Canter Bridge

This troubling book by a prolific scholar of empire dissects the American version of that phenomenon in eight well-researched chapters and a conclusion. Ominously, his first four chapters are grouped under the title ‘Rise’ and the last four under ‘Fall?’. Ferguson’s personal interest in empire and his unusually positive appreciation of its role in human history is best understood by first reading Empire. The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power.

Ferguson is convinced that empires can only be understood comparatively-by comparing one with another-and against the alternative of anarchy. This brings a welcome realism to the discussion of how empires should and shouldn’t behave. His interest in empire is not merely academic. He confesses in his epilogue what his book theorizes throughout: ‘I believe the world needs an effective liberal empire and that the United States is the best candidate for the job’.

The author believes that America has always been an empire but is afflicted with the peculiar need to deny this fact. Popular criticism considers empire a bad thing, but because Ferguson insists that we take seriously what has happened in the absence of empire, he stands apart from those whose reflex is to equate empire with oppression and the unjust imposition of alien structures. Ferguson wishes that America would get over its denial complex and get on with being a productive empire in a world that, more often than not, simply needs that.

In ‘The Limits of the American Empire’ (ch. 1, pp. 33-60), Ferguson shows that Americans thought, spoke, and wrote in imperial terms from the moment of their secession from the British Empire. Often this was articulated in stark contrast to their self-identity as the anti-empire. Still, in all their attempts at empire and colonization there was a chronic failure to execute well. By comparison with America’s imperial antecedents, its hegemonic achievements up to World War I were unimpressive.

American exceptionalism-to my knowledge a term that Ferguson does not employ in this book-manifested itself in the pre-WWII insistence that America could be an empire unlike all previous empires (‘The Imperialism of Anti-Imperialism’, pp. 61-104). The author trenchantly observes that ‘(f)or an empire in denial, there is really only one way to act imperially with a clear conscience, and that is to combat someone else’s imperialism.’ The rhetoric of anti-imperialism pervaded the post-War growth of America’s influence, in spite of the obvious ironies. Ferguson analyzes the remarkable fate of Japan and West Germany under American stewardship, all of which begs the question of why this extraordinary achievement-or accident-has not occurred with more frequency elsewhere.

One man, Douglas Macarthur, appeared to have the inclination and gumption to become America’s emperor. However, his ambition was decisively rejected and, like all good soldiers, in the end he faded away. Ferguson wonders whether Macarthur was right about ‘winning Korea’. He might have ended hostilities two years ahead of time. Harry Truman’s self-restraint, if that’s what it was, rang out its echo in the growing ‘bad conscience’ about Vietnam two decades later. Americans, it would seem, did not have the heart to exert its influence in foreign lands with the attention span that fulfillment of its intentions would require.

Ferguson is a master of turning the tables on comfortable assumptions, a skill he engages with relish in ‘The Civilization of Clashes’ (ch. 3, pp. 105-131). He argues that the United States is a late arrival in the Middle East and that it has been far more interested in containing Soviet advances in the region than in hijacking its oil wealth.

Nevertheless, a robust American response to the events of September 11 was made inevitable by what Ferguson calls ’11/9′, the collapse of the Soviet Union. With Israel having assumed for so many years that it had carte blanque from the US to impose a military solution to its own territorial woes, the disappearance of a Soviet checkmate in the Middle East, and the growing western dependence on oil from the region, American military action was inevitable. What the terrorists achieved on September 11, 2001, was the inadvertent psychological shock that would allow Americans to support a full-scale incursion into the region.

The provocatively titled ‘Splendid Multilateralism’ (ch. 4, pp. 132-166) wraps up Ferguson’s first section on the `rise’ of the American Colossus. The term is a play on the Victorian reference to ‘splendid isolation’, not a good thing for the long-lived monarch’s diplomatic advisers. Ferguson is at paints to show that multilateralism is not a always the splendid treasure that popular discussion of the diplomatic run-up to George Bush, Jr.’s invasion of Iraq often assumed it to be.

If I am reading Ferguson correctly, he can barely conceal his contempt for Bill Clinton’s aversion to military casualties and the UN’s oft-stated but seldom-executed desire to intervene in trouble spots on behalf of the international community. Indeed, he uses the A-word (‘appeasement’) to describe the UN’s (i.e. the Europeans’) response to the Bosnian crisis.

With regard to Iraq, the author believes that George W. Bush’s appeal to multilateralism-hardly his crass unilateralism!-created more trouble than either America or Britain needed. There were solid reasons for intervening without tying oneself in knots at the UN. Still, Bush was incapable of making the kind of long-term commitment to a nation-building task that Candidate Bush had specifically derided to accomplish a goal worthy of an empire’s good name.

Ferguson begins his part two (‘Fall?’) with ‘The Case for Liberal Empire’ (ch.%2~~, pp.%~~169-199) by making the audacious observation that empires have been around much longer than nation-states and thus are the more permanent fixture in history. However, the imperial phenomenon reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, then began its decline in the twentieth, ‘impelled forward by a combination of European exhaustion, non-European nationalism and American idealism.’ Empire was blamed for poverty, an accusation that Ferguson believes to have been refuted by post-imperial history.

The author then develops his argument that institutions and the free flow of capital are missing in post-colonial countries that remain poor. Importantly, these are two factors that empires seem relatively well prepared to establish and maintain. In a line of thinking that hearkens back to his Empire, Ferguson indicates that Britain’s empire was fairly good at the kind of global integration-he calls it ‘Anglobalization’-that safeguard liberal institutionalism. He then builds a bridge to the concern with American empire that is indicated by the book’s title. Some countries, Ferguson provocatively urges, would indisputably benefit from American colonial administration. But is the United States capable of such ‘long-term engagement’? If not, failure is predestined.

‘Going Home or Organizing Hypocrisy’ (ch 6, pp. 200-226) is a frighteningly comparison of the bland ambitions fostered by elite U.S. university graduates when compared with those of Oxbridge during Britain’s imperium. I do not often find a book personally depressing, but this chapter is an exception. With devastating effect, Ferguson shines a light on American culture’s short attention span with regard to the role its citizens are prepared to play in the wider world. An American reader does not have to agree to Ferguson’s thesis about the appropriateness of empire in our day in order to lament this collective loss of will to think and act largely. It is futile to speak of nation building when the comforts of home have achieved canonical status, undermining the very plausibility of difficult work for an extended time in another place. The ‘hypocrisy’ of the chapter is actually a virtue that Ferguson urges upon America in its occupation of Iraq. Promise to go home soon, but don’t even think about doing so.

Ferguson’s seventh chapter (‘”Impire”: Europe between Brussels and Byzantium’, pp. 227-257) examines the possibility of a European alternative to America’s unipolar empire. He finds the American specter of an EU rival plausible in its potentiality, but then judges it too distant for worry.

Penultimately, Ferguson turns in his final full chapter (Ch. 8, ‘The Closing Door’, pp. 258-285) to the appalling financial balance sheet of the American economy. America is indeed suffering from ‘overstretch’, but not of the variety usually bewailed by the critics of its military engagements. Rather, domestic overstretch of the financially irresponsible variety threatens to bring the American lion to its knees. Given that Asian-including Chinese-central bankers have until now underwritten America’s passion for indebting itself, Ferguson urges us to consider the risks to China’s tentative door-opening strategies should a cocktail of financial events that is not hard to imagine for the US to default on the global financial commitments it has assumed.

In his epilogue (‘Conclusion: Looking Homeward’, pp. 286-303), Ferguson manages both searing criticism and touching concern. Summarizing his book, he argues that for all its unrivaled prominence America suffers three deficits: economic, manpower, and attention. Though he hopes so, he is not sure the third can be overcome.

Thus, the American Colossus may fall before time. Ferguson’s peculiar contribution is to force us to imagine the consequences in something other than banal truisms. The decline of empires can just as well prove the occasion for tears as for jubilation.