Indispensable nation.(Colossus: The Price of America's Empire)(Book Review)

Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson (Penguin, 384 pp., $25.95)

WHAT are we going to do with Niall Ferguson? Ferguson is a brilliant young Scot now emerging as one of the English-speaking world's leading popular historians. Educated at Oxford, now transplanted to Harvard, he is also--incredibly enough--a thinker of generally conservative instincts. As a writer, he is engaging, often witty, erudite, ingenious--and yet again and again, his judgment is distorted by an almost frivolous perversity.

Ferguson's virtues are all on display in his most recent book. So, alas, is his fatal vice. Here is his case: America was and is an imperial power. And this, Ferguson argues, could be a good thing--if America would only exercise its imperial power in the right way. The trouble is, he continues, that Americans refuse to recognize the truth: They deny their country is an empire, they refuse to act like an empire, and therefore in the long run they will cease to be an empire: "For all its colossal economic, military, and cultural power, the United States still looks unlikely to be an effective liberal empire without some profound changes to its economic structure, its social makeup, and its political culture."

There's a political cliche that if something waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. Ferguson takes just the opposite view: He repeatedly complains that his particular fowl neither waddles nor quacks--and yet he insists it is nevertheless a duck. Or rather he keeps insisting until the very end of the book, when he himself is finally forced to admit that the language of empire "is irrevocably the language of a bygone age." So why does he use it? Very largely, it seems, as a stunt to win attention for his larger argument about America's role in the world. Unfortunately for Ferguson (and for his readers too), his stunt has succeeded all too well: His debate over American empire has garnered so much attention that the other--considerably more valuable--parts of his book are starved of attention in comparison.

Maybe an analogy will help make clear where the true value of Ferguson's book lies. In the 19th century, most economists believed that a free-market economy was inherently stable and self-correcting. If the economy got into trouble, the best thing to do was to leave it alone and let it find its own way back to equilibrium. The Great Depression discredited this optimistic view--and created an audience for John Maynard Keynes's observation that economies can sometimes dig themselves into holes they cannot dig themselves out of. In such cases, Keynes argued, a jolt of government intervention can spare people a lot of unnecessary misery. Keynes was of course right--but he overlooked something. Yes, markets fail; but so also does the government that Keynesians count on to save us from the market. Much of the best ...