The petrodollar trembles in the Iran war

The wars of great powers rarely produce only one battlefield. Beneath the thunder of missiles and the rhetoric of retaliation, another contest quietly unfolds—over currencies, energy markets, and the architecture of global power. 

In the current conflict involving the United States, Israel, and Iran, two spectators—Russia and China—are discovering that sometimes the greatest victories belong to those who do not fire the first shot.

At first glance, the war appears to be a confrontation between Washington, Tel Aviv, and Tehran. Yet the deeper economic tremors radiating from the Persian Gulf are redrawing the strategic map in ways that favour Moscow and Beijing.

The first arena of transformation is energy. The Strait of Hormuz, through which nearly one-fifth of global oil supply normally passes, has become the epicentre of the crisis after the U.S.–Israeli strikes on Iran triggered a wider maritime confrontation. Tanker traffic has collapsed, insurance costs have soared, and oil prices have surged beyond $100 per barrel, creating the largest disruption to energy markets since the 1970s oil shocks.

For Russia, this turmoil is not merely a geopolitical spectacle; it is a fiscal windfall. Russia’s economy remains deeply intertwined with hydrocarbon exports, and every spike in oil prices strengthens the Kremlin’s revenues. Analysts increasingly note that the ongoing conflict has turned Moscow into one of the “biggest short-term beneficiaries,” as higher prices replenish energy income that Western sanctions had sought to constrain.

War in the Persian Gulf thus performs an ironic function: it indirectly subsidises the Russian state. When energy markets panic, Moscow profits. When oil flows tighten, Russian barrels become more valuable. In the language of geopolitics, the Middle Eastern battlefield quietly finances Russia’s strategic resilience.

China’s advantage lies elsewhere—within the realm of currency and trade. Tehran has reportedly floated a dramatic condition for the partial reopening of the Strait of Hormuz: oil cargoes may pass only if transactions are settled in Chinese yuan rather than U.S. dollars.

This proposal is not merely a technical adjustment in payment mechanisms; it is a geopolitical signal. For decades, the global oil trade has been anchored to the U.S. dollar, creating the system known as the “petrodollar.” By tying energy shipments to the yuan, Iran would strike directly at that monetary architecture.

If even a portion of Hormuz-bound oil begins trading in Chinese currency, the symbolic implications would be profound. Energy markets have always been the bloodstream of the international monetary system. When oil trades in dollars, the dollar dominates global finance. When oil begins to trade in other currencies, the foundations of monetary hierarchy begin to shift.

In this sense, Tehran’s proposal could accelerate what Beijing has long pursued: the gradual internationalisation of the yuan. China has spent years constructing an alternative financial ecosystem—expanding currency swap lines, developing yuan-denominated commodity contracts, and promoting cross-border payment systems independent of Western institutions. The Hormuz crisis may now provide the geopolitical catalyst for that strategy.

There is another, subtler dimension to China’s advantage. Unlike many Western economies, Beijing has spent years insulating itself from energy shocks through large strategic reserves, domestic coal capacity, and a massive transition toward electrification and renewable power. This structural resilience allows China to endure high oil prices more comfortably than many competitors, positioning it to exploit geopolitical disruptions rather than merely suffer them.

Thus the paradox of the present war becomes clear. While missiles rain across the Middle East, the balance of global influence may be shifting thousands of kilometres away. Russia gains revenue from the oil shock. China gains leverage in the currency system.

Wars are often remembered for their battles and their generals. Yet history frequently reveals that the real winners were those who quietly converted chaos into opportunity. In the unfolding conflict around Iran, Moscow and Beijing appear to be doing precisely that—turning a regional war into a strategic dividend. In geopolitics, as in chess, the most decisive moves are often made by the players who seem least involved.

The limits of power: Why diplomacy and moral authority sustain empires

Empires do not fall merely because their armies weaken or their treasuries empty. They collapse when the world ceases to believe in their authority. 

Military strength can conquer territory and economic power can shape markets, but neither can sustain dominion without diplomacy and moral credibility. When an empire loses the capacity to persuade and the reputation to lead, its decline has already begun—even if its fleets still patrol the oceans.

History demonstrates a consistent pattern: durable empires are sustained by legitimacy. Rome ruled the Mediterranean not only through legions but through law, alliances and a reputation for order. Britain governed a vast imperial network not merely through naval supremacy but through diplomacy and the projection of institutional norms. 

Material strength created the framework of empire, but diplomatic skill and moral authority allowed that framework to endure. The contemporary United States increasingly risks losing these intangible pillars of power.

Diplomacy requires restraint, persuasion and respect for the dignity of other nations. Yet recent American political discourse—particularly during the presidency of Donald Trump—often replaced diplomacy with spectacle. International relations were conducted through abrupt declarations, confrontational rhetoric and impulsive messages delivered through social media. 

Foreign leaders were publicly mocked, alliances were treated as transactional burdens, and complex geopolitical questions were compressed into the language of confrontation. Such behaviour does not merely irritate allies; it erodes the legitimacy upon which global leadership depends.

An empire that commands through insults and threats resembles less a statesman and more a schoolyard bully. Bullying may intimidate weaker actors, but it rarely secures lasting loyalty. Diplomacy, by contrast, creates networks of trust that transform power into influence. Without this transformation, raw power becomes brittle.

Equally damaging has been the erosion of moral authority. For decades the United States positioned itself as the guardian of a rules-based international order—built upon institutions, treaties and norms that Washington itself helped construct after the Second World War. Yet credibility evaporates when a state selectively obeys the rules it champions.

When power ceases to respect the laws it created, the world ceases to respect power.

This contradiction has become visible in repeated military interventions whose outcomes have undermined the very principles they were meant to defend. Across large parts of Asia and the Middle East, American interventions did not produce the promised stability or democracy. Vietnam remains a symbol of strategic miscalculation; Afghanistan revealed the limits of prolonged military occupation; Iraq and Libya demonstrated how regime change can fracture societies into prolonged instability.

The paradox is striking. The most powerful military in history has repeatedly struggled to impose political order once the battlefield victories end.

This pattern reflects deeper historical characteristics. The United States is a young nation shaped by frontier expansion and continental conquest. The experience of settling vast territory cultivated a martial ethos—an instinctive readiness to confront challenges through force. Such instincts may succeed against weak adversaries but prove less effective when confronted with resilient societies and complex political realities.

Asia presents precisely such complexity. Unlike settler societies formed through colonisation, many Asian civilisations possess millennia-old political traditions rooted in their own landscapes. Their populations did not migrate to create new homelands; they have inhabited these regions for thousands of years. Political endurance in such societies often derives from cultural continuity rather than military superiority.

Force alone rarely reshapes such deeply rooted structures. The battlefield can defeat an army; it cannot easily conquer a civilisation.

In the decades since the Second World War, American military power has often succeeded in destroying regimes but has struggled to build stable political systems in their place. Democracies rarely emerge from foreign intervention unless supported by indigenous legitimacy. South Korea stands as a partial exception, yet even there the peninsula remains divided, with North Korea existing as one of the world’s most rigid authoritarian states.

Thus the dilemma confronting the modern American empire becomes clear. Its military remains formidable and its economy still commands global influence. Yet empires cannot survive on material strength alone.

Power without legitimacy eventually encounters resistance. Wealth without diplomacy breeds resentment. And military dominance without moral authority becomes a temporary advantage rather than a durable order.

History offers a simple verdict: when an empire begins to rely solely on brute strength, it has already entered the twilight of its power.

Holi and the pagan tradition: Why we still celebrate nature as sacred

Civilizations are often remembered through their monuments, their wars, and their scriptures. Yet the deeper measure of a civilization lies in the cosmology it creates—the way it interprets the universe, nature, and the human place within it. 

By that measure, Hinduism occupies a singular position in world history. It can plausibly be described as the last great surviving civilization of the ancient pagan world: a spiritual tradition rooted not in a single prophet or revelation, but in a vast and evolving dialogue between humanity and nature.

For most of human history, societies practiced forms of religion that modern scholars broadly describe as pagan or polytheistic—traditions that revered the multiplicity of nature. Rivers were sacred, mountains were divine, forests housed spirits, and the cosmos itself was seen as a living organism. In such cultures, religion was not a system imposed upon life; it was life itself.

Over the last two millennia, however, the global spiritual landscape underwent profound transformation. Vast regions of Europe, West Asia, Africa, and the Americas gradually embraced the Abrahamic traditions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—which emphasized monotheism, prophetic authority, and revealed scripture. 

In the twentieth century, a second transformation occurred. Large parts of the world came under the influence of ideological movements—communism, Maoism, and militant forms of atheism—that sought to replace religion altogether with political doctrine.

The result is that the ancient pagan civilizations that once flourished across continents—from the Norse and the Greeks to the Celts and the Egyptians—have largely vanished as living traditions. Their myths survive in literature and archaeology, but their rituals are no longer practiced by entire societies.

India represents a remarkable exception.

Despite centuries of interaction with Abrahamic faiths and the ideological currents of modernity, a substantial portion of the Indian subcontinent continues to sustain a spiritual worldview that predates recorded history. Hinduism is not merely a religion in the doctrinal sense; it is the civilizational continuation of a worldview in which the cosmos is inherently plural, sacred, and interconnected.

The antiquity of this worldview is staggering. Many historians believe that the Rig Veda, one of humanity’s oldest surviving texts, was composed over five millennia ago. Its hymns speak not of abstract dogma but of the living forces of nature—Agni the fire, Indra the storm, Varuna the cosmic order. The Upanishads probe the philosophical depths of existence, while the Puranas weave mythological narratives that connect the human world with the cosmic.

In this sense, Hinduism preserves something that has disappeared elsewhere: a civilizational memory of humanity’s earliest relationship with nature.

It is within this framework that festivals like Holi acquire their true meaning.

Holi is often described superficially as a “festival of colors.” Yet at a deeper level, it is a celebration of a worldview in which life itself is understood as a play of colors. Water, pigment, flowers, laughter, and music become instruments through which society reenacts its harmony with nature.

Only a civilization deeply rooted in natural abundance could have imagined such a festival. Holi presupposes a culture in which water is plentiful, seasons are celebrated, and the diversity of life is not feared but embraced. It transforms the social space into a temporary cosmos of color, where distinctions dissolve and the vitality of nature becomes the organizing principle of human interaction.

In that moment, theology becomes ecology.

If monotheistic civilizations often emphasize transcendence—the distance between the divine and the world—Hindu civilization often emphasizes immanence: the idea that divinity permeates the universe itself. The colors of Holi are therefore not merely festive decoration; they symbolize the manifold expressions of the sacred in nature.

One could say that Holi is a civilizational memory disguised as a festival. It reminds us that long before humanity organized itself around rigid doctrines or ideological systems, people understood themselves as participants in a vibrant and sacred universe. In celebrating Holi, India is not simply preserving a cultural custom—it is sustaining one of the oldest surviving conversations between humanity and nature.

Sacred soil, shared blood: The implacable logic of Middle Eastern wars

Of all wars, the most relentless are civil wars; of all civil wars, the most implacable are those between brothers. History does not merely record this truth—it laments it. 

When kinship turns adversarial, reconciliation becomes treachery and compromise a form of betrayal. Brotherhood deepens rivalry because it intensifies memory. It is not distance but proximity that breeds the longest hatred.

The Middle East today is not merely a theatre of geopolitics. It is, in civilisational terms, a struggle among three brothers — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — children of a shared patriarch, inheritors of overlapping sacred geographies, custodians of a single God articulated through rival revelations. The soil they contest is not just territory; it is theology made terrain.

These traditions emerged from broadly similar historical and socio-economic conditions in late antiquity and the early medieval period. They share prophets, narratives, and moral vocabularies. Yet it is precisely this shared origin that sharpens their contest. The closer the creed, the deeper the quarrel. The rivalry is not about difference alone; it is about precedence, authenticity, and finality. Each claims not merely to exist, but to complete and supersede the other.

From the suppression of early Jewish revolts under the Roman Empire, to the Byzantine – Persian conflicts infused with religious undertones, to the Crusades, to the sectarian fractures within Islam itself, to the imperial rearrangements of the Ottoman collapse, the region has witnessed a recurring pattern: faith translated into sovereignty. 

Even modern nationalism has not erased the sacred from politics; it has merely clothed it in the language of the state. The flags may change, the weapons modernise, but the metaphysical stakes endure.

To characterise the current conflict as merely technological or strategic is to mistake surface for substance. Missiles and drones are instruments; memory is the engine. The struggle is over land because land embodies covenant. It is over history because history legitimises destiny. It is over narrative because narrative authorises power.

In fraternal wars, exhaustion does not guarantee peace. “A brother does not forget; he waits.” As long as each of the three retains the capacity — material or moral — to wage struggle, the conflict will smoulder, if not blaze. Deterrence may pause the violence; it cannot dissolve the claim.

For India, this civilisational contest presents not a battlefield but a dilemma. India is not a participant in the Abrahamic sibling rivalry; it is an observer from a different metaphysical lineage. Hindu civilisation — arguably the last surviving large-scale Pagan religious tradition — did not emerge from the desert crucible of exclusive monotheism. Its philosophical grammar is plural, cyclical, and accommodative. It does not seek final revelation; it accepts layered truths.

This difference is not merely theological; it is strategic. India has everything to lose and little to gain from entanglement in a war of brothers. The prudent course is neither indifference nor partisanship, but calibrated engagement with all sides. In a quarrel of brothers, the outsider who chooses sides inherits the enmity of the other two. Strategic autonomy, not moral grandstanding, must guide policy.

India’s interests — energy security, diaspora safety, trade corridors, and defence partnerships — demand a functional relationship with Israel, the Arab world, and Iran alike. This is not opportunism; it is civilisational realism. A country of continental scale and plural ethos must resist being drawn into exclusive blocs forged by theological memory.

The Middle East’s tragedy is that shared ancestry has not yielded shared destiny — Brotherhood there has become a battlefield. India’s wisdom lies in recognising the depth of that fracture without presuming it can mend it.

Let the brothers negotiate, reconcile, or exhaust themselves. India’s task is different: to endure, to balance, and to preserve its own civilisational equilibrium in a world where ancient rivalries still write modern headlines.

Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine: Strength as the currency of American support

History has a paradoxical affection for small nations that refuse to behave like small nations. 

In the shadow of vast empires and continental powers, three states—Israel, Taiwan, and Ukraine—have exercised influence far beyond their demography. Each stands at the frontier of a larger civilisational contest. Each lives beside an adversary that is not merely stronger, but implacable. And each depends on the patronage of the United States.

The sentimental narrative claims that America supports them because they are democracies. The realist reading is less romantic. Great powers do not subsidize virtue; they subsidize utility. Washington’s support has always been contingent on a calculation: do these states enhance American leverage in their respective theatres? If yes, they are fortified. If not, they are liabilities.

An empire does not ask, “Who is right?” It asks, “Who is useful?”

This is not cynicism; it is structural logic. Empires preserve themselves. They align with actors who expand their strategic depth, technological edge, and economic access. Israel is a technological powerhouse embedded in a volatile region; Taiwan is the epicentre of advanced semiconductor manufacturing; Ukraine became a forward buffer against Russian resurgence. Their value is geopolitical capital.

But geopolitical capital must yield returns. The United States will back a partner so long as that partner demonstrates resilience, competence, and the will to prevail. Power respects power. It has little patience for dependency without performance.

In Ukraine’s case, the early months of resistance generated admiration in Western capitals. The narrative was one of heroic defiance. Yet wars are not won by narrative alone. As the conflict dragged on, domestic political fatigue in Washington intensified. Within the Republican Party, influential voices began to question the strategic dividend of continued aid. The moral vocabulary remained, but the arithmetic changed. When support becomes costlier than the advantage it yields, empires reassess.

Support born of interest survives only as long as interest survives. The European Union’s resolutions have not translated into direct military engagement against Russia. That restraint reveals the limits of solidarity when confronted with escalation risk. Moral outrage is abundant; strategic risk appetite is scarce.

Taiwan presents an even starker dilemma. It is indispensable to global technology supply chains, yet defending it against China would require a confrontation between the world’s two largest powers. The ambiguity in Washington’s posture reflects a profound strategic anxiety: can deterrence be sustained without triggering the very war it seeks to prevent? If Beijing were to escalate decisively, the question would not be about democratic values but about the balance of costs in a Sino-American conflict.

Israel, by contrast, has projected unambiguous resolve. Its military campaigns against Hamas have signalled both capacity and political will. In a region defined by volatility, Israel presents itself not as a ward of American power but as a force multiplier. That distinction matters. An ally who demonstrates battlefield dominance enhances the patron’s prestige; an ally who falters imposes reputational and financial burdens.

Empires do not abandon strength; they abandon weakness.

The lesson for small but strategically exposed states is unsentimental. Survival under the American umbrella is not guaranteed by shared ideology. It is guaranteed by sustained strategic relevance and visible competence. To remain indispensable is to remain supported. In geopolitics, virtue may inspire speeches. Victory secures alliances.

Survival with dignity: India’s place in a mercurial American strategy

India does not occupy a permanent seat in America’s grand strategy; it occupies a fluctuating utility. That is the uncomfortable truth beneath decades of rhetorical warmth between New Delhi and Washington. 

From Jawaharlal Nehru to Indira Gandhi, from Rajiv Gandhi to Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and now under Narendra Modi, Indian leaders have proclaimed closeness to Washington. Yet proximity is not centrality. In the architecture of American power, sentiment is incidental; strategic value is decisive.

The United States does not construct its grand strategy around affinities but around interests. Its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy—whether under Donald Trump or his predecessors—signal reprioritization rather than romantic alignment. 

The Indo-Pacific rises or recedes in importance depending on calculations about trade routes, supply chains, and the balance against China. India matters because of geography, demography, and its capacity to complicate Beijing’s ambitions. It does not matter because it is a democracy that speaks English and holds elections.

India’s democratic identity, often celebrated in joint statements, is strategically secondary. Democracies are unpredictable; they argue with themselves. India is a noisy republic with a free press, coalition pressures, and electoral volatility. For a superpower accustomed to transactional clarity, it is far easier to negotiate with centralized autocracies where leverage can be concentrated at the top. 

Democracy is morally admired in Washington, but autocracy is often administratively convenient. That paradox has shaped American conduct across regions. American power operates most smoothly where institutional friction is minimal. India, by contrast, insists on friction. It negotiates, hedges, delays, and recalibrates. This is sovereignty in action—but it also limits India’s elevation within any American grand design.

Yet India cannot afford strategic estrangement from the world’s preeminent military and financial power. Moral indignation is not a substitute for geopolitical leverage. Surrounded by nuclear rivals, burdened by internal development gaps, and dependent on global capital flows, India must ensure it is not positioned as an adversary in Washington’s worldview. 

American presidents can afford mercurial rhetoric; they command alliances, reserve currencies, and expeditionary forces. India commands resilience, not dominance.

If a U.S. administration adopts abrasive trade policies or unpredictable diplomatic tones, New Delhi’s response must be calibrated endurance. States do not have the luxury of emotional reactions. They have interests. India’s strategic task is survival with dignity, not posturing with defiance. 

In a hierarchy of powers, prudence is the first virtue of the rising state.

Equally important is intellectual honesty. Many of India’s constraints are domestic: regulatory inertia, infrastructure deficits, uneven education outcomes, episodic strategic incoherence. Externalizing blame onto Washington obscures internal reform. A nation that aspires to shape the Indo-Pacific must first discipline its own political economy.

The end of elite journalism: Why The Washington Post’s reckoning was inevitable

The early-February 2026 layoffs at The Washington Post, reportedly affecting more than 300 journalists, have been read by many as a tragedy for a venerable institution. I read them differently: as a belated recognition that an old compact between media power and political power has collapsed. 

Institutions survive not by sentiment but by relevance, and relevance is never guaranteed by pedigree alone.

Ownership matters. When Jeff Bezos acquired the Post in 2013, from the Graham family, the transaction was widely romanticised as a benevolent rescue of journalism by a visionary technologist. That narrative obscured a harder truth: elite media has rarely been sustained by profit alone. It has been sustained by access to policymakers, opinion-shapers, donors, regulators, and the cultural prestige that circulates within ruling coalitions. 

For a time, the Post was a central node in a global ecosystem of progressive power. Its newsroom was not merely reporting on the world; it was embedded in the ideological grammar of a world that believed itself permanent. That world is gone.

The 2010s were an era in which liberal-progressive consensus appeared hegemonic across Washington, Brussels, London, and even New Delhi. In that context, elite newsrooms could plausibly claim to ‘speak for democracy’ while addressing a narrow audience of the already convinced. The Post’s journalism often conflated moral certainty with explanatory depth, advocacy with analysis, and globalism with inevitability. What was lost was the discipline of persuading readers outside the ideological circle.

The political realignment of the 2020s shattered this arrangement. In the United States, the return of Donald Trump and the consolidation of an ultraconservative MAGA movement did not merely change electoral outcomes; they delegitimised an entire epistemic class that had treated dissent as pathology. Across Europe, conservative and nationalist movements have gained power by rejecting the language and priorities of progressive transnationalism. In India, Narendra Modi has normalised an assertive, unapologetic nationalism that no longer seeks validation from Western liberal opinion.

In this new environment, the Post’s ideological utility for its owner diminished sharply. A media organisation that once functioned as a passport to elite consensus now offers diminishing strategic value. Maintaining a large, highly paid newsroom that produces content misaligned with prevailing political realities is not patronage; it is indulgence. Capital eventually asks a brutal question: what purpose is being served?

This is not an argument against journalism as a craft. It is an argument against journalism as a self-regarding class. A press that speaks only to power will eventually be judged by power. The layoffs puncture the myth that elite newsrooms are indispensable regardless of performance. They expose a deeper failure: the inability of a once-great institution to re-imagine its audience beyond a shrinking progressive enclave.

Bezos’s decision, stripped of sentiment, is therefore rational. He did not buy the Post to underwrite a permanent opposition salon; he bought it at a moment when elite alignment promised influence. Influence has migrated. The cost structures remained. The correction was inevitable.

The geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence: How India, the US and China compete

Artificial intelligence has moved decisively from being a technology domain to becoming an instrument of statecraft. 

For India, the United States, and China, AI is no longer only about productivity gains or commercial advantage; it is about power, resilience, and long-term geopolitical positioning. The differing strategies adopted by these three countries reveal not just contrasting policy choices, but deeper philosophies about how states relate to markets, citizens, and the international order.

The United States approaches AI primarily as an extension of its innovation ecosystem and industrial strength. Its dominance rests on an unparalleled concentration of frontier research, venture capital, cloud infrastructure, and semiconductor capability. The American state plays an enabling role rather than a commanding one, focusing on sustaining the conditions under which private innovation can scale rapidly. 

Recent policy shifts suggest an increasing willingness to prioritise speed and global adoption over precaution. The emphasis is on ensuring that US-designed chips, models, platforms, and standards become the default global stack. 

In geopolitical terms, this is a strategy of technological entrenchment: if the world runs on American AI, American influence follows. Export controls and supply-chain interventions are deployed selectively, less as tools of global governance and more as instruments to deny adversaries strategic advantage.

China’s approach is structurally different. AI development there is embedded within a broader vision of state-led modernisation and national security. Long-term planning, coordinated investment, and regulatory control are tightly integrated. The Chinese state treats AI as a dual-use technology from the outset, one that must simultaneously drive economic growth and reinforce political stability. 

Governance frameworks are explicit, statute-driven, and enforcement-oriented, ensuring that algorithmic systems remain aligned with state priorities. Internationally, China seeks to export not just AI products but entire digital ecosystems—cloud infrastructure, surveillance technologies, data standards, and financing mechanisms—particularly to developing countries. 

This model positions China as a provider of turnkey digital sovereignty, albeit one that deepens dependence on Chinese technology and norms. AI, for Beijing, is both a domestic control mechanism and a vehicle for reshaping global technological governance.

India occupies a more complex and intermediate position. Unlike the United States, it does not possess first-mover dominance in frontier AI research or hardware. Unlike China, it does not deploy AI primarily through a command-and-control framework. Instead, India’s strategy reflects its experience with digital public infrastructure: build shared foundations, enable wide participation, and regulate progressively. 

The emphasis is on access rather than exclusivity—shared compute, open datasets, interoperable platforms, and language inclusion. This approach is shaped by India’s scale and diversity, where the political legitimacy of technology depends on its social reach. AI is framed less as an instrument of surveillance or dominance, and more as a multiplier for governance capacity, service delivery, and economic inclusion.

Geopolitically, these divergent strategies have significant implications. The United States is betting that innovation leadership will translate into normative power, allowing it to shape global standards informally through market dominance. China is pursuing a more explicit contest over governance models, offering an alternative digital order that prioritises state authority and security. 

India’s pathway suggests a third possibility: that AI leadership in the coming decades may not be defined solely by who builds the largest models, but by who demonstrates scalable, trustworthy use at population level. This has particular resonance for the Global South, where the challenge is less about frontier research and more about applying AI to development, administration, and inclusion.

Yet India’s position is not without constraints. Limited high-end compute capacity, uneven data availability, and shortages of advanced research talent remain binding challenges. Without sustained investment and institutional reform, India risks becoming a sophisticated user rather than a shaper of global AI trajectories. At the same time, its relatively open, democratic approach to AI governance offers strategic credibility. In an era of growing distrust around technology, legitimacy itself becomes a geopolitical asset.

What emerges from this comparison is that AI is reinforcing a multipolar technological order. The United States seeks supremacy through innovation velocity, China through scale and state coordination, and India through systemic inclusion and governance design. 

None of these strategies is fully sufficient on its own. The geopolitical contest around AI will therefore not be decided by capability alone, but by which model proves resilient, exportable, and politically sustainable. In that sense, AI is not merely transforming geopolitics; it is revealing how different states understand power itself.

At the hinge of history: R. Venkataraman and the Republic in turbulent times

Yesterday’s meeting and conversation with Ms. Lakshmi V. Venkatesan, Founder and Managing Trustee of the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust, unfolded less as a formal meeting and more as an intellectual passage through time — where memory, history, and contemporary purpose converged with uncommon clarity. 

It was a dialogue anchored in ideas, but animated by lived experience, shaped equally by inheritance and independent conviction.

As the daughter of Shri Ramaswamy Venkataraman, President of India from 1987 to 1992, Ms. Venkatesan stands at a unique vantage point in the story of modern India. Those five years of her father’s presidency were not merely a constitutional interlude; they were a hinge in history. India, in that brief span, crossed from one social, cultural, moral and economic imagination to another. 

In 1987, the republic still largely spoke the language of socialism, egalitarian restraint, and state stewardship. By 1992, it had begun to articulate a different grammar—of markets, aspiration, cultural nationalism, and a newly assertive middle class.

Four Prime Ministers—Rajiv Gandhi, V. P. Singh, Chandra Shekhar, and P. V. Narasimha Rao—passed through office during that single presidential term. Rarely has the continuity of the Republic been tested amid such political volatility. Yet, as history would later reveal, turbulence was not a sign of decay but of transformation. Democracies, after all, often renew themselves through disorder.

The early 1990s compressed multiple revolutions into a single moment. The Rath Yatra of 1990 reconfigured India’s cultural and political discourse, bringing questions of faith, identity, and nationhood into the electoral mainstream. 

The economic reforms initiated by Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao in July 1991 dismantled the old command economy and set India on the path toward liberalisation, competition, and consumerism. In 1992, the demolition in Ayodhya irreversibly altered the tone of political mobilisation, embedding cultural nationalism as a feature of democratic contestation.

Together, these events did not merely change policies or parties; they reshaped the Indian psyche. The Congress party, once the natural party of governance, entered a long decline, while the Bharatiya Janata Party began its steady ascent. 

Looking back, it is evident that Shri Ramaswamy Venkataraman’s presidency spanned the most tumultuous and consequential phase of post-Independence India—when old certainties dissolved and new forces gained legitimacy. Ms. Venkatesan’s reflections on this period were marked by nuance rather than nostalgia. She spoke of history not as a sequence of victories or failures, but as a series of choices made under constraint. 

Her insights moved effortlessly from India to the wider world — from the political churn in the United States to the shifting moral and economic frameworks of Europe — suggesting that national destinies are increasingly shaped by global currents, even as they remain rooted in local realities.

It is precisely this synthesis of historical consciousness and practical engagement that animates her work at the Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust. Through BYST, she has devoted herself to nurturing grampreneurs and micro-enterprises — those quiet architects of economic resilience who operate far from the glare of stock markets and policy summits. 

In her view, grassroots entrepreneurship is not a peripheral activity but a civilisational necessity. “A nation does not grow only from its capitals,” she implied, “it grows from the confidence of its smallest producers.” If the economic reforms of the 1990s unleashed markets, the challenge of the present is to democratise opportunity. By mentoring young entrepreneurs from underserved communities, BYST affirms a deeper truth: that economic dignity is the most sustainable form of social justice. 

In a country still negotiating the meaning of growth, Ms. Venkatesan’s work reminds us that history is not only something we inherit — it is something we actively build, enterprise by enterprise, choice by choice.

The secret history of regime change—and why Venezuela fits the pattern

Regime change is often sold as precision engineering. Remove the leader, manage the transition, restore order. Clean. Surgical. Final.

Lindsey A. O’Rourke’s Covert Regime Change: America’s Secret Cold War exposes why this story almost never survives contact with reality.

Between 1947 and 1989, the United States launched 64 covert regime-change operations. Most failed. Even the “successful” ones rarely delivered loyalty, stability, or legitimacy. Power did not dissolve nationalism; it inflamed it. Installed leaders discovered that domestic politics does not disappear simply because Washington prefers a different outcome.

The canonical cases are well known, yet their lessons remain unlearned. The 1953 overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran produced not durable compliance but revolutionary backlash. The failed 1958 effort to unseat Sukarno in Indonesia exposed the limits of proxy manipulation in a postcolonial society. 

The 1963 coup in South Vietnam, intended to strengthen American influence, resulted instead in the unintended assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem and deeper instability. In Angola, decades of covert support for rebel groups neither secured victory nor legitimacy. 

These episodes reveal a consistent pattern: secrecy may enable action, but it corrodes accountability and strategic foresight. Regimes propped up from the outside either collapsed under popular pressure or turned hostile once they confronted the same social forces that undid their predecessors.

The most uncomfortable finding is also the clearest. The U.S. did not export democracy; it often replaced elected governments with authoritarian ones. Dependency, not shared values, produced compliance—and dependency bred fragility, resentment, and revolt.

This is why Venezuela matters. Not because it is unique, but because it is familiar. The belief that “this time will be different” accompanies nearly every failed intervention in the American record. History shows otherwise.

O’Rourke’s book is not anti-American. It is anti-illusion. Power cannot substitute for legitimacy. Secrecy cannot override society. And fear-driven interventions accelerate decline rather than prevent it. The Cold War may be over. Its covert reflexes are not.

From WMDs to narcotics and illegal migration: How allegations become weapons and oil the prize

Maduro at 2023 South American summit

History has a habit of repeating itself, first as justification and later as regret. Venezuela today stands where many resource-rich nations have stood before—accused, isolated, and finally struck, not because it is uniquely evil, but because it is inconveniently endowed.

Oil, in the modern world, is not merely a commodity. It is power in liquid form. And power, when held outside the preferred architecture of empire, becomes suspect by definition. The language changes with time—communism, terrorism, narcotics, migration threats—but the destination remains the same: regime collapse followed by resource realignment.

The latest allegations levelled by Donald Trump against Caracas arrive wrapped in familiar moral packaging. Criminal networks. Security threats. Hemispheric instability. These are serious words, meant to close debate before it begins. Yet history urges caution. It reminds us that certainty in geopolitics is often manufactured, not discovered.

Two decades ago, the world was told—repeatedly and confidently—that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. The claim was treated not as a hypothesis, but as a verdict. Iraq was invaded. Its state dismantled. Its oil sector opened. The weapons, famously, were never found.

That absence did not reverse the war. It merely arrived too late to matter.

Venezuela’s story now carries an unsettling resemblance. The charges are different, but the structure is identical: demonize the regime, compress complexity into slogans, and present military action as a reluctant necessity. Propaganda succeeds not by lying outright, but by speaking with absolute confidence before facts have time to breathe.

If, years from now, investigations reveal that today’s accusations were exaggerated, selectively constructed, or strategically misleading, the damage will already have been done. Governments can be toppled in weeks; truth takes decades to recover its dignity.

The deeper reality is this: control over petroleum remains central to the maintenance of the American global order. This is not conspiracy; it is doctrine, openly articulated across decades of strategic literature. Energy flows shape alliances. Energy chokepoints define red lines. Energy independence for others is quietly viewed as strategic disobedience.

Oil-rich states that lack institutional resilience are not seen as partners. They are seen as opportunities.

The Venezuelan crisis is therefore not an aberration but a pattern—one that has touched Iran, Libya, Iraq, and others in different forms. The moral language shifts, but the economic geometry remains constant. Empire rarely announces itself as empire; it arrives disguised as concern.

For countries watching from afar, the lesson is sobering. Resource wealth does not guarantee sovereignty. It tests it. Weak institutions invite intervention; strong ones complicate it. The danger is not having oil. The danger is having oil without the capacity to defend political autonomy, economic competence, and narrative control.

Venezuela may yet be remembered not for what it did wrong, but for what it possessed. And history may again ask an uncomfortable question: was the real crime a security threat—or was it oil?

The AI race: When civilisations run out of children, they begin to dream of machines

The contemporary Western fascination with artificial intelligence is often framed as a triumph of innovation or a natural culmination of scientific progress. Yet beneath this celebratory narrative lies a quieter demographic anxiety. 

Much of the West now confronts a civilizational predicament not of excess population, as earlier theorists feared, but of absence—of too few young people to sustain the ordinary, unglamorous work on which societies depend. AI, in this context, is less a technological choice than a demographic compensation. It is being summoned to fill the spaces left empty by collapsing birth rates.

Factories without workers, hospitals without nurses, cities without sufficient technicians to maintain water, power, and transport systems—these are not speculative futures but emerging realities in large parts of Europe and North America. When societies age rapidly and reproduce slowly, they must either import labor at scale or mechanize intelligence itself. AI becomes attractive not because it is wise, but because it is available. 

“When a civilisation runs short of children, it begins to dream of machines.”

This pattern is no longer confined to the West. Several Asian societies that embraced Western economic and social models—marked by intense urbanisation, atomised family structures, and the prioritisation of individual consumption over generational continuity—are now confronting similar demographic decline. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and increasingly China, illustrate how prosperity coupled with a Malthusian imagination can produce societies that unconsciously choose extinction by arithmetic. 

The idea that population growth is a problem to be solved rather than a responsibility to be sustained has consequences that compound silently over decades.

India is often invoked as the demographic counterpoint, a youthful nation destined to supply the labour and energy the world lacks. Yet this confidence dissolves under closer scrutiny. While India’s aggregate population continues to grow, fertility rates are declining across most regions and communities. 

Among urban, educated, and economically secure Hindus, the birth rate is falling sharply, mirroring patterns seen earlier in the West and East Asia. Exposure to Western lifestyles—delayed marriage, dual-income households, career primacy, and the quiet devaluation of parenthood—has reshaped reproductive behaviour. The decline is not abrupt enough to alarm policy planners yet, but it is steady enough to matter. 

“Demography moves slowly, but it moves with the force of destiny.”

In societies experiencing such decline, AI begins to acquire an almost metaphysical allure. It is imagined as a neutral, tireless substitute for human presence—an invisible workforce that neither ages nor demands meaning. Governments, corporations, and even intellectual elites begin to speak of AI not merely as a tool but as an infrastructure for continuity. The implicit assumption is that a society can outsource not only labour, but judgment, care, and responsibility to code. This is where the myth takes shape.

AI can optimise processes, but it cannot reproduce society. It can simulate intelligence, but it cannot generate moral accountability, cultural transmission, or the instinctive solidarities that bind generations. A civilisation sustained primarily by machines risks becoming operationally efficient and existentially hollow. The belief that AI can replace human abundance with computational cleverness confuses functionality with fertility, and speed with succession.

Ultimately, the turn to AI as a demographic solution reflects a deeper refusal to confront the cultural choices that led to population decline in the first place. It is easier to fund algorithms than to rebuild social norms around family, continuity, and intergenerational duty. Yet no society has ever survived on intelligence alone—artificial or otherwise. 

“A future without children is not a future delayed by technology; it is a future denied by choice.”

Maps of the mind: Understanding power through India’s civilisational lens

Power is not only measured in armies, alliances, or economic scale. It is also shaped by how a civilisation understands itself — its memory of victory and defeat, its capacity for renewal, and its willingness to confront uncomfortable truths. India’s strategic worldview today cannot be understood without acknowledging both its philosophical depth and its historical lapses.

India’s civilisational imagination has long privileged inward coherence over outward conquest. Classical Indian political thought, from the Arthashastra to the Upanishadic tradition, treated power as relational and contextual rather than totalising. Influence was something to be stabilised, not endlessly expanded. This produced a worldview that valued equilibrium, legitimacy and restraint.

But restraint, when unaccompanied by institutional adaptation, can become vulnerability.

India’s first major civilisational setback was not military but ideological. The subcontinent’s plural cosmology proved ill-equipped to respond to the absolutist, missionary energy of Abrahamic religions. Hindu civilisation absorbed, accommodated and coexisted — but failed to project itself outward or defend its epistemic core. Over time, India lost narrative sovereignty over its own past.

“A civilisation that refuses to convert others must still learn how not to be converted.”

This pattern repeated itself in the economic domain. India did not lose the Industrial Revolution because of a lack of intelligence or craftsmanship — pre-colonial India was a manufacturing powerhouse. It lost because its civilisational mindset failed to institutionalise technological disruption. The industrial age demanded scale, standardisation and aggressive capital accumulation — all alien to a society structured around continuity and equilibrium.

Colonialism merely completed a process of displacement that had already begun. India entered modernity not as a co-author, but as a subject.

“The tragedy of India is not that it lacked knowledge, but that it failed to weaponise knowledge.”

This historical lag continues to shape India’s present predicament. Despite its rhetoric of strategic autonomy, India remains deeply dependent on Western systems — in finance, technology, defence platforms, intellectual property and digital architecture. The AI and digital revolutions are not unfolding on neutral terrain; they are being shaped by ecosystems dominated by the United States and its allies.

India is a consumer, adaptor and regulator of technology — but not yet a rule-maker.

The civilisational instinct that once resisted ideological rigidity now struggles in an age that rewards speed, disruption and first-mover dominance. India’s pluralism, while morally attractive, often translates into policy hesitation. Strategic autonomy, when not backed by indigenous capacity, risks becoming strategic dependence with better language.

“Autonomy without capability is not independence; it is aspiration.”

Even India’s engagement with global institutions reflects this tension. India seeks reform of the United Nations, IMF and World Bank, but operates within frameworks it did not design. Its challenge to the global order is incremental because it lacks the economic and technological leverage to be disruptive. Moral arguments cannot substitute for material power indefinitely.

Regionally, India aspires to be a stabilising force in the subcontinent and the Indian Ocean. Yet it faces persistent challenges — Chinese infrastructure diplomacy, political instability in neighbouring states, and its own uneven capacity to deliver public goods beyond its borders. Civilisational reassurance works only when backed by economic gravity.

“Influence flows not from memory alone, but from performance.”

None of this negates the value of India’s civilisational lens. It explains why India resists binaries, why it avoids ideological crusades, and why it speaks the language of balance in a fractured world. But civilisations that rely too heavily on memory risk mistaking endurance for strength.

The real test before India is whether it can translate philosophical depth into institutional power. Can a civilisation that once mapped the cosmos now shape the code that governs the future? Can a society that mastered metaphysics learn to dominate platforms, data and algorithms?

“Civilisational wisdom survives history; civilisational power must be rebuilt in every age.”

India’s maps of the mind remain rich, layered and humane. But in an era defined by technology, capital and narrative warfare, those maps must now be supplemented by hard infrastructures of power. Otherwise, India risks repeating an old pattern — moral authority without material command.

The future will not belong to civilisations that merely remember who they were. It will belong to those that can reinvent themselves without losing their soul.

Can India trust the West?

Western commentary has a strange habit: it grows loudest precisely when India refuses to play the role scripted for it. With Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to New Delhi on December 4 and 5 now concluded, the chorus has returned. 

The Telegraph of the United Kingdom even asked, with colonial astonishment, “Can the West trust India?” It is a revealing question—revealing not of India’s conduct, but of a worldview in which the West is the custodian of global virtue and others are meant to obey.

Yet millions of Indians are asking a different, more ancient question: Can India trust the West? The answers forming in the Indian mind are shaped not by editorials but by history, memory, and lived experience. “A nation’s trust is not won by sermons; it is earned by solidarity,” as one might say—and solidarity is something the West offers only when convenient.

History, for Indians, is never an abstraction. It has weight, texture, and blood. In 1971, as India intervened to stop a genocide in East Pakistan, the United States did not support the world’s largest democracy. Instead, Washington dispatched Task Force 74—a powerful naval armada led by the USS Enterprise, the world’s largest nuclear carrier—to the Bay of Bengal, signalling that India was to be intimidated into silence. 

In contrast, the Soviet Union responded with astonishing clarity: nuclear-armed submarines and cruisers sailed from Vladivostok and shadowed the American fleet, making it clear that New Delhi would not stand alone. The mighty task force, sent to bully a young India, found itself checkmated and withdrew quietly. “In moments of darkness, one does not forget the hand that reached out,” says an old proverb, and India has not forgotten.

This is what Russia means to India: not sainthood, not perfection, but reliability. And reliability, in a world of shifting allegiances, is worth more than eloquent lectures delivered from editorial pages soaked in selective morality. Those who now scold India for hosting Putin conveniently ignore their own hypocrisies. European LNG imports from Russia rose after the Ukraine war. Western corporations continue to operate in Russia through legal and financial loopholes. Western nuclear reactors still depend on Russian uranium. 

“Morality enforced selectively is not morality—it is strategy disguised as virtue.”

Then there is the present. President Donald Trump’s second-term policies have shown India a mirror it did not seek but cannot unsee. His open tilt toward Pakistan, the imposition of tariffs on Indian goods, and his repeated jabs at India’s economy have made it clear that the West’s friendship is transactional. The new American doctrine, stripped of its diplomatic cosmetics, is simply: America first, and everyone else somewhere far behind. That leaves nations like India with no illusions. Trust, to exist, must be mutual.

Against this backdrop, Western outrage over India’s engagement with Russia feels both performative and patronising. If meeting Putin equals endorsing war, then why was there silence when Trump welcomed him? Where was this indignation when China hosted him at SCO summits attended by dozens of nations? Why is India singled out? The uncomfortable truth is that the anger is not moral; it is racialised. It emerges from the belief that Western nations may act in their interest, but India must act in accordance with theirs. 

“The coloniser’s voice lingers long after the empire has died.”

India does not support invasions, but neither will it abandon an old ally to satisfy the fleeting indignation of distant commentators. Nations, like individuals, are defined by how they remember their friends. India will protect its interests, honour its partnerships, and walk its own path without apology. The world may frown, lecture, or protest. But sovereignty is not a performance; it is a principle. And India will uphold it—calmly, firmly, and without seeking anyone’s permission.

In the end, the message is simple: we will engage with whom we choose. We remember who stood with us. And we do not need the West’s approval to act as a sovereign civilisation-state.

The Dark Ages of conscience: Rethinking Europe’s rise without the myth of virtue

History is often narrated as if it were a sermon. We like to believe that moral clarity triumphs, that civilizations rise when virtues blossom and fall when vices become intolerable. 

Yet the story of slavery’s disappearance from Europe after the collapse of Rome tells a different tale—one where economics smothers morality, and where the so-called “progress of conscience” is little more than a rearrangement of incentives.

Slavery, that ancient and brutal institution, faded from Europe not at the height of its intellectual brilliance but precisely during what later historians would label the Dark Ages. The disappearance of slavery was not accompanied by a burst of light, but by a dimming of power. “History rarely abolishes an institution out of compassion,” as one philosopher observed, “but often out of exhaustion.” Rome’s machinery had collapsed; the system that fed on slaves was too weak to sustain itself.

And yet, modern European memory prefers a gentler explanation: Christianity. It is comforting to believe that spiritual awakenings liberate bodies. But the record tells us something more ambivalent. Medieval theologians debated the soul’s salvation far more than the slave’s emancipation. Later centuries would reveal the irony with painful clarity: Christian conquistadors and Protestant merchants built slavery on a planetary scale. The cross and the whip often sailed on the same ship.

The more plausible engine of change was feudalism. Europe did not morally transcend slavery—it replaced it. The feudal lord had no use for chattel slaves when serfs could be bound to the soil through custom, obligation, and necessity. The manor replaced the plantation; the chain became invisible. Feudalism did not awaken Europe’s conscience; it merely taught Europe another technique of domination. As a result, the continent survived, but did not flourish. It lived, as it were, in a long twilight.

This is the uncomfortable hypothesis: Europe’s great ages of power correlate disturbingly well with its access to coerced labour. When Europe abandons slavery, Europe withers; when Europe embraces it, Europe ascends.

The fifteenth century proved the point. Europe’s re-emergence into global power was not powered by piety, nor by a spontaneous improvement in diligence, but by the mass enslavement of Africans. Between 12 and 18 million people were transported across the Atlantic—an atrocity industrial in scale, theological in justification, and civilizational in effect.

The plantations of the New World—built on the backs of Africans—did not merely produce crops; they produced Europe’s re-entry into world history. Before Africans arrived, European settlers in the Americas were, quite literally, dying out. Their life expectancy hovered near twenty-five years; starvation and disease threatened the colonial project. In a tragic twist of history, Africans saved the European presence in the Americas; without African labour, the “West” might never have become Western.

And yet Europe congratulated itself with another myth: the “Western work ethic.” Max Weber, that eloquent theorist of capitalism, attributed Europe’s ascent to the Protestant ethic—discipline, frugality, and industriousness. But the plantations tell a different story: If the Europeans possessed such a superior work ethic, why did their prosperity require millions of enslaved labourers? A civilization that relies on coerced bodies should hesitate before praising its own industrious spirit.

The paradox deepens in the twentieth century. As Europe and the United States industrialised into great powers, they steadily shifted their agriculture to Latin America and Africa, and their manufacturing to East Asia. The global economy rearranged itself along a new axis: the so-called engines of Western productivity were powered by the labour of non-Western hands. If Weber had travelled through Asia, he might have rewritten his thesis altogether—perhaps not “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” but “The Discipline of Asia and the Exhaustion of Europe.”

History, when stripped of its comforting narratives, forces us to confront a sobering truth: Civilizations do not rise because they work harder or pray better. They rise because they discover, justify, or outsource labour.

Europe tells this story with a peculiar combination of moral pride and historical amnesia. But beneath the surface lies an older, harsher logic: whenever Europe loses control over cheap labour—whether in antiquity or in modern times—it enters a winter of decline. And whenever it regains such control, it reclaims a summer of strength.

Whether this is a cycle or a curse depends on what humanity chooses to remember—and what it chooses to forget.

Sankhya and Yoga as one truth: The metaphysical harmony of the twin philosophical systems

Bhishma Lying on the Bed of Arrows

Among the six classical systems (darshanas) of Indian philosophy, Sankhya and Yoga stand as closely related schools that complement each other in both doctrine and purpose. 

Sankhya, traditionally attributed to the sage Kapila, is regarded as one of the oldest philosophical systems in India. It lays out a profound theory of cosmic evolution through the interaction of Purusha (pure consciousness) and Prakriti (primordial nature). 

Yoga, systematized by Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, builds upon Sankhya’s metaphysics but translates its insights into a practical discipline—a method for the realization of the self through moral restraint, meditation, and concentration.

Both systems share the same metaphysical foundation; their distinction lies not in essence but in method. While Sankhya seeks liberation through the power of discrimination and knowledge (jnana), Yoga pursues it through disciplined physical and mental practices that still the movements of the mind.

The Mahabharata, that monumental repository of India’s philosophical heritage, contains nearly 900 references to Yoga and about 150 to Sankhya. In many passages, the two are mentioned together, indicating not opposition but integration—a recognition that the pursuit of truth demands both knowledge and practice.

In the Shanti Parva (specifically the Moksha-dharma Parva), Yudhishthira asks Bhishma to explain the difference between Sankhya and Yoga. Bhishma’s reply encapsulates the spirit of Indian philosophical pluralism:

“The followers of Sankhya praise their system, and the Yogins praise the Yoga system. Each proclaims that their own path is the best for attaining life’s highest ends. I consider both these views to be true. I approve of both Yoga and Sankhya. There is no knowledge equal to Sankhya, and no power equal to Yoga. If practiced with devotion, either will lead to the highest goal.”

The essence of Bhishma’s teaching is unmistakable: Sankhya and Yoga are two expressions of the same quest. What the followers of Sankhya experience through discernment and wisdom, the Yogins realize through meditation and discipline. To those who have attained insight, there is no real difference between the two.

This harmony of doctrine and practice is reaffirmed in the Bhagavad Gita, where Krishna tells Arjuna: “Both Sankhya and Yoga lead to the same goal; only the means differ. Yet among the two, Yoga is superior for those who act.”

In this synthesis, Indian thought dissolves the apparent conflict between knowledge and action. Sankhya offers the vision—the metaphysical map of consciousness and matter—while Yoga provides the discipline to traverse it. Together they represent the twin wings of liberation: wisdom and effort, contemplation and action, understanding and realization, converging toward the same eternal truth.

The myth of World War III: Europe’s civil wars and the end of colonial mobilisation

Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini, Ciano 

just before signing the 

Munich Agreement, Sept 1938

Since the guns roared in Ukraine and the fires spread across the Middle East, the world’s commentators have been murmuring a familiar prophecy: World War III is upon us. 

Yet the phrase itself is a ghost — an echo of the 20th century that refuses to die. The truth is simpler and more sobering: a “world war” in the classical sense is no longer possible. What we mistake for a global conflagration is often a regional contest amplified by the memories of Europe’s own cataclysms.

A true world war presupposes that a significant number of great powers are locked in combat — not in proxy or policy, but in arms. History, however, offers no such precedent. Even the so-called World Wars were not global wars in the literal sense; they were European civil wars with imperial appendages.

The First and Second World Wars were Europe’s internal convulsions — tragic quarrels among its own dynasties, ideologies, and ambitions. Their scale became “worldwide” not because the world chose to fight, but because Europe commanded it to fight. The empires of the day possessed colonies, and through the machinery of imperial authority, they dragged Asia, Africa, and Latin America into their continental vendettas.

Millions of young men from lands that had no quarrel with Germany or France or Britain were compelled to die for them. Indian soldiers perished in Flanders, African battalions marched through deserts not their own, and Caribbean sailors sank in cold Atlantic waters — all in wars that had nothing to do with their destiny. 

The term “world war” thus concealed an ethical scandal: it was not the world that went to war, but the world that was made to fight for Europe.

Today, such coercion is impossible. Colonialism — the great European engine of conscription — has been dismantled. No European power, nor any other, can now summon men and resources from unwilling nations to die in its stead. Every state, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, now answers to its own conscience, not to a colonial office in London, Paris, or Berlin.

Therefore, if Europe, or any power bloc, chooses to engage in conflict, it must bear the full moral and material cost of its own belligerence. The rest of the world will no longer offer its youth as collateral for European anxieties.

The world has grown both more connected and more sovereign. It is bound by trade, data, and dialogue — not by imperial chains. In this new reality, the very notion of a “world war” belongs to a bygone order of domination. Wars may still erupt, but they will be regional storms, not planetary infernos.

The 21st century’s greatest challenge is not the prevention of another “world war,” but the prevention of a world order that still imagines itself through Europe’s old wars. The age of imperial mobilization is over; the age of moral independence has begun.

The world need not march again to Europe’s drums.

The empire’s orphans: Pakistan and Afghanistan in the ruins of American strategy

President Reagan with Afghan Mujahideen

Oval Office in 1983

Afghanistan and Pakistan are once again at war, each claiming to have struck devastating blows against the other. Kabul says hundreds of Pakistani soldiers lie dead; Islamabad responds with air raids deep inside Afghan territory. 

It is a grotesque irony—two nations that once fought together in the name of faith and freedom now destroy each other in the name of security. But this is not a new tragedy. It is the final act in a drama written long ago by Washington’s pen and executed with Islamabad’s hand.

Since the 1970s, Pakistan has served as the principal instrument of American power in South Asia. It was in Pakistan’s madrassas and military camps that the jihad against the Soviets was conceived, funded, and armed. The United States provided the dollars, and Pakistan provided the zeal. 

In the 1980s, Pakistani generals and politicians openly celebrated their role as “the sword arm of the free world.” They spoke of Afghanistan as their “strategic depth,” a phrase that revealed both ambition and arrogance. The Taliban, born from the refugee camps of Peshawar, was not an accident of history; it was Islamabad’s deliberate project—what its leaders once proudly called their greatest foreign-policy achievement.

The destruction of Afghanistan was thus not merely collateral damage of the Cold War; it was the intended price of Pakistan’s regional fantasies. When the Soviet Union fell, the West walked away, but Pakistan stayed, cultivating the Taliban as a tool of control over its war-scarred neighbor. 

Through the 1990s, Pakistani advisers shaped Kabul’s policies, its economy, even its ideology. Afghanistan was reduced to a protectorate in everything but name. What was once an ancient civilization became an experimental ground for geopolitical engineering.

Then came 9/11. The monster that Pakistan had built and America had sponsored turned against its makers. Washington called for Pakistan’s help once more, and the generals in Rawalpindi obliged—turning on their own creation with one hand while secretly shielding it with the other. 

This double game defined the next two decades. The U.S. poured billions into Pakistan’s military and intelligence networks, only to discover that the Taliban’s sanctuaries lay across the border in Pakistani territory. Islamabad played both arsonist and fireman, ensuring that the flames never died completely. The longer the fire burned, the more aid flowed.

When America finally withdrew from Afghanistan in August 2021, it left behind the same Taliban it had overthrown twenty years earlier. The circle was complete. The irony was cruel: Pakistan had again helped bring the Taliban to power—only to find itself their next target. Today’s war between Kabul and Islamabad is not a clash of civilizations or religions; it is the implosion of a forty-year deceit. 

The Taliban’s protégés in Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), are now laying siege to their old patrons. The “strategic depth” has become a strategic grave.

The deeper tragedy is that both Pakistan and Afghanistan have spent half a century mistaking servitude for strategy. They fought wars not for their people, but for the illusions of empire—first Soviet, then American. The geography of their suffering has remained constant: villages bombed, schools closed, refugees displaced, futures erased. The Americans left, but their architecture of dependency remained. Pakistan’s generals still see power through foreign eyes, and Afghanistan’s rulers still wield it through borrowed guns.

History offers its verdict without emotion. Nations that build their politics on the approval of outsiders end up fighting wars they never truly chose. Pakistan may blame Kabul for harboring terrorists; Kabul may denounce Islamabad’s airstrikes. But both are prisoners of a past they helped create. The smoke rising over the Durand Line today is not just the sign of a border at war—it is the funeral pyre of sovereignty sacrificed to ambition.

Until Pakistan and Afghanistan free themselves from the ghosts of American patronage and their own delusions of control, they will continue to fight not for territory, but for the very meaning of independence. For now, they remain the empire’s orphans—armed, abandoned, and endlessly at war with themselves.

Russia plays Chess, China plays Go, America plays Poker: The games that shape our century

“Russia plays chess, China plays Go, and America plays poker.” ~ With this one line, economist Jeffrey Sachs captures the essence of global strategy—three civilizations, three games, three ways of thinking about power. 

Russia plots its moves for positional dominance, China builds patient encirclements that last centuries, and America plays a fast, deceptive, high-stakes game—one that dazzles in the moment but often collapses when the cards are revealed.

In these metaphors lie not just clever comparisons but the essence of our age. The 21st century is no longer a clash of armies—it is a war of time horizons. Russia and China play for eternity; America plays for the evening, the next election, or a one-night stand.

Russia’s moves on the global chessboard are deliberate and cold. Every gambit in Ukraine, every energy pipeline to Europe, every alliance in West Asia is a calculated step to protect the king—the Russian state and its sphere of influence. Chess is not about speed; it is about control of the center. It rewards foresight, not frenzy. 

And that is the Russian temperament: to suffer losses, endure isolation, and emerge with the board rearranged in its favor. In Putin’s Eurasian vision, even setbacks are sacrifices—pawns given up to strengthen the position of the empire.

China, meanwhile, plays Go, not chess. It does not seek checkmate; it seeks quiet encirclement. Each port, each investment, each fiber-optic cable is a stone placed on the vast board of influence. Go is about patience and space—it is the art of conquest without confrontation. 

The Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the Digital Silk Road—these are not mere economic programs; they are the slow accumulation of presence. When Go is played well, there is no single battle won, only a landscape transformed.

Xi Jinping’s China thinks not in election cycles but in dynastic arcs. It measures time in centuries, not years. Its strategy is to create dependencies so subtle that rivals do not even realize they have been surrounded. A mine in Africa, a highway in Central Asia, a satellite over the Indian Ocean—all are stones on the board. As Chinese strategist Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War: “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

America, however, sits at a different table—the poker table, loud and luminous. Its strength lies in theatre, in the ability to bluff, to make the world believe it holds the winning hand. For decades, it worked. The U.S. projected an aura of invincibility—military bases in a hundred countries, the dollar as the global reserve, Hollywood as soft power, Silicon Valley as modern Olympus. Yet poker is a game of perception, not patience. You win until someone calls your bluff.

The American system, Sachs implies, thrives on short-term wins: a war here, a sanction there, a revolution elsewhere. It operates in news cycles, not historical cycles. Each “victory” becomes the seed of the next crisis—Iraq after Afghanistan, Libya after Iraq, Ukraine after Libya. The moves come fast, the pot grows huge, but the debt piles higher. Poker, unlike chess or Go, has no endgame—only exhaustion.

The tragedy is not that America lacks power, but that it mistakes momentum for strategy. It fights wars of choice but loses wars of consequence. It spends trillions to control oil, only to be overtaken by nations that invest billions in chips and data. Its greatest weapon—its image—is now its greatest vulnerability. You can bluff once, twice, a hundred times; but in the long game of civilizations, the truth of the hand is eventually revealed.

The world today reflects this collision of games. Russia defends its core; China expands its periphery; America doubles down on the next round. Meanwhile, the rest of the world—India, Brazil, Indonesia, the Gulf nations—watches closely, learning the rules of all three. 

In this emerging multipolar order, the cleverest players are those who can combine patience with agility, endurance with deception. The future will belong neither to the bluffer nor to the conqueror but to the strategist who can see through the illusion of the table itself.

History reminds us that every empire eventually meets its game’s limit. The Soviet Union ran out of moves. The British Empire ran out of colonies. The American empire risks running out of credibility. But China and Russia, for all their calculation, also face internal fragilities—demography, dissent, debt. In the coming decades, the world may witness a battle of fatigue, not of firepower—a test of whose system can endure chaos without collapsing.

“Power,” wrote Henry Kissinger, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” But desire without discipline breeds ruin. The empires that endure are those that master the rhythm of restraint—knowing when to act and when to wait. Russia and China may not always win, but they play as if the board is infinite. America plays as if the table will always be there.

In the end, the metaphor extends beyond geopolitics—it is a parable of civilizations. Chess demands calculation, Go requires patience, poker rewards risk. But the 21st century demands something rarer: wisdom—the ability to know when to change the game itself.

When the pieces settle, and the cards are down, it will not be the loudest player who prevails, but the quiet one who has been planning all along.