And then, the third upheaval. For an instant the world saw what it did not want to see. And what it saw was a planet that froze briefly before beginning to turn again—but now turning on new bearings.
In 2018, I wrote a book entitled The Empire and the Five Kings. The title was an allusion to the Biblical story of the five kings whom Abraham fought to save his nephew, Lot. In that book, I described an empire consisting of Europe, its American outgrowth, and others in the rest of the world that have faith in the Western Enlightenment.
I argued that this empire, which I called the “Global West,” is contracting nearly everywhere, both in people’s minds and geographically. I showed how the space left vacant by the empire’s retreat was creating opportunities for five new kings, five potentates, who ruled over countries that had once been the centers for powerful empires and aspired to become so again. My thesis was that these five kings—Russia, China, the Iran of the ayatollahs, neo-Ottoman Turkey, and the Arab countries prone to jihadism—were ready to forgo their ancient enmities if that were the price of reviving the glory of Peter the Great, the Qing and Ming dynasties, the Ottoman vizirs, the shahs of Persia, or the Umayyad and Abbasid sultans.
The book was written in the context of the war against the Islamic State, the role of the Kurds in that war, and then, at the moment of the battle of Kirkuk—which in my eyes was the equivalent of the ancient battles that .