Honestly with Bari Weiss: w/ Niall Ferguson on 2026 Forecast (Transcript)

The Israeli Defense Forces had a pretty good go at this and certainly inflicted very serious damage on the organization. But it’s still there in that rump of Gaza that it controls, and it’s still using brutal violence to ensure that the local population doesn’t question its authority.

So that was an important moment and a meaningful success for President Trump because it had been enormously difficult to resolve the problem ever since October 7, 2023, because Israel found itself in the wake of those appalling atrocities that you and I discussed more than once, Bari, having to do two incompatible things: destroy Hamas and rescue the hostages. It was pretty much impossible to do both those things. Now it can focus on destroying Hamas without having to be concerned about hostages.

But I’d just like to add one broader point. It always was a mistake of media coverage to focus on Gaza as if it was the only game or the only war in town. Israel’s actually been fighting on seven different fronts. It has been dealing not only with Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, but also with Hezbollah in Lebanon. It had to contend with the Houthis. It had problems coming at it from multiple directions, including, until quite recently, from Syria.

And so you have to really understand the Middle East in a slightly broader framework than just Gaza. And I think in that sense, the real story of 2025 was that Iran and its proxies suffered multiple defeats, all of which significantly weakened it, of which the most important was clearly the destruction or semi-destruction of the nuclear facility at Fordow by U.S. stealth bombers.

Where do we go from here? Well, where we go from here is ongoing conflict in a number of those theaters, because this story ain’t over. Iran is beginning to rebuild its seriously damaged nuclear capabilities. It is trying to revive its economy. That’s not easy. They’re in the grip of a dreadful water shortage.

And Benjamin Netanyahu, the ultimate survivor of Israeli politics, has to decide between now and the election that has to happen in October, what to do. Does he hit Iran again? I think he probably does, because why let these guys rebuild when you had them on their knees last year?

The challenge for him is that the more pressure he exerts, particularly on Iran, but more generally, the more he flexes in the region, the more ambivalence in the United States will become apparent. And I don’t just mean the hostility of people on the left, which has been going on for some time. I think I’m really more concerned about the hostility on the right, on the far right of American politics towards Israel, which has been one of the really striking developments of the past 12 months.

Iran’s Internal Instability

OLIVER WISEMAN: Niall, before we move on, let’s just—on Iran, I mean, there’s the Israel-Iran dynamic. But then there’s also the internal question of the stability of the Iranian regime. You know, we see now young women in Iran walking around without hijabs in the way they couldn’t not so long ago. The kind of open defiance that suggests a regime that doesn’t feel as strong as it once did.

What are your predictions of how things look in Iran internally in 2026 and whether there could be some kind of instability there that changes things geopolitically?

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I think there is a great danger in inferring from protests in Tehran a probability of regime change or regime crisis in Iran as a whole. The regime has proved remarkably effective at withstanding popular protest year after year. And so I’m not about to predict its downfall.

It’s hard to believe that Supreme Leader Khamenei will still be alive at the end of 2026 because he’s so old. And in fact, it’s remarkable that he got through 2025. The bigger problem for the regime, I think, is what they do when he dies. And can they manage a transition when they don’t have a succession plan, they don’t have a successor to what I imagine will be an IRGC, a Revolutionary Guard-led military-type regime.

I think one of the big questions for the Israeli government and the U.S. government is what’s the right thing to do to help that regime collapse? I don’t think Mr. Netanyahu cares about regime change. I think he likes the idea of regime collapse. And indeed, the United States can’t come up with a credible story about what the regime would change to. So it probably implicitly is on side with regime collapse. It’s just hard to bring that about.

And my own view is it’s extremely difficult to imagine a peaceful transition to a more friendly Iranian regime if the process has Israeli fingerprints on it. And that, I think, is one of the central strategic dilemmas not only for Mr. Netanyahu, but also for Mr. Trump.

The War in Ukraine

BARI WEISS: Okay, let’s turn now from Iran to Eastern Europe. Let’s go to the war in Ukraine, a subject you’ve written about for us an enormous amount. All of it’s fantastic. Those who haven’t read Niall on Ukraine, go to The Free Press right now.

So just to review for people who have kind of tuned out that war, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in 2022. And in the early months, there was widespread optimism, I would say, about Ukraine’s ability to win the war. We’re four years in. You tell me how many people have been killed so far in this war. Niall, how many?

NIALL FERGUSON: Oh, nobody really knows. But the Russian casualties are certainly in the hundreds of thousands. It has been an enormously bloody war. We don’t know the Ukrainian death tolls, we can only guess. Probably not as high because they’ve mostly been on the defensive.

But this has been a very bloody war, partly because the weaponry has become very accurate. Drones are very reliable ways of killing people. And so it’s a desperately dangerous front line where the conflict goes on. But the casualties are also mounting on the home front, particularly for Ukraine, because this past year was the year when the Russians turned to terror bombing, bombing of civilians with drones and with missiles as deliberate strategy. So the body count is high and rising.

BARI WEISS: So the question is how this ends and whether or not some kind of deal that doesn’t sort of reward Russia is possible. So where is Putin’s head heading into 2026, and where is Zelensky’s?

The War in Ukraine: A Historian’s Sobering Assessment

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, I don’t think The Free Press existed when this war began. It certainly didn’t exist when Russia made its first move against Ukraine back in 2014. But if you were following my writing in other locations, I was saying that it was highly unlikely that Ukraine could win a war against Russia.

And those who euphorically predicted a Ukrainian victory, I think were ignoring history and ignoring the economic imbalance between these two competing states. So I was never an optimist about how this would turn out.

I am emotionally engaged on the side of Ukraine. I’ve been to Ukraine every year, I think, since 2011, and I was there most recently in September. I can tell you better where President Zelenskyy’s head is. I can guess where Putin’s is. Of course, you can best base your guess on an extremely long press conference that Putin has just held, during which I can’t say I watched it all.

He made it pretty clear that he was not about to accept a compromise piece of the sort that has been on the table now for some weeks. That would leave Ukraine intact as a sovereign state with a substantial army and a U.S. and European security guarantee.

Putin’s goal has been from the outset to break Ukraine as an independent sovereign state, not to allow it to continue in that capacity. It’s not just about territory for him. It doesn’t seem to me to matter how many square miles of the Donbas region he gets to keep. The problem for Putin is that if he gets the Donbass but Ukraine is still viable, then he hasn’t achieved his war aim.

And so we can, I think, confidently predict that he doesn’t accept a compromise peace deal and prepares to carry on fighting the war.

For President Zelensky, things are more complicated because, well, he’s running a democracy apart from anything else. And although the opinion polls are quite good for Zelensky, it’s not like he’s lost popular support despite a welter of corruption scandals that have embarrassed his government in the past year.

The problem is just that this war is taking a terrible toll on Ukraine’s people. The army is very thinly spread along a long front line. The army is an elderly army by historic standards. Last time I checked, the average age was 43. And they are struggling to recruit young men into that army.

That is a very big problem in a war of attrition along front line, when the Russians seem able to find warm bodies that can walk towards gunfire or at least drone fire in the regions east of the Urals where economic opportunities are fairly limited.

So Zelensky is dealing with a fatigued population and he knows that he needs a ceasefire. The problem is that if he buys a ceasefire at too high a price, he’s going to be politically vulnerable to challenges. So his path is a much rockier one than Putin’s, particularly because he has to get not only Trump, the United States on side, but also the Europeans, who are currently providing more financial support than the United States.

And since the U.S. and the Europeans can’t really agree on what an adequate or satisfactory peace would look like, it makes the diplomacy of negotiating peace extremely difficult for the Ukrainians.

Putin doesn’t have that problem because the people backing him are Xi Jinping, plus the Iranians and the North Koreans. But Xi Jinping is a lot easier to deal with than all the different leaders that Zelensky has to spend his time mollifying.

OLIVER WISEMAN: So, Niall, this is a prediction show. If you had to distill all of that analysis down into a prediction about whether there will be an end to the war, some kind of ceasefire, some kind of deal in 2026, what would you say?

NIALL FERGUSON: My base case is that the war keeps going, but there’s a rising probability, maybe it’s 30%, that some kind of compromise peace gets hammered out because Ukraine needs it. And there are pressure points that can be used to move Putin if we choose to apply pressure.

So I think there’s a non-zero, but it’s not higher than 30% probability of at least a ceasefire in 2026. But the base case is, I’m afraid the war keeps going.

OLIVER WISEMAN: And just on that, one more question, which is, what should the Trump administration be doing that it badly wants peace? What should it be doing if it wants to deliver that in 2026 that it’s not currently doing?

What Trump Could Do to End the War

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, there are two things that really can hurt Russia. One is that you make secondary sanctions on Russia’s oil exports so that they cease to have a market because it’s too expensive for Indian or Chinese businesses to buy Russian oil. We’ve threatened that, but we haven’t really enforced it.

And the second thing is just to tell the Ukrainians, just keep hitting those targets deep inside Russia. Here, have some more missiles to do it. And we could also do that. We nearly gave them the Tomahawk missiles, and then Trump changed his mind.

The reason, by the way, that we aren’t doing that is not that President Trump has a bromance with Putin or that the Russians have kompromat on him. It’s that, strategically, the Trump team thinks that it’s in a world of great powers, one of which is the U.S., one of which is China, one of which is Russia, and maybe there are a couple of others.

And in that world, you can’t permanently antagonize both Russia and China. Ideally, you want one of them to come closer to you. So, on the basis of Realpolitik, or as we’ve sometimes called it, Bari, “real estate politic,” the Trump people don’t really want to lean that hard on Putin.

They are hoping that they can get Zelensky to make the concessions because, well, he’s just Ukraine, he’s not a great power. That’s how they think about these things.

The trouble about that approach is you don’t get the peace because Putin has no incentive to settle. Putin can just play to win. He can just grind out this victory, even if the casualties on the Russian side go to a million. Because he’s Putin. He’s got the bodies and he’s got the power.

He doesn’t have the accountability to his own people, and he’s got the Chinese supplying them with the hardware. That’s why my base case is that the war keeps going.

I think the Ukrainians can hold out, but it’s getting harder and harder for them. And that’s why I’m urging them and the U.S. and the Europeans take a compromise peace, even if it means losing some of the territory in Donbass you currently control, because you need a ceasefire and with security guarantees, you have a future.

Trump’s China Strategy: Did the Tariffs Work?

BARI WEISS: So we’ve covered the Middle East, we’re on a rapid whistle stop tour around the world. We’ve gone to Eastern Europe. Now let’s go to what you and everyone I trust really considers our most formidable adversary and the force, frankly behind a lot of what’s going on in those other places, which of course is China.

Trump on April 2 declared “Liberation Day” and announced these reciprocal tariffs on all countries not already subject to sanctions. Some of these tariffs of course, reached as high as 125%. I remember being in a very cold hotel room and livestreaming with you about this topic.

And then of course what happened is that people, especially libertarian economists, were freaking out. But Trump then began to walk some of it back and carving out exceptions. And this is how he began to earn that infamous nickname of “TACO”—Trump Always Chickens Out.

So first I want to ask, did the tariffs work? And second is give us the broad picture. How would you rate Trump’s handling so far in this second term of our most formidable adversary in the world?

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, on tariffs working, it depends what you mean by “works.” They’re supposed to do multiple things, not all of which they can simultaneously do. They’ve certainly worked as a source of revenue. It’s brought in quite a hefty amount of money to the U.S. treasury, not enough to solve the huge deficit that it’s running, but still it’s brought in some cash.

It hasn’t caused industrialization in the United States to resume on a vast scale because it would take a lot more than protective or protectionist tariffs to do that. There are lots of reasons why it’s hard to do manufacturing in the United States, labor costs permitting, etc.

But the real point of these tariffs, I think was to try to redress the imbalances in the global trading system, which I think were real. I don’t think it was delusion on the part of Donald Trump to say that the trading system, the so-called liberal international order, benefited others more than the United States.

The question is whether the reciprocal tariffs were the right way to go about fixing that. To some extent I think it has worked in the sense that those countries that really did have very asymmetrical trading relationships with the U.S.—say India or Brazil, which clearly charged very high duties and non-tariff barriers on U.S. goods and paid almost nothing on the other end, exporting to the U.S.—have had to renegotiate.

And the renegotiation, especially with the Asian economies as well as with the Europeans, is real and it’s ongoing and I don’t think it’s trivial.

But China is the main event, as you implied, Bari, and when you look at the trade war with China that Trump launched very early on in 2025, before reciprocal tariffs, before Liberation Day, the result of that trade war has to have been a win for Xi Jinping.

Unlike everybody else, China retaliated commensurately in a kind of tit-for-tat game theoretical way. They’d planned for this. They had a strategy. Everything Trump did, they matched it. And then they played their ace, which was export controls on rare earth elements.

That’s all those weird and wonderful things on the periodic table that you never learned in chemistry, which turn out to be kind of important for a whole bunch of 21st century industrial activities. And that was the trump card which forced the United States to scale back its tariffs on China and enter into negotiations, which are still going on, about the tariffs that the U.S. and China are going to levy on one another.

So I think you have to say that as an instrument in Cold War II of applying pressure to Xi Jinping, this did not work well. In fact, it revealed the power that China now exerts not only over the U.S. but over the whole world because it has a monopoly on the mining and refining of these rare earth elements. And you can’t build a modern car without those.

Will China Invade Taiwan in 2026?

OLIVER WISEMAN: Niall, the place, of course, where this Cold War people worry might become a hot war is Taiwan. And we ask you about it now because the clock is ticking and Xi Jinping has set himself and the Chinese army a deadline of being ready to achieve reunification, meaning in non-propagandistic terms, the invasion of Taiwan by 2027, which means it has to happen this year or it might happen this year.

So again, I’m going to pin you down with a cold, hard prediction question, which is will China invade Taiwan in 2026?

NIALL FERGUSON: No, it won’t. And I don’t think it’ll invade Taiwan in 2027 either, because I don’t think China’s military is ready to carry on what would be an enormously challenging military operation. I’m not even sure they’re going to blockade Taiwan, which is another option where they just surround the island and control access to it for people and trade.

I think what we’ll see in 2026 is ongoing political pressure and military pressure to try to shift the Taiwanese towards a kind of acceptance that where Hong Kong now is, is where they’re going, where they’ll have some nominal separate system, but they’ll in effect, be under the control of Beijing.

It’s going to be all about diplomacy in 2026, not about warfare, because President Trump thinks he’s going to have multiple meetings with Xi Jinping. I’ve heard the number four bandied around. That would be unprecedented for the U.S. President to meet the Chinese leader four times. Not even Richard Nixon managed that.

I think we can forget four meetings, but there’ll be at least two, I’d guess. And these meetings will be very consequential because there is a whole lot of stuff on the table.

It’s true that the Chinese have the rare earth elements that they can restrict our access to, but we have something that we can restrict their access to, and that is the most sophisticated semiconductors. Those are the ones designed by Nvidia, by Jensen Huang’s company and manufactured by TSMC in, you guessed it, Taiwan.

So the negotiations are going to be about tariffs, they’re going to be about trade restrictions, about export controls on rare earth elements, they’re going to be about fentanyl, they’re going to be about a whole range of things. But the one that will really be the key is Taiwan itself.

The Chinese want the U.S. to change its position on Taiwan to say right out that we will not support, in fact, we will oppose any move towards Taiwanese independence. I don’t think President Trump is going to do that. I don’t think any of his advisors will tell him to do it, but that’s going to be the ask.

So it’s going to be a year of summitry, not of invasions or blockades. And these summits could be very consequential because there’s so much on the table. This is the kind of thing you would expect in a cold war. The two presidents get together.

You remember summitry was such a thing back in the day, the summit. I mean, I’m old enough to remember “summit mania” when you would get all kinds of excitement because Reagan was meeting Gorbachev in Reykjavik. Well, it’s going to be like that, only with Trump and Xi.

Venezuela: Will Maduro Fall?

BARI WEISS: Okay, let’s take one last stop, one that I don’t know if we could have predicted a year ago, and that is Venezuela. The U.S., of course, has been conducting these operations against what it describes as Venezuelan drug trafficking vessels. Washington says that these are completely legitimate. It’s aimed at stopping narcotic shipments. Venezuela says that Washington is trying to destabilize the government.

Machado just won the Nobel Peace Prize. She smuggled out of the country. There’s a lot of drama around Venezuela and the pretty horrendous evil regime of Maduro. Where does this end in 2026? Does Maduro fall?

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, if you want to get rid of somebody, if you really want to change the regime, history tells us it’s hard to do it from the air. You really do need to be down there on the ground in Caracas if you want to get rid of Maduro and put somebody else better than Maduro into that job. And what I’m not seeing is any evidence that the Trump administration is ready to send in the Marines.

Let’s go back to the Trump corollary. After the Roosevelt corollary, it was pretty routine for the Marine Corps and other U.S. military personnel to be deployed to Cuba, to Panama, to Haiti. And so there’s a precedent, if you’re prepared to go back far enough for that kind of intervention. And the U.S. continued to do that kind of thing, really right up until the 1950s. You could even say that the overthrow of Noriega was an example. Think of Grenada. You know, the Reagan administration did stuff like this and then we stopped.

Then we kind of got a bit embarrassed about treating Latin America as our backyard. And we still are a little bit embarrassed about it, or at least we’re reluctant to deploy the proverbial boots on the ground because, well, you never know what might go wrong. And it never looks good if you send a bunch of our boys somewhere and they start coming back in body bags.

So I think Maduro can hang on if the U.S. isn’t prepared to send in some ground forces to persuade him to get on the plane and leave. That’s not something I say with high confidence, because as you mentioned, Bari, there are a great many moving parts. And you have to admit that it would be kind of anticlimactic for the U.S. to deploy an enormous flotilla, as big as there has been, really, since the Second World War in the Caribbean, and then have nothing happen.

So I can’t quite work out how they get around this. But I’m confident that if Maduro doesn’t want to go, he’s not going to go unless there is a military force there that makes him go.

The Unpredictable Flashpoints of 2026

OLIVER WISEMAN: Niall, we’ve covered the kind of obvious flashpoints, I guess: China, Venezuela, the Middle East, Ukraine. Often, though, it’s the places that we don’t predict, and that’s where the drama pops up. Who could have predicted in 2023, at the start of 2023, that Israel, Gaza would be the big thing for the following two years?

So, first part of my question is, what is not on our radar so far in this conversation that should be on our radar for 2026 in your view? And then secondly, you mentioned earlier the kind of fight on the right in America about all sorts of things, including America’s role in the world and U.S. foreign policy. And how does that, do you predict, how is that going to change or impact the administration’s approach to all of these things? Is that going to, are we going to see the ripple effects of that fight in U.S. foreign policy?

The Return of the Pogrom

NIALL FERGUSON: Well, this is a subject that I’ve been thinking a lot about since the hideous massacre in Bondi Beach in Australia. And I come away with the following conclusion: that there are going to be attacks on Jewish communities all over the world because the pattern is now establishing itself that the Islamists, whether they’re Iranian-backed or not, see a whole variety of soft targets in the Jewish communities of the Western world, broadly defined.

And as that violence continues, and I fear it will, then I think the whole issue of antisemitism is going to become a bigger and bigger issue in U.S. politics because those, and I associate them with Tucker Carlson and others who have supported him, those who want to flirt with the old and odious antisemitism of the right will, I think, be roundly condemned, as they were by Ben Shapiro just the other night, by people who understand that antisemitism is a truly toxic ideological substance.

It’s a very problematic issue for the MAGA movement because there are clearly elements in the MAGA movement in the United States that don’t want to expel Tucker Carlson from their midst. So I would say the question of where we are neglecting is the location of the next major attack on a Jewish community. And since attacks happened in 2025 everywhere from England to Australia, it’s really anybody’s guess where the next attack occurs.

I’m sad to say this, but I think we have to stare in the face the reality that antisemitism is on the rise, violent attacks, pogroms are on the rise around the world. I had a conversation with an Israeli minister in November and he made the point that if you think about antisemitism mainly in terms of the Holocaust, which I suppose we’ve been educated to do, you forget that prior to the Holocaust, pogroms, outbreaks of violence against Jewish communities, were a regular feature of life in 19th century Europe, and not only in Europe.

So it’s the return of the pogrom which begins to feel like one of the trends of the 2000s, perhaps the most odious trend of the 2000s. I suspect that we’re going to have to deal with more of that in 2026.

OLIVER WISEMAN: Alas.

Historical Lessons on Antisemitism

BARI WEISS: Put on your historian’s hat for a moment. How does that play out? In other words, has there ever been sort of a rising surge of antisemitic, frenzied violence that doesn’t end with some kind of broader catastrophe? Or is it possible to somehow, like, put the genie back in the bottle? How does it play out more specifically when this… I’m just asking for a friend, you know what I mean?

OLIVER WISEMAN: Yeah, you’re asking for a lot of friends of mine too.

NIALL FERGUSON: I think the lesson of the late 19th century is that when violence against Jews occurred in the Russian Empire, what was called the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe, where Jewish communities under Russian rule lived, the United States played a key role in condemning the tsarist government and indeed, restricting its access to the New York capital market. It was a remarkable time when a financial figure like Jacob Schiff could have that kind of influence.

The Rothschilds in London also played a part in condemning the way that Jews were being treated. And Jewish communities found that they were supported by non-Jewish liberals as well as many conservatives on that issue. So there is a playbook for condemning antisemitism and penalizing those who engage in it.

And we need to blow the dust off that playbook and remind Britons, Americans, perhaps throughout the English-speaking world and beyond that the lesson of the 20th century is if you do not check antisemitism, if you don’t condemn it, if you don’t drive it out of the pale of political respectability, then like some ghastly cancer, it will spread until it poses a truly mortal threat.

That is the way to think about the Holocaust. The Holocaust, I argued this in a book called “War of the World,” published back in 2006, nearly 20 years ago, was a consequence of a sustained spread of an ideology that identified Jews as racial aliens and then laid the foundation for their annihilation. It didn’t begin in 1933. These ideologies had roots in the mid-19th century.

And one of the points I keep making when I try to explain what’s going on to people is the ideology is not new. Nobody’s come up with anything new in the 21st century. Ideologically, we’re back to 19th century brands. Hey, try antisemitism or how about socialism? How does that grab you?

So these ideologies, they’ve been around for a long, long time. But when people try to deploy them again in the context of our time, with all the powerful algorithms that exist to disseminate these toxic ideologies, when a Nick Fuentes can be turned into a kind of star, essentially by algorithmic manipulation, then the potential seems even more lethal.

So we have to act now. We have to act now because if we don’t, it will ultimately lead down a path to something like Auschwitz. And this is, I think, a moral imperative for all people who care about not just democracy, but also the rule of law and basic human decency. If you think it’s okay to say Hitler was cool for the LOLs, then you’re evil and you’re part of what ultimately is a political cancer.

Closing

BARI WEISS: Niall Ferguson, maybe not the happiest note, but I can’t think of a more powerful one to end on. Thanks for coming on the show. And more than that, thanks for being with us at The Free Press. Can’t wait to see what you are going to write about and talk about in 2026. Merry Christmas.

NIALL FERGUSON: Thanks, Bari. Thanks, Oliver. Merry Christmas to everybody. I wasn’t very merry there, but hey, you did ask.

BARI WEISS: Can you just do the imitation that you began with for me, for my LOLs for one more second? Be the radio man.

NIALL FERGUSON: This is London calling with news of fresh disaster. The world is ending on our watch. His Majesty the King will be opening a garden fete in Liverpool this afternoon at 4 p.m. At Prime Minister’s questions, the Leader of the Opposition will ask a devastating question about social media censorship.

BARI WEISS: You’re the best.

NIALL FERGUSON: Lovely, lovely to see you. Lots of love, everybody. Bye.

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