Book review: A fresh view on international politics

Exploring the parallel rise to power of amoral autocrats and tech billionaires, and the chronic inability of our political structures to do anything about the ascendancy of either

Giuliano da Empoli is not a revolutionary thinker but this is a thought-provoking, humorous book that gives us a side-stage view on the machinations of international politics. Picture: Joel Saget/AFP via Getty

• The Hour of the Predator 
• Giuliano Da Empoli 
• Pushkin Press, €15.99

Giuliano Da Empoli’s best-selling novel, The Wizard of the Kremlin, purported to show us the true nature of life and government in Russia under Vladimir Putin. 

Now, he has taken the short stride over into non-fiction. 

His latest work, The Hour of the Predator, is an engaging piece of political analysis that attempts to address what he sees as a uniquely modern problem: the parallel rise to power of amoral autocrats and tech billionaires, and the chronic inability of our political structures to do anything about the ascendancy of either.

Da Empoli, a former political advisor to Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi, is well placed to critique western political structures. 

The book begins with an imagined scene at the court of the Aztec emperor Moctezuma II when he first hears of the arrival of Hernan Cortes on his shores.

Surrounded by his most senior courtiers and bombarded by panicked, conflicting advice, the emperor does what politicians and leaders have done for millennia when confronted with an overwhelming crisis — nothing.

Deciding to wait and see until it was too late, Moctezuma sealed his own fate.

The Hour of the Predator, makes the case that our own political elites are paralysed by indecision and complacency in the face of a similarly urgent crises as two never-before-seen predators — power-crazed autocrats and tech billionaires — devour our societies.

Da Empoli writes from the perspective of a repentant insider. 

He illustrates his arguments with an impressive range of anecdotes featuring the Aztec Empire, the Borgias, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Kissinger, and others, but the United Nations is brought into particularly unflattering focus. 

In one episode after another we’re invited to laugh at the pomposity of heads of state with their inflated retinues and obsessions about their status vis-a-vis one another.

Da Empoli lays bare the shabbiness of it all when he describes a speech by French president Emmanuel Macron in the UN General Assembly Hall.

Standing before the famous golden backdrop emblazoned with the logo of the United Nations, Macron lectures on the dangers of powerless diplomacy and ineffective speech while around 15 people listen. 

Everyone else is on their phone, working on their laptop, or chatting amongst themselves.

Meanwhile, the world’s most vicious autocrats and sociopathic tech billionaires grow ever more powerful, ever more brazen. 

But, for all of his entertaining cynicism and worldly-wise tone, when Da Empoli reminisces on his time working with Matteo Renzi it’s clear that he mourns the political world that was, the one he joined when it was in terminal decline.

The book attempts to chart the abandonment of traditional diplomacy, international law, and basic rationality. 

The end of Joe Biden’s presidency is seen as a watershed. Not for any qualities that Biden possessed but, rather, what Da Empoli believes he represents the US’s last trans Atlantic president.

There are obvious questions to be asked at this point. 

Is it credible to say that Biden and his ilk represent something substantially different when, to take the most horrific example, the genocide in Gaza began under Biden and has continued under his successor? 

What if the comforting political structures that Da Empoli holds so dear were always more illusion than substance?

The Hour of the Predator doesn’t envision any serious alternative to the type of politics it criticises or even suggest what our current leaders might do differently. 

Deep down, one suspects, its author’s chief hope remains that we can simply set the clock back by several decades. 

Da Empoli is not a revolutionary thinker but this is a thought-provoking, humorous book that gives us a side-stage view on the machinations of international politics.