United States President Donald Trump’s unilateral and illegal actions against Venezuela, Iran and its trade partners suggest a deeper method to the ongoing madness. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly proclaimed that the action in Venezuela was primarily aimed at denying China the massive fossil fuel resource as well as the ample gold and rare earth minerals in the South American nation. China was buying over 70% of Venezuelan crude on a long term basis. Now that arrangement stands disrupted.Clearly, denying China resources to dominate future technologies has become critical for the US. Huang Jensen, Chairman of Nvidia, the US’s biggest semiconductor chip-maker, publicly admitted that China is only “nano seconds” behind the US in the AI race. China is way ahead in creating massive energy capacity to build future artificial intelligence (AI) industry, including open AI application models, Jensen admits.All of this naturally feeds into the perception about the gradual erosion of the US’s hegemony, especially in terms of its tech dominance and its global finance leadership, which has lasted several decades but is clearly waning in recent years. This is reflected in how central banks around the world have increasingly stocked up on gold and reduced the proportion of US treasury bills in their reserves.US dollar assets, by one estimate, are down from nearly 60% of global central bank reserves a decade ago to about 40% now. That is a substantial erosion in the erstwhile faith in the dollar. This particularly accelerated after the Ukraine war when the US imposed harsh sanctions against Russia. Central Banks’ buying of gold doubled year after year after the Ukraine war. In 2025, gold prices were up 65% and the dollar index was down 9.5%. This was a double whammy which has rarely occurred in recent memory.The next five to 10 years are, therefore, particularly critical for the US to examine how its status as a hegemon plays out even as the axis of economic power continues to shift to the East. The US may even develop some niggling self-doubts about its unquestioned military power. Some new trends have emerged in this respect.Diffusion of remote electronics warfare capacity with complex technologies aided by AI may also challenge its unparalleled military dominance enjoyed so far. China is quietly working to enhance its future tech-based warfare capabilities, which is happening in tandem with its growing economic power. Some of it was visible in the recent exchange between India and Pakistan during Operation Sindoor in May 2025.China’s rising economic prowessIn the 20th century, the US used a mix of persuasion and coercion to maintain its economic and military hegemony. For instance, in the early 1970s, Richard Nixon used the US’s persuasive powers and skills to move the dollar away from its gold-backed status to further enhance the role of the dollar as a dominant world currency. He persuaded the oil-rich West Asia to make oil transactions dollar denominated – that is, petro dollars – so that the dollars’ overall influence spread even further.Today, the opposite seems to be happening. The oil-rich nations like Saudi Arabia and others in West Asia are happy to move away from the dollar and accept the Chinese currency for crude sold to China. With its growing economic size and heft, China is emerging as a hub and rallying point for many developed and developing economies who feel a permanent loss of trust with the US.China is the largest trading partner for over 120 countries in the world. Its economy in PPP terms now stands at around USD 39 trillion, far exceeding America’s USD 31 trillion.Also read: The Self-Correcting Engine Behind China’s Economic GrowthOne example would suffice to illustrate China’s growing influence in world trade. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as a regional bloc, was created with the US’s blessing in the mid-1960s. The US was the largest trading partner of ASEAN in 2001. That year is important because it was also the year China fully integrated with global multilateral trade under the World Trade Organization.In 2001, US’s trade with ASEAN was USD 135 billion and China’s trade with the bloc was about USD 35 billion. China executed the first free-trade agreement with the 10 ASEAN economies in 2001. In the next more than 20 years, China’s trade with ASEAN economies massively overtook that of America’s. By 2022, the US-ASEAN trade stood at about USD 450 billion whereas the China-ASEAN trade went up to USD 950 billion plus!After the Trump trade disruptions, it is likely that the China-ASEAN trade would consolidate even more. Trump’s actions are likely to produce the opposite effect.India-China tradeA similar pattern can also be seen in the massive shift in India-China trade relative to India-US trade between 2001 and 2024. In 2001-02, India’s two-way trade with China was merely USD 2.3 billion, and that with America was USD 25 billion. Today, China is India’s largest trade partner with total trade at USD 131 billion.The catch up China has done in the last 24 years is nothing less than stupendous. It has incrementally emerged as a fulcrum of world trade thus considerably reducing the US’s influence.Also read: The Sino-Indian Rapprochement Is More Than Just a Response to TrumpClearly, the coercive and disruptive trade strategy of Trump is based on the capacity of the Americans to absorb world imports as its export competitiveness in global manufacturing has rapidly declined vis-à-vis China’s in recent decades. This trend has been quite inexorable and unrelenting. Trump now wants to reverse it with coercion and illegal means.This also shows in the way Trump has been constantly threatening the expanded format of BRICS nations where China remains the hub around which an alternative currency trading system, away from the dollar, is gradually evolving.The growing popularity of the expanded BRICS is troubling Trump no end. He has been threatening 100% tariff on BRICS nations for sometime now. Generally, he has been threatening BRICS nations openly with massive economic sanctions if they moved away from the dollar as a hard currency. Among the economies threatened with 25% additional tariffs for trading with Iran are nations like China, India, Brazil, Russia, UAE and Iran.There is a clear pattern here to undermine BRICS. India is willy-nilly situated in the middle of this new geopolitics. India is the host and holds the chairmanship of the BRICS Summit this year in New Delhi. It will be embarrassing if India, as chair of the expanded BRICS grouping, ceases to do trade with Iran or substantially reduces Russian crude imports under pressure from Trump.Can India afford to be seen on the wrong side of history in the name of pragmatism?Fundamentally, India needs to understand that Trump’s desperate attempt to restore the US’s past glory and its economic hegemony is like trying to turn an omelette back into an egg. It is tantamount to running against the tide of history. At some level, the quixotic nature of this project is also appreciated by serious scholars in the US. But the American state, such as it is, appears unabashedly in favour of resorting to unilateralism to counter the forces of history.History also suggests that the economic hegemony of nations have rarely lasted beyond a certain period. Military decline has followed with a lag. Good times have to end sometime or another. That is the law of nature.