Books: How to be a hyperpower and how to kidnap a general

Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance – and Why They Fall, by Amy Chua (Anchor Books; $16.95)

Ill Met By Moonlight, by W. Stanley Moss (Cassell Military Paperbacks; $10-and-under; 1999 reprint of the 1950 edition)

Plenty of discussion on the talk-show circuit about how the United States has entered a decline. That usually occurs whenever oil prices get a little high or the economy takes a ride off its high-speed rails.

Amy Chua, the John Duff Jr. professor of law at Yale Law School and author of World on Fire, tackles the issue from another direction. Chua examines other great hyperpowers – in her definition, a power that clearly surpasses other rivals – such as Achaemenid Persia, Imperial Rome, the Tang Dynasty in China, the Mongol Empire, the Dutch commercial empire of the 17th century, the British Empire and the U.S.

Chua carefully examines each of these hyperpowers – utilizing a variety of entertaining examples – and finds, somewhat to her own surprise, that each of these powerful empires shared a key trait: tolerance.

As Chua explained during a visit to the Fort Worth Business Press in March (she spoke at the Fort Worth Central Library as part of a World Affairs Council of Dallas and Fort Worth program), the tolerance she discusses in the book is “relative tolerance.”

“This thesis does sound counterintuitive at first,” she said. “After all, do you really think of Genghis Khan as tolerant? I mean he used his victims’ corpses to fill moats. He has a famous quote that his definition of happiness was to ‘crush your enemies and hear the lamentation of their women.’ That’s not tolerant as we think of it.”

However, she adds, Khan was open to ethnic diversity and championed religious freedom — and was thus able to entice some of the most talented people from his conquered populations.

“I’m talking about relative tolerance,” Chua said. “The only way to true global dominance is [to be] at the cutting edge of technology and innovation. To do that, you have to pull in and motivate the best and brightest, find the world’s best human capital.”

No one ethnic group or nationality can do that, she says, explaining that the Nazis fell far short of a goal of world domination — partially because they were so intolerant.

ChuaÂ’s book offers an enlightening and entertaining look at an issue that will likely gain importance as the U.S. and the world climb out of the current recession.

Coincidentally, just prior to reading Chua’s fascinating book, I read Ill Met By Moonlight, a true account of World War II espionage. The book, written by one of the participants, tells the story of two British officers who set out in Nazi-occupied Crete to kidnap a German general who heads up the island for the Germans. (The book was adapted in 1957 as a starring film for British actor Dirk Bogarde — a dry and tedious interpretation that drains much of the suspense from the story.)

The British officers use local resistance forces — locals who have gained strength with each new German atrocity. They come upon two escaped Russian prisoners, who help with the mission.

After successfully kidnapping a German general, the ragtag group hides him out while waiting for a boat to carry away their captive.

The German general is initially insulted that people he views as less than human have been able to capture him. But – after witnessing the military savvy of the Cretan resistance, the intelligence of the British and the skills of the Russians – the Nazi begins to take a more tolerant view of his captors and re-examines his own world-view.

The two books, taken together, form something of a mirror-image, with Ill Met offering a first-person account of some of the ideas ChuaÂ’s book espouses. ChuaÂ’s book is generally available. Ill Met, an out-of-print British publication, has turned up in volume at Half-Price Books.

rfrancis@bizpress.net