UN, IMF, World Bank:The last colonial club

Plaque Commemorating Formation of

 IMF in July 1944

The global order is a museum of Western power — polished, curated, and protected by velvet ropes. 

The UN, the IMF and the World Bank proudly claim to represent humanity, but the architecture of these institutions still reflects the world of 1945, when colonial empires still breathed and Asia was on its knees. The difference today is jarring: Europe’s share of global GDP has shrunk, but its grip on global governance remains a clenched fist.

Henry Kissinger once said, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” The world’s most powerful nations built multilateralism not as a moral project, but as a mechanism to institutionalize their dominance. And they have been intoxicated with that privilege ever since.

The UN Security Council is the most blatant exhibit: five nations hold veto power, including three European or Western states and China that inherited a seat meant for Taiwan. India — the world’s largest democracy, largest population, and a top-five economy — remains an outsider. Legitimacy is apparently optional; victory in 1945 is not.

The Bretton Woods twins are even less subtle. By long-standing tradition, the United States appoints the World Bank President and Europe selects the IMF Managing Director. The coveted voting quotas? Engineered to ensure that nothing of strategic importance escapes Washington’s oversight. This is not governance — it is geopolitical wealth management.

Let us not pretend the rhetoric of “global cooperation” hides the cold math behind it. Former U.S. officials have said the quiet part out loud. President Donald Trump declared: “The United States owes billions of dollars and we’re not paying until they treat us fairly.” If the UN doesn’t serve America’s interests, America will simply choke the funds. It is a protection racket with better lighting.

China markets itself as the alternative champion of the developing world — but only as long as the world agrees to be developed in China’s image. Behind its loans lie ports, digital dependencies, and a map of influence drawn in hidden ink. Beijing wants to rewrite the rules — not to make them fair, but to make them Chinese.

India stands at the edge of this dangerous duality. Its position is unique — a democracy that refuses Western tutelage and an Asian power that rejects authoritarian expansion. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has declared: “India’s voice must be heard in shaping the global order.” He is not asking for charity; he is demanding recognition.

India’s diplomacy is no longer polite. Delhi is calling out hypocrisy in real time. External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar argues that Security Council reform is the world’s most urgent structural correction. He means what he says: an order that excludes 4.3 billion people from real power cannot preach democracy to anyone.

During its G20 presidency, India forced the system to listen — bringing the African Union into the room not as a guest but as a member. It was a crack in the colonial glass ceiling of global governance.

The West built the system. China wants to capture it. India intends to rewrite it.

The multilateral world is not collapsing — it is mutating. And the biggest shock to the old guard is this: India is no longer willing to play by rules written to keep it small. The heirs of the empire must finally confront a world where they no longer get to decide who counts as powerful.

The Indian Ocean imperative: New Delhi’s strategy for influence and security at sea

India’s strategic imagination has increasingly shifted from the Himalayas to the high seas. The Indian Ocean, long treated as a backdrop of national defence, is now recognised as the arena where India’s economic security, geopolitical aspirations, and civilisational outreach converge. 

More than 90 percent of India’s trade by volume is seaborne; its energy lifelines pass through narrow chokepoints vulnerable to disruption. Geography, therefore, dictates that India cannot afford to be a bystander in its own maritime neighbourhood. The ambition to act as “guardian of the blue waters” is not merely aspirational — it is essential.

However, India’s path to maritime primacy is complicated. The Indian Ocean of today is not the relatively uncontested space of the late twentieth century. It has become a crowded, competitive, and contested geostrategic highway. India is attempting to consolidate influence in a domain where multiple powers — especially China — are asserting themselves with growing confidence.

Beijing’s expanding presence across the Indian Ocean has transformed regional dynamics. Its investments in ports from Gwadar to Hambantota, along with the establishment of its first overseas military base in Djibouti, indicate long-term strategic intent. Frequent deployment of Chinese warships and submarines in waters close to India’s critical sea lanes and island territories is viewed in New Delhi as more than normal naval diplomacy. The result is a growing perception of encirclement — a maritime “great game” unfolding around India’s periphery.

India has responded by accelerating its naval modernisation and diplomatic outreach. The Indian Navy remains the most capable regional force, fielding aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and modern surface combatants. Doctrinal shifts toward sustained deployments, intelligence-sharing, and humanitarian assistance reflect a confident assertion of leadership. Initiatives like SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) and Maritime India Vision 2047 project India as a net security provider, a nation ready to secure sea lanes, support coastal states, and promote rules-based maritime governance.

Yet, ambition outpaces capability in important ways. India’s maritime strategy competes for attention and funding with pressing continental challenges. Significant delays in shipbuilding and defence technology development persist. Internally, maritime governance remains fragmented, demanding better coordination between naval modernisation, coastal security, and blue-economy policies.

Partnerships with the United States and European navies are helpful, but limited. Washington’s primary priority is the Western Pacific, not the Indian Ocean. European naval engagement fluctuates based on global crises. And India’s own insistence on strategic autonomy ensures that no partnership can fully substitute for independent capability. The West may assist India — but will not underwrite its dominion.

Adding complexity, the Global South — where India seeks moral and political leadership — is deeply divided. Smaller coastal and island nations often hedge between India and China, driven by economic necessity rather than strategic loyalty. Influence must be earned continuously, not assumed.

India’s maritime rise, therefore, requires balancing ambition with realism. Absolute dominance in the classical sense may be neither possible nor necessary. What India can — and must — achieve is decisive influence: ensuring that no hostile power can threaten its maritime security, and that regional states view India as an indispensable partner.

If New Delhi can sustain economic growth, modernise its naval power, and unify its maritime governance, India’s role as a responsible steward of the Indian Ocean will not remain a distant aspiration — it will mature into a defining element of Indian statecraft in the twenty-first century.

Sankhya and Yoga as one truth: The metaphysical harmony of the twin philosophical systems

Bhishma Lying on the Bed of Arrows

Among the six classical systems (darshanas) of Indian philosophy, Sankhya and Yoga stand as closely related schools that complement each other in both doctrine and purpose. 

Sankhya, traditionally attributed to the sage Kapila, is regarded as one of the oldest philosophical systems in India. It lays out a profound theory of cosmic evolution through the interaction of Purusha (pure consciousness) and Prakriti (primordial nature). 

Yoga, systematized by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, builds upon Sankhya’s metaphysics but translates its insights into a practical discipline—a method for the realization of the self through moral restraint, meditation, and concentration.

Both systems share the same metaphysical foundation; their distinction lies not in essence but in method. While Sankhya seeks liberation through the power of discrimination and knowledge (jnana), Yoga pursues it through disciplined physical and mental practices that still the movements of the mind.

The Mahabharata, that monumental repository of India’s philosophical heritage, contains nearly 900 references to Yoga and about 150 to Sankhya. In many passages, the two are mentioned together, indicating not opposition but integration—a recognition that the pursuit of truth demands both knowledge and practice.

In the Shanti Parva (specifically the Moksha-dharma Parva), Yudhishthira asks Bhishma to explain the difference between Sankhya and Yoga. Bhishma’s reply encapsulates the spirit of Indian philosophical pluralism:

“The followers of Sankhya praise their system, and the Yogins praise the Yoga system. Each proclaims that their own path is the best for attaining life’s highest ends. I consider both these views to be true. I approve of both Yoga and Sankhya. There is no knowledge equal to Sankhya, and no power equal to Yoga. If practiced with devotion, either will lead to the highest goal.”

The essence of Bhishma’s teaching is unmistakable: Sankhya and Yoga are two expressions of the same quest. What the followers of Sankhya experience through discernment and wisdom, the Yogins realize through meditation and discipline. To those who have attained insight, there is no real difference between the two.

This harmony of doctrine and practice is reaffirmed in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna tells Arjuna: “Both Sankhya and Yoga lead to the same goal; only the means differ. Yet among the two, Yoga is superior for those who act.”

In this synthesis, Indian thought dissolves the apparent conflict between knowledge and action. Sankhya offers the vision—the metaphysical map of consciousness and matter—while Yoga provides the discipline to traverse it. Together they represent the twin wings of liberation: wisdom and effort, contemplation and action, understanding and realization, converging toward the same eternal truth.

The myth of World War III: Europe’s civil wars and the end of colonial mobilisation

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, Ciano 

just before signing the 

Munich Agreement, Sept 1938

Since the guns roared in Ukraine and the fires spread across the Middle East, the world’s commentators have been murmuring a familiar prophecy: World War III is upon us. 

Yet the phrase itself is a ghost — an echo of the 20th century that refuses to die. The truth is simpler and more sobering: a “world war” in the classical sense is no longer possible. What we mistake for a global conflagration is often a regional contest amplified by the memories of Europe’s own cataclysms.

A true world war presupposes that a significant number of great powers are locked in combat — not in proxy or policy, but in arms. History, however, offers no such precedent. Even the so-called World Wars were not global wars in the literal sense; they were European civil wars with imperial appendages.

The First and Second World Wars were Europe’s internal convulsions — tragic quarrels among its own dynasties, ideologies, and ambitions. Their scale became “worldwide” not because the world chose to fight, but because Europe commanded it to fight. The empires of the day possessed colonies, and through the machinery of imperial authority, they dragged Asia, Africa, and Latin America into their continental vendettas.

Millions of young men from lands that had no quarrel with Germany or France or Britain were compelled to die for them. Indian soldiers perished in Flanders, African battalions marched through deserts not their own, and Caribbean sailors sank in cold Atlantic waters — all in wars that had nothing to do with their destiny. 

The term “world war” thus concealed an ethical scandal: it was not the world that went to war, but the world that was made to fight for Europe.

Today, such coercion is impossible. Colonialism — the great European engine of conscription — has been dismantled. No European power, nor any other, can now summon men and resources from unwilling nations to die in its stead. Every state, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, now answers to its own conscience, not to a colonial office in London, Paris, or Berlin.

Therefore, if Europe, or any power bloc, chooses to engage in conflict, it must bear the full moral and material cost of its own belligerence. The rest of the world will no longer offer its youth as collateral for European anxieties.

The world has grown both more connected and more sovereign. It is bound by trade, data, and dialogue — not by imperial chains. In this new reality, the very notion of a “world war” belongs to a bygone order of domination. Wars may still erupt, but they will be regional storms, not planetary infernos.

The 21st century’s greatest challenge is not the prevention of another “world war,” but the prevention of a world order that still imagines itself through Europe’s old wars. The age of imperial mobilization is over; the age of moral independence has begun.

The world need not march again to Europe’s drums.

The empire’s orphans: Pakistan and Afghanistan in the ruins of American strategy

President Reagan with Afghan Mujahideen

Oval Office, 1983

Afghanistan and Pakistan are once again at war, each claiming to have struck devastating blows against the other. Kabul says hundreds of Pakistani soldiers lie dead; Islamabad responds with air raids deep inside Afghan territory. 

It is a grotesque irony—two nations that once fought together in the name of faith and freedom now destroy each other in the name of security. But this is not a new tragedy. It is the final act in a drama written long ago by Washington’s pen and executed with Islamabad’s hand.

Since the 1970s, Pakistan has served as the principal instrument of American power in South Asia. It was in Pakistan’s madrassas and military camps that the jihad against the Soviets was conceived, funded, and armed. The United States provided the dollars, and Pakistan provided the zeal. 

In the 1980s, Pakistani generals and politicians openly celebrated their role as “the sword arm of the free world.” They spoke of Afghanistan as their “strategic depth,” a phrase that revealed both ambition and arrogance. The Taliban, born from the refugee camps of Peshawar, was not an accident of history; it was Islamabad’s deliberate project—what its leaders once proudly called their greatest foreign-policy achievement.

The destruction of Afghanistan was thus not merely collateral damage of the Cold War; it was the intended price of Pakistan’s regional fantasies. When the Soviet Union fell, the West walked away, but Pakistan stayed, cultivating the Taliban as a tool of control over its war-scarred neighbor. 

Through the 1990s, Pakistani advisers shaped Kabul’s policies, its economy, even its ideology. Afghanistan was reduced to a protectorate in everything but name. What was once an ancient civilization became an experimental ground for geopolitical engineering.

Then came 9/11. The monster that Pakistan had built and America had sponsored turned against its makers. Washington called for Pakistan’s help once more, and the generals in Rawalpindi obliged—turning on their own creation with one hand while secretly shielding it with the other. 

This double game defined the next two decades. The U.S. poured billions into Pakistan’s military and intelligence networks, only to discover that the Taliban’s sanctuaries lay across the border in Pakistani territory. Islamabad played both arsonist and fireman, ensuring that the flames never died completely. The longer the fire burned, the more aid flowed.

When America finally withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, it left behind the same Taliban it had overthrown twenty years earlier. The circle was complete. The irony was cruel: Pakistan had again helped bring the Taliban to power—only to find itself their next target. Today’s war between Kabul and Islamabad is not a clash of civilizations or religions; it is the implosion of a forty-year deceit. 

The Taliban’s protégés in Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are now laying siege to their old patrons. The “strategic depth” has become a strategic grave.

The deeper tragedy is that both Pakistan and Afghanistan have spent half a century mistaking servitude for strategy. They fought wars not for their people, but for the illusions of empire—first Soviet, then American. The geography of their suffering has remained constant: villages bombed, schools closed, refugees displaced, futures erased. 

The Americans left, but their architecture of dependency remained. Pakistan’s generals still see power through foreign eyes, and Afghanistan’s rulers still wield it through borrowed guns.

History offers its verdict without emotion. Nations that build their politics on the approval of outsiders end up fighting wars they never truly chose. Pakistan may blame Kabul for harboring terrorists; Kabul may denounce Islamabad’s airstrikes. But both are prisoners of a past they helped create. The smoke rising over the Durand Line today is not just the sign of a border at war—it is the funeral pyre of sovereignty sacrificed to ambition.

Until Pakistan and Afghanistan free themselves from the ghosts of American patronage and their own delusions of control, they will continue to fight not for territory, but for the very meaning of independence. For now, they remain the empire’s orphans—armed, abandoned, and endlessly at war with themselves.

Russia plays Chess, China plays Go, America plays Poker: The games that shape our century

“Russia plays chess, China plays Go, and America plays poker.” ~ With this one line, economist Jeffrey Sachs captures the essence of global strategy—three civilizations, three games, three ways of thinking about power. 

Russia plots its moves for positional dominance, China builds patient encirclements that last centuries, and America plays a fast, deceptive, high-stakes game—one that dazzles in the moment but often collapses when the cards are revealed.

In these metaphors lie not just clever comparisons but the essence of our age. The 21st century is no longer a clash of armies—it is a war of time horizons. Russia and China play for eternity; America plays for the evening, the next election, or a one-night stand.

Russia’s moves on the global chessboard are deliberate and cold. Every gambit in Ukraine, every energy pipeline to Europe, every alliance in West Asia is a calculated step to protect the king—the Russian state and its sphere of influence. Chess is not about speed; it is about control of the center. It rewards foresight, not frenzy. 

And that is the Russian temperament: to suffer losses, endure isolation, and emerge with the board rearranged in its favor. In Putin’s Eurasian vision, even setbacks are sacrifices—pawns given up to strengthen the position of the empire.

China, meanwhile, plays Go, not chess. It does not seek checkmate; it seeks quiet encirclement. Each port, each investment, each fiber-optic cable is a stone placed on the vast board of influence. Go is about patience and space—it is the art of conquest without confrontation. 

The Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Digital Silk Road—these are not mere economic programs; they are the slow accumulation of presence. When Go is played well, there is no single battle won, only a landscape transformed.

Xi Jinping’s China thinks not in election cycles but in dynastic arcs. It measures time in centuries, not years. Its strategy is to create dependencies so subtle that rivals do not even realize they have been surrounded. A mine in Africa, a highway in Central Asia, a satellite over the Indian Ocean—all are stones on the board. As Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

America, however, sits at a different table—the poker table, loud and luminous. Its strength lies in theatre, in the ability to bluff, to make the world believe it holds the winning hand. For decades, it worked. The U.S. projected an aura of invincibility—military bases in a hundred countries, the dollar as the global reserve, Hollywood as soft power, Silicon Valley as modern Olympus. Yet poker is a game of perception, not patience. You win until someone calls your bluff.

The American system, Sachs implies, thrives on short-term wins: a war here, a sanction there, a revolution elsewhere. It operates in news cycles, not historical cycles. Each “victory” becomes the seed of the next crisis—Iraq after Afghanistan, Libya after Iraq, Ukraine after Libya. The moves come fast, the pot grows huge, but the debt piles higher. Poker, unlike chess or Go, has no endgame—only exhaustion.

The tragedy is not that America lacks power, but that it mistakes momentum for strategy. It fights wars of choice but loses wars of consequence. It spends trillions to control oil, only to be overtaken by nations that invest billions in chips and data. Its greatest weapon—its image—is now its greatest vulnerability. You can bluff once, twice, a hundred times; but in the long game of civilizations, the truth of the hand is eventually revealed.

The world today reflects this collision of games. Russia defends its core; China expands its periphery; America doubles down on the next round. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—India, Brazil, Indonesia, the Gulf nations—watches closely, learning the rules of all three. 

In this emerging multipolar order, the cleverest players are those who can combine patience with agility, endurance with deception. The future will belong neither to the bluffer nor to the conqueror but to the strategist who can see through the illusion of the table itself.

History reminds us that every empire eventually meets its game’s limit. The Soviet Union ran out of moves. The British Empire ran out of colonies. The American empire risks running out of credibility. But China and Russia, for all their calculation, also face internal fragilities—demography, dissent, debt. In the coming decades, the world may witness a battle of fatigue, not of firepower—a test of whose system can endure chaos without collapsing.

“Power,” wrote Henry Kissinger, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” But desire without discipline breeds ruin. The empires that endure are those that master the rhythm of restraint—knowing when to act and when to wait. Russia and China may not always win, but they play as if the board is infinite. America plays as if the table will always be there.

In the end, the metaphor extends beyond geopolitics—it is a parable of civilizations. Chess demands calculation, Go requires patience, poker rewards risk. But the 21st century demands something rarer: wisdom—the ability to know when to change the game itself.

When the pieces settle, and the cards are down, it will not be the loudest player who prevails, but the quiet one who has been planning all along.

The price of NATO’s shield: Europe’s strategic autonomy in American custody

When Russia sells uranium to the United States, it is deemed a matter of strategic necessity. But when Europe attempts to import Russian oil or gas, it becomes an act of treachery. 

Why this double standard? 

The answer, as President Vladimir Putin recently remarked, lies in sovereignty—or rather, its loss. In the first half of 2025 alone, Russia earned $800 million from uranium sales to the U.S., exceeding the total for all of 2024. Power, profit, and politics—three forces intertwined in one transaction—reveal the deeper fault lines of the global order.

Putin’s claim is more than a rhetorical flourish. Europe has, in many ways, ceded its sovereignty to Washington. What was once a transatlantic partnership of equals has evolved into a hierarchical arrangement where security patronage is exchanged for obedience. 

NATO, conceived as a defensive alliance, now functions as a mechanism through which the United States exerts disproportionate influence over Europe’s foreign and even economic policy. As one European diplomat recently quipped off record, “We provide the flag, Washington writes the script.”

This dynamic is most evident in the energy domain—the lifeblood of modern economies. The decision about where Europe can purchase its oil and gas is no longer made solely in Berlin, Paris, or Brussels. It is shaped, and in many cases dictated, by Washington’s strategic calculus. 

Even as the U.S. continues to import Russian uranium—a fuel critical to its nuclear energy sector—it pressures its European allies to “decouple” from Russian hydrocarbons, regardless of the cost to their own industries and households. The result is an energy policy that prioritizes ideological alignment over economic rationality.

The ongoing war in Ukraine has intensified this pattern. While Europe bears the brunt of the conflict—its economies disrupted, its societies unsettled—the geopolitical agenda that drives much of the West’s response originates across the Atlantic. 

This is not to diminish Ukraine’s suffering or Europe’s agency entirely, but to highlight how the United States has leveraged the crisis to consolidate its leadership within NATO and secure a pliant European bloc. The security umbrella comes at a steep price: the erosion of strategic autonomy.

For India, this European experience holds an urgent lesson. Nations that outsource their security eventually compromise their sovereignty. Dependency is never neutral; it reshapes the very architecture of decision-making. 

If India, lured by the promise of protection or partnership, were to surrender its strategic autonomy to Washington, it would find itself in a position akin to that of Europe today—an informal protectorate where foreign and economic policies are calibrated not to national interests but to the preferences of a distant capital.

India’s post-independence foreign policy—whether under Nehru’s non-alignment or today’s multi-alignment—has been animated by a single principle: autonomy. Strategic partnerships are valuable; strategic dependence is fatal. In an age of shifting power blocs, it is tempting for middle powers to “rent” security from a superpower. 

But as Europe demonstrates, the rent soon becomes tribute.

Sovereignty in the 21st century is not merely a question of territorial integrity; it is a question of decision-making independence. The true measure of freedom is not who guards your borders but who sets your policies. Europe chose security at the cost of autonomy. India must ensure it does not repeat that mistake.

As Kautilya observed in the Arthashastra, “Dependence upon another is the root of all weakness.” Today, that ancient warning rings truer than ever.

Between the spinning wheel and the steel mill: Gandhi and Nehru’s contrasting visions of India

Jawaharlal Nehru is often remembered as Mahatma Gandhi’s chosen disciple, yet the two men embodied strikingly different Indias. Gandhi’s India was woven around the spinning wheel, ascetic self-sacrifice, and the radical ethic of non-violence. Nehru’s India, by contrast, was built on the scaffolding of secularism, socialism, and modernization through public sector undertakings and Soviet-style Five-Year Plans.

If Gandhi was the fabian saint—a Western-educated utopian cloaked in homespun simplicity—Nehru was the fabian autocrat, the pukka sahib, who combined the airs of a Westernized intellectual with the instincts of a ruling Maharaja. Gandhi tested his ideals in the crucible of his own body and spirit: experiments with truth, celibacy, diet, and the renunciation of possessions. He demanded from his family and followers the same relentless discipline, often at great personal cost to them. 

Nehru, by contrast, supported Gandhi’s experiments but felt no compulsion to replicate them. Convinced of his own moral and intellectual sufficiency, he instead sought to refashion Indian society from above through institutions, plans, and ideologies imported from Europe.

Gandhi’s ethic was centripetal: he dissolved the self into the community, seeing the nation itself as an extension of family. Nehru’s ethic was centrifugal: he founded a dynasty, binding India’s political destiny to the fortunes of his progeny, a legacy that persists with remarkable tenacity. Gandhi sought liberation through renunciation; Nehru through statecraft. Gandhi’s politics was spiritual and moral; Nehru’s was technocratic and statist.

Yet both men shared a common inheritance: they were products of Western education, steeped more in European thought than in the depths of India’s own civilizational traditions. Their grasp of ancient Indian philosophy, theology, and history was at best cursory. Gandhi distilled Hinduism into the single principle of non-violence, overlooking the religion’s vast and contradictory traditions of dharma, power, and transcendence. Nehru, meanwhile, embraced secularism not as a pragmatic framework but as a kind of fundamentalism, scorning the spiritual pluralism that had long defined Indian civilization.

The irony is sharp. Gandhi, in seeking to spiritualize politics, ended up politicizing spirituality. Nehru, in seeking to modernize India, created institutions that became monuments to inertia. Gandhi dreamt of an India that would resist the machine; Nehru of an India that would master it. Between them, they set in motion two contradictory currents: one of renunciation, the other of control. India has lived ever since in the uneasy confluence of these two legacies—torn between the fabian saint’s spinning wheel and the fabian autocrat’s public sector steel mill.

The Brute Force of Reason

Ayn Rand: From reason to a cult of ego

 that glorified adultery & abortion

“Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of 'touching' a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit it.” ~ G. K. Chesterton

Chesterton’s observation is not paradox but prophecy. The last two and a half centuries have demonstrated that when men proclaim themselves apostles of Reason, they often become its executioners. 

The French Revolution, hailed as the dawn of Enlightenment, proclaimed liberty, equality, fraternity—and delivered mass executions, civil war, and the reign of terror. The guillotine became the emblem of rational progress, slicing off heads in the name of clarity. The revolutionaries, intoxicated by their belief that they embodied the Age of Reason, proved how easily abstract ideals can justify rivers of blood.

The lesson did not end there. The twentieth century carried this creed to monstrous extremes. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, Pol Pot—all believed they had a rational system, a scientific doctrine, a historical inevitability that authorized them to reorder humanity. They were not simply tyrants; they were self-proclaimed men of reason who believed their syllogisms and dialectics were more sacred than human life. 

And under their banners, some of the greatest genocides in history were carried out: gulags and purges in the Soviet Union, concentration camps in Nazi Germany, the Cultural Revolution in China, the killing fields of Cambodia. These were not spasms of blind superstition, but cold, calculated programs executed in the name of reason, efficiency, and progress.

Nor is this tendency confined to dictators. Even democratic societies intoxicated by their rationalist self-image have repeatedly justified endless wars and economic predation as reasonable necessity. American progressives often claim reason is on their side, yet their state apparatus has funded and fought conflicts across the globe with little sense of moral responsibility. Reason in such hands does not appear as persuasion but as justification, a mask worn by violence to make itself seem inevitable.

When the absolutism of modern reason began to falter, it mutated into new disguises. Postmodernists denied the very possibility of truth while insisting on the authority of their critique; libertarians reduced the complexity of society to a narrow calculus of self-interest. Both postures were proclaimed as rational, but both detached themselves from the human heart and lived realities of community. 

Ayn Rand was the most grotesque example: she exalted “objectivism” as the philosophy of reason, but built a cult of ego that glorified adultery, abortion, and even stylized rape in fiction as symbols of creative power. This was not reason as wisdom, but reason as will to dominate, stripped of tenderness, mercy, or conscience.

History thus confirms Chesterton’s suspicion: reason, when enthroned as an idol, is not gentle but brutal. It cuts, hammers, and compels. Some of the greatest genocides of recent history were not committed by madmen in religious frenzy, but by cold administrators, engineers, and philosophers who claimed they were building a rational society. To follow the head alone is to risk reducing human beings into units, categories, numbers—things to be managed, eliminated, or improved.

Reason, without the tempering of heart, is indistinguishable from fanaticism. It cannot heal, it cannot forgive, it cannot love. The heart touches, the head strikes. And the societies that forget this truth—trusting only in the logic of their clever systems—become laboratories of cruelty. Chesterton was right: the men of reason are as dangerous, as psychopathic, as the most blinded zealots.

Walls or renewal? The paradox of conservative civilizations

Morality, though revered as an absolute by many philosophers and preachers, is in truth a subjective construct. Its edicts bind the conscience of individuals, not the destinies of civilizations. 

To speak of a “moral civilization” or an “immoral civilization” is to misapply the language of ethics. Civilizations are not saints or sinners; they are organisms of culture, faith, and survival. Their vitality is measured not by their moral rectitude but by the endurance of their traditions, their conception of the divine, and their will to perpetuate themselves through centuries of trial and sacrifice.

What endows a civilization with grandeur is not its claim to goodness, but its ability to forge a culture that gives meaning to existence. Generations suffer, labor, and perish so that a vision of man’s place in the cosmos, and of God’s sovereignty, might persist. This act of transmission—the handing down of myths, rituals, and principles of order—is the highest achievement of any people. A civilization’s true worth lies in its capacity to produce men and women of courage, character, and conviction, who, in turn, stand sentinel over its temples, scriptures, and laws.



Nor do I deny that survival requires not only culture but also strength, not only the poet and the priest but also the soldier. Warfare has always been one of the grim but necessary instruments through which civilizations are forged and preserved. No great culture has endured without a race of warriors to guard its borders, defend its honor, and, when destiny demanded it, to seize new frontiers. To fight, to conquer, and to secure the ground upon which one’s people may flourish—this belongs to the tragic yet unavoidable conditions of history.



But here lies the paradox of our time: those who proclaim themselves the guardians of tradition—the conservatives—are seldom true warriors. For all their bellicose rhetoric, they lack the harder courage: the courage of reform. They cling to the illusion that civilization can be preserved merely by denouncing outsiders, by railing against foreign influences, by imagining the source of all decline to be external. Yet no civilization survives by exclusion alone. To endure, it must ceaselessly renew itself from within. It must bring forth not merely yesterday’s soldier but a new breed of warriors, equal to the changing trials of their age. Without such renewal, no army, however numerous, remains unconquerable.



The conservative’s gaze remains fixed outward, upon the alien and the enemy, while his own house decays. He imagines that civilization is secured by building walls against others, but fails to see that the deeper work lies within: the cultivation of institutions, the purification of customs, the reform of spirit. A people that cannot confront its own corruption, that cannot wrestle with its own contradictions, cannot long endure. It is not the foreigner who defeats such a people, but their own refusal to change.



Thus the destiny of civilizations rests not on any illusion of moral superiority, nor on the endless denunciation of the outsider, but on the harder, nobler task: to preserve their essence without succumbing to arrogance, to reform without erasing their foundations, and to endure without pretending to perfection. A civilization lives when it produces warriors not merely of the sword, but of the soul.

From Lenin to Nixon: The fall of the dollar, the rise of a new world

Soon after the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks imagined that money itself could be annihilated. They saw Ruble as not a medium of exchange but a relic of bourgeois corruption. 

Lenin and Trotsky flooded Russia with Rubles until the currency collapsed, believing that once money died, society could be reorganized around coupons for food, housing, and education.  Yet by 1921, their utopia dissolved into chaos. Trade froze, incentives vanished, and the nation discovered that money is not just an instrument of greed but the grammar of civilization. To abolish it was to unwrite the syntax of social life.

Across the Channel, Britain staged a quieter revolution. The pound had been born in 1694, when a syndicate of bankers lent £1.2 million to the Crown and in return secured the right to issue notes, monetizing royal debt and tethering currency to gold. For centuries, this alchemy of credit and metal sustained the most trusted money in the world. 

But in 1931 Britain abandoned the gold standard, and in 1946 the Bank of England was nationalized. Money ceased to be metal; it became pure abstraction, underwritten not by gold but by trust in the state.

America soon followed. In 1933 Roosevelt severed the dollar’s partial link to gold; in 1971 Nixon severed it entirely. The dollar floated free, and with it began the global regime of fiat money—currencies backed not by substance but by promise, force, and habit. Western strategists believed they had devised the perfect scheme: export inflation to the world while consuming without constraint. 

But history is cunning. The torrents of paper that poured out of America and Europe were absorbed by Asia, which converted them into factories, supply chains, and industries. The West exported inflation; the East imported prosperity.

Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the dollar—the most traded and most weaponized currency in history—stands at the edge of exhaustion. Its very ubiquity makes it uncontrollable. Since its detachment from gold, its long arc has been one of decline, a slow erosion masked by inertia. 

A major crisis could trigger a stampede away from the dollar, and Washington will discover that hegemony built on paper can dissolve like paper in water. The death of the dollar will not be the collapse of one currency but the implosion of an entire financial order.

For two decades, Asia and even multinational corporations have been preparing for this twilight. Local-currency trade, sovereign funds, digital payments, and strategic stockpiles are scaffolding a post-dollar world. The West still mistakes this for adjustment; in truth it is replacement. The illusion that the dollar is eternal is America’s last superstition.

Money is always more than money. It is trust made tangible, empire made portable, the metaphysics of power disguised as paper. The Bolsheviks proved it could not be abolished; the British proved it could be nationalized; the Americans proved it could be globalized. What remains to be proven is how it will end. 

When the dollar dies, it will not merely mark the decline of a currency. It will announce the end of an epoch, and perhaps the beginning of another story for mankind.

Beyond the enlightenment myth: Diversity as humanity’s first principle

The dream of a universal human nature, so often invoked in the rhetoric of modernity, is not an ancient inheritance of mankind but a relatively recent construction. 

It emerged most forcefully during the so-called Age of Enlightenment, when philosophers, intoxicated by the promise of reason, imagined humanity as a singular species that could be united beneath one political and moral canopy. This vision of universality—noble in aspiration, yet abstract in foundation—was less a discovery of human essence than an invention designed to serve a particular order: the Western order.

The Enlightenment project carried within it a utopian premise. It assumed that beneath the dense thicket of cultural difference, historical trauma, and geographical dispersion, there lay a common human substratum waiting to be revealed. If only reason were universally applied, it was believed, humanity could converge upon a shared destiny, a single form of government, and a universal moral law. Yet history, stubborn and unyielding, has consistently mocked this assumption.

Human beings have never been a singular tribe. They are divided by race, fractured by religion, anchored to disparate nations, and shaped by climates, languages, and traditions that generate profoundly different ways of life. What one civilization sanctifies, another abhors; what one calls justice, another may denounce as tyranny. To speak, therefore, of a universal human nature is to indulge in a myth, a philosophical fiction designed to ease the anxieties of fragmentation.

If there is no universal human essence, then the edifice built upon it—universal morality, universal law, universal government—collapses under its own weight. The dream of a single world order is not a political possibility but a mirage. The very attempt to impose it, as history has shown in colonial encounters and imperial adventures, leads not to harmony but to violence, resistance, and disintegration.

This recognition is not a call to nihilism but to humility. To accept the absence of a universal human nature is to acknowledge the plurality of human existence: that different peoples, born into different soils, shaped by different histories, will craft different visions of the good life. The challenge, then, is not to subsume them under a singular code, but to negotiate coexistence amidst incommensurability.

The Enlightenment myth of universality was a bold gamble of reason against reality. Its failure reminds us of an older, perhaps wiser truth: that mankind is not a monolith but a mosaic. The task of philosophy and politics alike is not to erase the tesserae but to find beauty in their irreducible diversity.

When tyranny and schizophrenia define nations: Beyond socialism & capitalism

Socialism and capitalism, though clothed in the rhetoric of salvation, conceal within themselves the seeds of ruin.

Socialism, by exalting the collective at the expense of the individual, breeds tyranny. In its attempt to abolish inequality, it abolishes freedom, reducing citizens into subjects of the state. History testifies that socialist regimes do not collapse from foreign invasion but from within—paralyzed by economic stagnation, bureaucratic excess, and political decay. The dream of equality hardens into the nightmare of enforced conformity.

Capitalism, on the other hand, worships the individual and the market with equal fervor. Its triumph is material abundance, but its hidden cost is cultural exhaustion. By dissolving all traditions into commodities and turning all values into market calculations, capitalism produces not citizens but consumers. 

The result is a kind of civilizational schizophrenia: a society technologically advanced yet morally disoriented, overflowing with wealth yet haunted by emptiness. Nations born in capitalism’s furnace rarely fall to poverty; they decay instead through intellectual frivolity, cultural fragmentation, and the slow erosion of meaning.

If socialism leads to the dungeon and capitalism to the abyss, then humanity must look beyond these twin idols. To imagine that our destiny lies only between the bureaucrat’s fist and the merchant’s ledger is to consign ourselves to doom. Civilizations cannot endure on economics alone; they require a philosophy of life—one that unites liberty with virtue, prosperity with purpose, power with restraint.

The tragedy of our age is not merely that socialism and capitalism have failed, but that under the relentless spell of Western propaganda we remain imprisoned within their false dichotomy, unable to conceive that other forms of order, liberty, and meaning are possible.

The fountainhead of civilization: Why collectivism sustains culture

Collectivism is the fountainhead of culture and civilization. The greater the refinement of a society, the deeper and more intricate are the institutions by which it binds its people together. Civilization, in essence, is not the triumph of the solitary mind, but of the collective spirit.

Primitive societies, though tethered by blood ties, remained simplistic in their structure and marginal in their collectivism. In the long dusk of prehistory, man wandered in fragile bands, compelled into unity by hunger and danger. Yet within this necessity lay the seed of destiny: the realization that survival—and meaning itself—was magnified by togetherness. 

“To be human,” as one might say, “was never to be alone, but to be in communion.”

It was not the spear or the wheel that first drew mankind into higher forms of unity, but belief. Between twenty-five and fifteen millennia ago, religion provided the first great architecture of collectivism. In the name of unseen gods, strangers ceased to be strangers; they became tribes, peoples, nations. Religion was mankind’s earliest empire of the spirit, welding millions into a rhythm of ritual, sacrifice, and duty. From its altars arose cities, philosophies, and empires.

History’s verdict is clear: those who collectivised most completely endured and expanded. The Islamic movements of the Middle Ages conquered and converted vast territories not merely through the sword, but through unity—one monarch, one law, one faith. 

Western imperialists, too, marched across continents with the same formula: one king, one church, one creed. Their solidarity was not merely political; it was metaphysical, an existential bond that allowed them to impose their will upon the disunited.

Hindu civilization, by contrast, though spiritually profound, was fractured into many gods and many kings. The absence of a single unifying banner meant that its extraordinary depth of spiritual wisdom and economic strength could not shield it from conquest. Political and cultural fragmentation became vulnerability; diversity without cohesion invited domination. The disunited were destined to be ruled by the united.

In our own age of secularism, the pattern continues in new attire. The Western powers—led above all by the United States—no longer rally beneath throne and altar, but beneath the banners of capitalism and socialism, those twin ideologies of modern collectivism. 

Capitalism binds through consumption, socialism through redistribution, and both through the mythology of progress. They wear the mask of freedom even as they function as instruments of political and cultural unification. Markets and material equality are the new creeds; credit cards and ballots the new sacraments.

These are not merely economic theories or philosophical fashions. They are the West’s chosen methods of sustaining unity within and projecting power abroad. By gathering their populations under these secular banners, they preserve the architecture of domination and extend influence over the wider world. 

The empires of faith have given way to the empires of capital, but the principle remains unchanged: civilization is the triumph of the collective over the solitary, and the fate of nations is written not by their isolated geniuses but by their capacity to march together beneath a common banner.

Arrow and the wheel: Two visions of history and time

It is fashionable to say that history repeats itself. But if history were truly repetitive, then the future would be a mere echo of the past—predictable, inevitable, and tame. The truth is otherwise. The future is never repetition; it is surprise.

Every epoch has been singular, carved by its own struggles and revelations. The Greeks did not anticipate the collapse of their polis-world, the Romans did not foresee the twilight of empire, nor did Europe imagine the shattering violence of the Great War. If the wisest thinkers of their time could not predict their own century, why should we imagine we can divine ours?

We live amid archives, statistics, and histories more abundant than any previous age. Yet all this memory does not give us foresight. Our present itself eludes us: what we call “breaking news” often decays into tomorrow’s irrelevance. When we cannot even judge the weight of today’s events, how can we presume to chart the destinies of 2030, 2040, or 2050? Here the contrast between civilizational views of time becomes instructive. 

The Western imagination tends to think of history as a linear march: past leading to present, present to future. It is an arrow pointing forward. The Hindu imagination, however, is not enslaved to such linearity. 

In the philosophy of the yugas, time unfolds in vast cycles—Satya, Treta, Dvapara, Kali—endlessly repeating in cosmic rhythm. But even this vision does not yield prediction. For the cycles described in the Puranas are not chronicles of history but revelations of the eternal. They teach us not what tomorrow will be, but what the nature of time itself is.

History, then, is a Western device—a way of situating man within the river of time. Useful, yes, but limited. The Hindu vision dissolves the very categories of “past,” “present,” and “future” into a single continuum, reminding us that what truly matters is not chronology but meaning. “History tells us what happened,” one might say, “but the Puranas tell us why it matters in the cosmic order.”

From either perspective—linear or cyclical—the result is the same: the future refuses capture. The arrow misses, and the wheel turns beyond our comprehension. What is certain is not the repetition of events but the recurrence of human astonishment.

The only wisdom left is humility. The future is not a shadow of the past, nor the fulfillment of our predictions. It is a realm perpetually unimagined. As Heraclitus once reminded us, we never step into the same river twice. And as the Hindu seers intuited, the river itself is eternal, flowing through yugas without beginning or end.

To live wisely, therefore, is not to claim foresight, but to remain open to surprise. For history does not repeat—it creates. And the future, when it comes, will be unlike anything we can imagine.

History Is a harsher interviewer: Trump’s rhetoric, Putin’s war, and India’s insult

I watched Hannity’s interview with President Trump and was struck less by what was asked than by what was carefully avoided. 

Hannity, instead of probing Trump on the substance of his summit with President Putin, assumed the part of a court flatterer—hailing him as a peacemaker in five conflicts while squandering the remainder of the airtime on ritual grievances about the ‘Russia hoax,’ stock tirades against NATO’s economic burdens, and perfunctory denunciations of Biden’s incompetence.

Trump, ever the alpha narcissist, thrives on this. He loves to be admired, he loves to speak of himself in superlatives, and he longs to be seen as the indispensable man who could deliver peace where others fail. Yet the truth peeks out between the lines. His body language during the joint press conference and the interview betrayed more discomfort than triumph. 

A man who claims victory too loudly often does so to mask defeat.

Putin, for his part, played his hand shrewdly. “When President Trump says if he was the president back then, there would be no war... it would indeed be so. I can confirm that,” he said. The compliment was perfunctory—a gesture of politeness, not conviction. The structural causes of the Ukraine war—NATO’s steady eastward march and Russia’s refusal to accept it—would have produced conflict no matter who sat in the Oval Office. To imagine that Trump alone could have forestalled it is to mistake theatre for geopolitics.

Trump’s claim to be a global peacemaker collapses before the hard realities of great-power politics. He may exert influence over the minor quarrels of Armenia and Azerbaijan, or even Thailand and Cambodia. But with Putin, he is powerless. Russia does not yield to charm, and history does not bend to bravado.

Worse, Trump has shown a tendency to belittle India, a nation he should treat as a partner. In one of his social media pronouncements, he framed Putin’s flattery in terms that seemed to place India in a subordinate role. This is shortsighted at best, insulting at worst. 

India today is the world’s fourth-largest economy, projected to become the third by 2028. It is not merely a market but the only functioning constitutional democracy of scale in South Asia—a fact any American president must respect if he claims to speak the language of freedom.

As for Ukraine, no leader in Kyiv can accept the partition of their territory as the price of peace. Trump will not be able to impose Putin’s terms. That leaves him grasping for alternatives. 

The danger is that, frustrated abroad, he may lash out elsewhere—perhaps by reviving tariffs on India, which he perceives as a softer target. China, too deeply entangled with Russia and too formidable in economic weight, would be spared his ire. India, by contrast, risks being punished for the very fact that it is a democracy, vulnerable to the volatility of a man who mistakes intimidation for statecraft.

History teaches that hubris often precedes humiliation. A self-proclaimed peacemaker who cannot command peace risks becoming instead a warmonger’s useful foil. The world expects sobriety, not self-congratulation, from the leader of a superpower. 

And if Trump cannot distinguish between applause in a TV studio and power on the world stage, he will soon learn that history is a harsher interviewer than Sean Hannity.

The end of entitlement: Europe’s problems are not the world’s problems

Dresden after World War II bombing

“Europe has to grow out of the mindset that Europe’s problems are the world’s problems, but the world’s problems are not Europe’s problems.” These were the words of External Affairs Minister, Dr. S. Jaishankar, speaking at a global security forum in Slovakia.

The statement lays bare an enduring flaw in the worldview of many European powers—a belief that their own disputes and crises are of universal importance, while the struggles of other nations are peripheral, if not irrelevant. 

This Eurocentric ideology has shaped both history and narrative. It is precisely this mindset that allowed Europe to label the two major wars of the 20th century—World War I and World War II—as “World Wars.” In truth, these were largely European civil wars, born out of rivalries within the continent’s imperial order. The rest of the world had little to do with their origins, but was nonetheless dragged into the conflicts, often at great human and economic cost.

Historically, Europe’s dominance over vast parts of Asia lasted scarcely 100 to 150 years, from the early 19th century until the mid-20th century—a mere blink in the timeline of civilizations that stretches back tens of thousands of years and will extend indefinitely into the future. Yet because this dominance is so recent, the political and intellectual classes in some of the former colonial powers continue to behave as though global leadership is their permanent right, and that others must rally to resolve their crises.

This attitude has bred an unspoken expectation: that non-Western nations should make costly sacrifices for European causes, while Europe is free to ignore, or even exacerbate, the crises of others. Many of these global problems—whether in Africa, Asia, or Latin America—are in fact the result of European interventions, colonial extractions, and political manipulations.

But history is moving on. The brief era of Western dominance is reaching its epilogue. The global order is now irreversibly multipolar, with nations determined to chart independent courses based on their own strategic, economic, and cultural imperatives.

For India, this means safeguarding its resources and decision-making autonomy. Any assistance to Europe—or, for that matter, to the United States—must be grounded in mutual benefit, not inherited obligation. Partnership must replace presumption, and reciprocity must replace entitlement. In the multipolar century, respect will be earned through balance, not demanded through outdated hierarchies.

When the dollar crumbles: The coming mega-debtquake

The United States now staggers under a federal debt exceeding $37 trillion—yet President Trump speaks as though Washington’s coffers are financing the rest of the world. 

Factor in the liabilities of state governments, public institutions, and household debts, and the figure for US debt swells to a staggering $100 trillion—an amount nearly equal to the total annual output of the entire planet.

The gravest threat to global stability today is not the bombast of religious fundamentalists in the Middle East, but the relentless expansion of American debt. A civilization can survive fanaticism; it cannot survive the implosion of its currency. How far can this edifice of paper promises stretch—$150 trillion, $200 trillion—before the dollar’s architecture of confidence crumbles?

It is an illusion to think that such a house of cards will stand forever. When it falls, the collapse will not merely be an American tragedy; it will be an economic extinction event. Western Europe will reel, Asia will stagger, and any nation tethered to the dollar’s mast will be dragged into the depths.

For India, the lesson is plain: diversify trade, dilute dollar dependency, and build buffers. Ironically, the tariffs Washington has so generously imposed may become the very medicine that reduces our exposure. In global finance, as in life, sometimes the insult is the cure.

Democracy came later: The violent birth of Western supremacy

“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.”

This line from Samuel P. Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order strikes like a hammer on the glass pane of modern illusions. It forces us to confront a truth that contemporary discourse, in its comfort and self-congratulation, often prefers to ignore.

History, stripped of its moral varnish, is a record not of the triumph of noble ideals but of the calculated, ruthless application of force. From the Akkadian Empire to the Mongol Khanates, from the Ottomans to the British Raj, between fifty and seventy major empires have risen and ruled vast swathes of the earth. 

Each was forged not in the quiet deliberations of a senate, nor in the tranquil exchanges of commerce, but in the roar of cavalry, the crack of muskets, and the smoke of burning cities. These were polities built by warlike peoples—nations or tribes that possessed not merely the will to conquer, but the organizational genius to turn violence into a disciplined instrument of statecraft.

In our own age, intoxicated by the rhetoric of progressivism, libertarianism, postmodernism, and the newer “woke” ideologies, this reality has receded from public memory. The story now told is that the West ascended because it was more democratic, more committed to free trade, more imbued with universal values. This is a pleasant myth, but a myth nonetheless.

The historical record is unambiguous: when the West was at the height of its imperial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, its nations were neither fully democratic nor committed to open markets in any modern sense. Their internal political systems were often oligarchic, their trade policies protectionist, and their diplomacy underwritten by the threat of naval cannon and expeditionary armies. Democracy and free trade became prominent Western virtues only in the 20th century—ironically, during the very century when Western hegemony began to wane.

Huntington’s observation is therefore less a provocation than a reminder: civilizations rise to dominance not by moral persuasion but by their capacity to project power, and to do so with relentless organization. The superiority that matters in the great contests of history is not that of ideals in abstraction, but of the machinery—political, economic, and military—that can transform violence from chaos into conquest.

We may comfort ourselves with the thought that the modern world has outgrown this ancient truth. But the chronicles of empire suggest otherwise. Beneath the thin ice of our contemporary ideals, the dark waters of organized force still move, as cold and irresistible as ever.

Orwell’s slogans, Asimov’s predictions, and America’s imperial present

It is often said that George Orwell’s aphorism from 1984—“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”—was a mirror held up to the totalitarian Soviet Union. Yet history, with its taste for irony, has turned the mirror around. 

In the decades since the USSR’s collapse, it is the United States that has come to resemble an Orwellian empire—waging wars in the name of peace, orchestrating coups and “color revolutions” to install compliant dictators in the name of freedom, and manufacturing ignorance as if it were the highest civic virtue.

In the Western world, Washington can tolerate democracy, for there it is contained within familiar cultural and ideological boundaries. But in the non-Western world, democracy is tolerated only if it bends to the American will. It is an uncomfortable truth that the U.S. establishment has often looked askance at India precisely because it is a democracy—one that insists on making its own choices. 

By contrast, it has long embraced Pakistan, a theocratic-militaristic state where democracy is an occasional visitor, swiftly ushered out by generals and clerics. American policy has often ensured that Pakistan’s fragile shoots of popular governance are uprooted before they can take hold, leaving the army and the mullahs in unchallenged command.

The contradictions deepen in the realm of trade and sanctions. Under the banner of the Russia–Ukraine conflict, President Donald Trump’s administration has imposed tariffs on India, even as other major economies—China, Japan, and the European Union—continue to import Russian energy with impunity. The rules of the American game, it seems, are written in disappearing ink: visible only to those meant to obey them, vanishing for those meant to escape them.

This dissonance calls to mind not only Orwell but also Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, where a vast Galactic Empire rules the stars with the complacency of those who believe their reign eternal. In Asimov’s tale, the mathematician Hari Seldon predicts the inevitable decline of the empire—not through rebellion, but through the slow corrosion of its own contradictions. The empire falls, not because it is defeated from without, but because it collapses from within.

Both Orwell and Asimov were writing in the 1940s, worlds apart from today’s geopolitics, and neither could have witnessed America’s imperial overreach firsthand. Yet from the vantage point of the third decade of the 21st century, their visions appear eerily prescient. 

Orwell gave us the moral language to name the inversion of values; Asimov gave us the long view of the empire's decay. Together, they seem to be whispering across time that Trump’s America is less the shining city on a hill than the Galactic Empire in its autumn—still grand, still powerful, yet already shadowed by the mathematics of its own decline.

In the end, the fate of all empires is written in the very logic of their ambition. They teach the world that might is right, only to discover, too late, that history has a deeper arithmetic.

Fatal friendship: Why America can’t be trusted with long-term alliances

"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." ~ Henry Kissinger

In an age where diplomacy is increasingly tethered to spectacle, spectacle often distracts from substance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the art—and artifice—of negotiating with the United States of America. For nations seeking enduring partnerships, the challenge is not merely ideological divergence or geopolitical friction; it is the fundamental impermanence embedded within the very architecture of American democracy.

To negotiate a long-term deal with the United States is to build a palace on shifting sands. Every four years, the tide changes—sometimes violently. Presidents are not just replaced; policies are repudiated, treaties torn, and entire geopolitical visions reversed without apology. What one administration solemnly agrees to, the next might discard with theatrical disdain.

Consider India's recent engagements with the Biden administration. Agreements were inked with all the ceremony due to a rising strategic partnership. But as Donald Trump—now a returning force in American politics—seeks to reclaim the Oval Office, he has made it clear: yesterday’s promises are today’s irrelevance. What he did not honour under Biden, he will not inherit from Biden. He demands not continuity, but rupture—new deals, new alignments, and a clean break with India's traditional ally, Russia.

To mistake American politics for a steady flame is to mistake a bonfire for a hearth.

This pattern of abandonment is not new; it is structural. It is not the exception; it is the rule. From Vietnam to Kabul, from the Kurds to the Shah of Iran, the United States has repeatedly walked away from those who trusted in the durability of its word. Its global conduct is governed less by covenant and more by convenience. There are few constants—only cycles.

In the case of the former Soviet Union, this betrayal assumed epochal dimensions. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, in an act of profound good faith, agreed to withdraw Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, trusting in the verbal assurances of Presidents Reagan and George H. W. Bush that NATO would not move "one inch eastward." What followed was not gratitude, but encroachment. Under Clinton, NATO expanded east. Under Bush, it expanded further. Today, NATO’s flirtation with Ukraine has ignited a powder keg. The broken promise echoes through the rubble of Donetsk and the ghost towns of Mariupol.

And what of the Middle East—a region disfigured by the oscillations of American foreign policy? One administration arms a faction; the next bombs it. From the ruins of Iraq to the fragmented sovereignties of Syria and Libya, the United States has demonstrated a tragic incapacity for stewardship. Each new doctrine overwrites the last with the urgency of erasure. Hope is installed one term, only to be deposed the next.

India, therefore, must ask itself: can a civilisation whose statecraft is measured in millennia afford to anchor its future to a polity whose attention span is electoral?

The caution is not anti-American. Rather, it is pro-reason. It is a call to strategic sobriety. India must engage with the United States—vigorously, and on equal terms—but without the illusion of permanence. We can trade, talk, and even temporarily align, but we must never tether our sovereignty to their signatures.

Long-term alliances demand long-term memory. And long-term memory is precisely what American politics lacks. In that sense, Kissinger's mordant quip contains a bitter truth for our times: America is a powerful friend, but a forgetful one—and to be forgotten by a superpower is to be exposed to history’s cruelties.

India must, therefore, be non-aligned not out of nostalgia, but necessity. Our foreign policy must resemble the banyan tree—rooted deeply in strategic autonomy, yet flexible in its embrace of the world. Let the winds of Washington blow as they will. We, on the other hand, must learn to build shelters that do not collapse with every change in weather.

The rise of nations, the decline of dissent: How Tiananmen paved the way for China's global ascendancy

Deng Xiaoping

The rise of China poses an enduring question: Can prosperity flourish without freedom? Can a world-class market economy be engineered not through the expansion of democratic rights, but through their systematic suppression?

Modern China offers a stark and unsettling answer.

In June 1989, the Chinese Communist Party unleashed its military upon its own people. In Tiananmen Square, thousands of pro-democracy protesters—most of them students—were met not with dialogue, but with tanks and assault rifles. The square, which for weeks had pulsed with the hopes of political reform, was reduced overnight to a symbol of crushed dissent. 

The massacre was swift and brutal, but it achieved its intended aim: it extinguished, with cold efficiency, the possibility of political pluralism.

From the standpoint of liberal democratic theory, such an act should have consigned China to pariah status and economic isolation. But history, as always, moves by different laws than moral theory.

In reality, the massacre ushered in a new phase of political stability—one secured by fear and silence. China had already begun to liberalize its economy a decade earlier, under Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms initiated in 1979. The ideological contradiction was apparent even then: economic openness without political openness, markets without freedoms. 

But foreign investors, ever pragmatic, did not flinch. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, global capital flowed into China with even greater speed. The blood in the square had barely dried when the boardrooms of the West resumed their calculations. Stability, however achieved, was good for business.

For multinational corporations, political repression was no disqualifier. On the contrary, it offered a kind of security—no labor unions, no strikes, no elections, no populist reversals. The Chinese state could promise infrastructure, cheap labor, and docile social conditions, uninterrupted by the turbulence of democratic accountability. The authoritarian state became the perfect incubator for global capital.

By 2010, China had overtaken Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy—a transformation that occurred not in spite of Tiananmen, but in its long shadow.

The historical irony is profound. While the democracy hypothesis often posits that prosperity and freedom are twin virtues—that the flourishing of markets goes hand-in-hand with the flourishing of rights—China charted a different path. It demonstrated that an authoritarian regime, if disciplined and strategic, can harness the engines of capitalism without surrendering control. In Beijing’s model, economic dynamism coexists with political absolutism. The state does not merely permit the market; it orchestrates it.

Philosophically, this forces a reckoning. What is freedom if a people can be enriched but not empowered? Can human development be reduced to GDP? Is prosperity without dignity a success—or merely a gilded cage?

The Tiananmen Square massacre was not just a political event. It was a civilizational marker. It signaled that the 21st century would not necessarily be shaped by free-market triumphalism. The so-called “end of history” thesis, so confidently advanced in the West after the Cold War, failed to anticipate that authoritarian capitalism might not be an aberration—but an enduring model.