Obama’s timidity threatens US leadership in the region
Michael Young
Last Updated: March 17. 2010 9:22PM UAE / March 17. 2010 5:22PM GMT
The Harvard historian Niall Ferguson published a provocative essay in the magazine Foreign Affairs recently. His contention was that empires, when they entered a phase of terminal decline, tended to do so rapidly rather than passing through a long itinerary of degradation. If Mr Ferguson is right, his theory raises interesting questions about the power of the United States in the Middle East.
Mr Ferguson believes the collapse of the American empire will be provoked by domestic economic and demographic realities. Specifically, the ratio of American retired persons to workers is rising, so that the United States, with an inadequate fiscal system, will sink into an unmanageable cycle of debt as relatively fewer workers support an expanding base of retirees. As Mr Ferguson explained in his book Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire from 2004, the only way for the US to overcome this crisis is through self-defeating policies, namely to vastly increase income and payroll taxes, slash social security benefits by equally dramatic amounts, or to cut discretionary spending to zero.
While Mr Ferguson is primarily an economic historian, he is also acutely sensitive to the psychological dimensions of empire. His most quoted line about the US is that it is an empire “with a short attention span”. There is an ethos to empire, he asserts, that is necessary to keep the imperial project running. For Mr Ferguson, the world benefits from an effective liberal empire, as it did during the 19th century when Britain ruled. The US is the natural candidate to play that role today, yet keeps resisting this.
As Mr Ferguson lamented in Colossus: “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 in its economic structure, its social make-up and its political culture.”
Segue to the Middle East. To what extent has the Obama administration’s actions in the region confirmed, or contradicted, Mr Ferguson’s observations? There has been a disconcerting feeling since President Barack Obama took office that if the American empire ...
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