Niall Ferguson, Harvard professor of history and business, has just published an article critical of President Obama's handling of the populist uprising in Egypt . He even goes so far as to call Obama's hesitant and admittedly uncertain actions of the past two weeks a "foreign policy debacle." After noting with pride that he jetted last week to attend the annual Herzliya security conference in Tel Aviv, he informs us that the consensus of the assembled experts on the Middle East was "a colossal failure of American foreign policy."

However, I actually cannot find any such condemnation in any of the actual reports, summaries, bulletins, or statements from the Herzliya conference. While there is criticism of Obama concerning the year wasted in trying to pressure Iran about nuclear weapons , there is no mention of Obama's handling of the Egyptian crisis. Other reports make no mention of the US at all . While the topic of Egypt clearly dominated the conference, the US response did not seem to be a significant concern. Israel blasted Obama's response to the situation in Egypt in the first few days of the uprising, but has been fairly quiet since.

It is also fascinating that Ferguson seems to believe that the Obama administration should have predicted the uprising, had a more cohesive policy immediately in place, and acted decisively throughout the events when neither Israel or Saudi Arabia, who border Egypt and by any criteria have far more at stake in Egypt's future, seemed to have had any idea that a revolt was possible. In fact, some argue that Israel seems remarkably unprepared for what has been happening . The Saudis have yet to actually respond to the entire sequence of events, and now that Mubarak is gone, are giving the impression of paralysis in the face of fear and uncertainty. I do not see how Obama and the US could possibly have been more informed and proactive than Egypt's own neighbors.

Perhaps part of Ferguson's disconnect with current world events and the foreign policy choices being made to respond to them comes from his admiration of a nineteenth century Prime Minister of a country that no longer exists. Otto von Bismarck, Ferguson's diplomacy hero, was a brilliant statesman who, as the Prime Minister of Prussia, was responsible for the unification of Germany. He is famously remembered for his observation that "the statesman can only wait and listen until he hears the footsteps of God resounding through events; then he must jump up and grasp the hem of His coat, that is all" - which Ferguson quotes at the beginning of his article.

While this held true over 100 years ago, and still carries some weight today, frankly, times have changed over the past century. Communications across the world are no longer transmitted by ships and ponies. Bismarck cannot possibly have conceived of the internet, in which events are transmitted almost in real time around the world, and millions of people can be reached in a matter of seconds. The revolutions in the mid nineteenth century that culminated in the unification of Germany lasted two years, not two weeks. The rapid unfolding of events in Egypt, and their near instantaneous transmission to the rest of the world, meant that a cautious approach was probably the wisest path. It also means that the US, just like Israel and Saudi Arabia, needs some time to sort out the events and evaluate their ramifications. Egypt did not need our interference in recent weeks, and we could not have known what would be helpful and what would have been harmful. Israel and Saudi Arabia clearly believed the same course of non-intervention was the wisest.

To his credit, I am sure that Ferguson is an excellent historian regarding his area of expertise, which happens to be the first three decades of the last century . I am not certain, however, how much of an expert that makes him given the technological and social media revolutions that have taken place in the past decade alone. This article certainly does not indicate that he has learned much about contemporary foreign affairs or policy in the age of the internet.