BOOKS: After Empire -- The Birth of a Multipolar World. By Dilip Hiro (Jim Miles)

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After Empire - The Birth of a Multipolar World. Dilip Hiro. Nation Books, Perseus, New York, 2010.

Apr. 25, 2011 (Palestine Chronicle) -- Modern history and current events are aligned in this excellent text from Dilip Hiro.

Beginning with a short, concise back ground history on the arraignment of empires before and after World War II, “After Empire” then focuses more closely on the New World Order following on two main events. The first was the self-inflicted collapse of the Soviet Union following on Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, followed by Yeltsin’s inebriated attempts to throw the country wide open to the capitalist free market west and the Washington consensus of the IMF and World Bank. The second event, a decade later, was the attack on the World Trade Center and the subsequent series of attacks and manipulations around the world combined with the stealthy annexation of the powers of the constitution towards executive supremacy in the U.S. government.

But as Hiro says, the book “does not revolve around America,” nor is it “dialectical,” one party against another. While it may not “revolve” around “America” the very force of the arguments keeps the United States front and center in all the global actions charted through the work. Hiro does succeed in describing developments “leading to an international order with multiple poles, cooperating and competing with one another, with no single pole being allowed to act as the hegemonic power ... the age-old balance of power is back at work.”

It is, after all, a book about "after empire," and the only true empire at the moment is the U.S. empire, one that stretches over all curves of the earth. In writing about it, Hiro covers a wide range of topics effectively. They range through warfare, economics, oil, democracy, capitalism, Islamism, soft power and hard power, media, investments, the business of war, liberty, decolonization, foreign aid, interventions clandestine or overt. All major countries, as necessitated by their many global interactions, are essential parts of the story. An excellent summary and history of the modern Soviet Union collapse followed by the Russian revival provides a strong base for events that occur later. China is of course central to any discussion on "after empire," as are Brazil and India, the so-called BRIC group. Other considerations are with the state of the European Union, economically powerful yet also fighting its own internal economic wars, while generally remaining within the U.S. sphere of foreign affairs influence.

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