Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire [Paperback]

It was all enough to compel me to temporarily close Colossus with a scowl and a wrinkled brow to reach for the comfort of a dusty old volume containing he works of Tacitus, the first and second century Roman historian who Mr. Ferguson no doubt knows far better than I do. Tacitus, best known for his opinions about the throne's power to corrupt and the scandals and ruined lives its corruption produced, famously wrote about Domitian's reign of terror: "They made a desert and called it victory."

Evidently, if Mr. Ferguson had his way, the desert would stretch far beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. He backed the controversial U.S. war effort in Iraq from its first rumblings, criticizing it only where it has paused to reassess or deny its imperial designs when that time could have been used to forcefully to indiscriminately crush resistance (or anything that appears to be resistance ... or that might evolve into resistance). He argues for a U.S. foreign policy along the lines of that employed by imperial Britain, endeavoring to win the Middle East's hearts and minds by ruling their pocketbooks and politics.

If these dangerous points had been made by almost anyone else, I would have stopped reading after 30 or 40 pages and dismissed the writer as a crackpot. But I grew to know Mr. Ferguson through the Pity of War and The House of Rothschild -- not books that swayed me with every argument, but which were full of worthwhile, uncommon, meaty, and complex theories that forced me more than once to dramatically reconsider what I believed. And while last year's troubling effort Empire now seems like a kind of uncomfortable preface to Colossus, it had been easy for me until now to dismiss that book as an aberration. So I returned to Colossus after a short break and finished its 400 pages, sadly shaking my head almost the whole time.

Without a doubt, Mr. Ferguson is a talented writer with a stunning command of information and historical context. He writes compellingly and with great enthusiasm, more so in Colossus than in his earlier work. But it appears to me to be sorely misdirected here: he fails to convince that the U.S. has the power to develop the kind of empire he describes and, more importantly, he fails to explain why it should even try to do so. I get the idea that without many decades of time to provide context to what he writes about, Mr. Ferguson loses almost all of the edge that previously made him stand out among his contemporaries.

Sigh. I don't know what sparked this apparent evolution in Mr. Ferguson's interests, but I can only hope that it doesn't get around.

This book, however, does not prove his case. Ferguson writes very well and marshals an amazing array of facts to support some of his points, but he still fails to support the general task he assigns to "Colossus". For all the power of his prose and the flash of his facts, they merely gloss over crucial points in his analysis. This is true from the start, where Ferguson does not so much define "empire", as he does un-define it by giving the widely-used term so broad a meaning as to basically stand for any great power. He complains that some would use the word so narrowly that the U.S. would be excluded from the category, but he does not appreciate the opposite possibility: that the term can be defined so widely as to catch some ridiculous examples under its rubric, along with the U.S. By Ferguson's vague notion of the word, present-day Germany could be considered an empire along with the present-day United States.

But the weakest section of the book is its holding up of Imperial Britain as a model for the United States in the twenty-first century. Ferguson seems lost in a time warp here (and I speak both as a supporter of a strong U.S. foreign policy and an admirer of the British Empire). Perhaps the strangest argument in support of this section is his showcasing of Britain's seventy-four year stewardship of Egypt as a shining example of the benefits of liberal empire. But even Ferguson's presentation doesn't disguise that Egypt's long tenure under the British seemed to leave little of substance for the average Egyptian. Is this the best he could do for his argument? Give us Nasser and Egypt, circa 1956, as what Americans could look forward to in Iraq if we just stay the course there for the next seven decades, as the British did in Cairo? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll take the quick exit instead.

I still had a difficult time deciding what to rate this book. Ferguson's talents are obvious. He writes very well; his books are brimming with information and interesting narratives; there's no denying that some of his observations are brilliant. But the core message in this book is just so off that I couldn't bring myself to rate it higher, even as much as I sometimes enjoyed reading it. Like a delicious sweet, the taste of this book is hard to resist, but it's also impossible to deny the lack of anything nutritious inside it.