Book Review

After Empire, by Dilip Hiro

November 9^th 1989 must have been a fairly good time to be George H.W Bush. After nearly five decades of Cold War, America and its NATO allies were finally victorious. As The Berlin Wall came tumbling down, thousands of East Germans poured over to the west, eager for blue jeans, Coca Cola and Rock & Roll. Historian Francis Fukuyama even called that momentous occasion the end of history. Like a victorious demigod, Bush 41 now towered over the rest of the world, and America was the world’s sole superpower. Historians were suddenly out of a job as the only thing left to record for posterity was the onward march of western capitalism, or so it seemed at the time.

Dilip Hiro is one of the world´s leading experts on the Middle East and Central Asia and has written several critically acclaimed books on global affairs. After Empire aims to explain what type of world we can expect to inhabit in the coming decades and what this will mean for global affairs.

During the Cold War we lived in a bipolar world. That meant that there were two great powers who squared off for global dominion, The Soviet Union and their Warsaw pact allies against The USA and Nato. With the fall of the Soviet Union The USA became the world´s only superpower and proceeded to briefly lead a unipolar world. This dominion, however, proved to be short-lived, and as Mr. Hiro explains, US dominion had in fact been declining steadily since the end of WWII. This might sound alarming some people, but Mr. Hiro argues why this is not a doom and gloom prophecy. Rather, he points out, it´s unavoidable that The USA, who controlled half of the world economy immediately after WWII, would see their share of global wealth shrink as war torn countries and the third world starts to grow and develop.

In After Empire, Mr. Hiro gives his candid account of the key regions of the world, The USA, South America, Europe, Russia, China and Iran. He retells their recent history and gives his predictions over what the future will hold for each of them. Most writers who write these types of books are inevitably Anglo-Saxon and unabashedly cheer for team star spangled banner. Mr. Hiro´s account offers a somewhat different perspective. Although I should add that I feel he is sometimes a bit too zealous in condemning the USA. Russia, Iran and China get off the human rights violations hook relatively easily, while the USA is judged much harsher consistently throughout the book. Iran and China, however, have never claimed to be global superpowers, and that is quite possibly why the USA is subjected to the most intimate scrutiny.

A large part of Mr. Hiro´s narrative concerns the tumultuous first decade of this century. When Bush 43 was handed the keys to the car, he inherited a surplus budget and the only superpower in the world. A detailed analysis of the two terms Bush 43 served as commander in chief is outside the scope of this review but it will suffice to say that when Mr. Obama was sworn in as president he inherited a massive deficit, the largest financial crisis since The Great Depression and a catastrophic quagmire in Iraq that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The family station wagon had crashed into a tree and was gliding into a ditch. These unfortunate events were not the cause of The USA no longer being the undisputed master of the world, they simply accelerated the underlying trend, Mr. Hiro argues. A country that makes up one twentieth of the world’s population cannot hope to reign supreme forever.

Although Mr. Hiro methodically goes through each part of our blue planet and gives his best predictions for what a multipolar world will mean for them, the main narrative inevitably centers on the somewhat less than cordial relationship between China and The USA.

When Mr. Hiro writes about China, he chronicles the spectacularly rapid rise of a sleeping dragon. Staying truthful to Deng Xiaoping´s maxim “Hide your capabilities and bide your time”, China has strived to grow in prosperity and stature without becoming engaged in costly foreign entanglements. The Chinese have instead adopted a Confucian strategy of using all the means at their disposal, diplomatic, paramilitary, cyber, subterfuge and military, to blunt and diminish The United States influence. Like a rampant red dragon barring it´s fangs and hissing menacingly at a bald eagle with a bad hip, it requires no detective work to understand what the writers opinions are of the current state of global affairs.

While China is the only other Country that in itself can become a serious rival to the United States, the future global order will be a patchwork of regional actors, sovereign nations and imperial pretenders. Before the First World War, the writer reminds us, this was more or less what the world looked like. Back then a number of global actors and regional powers wrestled with each other for supremacy, all of them keen to make sure that no single nation became powerful enough to subdue the others. This prediction doesn´t come straight from Mr. Hiro, it´s partly yours truly having to fill in the blanks, since the writer tends to loose himself in the minutiae of global politics. This makes the overall picture somewhat blurry and uncertain at times. While I´m complaining I might as well point out that Mr. Hiro must have written the chapter concerning Europe on a Friday afternoon when he was eager to nip down to the pub. It´s mostly a depressing account of the Greek sovereign debt crisis and doesn´t really address any of the more fundamental problems that Europe faces. This might be because Mr. Hiro was unable to understand the byzantine bureaucracy of our dear European Union, or because Europe is simply too boring and since he lives in London he figures that in the near future he might not be part of it anymore.

After Empire is well worth reading, since it gives an interesting and refreshingly nuanced account of global affairs, even if you sometimes drown in all the details and the author could have taken a step back and looked at the bigger picture a bit more often. When he does so, however, the book offers many valuable insights.