In his debut column for The Free Press, Niall Ferguson highlights some of the challenges currently facing the United States. Particularly for conservatives, his criticisms are painfully familiar: aging leadership, an ever-expanding state, a weakened military, an out-of-touch elite, and mounting debt. However, Ferguson’s provocative thesis—“Are we the baddies?”—immediately nullifies these criticisms.
Ferguson’s column would have been uncontroversial, if somewhat dull, had he not framed it within the context of the U.S.–China rivalry. In his pursuit of provocation, he undermines his objective. Ferguson writes:
But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”
Jonah Goldberg has argued that this criticism fails on domestic and moral grounds, and there is little to add. Outside the far left and far right, most sane Americans would agree that the American regime and the international order it upholds are morally good, at least compared to the alternatives of China, Russia, and Iran.
But beyond the moral argument, Ferguson further errs in comparing the United States with China in amoral terms. For all America’s problems, China is far weaker and less capable of winning a protracted conflict.
