Niall Ferguson, Columnist

If You Think World War III Is Unimaginable, Read This

Novelists and filmmakers have long developed alternative histories of major conflicts that should serve as warnings for complacent Americans.

February 11, 2024 at 12:00 AM EST

Corrected

April 25, 2024 at 2:32 PM EDT

By Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the author, most recently, of “Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.”

London, blitzed.
Photographer: London Express/Hulton Archive via Getty Images

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Are we unable to imagine defeat?

You might have thought that, having so recently lost a small war, Americans would have no difficulty picturing the consequences of losing a large one. But the humiliating abandonment of Afghanistan in 2021 has been consigned with remarkable swiftness to the collective memory hole.

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