The neocon's imperial burden

Sam Leith

COLOSSUS: THE RISE AND FALL OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE by Niall Ferguson Allen Lane, £20, pp. 384, ISBN 0713997702

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They can't like us a whole lot,' was the report of one American soldier. 'If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. 'Oh, here come the fucking Americans again, Jesus, when are they going to learn?'

That was Vietnam. Even the well-intentioned imperialist, as Niall Ferguson puts it, is 'seldom loved'. Ferguson is both a lucid and prolific newspaper commentator and a historian whose booklength specialisms have been money, and empire. So he is well-positioned to consider the place of the United States in the world just now — a time when it seems to have more of both than most nations would decently know what to do with.

It's a tricky topic, however. Ferguson, according to his own subtitle, sets out to describe 'the rise and fall of the American empire'. But ask most Americans and they won't admit there has been a 'rise., because they won't admit to being an empire. Indeed, as the US only came into being by violently seceding from someone else's empire, the very word has been kryptonite to American political discourse since its politicians were still wearing wooden teeth.

As for the 'fall', it hasn't happened yet — which presents a problem for even the most enterprising historian, So. Ferguson's book — written to accompany a television programme — is at the same time a polemical enquiry, an informative survey for the general reader, and a proper piece of scholarship, complete with footnotes and bibliography. It is half a work of history and half a work of hackery: like a very extensive and carefully researched Op-Ed.

Ferguson leavens his style with slanginess, and allows himself strictly unscholarly flourishes of glibness. He likes witty chapter headings: 'The Civilisation of Clashes'; 'Impire; 'Splendid Multilateralism'. He calls Liberia a 'basket case' and, in the tones of Lady Bracknell seeing off an encyclopedia salesman, dismisses North Korea as 'a repulsive little dictatorship'. And he can seldom resist an alliterative tag, a tic of his style that once noticed, gets tedious: 'Tuscany to Texas', 'policing and parleying', 'Brussels and the Beltway', 'duress and dialogue', 'bullet and ballot box', `CEO. not CBE', 'Hejaz' versus 'hedge-fund', and once, when particularly excited, 'Kosovo, Kabul and Kirkuk'. He even ends with a long and rather silly conceit likening America to Arnie in The Terminator.

But Ferguson is not a comedy turn; nor, when he gets down to it, is he glib. The meat of his book is serious, nuanced and very clearly expressed. In part one, 'Rise', he sets about making the case that America is an empire. This, he says, is not hard. Of course America is an empire. It's an empire perforce in that it exercises a hegemonic influence both culturally and economically (Ferguson is a bit thin on the former, and admirably full on the latter) over a huge sphere. And it also behaves, in active policy, like an imperial power in that it pretty regularly projects force outside its borders in order to muck around in the affairs of other countries.

What is more, Ferguson says, America's imperialistic tendencies, however they have been denied, go back to the Louisiana Purchase and beyond. But the nature of American empire has changed, and Ferguson runs through America's several imperialisms with discrimination. The big paradigm shift came, he argues unanswerably, not with 9/11 but 11/9. Throughout the Cold War, the US maintained what he calls 'the imperialism of anti-imperialism', a form of political denial that collapsed with the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. Since then, he argues, the best model from which America can learn is that of the British empire.

Unlike Noam Chomsky and his pals, it should be noted, Ferguson is entirely in favour of US imperialism, and he argues convincingly that it can benefit the world, if its effect is to liberalise global markets in the context of the local rule of law. Should it continue to deny being an empire? Perhaps. Sometimes, he says, a dab of hypocrisy is no bad thing. The second part of his book asks how good the US actually is at doing this, and what are the extant threats to its hegemony. His conclusions are, respectively, 'not so hot' and 'its own welfare bill'.

This first point is where Ferguson differs from our own Mark Steyn — something that led to an entertaining recent cat-fight in print. Ferguson had said, in effect, that the American commanders in Iraq wouldn't be in such a mess if they knew as much history as he did. Steyn said they knew plenty history, thanks, and it's we stuck-up Brits who need to brush up on 1066 and All That. The clash may be in part one of style. Where Steyn is genially thuggish, Ferguson is pursed-lipped and tends towards the manner of the sniffy don.

The funny thing is, they are coming from the same rough position: both think America can and should be behaving as imperially as possible, and both think invading Iraq was the right thing to do. It is on the corollary question — of whether the US is going about it the right way — that they disagree.

Ferguson's thesis is that being an 'empire in denial, America is also an empire more or less phobic of being an occupying power for any length of time. 'Regime change' is an acceptable object of military policy, George W. Bush has publicly declared; 'nation-building' is not. The standard neocon injunction to look not at the failures of Haiti or Somalia, but the successes of West Germany and Japan tends, he says, to elide both the scale of aid and duration of time invested in those successes. Ferguson argues, with succinct accounts of the expeditionary wars America has botched in the past, that the bullet of nation-building will have to be bitten — its cost in time, lives and foreign aid borne for years, rather than weeks — if the interventions in Iraq and elsewhere are to make things better rather than, in the long run, worse.

On this, he is gloomy. The US has no appetite to export the sort of communities of expatriate civil administrators who ran the British empire. Nor do their military and intelligence services have the patience to spend time getting to know the places whose regimes they change. Only one student majored in a Near-Eastern language, Ferguson reports, out of 43,683 undergraduate registrations at Yale in 2004. American intelligence has, one former CIA man said shortly before 9/11, not one single Arab-speaking agent who could plausibly infiltrate an Islamist cell in Afghanistan. 'Operations that include diarrhoea as a way of life don't happen.'

But it is when he comes to the question of the imminent (and immanent) threat to the American empire that Ferguson produces his most hair-raising material. Having trotted briskly through the claims of Europe and China as potential rival imperia — territory familiar from Roberts Kagan and Cooper and, particularly, Joseph Nye, and done very well here — he moves on to conclude that the real threat is the enemy within. Not boxcutter-wielding Islamic terrorists, rather, wobbly old ladies with bingo wings and grey-haired golfers with dicky tickers.

The real threat, he says, is a $45 trillion hole in America's budget, caused by the 77 million baby-boomers who will very shortly start claiming Medicare benefits. By the time they have all retired, America's elderly population will have doubled and the population of taxpayers supporting them will have gone up by only 15 per cent.

This, he suggests, is a fiscal catastrophe so staggering in its badness, and so baleful in its loomingness, that the only reason there isn't outright panic on the streets is that it hasn't really sunk in: America is in denial. You can't blame it. According to one set of calculations, plugging the hole would require either raising payroll tax by 95 per cent, cutting Social Security and Medicare by 56 per cent, or cutting federal discretionary spending by, urn, 100 per cent, to zero. Try taking that to the polls, Senator Kerry.