From Pax Americana to the New World Order: A Riveting Review

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.)

Yet the memory of Bandung energizes Mr. Acharya, who describes it as “the first powerful sign of an emerging alternative” to the Western domination (however attenuated in the present) that still dogs the non-Western world. The inevitable breakdown of the U.S.-led world order will not result in “a kind of Putinesque law of the jungle,” Mr. Acharya writes, “aided and abetted by an ever more powerful China.” It will, instead, lead to “new balances” in “a genuinely more diverse global community in which no single member or group of members is able to achieve hegemony.” Instead of “fearing the future,” he says, the West should “learn from history and cooperate with the rest of the world to forge a more equitable order.”

Never mind that appeals to the “equitable” in global relations are usually anti-Americanism dressed up in progressive finery; what exactly is this history to which the author points? Mr. Acharya’s framing of international relations is culturally resentful (call it the chip-on-the-shoulder school of IR). He’s indignant that non-Western peoples and civilizations are not given sufficient credit for their role in the emergence of “core elements of the existing world order.” Any claim that the principles that undergird the world order today are largely Western is, he believes, hubristic. Notions of republican government, due process and protections against torture, personal and property rights, humanitarian laws of war, and the freedom of the high seas, can all be traced back—in some way, he strains to tell us—to Sumerian, Egyptian, Persian, Indian, Chinese, Islamic, African and Native American peoples and civilizations, and not only to the Western world.

He’s particularly resentful of the status accorded “in the Western mind” to ancient Greece (and Rome) as the source and origin of contemporary liberal-democratic life. Greece, he writes, is “the most mythicized of the ancient cultures,” treated much too deferentially by Western historians who ignore its (and Rome’s) many flaws. But even Mr. Acharya cannot deny that the Greeks pioneered self-government. The Romans followed suit. The modern West has improved on their achievements. That is something to be treasured.

Besides, in knocking myth-making, he gets an important political point wrong: All cultural traditions (yes, even India’s, China’s and the Islamosphere’s) hark back consciously to a time and place of origin, however inexact or mythological. The West’s foundational myths tend to be more scientific than most, supported as they are by archaeological and historical evidence. But since all things pertaining to the West must be attacked in the name of equity, Mr. Acharya dedicates many pages to a quixotic disparagement of the Greek and Roman roots of our heritage. Of Greece, he never tires of telling us that Western culture “understates both its dark sides and its indebtedness” to Egypt, Mesopotamia and Persia. So ancient Greece was syncretic—who denies that?

The post-Western order, he tells us, will not be a multipolar world where a handful of powers shape international security. Instead, we’re going to be blessed with a “global multiplex,” of which he gives us a definition that is pure waffle, progressive pablum of an almost breathtaking kind. The multiplex is a state of affairs in which “large, medium, and some innovative smaller nations, as well as people acting through governments, companies, and civil groups powered by social media and employing new forms of interdependence and interactions will shape world order.” For all this to happen, Western nations will, of course, “need to take ownership of their racist colonialism” in the global South, to abase themselves and—presumably—make material reparations.

Once that’s done, our ugly world will become a global Eden—almost prelapsarian in its sweetness—in which the violence of colonialism and racism, of inequality and slavery, of Western triumphalism and self-aggrandizement, withers away to extinction and we all live together happily ever after.

Someone should tell Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei about this New World Order. His reaction would be fascinating to record.

Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.