In 1648 the Thirty Years War officially came to an end with the treaties now collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia. The Peace is usually credited with inaugurating the modern European state system: a pluralistic order made up of independent sovereign states, their relations regulated by a set of neutral rules and maintained by a balance of power.

While admitting that “no truly global ‘world order’ has ever existed,” renowned diplomat (and controversial Nobel Peace Prize winner) Henry Kissinger sees this Westphalian system as the model for what “passes for order in our time,” with Europe now being just one regional unit in a new global edition.

The global Westphalian system forms the backbone of Kissinger’s analysis in World Order, as he looks at the historical development and future prospects of today’s most important regional players: Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the United States (South America and Africa are scarcely mentioned).

Given Kissinger’s expertise and experience, one expects more than World Order delivers, though its shortcomings are not unexpected from this author.

The regional background briefs are good, and there is a surprisingly insightful chapter on the impact the Internet may have on politics, but much of the analysis of contemporary historical events comes with a clear political slant.

To take one specific example, from among many: “Before the ayatollahs’ revolution, the West’s interaction with Iran had been cordial and cooperative on both sides, based on a perceived parallelism of national interests.” Given the overthrow of the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammed Mosaddegh, in a British and American coup d’état in 1953 that gets only an indirect reference a page earlier, this is a little hard to swallow.

More frustrating, however, are the mushy platitudes that the great “realist” slides into when offering prescripts in full Olympian mode. “Order always requires a subtle balance of restraint, force, and legitimacy. . . . Wise statesmanship must try to find that balance. For outside it, disaster beckons.” Such generic advice tells the would-be diplomat nothing.

Canada, which has never been a superpower, isn’t listed in the index of Kissinger’s book, and there are only a couple of references to it in the text, both from people who treat it as a bit of baggage to be claimed by America’s manifest destiny. Nevertheless, Canada has been, and continues to be, a player on the world scene, as Gwynne Dyer chronicles in his study of Canada in the Great Power Game.

While it presents itself as a study of Canada’s role in foreign wars from 1914 to 2014, the dates are a bit misleading. If Kissinger’s seminal historical moment was the Peace of Westphalia, Dyer’s is the First World War: “the most profound trauma in Canada’s history,” and an event that has always had a special place in our national imagination and sense of collective identity (as anyone acquainted with Canadian fiction can attest).

As a result of this historical emphasis, most of Dyer’s book is set in the first half of the twentieth century, with little time spared on current affairs (Stephen Harper, for example, is mentioned only once). His closer look at the myths and realities of Canada at war reveals a lot, but one still wishes he had spent more time in the present, and looking ahead.

On the matter of the great game, where Kissinger is interested in the balance of power, Dyer is focused on “critical systems”: inherently unstable conditions subject to catastrophic failures. For Dyer, managing the critical system of international diplomacy should rightly fall under the purview of the United Nations — a body Kissinger has little to say about but which Dyer thinks has managed global affairs pretty well.

The standard for diplomacy can’t be perfection. All political systems are temporary, and every age is an age of disorder. We will never put an end to war, but through the operation of a global balance of power and institutions like the UN we have been able to avoid major conflicts for over half a century.

Complex systems, however, do break down. Given the fragility of our current civilization — its interconnectedness, dependence on advanced technology, overpopulation and environmental problems, and increased capacity for destruction — perhaps the best we can hope for is a soft landing when the world order falls apart again.

Taking a break from her immensely successful Thomas Cromwell trilogy, Hilary Mantel’s The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher is a collection of short stories dealing with more contemporary matters.

But while the setting has changed, much remains the same. We can’t judge by appearances. Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell, we have come to see, may seem a reasonable and decent man, but he has highly situational ethics and, if not a villain himself, he is certainly an enabler of evil deeds.

Mantel enjoys this sort of sleight-of-hand: showing evil taking innocuous forms and imagining quiet, domestic horror stories that slip past our defences. What any particular story seems to be about is usually less important than the sense of unease that underlies it, and what remains unsaid.

The first story, “Sorry to Disturb, “tells of a married Englishwoman who lives for a time in Saudi Arabia, where she picks up an unwanted admirer in the form of a Pakistani businessman. In some ways it’s a fairly bland social comedy, but then it starts to give off a Fatal Attraction kind of vibe. Mr. Ijaz is a little creepy. He’s “restless and nervy, “ laughs at nothing, and is “always twitching his collar and twisting his feet in their scuffed Oxfords, always tapping the fake Rolex, always apologizing.”

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In short, he isn’t quite what he seems to be. He is superficial, if not as fake as his watch. He’s definitely not a proper gentleman. Things escalate and he starts to act like a stalker, while displaying a callous attitude toward his own wife (she may be dying of some kidney disease but he’s “getting rid of her anyway”). Before long the narrator is developing her own neurotic symptoms and taking to watching The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

“Sorry to Disturb” isn’t a conventional horror story, but there’s something unpleasant riding under the surface that’s typical of Mantel’s writing. She has a way with understatement and indirection, with social meanings and class codes that are subtly broken.

These become all the more noticeable given the British penchant for keeping up appearances. We see that sense of protocol in action when a woman dies on the spot after discovering her husband’s adultery. She “almost casually” looks at where she has accidentally cut herself before folding “tidily back on to her heels.” Her problem, we later learn, was an undiagnosed, hidden heart condition, one liable to be brought on by “strong emotion of any sort.”

Strong emotion, of any sort, can be one’s undoing. Better to keep up appearances, to live life at the conventional rhythm, a rhythm described by the visionary story “Terminus” as “a mystery indeed ... an aid to dissimulation, a guide to those who otherwise would not know how to act.” Marching to that rhythm may make you a zombie, but you’ll rue the day you break with it.

A number of these themes come together in the title story, which has a plot to assassinate prime minister Thatcher unfolding behind the walls of a bourgeois house on a certain “genteel corner, bypassed by shoppers and tourists.”

The narrator is not an assassin herself, but she is guilty of aiding and abetting the lone gunman, even offering him tea and the use of her washroom. Again, one feels that a rhythm of formalities is being observed. In this story the character, who doesn’t quite belong, who doesn’t seem real, is Thatcher herself, a figure Mantel has likened to a “psychological transvestite.”

She walks on stage here like a cartoon caricature of the Iron Lady, the bag on her arm “slung like a shield” and “big goggle glasses” beneath a “glittering helmet of hair.” Even in the crosshairs she’s the one who constitutes the real threat to the public order.

Mantel is very easy to read which is, no doubt, part of the reason she’s so popular. But she’s even more enjoyable to reread, when you hear sounds of a different frequency beneath the mysterious rhythms of modern life.