Through a Non-Western Lens
Uma Purushothaman
TRUMPED: EMERGING POWERS IN A POST-AMERICAN WORLD by Sreeram Chaulia Bloomsbury, New Delhi, 2019, 297 pp., $27.99
March 2021, volume 45, No 3

In Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World, Sreeram Chaulia tries to make sense of the impact of Donald Trump on the global order from the perspective of the emerging powers. The author chooses four emerging powers—India, Turkey, Brazil, and Nigeria to make his point. All these countries have strong anti-colonial traditions and have had strategic relations with the US at one point or the other, and have all used dissimilar and distinctive strategies to deal with Trump.

Chaulia argues that Trump’s upending of liberal internationalism has created opportunities for these powers to emerge as regional powers and to carve out a space for themselves in the global order with the right leadership. Trump has created a vacuum in international politics through his isolationism and his insistence that the US need not be the global policeman, which these countries could fill if they play their cards right. However, Trump is also upsetting the regional balance of power, leaving regional powers to grapple with issues on their own, including dealing with an ‘expansive and aggressive China’ (p. 2). These countries also welcome the global power shift, seeing it as an opportunity to regain their lost glory.

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