Niall Ferguson: The Vibe Shift Goes Global At home, Yale Law School and DEI committees are out. Abroad, strength and escalation are in.
I am a 60-year-old Scotsman with a penchant for red suspenders, oolong tea, and the novels of Walter Scott—so no one will ever accuse me of being an arbiter of cool. But to understand politics and even geopolitics you have to understand culture, which is sometimes—often—upstream of both. And to understand culture you have to understand, well, vibes.
Specifically, vibe shifts.
The pop culture commentator Sean Monahan identified three mini-epochs between 2003 and 2020: Hipster/Indie (ca. 2003–9), Post-Internet/Techno (ca. 2010–16), and Hypebeast/Woke (ca. 2016–20). Each was defined by a distinct aesthetic, and the vibe shift from one to the other was swift and palpable. As the pandemic receded, New York magazine’s Allison P. Davis predicted that another vibe shift had to be approaching. (And indeed, Monahan has dubbed the new epoch “Pilled/Scene.”)
I confess none of this meant much to me. I couldn’t tell a hypebeast from a hipster if my life depended on it.
But the term finally clicked—and acquired a powerful significance—when it was imported to the world of tech. In a clever Substack post in February, Santiago Pliego tried to sum up the change that had occurred from the epoch of woke—which began with the cancellation of James Damore by Google in 2017—to the unfiltered era of Elon Musk’s X.
“Fundamentally,” Pliego wrote, “the Vibe Shift is a return to—a championing of—Reality, a rejection of the bureaucratic, the cowardly, the guilt-driven; a return to greatness, courage, and joyous ambition.” To be precise:
The Vibe Shift is spurning the fake and therapeutic and reclaiming the authentic and concrete.
The Vibe Shift is a healthy suspicion of credentialism and a return to human judgment.
The Vibe Shift is living not by lies, and instead speaking the truth—whatever the cost.
The Vibe Shift is directly facing our tumultuous times, refusing to blackpill, and choosing to build instead.
The vibe shift hit American politics on the night of November 5. What no one foresaw was that it would almost immediately go global, too.
The crude way to think about this is just geopolitical physics. The American electorate decisively reelects Donald Trump. Ergo: The German government falls, the French government falls, the South Korean president declares martial law, Bashar al-Assad flees Syria. There’s an economic chain reaction, too. Bitcoin rallies, the dollar rallies, U.S. stocks rally, Tesla rallies. Meanwhile, the Russian currency weakens, China slides deeper into deflation, and Iran’s economy reels.
One catchphrase that sums it up: It’s like Trump’s already president.
If the vibe shift in culture is about founder mode versus diversity, equity, and inclusion committees, the global vibe shift is about peace through strength versus chaos through de-escalation. It’s Daddy’s Home—not the fraying liberal international order.
“It must be nice, it must be nice,” sang Lin-Manuel Miranda, “to have Washington on your side.” It must be nice to have Trump, too. The Argentine president, Javier Milei—a radical libertarian who has taken a chainsaw to the bloated bureaucracy of Buenos Aires—is one of the lucky few foreign leaders on whom Trump smiles. The global vibe shift is very good for Milei because in many ways, he started it. A year ago, at Davos, he was treated as a kind of Mad Hatter. Now he’s in the Palm Beach Rat Pack, right next to Don and Elon. If Milei needs more help from the International Monetary Fund, he’ll get it.
Canada, America’s nearest neighbor, certainly felt the vibe shift on November 25 when Trump threatened to impose a 25-percent tariff on both Canada and Mexico on his first day in power unless fentanyl and illegal migrants stopped crossing into the United States from their territories. Four days later, Justin Trudeau was in Mar-a-Lago. The Canadian prime minister soon realized he’d bought a ticket to be trolled when Trump suggested over dinner that Canada become the 51st state.
Mexico’s president Claudia Sheinbaum tried to hang tough, warning Trump that Mexico would “meet tariffs with tariffs,” according to The Economist. But when the two leaders spoke, her tone was emollient. Not long after that, the Mexican military seized over a ton of fentanyl pills—the largest hit against the opioid smugglers in the country’s history. Cause, meet effect.
The vibe shift has already had effects in Europe, too. Within days of the U.S. election, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen proposed that Europe should buy more liquefied natural gas from America in order to ward off new tariffs on European exports to the United States. It’s a little embarrassing, to say the least, that Europe continues to buy natural gas from Russia, which it otherwise excoriates for having invaded Ukraine. “Why not replace it [with] American LNG,” asked von der Leyen, “which is cheaper for us and brings down our energy prices?” That’s a pretty good question. It’s funny she never asked it until after November 5.
Here’s another consequence of the global vibe shift. Prior to the U.S. election, European leaders were unable to agree on any collective action to increase their defense capabilities. “Strategic autonomy” was an empty slogan. Now, suddenly, there is serious discussion of a €500 billion EU defense fund.
There is more at work here than mere coincidence. This time four years ago, liberals could tell themselves that the Trump presidency had been a one-term populist aberration, and that the adults were in charge again. Those adults went ahead and restored much of Barack Obama’s foreign policy.
American allies in Europe and Asia were supposed to give all this a standing ovation. Some did. But now the vibe shift is sweeping those suckers aside.
Last week, in France, an alliance of the far right and the left in the National Assembly voted down the government of Prime Minister Michel Barnier, appointed by President Emmanuel Macron after disastrous legislative elections last summer destroyed his domestic power base. The decision to pull the plug on Barnier was primarily taken by the leader of the far-right Rassemblement National, Marine Le Pen, long seen as the French Trump. In Berlin, Olaf Scholz’s “traffic-light” coalition—of red Social Democrats, amber Free Democrats, and green Greens—fell in the same week as Trump’s election. Friedrich Merz, who was for years the Christian Democrats’ genuinely conservative alternative to centrist Angela “Mutti” Merkel, now seems very likely to be the next German chancellor. (Indeed, the vibe shift has abruptly turned Merkel from hero to zero. “The indispensable European” was what The Economist called her in November 2015. “Angela who?” asked the same magazine on October 24.)
All over the world, from Romania to South Korea, the vibe shift reverberates. Yet the best example of the global vibe shift—by far—is surely in the Middle East.
Joe Biden wants you to believe that it’s his doing. “For years the main backers of Assad have been Iran, Hezbollah, and Russia, but over the last week their support collapsed, all three of them, because all three of them are far weaker today than they were when I took office,” he said on Sunday, in the aftermath of the Syrian tyrant’s flight from Damascus to Moscow.
But who deserves the credit here? Surely not Biden. If anyone has weakened Iran and Hezbollah, it must be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has refused to yield to sustained American pressure to de-escalate Israel’s war against Iran’s proxies. The credit for weakening Russia belongs mainly to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, who declined Biden’s offer of a plane to escape Kyiv following the Russian invasion of his country.
The usual purveyors of banal commentary want to hail Assad’s fall as a victory for democracy over tyranny. But no one should delude themselves about what has just happened in Syria. It’s not the wind of freedom that is blowing through the streets of Damascus because, as is so often the case in the Arab world, the people who overthrew Assad are radical Islamists. Op-eds about a new morning in Damascus seem like they were written in 2011. They completely miss the vibe shift.
The reality is that we are witnessing the complete and total unraveling of the disastrous foreign policy that began under Obama and was picked up again by Biden, the perverse effect of which was to strengthen both Iran and Russia.
The series of blunders that consigned Syria to a hideous and protracted civil war and opened the door to Russia in both Syria and Ukraine began between July 2012 and August 2013, when the White House said that if Assad used chemical weapons he would be deemed to have “crossed a red line.” The regime used chemical weapons anyway. And the White House’s threat was empty; in August 2013, Obama decided to call off the planned retaliatory air strikes.
Worse, Obama then allowed the Russian government to broker a deal under which Assad handed over (some of) his chemical weapons. On September 10, 2013, Obama announced that the United States was no longer the “world’s policeman.” Five months later, Russian troops occupied Crimea, the annexation of which followed on March 18. In September 2015, President Vladimir Putin sent not only three dozen aircraft but also 1,500 troops to Latakia, Syria, and warships to the Caspian Sea.
On Obama’s watch, Putin established himself not only as the proud owner-occupier of the Crimean peninsula and a power broker in the Middle East but also as a troublemaker in Africa, hiring out the mercenaries of the Wagner Group to the nastiest regimes he could find south of the Sahara.
The signature achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was supposed to be his much-vaunted Iran deal. But the upshot of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was that the Iranians took the money they made from sanctions relief and diverted it to the likes of Assad, Hamas, and Hezbollah.
Meanwhile, China—under its new leader Xi Jinping—embarked on an arms buildup unlike anything since the Cold War. The North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, who also came to power on Obama’s watch, was another who understood the importance of acquiring weapons of mass destruction while Obama was in the White House.
The overall effect of Obama’s second term was to tilt the balance of geopolitical advantage in favor of our enemies: China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Trump’s election in 2016 temporarily halted this tilt, but it merely resumed and accelerated after Trump lost to Biden. In Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, Biden explicitly signaled the replacement of deterrence with “de-escalation.” The result was increasing cooperation between what began to look like a new Eurasian Axis.
The vibe shift is, in essence, escalation versus de-escalation. Trump made that perfectly clear when he recently posted:
“Everybody is talking about the hostages who are being held so violently, inhumanely, and against the will of the entire World, in the Middle East,” Trump wrote on December 2. “But it’s all talk, and no action! Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that if the hostages are not released prior to January 20, 2025, the date that I proudly assume Office as President of the United States, there will be ALL HELL TO PAY in the Middle East, and for those in charge who perpetrated these atrocities against Humanity. Those responsible will be hit harder than anybody has been hit in the long and storied History of the United States of America. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW!”
This is exactly the kind of language the Biden administration has refused to use for the past 14 months. Even better was this gem from Saturday, which Trump put out as soon as it became clear that Assad had fled to Russia:
Assad is gone. He has fled his country. His protector, Russia, Russia, Russia, led by Vladimir Putin, was not interested in protecting him any longer. There was no reason for Russia to be there in the first place. They lost all interest in Syria because of Ukraine, where close to 600,000 Russian soldiers lay wounded or dead, in a war that should never have started, and could go on forever. Russia and Iran are in a weakened state right now, one because of Ukraine and a bad economy, the other because of Israel and its fighting success. . . . There should be an immediate ceasefire and negotiations should begin. . . . I know Vladimir well. This is his time to act. China can help. The World is waiting!
I think it is fair to say that this is not quite what Putin was expecting to hear from Trump after November 5. Nor can he have expected Trump to make a 25-minute call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky the day after his election victory, with Musk also on the line. According to three sources with knowledge of Zelensky’s meeting with Trump in September, “Trump told Zelensky he would not abandon Ukraine, but wants to give diplomacy a chance.” And on Saturday the two men were together again for the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, smiling and shaking hands.
Slowly, Putin is realizing that Trump is not going to hand Ukraine to him on a plate, which explains the increased intensity of Russia’s assaults on Ukraine in recent weeks. Putin is desperate to grab whatever he can before the negotiation over ending the war begins, as it surely will, soon after January 20.
Note, too, the phrase “China can help.” The People’s Republic is the only other superpower in the world in terms of both economic scale, technological sophistication, and military capability. It would prefer to ignore the vibe shift. In May, when I was last in Beijing, Chinese officials assured me they were indifferent to who would win the U.S. presidential election, as Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris were “two bowls of poison” as far as China was concerned.
But this was surely a lie. Not only would Trump’s threatened 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports be a much bigger shock to the Chinese economy than anything Harris might plausibly have done—in Trump’s nominees for key national security positions, the Chinese can also see that he intends to approach the People’s Republic much more hawkishly than in 2017. This is good news for Admiral Sam Paparo, the commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, who has a plan to deter China from attacking Taiwan he calls “hellscape.” All he needs to make it credible is a vast supply of drones—and the vibe shift.
“A Vibe Shift Is Coming,” wrote Davis in 2022. “Will Any of Us Survive It?” It is a good question. The vibe shift has gone from the world of the fashionistas to the world of four-star admirals by way of the tech bros and the Trump–Musk campaign. It began as a revulsion against pronouns and piercings; it is culminating in a global repudiation of the liberal international order that inspired two generations of Democrats.
Yale Law School is out. The world is going to look a lot more like Gotham City from here on.
Niall Ferguson is a columnist for The Free Press. His latest book is Doom. Read his piece “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” and follow him on X @NFergus.
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