The Empire Slinks Back: “Why Americans don’t really have what it takes to rule the world.” — Niall Ferguson, professor of financial history at the Stern School of Business, New York University, senior research fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and author of Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, NY Times Magazine Ferguson ends:

So long as the American empire dare not speak its own name — so long as it continues this tradition of organized hypocrisy — today’s ambitious young men and women will take one look at the prospects for postwar Iraq and say with one voice, ”Don’t even go there.”

Americans need to go there. If the best and brightest insist on staying home, today’s unspoken imperial project may end — unspeakably — tomorrow.

For him, this appears to be an exhortation that we accept our manifest destiny and go forward boldly to build the American empire. Could he still be reeling from the collapse of enlightened, superior, civilized and civilizing British empire?