The 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."
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 of modern economics is the study of government failure. We study government failure not because we think government is never necessary, but because we want to ensure that when governments do intervene, they intervene intelligently and effectively and with the fewest possible negative side effects.
Nineteenth-century people likewise thought of the international system as self-correcting: The balance of power was the foreign-policy equivalent of the free market. Two world wars cured Europeans of that mistake. Just as competitive economies can tumble into prolonged depressions, so a world of competing nation-states can tumble into murderous carnage. In the 1940s and 1950s, the survivors of World War II built a new international system that limited the sovereignty of nation-states in much the same way that the Keynesian economy limited the freedom of individual corporations. The U.N., NATO, the European Union, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the International Monetary Fund, and on and on the list went: These were the international equivalents of the Securities and Exchange Commission--with the United States government serving as the ultimate regulator of the whole system.
Like the neoclassical economists, Ferguson has set himself the task of exposing the flaws and weaknesses of the regulator of the international system--and, like them, not because he denies that the system needs a regulator, but precisely because he agrees that it does, and wants that regulator to work better.
Ferguson's list of flaws and weaknesses boils down to this great overriding challenge: Because the U.S. population is aging, and the costs of Social Security and Medicare are therefore rising, there is a very real risk that the United States may soon lack the money and manpower to act effectively in international affairs. Ferguson is also concerned that the short-termism of the American electoral cycle makes it difficult, even impossible, for American political leaders to give international affairs the attention they deserve. These are important warnings, especially the first--and they do not become less important because Ferguson has no solutions to propose.
What Ferguson does do, and this is achievement enough, is remind us all of how indispensable the United States is to all the peoples of the world. In the book's most entertaining chapter, he wittily demolishes any hope that the European Union will emerge as any kind of effective competitor to the United States. And he leaves the reader with this final summons to action: If the costs of leaving Social Security and Medicare unreformed threaten to cripple America's ability to guarantee the peace and freedom of the world, then they are going to have to be reformed, aren't they?