Here's the entirety of Prof.Ferguson's Lord of the Rings Analogy vis-a-vis America/west (Numenor, Elves, middle-earth) vs. China, Russia, Iran, (Sauron, Saruman, Orcs)
PART I
The Second Cold War Is Escalating Faster Than the First To understand what is at stake in the fight against the axis of China, Russia and Iran, just read “The Lord of the Rings.”
In J.R.R. Tolkien’s great epic, The Lord of the Rings, it becomes apparent only gradually that the forces of darkness have united. Sauron, with his baleful all-seeing eye, emerges as the leader of a vast axis of evil: the Black Riders, the corrupted wizard Saruman, the subhuman orcs, the malignant courtier Wormtongue, the giant venomous spider Shelob — they are all in it together, and Mordor is their headquarters.
Tolkien knew whereof he wrote. A veteran of World War I, he watched with dismay the approach of a second great conflagration. Sipping pints of bitter and puffing his pipe in “The Shire” — his idealized Middle England — he could only shudder as Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperialist Japan came together to form their Axis in 1936-37, and mutter, “I told you so,” when Hitler and Stalin joined forces in 1939.
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We, too, are witnessing the formation and consolidation of an Axis. I was vividly reminded of Tolkien by a tweet published by the conservative broadcaster Mark R. Levin on Tuesday. It is worth quoting: “Appeasement is escalation. Our enemies are on the move. Our allies are being encircled and attacked or soon attacked. … Conservatism and MAGA are not about isolationism or pacifism. They’re not about appeasement or national suicide. … It is up to us, patriotic Americans, to step into the breach and get this done now.”
The significance of Levin’s intervention — penned from Israel, which he has been visiting — is that it so clearly puts him on a collision course with the isolationist elements within the Republican Party, such as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who last week threatened to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson if he pressed ahead with a bill that would restore US aid to Ukraine. “We are going to stand for freedom and make sure that Vladimir Putin doesn’t march through Europe,” Johnson declared. “We have to project to Putin, Xi, and Iran, and North Korea, and anybody else that we will defend freedom.”
To the likes of Greene and Levin’s former Fox News colleague Tucker Carlson, the war in Ukraine is just “a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing,” as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain infamously said of Czechoslovakia in September 1938. They appear quite unembarrassed to serve as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “useful idiots,” in direct lineal succession to Hitler’s and Stalin’s apologists in the 1930s.
And not only Putin’s. For, as State Department spokesman Matthew Miller pointed out last week, behind the Russian war effort stands the vast economic resources of the People’s Republic of China. “What we have seen over the past months is that there have been materials moving from China to Russia that Russia has used to rebuild [its] industrial base and produce arms that are showing up on the battlefield in Ukraine,” Miller told reporters on Tuesday. “And we are incredibly concerned about that.” In Beijing earlier this month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned her Chinese counterpart that there would be “significant consequences” if China continued to support the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Despite their protestations that they wish to act as peacemakers, China’s leaders gave the invasion of Ukraine their blessing on its eve — what else did the mutual pledge of a “no-limits” partnership mean? — and President Xi Jinping’s support has been crucial to Putin’s survival ever since his invasion force was repelled from the outskirts of Kyiv two years ago.
By the same token, one cannot treat Iran’s war against Israel in isolation. Tehran supports Russia’s war against Ukraine, supplying thousands of drones and missiles similar to the ones unleashed against Israel last weekend. Russia, in turn, is likely helping to strengthen Iran’s air defenses. China is not only one of the main buyers of Iran’s oil; Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called Tehran immediately after the attack on Israel to praise rather than condemn his Iranian counterparts. Chinese propaganda has been consistently anti-Israel since Hamas’s murderous attacks of Oct. 7 last year.
The emergence of this new Axis was foreseen by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, as long ago as 1997. In his book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski wrote:
Potentially, the most dangerous scenario would be a grand coalition of China, Russia, and perhaps Iran, an “antihegemonic” coalition united not by ideology but by complementary grievances. It would be reminiscent in scale and scope of the challenge once posed by the Sino-Soviet bloc, though this time China would likely be the leader and Russia the follower.
Brzezinski was prophetic. Looking back over the past three years, however, it is hard not to conclude that his successors in the Biden administration have done a great deal unwittingly as well as wittingly to make this coalition a reality, beginning by abandoning the Afghans to the tender mercies of the Taliban in 2021, then failing to deter Russia from invading Ukraine in 2022, and finally failing to deter Iran from unleashing its proxies against Israel in 2023. Yes, Biden stepped up to aid Ukraine and Israel when they came under attack, but an earlier show of strength might have avoided both emergencies.
Levin and Johnson have realized, as former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has long argued, that some quarrels in far-away countries must ultimately concern us. They are parts of a single war being waged by a new Axis against the fundamental values we hold dear: democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom. I predict that the isolationists’ counterarguments will not age well.