Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World

by Sreeram Chaulia

Why is US President Donald Trump so shockingly unorthodox in his foreign policy?How are prominent developing countries adjusting to Trump's 'America First' approach? Is Trump unintentionally a blessing in disguise for rising powers? Will the Trump effect of withdrawing America from global governance continue after him? What drives populism in the US and how is it accelerating the evolution of a 'post-American world'?What kind of arrangement is replacing the Western-led liberal international order? Emerging Powers in a Post-American World challenges Western liberal presumptions that without America as the global policeman and financier, there would be chaos and collapse in the world or a takeover by totalitarian China. It argues that there is no need to despair about Trump's self-goal of undermining American leadership around the world because capable rising powers in different regions can fill the vacuum left by Trump's abandonment and provide order, peace, security and prosperity in their respective areas. Readers get insights into the domestic structural pressures motivating Trump's trademark foreign policy insurgency and the divisions within his 'two-track presidency' between 'nationalists' and 'globalists' which are profoundly impacting on Asia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. The author provides an alternative vision from the lens of powerful developing countries by arguing that the solution to a withdrawing and isolationist US is not a return to US interventionism or a China-dominated new global order but multiple 'post-American' regionally based orders.

297 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 18, 2019

Reviews

[Ashutosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice book to understand the emerging powers in the world. Well written, doesn't go in the details too much (I guess to keep the readers attention) but enough references to find out the details for interested readers. I think this book will become more popular in next 5 years as the predictions made in the book will start to play out but then.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think the alleged thesis of the book, that Trump's isolationism and other foreign policy decisions opened up a pathway for emerging powers in what's likely to be a period of multipolarity, is really interesting. The statement isn't unique, lots of other people have said this, but nobody else bothered to write a book about it. However that isn't really the thesis of the book. The actual thesis is that the US sucks in every imaginable way, but particularly for emerging powers.

Unfortunately I found Dr. Chaulia to be a bit of an unreliable narrator here. He has a vicious, essentially categorical dislike for the US, and something approaching a fanboy attitude towards China in between critiques of their hegemonic aspirations, which is hard to make sense of, and a heavy disdain for the liberal international order, I think largely because it's originally a western concoction. He at one point called the the LIO "apartheid-like" which made me laugh out loud because it's such an unhinged statement. And actually, given his obsequiously enthusiastic stance on Modi, who is very, very Trumpy and scary in many ways, I found myself unconvinced by the attempts at expressing contempt for Trump. That too was belied by moments of fawning. His hatred for the "apartheid-like" liberal international order is the point around which all other opinions in this book align themselves, despite at times conflicting, which is inherently un-objective. Also the constant use of the term "deep state", which is a conspiracy theorist's dog whistle term, to refer to the US national security apparatus was extremely off-putting, and ironically Trumpy.

It should be possible to write an analytical book on this topic without veering into screed. The entire introduction, which is incredibly long (Kindle said 18% of the whole book, 25% including citations), is just a screaming rant about the US delivered without much nuance. And instead of focusing on detailing how these countries are adapting their foreign policy to meet the moment, the main chapters were just about why the US and Trump suck but in different geographic locations, which is tedious. This book is actually mostly a personal middle finger to one country, more than a meaningful geopolitical or foreign policy analysis. It's an exhausting, backwards-looking opinion-filled tantrum about Trump and the US, not a forward-looking examination of these middle powers and their changing positions on economics and domestic/foreign policy in order to rise in a multipolar world. The chapter on Nigeria is the exception. That chapter was excellent.

The details about why Trump's foreign policy specifically sucks were interesting, because this is a new take on why Trump is awful, among the many boring books already written on that general subject, but I grew really tired of the broad extrapolations and the nuance-free fire breathing about the west in general that this book consists of.

I will probably keep reading Chaulia's books though for the same reason I read John Mearsheimer's books, not that I'm placing them in the same tier of scholarship. But that is to say that despite being a factory of molten hot takes, in a weird way they're fun to read. There are not many books where a word like "adumbrated" appears in the same sentence as "gone abegging."