In a new article for Bloomberg, historian Niall Ferguson has written a grimly fascinating summary of where things stand in the escalating contest between the West (loosely speaking) on one side and the alliance — because that’s what it is — between Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran on the other. […]
And speaking of reckoning, there’s the small matter of America’s debt, something that prompts Ferguson to remind his readers about “Ferguson’s law”:
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. True of Hapsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year, when (according to the CBO) net interest outlays will be 3.1% of GDP, defense spending 3.0%.
On our current trajectory, this gap will only widen, until it can’t. Läs artikel