Niall Ferguson: Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory

"Comparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. ...

"It is not just that the West has been successfully penetrated by an antagonistic civilisation that fundamentally rejects the fundamental division between religion and politics - church and state - that lies at the heart of both Christianity and Judaism. The West is also being geopolitically outmanoeuvred by 'the rest' in just the way Huntington foresaw*.

"Contrast the global order after 9/11 with the global order today. We have come a long way since NATO secretary-general George Robertson’s statement on September 11, 2001 - 'Our message to the people of the United States is . . . "We are with you." '

"In the past three years, Zbig Brzezinski’s worst-case scenario has come about. 'Potentially, the most dangerous scenario,' he wrote in 'The Grand Chessboard' (1997), would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an ‘antihegemonic’ coalition united not by ideology but by 'complementary grievances' Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, that grand coalition has come into being, with North Korea as a fourth member. The 'Axis of Upheaval' (China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea) are now cooperating in military, economic and diplomatic ways. Moreover, the Trump administration’s combative treatment of American allies (the European Union, Japan, South Korea) and neutrals (Brazil, India, and Switzerland), not least with respect to trade policy, is alienating not only the traditionally nonaligned but also key partners.

'The upshot is that Israel is now virtually alone in fighting against the Islamists, so that even the United States wants plausible deniability when, as this week, the Israeli Air Force strikes the leadership of Hamas in the Qatari capital, Doha.

'The point is that the clash of civilisation continues. Now ask yourself: Who’s winning? 

...
"[C]omparing the world today with that of 24 years ago, I am tempted to say that bin Laden lost the war on terror but is winning the clash of civilisations. That’s not to say his particular brand of Salafist jihadism is winning; it can even be argued that it’s in decline. Bin Laden’s creed was always too uncompromising to form alliances of convenience. By contrast, the pro-Palestinian 'global intifada' is much more omnivorous, and can easily absorb the old left (Marxism and pan-Arabism) and the new (anti-globalism and wokeism). ...

"At the same time, Western civilisation today is so much more divided than it was 24 years ago. The public response to 10/7 illuminated the divisions. Whereas older voters generally remain more pro-Israel than pro-Palestinian, younger cohorts have swung the other way. Perhaps that’s because to Gen-Z, 9/11 is a faint memory - as distant as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Kennedy’s assassination were to my generation. But it’s also because the Islamists have done such a good job of co-opting the campus radicals, somehow overriding the cognitive dissonance in slogans such as “Queers for Palestine,” while at the same time tapping the antisemitism that still lurks on the far right. ...

"Walking the streets of New York this week, I felt old. To my children, my students, and my employees, 9/11 is not a memory. It is not even an historical fact. It is something people argue about on social media. ...

"It has taken me all these years to understand that 9/11 really was a clash of civilisations. And it has taken me until this week finally to face the reality that ours is losing."

~ Niall Ferguson from his post commemorating September 11, 2001: 'Osama bin Laden’s Posthumous Victory'

* Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntiongton, whose seminal essay on “The Clash of Civilizations” was published in 1993, aligning with the Princeton scholar Bernard Lewis, who had long argued that Islam was chronically unable to modernise.

Quote of 2022: "I don’t want an air ticket. I want ammunition."

"[Y]ou can’t really be an historian without a philosophy of history. You have to understand the nature of causation. These days, nobody bothers with that, which is why a lot of academic history is garbage ... There [is] a very central problem, namely that any causal statement ... implies a counterfactual....

    "Lewis Namier was a great Cambridge historian who said that the key to history was having a sense of what didn’t happen. And I always think of Thelonious Monk’s line about jazz. 'It’s the notes you don’t play.' And as a jazz fan, I think history has to have that kind of Thelonious Monk feel to it where you’re telling the reader, 'This didn’t happen, but it nearly did, and people at the time thought about it.' ...

    "[T]here is [therefore] a very important role for contingency, and that continues to be true today.... Contingency here means a relatively small event or decision. And it doesn’t need to be a decision. It can be something accidental, [that] has very major consequences. And historical causations like that, something relatively small, can have tremendous ramifications.
    "I’ll give you [a contemporary] illustration. This year, most people, including the US government, thought that if Russia invaded Ukraine, the Ukrainian government would quite quickly fold, and it was assumed that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president, would bail. He didn’t. He gave his famous response, 'I don’t want an air ticket. I want ammunition.' And Zelenskyy’s courage when they were closing in on Kyiv with a high probability that they [the Russians] would assassinate, turned the course of history in a way that I think is now quite widely understood....
    "[I]t emboldened ordinary Ukrainians not to fold, and it also intimidated the collaborators who were ready to help the Russians, not to act. So the contingency there is if Zelenskyy had gone according to our expectation and taken the plane, then Putin would’ve had Kyiv within a matter of days or weeks, and the war would be over.
    "So I think one of the things that’s exciting about the study of history is you are trying to remind yourself again and again that what happened, that what we know happened, might have gone the other way. That the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in both sides essentially backing down was not predetermined. There was a moment when a Soviet submarine commander gave the order to fire a nuclear torpedo at US naval surface ships. So we came within a hair’s breadth of World War III. These alternate worlds, these histories that didn’t happen, have to be alive in your mind when you are writing history.
    "The fatal mistake is to write history as if it was bound to happen the way it happened. And this, of course, is the mistake that a great majority of historians make. Forgetting that, we don’t know at the time, at the moment, we didn’t know the morning of the 24th of February that Zelenskyy would stand his ground. Nobody knew that. I wonder if even Zelenskyy at that moment knew what it was that he was going to do.
    "So I say all this because I think it’s really important to convey ... how exciting history is, and how studying it makes you understand the course of events in your own life better -- removes that passivity to which people sometimes succumb. If you think great historical forces are going to have inevitable outcomes, if you have a deterministic view of the historical process, it’s very easy to lapse into fatalism. (There’s the other trap, which is the conspiracy theories. 'Well, the truth of the matter is that actually, Soros and the Rothschilds are orchestrating all this.' Again, you throw up your hands and you abandon the attempt to understand how the historical process works.)"

~ Historian Niall Ferguson, in conversation with Tim Ferriss, taken from 'The Tim Ferriss Show Transcripts: Niall Ferguson, Historian — The Coming Cold War II, Visible and Invisible Geopolitics, Why Even Atheists Should Study Religion, Masters of Paradox, Fatherhood, Fear, and More'

Here's Thelonious Monk...