‘The Once and Future World Order' Review: After Pax Americana

22-06-2025

Dust-jacket blurbs on books are usually ignored by reviewers. But when a new book on international relations carries fulsome endorsements by Gareth Evans (a preachy former Australian foreign minister, now unfriendly to America) and Kishore Mahbubani (a Singaporean former president of the United Nations Security Council who thinks America's moral authority is no greater than China's), a reader must entertain doubts about the book's true worth. With Amitav Acharya's 'The Once and Future World Order,' such doubts quickly turn into a conviction that the author hews to values of which we should beware.
Mr. Acharya, an Indian-born professor at American University in Washington, addresses a subject that alarms many of us: the unmistakable decline of the West and the serious fraying (if not quite yet the breakdown) of the American-led world order. But Mr. Acharya is not at all fazed by this. On the contrary, he's impatient for the old order to end and for the world to emerge into the blazing sunshine of a multicivilizational, post-American nirvana.
'Would the end of U.S. and Western dominance really be so bad?' Mr. Acharya asks. 'It need not be,' he says. Such an end 'is not a disaster.' If these hedges lull us, at first, into believing that we're in the hands of a gently neutral analyst of international affairs, we're soon disabused. The end of Pax Americana, he tells us, will 'turn out to be a good thing.'
From Mr. Acharya's standpoint, American and Western domination has been less a blessing than a threat—marred since its inception by 'economic inequality, racism, and wars of choice waged usually in the global South.' The author is blithely (and blindly) optimistic, his beliefs rooted in a form of nonalignment that idealizes such events as the Bandung Conference of 1955, a gathering, in Indonesia, of anti- and postcolonial leaders from Africa and Asia. (Only a handful of them, it should be said, believed in democracy; the majority of the leaders present were, or soon became, autocrats and tyrants.)