NIALL FERGUSON, THE NEWEST WINGNUT PUNDIT

He's one of the academic elite the wingnuts can praise because he agrees with their warped view of the world. He seems to be just another glib neo-con pundit, the type who would attend the Herzliya conference in Israel and be a member of the Hoover Institution.

In his debut essay in Newsweek, he trashes Pres. Obama for not being either Otto von Bismarck or Henry Kissinger. Ferguson goes on to assert that America needs "coherent grand strategy" and I for one am completely opposed to any foreign policy that can be called "grand."  The comparison to Kissinger is a bit amusing because Kissinger praised Metternich for waiting until the last possible moment to make a decision instead of trying to follow some grand strategy.

Ferguson's measure of past events is also suspect. Here's just one example:

The Iranian revolution of 1979, which took the Carter administration wholly by surprise, was a catastrophe far greater than the loss of South Vietnam.

This is simply an absurd claim, something more suited to late night talk radio instead of Harvard, but I suspect the former is closer to Ferguson's intended audience.

His conception of our current policy choices is also suspect:

Grand strategy is all about the necessity of choice. Today, it means choosing between a daunting list of objectives: to resist the spread of radical Islam, to limit Iran's ambition to become dominant in the Middle East, to contain the rise of China as an economic rival, to guard against a Russian "reconquista" of Eastern Europe—and so on.

There is no reason to contain China economically, whatever that would mean in today's global markets. There's also little threat that Russia will try to re-take Eastern Europe. I would say the Obama Administration has been doing a fairly good job of fighting radical Islam and containing Iran.