Victor Davis Hanson reviews the new book by Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire: The Power to Do Good.

SO, the real crises of American power are soaring entitlements, unfunded social mandates and ever-increasing laxity and affluence among an indulgent citizenry. While we fret about prescription-drug benefits, the madrassas turn out soldiers of Islam who are emboldened in their hostility precisely because of our restraint and self-absorption. We have deficits of sorts galore - but they involve shortcomings in galvanizing spiritual power, fielding enough willing soldiers and setting sensible budget priorities.

This is a bold, original and eccentric argument, and there will be plenty of critics who will pounce on Ferguson’s Gibbonesque theory of internal decline and imperial denial. Indeed, sometimes Ferguson himself gives critics easy ammunition.

Need soldiers? Ferguson advises that we look at the millions of prison convicts, illegal immigrants and chronic unemployed who could easily be induced to serve in a massive new imperial army - as if the U.S. military is looking for such bodies for its high-tech, high morale expeditionary forces.

Ferguson really does argue that far from spending too little at home, our real problems are federal wasteful entitlements for couch potatoes. Americans risk becoming softies, pear-shaped and fat, with maxed-out credit cards, waiting to check out in luxurious rest homes - the entire society in danger of becoming an “inert lump of old iron.”

But the Marines - some with dyed hair and Ray Bans - who drove to Baghdad in three weeks, and the Rangers who sleep out in the Hindu Kush, hardly seem the same sort of fellows as those who pour out into the streets of European cities to protest for a 35-hour work week and more government unemployment insurance.

Twenty-six days after 9/11, Americans were in Afghanistan; 40 hours after a similar al Qaeda attack, the Spanish electorate voted in Socialists on the promise that they would get out of Iraq pronto. Our population may seem soft and flabby on university campuses and think tanks, but the sort of Americans I see out here in rural central California like to fight, work to exhaustion and, for the most part, worry more about what we are going to do to our enemies in the Middle East, rather than they to us.

Ferguson, in contrast, thinks that if we keep this indulgence up as a nation, we should fear not the Chinese, Middle East or jealous Europeans, but rather ourselves, who will have to either appease, bribe or apologize to a growing group of emboldened barbarians and terrorists.