ROGER PARTRIDGE: The Historian Who Forgot His History

A response to Niall Ferguson’s claim that Trump "won" Davos

Economic historian and Hoover Institution senior fellow Niall Ferguson declares that Donald Trump “won Davos, hands down.”

Writing in The Free Press, Ferguson’s argument runs as follows. European leaders genuinely feared Trump might use military force to annex Greenland. They invoked international law and the rules-based order. Then Trump arrived, delivered his usual improvisational performance, and called the whole thing off. No new tariffs. No military action. 

Ferguson’s conclusion: Trump was bluffing all along – “maskirovka” to distract Europeans while his envoys negotiated with Putin over Ukraine. A further reassurance follows: Trump carries out only about half his social media threats. This is “a feature, not a bug” – a sophisticated strategy keeping counterparties uncertain.

Ferguson’s work has shaped my thinking about how liberal institutions flourish or fail. We share philosophical ground – a commitment to competitive markets, individual freedom, property rights and the rule of law. But his sanguine view of Trump’s assault on democratic institutions prompted me to challenge his thinking in an earlier essay for Persuasion. His more recent celebration of Trump’s Davos performance is equally troubling.

Ferguson frames Trump’s performance through the lens of the Melian Dialogue – the famous passage from Thucydides in which Athens tells the small island of Melos that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” Ferguson celebrates this as vindication of Trumpian realpolitik. Trump dominated the World Economic Forum, forced European leaders to discuss Greenland instead of substantive policy, and extracted their anxiety before backing down. Victory.

There are several problems with this – beginning with the history Ferguson omits.

Hubris and Nemesis

Athens won at Melos. The Athenians besieged the island, and when the Melians surrendered, they executed the men and enslaved the women and children. “The realists won an emphatic victory,” Ferguson notes approvingly.

What he neglects to mention is what happened next. The Melian massacre occurred in 416 BCE. The very next year, Athens launched the Sicilian Expedition – an act of imperial overreach that destroyed the Athenian fleet and army. Within twelve years of telling Melos that might makes right, Athens had surrendered to Sparta. Its walls were torn down. Its fleet was confiscated. Its democracy was replaced by oligarchy.

Thucydides presented the Melian Dialogue not as a celebration of power politics but as a moral indictment – hubris preceding nemesis. More than that, he used the Dialogue to dramatise the moment when Athens stopped making arguments and simply issued threats. Reasoned discourse gave way to raw power. The parallel to Trump’s negotiating style writes itself.

The professional historian appears to have forgotten his own source material.

The Contradiction with Ferguson’s Own Work

Puzzling, too, is that this enthusiasm for Trumpian “nineteenth‑century” politics sits uneasily with Ferguson’s earlier scholarship. In Colossus, he argued that the United States was already a de facto empire and urged it to shoulder that role responsibly: globalising free markets, the rule of law, and representative government, while sustaining its commitments rather than posturing and retreating. The book warned about imperial myopia, denial, and overstretch – an “empire with an attention deficit disorder” whose colossus had “feet of clay.” Ferguson drew explicit parallels with British decline.

Now the same historian celebrates Trump tearing that order apart. The intellectual trajectory from Colossus to this Davos column is not evolution. It is abandonment.

Domination Is Not Victory

The analytical confusion runs deeper. Conflating domination with victory and intimidation with diplomacy mistakes the nature of power itself.

Trump “owned” Davos by threatening tariffs, mocking allies, and forcing everyone to discuss his demands. This is not statecraft. It is the logic of the playground bully.

The playground bully also “wins” every lunchtime confrontation. Other children hand over their sandwiches. But he has not built alliances, earned loyalty, or created anything durable. He has merely demonstrated willingness to inflict costs. The moment his targets find alternatives – or band together – his power evaporates.

Consider what Trump’s Davos “victory” actually achieved. America already enjoys military access to Greenland. Denmark continues paying for the island’s subsidised inhabitants. The only concrete outcome is that European allies now view the United States as an unpredictable threat rather than a reliable partner.

This is the difference between transactional dominance and strategic success. Trump extracted attention and anxiety. He won the news cycle while degrading the relationships that underpin American security.

Ferguson presents all this as sophisticated strategy. The actual diplomatic communications tell a different story. In the days before Davos, Trump sentNorway’s prime minister a letter complaining that he had been denied the Nobel Peace Prize and therefore no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of Peace.” He questioned Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland because “a boat landed there hundreds of years ago,” adding “we had boats landing there, also.” This is not strategic ambiguity; it is grievance dressed up as statecraft.

Ferguson’s classical framing launders conduct that no previous president of either party would have contemplated.

Why This Matters

American power since 1945 has rested on something historically unusual: a dominant nation that deliberately bound itself with rules and institutions. Call it the Madisonian logic of international order. Just as the Founders understood that domestic liberty required constitutional constraints on power, the architects of the post-war system understood that durable cooperation required the strong to limit themselves. America did not bind itself out of weakness. It bound itself because self-restraint made its power more effective and more legitimate.

Allies provide forward bases, intelligence sharing, burden sharing, and collective legitimacy. When they view America as unreliable, they hedge – building independent capabilities, making side deals with rivals, refusing to coordinate when Washington needs them. This is already happening. European leaders now openly discuss strategic autonomy. Asian allies wonder whether American guarantees mean anything when the president threatens friends and praises dictators.

The dollar’s reserve currency status, favourable borrowing rates, and global investment flows all rest on trust in American institutions and predictability. When America becomes systematically unpredictable, capital seeks stability elsewhere. The privilege is not guaranteed. It must be maintained.

The reassurance that Trump bluffs half the time does not help. Imagine a surgeon who performs unnecessary operations half the time, or a banker who honours contracts at the flip of a coin. Predictability is not weakness. It is the foundation of trust, and trust is the foundation of durable relationships. Individual confrontations may be won while the capacity for sustained cooperation drains away.

The Real Lesson

The History of the Peloponnesian War is a tragedy. Athens begins as the champion of Greek liberty. It builds an empire. It grows arrogant. It treats allies as subjects and neutrals as enemies. It tells Melos that justice is irrelevant between the strong and the weak. And then it destroys itself through imperial overreach, internal division, and the accumulated resentments of those it bullied.

Thucydides wrote his history as “a possession for all time” – a warning about how great powers destroy themselves. The Melian Dialogue is not the lesson. It is the setup. The lesson comes after.

The liberal international order was built by Americans who remembered what the alternative looked like. They had lived through two world wars and understood that unconstrained great-power competition produces catastrophe. The rules they built were not naive idealism. They were hard-won wisdom about how to prevent the strong from destroying themselves along with the weak.

Ferguson knows this history better than most. He helped to teach a generation of readers why hubris, contempt for allies, and impatience with rules are the prelude to decline, not its antidote. The question now is not whether he has misread Thucydides. It is whether conservatives are willing to forget the constitutional and institutional restraints that once made Western power effective and legitimate – and to call that forgetfulness realism.

This essay is part of an ongoing series on liberalism, democracy, and the international order. Related writing is collected here.

Roger Partridge writes at Plain Thinking