Book Review: "Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World"

Media Coverage | April 02, 2020

A new book examines global order in the 21st century.

Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World is an inquiry by international relations scholar Sreeram Chaulia into the emerging global order. Chaulia makes an enterprising effort to decipher and distinguish the global order’s superficial appearance from what it substantively stands for.

In the process, he challenges the widespread assumption held in Western literature on the subject of a receding U.S.-led global order, that the necessary antithesis of any U.S. withdrawal is a substitution of that space by a China-led order. He argues that this China-led world order is not a natural ramification of U.S. withdrawal and emerging powers have a role in this process.

Unlike the scholarship in the West, he ascribes agency to these emerging powers in determining the shape and structure of power distribution in the system. To that end the book focuses its attention on four independent states—namely India, Turkey, Brazil, and Nigeria—among the rising powers with the potential to autonomously shape the global order.

Click here to read the full article on The Diplomat.