Although the present leadership in India clearly supports a multipolar world order, the US’s unparalleled ascendance with its self-obsessed approach in international relations has gravely hurt the national interests of poor and developing nations clubbed as the Third World, including India. This inevitably discourages the consolidation of global and regional institutions of multipolarity and also hurts the solemn spirit of multilateral negotiations, leading to much loss for Third World nations.
Against this backdrop, India’s national development goals need freedom of decision-making and independent actions to be pursued by its foreign policy, characterised by the doctrine of non-alignment, so as to procure and preserve its national interests and discourage alignment of nations into rival blocs. This would consolidate the spirit of multipolarity in international relations and ensure India’s active participation in all multilateral instruments promoting peace, progress, and security across the world.
While the changing world today often poses considerable challenges, or even threats, to the very survival of a state due to one reason or the other, given the structural compulsions and constraints of international relations—as pointed out by a great realist of our times, John Mearsheimer—India’s ancient moral traditions and rich cultural heritage, characterized by peace, love, tolerance, non-violence, justice, and freedom, altogether manifesting Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam and Sarve Bhavantu Sukhinah, always underscore its magnificent policy of humanism and globalism. This is for the welfare of the entire humanity while upholding strategic autonomy with respect to the country’s independent foreign policy, particularly marked by the policy of non-alignment.
Although this policy is often rejected as obsolete or irrelevant after the disintegration of the erstwhile USSR and the demise of the Cold War during the closing years of the 1980s, the rising membership of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) sustains its relevance even in current international relations. Evidently, India and most of the non-aligned members never compromised with the policy of non-alignment, notwithstanding reasonable mutual differences among them over their respective national interests.
However, the reasons behind systemic balance, consistently evolving out of the Law of Nature sweeping across existence itself—as underscored by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle during the 4th and 3rd centuries BC, and also by sages and seers in ancient India—always act to restore the balance and order at both the individual and national levels, re-establishing peace and security across the world. Indeed, the collective conscience of humanity always reflects the hidden wishes of the supreme divine, which essentially acts to restore balance and order.
Fortunately, India’s foreign policy has always adhered to the Laws of Nature to respect the supreme conscience in pursuit of world peace and the welfare of all, including itself. But most powerful nations in the West, especially America, pursue only their short-term national interests while ignoring the collective conscience and larger interests of global humanity, thereby leading to immense troubles, disorder, and untold trauma for people at large. This undermines global peace, progress, prosperity, and security.
Such tendencies strengthen the monopoly of super and major powers over global financial institutions like the WTO, World Bank, and its soft-loaning agency IMF, as well as over the military architecture propagated through alliances like NATO, ANZUS, and the (now disbanded) Warsaw and Baghdad Pacts. Their huge arms and weapons build-up, including nuclear arsenals, are used to frighten and compel poor and developing countries to follow their dictates. In addition, they have formulated several discriminatory treaties regarding disarmament and arms control, including the NPT and CTBT, in a manner that preserves their supremacy. They also maintain a monopoly in groupings such as the NSG and FMCT, besides enjoying veto power in the UN Security Council, thereby establishing a hierarchical power structure in which Third World countries have little scope to resist discriminatory designs.
These structural compulsions result in rising economic inequalities and military threats, altogether engendering security concerns—as witnessed in the recent short military flare-ups between the US and Iran, and also Venezuela, besides the long-continuing Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas armed conflict, which has taken an uglier turn with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis from Yemen opening new fronts against Israel. These are indeed grave dangers to established peace and security.
Prevailing tensions between China and the US, and also Taiwan, as well as simmering tensions between North and South Korea—including China’s expansionist and militarist assertions in the Indo-Pacific and the South China Sea—are ample proof of injustice and exploitation perpetrated upon weaker states by powerful nations. This is a clear violation of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia (1648), enshrined later in the United Nations Charter, laying the foundation of sovereign equality of nation-states.
Thus, the consistent rise of China and Russia, in association with Tehran, North Korea, Pakistan and a few more undemocratic states—both economically and militarily—against the supremacy of the United States and its allies in Western Europe, continues to pose tremendous threats to the liberal-democratic order long dominated by Anglo-European nations.
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