Reductive commitment traps

By the time these lines reach you, Russia's President Putin must have concluded his two-day visit to India. Some analysts are viewing it as one of President Putin's more expensive outings for both the visitor and the host. But more of that context later. Similarly, French President Macron's three-day China visit must have concluded by then, too. At the time of writing, they have not, so one cannot definitively comment on the outcomes.

But you will notice that in today's highly charged global situation, both visits represent risky gambits. India is already paying a high price for importing oil from a highly sanctioned Russia. While Sino-US relations seem to have improved slightly following the meeting between Presidents Xi and Trump in South Korea, hawks dominate debates within think tank circles in both Washington and Beijing. Therefore, an outreach by France and the EU can, by default, be interpreted in a million different ways. Not all of them are quite savoury.

So, how have New Delhi and France sought to manage the optics? Indian analysts have taken extra pains to dismiss the prospects of further hard military procurements from Russia. As if that wasn't enough, the State Department's Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs put out the following tweet: "Great news in our defence relationship with India. India's Ministry of Defence signed a sustainment package for its 24 MH-60R Seahawk helicopters, developed by Lockheed Martin. The 946-million-dollar package will enhance the Indian Navy's maritime capabilities, build interoperability with the US and regional partners, and make both our nations safer and more prosperous."

This is a clever move. But it is called balancing. Indian pundits further maintained that they were looking for access to Russia's consumer market. Suddenly shut out by two major global consumer economies (the US and China), Indian businesses are seeking enhanced access to the Russian market. The problem is that even if they get it, they may not be able to withstand Chinese competition. And Moscow will not want to alienate Beijing in the middle of a major war. So, some balancing there too.

Pakistan has also witnessed an improvement in its relationship with Russia. Hence, as President Putin headed to New Delhi, Pakistan hosted a leader of another important CSTO member state, Kyrgyzstan.

There was no direct French corollary to New Delhi's procurement from the US. But France is playing an active part in President Trump's efforts to broker a Ukraine-Russia ceasefire. Given that one of the stated objectives of President Macron's visit was to find a resolution to the intractable war, both these factors should be able to mollify Washington.

The purpose of bringing up all these outreaches and balancing acts, dear readers, is to highlight how complicated and interdependent our world is today. In such a complex global and regional context, raging wars like the one in Ukraine and the one that seems to be concluding in Gaza add further complexity because old tribal sensibilities and muscle memories reassert themselves. In such a situation, if you find the talk of bipolarity or multipolarity resurfacing, that is only symptomatic of two critical failures of punditry.

Every time I bring it up, I risk offending my teachers and friends associated with the discipline of international relations. But even they will agree that the discipline has let itself go and has not produced a single useful insight into the workings of the future of the world order. It failed to predict the end of the Cold War, the behaviour of actors like Iraq under Saddam, or the re-emergence of Russia as a major power. China's rise was a given. But again, the pundits failed to predict India's abysmal performance in the four-day war with Pakistan. Following this war, the Indian government claimed that it had put an end to Pakistan's nuclear blackmail. What the war achieved, however, was an end to the notion of India's invincibility due to numerical strength and conventional war blackmail. Irrationality has its own dynamics, but this is the upshot of the rational thinking that has emerged since the war.

The second critical failure of the discipline is the balkanisation of the theoretical space. There are so many theories today that an analyst cannot keep their head straight. So, what do prudent analysts do? They revert to what worked in the past. With the help of complacent historians, they have accomplished enough retrofitting to make bipolarity and multipolarity legitimate realities. Can a world be called bipolar when one power (the USSR) is constantly losing power and wealth? Can the term multipolarity be applied to the pre-Cold War world where the term superpower had not entered the formal lexicon and modern nation-states were still working out their current shapes and boundaries? All of this is retroprojection.

But another reason why you hear discussions about multipolarity and bipolarity is because IR pundits often moonlight for powerful interests like states, lobbyists, and increasingly for big business. Why else would you have so many disparate and unsubstantiated theories? How much data can two centuries of the post-Concert of Europe world order produce? There are only 193 members of the UN today. Not every country is out to assert dominance or even seek a fair shake. If you cannot justify your actions through the existing body of work, you can surely invent your theory. Professor Ken Booth called it "fast food realism" and "speaking power to truth". Commitment traps based on such flimsy assumptions can only distort further analysis.

Remove this glut from the system and you see a world of infinite possibilities. It is a fact that India and Pakistan today have an almost identical list of allies. If they decide to work together, Afghanistan and Central Asia may prosper quickly. China and America share more than they let on. Europe and Russia cannot change neighbours. And since tech billionaires now use the Cold War straitjacket to restrict policy choices for each power (don't regulate us, or your rival will win), turning a blind eye to their machinations in the name of realpolitik, and that too in the age of AI and space exploration, will be the undoing of every nation-state and the decline of state power as we know it. I remain open to new possibilities, but I will never want to give up one in the hand for the proverbial two in the bush.

Today, the reality is that every state faces almost an identical set of challenges. We are sleepwalking into a revolutionary new age about which we understand little. In the meantime, the Western democratic consensus is dissolving. We are only a decade away from witnessing the emergence of full-blown techno-autocracies among the democratic states. This is not an age for war. This age is meant for aggressive preparations and disregarding the counsel of self-serving and reductive punditry. Stop using Windows 3.1 for today's supercomputers.