Niall Ferguson: “A very large proportion of Americans don't have passports. But even more striking to me is the fact that the kind of people you might expect to be well-equipped to engage in what we rather euphemistically call nation-building—that's to say, the graduates of the elite universities—disproportionately avoid overseas engagements. The ambitions of the educational elite in this country are quite domestically focused. They really would rather be running a Wall Street law firm than governing Baghdad. And I think that's a fundamental social-cultural reason why the United States is bad at empire.”
In the following paragraph, Ferguson makes a very interesting point about drafting soldiers (which I oppose on the grounds that it weakens the army because volunteers are more likely to follow orders than those there unwillingly). He says that when you draft people in the military, you increase the likelihood that soldiers will have a diverse range of talents, and these talents came into play during the post-WWII period nation-building in Germany and Japan because soldiers were drawn from more walks of life than those who would join the army anyway.
