Ferguson believes that empires are inherently good things. Colossus offers a provocative diatribe against America’s underutilized power, self-absorption, and refusal to embrace a crucial global role. In the process, he analyzes the interaction between domestic and foreign policy, the roots of empires, the fit between globalization and imperialism, and America’s many challenges, including funding the war on terror. Generally, Ferguson is balanced, readable, informative—and didactic. Critics mostly disagree about the thesis. Some buy it; others, like The Washington Post, question Ferguson’s constant comparisons to a romanticized British Empire. Still, Colossus will get you thinking about American expansion, responsibility, and yes, perhaps even your future colonial palace in
North Korea? Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Amid the torrent of books on terrorism, liberalism, American empire, and the apocalypse, Ferguson's stands out not in its premise--suggesting that America is an empire is nothing new--but in its assertion that an American empire is good for the world (this coming from a European writer). Though aspiring to neither colonialism nor conquest, argues Ferguson, America does indeed control an empire, defined by the "soft power" of economic muscle and liberal democratic idealism. Like the British empire of the early twentieth century, American economic and military supremacy can offer stability in ways weaker powers and inward-turned institutions like the European Union cannot. There's a catch, though--America cannot remain in willful denial about its global responsibilities, lest it fall as other empires have fallen before it. The deficit is the problem, says Ferguson--the fiscal one, sure, but more importantly, America's attention deficit when it comes to necessary yet protracted and unglamorous foreign endeavors. This is a conservative argument, smacking gently of The Economist editorial page, but it is far from optimistic. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Every page of Colossus is provocative." —Ernest May"Amid the seemingly endless writings and decisions about ‘America as Empire,’ the most prominent recent voice is that of Niall Ferguson." —Paul Kennedy, New York Review of Books
About the Author
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. The bestselling author of Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild, The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire, and Colossus, he also writes regularly for newspapers and magazines all over the world. Since 2003 he has written and presented three highly successful television documentary series for British television: Empire, American Colossus, and, most recently, The War of the World.
From The Washington Post
The war in Iraq flickers between the lines of Niall Ferguson's new book about America's role as imperial power in the 21st century. The book was commissioned at the flood tide of neoconservative enthusiasm for American empire; it is now appearing at an ebb of that fervor -- at a moment when the neocons' idealistic strategy of transformation has collided with the bitter realities of Iraq. In Colossus, Ferguson manages to be on both sides of the bet, intellectually. He wants America to embark on a new civilizing mission in the Middle East and around the world; but he doesn't really think we have the stuff to succeed as empire-builders.
Ferguson's earlier books won him a reputation as a bright and iconoclastic young historian. His best-known book, The Pity of War, managed to say something new about one of the most carefully studied topics of modern history -- the origins and consequences of World War I. Ferguson argued that the war was a British blunder. Had the British better accommodated German ambitions for European dominance, they could have prevented the Russian Revolution, saved their empire and avoided the rise of Nazism -- not to mention saving the millions of lives that were wasted in the trenches.
Ferguson makes an equally provocative argument in Colossus. America is already an empire, he argues, but one that is "in denial" and refuses to accept the political and moral responsibilities that come with global power. This failure troubles Ferguson, who believes that without the ordering force of empire, the world will be fragmented and dangerous as never before. "I am fundamentally in favor of empire," he writes. "Indeed, I believe that empire is more necessary in the twenty-first century than ever before." Liberal imperialism, he argues, is the necessary political-military complement to economic globalization.
Ferguson's America was made for empire. Its founding fathers had an imperial self-confidence, and the new nation relentlessly extended its borders until it dominated the North American continent. It became a sea power and conquered what amounted to overseas colonies -- all the while insisting it was different from the European powers from which it had sprung. Ferguson quotes Herman Melville in a mid-19th century proclamation of national identity that would resonate in today's White House: "We Americans are the peculiar, chosen people, the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of liberties of the world."
For all America's power and sense of manifest destiny, the nation never developed what Ferguson regards as a mature appreciation of its proper role in the world. He shares Walter Lippmann's diagnosis: "We continue to think of ourselves as a kind of great, peaceful Switzerland, whereas we are in fact a great, expanding world power. . . . Our imperialism is more or less unconscious." Failing to embrace the reality of its power, America often failed in its global interventions. The Korean War showed "the remarkable self-limiting character of the American republic," Ferguson writes. In Vietnam, America preferred "the irresponsibilities of weakness" to the responsibilities of power. The aversion to using American power deepened in the Clinton years, when Ferguson notes that the chance of an American serviceman being killed in action was one in 160,000. America had power but not the will to use it.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq was the war that was going to banish that reticence at last. The war's proponents idealized -- and even romanticized -- the use of military power, as in Robert Kagan's famous contrast of sanguinary Americans from Mars and wary Europeans from Venus. But rather than validating the neoconservative vision, Iraq, a year on, has discredited it. For all America's brilliant show of arms, it seems likely to be another instance of Ferguson's paradox of a mighty America that miscalibrates its attempts to project that power. Though his book was finished before any final evaluation of the Iraq war was possible, Ferguson conveys the sense that it will turn out badly.
America disappoints Ferguson because it is not 19th-century Britain. He enumerates the virtues of British imperialism with the enthusiasm of a Victorian schoolboy: Imperial Britain generously exported capital to needy nations of the world; it maintained open markets that allowed the colonies to sell their goods and improve their living standards; it administered the empire with its best and brightest (by Ferguson's account, 75 percent of the Indian civil servants in the 1830s had attended either Oxford or Cambridge).
Ferguson blames three American "deficits" that prevent it from emulating Britain's liberal empire. The first of these is economic: America is a spendthrift superpower, which since the mid-1980s has needed to import capital from abroad to fund its trade and fiscal deficits. The second is manpower; in his view, America simply doesn't have enough troops or diplomats to police an unruly world. Worst of all, says Ferguson, is America's attention deficit. The nation lacks the staying power to see through its foreign adventures.
Ferguson's book reads more like a long essay than a systematic work of history; it covers a wide swath of intellectual territory, but thinly. The book was written to accompany a British television series, and it has a fade-in, fade-out jumpiness that works better on the screen than on the printed page.
The core argument of the book -- that the world needs an American empire that Americans are unable to provide -- is provocative but not convincing. For me, the book blurs the choices facing the United States by comparing it to Ferguson's idealized version of imperial Britain. We Americans actually spend too much time already wishing we were Britain. The CIA wonders why it can't spy like MI6; every president fixes on the resolute Winston Churchill as a secret role model. In crisis, we hear the voice of Margaret Thatcher whispering, "Don't go wobbly."
The challenge for the United States, especially after our reversals in Iraq, is to model American power to fit the real strengths and limitations of our culture and political experience. The most intriguing passage in Ferguson's book is his discussion of an imperialism that would be an appropriate fit with globalization. I suspect he's wrong in thinking the answers can be found in a centuries-old British tradition. We haven't the stuff for that, as Ferguson says, but we may have the stuff for something else that will suit the world far better. We will surely fail as a modern-day version of Gladstone's Britain, but we may yet succeed as America.
Reviewed by David Ignatius
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
It used to be that only foreigners and those on the political fringes referred to the “American Empire.” Invariably, they did so in order to criticize the United States. Since the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001, however, there has been a growing volume of more mainstream writing on the subject of an American empire. The striking thing is that not all those who now openly use the “e” word do so pejoratively. On the contrary, a number of commentators seem positively to relish the idea of a U.S. imperium.
There is certainly no question that the United States has the military capability to take on the old British role as underwriter of a globalized, liberalized economic system. Before the deployment of troops for the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military had around 752 military installations located in more than 130 countries, accommodating 247,000 American service personnel deployed abroad. On land, the United States has 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks. The rest of the world has nothing that can compete. At sea, the United States possesses 9 “supercarrier” battle groups. The rest of the world has none. And in the air, the United States has 3 different kinds of undetectable stealth aircraft. The rest of the world has none. The United States is also miles ahead in the production of “smart” missiles and pilotless high-altitude drones. Pentagon insiders call it “full spectrum dominance.”
Nor is there any doubt that the United States has the economic resource to maintain FSD. America’s 31 percent share of the world product is equal to the shares of the next four countries combined (Japan, Germany, Britain and France). So rapidly has its economy grown since the late 1980s that it has been able to achieve a unique “revolution in military affairs” while vastly reducing the share of defense expenditures as a proportion of the gross domestic product. According to the Congressional Budget Office, defense spending in 2003 is likely to amount to 3.6 percent of the GDP—substantially below its cold war average. In the space of less than five years, three of the world’s tyrannies—Milosevic’s in Serbia, the Taliban’s in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq—have been swept from power at negligible cost. If this combination of military and economic dominance is not imperial power, then it is hard to know what is.
Yet the idea that the United States is now an authentic empire remains entirely foreign to the majority of Americans, who uncritically accept what has long been the official line: that the United States just doesn’t “do” empire. In the words of George W. Bush during the 2000 election campaign: “America has never been an empire. We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused, preferring greatness to power, and justice to glory.” Since becoming president, Bush has in fact initiated two invasions of sovereign states, successfully overthrowing their governments in both cases. The Office of the President has produced a document on “National Security Strategy” that states as a goal of U.S. policy “to extend the benefits of freedom…;to every corner of the world.” But Bush himself has continued to deny that the United States has any imperial intentions. Speaking on board the homeward-bound Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1, President Bush declared: “Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home.” A few days previously, Donald Rumsfeld was asked by a journalist from Al-Jazeera if the United States was engaged in “empire building in Iraq.” “We don’t seek empires,” shot back Rumsfeld. “We’re not imperialistic. We never have been.” Few Americans would disagree with that sentiment.
The Victorian historian J. R. Seeley famously joked that the British had “conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.” But the Americans have gone one better. The greatest empire of modern times has come into existence without the great majority of the American people even noticing. This is not a fit of absence of mind. This is mass myopia.
It is not hard to explain such attitudes given the anti-imperial origins of the United States. However, just because you were once a colony doesn’t mean you can’t ever become an empire. England was once a Roman colony, after all. Americans also like to point out that they don’t formally rule over that much foreign territory: the formal dependencies of the United States (like Puerto Rico) amount to just over ten thousand square kilometers. But nowadays, thanks to air power, it is possible to control vastly more territory than that with a network of strategically situated military bases. And as for the claim that when Americans invade countries they come not to subjugate but to emancipate, the British said exactly the same when they occupied Baghdad in 1917. “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, or enemies, but as liberators.” Those were the precise words of General F. S. Maude’s proclamation to the people of Mesopotamia, dated March 19, 1917.
Unfortunately, the American refusal to recognize the reality of their own imperial role in the world is one of the things that make their empire very different from—and significantly less effective than—the last great English-speaking empire. For a start, Americans feel no qualms about sending their servicepeople to fight wars in faraway countries, but they expect those wars to be short and the casualty list to be even shorter.
Moreover, compared with the British Empire, the United States is much less good at sending its businesspeople, its civilian administrators and its money to those same faraway countries once the fighting is over. In short, America may be a “hyperpower”—the most militarily powerful empire in all history—but it is an empire in denial, a colossus with an attention deficit disorder. And that is potentially very dangerous.
