I first encountered Niall Ferguson in a real way when I was writing a review essay for The New Yorker at the end of 2003. The editors had sent me a small stack of books about what we might call the “neo-imperial” moment that took hold of Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. One of these books was by Ferguson, a fairly rousing and unabashed celebration of the British Empire. If anything it was among the more indirect and implicit versions of the story told by the various authors, celebrating the glories of empire and leaving it to the reader to draw the conclusion it was time to bring them back. As I’ve read columns of his here and there over the last couple decades, the historianness has receded as the tendentious provocateur has moved to the front. But something different struck me about the piece he published in The Free Press earlier this week (subscription required) about Trump’s Gaza peace plan: that was how much it matches in key outlines the piece I wrote on the same topic last week. If you recall, I wrote that the Trump plan was actually a fairly big deal and one that for a variety of reasons only Trump was in a position to pull off. The basis of the agreement is the common authoritarianism and corruption that now knits together Washington, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi and other regional capitals through the personal relationships binding together Trump family and the princely families of the Gulf.
