Imperial waltz: is American power good, bad, or distressingly reluctant?

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Colossus: The Price of America's Empire - An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror - Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East - Book Review

Colossus: The Price of America's Empire, by Niall Ferguson, New York: Penguin Press, 384 pages, $25.95

An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, by David Frum and Richard Perle, New York: Random House, 284 pages, $25.95

Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, by Rashid Khalidi, Boston: Beacon Press, 223 pages, 823

WRITING OF BRITAIN'S Victorian empire, James (now Jan) Morris observed that the imperial experience released emotions "laced with the hope of profit, the pleasure of authority and the chance of doing good." He added that "the theme grows heavier as it progresses, an instinct matures into a duty, a duty curdles into a craze, a craze becomes a burden." By the end of the cycle, the empire, accepted at the start, is "utterly discredited."

Those emotions of empire, this time the American version, are captured, separately, in David Frum and Richard Perle's An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, Rashid Khalidi's Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America's Perilous Path in the Middle East, and Niall Ferguson's Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. Frum and Perle see American domination as an opportunity to do good. Khalidi fast-forwards to the discredit ultimately heaped on empire. Ferguson provides a partial synthesis of the two perspectives (minus Khalidi's animosity). Conscious of how the American empire blends the hope of profit with the desire to do good, as well as the pleasures and rights of authority, he worries that the United States may be dangerously ignorant of its imperial fate.

While only Khalidi deals solely with the Middle East, all the authors keep a steady eye on the region. A recurring theme is their concern with the spread of open societies and free markets--or the charade of that project--particularly in the Arab world. Frum and Perle are undone by speaking out of both the liberal and the illiberal sides of their mouths, even as they deny that the U.S. is an empire at all. Khalidi self-destructs thanks to his inability even to consider a benevolent aspect to empire. Ferguson, who has no doubts about America's imperialism, recognizes the liberalizing potential of its power while playing down its darker side.

Ferguson's creativity is emancipating. An inescapable conclusion about the modern Middle East is that indigenous liberal reform has been a spectacular illusion. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. As Arab countries embarked on post-colonial independence, they became less free. Most Arab civil societies have been bludgeoned into silence by their regimes, with even the more representative systems denying their citizens true political participation.

Ferguson, positing the need for a liberal American empire, suggests a possible mechanism for change from the outside, even as he wonders whether the U.S. is up to the task. And while there has been much denigration of the notion that democracy and free markets can be imposed, Ferguson suggests it is indeed possible. More pertinently, the 9/11 attacks underlined how the success of this ambition in the Middle East is intimately tied to U.S. national security.

There is of course the problem of defining empire. For former Pentagon official Richard Perle and former Bush speechwriter David Frum, America is not an empire because free societies cannot be ruthlessly expansionist--givers of freedom don't wantonly accumulate power. They write in closing that "America's vocation is not an imperial vocation. Our vocation is to support justice with power. It is a vocation that has earned us terrible enemies. It is a vocation that has made us, at our best moments, the hope of the world."

Perle and Frum banish thoughts of a...