Commentary
Every so often a book comes along that slices through comforting illusions and forces readers to face the world as it is. Emma Ashford’s “First Among Equals” is one of those books. For too long the foreign policy debate in Washington has oscillated between two equally pernicious illusions. On the one side are the fantasists who believe that America can somehow rediscover the unipolar moment of the 1990s. On the other are those who are convinced that the United States is fated to decline into second-rank irrelevance as China rises. Ashford rejects both views. Her alternative is a simple one, but a radical one too: the world is multipolar, the unipolar era is over, but the United States can still thrive as the most powerful actor in the system. It just needs to understand that its role is one of “first among equals” rather than that of an unchallenged hegemon.
