In the short span of a mere five years, the world has been hit by the worst pandemic in a century; by the most serious war in Europe since 1945; by a genocidal war in Gaza; another in Sudan; and one in the Congo; mass migrations; famines and draughts of various kinds; financial indebtedness across the developing world ; and by the looming specter of climate change, already with us. Defence expenditures have reached a record U$ 2.7 trillion, while humanitarian aid is being severely cut.
Why this veritable cascade of disasters that have brought so much suffering to humanity?
There is a straightforward reason for this crisis. As the Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci famously wrote in his Prison Notebooks, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. We are living in this time of monsters that Gramsci alluded to.
And the crisis is rooted in the transition from one type of world order to another. The post-Cold War epoch, roughly the period from 1991 to 2016, dubbed by some as the “unipolar moment”, to another type of order. The contours of these have yet to emerge, but it will be one in which power is more diffused, and which some describe as multipolar, while others, like Indian scholar Amitav Acharya, describe as a multiplex order. In such transitions, as the old established rules fall by the wayside, and the new ones are not yet in place, anything goes. Thus, the seeming chaos and anarchy of today’s world, something that has been magnified by fast technological change, political polarisation and policy volatility.
The Liberal International Order (LIO), established in 1945, was based on various key principles like multilateralism, free trade, certain central international institutions, and a commitment to democracy at home and abroad. To list these principles is to realise how far certain leading countries have strayed from them– not to say totally abandoned them – in the recent past. So, if the LIO has been in steady decline for the past decade or so, I think we can safely say that it is dead by now. And the Trump administration has been quite explicit about this: As secretary of state Marco Rubio has put it, “The post-war global order is not just obsolete; it is now a weapon being used against us”. Thus, the dismantling of it.
The decline of the West
The question that arises then is: what lies behind the passing of this order and declining US hegemony? Is it true that the United States is in steady and irredeemable decline? Well, not really. In 1945, the United States represented 50% of global GDP, not surprisingly as it was the main winner of World War Two. By 1970, this had fallen to 25%. But the interesting thing is that this 25%, one quarter of the world economy, has held steady for the past half century, and today still stands at 25%. In that sense, there is no “US decline” per se, which makes the claims about this order harming the US especially absurd. There is, however, another angle from which one could argue that there is a broader “Western decline”: if we look at the six other member of the G7, apart from the US, we shall that their share of global GDP has fallen from 42% in 1991 to 18% in 2023.
And of, course, we have the rise of China, that now represents about 19% of global GDP, and since 2014 has overtaken the US economy if the latter is measured in PPP terms. So, there is no US decline in absolute terms, but there has been a relative decline of its closest allies and partners. This has gone hand in hand with “the rise of the rest”, in the _expression_ of another Indian analyst, Fareed Zakaria. This means that the US is less able to exercise its power and influence than it did in the past, though this does not mean that it is not still the world’s largest military power, the largest economy and the most advanced one in technological and scientific terms.
Yet, what we did not expect is that this decline of the West, such as it is, would be accelerated, not by any further economic downturn, but by its breakup. As the head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, has put it in April of this year, “The West as we knew it no longer exists”.
And at no moment was this more apparent than in the vote held at the UNGA on 24 February 2025, on the third anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In it, the US voted with Russia, Belarus and North Korea against a resolution submitted by several European member states condemning the invasion and calling for a withdrawal from Ukraine’s occupied territories.
And this was by no means a one-off. Shortly before that, US VP JD Vance, at the Munich Security Conference, instead of criticising Russia, criticised Western European governments for not allowing free reign to far-right political parties. And what Vance put forward was a very different conception of the West, not as a geopolitical entity, but as a civilisational one, a white nationalist, Christian view of what the West is all about.
We thus have a significant trans-Atlantic rift, in which the very survival of NATO is in serious doubt, and the very notion of the West as a geopolitical entity has ceased to exist.
A rising South
Together with the breakup of the West, we have also seen the “rise of the rest”, i.e. of the Global South, expressed most dramatically in the BRICS group.
Two things are at play here. One is what the World Bank has referred to as the “Wealth Shift”, meaning the broad shift of the world’s geoeconomic axis from the North Atlantic to the Asia Pacific. Of the ten cities with the largest number of billionaires in the world, five are in Asia, three in the US, one in Europe and one in Russia. No prizes for guessing which Indian city is on the list – Mumbai, of course.
The fastest growing region in the world today is East Asia, and Asia has 60% of the world’s population. As Parag Khanna has put it, “the future is Asian”. And Kishore Mahbubani has written at length on why this will be “the Asian Century”.
The other is what we might refer to as the political emergence of the Global South. There is a reason why Foreign Policy Magazine referred to 2023 as “the Year of the Global South”. Over the past three years, we have had several developments that have pushed the Global South to the very forefront of world affairs:
- The Russian invasion of and subsequent war in Ukraine. This led many countries, including most prominently, India, not to side with the West, and to the rebirth of non-alignment as a foreign policy option.
- The second was BRICS expansion, from the 2023 Johannesburg summit onwards, which has led to the doubling of group members to ten, including Indonesia, which has added considerable heft to the group
- The third has been the war in Gaza, which has led countries such as South Africa and Brazil to take strong stands against the war being waged by Israel, and a significant number of UNGA votes calling for a ceasefire, with lopsided majorities of 140 to 50, and a clearcut North-South cleavage.
These factors have made the Global South, despite the many differences among the countries of Africa, Asia and Latin America that are part of it, a force to be reckoned with in world affairs. There is a reason why we talk about a post-Western world: according to several projections, by 2050, seven of the largest economies will be non-Western, and only one European country will be among them.
The Indian imperative
It is in this context, then, that we must look at the role that India can and should play in this very fraught international environment. India’s rise, its condition as the world’s most populous nation, its high growth over the past 35 years or so, that has led it not just to overtake the United Kingdom as the world’s fifth largest economy, but now, in April of this year, to displace Japan to become the world’s fourth largest economy, and the leadership it has exercised in entities like the G20, all speak to an enormous potential in this regard.
In the new century, with China’s rise, what we have seen is a major Western effort to entice India to do the West’s bidding in its dealings with China, with Washington trying to play New Delhi against Beijing. The US-India nuclear deal was an important component of this, as was the role of the large Indian community in the US that has been effectively deployed to this effect, and the undoubtedly high regard in which the United States is regarded by Indian public opinion.
I always thought that India is far too significant a power to let itself be used as a pawn by others, but that was the playbook.
But now the game is up. Washington’s unfounded claim to have brokered the peace in Pakistan’s recent war with India; the imposition of 50% tariffs on India (the highest on any country in the world); and the establishment of $ 100,000 fee on H-B1 US work visas, 70 % of which are used by Indian citizens; and the announcement that Washington will , after all ( despite a long-standing commitment not to do so) impose sanctions on the port of Chabahar being built by India to facilitate trade to Central Asia, have all shown little regard for Indian interests, and have brought US-Indian relations back to what they were in 2005, if not 1995. Thus, India finds herself in a bind.
What to do?
There is one school of thought that argues that despite everything that has happened, India should continue to try to make nice with the US and the West more generally, siding with the world’s democracies against the Eastern autocracies. This notion, of “turning the other cheek”, while admirable in some ways, betrays a certain naivete worthy of a better cause.
The harsh reality is that the isolationism, protectionism, ethnonationalism and chauvinism that we are seeing in the West, joined at the hip with a strong anti-immigrant and anti-foreigner feeling is here to stay, will not go away, and is bound to affect and stand in the way of any such efforts to kiss and make up.
Another alternative which has been set forth by Stewart Patrick, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is that, now that the US has given up on the Liberal International Order, the time has come for India and other middle powers in the South to join forces with European democracies to revive it. This seems to me to be another non-starter. Europe is not exactly the continent of the future – all numbers indicate the contrary.
And the notion that emerging powers should join forces with a few European nations to revive an order once anchored in the North Atlantic and based on the notion of imperial primacy is odd, to put mildly. We are moving firmly and steadily towards a post-Western world, and the time has come to acknowledge this, rather than try to stop the forward march of history.
Thus, India should take a page from its own history and embrace active Non-Alignment as its foreign policy. As I argue in my new book, The Non-Aligned World , the best alternative for countries of the Global South, and for India as leader of the developing world, to deal with the uncertainties of this highly fluid situation is not to side with any of the Great Powers that are competing with each other, but to put your own country’s interests front and center, and act accordingly.
ANA’s grand strategy is “to play the field”– that is take issues one by one, as they come along, and decide on a case-by-case basis on solutions that may be closer to one or another of the Great Powers. In turn, its tactic is what is known as hedging, a middle ground between “balancing” and “bandwagoning”, the two traditional approaches on which states rely to interact with each other. This requires a very sophisticated diplomatic apparatus, with strong analytical capabilities.
In contrast with traditional non-alignment, which had a strong defensive component, ANA is very proactive, being constantly on the lookout for new opportunities in the international environment, trying to make the most of them.
India has some very legitimate differences with China, and there is no reason its spat with the US should make it side with Beijing on the matter of its differences with Washington. At the same time, New Delhi should not let itself be cajoled into buying the US narrative into what this competition is all about. India should stay above the fray and capitalise on its condition as the natural leader of the Global South – build coalitions, project its digital power and technology and be much more outgoing in its foreign policy initiatives.
My former colleague at Boston University, Manjari Miller Chatterjee, now at the University of Toronto and the Council of Foreign Relations, has referred to India as a “reluctant power”. By this she means that Indian political elites, for good reasons, have concluded that given India’s enormous internal economic and social challenges, foreign policy should not be a priority.
The result is a rather small foreign service, with about 1000 diplomats – which compares with 12,000 for the United States, 10,000 for China and 1,400 for Brazil, and a much more limited foreign presence than other powers. And the prevalent notion has been that India interacts with the Great Powers and other middle powers, but not much with smaller nations.
My own country, Chile, has not had the visit of an Indian PM since 1968, when Indira Gandhi visited. Xi Jinping, in turn, has visited Chile three times, in different capacities. India needs to change its approach. As leader of the Global South, India must reach out to all countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, not just to those it considers its peers or near peers. The receptivity and the good will for a major Indian charm offensive across the South, buttressed by concrete programs and projects, are very much there. A reluctant foreign policy will no longer do. The time for change is now.
Aa Lal Bahadur Shastri put it, “There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go”. India finds herself at one such moment.
Jorge Heine is a non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute in Washington DC and a former Chilean ambassador to India, to China and to South Africa. His new book, The Non-Aligned World: Striking Out in an Era of Great Power Competition, is published by Polity Press. This article is an edited version of a presentation made at the conference “India and the World Order: Preparing for 2047” held at Jawaharlal Nehru University.