Andrew Latham
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.
The book is intellectually rigorous and, for a work of IR scholarship, refreshingly accessible. Ashford draws on the realist tradition but avoids the jargon that can suffocate that literature. Her writing is sharp and clear-eyed. Free of illusions, she reminds us that power—not institutions, not platitudes about “the rules-based order”—remains the coin of the realm. At the same time, her realism is not the crude kind that reduces international politics to a zero-sum balance of tanks and ships. Instead, Ashford locates America’s choices within a broader sweep of history, showing that multipolarity is neither catastrophe nor apocalypse but a recurring rhythm of world politics.
Ashford is at her best when taking aim at the lazy analogies that saturate Washington’s discourse. Thus, she rightly debunks the myth that today’s strategic competition with China is a rerun of the Cold War. Beijing is not the Soviet Union, and the Indo-Pacific is not Europe circa 1949. To frame the rivalry in such terms, Ashford argues, is to risk overextension, squandered resources, and a self-destructive spiral of ideological crusading. Instead, the United States must prioritize ruthlessly, choosing between vital interests and peripheral distractions. That means focusing on maintaining the balance of power in Asia while resisting the temptation to fight ideological battles everywhere.
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