For the historian as well as for the practitioner of foreign policy with a penchant for things past, empires long defunct provide an endless source of lessons and analogies, of trials and errors already experienced, though in most instances already forgotten. Few in our times think, though, that empires are a form of political organization suitable for solving the tribulations of the present or even less of future times. After all, recent attempts at recreating some sort of formal or informal empires have ended up in utter failure. So, we keep on living in a world that is parcelled among a myriad of small and medium sized states, some of them in a worrisome stay of decay, a few number of polities with the means and maybe the will to fall into the traditional category of great powers and even fewer and frail-looking examples of supranational entities. Then, there are those multilateral organizations, regional or universal in scope, where all or some of the above meet, talk and sometimes agree about how best to respond to the most pressing challenges and threats. Empires, then, do not seem to fit in the current political taxonomy. But we would be wrong to consider them the dinosaurs of the political ecosystem, only to be contemplated in awe as they lay with their bones inertly exposed in museums, never to see their likenesses alive again and roaming among us. In fact, empires have been the rule rather than the exception in history. Throughout the ages, the world and a majority of humans in it have been mostly ruled by empires and not by states, federations, confederations, tribes or hordes.