Niall Ferguson: The Trade War and the Battle for the 21st Century
Bari Weiss: So what is your message, Niall, to someone living in a deindustrialized, hollowed-out town in the Rust Belt, who looks at the history, economically speaking, of the past 30 years and thinks, “this didn’t work for me and I need something to work for me.” What is the message to those people? If the message is not ‘manufacturing is coming back,’ and you’re saying that’s a nostalgia trip, what is the message?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it’s the same message you would have given people in agriculture who were making similar lamentations in the 1920s, when American agriculture started to encounter very severe competition. The message is: I’m really sorry, economic history hasn’t been on your side, but you’re still getting a better deal than the people who died in the trenches in World War I, or who were mown down in the battlefields of Europe in World War II. Economic history is kinder than military and geopolitical history can be. You cannot turn the economic historical clock back. It’s as realistic to imagine America being an industrial superpower again as to imagine that Britain could rebuild the British Empire by an act of political will. So one has to accept that.
Emphasis mine.