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The Last Empire, for Now

COLOSSUS

The Price of America's Empire.

By Niall Ferguson.

384 pp. The Penguin Press. $25.95.

NIALL FERGUSON points out, toward the end of this book, that between 1999 and 2003 the United States played the decisive role in removing Slobodan Milosevic, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from power. ''Toppling three tyrannies within four years,'' he notes, ''is no mean achievement by the standards of any past global empire.'' It is an impressive record, even for a country whose military strength, since the cold war ended, has been unchallenged. Within the world of historians, however, it has a parallel.

Ferguson himself, during the past four years, has published three big books: on the relationship between money and the power of states since 1700; on the history of the British Empire; and now on the achievements and prospects of the only empire left, that of the United States. Despite having just turned 40, he has four other major books to his credit, one of them -- a history of the Rothschilds -- in two volumes. No contemporary historian rivals him in the range, productivity and visibility of his scholarship. If the United States is pre-eminent in the world these days, then surely Ferguson is so within his profession.

Trained at Oxford, Ferguson taught there for a decade before moving to New York University, where he has briefly been professor of financial history -- he joins the Harvard history department later this year. Unlike most of his academic colleagues, he defies categorization. He writes military, political and economic history as well as biography; he is an innovative methodologist; he has starred in his own six-part television documentary (on the British Empire); and he is a prolific commentator on current affairs. Ferguson is always provocative, often insightful and he seems to have trouble sitting still.

At 384 pages, ''Colossus'' is one of Ferguson's smaller books; but it is his most ambitious effort yet to connect historical analysis with what is happening in the world today. His thesis is simply stated: the United States is an empire, however much Americans might deny that fact; its record of accomplishment in this capacity is not very good; and it should learn from the experiences of earlier empires, notably that of Britain.

Both ''Colossus'' and Ferguson's previous book ''Empire'' proceed from a controversial assumption for which he makes no apologies: it is that empires have as often been a force for progress as a source of oppression. Their history, he reminds us, goes back much farther than does that of the modern state -- that fact alone provides reason to question politically correct claims that we live in a postimperial age. Nor should we want to, Ferguson argues, because empires are a time-tested method for imposing order and securing justice, qualities sadly lacking in the post-cold-war world. ''What is required,'' he writes, ''is an agency capable of intervening . . . to contain epidemics, depose tyrants, end local wars and eradicate terrorist organizations.'' The United Nations has long since demonstrated its inability to perform this task. That leaves only the United States, together with such coalitions of the willing as it can assemble.

That Americans have the power to run such a ''liberal empire'' Ferguson does not doubt: they have been doing something like this for decades. They have, however, been ''surprisingly inept'' in their interventions, which are ''often short-lived and their results ephemeral.'' This has happened, he complains, because they ''lack the imperial cast of mind.'' Americans fail to train their youth to manage their empire. They resist annexation, preferring ''that foreigners . . . Americanize themselves without the need for formal rule.'' They are more into consumption than conquest: ''They would rather build shopping malls than nations. They crave for themselves protracted old age and dread, even for other Americans who have volunteered for military service, untimely death in battle.''

As a fulmination, this is splendid. As history, however, it is unpersuasive. Ferguson himself acknowledges that annexation is no necessary requirement for imperial success: the British Empire often operated without formally controlling territory. Fears of casualties did not deter Americans from slaughtering one another in their own Civil War, or from costly sacrifices in the two world wars, as well as in Korea and Vietnam. And if it was ''ephemeral'' for the United States to have exited the world wars far stronger than when it entered them, one wonders what might be said about the comparative performance of the British, French, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, Dutch and Japanese empires.

Nor does ''inept'' seem quite the right word for the record of the United States during the cold war. It led the effort to contain the Soviet Union and international Communism, without resorting to war or appeasement. It designed an international order in which American influence spread, as Ferguson himself notes, more by invitation than by imposition. And it emerged from the cold war with no credible great power rivals in sight, a condition that persists over a decade later. A fondness for consumption and shopping malls? Perhaps, but compared with whom? The Europeans? The Japanese? The Chinese?

Several of Ferguson's claims, moreover, are contradictory. He maintains at one point that West Germany would have recovered without American assistance after World War II because the Nazis had been in power for only 12 years, so that the Germans retained the memory of how democratic institutions functioned. Elsewhere, though, he dismisses this argument as ''conventional wisdom,'' which overlooks ''the extent to which the Third Reich had revolutionized German political culture.'' He criticizes the Truman administration for rejecting Gen. Douglas MacArthur's advice to use nuclear weapons against Chinese targets during the Korean War; but he admits that MacArthur himself ''had no answer'' to critics who warned of the risks this strategy would entail. Ferguson documents the futility of American military operations in Vietnam, but regards the Johnson administration's 1968 decisions to send no additional troops and to begin negotiations as ''fatal mistakes.''

There are, along with these contradictions, curious digressions -- box office receipts for movies about Vietnam, for example, or statistics on American obesity -- the relevance of which is unclear. And there are errors, like misdating the American directive for the occupation of Germany, and misstating the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. ''Colossus'' reads, in short, like a series of previously published essays too hastily stitched together.

This is unfortunate, because whatever his skill at stitching, Ferguson is an accomplished and imaginative scholar. Several of his arguments deserve more careful consideration than they are likely to receive, given the distractions that surround them.

One is that the dismantling of formal empires and the near-universal practice of self-determination have so far failed to produce the orderly, prosperous and equitable world for which liberals since Woodrow Wilson have hoped. Another is that ''for some countries some form of imperial governance, meaning a partial or complete suspension of their national sovereignty, might be better than full independence,'' and that only the United States is in a position to supply, and secure international support for, such tutelage.

Yet another argument reflects Ferguson at his best: it is his warning that Americans may fail in this task because of a threat from within their own society. It is not terrorism, but rather the ballooning costs of Social Security and Medicare, combined with recent tax cuts, that ensure trillions of dollars in deficits for as far into the future as anyone can see. As a result, the United States government already depends upon the willingness of foreigners, notably the Chinese, to cover its budgetary shortfalls by purchasing its bonds. One need not accept Ferguson's account of past ineptitudes to see the dangerous implications of this one: the responsibility for it resides squarely within the administration of George W. Bush.

The time has therefore come, Ferguson concludes, to revive Paul Kennedy's term ''imperial overstretch,'' but to apply it now to the gap that exists between the domestic obligations Americans have taken on and their unwillingness to pay for them: this could be the Achilles' heel of their empire. The point makes gloomy good sense. It's all the more regrettable, then, that Ferguson has embedded it in a book that does not bear its weight. Perhaps there is also such a thing as authorial overstretch.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 7, Page 11 of the National edition with the headline: The Last Empire, for Now. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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