Thirty-eight days of war, and the ceasefire that was supposed to end it looks like a mirage. Iran keeps firing drones at Gulf states, Israel is pounding Lebanon harder than ever, and Tehran is demanding a dollar-a-barrel crypto toll on every ship through Hormuz. In a conversation with The Free Press, historian Niall Ferguson delivers a devastating verdict: the US has achieved military dominance and strategic failure simultaneously - a pattern he compares to the 1956 Suez Crisis. With Vice President Vance heading to Pakistan for negotiations against an Iranian regime that models itself on North Vietnam's playbook, Ferguson argues Trump may have already missed his window by not deploying ground forces to retake the strait. The result, he warns, could be America's own Pyrrhic non-victory.
Schrodinger's ceasefire
Rafaela Siewert: Niall Ferguson, thank you so much for being here.
Niall Ferguson: Great to be with you.
Rafaela Siewert: Well, last night a ceasefire went into place that's set to be two weeks long after thirty-eight days of war between US, Israel, and Iran. And even in the first day of the ceasefire there's been a lot of confusion and still some lingering strikes. So just to kick us off - what is your initial reaction to the ceasefire that's gone into effect last night?
Niall Ferguson: Well, somebody remarked today, and I rather liked this, that it was like Schrodinger's cat, which you'll remember was simultaneously alive and dead. And this is Schrodinger's ceasefire because fire has simultaneously ceased and continued. In fact there's really been no meaningful change in the number of drones and missiles the Iranians have fired at Gulf states. We track this daily. You can see no ceasefire in those data. And of course there continues to be fighting in Lebanon because Israel doesn't recognize the ceasefire as applying to the war that it's fighting against Hezbollah there. So as ceasefires go, this is one that is not a huge success. Of course, in the history of ceasefires the first twenty-four hours are very rarely characterized by a complete cessation of fire. So you could argue that it's just the beginning and it'll take hold in the coming days. However, it's also interesting to look at what people say, isn't it? And all that has come out of Iran today has been, A, a kind of triumphal narrative - "we won" - and B, an insistence that if the United States wants there to be negotiations within these two weeks, then Israel is going to have to have a ceasefire in Lebanon. So I think we've run into something more than just continued shooting. I think we've run into some really quite important roadblocks that could in fact prevent there being a negotiation, and it might cause the ceasefire to unravel before fourteen days have passed.
The Strait of Hormuz as leverage
Rafaela Siewert: Well, the situation in Lebanon has commanded a lot of media attention today. I believe it's the heaviest day of Israeli airstrikes since the start of this war that started on February twenty-eighth. And Iran has threatened to keep the Strait of Hormuz closed and to boycott the peace talks in Pakistan unless Israel agrees to include Lebanon and their targeting of Hezbollah in this ceasefire. Do you think they'll ultimately do that, or do you think the ceasefire breaks down around this Lebanese question?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I certainly think that the Iranians intend to make the most of the leverage that they have here. And it's considerable. President Trump wants the negotiations to happen. He's lining up Vice President Vance to lead the American side, which is as high level as it gets really, short of a presidential summit, which certainly was never likely. Moreover, the Iranians have additional leverage. They control the Strait of Hormuz. And in their ten-point plan it's pretty unambiguous - they intend to continue to control the Strait of Hormuz. And that control is an additional piece of very powerful leverage, because as long as the strait is in effect closed - and the number of ships going through right now in the last twenty-four hours is no greater than in the previous twenty-four hours - as long as that continues, then the economic pain in the United States, but as well in the rest of the world, grows. And that is of course part of the Iranian strategy - to take advantage of the pain that they're inflicting by restricting shipping in the strait to try and get concessions. So the president I think has two major problems that have to be addressed fast. One - what are we going to do about Israel and Lebanon? Are we going to lean on Prime Minister Netanyahu and tell him you have to have a ceasefire in Lebanon? He's not going to like that. The president of the United States can make the prime minister of Israel do things, but that's choice number one. And the second big dilemma is - what do you do about the Strait of Hormuz? Because you can't possibly sign an agreement that leaves them in their current position as terrorist tollkeeper of one of the biggest choke points in the global economy.
Iran's dollar-a-barrel toll
Rafaela Siewert: One might say that one unintended consequence of this military action is that Iran has fully recognized the leverage they have over the global energy economy. And even as the strait is supposedly going to open up, they've said they want to charge a dollar a barrel in cryptocurrency for every ship coming through, that boats would need to coordinate with the Iranian military. There seems to be a bit of daylight between fully opening the strait and what Iran is saying constitutes as opening the strait. Seems like a pretty big win for the regime. And I'm curious - is the strait going to go back to the way it was functioning before the war, or do you think that's a lost cause at this point?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it's certainly not going to do that in the next two weeks the way things are going. Whether it ultimately does that depends a lot on what can be achieved in negotiations. Now, my view was at the weekend that President Trump had three options. He could carry out his - I thought overblown - threat to end Iranian civilization with large-scale attacks on the energy and other infrastructure of Iran. That never seemed to me likely that he would carry that out. Option two was what people colloquially call TACO, where he accepted a ceasefire negotiated through the Pakistani channel. But there was a third option, and that didn't get discussed nearly enough. And I'm pretty sure that was the option that was recommended by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Keane. And that option was to deploy ground forces - special forces and Marines - to try and take control of the strait. Now, not having done that puts I think the president in a weak position to negotiate a better deal in the strait. There clearly needs to be a better deal. It would be an unequivocal strategic failure to leave Iran in its current position, to say nothing of the economic costs. But it's hard to get the Iranians to let go of what they currently hold purely by sending Vice President Vance and hoping that he, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner can charm the Iranians. The Iranians have a pretty good track record of being difficult and tenacious negotiators. Unless there's some military pressure applied to them, I don't see why they would accept what President Trump hinted at just today - some kind of joint venture in which the United States and perhaps others get a share of the revenues from charging duties or tolls on shipping.
Military victory is not strategic victory
Rafaela Siewert: If their biggest point of leverage is the Strait of Hormuz, what would you say the US's biggest point of leverage is right now?
Niall Ferguson: Part of the problem is that the US leverage that's most obvious is military. The United States has overwhelming military superiority. Iran has almost no air defenses. And the United States has inflicted pretty extraordinary damage on Iran's military capabilities, its missile launchers and so on. And in that sense Pete Hegseth wasn't raving today in his press conference when he talked about a victory on the battlefield. In military terms, this has been a pretty remarkable victory. But it has turned out not to be sufficient. And that is often the case in history - that you can achieve great military results, but then it turns out that economically and strategically you haven't won. And I made this point in my most recent essay for The Free Press, because that was what happened when Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt to try and take control of the Suez Canal in 1956. In military terms, they completely defeated Egypt. It was as emphatic a victory in many ways as the one we've just seen. But it turned out that it was economically unsustainable, particularly for Britain. And so it turned into a huge strategic failure and it left Egypt in control of the Suez Canal. So there's a lot of Suez about what's going on at the moment. You've achieved this great military result. You've degraded, as we like to say these days, Iran's military capabilities. But it actually turns out not to be sufficient, because you've caused a huge economic problem for yourself and for the whole world, which means that a lot of people want you to settle. And you've also handed new leverage to the other side that they are able to exercise even with their degraded military. It turns out you don't need that much firepower to intimidate insurers and ship owners. And the Iranians have that much firepower. And it's not clear that the United States can get rid of that remaining firepower without putting boots on the ground. That's why I think President Trump may have made a mistake by not deploying ground forces, because without them it's simply not going to be possible to shut down the Iranian threat to the strait. Remember, it wasn't a surprising thing that the Iranians did this. Anybody who has spent time thinking about the history of the region knows just what a vital choke point the strait is, knows that in the 1980s it was necessary to have naval escorts, an international effort to escort shipping during the Iran-Iraq war. It's not like General Keane was surprised that the Iranians did this. And he certainly had a plan to address this, but that plan involved deploying special forces and Marines, and the president has hesitated to do that. That is the really significant thing that happened over the weekend. Not that he didn't wipe out Iranian civilization - that was, I think, an empty threat. It's the fact that he didn't deploy the ground forces. And you know, Rafaela, one really important point - this is a depreciating asset. The longer the president waits to take that kind of action, the harder it will be to pull it off, because every day the economic pain mounts. And although the United States feels that pain relatively later than other economies, it's coming. And it's coming in lots of different forms, in ways that will make the political position, the domestic political position of the administration, increasingly painful.
A failure of process
Rafaela Siewert: Do you see the administration's choice as a failure of strategy, failure of foresight, failure of action? How do you understand the situation that we're in now based on everything you just said?
Niall Ferguson: Last year I had a debate at the Hoover Institution with my good friend and colleague Stephen Kotkin. And Steve Kotkin complained about the lack of process in the Trump administration. And I confess that I somewhat mocked him and said that it didn't greatly matter if there was no process - there had been plenty of process in the Biden administration, and look at the successes of, say, the twelve-day war, of the strikes on Fordow. I'm afraid I'm now going to have to get out my knife and fork, order the crow, and eat it, because I think what we've seen in this sequence of events since February the twenty-eighth suggests a failure of process. And it's clear that, for example, the National Security Council did not perform its designated role - allowing the president to see pros and cons, to see that military success, which is always on offer from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs (in every administration they're always going to win the war), had to be weighed against economic downside risks. And I think that didn't happen. And it's interesting to me, for example, that in the key decision-making moments - we know this now from recent New York Times reporting - Treasury Secretary Bessent was not in the room and doesn't appear to have played any major role at all in the decision-making around this conflict. But you know, this is the biggest energy shock that we've seen in our lifetimes. And I include the 1970s, because I'm old enough to have lived through that. And so this is a major economic problem that's quite distinct from the military problem that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs is trained to solve. He solved that problem - they comprehensively defeated the Iranians. But the economic downside risk has turned out to be badly underestimated. So I think that's perhaps the best explanation. And I therefore owe Steve Kotkin a public apology. He was right, and I was wrong about that.
American Suez?
Rafaela Siewert: I want to go a beat deeper on what Trump has accomplished versus what he has not accomplished, because this has been a major debate in public discourse. As you mentioned, much of the military establishment has been degraded - I think that's undeniable. The question, I think, or the debate, lies more within the question of what remains, right? Iran's missile stockpile - a portion of it remains. Their launchers - some of them remain. Its proxies in Yemen and Lebanon remain. And the question is - they can rebuild. If the regime survives, and they will rebuild. And one might ask how, within that framework, you assess his accomplishments here or lack thereof?
Niall Ferguson: Well, I think if Iran emerges as the victor with control of the Strait of Hormuz, its regime not merely intact but actually radicalized - I mean, the president is right that there's been regime change in Iran. It's just that it's produced a more radical regime. The people now running Iran regarded Ali Khamenei as a softie because he hadn't retaliated hard enough in the past. So if all of that happens, and Iran looks like the victor - or to put it differently, if this is the American Suez - it's a Pyrrhic victory, because the regime will have won at immense cost. Its already very weak economy will have taken another hammering, and its military capabilities will have been thoroughly more than decimated - a decimation would be a good outcome, it's much worse than that. We don't know exactly how much damage has been done. I saw one surprising assessment, leaked - I don't know where it came from - suggesting that only half of the missile launchers had been destroyed. That surprises me, because I'd expect then there to be many more missiles being fired, so I suspect that that might be wrong. At any event, a Pyrrhic victory is a victory where you kind of come out the winner, but your own land is in ruins. And I think that would be the nature of the Iranian achievement. What President Trump has achieved so far is dangerously close to American Suez. It's dangerously close to being a moment when the United States has deployed its military might with all its impressive shock and awe and has failed to achieve a strategic result, has failed to achieve any of the intended objectives. Unless you think the war was intended just to disarm Iran, which you and I know it wasn't, because at the beginning regime change was a part of the plan, just as it was in 1956 when Britain hoped to get rid of Nasser's regime in Egypt. The danger for the president is that his result isn't as necessarily Pyrrhic as Iran's, because the cost to the United States economy won't be that huge - inflation might be up by a hundred basis points, not by 1970s standards that big a deal. But it will be defeat. It'll be a kind of non-Pyrrhic defeat. Unless - and this is the critical point - unless in the next two weeks, or it'll probably be more than two weeks, the administration is able to come up with a deal with the Iranians that ends their control of the Strait of Hormuz, internationalizes the Strait of Hormuz, creates, as President Trump hinted the other day, some kind of joint venture, and gets the Iranians to accept that their nuclear weapons program is never going to happen - then I think the president could say he did achieve something meaningful. But it's going to be very hard to do that without deploying ground forces and exerting more military leverage.
Two dueling peace plans
Rafaela Siewert: Well, I was going to ask about this, because there are sort of two dueling peace plans. The United States' fifteen-point peace plan and Iran's ten-point peace plan. And a lot of the points are diametrically opposed. I mean, Iran is asking for total withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East, complete control of the strait, war reparations, acceptance of their right to nuclear enrichment. I mean, these are just total non-starters. Do you think a deal can be reached here? If you had to place money or a bet on it - is it possible?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it's a little bit like the current peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, which started out with the same phenomenon - that each side demanded things entirely unacceptable to the other side. And here we are, those negotiations have not been abandoned but they have essentially stalled, and the war is in its fifth year. So I think one lesson of history is that negotiation, when the two sides are this far apart, is highly unlikely to deliver a result, certainly in a fourteen-day timeframe. One of the things I have been saying ad nauseam in the last five years is that it's easy to start a war and it takes a much longer time to end one. And peace processes are slow. I'll give you an example. In 1973, Richard Nixon said to Kissinger, "You have to go and get the Saudis to lift the oil embargo." That was the unintended consequence of American support for Israel in the Yom Kippur War. And although the administration had been warned about it, they really hadn't paid enough attention to the warning. When the Saudis did it and effectively quadrupled the price of oil, it was an instantaneous shock at the pump for American households. Kissinger was told, "You have to go and get this done." It took four months of shuttle diplomacy to get the Saudi king to relent. And that was in a war that the United States was not a combatant in. It was merely the aid to Israel that had led the Saudis to impose the embargo. This is a tougher assignment for Vice President Vance than Henry Kissinger had in 1973-74. And let's remember that that was Henry Kissinger. So I worry that the two-week timeframe is going to start looking pretty implausible pretty quickly, if we even make it to fourteen days of ceasefire.
The uranium question
Rafaela Siewert: One of the biggest sticking points and one of the most important negotiation points will be the highly enriched uranium that remains in the country. I believe it's about 970 pounds. You know, Trump has sort of gone back and forth on this in a way that's sort of interesting. I mean, on one hand he said they can never have a nuclear weapon. There was the twelve-day war last year. Now he sort of alluded to something different, which is - well, we know where it is, it's deeply buried underground, we're surveilling it with our satellites, and if Iran attempts to move it or take it out of this bunker that it's sitting in, we'll strike. And the question is - can he walk away leaving this 970 pounds of highly enriched uranium in the country, or do you think that's unacceptable?
Niall Ferguson: Well, it's certainly true that Iran is a great deal further from having a nuclear weapon today than it was forty days ago. And so I think one should realize that even if the Iranians were able to dig it up and get back to work, the damage that has been done to the entire nuclear weapons program has been enormous. Not just in terms of the strikes on Fordow and other sites, but also because the scientific personnel of the operation has been hard hit. So I sense that this isn't really an immediate short-run problem, although of course if the regime survives it will be highly incentivized to resume its efforts. Those efforts will take a long time. That will be the nature of the Pyrrhic victory. I think the war came about partly because not of the nuclear program but because of the conventional weapons program. It was the speed with which the Iranians were building up their ballistic missile capability, with assistance from China, that got people worried in Washington as well as in Jerusalem, because there was a certain threshold beyond which, with those ballistic missiles, Iran would have been pretty hard to hold to account. So the ballistic missiles would have served as a kind of shield behind which the nuclear program would have been very hard to stop. That, I think, was more important. That ballistic missile capability has certainly been significantly reduced - we don't know by how much. But the uranium isn't about to be handed over to President Trump, any more than it's about to be miraculously rescued by SEAL Team 6 and the Green Berets. That would make a great movie, but it never struck me as remotely a realistic proposition, great though our special forces are.
Iran thinks it's winning - and the Vietnamese playbook
Rafaela Siewert: Their ten-point plan was maximalist, I think one might say. Do you think that they think that they're winning? And the reason I ask that is because maybe if they thought they were losing, they wouldn't have such a maximalist plan that they put forward. What do you think?
Niall Ferguson: Oh, they think they're winning. And they think they're winning because their playbook is quite an old and tried and tested one. It's interesting the extent to which people in the IRGC look back on the Vietnam War for inspiration. This is a point that is worth stressing given the passage of fifty-plus years. The idea is now well enshrined in any anti-American revolutionary government that the United States, for all its military power, is vulnerable to domestic pressure, particularly if it can have an economic dimension to it. And so the IRGC think they're winning because they just look at the polls. They look at the opinion polls and they see that the president's approval is tanking. They see that the midterms are in serious difficulty from a Republican perspective. They do the math on the likely impact on the inflation rate of the closure of the strait. And they foresee that that will have an extremely negative impact on an electorate that already thinks affordability is the number one issue. So no, they think they're winning. And they think, I think at this point, that they may have broken through, because Trump has not used the next and logical military step, which is to send ground forces in to take back the strait. The fact that he's not done that must be seen in Tehran as a tremendous win. And now I think they can play the Vietnamese game. And this was the game the North Vietnamese excelled at - which was to have ten, sometimes it was nine, points which they would insist on completely, implacably, and dogmatically. And they would wait for the United States to make modifications to its points. That North Vietnamese playbook is highly likely to be on display if the negotiations in Pakistan ever happen.
Brinkmanship or blinkmanship?
Rafaela Siewert: Over the past few days, one of the things that's gotten the most attention is Donald Trump's Truth Social posts. On Easter Sunday he said - I'll just read it back - "Tuesday will be power plant day and bridge day." He added on, "Open the fucking strait, you crazy bastards, or you'll be living in hell." He didn't mince words. And clearly threatened critical infrastructure. Also setting that 48-hour deadline to open the strait. Then yesterday, 12 hours before the deadline, he posted, "A whole civilization will die tonight. Never to be brought back again. I don't want that to happen but it probably will." He went on in the tweet, it was much longer obviously. Do you think the regime reads that as desperation, a credible threat? How do you think they're interpreting that?
Niall Ferguson: I think it got desperate over the weekend. I've always felt that when somebody uses the F-word, they're beginning to lose the argument. It's a good rule in any kind of public debate. And I saw that social media post and thought to myself, that's a very bad sign. And it smacked of desperation. The thing about President Trump's Truth Social feed over the last 30 or 40 days is that it's mainly been designed to mollify the oil market. He has used that bully pulpit, that way of communicating, to try to ease fears in energy markets. And in that sense, of course, the ceasefire announcement was a massive success, because we saw a huge decline in the price of oil from the minute that announcement was made. But the thing about Truth Social is that it's wonderfully misnamed. Roughly half of the things that appear on President Trump's feed are not true. And that's of course what makes him difficult to negotiate with. You can never quite tell if it's for real or if he's bluffing. The case of Greenland is my favorite example - when he made it sound as if he really intended to take Greenland, so much so that the Danes were prepared to defend it. But that was just a classic bit of maskirovka, it wasn't a serious thing at all. And I think some of the signaling that President Trump was directing at the oil market was picked up in Tehran as a sign of weakness. Which it was. It was telling the Iranians, "I'm really worried about the economic consequences of this, I need to get it over." And I think the timeframe is always the key here. President Trump signaled repeatedly on Truth Social that his timeframe was maybe six weeks max. Now, for sure the kind of ground operation you'd need to take control of the Strait of Hormuz would take longer than that, and would have extended the conflict well into May and perhaps beyond. And I think that's the reason that it didn't happen. So the Truth Social feed is important, it's designed to have an impact. But if you're really signaling to oil traders primarily and only secondarily to your adversary, don't be surprised if the adversary detects the tone of weakness that's there in your increasingly shrill language.
Rafaela Siewert: Do you think it was reckless? I mean, some critics came forward and said one of two things - either that it would embolden the regime because it would inspire nationalism, and it's almost a gift to the regime: "See, this is what he wants to do." And others say, "Why would you threaten 90 million people?" We could go back and forth about whether he actually meant it or not. I mean, there's a real debate. Or maybe there's not. I don't think he really meant it.
Niall Ferguson: I don't think he meant it. I think he hoped that what amounted to a nuclear threat - I mean, in effect you're threatening so much devastation that you might as well have been threatening to drop nuclear weapons. I think this was a last-ditch attempt to get the other side to blink. And in the end, it was of course the president who blinked. And I think the term "blinkmanship" deserves wider currency, because President Trump is engaged, in his own mind, in brinkmanship. He's gone right up to the brink by making these threats. But because the threats weren't entirely convincing, least of all to the people he was trying to threaten, it turned out to be blinkmanship. And I think he did blink. I've said before, I don't like the term TACO - "Trump Always Chickens Out" - because it's not true, he doesn't always chicken out. He'd be a very different kind of president if he always chickened out. What Trump does is he loves to take risk. And he takes risk on a basis quite unparalleled in the history of the modern presidency. But the thing about Trump's risk-taking is that periodically he overreaches, and then he has to blink. He blinked back in April last year over the tariffs, where he very nearly caused a major economic accident. And he also elicited from China this fantastic retaliation, culminating in the threat to cut off the exports of the critical minerals, the rare earth elements. And something very similar has happened here, where President Trump has gone in guns blazing, taking a huge risk by all-out war against the Iranian regime. And the Iranians turned out to have learned from the Chinese example - they retaliated in ways that I don't think were foreseen. I don't think many people foresaw that the Iranians would attack all their Gulf neighbors. Their retaliation would not be focused on the US or Israel - it would be focused on their neighbors. And that created a world of pain for the Emiratis in particular, but really for everybody, even the Qataris. That was a very smart bit of escalation. And it was the Iranians who first said, "Oh, we could hit their desalination plants, we could hit their critical infrastructure." So they actually got escalation dominance by doing that. And I think that was ultimately why it wasn't credible that President Trump threatened to do it to them, because if he had unleashed the B-52s, the Iranians would have been able to take potshots at the Gulf desalination plants, and you could render Bahrain uninhabitable with one well-aimed strike. That, I think, was the critical problem with the brinkmanship. There wasn't actually escalation dominance from a very early stage in this conflict.
Who is winning?
Rafaela Siewert: As we begin to close out - Iran thinks they're winning. Who do you think is winning, as we're talking at 5 PM on April 8th?
Niall Ferguson: It would be a stretch to argue that the United States is winning strategically. It's won militarily - by the standards of most conflicts the damage inflicted has been on a huge scale, and the costs, the losses on the American side, have been trivial. But one of the lessons of history is that military victory is not strategic victory, because you have to include the economics, domestic politics, the effects on your allies of your action. A comprehensive strategic assessment seems to me points to an Iranian victory. But it isn't over. And we're now entering a phase in which there will be negotiations, but I think there will also be ongoing conflict. And one of the big questions in my mind is - at what point is it too late to use American ground forces to take control of the strait and take away that critical lever that the Iranians have established for themselves? So there's still much to play for. This is relatively short in terms of the history of a typical war - early days. I don't think this war will still be going on in midsummer, because I don't think it's sustainable from an economic point of view by either side, in truth. If it is going on, it will be going on at a much lower level of intensity. But my sense is that the really difficult work lies ahead. And I'd love to echo a point Stan McChrystal made in an excellent interview with the New York Times. He said, enjoy the first phase of the war, because when you're at 35,000 feet it really is quite an enjoyable military imbalance. But as soon as you're down on the ground, you are six foot high and so is your adversary. And we're not even on the ground yet. So that card still remains to be played, and I think it will be a decisive moment in President Trump's time in office whether he is willing to take that risk. I think if he doesn't take the risk, he's not going to have an awful lot of bargaining power over the strait, and more generally over the final peace settlement that is going to be reached.
The Jacobins of Tehran
Rafaela Siewert: Given your deep understanding of Iranian history and of this regime, what do you think is one thing that the administration and even the American public should be thinking about as they approach this phase of the war, the negotiation, and the weeks to come?
Niall Ferguson: I think you need to think about the nature of the regime as it has metamorphosed. President Trump would love you to believe that this is somehow a more reasonable regime than the one of Ali Khamenei. But I don't think that's right. I think it's actually a great deal more radical. And the fact that the group of people now running Iran, with Mojtaba Khamenei as the figurehead, is a tightly knit group of revolutionaries deeply committed to the project of the 1979 revolution, who regarded Ali Khamenei as too soft. The thing that I think has been most missing in most of the US and European analysis is deep understanding of the regime as it now is. And it has something of the quality of the French Revolution, where the effect of external conflict actually moves the regime further in the direction of radicalism. So think of the Jacobins as being now in power. That's a frightening thought, because of course these people are also capable, as they've shown, of brutal repression of their own population. But I think that's the kind of government that we're up against now. It's a more fanatical, ideologically motivated government than was there before. And that is one of the unintended consequences of this war.
Rafaela Siewert: I think that's where we'll leave it. Niall Ferguson, thank you so much for your time.
Niall Ferguson: Thank you, Rafaela.