The United States' victory in the Cold War in 1991 led to
triumphalist claims that humanity had reached the end of history,"
and that Washington would enjoy everlasting supremacy. Some years
later, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright called America
the indispensable nation." And a senior aide to President George W.
Bush crowed: We are an empire now." But by invading Iraq, Bush
irreparably undermined U.S. credibility worldwide. And by
curtailing Americans' civil liberties in the name of waging an
endless war on terror," and resorting to torture in the prisons of
occupied Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, his
administration,as well as America,lost its claim to a moral high
ground. Moreover, the 2008-2009 global fiscal meltdown, triggered
by the sub-prime mortgage crisis on Wall Street, exposed a stark
fact: The heavily indebted America had ceased to be the financial
behemoth it had been since World War II. After Empire sketches the
contours of a complex world system emerging during the late
imperial phase of the U.S. It examines, critically, the events that
prepared the ground for the world to move from the tutelage of the
sole superpower, America, to a multipolar, post-imperial global
order. Refreshingly, it does so from a distinctly non-Western
perspective. Unlike other scholars, Dilip Hiro,one of the world's
leading experts on the geopolitics of hydrocarbons as well as the
Middle East and South and Central Asia,does not offer a comforting
thesis that the U.S. is quite capable of accommodating the rising
world powers like China, Russia, India, and the European Union
while retaining its dominant position at the table. Neither does he
frame global politics in a Manichean way,America versus China the
West against Asia. The world, he suggests, is set to revisit the
pre-World War I Europe, where rulers frequently changed allies and
adversaries to achieve the shared aim of keeping the continent free
of an overarching power,to date, a privilege enjoyed globally by
America. With more than two trillion dollars in its foreign
reserves, China's state-owned corporations are busily buying up
companies worldwide. By surpassing Saudi Arabia in its oil output,
Russia, the number one producer of natural gas, is now the world's
foremost producer of hydrocarbons. Its nuclear arsenal is on par
with America's. Elsewhere the hydrocarbon-rich nations of Venezuela
and Iran are challenging the Washington-dominated status quo
respectively in South America and the Middle East. Already, the
27-nation European Union of nearly 500 million has surpassed
America as the globe's largest trading entity, and the euro has
emerged as a strong rival to the U.S. dollar as a dominant reserve
currency. After Empire is realistic and nuanced in its assessment
of global politics. Shorn of an ideological bias or a soft corner
for America, it abounds in unsettling and stimulating insights on
politics, history, hard and soft power, political economy and
democracy.
General
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