Deterrence 2.0: We are in a post-western global order

The fragmentation of the western spirit is now visible. It must wake up to alternative civilizational systems that exist and to a world that is not anti-western but post-western.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

On the eve of the visit of President Vladamir Putin to India, it is essential to understand the post western order of not unipolarity, or bipolarity, but multipolarity and changing multi-alignments. On 21 October, Vladimir Putin called the shot in the global balance of power by testing the Burevest-nik nuclear-powered long-range cruise missile. The test meant far more than its technological capabilities. It was a message wrapped in aerospace engineering. It loudly declared that the era of unilateral coercion, which has dominated global politics since the end of the Cold War, is ending.

Not because someone wishes it to end, but because the illusion of permanent western dominance has cracked. The test reminded us that writing off great powers is not only arrogant but historically foolish. Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat its worst mistakes. And history has a cruel way of punishing those who mistake dominance for invincibility.

For decades, the West comforted itself with two convenient narratives: that Russia is a declining relic whose power had become redundant, and that China’s rise can be contained. These assumptions were not a strategy but self-congratulation disguised as farsightedness. Meanwhile, the West convinced itself that its so-called rules-based order would endure simply because it said so. However, somewhere, the West laid the groundwork for its own failure by undermining itself from within. The system became self-referential, believing its own proclamations while failing to understand that rules, like empires, collapse when one side starts acting with impunity as if there are no consequences.