just begun. https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-america-late-stage-republic-rome-china-russia-cold-war This article was produced by and originally published in Noema magazine. https://www.noemamag.com/america-is-in-a-late-republic-stage-like-rome/

And while it’s true the Japanese Navy’s target was unexpectedly audacious, the savvier geopolitical minds of the day saw war between the US and Japan as increasingly inexorable.  And the proximate causes were the American embargoes in 1940 on scrap iron, steel and especially oil to the Japanese Empire, followed in 1941 by a freeze on Japanese assets in US banks.  The US was cutting off the blood supply of the heart of a Japanese war machine fighting expansionist conflicts across Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia.  I'm well aware I'm not the first person to think of this. When bellicose countries are backed into an economic corner, bad things happen.  Beijing is just as dependent on foreign oil for its rise to Asian mastery today as Japan was 85 years ago. Consider all the major conflicts that began as trade disputes:  The Lelantine War  Lelantinska kriget – Wikipedia   ; the Punic Wars; the first Byzantine-Bulgarian War ; the Anglo-Hanseatic War ; th...

 Ordinary Americans elected Trump because they expected him to make things better. Did they realize they were getting a reactionary economic project? It is exactly a century since John Maynard Keynes published “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Churchill,”  a devastating takedown of the policies of the Conservative government in which Winston Churchill served as Chancellor of the Exchequer—the British equivalent of Treasury Secretary. Keynes predicted—correctly—that the government’s decision to return the pound to the gold standard would lead to “unemployment and industrial disputes,” “great depression in the export industries,” and “credit restriction.” They elected Trump to punish the Democrats for 9 percent inflation at the mid-2022 peak and net migration of 8 million in four years, most of it illegal. The British Conservatives just wanted to go back 11 years. The Trump administration aims to reverse at least four decades of American economic history. Of course, the biggest ...

  The story about sandpiles and the financial system may be the most popular letter I’ve written in the last 25 years.  It is one we should all re-read every few years to remind us how change happens slowly, then suddenly.  A very important book by Mark Buchanan called Ubiquity, Why Catastrophes Happen.  I HIGHLY recommend it if you, like me, are trying to understand the complexity of the markets.  The book is about chaos theory, complexity theory, and critical states. It’s written so anyone can understand—no equations, just easy-to-grasp, well-written stories and analogies. Imagine, Buchanan says, dropping one grain of sand after another onto a table. A pile soon develops. Eventually, just one grain starts an avalanche. First, economist Dr. Hyman Minsky showed how stability leads to instability.  The more comfortable we get with a given condition or trend, the longer it will persist, and then the more dramatic the correction when the trend fails. Go back t...

Those siding with me in believing that we are already in a second cold war Then there is the Yale University/Hoover Institution view. the global situation today more closely resembles the world on the eve of one or the other of the world wars.  In an excellent new piece, Zelikow argues that it is a comforting delusion — indeed, “wishful thinking” — to believe we are in a cold war with China. Rather, we confront a new Axis — China, Russia, Iran and North Korea — that in many ways poses a bigger threat than the Germany-Japan-Italy Axis of the late 1930s and early 1940s, or the early Cold War combination of the Soviet Union, China and the other communist-controlled states. “The worst case, in a major crisis,” writes Zelikow, “will be if the United States and its allies commit to victory, animated by their own rhetoric and dutiful but ill-considered military plans, and then are outmaneuvered and defeated. It would be the ‘Suez moment’ for the United States, or perhaps much worse.”...

Today, the idea of Cold War II is fast becoming conventional wisdom.  President Donald Trump’s initial trade war against China was evolving into a tech war — and more. I vividly remember a world map highlighting which countries were buying Huawei’s 5G hardware The US floods the world in dollars; China floods the world in hardware. One reason that some were slow to discern the drift to a new cold war was that it seemed economically irrational from the point of view of a “Washington consensus” that for years had prioritized free trade, global capital flows and open borders, not to forget the wishful thought that greater economic integration between the US and China would magically lead to political liberalization in the latter. the widespread belief that the European Monetary Union (EMU) would fall apart in the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008-09  I was emotionally attracted to the breakup of the euro area, as I had been against the idea of monetary union in the 1990s...

To understand what is at stake in the fight against the axis of China, Russia and Iran, just read “The Lord of the Rings. The emergence of this new Axis was foreseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, as long ago as 1997. In his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski wrote: Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran Ferguson’s Law — states that any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long.  Tolkien’s hobbits are also isolationists, in their way. However, despite their strong preference for the quiet life, Frodo and Sam come to realize that they must fight their way to Mordor and risk their necks to destroy Sauron’s Ring of Power.  Niall Ferguson 21 april 2024 https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-04-21/china-russia-iran-axis-is-bad-news-for-trump-and-gop-isolationists On his ...

If the Jewish state can be bullied into letting Hamas survive, how can any free nation defend itself? Every Islamist terrorist Israel kills is one fewer threat to the rest of us. Every setback Israel can deal to the Iranian puppet masters of Hamas, Hezbollah and others inflicts a loss on the regime that is sworn to eliminate us, the “Great Satan,” and our allies.  There is no historical evidence that appeasing enemies committed to our extinction ever keeps us safe. If Israel can somehow be bullied into forgoing victory over this enemy, our own capacity to wage wars inflicted on us will be dramatically diminished.  We will have allowed a coalition of armchair media critics, far-left agitators and Islamist-sympathizing activists and governments to hold Israel to a standard no nation taking necessary measures to protect itself would ever be able to meet, a standard to which our enemies will certainly never hold themselves. Gerard Baker Wall Street Journal  8 April 2024 ...

My blogg short index https://englundmacro.blogspot.com/2025/07/my-blogg-short-index.html Denna vackra betraktelse från 1994 har sedan dess legat i mitt bakhuvud. Sven Otto Littorin; Akvedukten vid Zaghouan – Svensk Tidskrift Den artikeln satte mig på spåren till Akvedukten vid Zaghouan : en essä om stat, moral och liberalismens framtid, av Per Molander  https://www.bokus.com/bok/9789176811436/akvedukten-vid-zaghouan-om-stat-moral-och-det-liberala-samhallets-framti/ Och vidare till min Guru Niall Fergusons CIVILIZATION The West and the Rest   The financial disasters of 2008 and its continuing fallout;  political partisanship and gridlock in the face of daunting problems; divisions within the United States and within the European Union; the overextension of American military forces in the wake of costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the rise of China: Is the West headed toward a fall like ancient Rome’s? Even more alarmingly, he suggests that the collapses of ...

The total fertility rate (TFR) — the number of live children the average woman bears in her lifetime   In one country after another, it has dropped under the 2.1 threshold (the “replacement rate,” allowing for childhood deaths and sex imbalances), below which the population is bound to decline.    This fertility slump is in many ways the most remarkable trend of our era. And it is not only Elon Musk who worries that “population collapse is potentially the greatest risk to the future of civilization.” Our species is not done multiplying, to be sure.   “More than half of the projected increase in the global population between 2022 and 2050 is expected to be concentrated in just eight countries: the Democratic Republic of the Congo [DRC], Egypt, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines and the United Republic of Tanzania.”  When the human population begins to fall, it will do so not gradually, but almost as steeply as it once rose. The problem ...

... if at some future date the Ukrainian army, starved of ammunition, were overrun by its Russian adversaries. And how will we react if — say, later this year — we are informed that Iran has successfully built a nuclear weapon and has unleashed its proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, to rain missiles down on Israel? Or what if we hear news that Taiwan has been blockaded by the People’s Liberation Army ... How much attention will we devote to the end of Taiwan’s democracy and the imposition of Chinese Communist Party rule on its people? More than we pay to the next Grammy awards ceremony or Super Bowl? Kabul in 2021 Re-reading Len Deighton’s novel SS-GB  By comparison with Robert Harris’s more ambitious Fatherland — published in 1992 and set long after a German victory — SS-GB is imbued with gritty realism. A quarter of a century has passed since I persuaded Andrew Roberts to write a chapter of the book Virtual History devoted to the historical plausibility of Deighton’s scenario.  ...

For more than 20 years, the federal government has run an unsustainable fiscal policy, with excessive spending and inefficient taxation causing deficits to become the norm, even at full employment, and the federal debt to rise rapidly above total GDP (to say nothing of the unfunded liabilities of welfare programs).  This is a major vulnerability, given US reliance on foreign investors and the Federal Reserve to buy the bonds and other paper issued by the Treasury.  The rise in real interest rates since 2022 has significantly increased the cost of servicing the debt, to the point that it is close to exceeding the total defense budget. Finally, we must look at legitimacy at home and abroad.  It is perhaps harder to quantify than any other attribute, but “soft power” clearly matters in two respects. First, it is beneficial if the US is perceived in a positive light by actual or potential allies. Second, it is crucial that American power should be regarded as legitimate by US...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtN7Z20ga6Y 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed Englund: 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (englundmacro.blogspot.com) Rome fell. Will West follow suit? Englund: Rome fell. Will West follow suit? (englundmacro.blogspot.com)