By Niall Ferguson March 9, 2022 Does Russia grind out victory? Can sanctions stop that? Might Putin go nuclear? Is China for war or peace? The past offers clues, but no certain answers.
What makes history so hard to predict - the reason there is no neat "cycle" of history enabling us to prophesy the future - is that most disasters come out of left field. Unlike hurricanes and auto accidents, to which we can at least attach probabilities, the biggest disasters (pandemics and wars) follow power-law or random distributions. They belong in the realm of uncertainty, or what Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book The Black Swan, calls Extremistan. They are like tsunamis, not tides.
What's more, as I argued in my book "Doom", disasters don't come in any predictable sequence. The most I can say is that we tend not to get the same disaster twice in succession. This time we've gone from plague to war. In 1918, it was from war to plague. The Hundred Years War began eight years before the Black Death struck England.
Not everything in history is random, of course. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not difficult to foresee at the beginning of this year. You just had to take Russian President Vladimir Putin both literally and seriously when he asserted that the Russian and Ukrainian peoples were one and that the possibility of Ukraine becoming a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization or the European Union was a red line; and to realize that Western threats of economic sanctions would not deter him.
Now
that the war is well into its second week, however, there are much more
difficult predictions to make. It seems there are seven distinct
historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going
fastest. All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from
political science or economics that can really help us here.........To Read More.....
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