The spring 2005 issue of Daedalus contains a lengthy article by Niall Ferguson "The unconscious colossus: limits of (& alternatives to) American empire" that I recommend downloading.
Getting to the article is a bit complicated, since there doesn't seem to be an HTML version of the journal. If you load the PDF of the cover page (120 KB) in your browser, you'll see that the title of Ferguson's article is highlighted, meaning that you can click on it to load the PDF of the article itself. Or, with my help, you can go straight to the PDF of the article (508 KB). The essay is sixteen pages long.
The first half of the article doesn't contain much that is new to anyone who has already read Ferguson's book Colossus: The Price of America's Empire. If you've simply been keeping up with the short pieces that I've blogged in my Ferguson posts, then you're probably already up to speed on this portion of the article. But it's useful to have everything in one place.
Ferguson provides a succinct summary of his book in this paragraph:
Here, in a simplified form, is what it says: that the United States has always been, functionally if not self-consciously, an empire; that a self-conscious American imperialism might well be preferable to the available alternatives; but that financial, human, and cultural constraints make such self-consciousness highly unlikely; and that therefore the American empire, insofar as it continues to exist, will remain a somewhat dysfunctional entity.
The second half of the essay looks at the future of the American empire in light of burgeoning federal deficits, enormous social spending liabilities, and the unfinished war in Iraq.