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4.5
You will correctly surmise from purusing other reviews of this work that Niall Ferguson's books attract very well informed and thoughtful readers who are not at all reluctant to let him have it if in their view he strays too far into the counterfactual world he helped revive and refine with his works such as "Virtual History." My own take on the rather strong negative reactions engendered by "Colossus" here and elsewhere is that they are generated--like many counterfactuals--by Ferguson's message being taken too seriously on the one hand and not seriously enough on the other. "Colossus" is an essay on possibilities, not a prescription for world domination. It asks--and attempts to answer--the question of why the United States is such a reluctant world leader (in terms of active intervention in its affairs) and explores the possible implications of its shedding its historical aversion to international activism.What I find lacking in negative reviews is an appreciation, however reluctant, of the value of this inquiry whatever the likelihood of its practical application. And this failure to "get" the message I attribute latently to our historic isolationism and explicitly to the same cause Ferguson highlights as one of the principal reasons why we are unlikely to change our minds: our national attention deficit disorder.Irag provides the perfect illustration of one of Ferguson's most telling points: we were hardly there before we said we were leaving and then reinforced our apparent disenchantment with the enterprise by becoming politically irrational and transfixed by prisoner abuse and the failure to find WMD's. No reasonable person can argue that if we leave Iraq prematurely, we will have wholly failed to achieve our stated goal of bringing democracy to the Middle East, which conclusion raises the even more compelling public policy question of if we could have foreseen that home front and/or international political pressures were going to prompt us to cut and run, then why did we undertake the enterprise in the first place?You can't go by me: I am an unabashed and unrepentent Ferguson fan. Every time I pick up one of his books, I feel like I am taking a walk on a pleasant Summer evening with an old friend who happens to be unassailably erudite and enviably eloquent and I am listening to him expound his well-informed views. Neither in these fanciful strolls nor in my critical reading of his works do I feel compelled to agree with him, but I am inexorably forced to think about what he is saying and consider the wonderfully diverse and provocative implications of his musings.Finally, what troubles me is not whether this or my fellow readers' reviews will prompt you to buy and read this book. No, the question I ask is whether our policy makers ever choose a book like "Colossus" as their summer reading. Our recent foreign adventures suggest to me at least the exercise would be very much worth their--and our--while.
