The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order
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The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order Customer Reviews
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Rooks, knights, bishops and queens on the global chessboard
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| Can you judge a book by its cover? The dust jacket map emphasizes all the countries that really matter; sub-Saharan Africa is left literally Dark. Pages devoted to that region add up to approximately zero. For someone (like me) who has focused a decade on the politics, economics and culture of our oldest continent, that omission at first seemed glaring. No post-apartheid South Africa, which had the bomb and could again? No Congo, with its unsurpassed natural wealth? No Nigeria, the world's fourth largest democracy and sixth largest oil producer? No Angola, one of three countries (with Russia and the US) to hold such a diverse resource portfolio that it need not trade across borders? Nope. And Khanna offers no apologies. I found just two pages at the end of a chapter on Libya, boiled down to a sentence about China backing Mugabe's Zimbabwe while the U.S. bankrolls the equally despicable regime in Equatorial Guinea. Yet that, of course, is the author's whole realpolitik and neo-imperialist point. He is not unsympathetic to the 800 million souls floundering in these underdeveloped countries. He just states what most people won't: Africa's states are expendable pawns, limited to plod one square at a time, sacrificed if necessary but mostly bypassed. And while the Great Game of the 20th century tended to obsess on the psyche of America's noble white king vs a dark king of the Evil Empire, Khanna shows not only how there are now three amoral players in the fast-paced game, but that that game will be won or lost on the unexpected lateral and diagonal moves made by rooks, knights, bishops and queens of the Second World. And therein lies hope for countries left off the map. Perhaps as Africa's disadvantaged pawns survive their slow shuffle to the other side of the board, they can learn new moves, and transform themselves into chess pieces with more flexibility and clout. |
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