INTO THE ERA OF TECHNO DIPLOMACY

THE contemporary international system increasingly reflects a paradox: deep economic interdependence coexisting with profound strategic distrust.

- SHASHI THAROOR

Globalisation has integrated markets and supply chains over the past three decades, yet recent developments suggest that integration has not produced political convergence. Instead, economic links are increasingly being deployed as instruments of pressure and leverage.We are living in an era of 'weaponised interdependence'. Networks originally designed to facilitate global commerce, financial messaging systems, digital infrastructure and logistics chains now enable States that control key nodes in those networks to exert pressure on others.

The erosion of trust among major powers further complicates this picture. Countries remain deeply interconnected economically, yet political confidence between them has diminished. The result is a system in which States continue to rely on each other economically while simultaneously seeking to reduce strategic vulnerabilities. This tension—interdependence without trust—is likely to remain one of the defining characteristics of the emerging international order.

The notion of a cooperative 'global village', once the defining metaphor of the post-Cold-War era, appears to be giving way to a far more competitive environment in which nations openly use trade restrictions, tariffs and export controls as tools of statecraft. A dramatic example of this was the sharp tariff measures imposed by the US on several partners; another, China's decision to restrict the export of critical rare earth minerals to India and the US. Supply chains themselves have become geopolitical battlegrounds.