Richard B. Speed: Review of Niall Ferguson's, Colossus: The Price of America's Empire (Penguin, 2004)
Just over a century ago in 1899, as the American people debated what to do with the newly acquired Philippine Islands, the British poet Rudyard Kipling urged them to “Take up the White Man’s burden,” and shoulder the responsibilities of imperial power. Now another British subject, Niall Ferguson urges Americans to embrace the imperial role as Britain once did. Although Ferguson believes that the world would benefit from the forthright exercise of an American imperium, as he explains in Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire, he doubts that Americans will rise to the task.
Unlike so many critics who, schooled in the works of Lenin and Hobson, denounce what they regard as an American empire, Ferguson thinks that’s just what the world needs. He explains that the nation-state, with its emphasis on ethnic self-determination, is a relatively recent development whereas, empire has been commonplace throughout human history. Not only have most human beings lived under the sway of empire, but the latter has often advanced human society. Given the threat to civilization posed by rogue states armed with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, and the wreckage of states which failed during the half century since the demise of Europe’s imperial power, Ferguson argues that the establishment of a “liberal empire,” not unlike that of Britain in the nineteenth century, would benefit mankind. Such an empire he says would produce substantial “public goods,” many of which are in critically short supply in various parts of the “third world.” These range from the establishment and honest administration of law and order to the provision of capital and the construction of infrastructure. Such goods, which were once produced by the British Empire, are of greater value to the “new-caught, sullen peoples” than to the citizens of the imperial state itself, but nevertheless, all stand to benefit when order is imposed on the tribal chaos so prevalent throughout much of the world. The sort of economic development that has bypassed much of the “third world” in the decades since de-colonization, can only take place within the context of an orderly society governed by the rule of law. The United Nations is clearly not capable of providing such order. Accordingly, Ferguson believes that the United States is the only state capable of serving this historic function, but he fears that Americans will shirk their responsibility.
The United States today is an empire. Of this neither Ferguson nor most European and other foreign observers have any doubt. Indeed, many angrily denounce American imperialism. The very words imperialism and empire have become epithets, weapons hurled in an ideological battle that continues fifteen years after the war was won. Yet most Americans deny that they have any imperial ambitions or that their power makes the United States an empire. In short, Americans do not even recognize that they have an empire. The United States says Ferguson, is “an empire in denial.” This is not new. Even as Americans were vigorously expanding across a broad expanse of the North American continent and proclaiming that it was their “Manifest Destiny” to do so, they announced that they were bringing not dominion but liberty to a thinly inhabited land which God had prepared for them. In 1898 when they went to war against Spain, it was not in order to seize territory—the Teller Amendment specifically renounced any intention to annex Cuba—but to liberate the Cuban people from the clutches of the brutal Spaniards. It had been a war against Spanish imperialism. It had been an anti-imperial war. Yet the great irony was that the war presented imperial opportunities which Americans seized under the leadership of a reluctant William McKinley and an enthusiastic Theodore Roosevelt. It is this imperial denial that Ferguson believes Americans must reject once and for all before they can take up the burden Kipling commended to them a century ago.
Defeating the Spanish armed forces in 1898 was easy, much like defeating the army of Iraq was easy in 2003, but in the aftermath of victory Americans in the Philippines faced an insurgency in some respects like that which they face in Iraq today. The Philippine insurrection then, like the Iraqi resistance today, intensified the domestic debate precipitated by the conflict, and undermined the willingness of Americans to wage “the savage wars of peace.” It was in the context of the debate about the fate of the Philippines that an anti-imperial faction, represented by such luminaries as William Jennings Bryan and Mark Twain, made its appearance. While the anti-imperialists did not win the battle of the Philippines, it may be argued that they won the war. By 1906, even such a confident imperialist as Theodore Roosevelt had been so chastened by the Philippine resistance that he no longer believed that the United States could run “thickly peopled tropical regions” like Cuba. As early as 1916 Congress passed the Jones Act which confirmed that the United States would grant independence to the Philippines “as soon as stable government can be established.” When TR was presented with the opportunity to take the Dominican Republic, Ferguson quotes him as saying, “I have about the same desire to annex it as a gorged boa-constrictor might have to swallow a porcupine wrong-end-to.” Most Americans today probably feel the same way about annexing Iraq as that boa-constrictor felt about the porcupine.
To Ferguson, this is the heart of the problem. When Americans say that they intend to stay in Iraq only as long as necessary to restore order “and not a day more,” they mean it. But Ferguson believes that centuries of “heathen folly” as Kipling put it, cannot be reversed in a few months or even years. Americans are not needed for weeks or months, they are needed for decades. When the British arrived in India or Mesopotamia, they intended to stay. Young British graduates of Oxford and Cambridge left England a century ago for the colonies imbued with an imperial ethos that prepared them to spend decades in the sun-baked outlands of Africa and India to “Fill full the mouth of Famine, And bid the sickness cease.” They wanted no more reward than to add the letters CBE (Companion of the British Empire) to their names. Their American counterparts today, Ferguson laments, seek only the letters CEO. They do not have the imperial cast of mind.
In 1987 Paul Kennedy argued in his popular work, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, that expenditures for American military commitments abroad had brought the U.S. to the point of “imperial overstretch,” a condition which had led to the collapse of previous empires. Under the circumstances Kennedy contended that the United States could not maintain its position as the world’s leading superpower. But Ferguson demolishes that argument, demonstrating persuasively that “Like Britain’s liberal empire a century ago, America’s nascent liberal empire is surprisingly inexpensive to run.” He explains that American gross domestic product has grown from 10 percent of the world’s output in 1980 to over 30 percent today. Meanwhile, American defense expenditures have declined from roughly 10 percent of GDP in the 1950s to less than 4 percent today. In other words, the United States can easily afford the military expenditures necessary to police an American empire. Imperial overstretch caused by military spending is simply not a problem.
Ferguson does however see one overwhelming financial problem that afflicts the empire. That problem is debt, in particular the vast current accounts deficit that the nation runs with its trading partners. As of September 2003, foreign investors held approximately 46 percent of U.S. Treasury obligations. “These are,” as Ferguson writes, “extraordinary levels of external indebtedness, more commonly associated with emerging markets than empires.” So what kind of an empire depends for its solvency upon the Chinese central bank? The answer he says, is an empire of debt.
This is a balanced and nuanced work in which Ferguson compares the American empire with the last great Anglophone empire, and assesses its prospects. His comparisons are thoughtful and illuminating, his judgments reasonable if not always persuasive. The fundamental contradiction at the heart of his analysis is this. He insists that the United States is an empire, but then demonstrates that it has produced few if any imperialists. This leads one to wonder how there can be an empire without imperialists. But this of course is his lament. The United States needs to produce more imperialists lest it becomes “the most ephemeral empire in history.”
Ferguson’s thorough familiarity with matters of macroeconomics and international finance lend a dimension to the comparative analysis of international and imperial affairs which is often missing in lesser works. Indeed, Ferguson’s comparative review of the economic elements of empire constitutes the most stimulating part of this important book. Those who are familiar with his other work would expect nothing less.