Brave New War

The post-Cold War liberal order is fading away. A new 21st century order should factor in the interests and aspirations of players of today

- P.S. Raghavan

WE enter 2025 with two wars entering their final phase, 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.