Colossus

NIALL FERGUSON

Colossus

The Rise and Fall of the American Empire

PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Introduction

PART I — RISE

1. THE LIMITS OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

2. THE IMPERIALISM OF ANTI-IMPERIALISM

3. THE CIVILIZATION OF CLASHES
105

4. SPLENDID MULTILATERALISM

PART II — FALL?

5. THE CASE FOR LIBERAL EMPIRE

6. GOING HOME OR ORGANIZING HYPOCRISY

7. “IMPIRE”: EUROPE BETWEEN BRUSSELS AND BYZANTIUM

8. THE CLOSING DOOR

Conclusion: Looking Homeward

Statistical Appendix

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

PENGUIN BOOKS

COLOSSUS

‘One of the world’s 100 most influential people’
Time Magazine

‘A talented controversialist. He brings a wealth of historical knowledge to bear on big questions’
Independent

‘In
Colossus
he turns his formidable powers of analysis toward the “American Empire,” offering a brief history as well as a provocative argument…. it is sure to shake the assumptions of both fans and critics of the American Empire – including those who deny that such a thing even exists’ Max Boot, author of
The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise ofAmerican Power

‘Illuminating, entertaining and often contentious’
The Times

‘Niall Ferguson takes as a premise that an American empire exists and that the world at large benefits from it. Even those who disagree with his perspective will find
Colossus
an immensely learned and useful book written with great verve and historical breadth’ William Roger Louis, author of
The British Empire in the Middle East, 1945–1951

‘Every page of
Colossus
is provocative. Niall Ferguson poses and puts tentative answers to every question that foreigners ask about America and that Americans ought to ask about themselves’ Ernest May, author of
Strange Victory: Hitlers Conquest of France and Imperial Democracy

‘Challenging and provocative’
Mail on Sunday

‘Niall Ferguson combines a prodigious output with clear, fluent writing and the all-too-rare ability to blend economic analysis with that of politics’
Economist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Niall Ferguson is Professor of International History at Harvard University, Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is the author of
Paper and Iron, The House of Rothschild
(two volumes),
The Pity of War, The Cash Nexus, Empire
and
Colossus
. He was also the editor of
Virtual History
. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and three children.

For John and Diana Herzog

Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus shall we be.

THOMAS JEFFERSON, 1816

… to me strength is my bane,
And proves the source of all my miseries;
So many, and so huge, that each apart
Would ask a life to wail, but chief of all,
O loss of sight, of thee I most complain!
Blind among enemies, O worse than chains,
Dungeon, or beggary, or decrepit age!

MILTON, Samson Agonistes

Preface to the Paperback Edition

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

RON SUSKIND, quoting a “senior advisor” to President Bush
¹

“History,” he said, shrugging, taking his hands out of his pockets, extending his arms, and suggesting with his body language that it was so far off. “We won’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

BOB WOODWARD, quoting President Bush
²

I set out to write this book in the belief that the role of the United States in the world today could be better understood by comparing it with past empires. I understood well enough that most Americans feel uneasy about applying the word
empire
to their country, though an influential minority (as the first epigraph above confirms) are not so inhibited. But what I had not fully understood until the first edition of
Colossus
was published was the precise nature of “imperial denial” as a national condition. It is, I discovered, acceptable among American liberals to say that the United States is an empire—provided that you deplore the fact. It is also permitted to say, when among conservatives, that American power is potentially beneficent—provided that you do not describe it as imperial. What is not allowed is to say that the United States is an empire
and
that this might not
be wholly bad.
Colossus
set out to do this, and thereby succeeded in antagonizing both conservative and liberal critics. Conservatives repudiated my contention that the United States is and, indeed, has always been an empire. Liberals were dismayed by my suggestion that the American empire might have positive as well as negative attributes.

As in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Iolanthe
, so in the United States today, it seems to be expected “That every boy and every gal / That’s born into the world alive / Is either a little Liberal, / Or else a little Conservative!” But I am afraid this book is neither. Here, in a simplified form, is what it says:

1. that the United States has always been, functionally if not self-consciously, an empire;
   
2. that a self-conscious American imperalism might well be preferable to the available alternatives, but
   
3. that financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely, and
   
4. that therefore the American empire, in so far as it continues to exist, will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.
   

The case for an American empire in
Colossus
is therefore twofold. First, there is the case for its functional existence; second, the case for the potential advantages of a self-conscious American imperalism. By self-conscious imperialism, please note, I have never meant that the United States should unabashedly proclaim itself an empire and its president an emperor; perish the thought. I merely mean that Americans need to recognize the imperial characteristics of their own power today and, if possible, to learn from the achievements and failures of past empires. It is no longer sensible to maintain the fiction that there is something wholly unique about the foreign relations of the United States. The dilemmas faced by America today have more in common with those faced by the later Caesars than with those faced by the Founding Fathers.
³

At the same time, however, the book makes clear the grave perils of being an “empire in denial.” Americans are not wholly oblivious to the imperial role their country plays in the world. But they dislike it. “I think we’re trying to run the business of the world too much,” a Kansas farmer told the British author Timothy Garton Ash in 2003, “… like the Romans used to.”
⁴
To
such feelings of unease, American politicians respond with a categorical reassurance. “We’re not an imperial power,” declared President George W. Bush on April 13, 2004, “We’re a liberating power.”
⁵

Of all the misconceptions that need to be dispelled here, this is perhaps the most obvious: That simply because Americans say they do not “do” empire, there cannot be such a thing as American imperialism. As I write, American troops are engaged in defending governments forcibly installed by the United States in two distant countries, Afghanistan and Iraq. They are likely to be there for some time to come; even President Bush’s Democratic rival John Kerry implied in the first of last year’s presidential debates that, if he were elected, he would only “
begin
to draw the troops down in six months.”
⁶
Iraq, however, is only the front line of an American imperium which, like all the great world empires of history, aspires to much more than just military dominance along a vast and variegated strategic frontier.
⁷
Empire also means economic, cultural, and political predominance within (and sometimes also without) that frontier. On November 6, 2003, in his speech to mark the twentieth anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy, President Bush set out a vision of American foreign policy that, for all its Wilsonian language, strongly implied the kind of universal civilizing mission that has been a feature of all the great empires:

The United States has adopted a new policy, a forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East…. The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution…. The advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is the calling of our country…. We believe that liberty is the design of nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history. We believe that human fulfillment and excellence come in the responsible exercise of liberty. And we believe that freedom—the freedom we prize—is not for us alone, it is the right and the capacity of all mankind.
⁸

He restated this messianic credo in his speech to the Republican Party convention last September [2004]:

The story of America is the story of expanding liberty: an ever-widening circle constantly growing to reach further and include more. Our nation’s founding commitment is still our deepest commitment: In our world, and here at home, we will extend the frontiers of freedom…. We are working to advance liberty in the broader Middle East because freedom will bring a future of hope and the peace we all want…. Freedom is on the march. I believe in the transformational power of liberty: The wisest use of American strength is to advance freedom.
⁹

Later that month, he used very similar words in the first presidential debate.
¹⁰

To the majority of Americans, it would appear, there is no contradiction between the ends of global democratization and the means of American military power. As defined by their president, the democratizing mission of the United States is both altruistic and distinct from the ambitions of past empires, which (so it is generally assumed) aimed to impose their own rule on foreign peoples. The difficulty is that President Bush’s ideal of freedom as a universal desideratum rather closely resembles the Victorian ideal of “civilization.” “Freedom” means, on close inspection, the American model of democracy and capitalism; when Americans speak of “nation building” they actually mean “state replicating,” in the sense that they want to build political and economic institutions that are fundamentally similar, though not identical, to their own.
¹¹
They may not aspire to rule, but they do aspire to have others rule themselves in the American way.