No one could have called ours a raucous household. The passions of our first two years at university were spent, and we were now buried in our books. My work, as usual, was quixotic and contradictory (studying zoology by day, writing a terrible novel by night), Niall's was focussed and unrelenting. He was charming, generous-spirited and easy to live with, but I think it is fair to say that everyone was frightened of him.
It's not just that my housemate knew his subject better than his contemporaries, and knew where he wanted to take it. He also knew how to do it. While the rest of us were fumbling with bunches of odd-shaped keys, trying to jam each of them into the lock in turn, the doors kept swinging open for him. Niall Ferguson is now professor of history at New York University, and rapidly becoming one of the most celebrated intellectuals in the US.
After university we retained an occasional friendship, during which we never quite engaged with each other's politics. I haven't seen him for three or four years, and I'm not sure what we'd talk about today. Our views, which were never close, have now polarized completely. We find ourselves on opposite sides of what will surely be the big fight of the early 21st century: global democracy versus American empire.
ILLUSTRATION MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
His new book and television series, Colossus, is an attempt to persuade the US that it must take its imperial role seriously, becoming in the 21st century what Britain was in the 19th.
"Many parts of the world," he claims, "would benefit from a period of American rule."
The US should stop messing about with "informal empire," and assert "direct rule" over countries which "require the imposition of some kind of external authority." But it is held back by "the absence of a will to power."
Colossus, like all Niall's books, is erudite and intelligent. The quality of his research forces those of us who take a different view to raise our game. He has remembered what so many have chosen to forget: that the US is and has always been an empire -- an "empire in denial."
He shows that there was little difference between the westward expansion of the founding states and the growth of "the great land empires of the past." He argues that its control of Central America, the Caribbean, the Pacific and the Middle East has had long had an imperial character. He makes the interesting point that the US found, in its attempt to contain the Soviet Union, "the perfect ideology for its own peculiar kind of empire: the imperialism of anti-imperialism."
But he asks us to remember only in order to persuade us to forget. He seeks to exchange an empire in denial for an empire of denial.
He forgets those who are always forgotten by empire: the victims. He remembers, of course, that former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein gassed his political opponents. He forgets that the British did the same. He talks of the "genuine benefits in the form of free trade" granted by Britain to its colonies, but forgets the devastating famines this policy caused in India (he is aware of Mike Davis's book Late Victorian Holocausts, but there is no sign that he has read it). He writes of the "institutions, knowledge and culture" bequeathed to the colonies, but forgets that Britain, as Basil Davidson showed, deliberately destroyed the institutions, knowledge and culture (including the hospitals and universities established by educated west Africans) of the colonized.
He forgets too that there was a difference between the interests of the British empire and those of its subject peoples.
He writes of the massive British investments in "railways and port facilities" and "plantations to produce new cash crops like tea, cotton, indigo and rubber" as if we seized the land, exploited the labor and exported the wealth of the colonies for the benefit of the natives.
Strangely, for one who knows empire so well, Niall also either forgets or fails to understand the current realities of America's informal rule. He dismisses the idea that the US wishes to control Middle Eastern oil reserves on the grounds that the US is already "oil rich." It's not just that oil production peaked in the US in 1970. The US government knows that if you control the diminishing resource on which every other nation depends, you will, as that resource dries up, come to exercise precisely the kind of indirect rule that Ferguson documents elsewhere.
While brilliantly exposing America's imperial denial, he takes at face value almost every other story it tells about its role in the world.
He accepts, for example, that the US went to war with Iraq because "its patience ran out" when Saddam failed to comply with the weapons inspectors. There's not a word about the way in which the US itself undermined and then destroyed the inspection missions.
When you forget, you must fill the memory gap with a story. And the story that all enthusiasts for empire tell themselves is that independent peoples have no one but themselves to blame for their misfortunes. The problem faced by many African states, Niall insists, "is simply misgovernment: corrupt and lawless dictators whose conduct makes economic development impossible." "Simply" misgovernment?
This is a continent, let us remember, whose economies are largely controlled by the IMF. As Joseph Stiglitz has shown, it has used its power to run a virtual empire for US capital, forcing poorer nations to remove their defenses against financial speculators and corporate theft. This is partly why some of the poorest African nations have the world's most liberal trade regimes. It is precisely because of forced liberalization of the kind Ferguson recommends that growth in sub-Saharan Africa fell from 36 percent between 1960 and 1980 (when countries exercised more control over their economies) to minus 15 percent between 1980 and 1998. The world's problem, Niall contends, is that the unaccountable government of the poor by the rich, which already has had such disastrous consequences, has not gone far enough.
The timing of all this is, of course, appalling. As the US has sought to impose direct imperial rule in Iraq, it has earned the hatred of much of the developing world. But we should never underestimate the willingness of the powerful to flatter themselves. Unaccountable power requires a justifying myth, and the US government might just be dumb enough to believe the one that Niall has sought to revive. My old friend could get us all into a great deal of trouble.
But even he doesn't really seem to believe it. His book, above all, is a lament for the opportunities the US has lost.
It is, he admits, so far from finding the will to recreate the British empire that the world could soon be left "without even one dominant imperial power." What better opportunity could there then be to press for global democracy?
George Monbiot is the author of The Age of Consent: a Manifesto for a New World Order.
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers
Gogoro Inc was once a rising star and a would-be unicorn in the years prior to its debut on the NASDAQ in 2022, as its environmentally friendly technology and stylish design attracted local young people. The electric scooter and battery swapping services provider is bracing for a major personnel shakeup following the abrupt resignation on Friday of founding chairman Horace Luke (陸學森) as chief executive officer. Luke’s departure indicates that Gogoro is sinking into the trough of unicorn disillusionment, with the company grappling with poor financial performance amid a slowdown in demand at home and setbacks in overseas expansions. About 95