"Colossus" by Niall Ferguson

If America lacks some of England's 19th century resolve, it's not merely because we are a nation of weak-willed, SUV-driving, Big Mac-gorging couch potatoes, though that is part of it. It's because, to our credit, we sense that the world's peoples don't really want us bossing them around. The global system the United States devised at the end of World War II was created to allow nations to take more control of their destinies than the European colonizers had ever allowed. We may love wealth and indulgence, but we do not admire rigid caste systems that favor the well-born. That is one of the very few areas of agreement joining the far right and far left in the United States, and the view is close to universally held in this country. FDR's thwarting of Winston Churchill's desire to re-create the empire is the third of his three great legacies (after restoring prosperity and winning the war). God knows the United States has applied its ideals imperfectly to its own people and the world's. But still, to quote Herman Melville (whom Ferguson cites impressively in a different context), "the Declaration makes a difference."

This point feels all the more palpable in the new gloom that has enveloped the Iraq adventure in 2004, and has exposed America's neoimperial assumptions (especially those of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz) to withering ridicule at home and around the world. "Colossus" will find a far more subdued American audience than "Empire" did a mere two years ago. Its examination of U.S. history to date is sound and reasonably asks Americans to look more closely at the complexity of their global role. But the book suffers from its subtle reinforcement of Bush's impulse to reshape the world in the image of Midland, Texas. It is an important effort and demands being read for its powerful analysis of what is wrong with the world, including America's failure to take full responsibility for the messes it keeps creating. We should feel honored by the attentions of a scholar as capable as Ferguson. But his call for a new kind of enlightened American empire fails to consider all of the unpleasant political realities facing a government that is detested by the world's peoples and increasingly distrusted by its own.

Nothing in the past three years more perfectly captured the way the world perceives the imperial impulse, and Bush specifically, than the photograph of a female G.I. holding a naked Iraqi prisoner by a leash. It would be hard to find a worse contradiction of one of Thomas Jefferson's best thoughts, expressed in the final letter he wrote, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence: "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God."

• View blog reactions