The neocon’s imperial burden

‘They can’t like us a whole lot,’ was the report of one American soldier. ‘If we came into a village there was no flag-waving, no pretty young girls coming out to give us kisses as we march through victorious. ‘Oh, here come the fucking Americans again. Jesus, when are they going to learn?’

That was Vietnam. Even the well-intentioned imperialist, as Niall Ferguson puts it, is ‘seldom loved’. Ferguson is both a lucid and prolific newspaper commentator and a historian whose book-length specialisms have been money, and empire. So he is well-positioned to consider the place of the United States in the world just now — a time when it seems to have more of both than most nations would decently know what to do with.

It’s a tricky topic, however. Ferguson, according to his own subtitle, sets out to describe ‘the rise and fall of the American empire’. But ask most Americans and they won’t admit there has been a ‘rise’, because they won’t admit to being an empire.