‘The world economy, in terms of both productive capacity and trade, is tripolar—the us, eu and China. But world power remains nearly unipolar. This inherently unstable configuration is the central fact of world politics.’ Such lapidary determinations have become a hallmark of Tom Stevenson’s essays over the past decade in the London Review of Books, where he is a contributing editor. In Someone Else’s Empire, which collects and frames a number of these pieces, Stevenson’s picture of the world comes into clearer shape. As his Introduction and Postscript make clear, he is interested in the structures and practices of power, rather than the piling up of wealth, but he understands the first as premised on a defence of the second against all competitors. Following Sumner, Hull, Berle and other strategists of fdr’s Brains Trust, Stevenson sees the us garrisoning of the Persian Gulf—home to some of its largest overseas military bases, one of its three external fleets, tens of thousands of American troops—as a means not to procure oil and gas for itself but to control access to them by the other two poles of world trade and production, Europe and East Asia, whose economies Washington can thereby choke.

Stevenson’s book is framed as a challenge to three conventional narratives about international relations. The first consists of ‘comforting stories of coalitions of democracies uniting against autocratic menaces’. The us empire should not be understood as an ideological construct, or a commitment to rules or to liberalism, let alone to democratic government, he writes. American power is founded on ‘brute military facts and centrality in the international energy and financial systems’. The us permits a range of political forms in its client states, from medieval monarchies, military juntas, parliamentary apartheids and presidential autocracies to liberal democracies with fairer representation and greater social equality than America itself; what matters to Washington is their general accordance with its goals. But what is not in doubt, for Stevenson, is the preponderance of American power: unrivalled military superiority, control of the world’s critical sea lanes, command posts on every continent, a network of alliances that covers most of the advanced economies, 30 per cent of global wealth and the levers of the international financial system. No other state, he writes, can affect political outcomes in other countries the way that Washington does, on a quotidian basis, from Honduras to Japan. ‘To call this an empire is if anything to understate its range.’

Second, Someone Else’s Empire is sceptical of talk about an emerging multipolar world. Russia’s costly invasion of its neighbour is hardly evidence of global power-projection capability, while eu fantasies of strategic autonomy are ‘insubstantial’. India has little throw-weight beyond the Subcontinent. Turkey is a staging ground for us nukes. For Stevenson, Sino-American competition is distinctly lopsided, the strategic balance overwhelmingly weighted towards the us. China does not militarily threaten America, he points out; it is not clear that it is even capable of invading Taiwan. Washington menaces Beijing with isolation and punishment, not vice versa. ‘So long as the us is maintaining a “defence perimeter” in the East and South China Seas that, unlike its 1950s original, extends to a few kilometres from mainland China, it is not dealing with a peer, it is threatening a recalcitrant.’

The third narrative in dispute is that of American decline. Stevenson dismisses the us pull-out from Afghanistan as evidence of wider retreat. That twenty years of nato statecraft could crumble within weeks confirmed only that the Afghan government had been ‘a corrupt and artificial dependent’. The humiliating conditions of the exit were partially compensated by Biden’s ‘signature act of punitive sadism’ in freezing Kabul’s central bank assets, ‘a flourish of parting malice’. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was widely proclaimed a mortal threat to the international order, as imperial propagandists like to call it, but Stevenson pours cold water on this notion. The us strategy of building up Ukrainian armed forces proved ‘quite effective’; that the cia appeared to have a mole in the Kremlin with access to the invasion plans also ‘ran counter to the narrative of the empire’s demise’.

Why Russia switched from small-scale operations, aimed at reasserting influence in the states around its borders, to adopt ‘a completely different and far more hubristic strategy’ for Ukraine remains, he stresses, poorly understood. ‘Part of the story must lie in the agreements signed between the us and Ukraine between September and November 2021’, even if the Western powers remained ‘studiously ambiguous’ about nato accession; the failure of us–Russia talks in January 2022 evidently ‘set’ the decision to invade. More significant for Someone Else’s Empire, Moscow’s ‘grave gamble’ in launching the attack was mirrored by the escalatory strategy of Washington and its allies, which shifted in April 2022 from the ostensible goal of shoring up Ukrainian defences to the ‘grander ambition’ of using the war for the strategic attrition of Russia—a terrible risk for the people of Europe, but no proof of us declension. ‘We live not in the mossy ruins of empire but in its still-smouldering battlefields.’

If American power is not on the wane—despite the heartland catastrophe of the financial crisis, a clear failure to lead on environmental questions and a series of unsuccessful wars—how is its perdurance to be explained? Stevenson suggests that the sheer scale of us superiority may be so great as to discourage would-be challengers. In that case, the forward stance of us policy, ever ready to escalate toward military conflict, can be grasped as a concerted effort to keep proving the extent of that superiority, maintaining its deterrent effect—the strategy proposed by Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s World Out of Balance (2008). The confrontations with both China and Russia were clearly elected by the us, Stevenson argues, as one can read ‘in the black and white of strategic documents written prior to any subsequent rupture’.

Several features distinguish Someone Else’s Empire from the standard realist ir approach—that of Patrick Porter in the uk, for instance. First, Stevenson initially engaged with these questions as a young reporter, amid the tumult of the Arab Spring. Educated at Queen Mary, University of London, where he was a student journalist, he found himself on the pensions desk at the Financial Times when the uprisings began. He lit out for the region, filing despatches from Cairo and the Maghreb. This exposure to the realities of geopolitics—witnessing at first hand the roles played by us and uk officials on the ground, which rarely made it into the pages of the Western press—had an electrifying effect. In particular, Britain’s function as American adjutant in the Middle East stuck in his craw. Someone Else’s Empire displays the results. Stevenson provides devastating accounts of uk actions in Iraq and Afghanistan; the ‘peculiarity’ of British foreign policy, structured as it is around the interests of another state, is given unflinching analysis.