THE EMPIRE AND THE FIVE KINGS

Without America’s strength and influence, five former empires
may vie for global power.

French philosopher, activist, and documentary filmmaker Lévy (The
Genius of Judaism, 2017, etc.), a self-described “committed
intellectual,” makes a compelling case that America’s isolationism has created
a “great vacuum” that may incite aggressive political ambitions in five powers
“bent on redrawing, in their favor, the global map of authority and power.”
Russia, China, Turkey, Iran, and radical Sunni Islam are beginning “to stir
again, to set themselves in motion, and, given the world newly exposed by the
American withdrawal…to recommence the assault on history.” For Lévy, America
stands as an exceptional nation whose “political, mythological, and symbolic
inheritance” impels it to carry the torch of democracy “into dark lands.”
Unlike Woodrow Wilson in 1917 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1941, the last two
presidents have turned away from European alliances: Barack Obama favored
forging ties with Asia and refused to support France when Bashar al-Assad used
chemical weapons in Syria; Trump seemingly wants to withdraw from everything.
The author also blames the decline of Western influence on “the digitization of
the world,” where all “expressions of belief are of equal value,” an idea
contorted by Trump into the notion of fake news. “What for so long had been
known as ‘the truth,’ ” Lévy writes, “is really a shifting shadow.” Despite his
admiration for Persian and Arab civilization and Russia’s great literature, the
author condemns the five empires for their attraction to Nazism, anti-Semitism,
fascism, and totalitarianism. In 1935, notes the author, Persia changed its
name to Iran—“which, in Farsi, means ‘land of the Aryans’ ”—in a gesture of
alignment with Hitlerism. Despite his dire warning, Lévy offers cautious hope:
The five entities are economically and politically weak, and they lack a vision
for a revival of culture and science, instead focusing, morbidly, on past
grandeur.