View from India: “Trump is not the cause of the West’s decline... He is its consequence”

Amitav Acharya, a Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University, Washington, D.C.

Amitav Acharya, Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University speaks with Brigadier Anil Raman (retired) on the structural forces reshaping global power.

- Your work has argued since 2014 that the American world order is in structural decline. And yet [Donald] Trump is bombing Iran, engineering regime change in Venezuela, and extracting sweeping concessions from India. If this is decline, what would dominance actually look like?

- The key distinction is between the decline of the United States as a power and the end of the order it built. I have never said [that] the U.S. is declining. On military, financial, and technology indices, it remains number one. What is over is the liberal international order: the multilateralism, the collective goods, and the promotion of democracy. What Mr. Trump is doing is not that. It is transactional, unilateral, and personal. When he weaponises tariffs, he is cashing in on the institutional inheritance of the liberal order. That is not strength. That is a hegemon monetising what remains of its credibility.

- So, Mr. Trump is the product of systemic decline, not its cause?

- Precisely. When Mr. Trump was elected in 2016, I updated my book with exactly that argument: he is the consequence of the decline, not its cause. He exploited genuine grievances against globalisation, against institutions, against the liberal establishment. [Joe] Biden came in wanting to revive the order. Mr. Trump has now ended it permanently. What surprised even those of us who foresaw this is the speed and scale of the destruction.

- Your multiplex model is quite distinct from multipolarity. Given that Mr. Trump is exercising raw power and subjugating countries one by one, does the multiplex framework still hold?

- Multiplex is not multipolarity. Multipolarity simply counts great powers and measures military and economic weight. The multiplex world describes the actual architecture of order: corporations, non-state actors, regional bodies, civil society, climate coalitions, all operating simultaneously. And here is the decisive point: Mr. Trump cannot determine outcomes in many domains. He can destroy. He cannot change regimes. Venezuela proves that. The U.S. in 1990 had hard and soft power and could mobilise allies, write rules, and shape outcomes. What we see today is a power that can cause destruction but cannot construct order. That is precisely what the end of order looks like.

- How might the Iran war reshape international order: does it strengthen U.S. dominance or weaken it, and how?

- I would argue that the U.S. has already suffered a loss of credibility and soft power erosion even [if] it manages to muddle through the conflict. Iran will survive, and its government will remain. It is the U.S. that might see a regime change due to domestic disapproval of the war. Unlike the U.S.-led victory in Iraq in 1991, which produced a “unipolar moment”, this war is the short-term usher in the “world-minus-one moment”, or the near total isolation of the U.S. on the world stage. Ultimately, it will hasten the end of U.S. global hegemony and pave the way for the emergence of what I have called a multiplex world in which not only one or a handful of great powers but also middle powers and regional powers will have more autonomy and [a] share of global leadership. Despite its vast military power, America will be distrusted and have to settle for a less prominent role in the global political, economic and diplomatic scene than has been the case since the [Second] World War.

- What does American foreign engagement look like in a post-Trump era? Is there any recovery possible for the institutional architecture that Mr. Trump has demolished?

- The trust is gone. Every major partner has spent the Trump years reducing dependence on the U.S.. The EU-India deal, EU-Mercosur, and Canada turning towards China: that reorganisation will not reverse even after Mr. Trump. And if a future President wants to rebuild, they will find the architecture already dismantled. The WTO weakened, NATO fractured, and normative authority spent. American engagement going forward will be, at best, mis-engagement: self-serving, selective, unpredictable.

- Looking ahead to 2035, what is the greatest structural challenge to the international system?

- Two things concern me most. First, nuclear war. Second, climate change. Beyond those two, I am more optimistic than people expect. The fear of disorder is highest in the West, not the Global South. China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam are not losing sleep over this. When people say the world is on fire, ask who started these fires. In almost every case since 9/11, the answer is Western intervention.

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