Attempts to build a new ideological project in foreign policy are less than convincing
There is a nostalgic quality to the popular writing of Niall Ferguson. The Scottish historian takes you back to the mid-noughties, where neocons railed against the “Axis of Evil” and insisted on the righteousness of up-ending the Middle East.
Time, however, has introduced a note of desperation to Ferguson’s prose. His recent column “A genocide is under way — but it’s not in Gaza” seems panicky — flitting from claim to claim with minimal obvious aspirations to coherence.
Ferguson cannot seem to decide on what he wants to argue about Israel. He is keen to make the case that it is not committing genocide in Gaza. This is an argument that seems dangerously liable to descend into a bog of semantics. Besides, we should avoid binary thinking here: the choice is not “just war” and “genocide”. There is a lot of space in the middle!
But Ferguson cannot seem to make up his mind on what he does think about the war — throwing out claims of dubious validity and relevancy. “Defeat for Israel … would mean obliteration, extinction,” he says. Hamas is no likelier to defeat Israel than I am to knock out Tom Aspinall, UFC Heavyweight Champion. The prospect is so improbable that it seems absurd to even raise it.
“Yet our support for [Israel] is at best equivocal,” writes Ferguson. Later in his piece, he writes:
One can criticise the way Israel has waged this war. One can note the impossibility of simultaneously rescuing the hostages and destroying Hamas. One can lament the extreme difficulty of defeating an enemy that lurks in tunnels, habitually uses civilians for cover and steals much of the aid sent into Gaza.
But I thought it was bad for people to even be “equivocal”? Does that not sound like a case for at least equivocation?
Ferguson applauds Israel for supplying aid to Gaza but admits that it has established “a kind of siege” — a kind of siege which has at times ensured that Gazans could not secure aid from anywhere else. “The Israeli government does not intend to kill Palestinian civilians,” he writes, yet he side-steps the question of the merits of continuing a shapeless war that has reduced Palestinian cities to deserts of debris — flattening hospitals, schools and even churches in the process — while lowering life expectancy in the area by as much as 35 years.
Ferguson contrasts Israel’s war in Gaza with Russian’s war in Ukraine. To be clear, I bow to no one in condemning the lunatic injustice of Putin’s escalation of violence. (It would also be difficult to dispute that October 7th provided a far more striking casus belli than the tit for tat fighting in the Donbas.) Yet when Ferguson writes that the Russian government “intends to eradicate a distinct Ukrainian identity”, and contrasts this with the supposedly purer intentions of the Israelis, he ignores the fact that the Israeli government is explicitly considering population transfer as the ultimate solution to the conflict in Gaza. Some commentators have been brave enough to defend this idea on its merits, but let’s not behave as if it doesn’t exist.
In his piece, Ferguson is very much taken with Rob Henderson’s idea of the “luxury belief”, which he defines — somewhat sloppily — as “the more preposterous ideas that progressives can afford to hold … because they are largely sheltered from the consequences when such ideas are put into practice”. It is certainly the case that we commentators should be careful when pontificating from the comfort of our homes. But I hope that Sir Niall remembers that he is also sheltered from the consequences of the policies that he supports. He doesn’t have to feel the pain — mental or physical — of the Palestinians — and, yes, sometimes pain is unavoidable, but these incoherent apologetics feel like an excuse not to engage in hard thought about whether Israel’s hawkishness is worth that suffering — and how much Britain gains from being attached to its ongoing efforts.
Ferguson has long been proud of being, in his own words, “a fully paid-up member of the neoimperialist gang”. In an interview from 2011, he said:
It’s all very well for us to sit here in the west with our high incomes and cushy lives, and say it’s immoral to violate the sovereignty of another state. But if the effect of that is to bring people in that country economic and political freedom, to raise their standard of living, to increase their life expectancy, then don’t rule it out.
There’s that focus on his comfortable critics again. Needless to say, Ferguson had a high income and a cushy life as soldiers and civilians were being killed in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Two can play this game. Additionally, though, why should Western people care, in policy terms, about the “economic and political freedom” of countries on the other side of the world? Our nations are doing badly enough that most young people would not fight for them.
Ferguson sees our historical moment as representing “Cold War II”, pitting the West against “an Axis of Authoritarians: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea”. That these nations pose some kind of threat is indisputable. That, in general, our continued security has more to do with economics and demographics than with applying force also seems inarguable. (One hopes that Ferguson remembers how much damage ill-conceived violence did to the USA in Cold War I.) Sure, pacifism is the pastime of the privileged — especially with an invasion on the West’s doorstep. But the time for port-flavoured musings about our role in reshaping the third world is deader than T.E. Lawrence. We don’t have the luxury of that.
Sorry, Sir Niall, but it isn’t 2005 any more.
