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happy day War And The New World Order

We enter 2025 with two wars entering their final phasehappy day, but with no realistic basis for a long-term peace settlement. They have also ensured that global empathy has been totally diverted from other human tragedies, notably in Africa.

We are also entering a new era in US politics, with a President who promises to transform the USA’s international approach. This has generated much hand-wringing among strategic commentators about undermining the US-led liberal international order.

This dismay flows from a distorted analysis of the current global geopolitical scenario. It ignores the reality that the end of the Cold War set in motion major changes in the strategic geography across regions.

In Europe, the expansion of the EU changed its economic geography. As NATO moved eastward, with a corresponding contraction of the Soviet space, new security perspectives emerged that eventually led to the Russian annexation of Crimea and its invasion of Ukraine.

As the US vacated some economic and strategic space in West Asia, Russia, China and Iran were drawn more intensively into it. The clash of regional interests resulted in the suppression of political Islam, the rise of new sectarian alignments and the search for new energy links.

The Asia-Pacific region also underwent a major strategic remake. The Cold War alliances, which aimed to confront the Soviet Union (with China adopting a broadly neutral posture) needed to be recalibrated to counter China, whose overweening maritime ambitions called for a much broader partnership covering the Indian Ocean and Pacific Rims. The concept of the Indo-Pacific was born of this, and India was, for the first time, fully included in the deliberations and decisions in this region.

These changes in strategic geography encouraged a number of countries to play increasing roles in their regions. The post-Cold War boost to globalisation, which facilitated the free movement across national boundaries of goods, people, money and technologies, enabled countries in different geographies to develop the economic heft, military strength and regional influence to seek a more prominent role in world affairs. They seek greater autonomy of action to protect their security interests and promote their aspirations for economic growth and political influence.

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To this end, they seek a democratisation of global political and economic governance. They accord greater priority to their national interests over group or partnership loyalties. The narrative of democracy vs authoritarianism does not sell with them because they see double standards in the definition of these terms. They routinely choose interests over values (though they may explain it otherwise).

This explains the divergent responses of countries to the conflict in Ukraine, the West Asian crisis and the US-China diplomatic standoff. Many African, Asian and South American countries did not join the sanctions regime against Russia to preserve their economic and security interests. The OPEC+ resisted pressures from the US to increase oil production to keep prices in check. And no example is as graphic as the procession of countries that travelled to Russia during the BRICS summit. They included (besides existing BRICS members) new members Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the UAE. Thirteen countries participated in the outreach meetings, including NATO member Turkey and four ASEAN countries. They ignored the narrative of international “isolation” of Putin and Russia and the allegation that BRICS is a Russia-China-led effort to counter the US-led world order. Theirs was simply a show of independence and political hedging in an uncertain world of great power frictions.

Such independent countries have been called the new non-aligned or middle powers. They consider themselves as contributing to a multipolarity in global affairs. There is a broader set of countries that aligns with many of the interests and aspirations of the middle powers; the Global South is a term often used for them.

Strategic analysts (especially in the West, but also some in India) discount the collective significance of the rise and impact of these countries. Their interests are disparate, there are inter se ideological differences and even disputes between some. Their actions are often described as impotent challenges to the US-led global order. The commonality among them lies in their determination to promote their autonomy of action and join those who have the same interests on particular issues. The expression Global South invites derision, as a nebulous concept with no uniting agenda. Definitions of multipolarity, drawn from 19th century international relations theory, are produced to show that today’s situation is not multipolarity.

These self-serving arguments ignore the global dynamics of the 21st century. The US-led dominance of the global order is not what it once was. New powers are willing to stand up for themselves, and other major powers have insinuated themselves into new areas of influence.

The US is still the strongest economic, technological and military power in the world, but the gap with other powers is diminishing. Its management of the international political environment has been suboptimal in recent years. Political dysfunction and fiscal overstretch are part of the reason. A declared neoconservatism, which drove ill-judged misadventures in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, was another. Its alliance system, based on the transatlantic and transpacific pillars, is facing internal challenges. The burden of US President-elect Donald Trump’s song is that by withdrawing from non-strategic foreign interventions, focussing on core US interests, sharing the financial burden of strategic goals with allies, and enforcing reciprocity in trade with adversaries, partners and allies, the US could reclaim much of the influence that it has squandered.

The growth of Chinese economic, technological and military power in this century has been remarkable. In the latter two areas, the gap with the US is shrinking (in some areas, China is actually ahead of the US). China has effectively integrated the innovative technologies of its civil industry with its military industrial complex. As early as in the early 2000s, the US recognised China as a major strategic rival of the future. But the temptation of profits continued to attract Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood to China, thus actively enhancing its economic and technological prowess.

It has used these strengths to expand its global outreach, effectively using a carrot-and-stick approach to secure control of the South China Sea, deter countries in its neighbourhood from infringing its (self-defined) interests, and expand its outreach for influence, technologies and natural resources. Chinese influence spans all of Asia, extends into Europe and penetrates deep into Africa and South America, as President Xi Jinping’s recent triumphant march through Peru and Brazil showed. China’s economic slowdown, demographic challenges and internal tensions are undeniable. Its GDP may not reach that of the US any time soon. But it will remain a major player in the global arena, and India’s principal strategic challenge for decades.

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The resurgence of Russia in this century has been another feature of the post-Cold War era. Its vast landmass straddling Europe and Asia, its abundant natural resource wealth and its formidable nuclear weapons arsenal have been its core strengths, though economic misgovernance and demographic weaknesses have hampered its full potential. As its geopolitical frictions with the West increased, it strengthened relations with China and Iran, created new linkages in West Asia (including the bases on Syria’s Mediterranean coast, whose continuance is now under jeopardy), and expanded its influence in Africa and Latin America. The Ukraine war and the attendant Western sanctions have had a major political, economic and military impact on Russia, but it will remain a major player in the evolution of security architectures in Europe, the Arctic and West Asia.

The relative decline of Europe is another feature of the changed strategic architecture of the post-Cold War space. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Europe made a concerted effort to emerge from the shadow of the US and establish itself as an independent power on the global stage, especially with the added economic and political weight acquired by its expansion. The EU launched an ambitious action plan at its Lisbon Summit in 2000. The “Lisbon Agenda” aimed to make the EU “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world” by 2010.

Underpinning this economic masterplan was a Common Security and Defence Policy, envisaging military integration and an autonomous military force to protect European interests even beyond its borders. External and internal deve­lopments dashed these hopes. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq effectively divided Europe even before its formal expansion. The Eurozone crisis created north-south economic fault lines. The Lisbon Agenda was formally buried in 2010 and replaced by a more modest strategy for growth and employment. Since then, economic decline—marked by high energy costs, sluggish productivity growth, deindustrialisation, ballooning debt, security dependencies and sociocultural fractures—has continued to dog much of Europe. In a damning indictment of Europe’s current situation, France’s President Emmanuel Macron said Europe has delegated everything that is strategic: energy to Russia, security to the US and other critical inputs to China; and has virtually become a vassal of the US.

This is the global structure that 2025 confronts. Our solutions to pressing problems and efforts to construct a world order have to be based on a clear understanding that the post-War global order and its brief aftermath in the 1990s have crumbled. We need new templates.

India will now play for bronze, the medal they won at Tokyo 2020, against Spain on Thursday while Germany will meet the Netherlands in the gold medal clash later the same day.

The Ukraine war has dragged on beyond 1,000 days, with about a million soldiers dead or injured. War fatigue, public attitudes and Trump’s pronouncements lead to a reasonable expectation that efforts to end the war will pick up steam. Any lasting solution will have to accommodate Europe’s largest country in a security architecture guaranteeing indivisible security—for Europe, Ukraine and Russia.

Trump’s presumed policy guide, Project 2025, suggests that a Eurasian security architecture should effectively consist of Europe developing a conventional deterrent against Russia, with the US providing a nuclear umbrella. It is difficult to see this happening in the near term, with Europe lacking an indigenous military-industrial capacity and an economic malaise that limits the scope for significant acceleration of defence expenditure. It will accentuate the shift, already underway, of Europe’s political and economic centre of gravity towards Central Europe countries, led by Poland.

The reconstruction of Ukraine and rehabilitation of its displaced population will be a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar project, for which resources have to be found, and Europe will again have to play a key role in it.

In West Asia, new configurations were beginning to emerge that linked the Gulf countries with their decades-old adversary, Israel. Chinese diplomacy that promoted a Saudi-Iran rapprochement, and a US-Iran prisoner exchange deal seemed to hold out some hope of tying up the loose ends of the chain, but this proved elusive, as the Palestinians were left in the lurch.

A repair of the configurations of cooperation and mutually beneficial economic connections will have to be reattempted, stepping back from attempted solutions that assume that the millions of Palestinians do not exist.

In the Indo-Pacific, in which core Indian economic and security interests are involved, efforts have to continue to keep the region free from any single power’s dominance and ensure open, free and secure movement of goods and people. Particu­larly in the context of the belligerent anti-China rhetoric of the presumptive Trump administration, the level at which the US-China rivalry finds equilibrium is important for India’s own sec­urity calculations and its bilateral posture towards China. The reluctance of many Asian countries to be drawn into a US-China standoff (let alone a conflict) will also be a factor.

In short, the post-Cold War liberal order, which historian Francis Fukuyama presaged in The End of History and the Last Man, is fading away. A new 21st century order should factor in the interests and aspirations of today’s players—a genuine, universal “rules-based order”, rather than the one touted in every international document today. An order that condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine, condones the disproportionate killings in Gaza, and ignores the massive destruction in African civil wars, cannot be described as rules-based.

For India, this means securing understanding for our strategic autonomy to promote our economic and strategic interests. We have broad-based our networks of partnership, based on shared perspectives. We should insist on mutual respect even in asymmetric relationships. Geopolitics, history and economics influence the pattern of our relations with Russia, China and Iran. Our engagement with the Global South is based on shared interests and mutually beneficial cooperation.

The principal challenge for our strategic analysts is to look at the world through an Indian prism, from the vantage point of our geography and history, and laser-focussed on our ambitions for a Viksit Bharat by 2047.

(Views expressed are personal)

P.S. Raghavan is a former diplomat and distinguished fellow, Vivekananda International Foundation

(This appeared in the print as 'Brave New War')happy day

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