Niall Ferguson on collapses: Soviet Union and USA
British-American historian Niall Ferguson may be horrified to admit it, but his comparison of the failing American empire to the late Soviet Union, “We’re all Soviets now”, was cribbed from Vladimir Putin.
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In 2022 Putin said that America was steadfastly walking towards ruin with the unhappy, steady and confident gait of the Soviet Union. Putin saw that America was securely blinded by its system of power. It marched relentlessly through swamps of disaster within a bubble of impunity.
The USA was making the mistake of empires, Putin said, rubbing salt into the wounds of the empire that dare not say its name. Imperial prestige convinced them their power was limitless and their leaders could afford endless mistakes. Their primacy lulled them into the sense of native superiority that dulled their wits and stopped them adapting. Empires learn nothing from their rivals. They scoff at the merits of other societies. They are exceptional. They bask in greatness.
In these reassuring dreams, the American empire walks its steady gait to disaster sealed within the fog of their founding fathers. In that way, the USA resembles the late Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev modelled himself on Lenin, and in 1990 studied the great revolutionary’s texts to revive perestroika. He lost touch with the sense of reality that is necessary to guide the ship of state. The US lost contact with reality in the 1990’s when Karl Rove said the sole super-power could make its own reality. In 2024, as American primacy collapses, Joe Biden may even imagine himself to be FDR, or Woodrow Wilson, after the stroke.
Ferguson’s article seeks to shake the American leadership back to reality. He is not alone. Ben Rhodes, Andreas Kluth, Douglas Murray, Elbridge Colby and, here in the South Pacific, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute have issued calls to arms for the West to rearm militarily and morally, if with a little more modesty of vision. They know they are in trouble, but they know not what they have done. The inner circle of the empire’s establishment is shrieking in despair.
Ferguson might even be described as the court historian of the empire’s inner circle. He wrote admiring histories of the British and American empires. He is the biographer of Kissinger. Like the great man, Ferguson runs a lucrative consultancy and makes grand strategic pronouncements, rather than get his hands dirty with real government. He calls himself “international man of history”, like James Bond, but safely in his sinecure at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, alongside Condoleezza Rice and H.R. McMaster.
His more modest historian colleagues at Stanford are not so sure. Priya Satia skewers Ferguson and his kin, who apply history nostalgically in the service of empire, in her book, Time’s Monster: History, Conscience and Britain’s Empire (2020). But unlike most in the Stanford silicon tower, Ferguson disputes the idea that America is a republic, not an empire. In Colossus: the rise and fall of the American empire (2012) he made the case, during the reign of George W. Bush, that America should own its empire and stand proudly in its domination of the world. He offended liberals and conservatives by arguing that “the United States is an empire and that this might not be wholly bad.”
But over the next decade Americans turned against the curious conservative that Ferguson is. They went nationalist and then went ‘woke’. They refused to take up his reinterpretation of Kipling’s White Man’s Burden, including his suggestion to revive the draft. They indulged themselves in liberal and nationalist moralizing. They got China wrong. They refused to implement his recipes for financial prudence, to be paid for by society, not by cuts to the military budget.
The spurned imperialist Ferguson has soured on his adopted country’s fake elites. In “We’re all Soviets now” he nurses his whiskey in a Stanford bar, and tells them he told them so. He doubted the US public could commit itself fully to the imperial enterprise in Iraq and Afghanistan. He warned of degeneration. He lamented how Western intellectuals no longer used the “killer apps” of the West. He feared the US and allied leadership, especially Europe, were too weak to turn the screws on the rest of the world, who could not be spared the empire’s rod.
Ferguson’s cribbed comparison of the USA with the Soviet Union, therefore, is not a sign that reality is dawning in America. It is a curmudgeon’s lament locked inside unipolar illusions. His history of the late Soviet Union is full of old tropes, and empty of true scholarship. Americans have coded Soviet Collapse into the myth of America’s plucky rebellion against European empire. His claim that we are in “Cold War II” misreads post-1945 history. His wishes that China will collapse too, in the end, are more grounded than cranks like Zeihan, but reluctant to face facts.
But his article is a sign of the distress of American primacy. His wake-up call speaks some truth about, not the Soviet Union, but the American Union. Ferguson identifies three main problems for the crumbling American empire: economy, military, and a cluster of political, social and cultural issues. In each case he misses the mark.
On the economy, Ferguson highlights that America can no longer pay the bills of empire. Its government has projected deficits greater than 5 per cent of GDP for decades. Its attempt to reintroduce “industrial policy” in the economic war with China is distorting private investment. Productivity has not improved much for 30 years despite the hype about the IT revolution, and its latest wave of artificial intelligence. Ferguson, however, does not quote the latest World Bank figures on the relative share of the real world economy, as measured by GDP purchasing power parity, of the USA and China, or the core USA allies and the BRICS states.
On the military, Ferguson bells the fat cat of the world’s greatest military. Expensive, yes. Capable, no. This military was defeated in Afghanistan, just like USSR. Yet he cannot bring himself to admit strategic failure in Ukraine. Nor does Ferguson admit into discussion Andrei Martyanov’s argument in The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs that Russia and China have surpassed the US in war-making capacity.
Rather, he uses the shame of defeat to amplify a US Senator’s plea to increase military spending “to improve the U.S. military’s ability to deter wider conflict and, if necessary, to win a war.” This Senator’s report begins with the paranoia of a failing empire.
America’s national defense strategy and military budget are inadequate for the dangerous world in which we find ourselves. An emerging axis of aggressors is working to undermine U.S. interests across the globe.
Washington has war fever. In “We’re all Soviets now,” Ferguson does not calm the patient down, but advocates more US military imperial leadership and, if necessary, combat in a world war. Fiscal reform is needed now to prevent interest payments on debt increasing to double the amount spent on national security by 2041. America cannot allow a reduction of defence spending in this dangerous world led by the “new Chinese-led Axis.” Ferguson’s use of the term, “Axis”, echoing World War Two opponents, is based on an article by his colleague, Phillip Zelikow. That article misrepresented the causes of World War Two as “the anti-American partnerships developed by the Axis powers,” in order to warn Americans they must prepare for the “serious possibility of worldwide warfare”. They must fix their budget so they can make a “generational investment” in the world’s most expensive, extensive extra-territorial military.
The imperial inner circle that Ferguson courts believe that the dumb American public needs to stop moaning and start fighting. Enter Ferguson’s third point of comparison with the Soviet Union: the cluster of political, cultural and social issues that scream degeneration. Yet again he misunderstands the mistakes of empires.
Ferguson compares the old leaders of the late USSR with the tottering elites of Biden’s America. He is honest enough to admit current US leaders are older than the trio of late Soviet gerontocrats. Brezhnev died at 75, Andropov, 68, and Chernenko, 72. Biden and Trump became Presidents at later ages. Ferguson discreetly passes over the old party hacks who dominate US Congressional politics. He fails to mention Gorbachev’s age when he came to power (54), or indeed Brezhnev’s (57). He confuses symptom with cause. Gerontocracy is a sign that elites have entrenched themselves inside oligarchical, patronage-ridden political institutions, and just won’t let go, despite their mistakes.
Then Ferguson compares public cynicism about institutions in the USSR and USA. In the USSR the joke about the major newspapers, Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (News), was that there was no truth in the news, and no news in the truth. Western political culture may be entering the same zone, but with the complication of radically decentred media. Opinion polls show mistrust of institutions. Average confidence in major institutions has halved since 1979. Trust in Congress and the mainstream media is pitifully low.
But Ferguson’s comparison focuses on the criticisms of Soviet society that followed Gorbachev’s glasnost reforms, while conflating these with the whole late Soviet period. When Gorbachev provoked society to share the truth in the news and news in the truth he unleashed a wave of pent-up criticisms. Ferguson refers to a recent analysis of this outburst of questioning, Roads to the Temple: Truth, Memory, Ideas, and Ideals in the Making of the Russian Revolution, 1987-1991. But he presents a shallow understanding of the institutional and cultural changes unleashed by glasnost. He fails to refer to other scholarship, such as Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: the Fall of the Soviet Union (2021). He repeats old tropes of the struggle for freedom, and the yearning to be like America, but does not explain glasnost, Gorbachev’s intent, nor the reformer’s mistakes.
The social issues that make Americans into Soviets now are health and social care. Ferguson compares the ‘deaths of despair’ – from substance misuse and mental illness – in the USA today and the late Soviet Union. But he fudges the history of the social crisis of the former Soviet states in the 1990’s and moralizes ineffectually about the USA’s failed health and social care systems.
As if embarrassed by the failure of America’s free enterprise health system, he provides misleading statistics about the fall in life expectancy and deaths of despair in the Soviet Union. He quotes Russian mortality statistics from 1990 to 2004, not the era of the Soviet Union’s health and social policies. There were, of course, many failures of those systems, as were recognized by Gorbachev’s failed attempts to change alcohol consumption by taxation, one of many reforms that undermined the reformer. But the economic and social catastrophe, visited upon Russia and post-Soviet states by free-market extremism in the 1990’s, surely partly caused the fall in life expectancy. Yet Ferguson has the gall to describe this human tragedy, in which the West played a dishonourable part, as the “self-destruction of homo-Sovieticus.”
Nor can Ferguson quite bring himself to state the facts of America’s health policy failure. His source does:
“Alarmingly, U.S. life expectancy fell between 2014 and 2015 and continued to decline through 2017, the longest sustained decline in life expectancy in a century (since the influenza pandemic of 1918-1919).”
The decline is the product of two long-term trends. Mortality among working age people (25-64 years) has increased since the 1990’s due to causes of death, primarily drug- and alcohol-related causes and suicide. Declines in working-age mortality due to other causes of death (mainly cardiovascular diseases) have also slowed since 2010.
The unipolar moment has not been good for the health of Americans. Its health care system is exceptional in its failure. Like its military, the US system is the most expensive in the world and delivers some of its worst outcomes, including its opiates problem. Ferguson notes, with some embarrassment that other countries “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” But he obscures the problem, which any health bureaucrat (and I used to be one) around the world knows. American health care is a disaster of its own making. It is nothing like the USSR.
The Commonwealth Fund reported in 2021 the four features of top performing countries that the US elites keep screwing up. They provide universal coverage and remove cost barriers. They invest in primary care systems available to all. They reduce administrative burdens. They invest in social services, especially for children and working-age adults. They choose health, not war; but not in libertarian America, home of the brave, land of the sick.
Ferguson does not bother to look at such sources for his analysis of late Soviet America’s problems with life expectancy. He consults a South Park episode to claim “the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.”
The American republic has failed for 100 years to develop effective health and social welfare systems, unlike most states in the world. Even the Soviet Union did better. But defying history and a library of reports, Ferguson blames the culture:
“the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.”
This last theme of cultural degeneration in the USA and USSR takes a partisan twist. Echoing critics of “cultural Marxism”, Ferguson locates this bogus ideology of the nomenklatura in his political opponents,
“the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
Ferguson has lately taken to denouncing ‘woke’ culture, appearing with Jordan Peterson, and establishing the conservative, private Austin university to kick against the pricks. He evokes old permissibly racist, anti-Russian rhetoric by describing “a horde of apparatchik DEI ‘officers’.” But what riles this grumpy imperialist most is that his adopted countrymen do not want to die to defend US interests across the globe.
His remarks on foreign policy mask concessions of failure with an imperialist error of judgment: if the nation would only take up the White Man’s Burden, then the empire could win again.
As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.
His criticism of US foreign policy being the hegemon everywhere all at once is a feint. Its purpose is to complain that the little people are not willing to die for the glory of Ferguson’s adopted empire. They want butter, not guns. The kids don’t love patriotism anymore. They have lost religion. They do not even want children or community involvement. They are spoiled rich kids at Ivy Leagues who pose at saving the planet and will not fight for power.
It is Ferguson’s theme of moral degeneration, causing incompetence in government. “We have done this to ourselves,” he shrieks. If only they had listened to me. Now Ferguson’s fear is that the weakness will lead the US to lose its war with China. The culture of the USA, not its empire, has become “as degenerate as the Soviets,” and the nation will “tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.”
In “We are all Soviets now” Ferguson cribbed Putin’s warning that the US is walking to disaster like the Soviet Union, but missed Putin’s essential insight. It is not degeneration but wilful blindness that is the distinguishing mark of failing empires. Blindness makes for mistakes. The visible problems are less important than the stubborn failure to learn.
The only way to overcome the blindness of America to its problems is to develop a proper sense of history. Niall Ferguson puts on a show of applying history but has restated “end of empire” memes. He has replayed Toynbee’s myth that empires die by suicide. But empires die in many ways, including military defeat and slow reversal of the currents of history on which they once had surged.
Niall Ferguson sought to goad America into war by comparing the US to its defeated, humiliated enemy. But he misrepresented Soviet history and misunderstood the collapse of American Primacy. We are not all Soviets now. The collapse of the Soviet Union emerged from its unique circumstances, the actions of its leaders and its enemies, and a failure to bend with the wind of global changes.
America is in a different storm all together, but it too is failing to learn. Its culture has created a mental prison for its elites as strongly barred as the Leninism that entrapped many Soviet leaders in the 1980’s. It is steadfastly walking the unhappy, steady and confident gait of the unhappy American Union.
Full members of the Burning Archive have access to my personal reading of this text. It is just over 29 minutes in length and gives members the option of listening to this essay while going for a walk and doing their chores.