What role did Iraq have in the breakdown of the post-Cold War global political consensus? Samuel Helfont defends the idea that there was such a consensus in 1990, built around shared values and upheld by the United States, and serving as the basis for coalition action against common threats. The focus of the book is how Iraq sought to disrupt and eventually undermine this consensus, principally through seeking to steer opinion around the world among political elites and wider populations. In this account, Iraq’s government sought to portray the “new world order” as something malign and deserving of their opposition. Helfont recognizes that there were many other factors that led to the fracturing of the global order from the mid-1990s to 2003, but nevertheless, he posits that Iraq’s agency was an important factor in explaining this fracturing.

The primary sources Helfont draws upon to develop his account are the records of the Iraqi state, especially those of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and those of the then-ruling Ba‘th Party Secretariat. These records were taken by the American military and US-supported Iraqi activists in 2003 and transported to two US universities, where they became accessible to scholars to use. Given the centrality of these records to the book’s material, it would have been helpful to have seen some reflection on ethical considerations for using these sources. One can imagine what such an argument would look like, but it is not made in the text.

The account is that of Iraq as a rogue state trying to break out of its pariah status. It unfolds largely chronologically. After a brief historical introduction to the country, there is a blow-by-blow account of Iraq’s international relations from the invasion of Kuwait through the dispute over the United Nations sanctions regime and the intermittent US military strikes on Iraq through the 1990s, and then onto the lead-up to the 2003 invasion, by which point the global consensus had almost entirely broken down. The conclusion draws out some thoughts on the legacies of the prolonged confrontation for the post-2003 world, including the idea and prospects of the liberal international order.

The book uses throughout its text terms that are strongly critical of the Iraqi government—phrases like “political warfare,” “Iraq’s machinations,” and “manipulative statesmanship” all figure as part of the narrative, conveying the sense of duplicity and alarm. Stepping back from the chronology though, one can draw from the account broader themes, and it may be useful to divide these into understandings of the intentions of the Iraqi government, the means they used, and the effects their actions had. In each case, there are potential gaps between the book’s overarching approach and the evidence on which it draws.

On the intentions of the Iraqi government, the substantive account is largely on the attempts by the Iraqi government to bring about the end of the sanctions regime designed by the United Nations Security Council. The sanctions cut Iraq off from the global economy, and even with the creation of the “oil-for-food” arrangement in 1996, the formal earnings of Iraq’s oil sales remained outside of the control of the government. So it is little surprise that a major objective of Iraq’s foreign policy was to delegitimize the sanctions regime with the goal of bringing it to an end.

But how far and in what ways did Iraq’s intentions go beyond this pressing objective? Presumably, they did, but there is little in the text to show that. That is, although the claim in the book’s general narrative is that Iraq sought to undermine the rules-based international system—that Saddam Hussein sought a “breakdown in global order” (e.g. p. 184)—the actual material presented rarely goes beyond displaying the objective of challenging one specific Security Council policy, that of the sanctions regime. There is little indication here that the Iraqi regime was purposively seeking a wider realignment in global, or even regional, politics.

The book does not challenge the view that there was immense harm to Iraqi civilians coming out of the sanctions regime—it notes that on occasion the Iraqi government exaggerated those harms, as part of its self-presentation of Iraq as a victim, but it accepts that there was widespread suffering. It is unfortunate that the text doesn’t draw upon Joy Gordon’s Invisible War: the United States and the Iraq Sanctions (Harvard University Press, 2010) which remains the best-researched work on the international politics around this issue, but which is unreferenced in Helfont’s book.

Helfont though does bring out clearly the way in which the Iraqi government sought to shape the global narrative around sanctions, and that concerns the means it used. The Iraqi government sought out advocacy and student groups, political parties, and corporations around the world who were or had the potential to be unsympathetic to the sanctions regime. It contacted them, often through front organizations, and kept apprised of their activities. The account is relevant to how many states seek to cultivate an image of themselves that speaks not just to other states but to wider populations, including to their own claimed diasporas. Often presented as “public diplomacy,” it often has a darker edge to it: states seek to dissuade criticism, and many—not only those with strongly authoritarian characteristics—have resorted to coercive means to silence dissent abroad. Although there is no comparative material in the book, and there is liberal use of terms such as “propaganda,” the account of Iraq’s means here does not show them to be especially distinctive. This is especially true as the US–UK alliance was also trying to shape narratives around sanctions, often relying on disinformation or exaggeration as well. In the contest to shape wider public understandings around sanctions, Helfont’s book here only presents Iraq’s efforts to do so.

Where the text is on dicier grounds is in its portrayal of critics of the sanctions regime as fellow travelers of the Ba‘th government. Ramsey Clark, the former US attorney general who became a strong critic of US foreign policy, we are told, “became an important ally of the Iraqi regime in the United States” (p. 89). The Chicago-based advocacy group Voices in the Wilderness, the text says, was an organization “with close ties to the Ba‘thists” (p. 116). No evidence is presented for either claim. The full archives of Voices in the Wilderness from 1995 to 2005 are housed at Marquette University in Milwaukee, but this source is not referenced in the book. The assumption of a binary opposition between a US-led order and the pro-Ba‘thist camp presented in the text does not leave much room for those whose politics did not reduce to either of those two perspectives.

When it comes to the effects of the Iraqi government’s work to steer opinion, it is undoubtedly true that there was a wider take-up of some of the themes it promoted, as the book argues. But as the text’s sources are primarily the archives of the Iraqi state and its ruling party, it is open to question whether the claims of achievements in those archives should be taken as true. For instance, it is easy to see why Iraqi officials would report back to their superiors that their work had turned Russian policy against the United States in 1992. But the book’s claim that the Russian government decided “that continuing to spurn Iraq would cost it political support at home” (p. 98)—a point evidenced solely by the report of an Iraqi official—would need substantial further evidence to make it plausible.

Perhaps unintentionally, the book reveals how often right from the start of this period the United States was, if not isolated, at least challenged by other countries in its policies toward Iraq in a way that cannot be explained by Iraqi influence campaigns. In the first few years, the United States rejected the humanitarian proposals of UN envoy Sadruddin Aga Khan in 1991 which were supported by India, China, and many other states. There was little global support for the US–UK no-fly-zone policy, which the French government turned against. US military action in January and June 1993 had little international support. And Russia had turned against US policy in the region by 1992. These episodes all cast doubt on the starting point of the book, the idea of a global political consensus at the end of the Cold War; US political leaders may have claimed there to be one—and the book quotes George H.W. Bush approvingly to that effect (p. 1)—but even if it existed briefly, it came quickly to fall apart amidst suspicion over the United States’s use of military force without international authorization. The efforts of Iraq and the United States to position themselves in the global order after 1990 led to a series of temporary alliances and enmities for each. Rarely, though, did it manifest itself simply as “Iraq against the world.”