Book review: Sreeram Chaulia, Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World
| DOI | 10.1177/2347797021992169 |
| Published date | 01 April 2021 |
| Date | 01 April 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
136 Journal of Asian Security and International Affairs 8(1)
after decades of counterinsurgency experience, most countries in South and
Southeast Asia still tend to downplay the political and overplay the military
dimensions of state response in COIN. That more needs to be done to strike a
more meaningful balance between kinetic and non-kinetic measures is thus a
timely takeaway. Finally, it should be reiterated that the editor has done a good job
in pulling in some particularly excellent contributions. On the whole, the
discussions within this volume provide a valuable, if imperfect, addition to the
literature on COIN in general and South Asia and Southeast Asia in particular.
ORCID iD
Kumar Ramakrishna https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0768-8680
References
Fair, C. C., & Ganguly, S. (Eds.). (2014). Policing insurgencies: Cops as counterinsurgents.
Oxford University Press.
Pandalai, S. (Ed.). (2019). Combating terrorism: Evolving Asian perspectives. Pentagon
Press.
Tan, A. T. H., & Ramakrishna, K. (Eds.). (2002). The new terrorism: Anatomy, anatomy,
trends and counter-strategies. Eastern Universities Press.
Ramakrishna, K., & Tan, S. S. (2003). After Bali: The threat of terrorism in Southeast Asia.
World Scientific.
Kumar Ramakrishna
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
E-mail: ISKumar@ntu.edu.sg
Sreeram Chaulia, Trumped: Emerging Powers in a Post-American World.
New Delhi: Bloomsbury India, 2019, 237 pp. ISBN: 978-9-3891-6594-4.
DOI: 10.1177/2347797021992169
As I write this review, the era of President Donald Trump is coming to a close after
four tumultuous years following his loss to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential
election. Regardless of whether you considered Trump’s stewardship of the
USA to have been a net positive or negative, it is undeniable that his Presidency
has been one of the most impactful in decades. In his crusade to put ‘America
First’ and challenge the influence of the globalist ‘Washington elite’ on behalf
of ‘ordinary Americans’, Trump upended several longstanding US foreign policy
norms and tore up several key international treaties. In doing so, he seriously
undermined the liberal-international world order that has been so painstakingly
built by successive US administrations since the Second World War. Most of
the analysis of the geopolitical fallout from this seismic policy shift focuses on
the extent to which the USA’s status has been damaged, the reaction of its NATO
allies or how America’s potential great power rivals in China and Russia have
managed to capitalise on the situation. However, Sreeram Chaulia takes a unique
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