Imperial Waltz

Is American power good, bad, or distressingly reluctant?

Michael Young from the January 2005 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

Ferguson's baldly neo-imperial approach is daring and novel, but it suffers from his downplaying the abuses that historically accompanied imperial ventures. Whether it was the British Empire or its more anemic American counterpart at the turn of the 20th century, the practice of power could be very bloody indeed. American behavior in the Philippines, for example, is hardly something one would want the U.S. to repeat. The same goes for Britain's performance in South Africa, India, or Ireland.

In concentrating on what a liberal empire can and should be, Ferguson does not mention what it should not be--and recent imperial history presents many foul examples of how burgeoning democratic systems could also be remarkably brutal in their overseas territories. Had Colossus provided some insight into this phenomenon, Ferguson could have avoided having the deficiency turned against his broader argument.��������

Ferguson ends his book with an intriguing hypothesis: that America's decline will come not from outside but "as it came to Gibbon's Rome, from within." He argues the empire is more likely to collapse because of a ballooning fiscal crisis nourished by the American propensity to consume much and save little than because of motley "barbarians at the gates." The U.S., he warns, faces an impending Social Security crisis because Americans are living longer and the fiscal system remains entirely inadequate to pay for future generations. The self-defeating ways to deal with this, he continues, are to engage in massive increases in income and payroll taxes, to slash Social Security benefits by equally dramatic amounts, or to cut discretionary spending to zero.

It would be a fitting end for this most contested of global entities: to close up shop thanks to consumer-induced bankruptcy. It is equally fitting that it takes a Scotsman, stepchild to a former empire, to raise such a possibility, even as America presses on, atop a wave of (sometimes vulnerable) self-confidence, cash registers frittering imperium away.�