In the old days it would have ...

In the old days it would have been a relatively simple matter to have checked Hitler's territorial ambitions. All you'd have needed would have been the 1914 combination of Britain, France and Russia. Indeed, if such an alliance had acted decisively to defend Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler might even have been overthrown by his own military. But it was not to be.
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 Niall Ferguson

Quotes from the same author

I would say I'm a 19th-century liberal, possibly even an 18th-century one.
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 Niall Ferguson
The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos.
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 Niall Ferguson
Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German. A thousand. ... That is the end of the Great Divergence.
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 Niall Ferguson
Empires, essentially, create order. In their absence, you don't end up with lots of happy, little nation-states full of people sitting around campfires singing John Lennon's "Imagine." What you end up with is civil war, anarchy.
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 Niall Ferguson
I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe's PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it's America.
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 Niall Ferguson