Indispensable Nation

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.”

DF

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David Frum

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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.”