The hype surrounding US President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing and the broad outcomes indicate that the politics of big power hyphenation is back.

After the collapse of the communist regime in the Soviet Union in 1991, some strategic thinkers in the US dreamt of single-power dominance. Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford political scientist, called it the “end of history” and predicted that the American way of liberal democracy would be the only way forward for the world. His own guru, Samuel Huntington, a renowned Harvard professor, challenged the thesis through his famous book The Clash of Civilisations two years later in 1993, in which he predicted a civilisational conflict involving various regions that would challenge US supremacy. Huntington was not far off the mark. Soon, the US ran into trouble with Islamic terrorists, culminating in the World Trade Centre attack in New York in 2001.

The early 21st century also saw several middle powers and some minilateral groupings emerging as important players in the world. The phrase “multipolarity” came into vogue, indicating that the world was no longer “unipolar” and under US hegemony. Many believed that a multipolar set up, where regionalism and localism play a dominant role, will be a good model for international governance. Sceptics and American apologists, who saw any talk of multipolarity as a........

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