Book Launch | Great Power Games: From Western Decline to Eastern Ascent

Great Power Games offers an incisive and panoramic account of a world order in flux — from the ashes of the Second World War to today’s fractured global landscape. For decades, the United States and its Western allies shaped the global system through treaties, institutions, and a carefully constructed rules-based order. That edifice, however, now shows deep cracks. Hot wars rage on multiple fronts, the West faces internal divisions, and America has retreated from the very frameworks it once created.

In this compelling narrative, Vikram Sood examines how nations pursue power — through covert operations, espionage, proxy wars, disinformation campaigns, and economic coercion. Tracing the arc from the Cold War’s shadow conflicts to the unipolar arrogance of post-Soviet America, he explores how the balance of power is once again shifting.

As China asserts its growing economic and military influence, and India emerges as a pivotal actor in global affairs, the old powers — the United States and Russia — remain locked in dangerous contests of ambition. The result, Sood argues, is a volatile multipolar world where the rules are being rewritten in real time.

Incisive, unsettling, and richly detailed, Great Power Games is both a masterful history of global geopolitics and a timely reflection on the uncertain future ahead.

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