You should read the article for yourself, but a few other highlights:

- "Remarkably the president polls relatively strongly on national security."

Remarkably the name Osama bin Laden does not appear in this article.

- On Afghanistan and Iraq: "Understandably, the men and women who have served there wonder what exactly their sacrifice was for, if any notion that we are nation building has been quietly dumped. Only when both countries sink back into civil war will we realize the real price of Obama's foreign policy."

The men and women who served in Iraq and Afghanistan were not told that "nation building" was the reason for their sacrifice. A review of the relevant history will reveal that they were sent in to rout the Taliban and al Qaeda, and to prevent Saddam Hussein from exercising his [claimed] impending threat to use weapons of mass destruction. Everything since then has been "mission creep" of a spectacular variety, and unlike Ferguson most Americans view it as a success rather than failure of Obama's to be reducing rather than expanding America's commitment in both wars.

- "In Tokyo in November 2009, the president gave his boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech... Yet by fall 2011, this approach had been jettisoned in favor of a 'pivot' back to the Pacific, including risible deployments of troops to Australia and Singapore. From the vantage point of Beijing, neither approach had credibility."

The "from the vantage point of Beijing" assertion is based on no adduced evidence, and based on my experience and interviews there is more or less the opposite of the truth. Again, note that a Harvard professor of history uses the phrase "boilerplate hug-a-foreigner speech."

- He presents an ominous chart showing that, if Obama is reelected, China's economy might become bigger than America's around the time he leaves office:

What this chart demonstrates is not "a nation losing ground" but the reality that China has four times as many people as America does. When its overall economy exceeds ours, its per capita output will be only one-quarter as great. A historian would presumably know that the conscious strategy of every president from Richard Nixon through Barack Obama has been to encourage rather than thwart China's continued development, on the reasoning that a poor and festering China would be more dangerous to the United States than one that is becoming richer.

- "I was a good loser four years ago. But this year, fired up by the rise of Ryan, I want badly to win."

According to an article in the Telegraph this year, Ferguson has chosen America over Britain because the intellectual life back home is so shallow. It is good that he is deepening our discourse with observations like these. (To the best of my knowledge, he is not a U.S. citizen, which I note only because it gives the "good loser" and "want badly to win" observations an unusual edge.)