Endangered Globe

It is time for a definitive political and societal policy reset

- C Uday Bhaskar

AFTER World War I led to the death of almost 20 million plus (including Indians of the subcontinent), the English poet, W. B. Yeats had bemoaned:

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity.”

These lines written a century ago have come back to haunt the globe. The world is in a geo-political reset mode and this was more than visible at the United Nations in late February, when member-states voted to mark the third anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In an extraordinary diplomatic development, the US voted on February 24 against a UN resolution condemning the Russian aggression and Washington was on the same side as Moscow, both in the voting in the UN General Assembly (UNGA) as well as within the UN Security Council (UNSC).

In the UNGA vote, the US opposed a resolution drafted by European members that condemned Moscow and, in what could be termed a dramatic volte-face, the US under President Donald Trump’s directives chose to be in the same group as Russia, Belarus and North Korea.

Dilution of the sanctity of treaties, disruption to traditional norms of military tactics, jettisoning of morality and ethics in the conduct of war and anomalous developments in diplomacy characterise international relations and the security domain in the period from February 2022 to 2025. The Russian invasion of Ukraine three years ago and the more recent vote in the UN are bookends to this extremely turbulent phase in recent history. Russia stunned the world with its February 2022 ‘special operation’ against Ukraine and justified its action as being a response to the US-led perfidy in seeking to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) eastwards.