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  • In the Age of Technology, Does Clausewitz Really Matter?

    In the Age of Technology, Does Clausewitz Really Matter?

    For the uninitiated, Carl Von Clausewitz (1780-1831) was a Prussian General and one of the foremost military thinkers of his era. His seminal work, Vom Kriege (On War), remains required reading to this day.

    While attending the book launch of a respected colleague and friend on the nature and conduct of future wars, I was immediately struck by his comment questioning Clausewitz’s relevance nearly two centuries after his passing. Ironically, his book’s title was an adaptation of a quote from Clausewitz’s work!

    Undoubtedly, questioning the relevance of his ideas, first published in 1832 by his widow after his sudden death from cholera, is a pertinent question. The ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Iran have made abundantly clear the overwhelming impact of technology on the battlefield.

    That is not only changing how armies are organised and fight, but also reshaping our understanding of the very nature or character of war, what victory implies, and how one aspires to achieve it. In fact, these are the very questions that Clausewitz examined more than two centuries ago.

    Thus, there is no gainsaying the fact that any serious critical commentary on the relevance, or otherwise, of his Works in this day and age requires us to first delve into the prevailing environment of the time. It stands to reason that we cannot fully grasp his concepts and philosophy, or their nuances, without a better understanding of the influences that shaped his thinking.

     Interestingly, earlier in his service, he spent two years as a French captive in 1806, following the Prussian defeat by Napoleon. At the time, he served as Aide-de-Camp to Prince August of Prussia. After his release, he initially tutored Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm of Prussia, then helped Scharnhorst rebuild the Prussian Army and served as an advisor to the Archduke of Prussia.

    Subsequently, upset that Prussia was forced to assist the French, he resigned his commission in 1812 to join the Imperial Russian Army. In September of that year, he fought at the brutal Battle of Borodino, the bloodiest single day of combat and the turning point in Napoleon’s campaign against Russia. He was wounded in another battle in 1813.

    He then rejoined the Prussian Army and went on to serve as Chief of Staff to one of the Prussian Corps Commanders at Waterloo in 1815. From 1818 to 1830, he was the Administrative Director of the Military Academy in Berlin, where he devoted himself to his writings.

    His ideas on war were undoubtedly grounded in his own experiences in the field and at the highest levels of the military. Beyond that, his views were also shaped by the collision of two major historical revolutions that dominated his life and times.

    The first was the French Revolution, which introduced the concept of “total war and mass mobilisation” (levée en masse) and transformed warfare from a limited conflict fought by mercenary armies into a clash driven by nationalism and the collective will of the civilian populace.

    The second is the rise of Romanticism, a reaction against the rigid and rationalistic ideas of the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. An Age that championed logic, order and scientific calculation, including the notion that warfare could be calculated with perfect mathematical formulae.

    Romanticism, on the other hand, held the belief that human beings cannot fully understand the universe through intellect alone. It shifted the focus towards intense emotion, individual imagination, and the wild, untamed power of nature.

    On War, as translated by Colonel J J Graham, is in three volumes, divided into a total of eight “books” as follows:

    • Book I: On the Nature of War.
    • Book II: On the Theory of War.
    • Book III: Of Strategy in General.
    • Book IV: Combat.
    • Book V: Military Forces
    • Book VI: Defence
    • Book VII: The Attack.
    • Book VIII: Plan of War

    In essence, Clausewitz came to believe that war was not governed by any rigid system of rules and principles in its conduct. Instead, it celebrated the free operation of genius, changing historical conditions, moral forces, and the elements of uncertainty and chance. These elements, especially the enemy’s counteractions, created “friction” that made even the simplest tasks difficult, uncertain, and wholly based on nonlinear logic.

    Many regard his most important contribution to strategic thought as his dictum that “war is a continuation of state policy by other means”, thereby making clear that the military is the last resort and must be so tasked as to assist in fulfilling the chosen political aim. In this context, even newer concepts, such as the Chinese concept of ‘Three Warfares‘ and what is now commonly referred to as hybrid or grey zone war, only reinforce the Clausewitzian dictum.

    After all, for example, the Three Warfares concept integrates psychological, media and legal warfare in peacetime to achieve strategic political objectives without resorting to violent confrontation. As the leading thinker on this subject, Stefan Halper of Cambridge University explained, “it is a dynamic three-dimensional war-fighting process that constitutes war by other means.”

    If one were to apply this Clausewitzian dictum to the ongoing US-Iran Conflict, the major lessons that emerge, and which point to its continuing relevance, are:

    • First, American leadership’s lack of clarity about its political aim. Was it regime change, preventing Iran from going nuclear, or ensuring the Straits of Hormuz remained open? Each aim required very different military responses. By trying to club them together, the US Military fell through the cracks, with debilitating results.
    • The fact that US military operations were launched at a time when there were indications that third-party-facilitated negotiations over nuclear proliferation were succeeding, probably because of the impact of the earlier attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities and the ongoing economic blockade, again points to a lack of clarity regarding political aim.
    • Alternatively, if regime change was the political objective, then ground operations to “compel their opponent to fulfil their will” were unavoidable. That would have required establishing a suitable firm base from which ground forces, in appropriate strength, could have been launched. It is clear that confusion over the selection of the primary political objective and the premature unleashing of forces, without adequate preparation, is largely responsible for the situation the United States finds itself in.

    There have been public statements by President Trump on a couple of occasions when his frustrations with the campaign’s progress have got the better of him, hinting at the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. It is a threat, though expressed much more subtly, that has also been made by a frustrated President Putin, unhappy with the stalemate in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian Conflict.

    While the portents of such an action are deeply disturbing, the question of escalation can be clearly understood through the distinction Clausewitz made between ‘Absolute War’, or war on paper as he called it, and ‘Real War’, or war as it really occurs in the real world. In the abstract, absolute war aims at compelling the adversary to do one’s will, with no logical limit to the application of force, which clearly invites inherent escalation as the adversary responds in a like manner, and can only end in the annihilation of one or both sides.

    Real war, by contrast, is premised on fulfilling political objectives shaped by three “real-world” factors, the ‘Trinity’, as he called them. These are, first, the government and the political objectives it sets, primarily to ensure it remains in power. Second, the people: their expectations, levels of patriotism, and willingness to bear the humongous costs war imposes, especially as “friction” adds to the unpredictability of outcomes. And finally, the military (or Army, as it was then), and their capabilities, standards of leadership, training, and levels of motivation and morale.

    From all of this, it is quite evident that if wars are to lead to a successful culmination, a balance among the dynamics that shape each of the factors is vital. The practical, the social, and the psychological have to be in harmony. Otherwise, escalation, stalemate, or annihilation are the likely outcomes. Clearly, all wars of the 21st Century, whether past or ongoing, have borne out this truth.

    In the context of the US-Iran Conflict, for example, Iran, by its actions, has shown us the impact of friction on an adversary’s conduct of operations. Whilst wars are still tethered to Clausewitz’s dictum “war is a continuation of policy by other means”, a rational, intentional instrument of state policy to achieve political goals, victory continues to be defined by one’s ability to impose one’s will on an adversary, which, in most circumstances, requires a preponderance of boots on the ground. Something that seems unlikely when adversaries have no common border and are separated by 1000s of kilometres.

    What has changed, however, is the character of war, with its conduct shaped by tactics, technology, and psycho-social dynamics. Iran has adopted an asymmetric response and shifted its use of missiles from purely military destruction to using them as tools of influence, targeting urban centres and infrastructure to create psycho-social impact. Clausewitz, in fact, referred to this very aspect when he described “war as more than a true chameleon that slightly adapts its characteristics to the given case”.

    While a chameleon changes only its colour on the outside and remains exactly the same creature on the inside, war changes its internal nature in every single conflict. Interestingly, in his work he covered only two operations of war, attack and defence, on which victory depended, which, it can be said, in the modern context translate to manoeuvre and firepower.

    Although all attention and focus at present are on technological advancements and their impact on the nature and conduct of war, the fact of the matter is that C4ISR, drones, artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems and stand-off precision-guided munitions continue to directly affect the two fundamental aspects governing the conduct of operations—manoeuvre and firepower, or attack and defence.

    To fully appreciate Clausewitz’s importance and relevance in the 21st Century, one must clearly understand the distinction he drew between strategy and tactics. As he put it in Book 2, Chapter 1, “Tactics is the theory of the use of military forces in combat. Strategy is the theory of the use of combats for the object of the war”.

    As the prominent Clausewitz scholar Christopher Bassford emphasises in his introductory essay to the book ‘Clausewitz on Strategy: Inspiration and Insight from a Master Strategist’ (Ed T von Ghyczy, B von Oetinger, C Bassford, published by John Wiley & Sons, 2001), ‘On War’ is “quintessentially a philosophy of strategy that contains the conceptual seeds for its constant rejuvenation”.

    He implies that Clausewitz’s holistic approach incorporates logical, historical, psychological, and sociological elements to prevent strategic thinking from becoming rigid dogma.

    In essence, Clausewitz helps us understand how strategy should be formulated: not within some laid-down matrix, but through first principles that allow preparation for future conflict. An issue that is often missed leads militaries to fall into the “Last War Trap”, or, to quote Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister during the closing stages of World War I, “generals always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they had won it”.

    Other examples also show why Clausewitz remains relevant today. The universal Principles of War, which most militaries continue to follow, emanate from the very philosophy that Clausewitz enunciated. For example, take two of the accepted Principles of War—‘selection and maintenance of aim’ and ‘concentration of force’. In Book 3, Chapter 11, Clausewitz states, “The best strategy is always to be very strong; first in general, then at the decisive point… There is no more imperative and no simpler law for strategy than to keep the forces concentrated. No portion is to be separated from the main body unless called away by some urgent necessity.”

    Similarly, regarding ‘Flexibility’, another important Principle of War that remains relevant today, he writes in Book 1, Chapter 7, “Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult”. In essence, he suggests that because unexpected complications (friction) always occur, a plan must be simple and adaptable, so that it can withstand chaos. The true genius of the commander lies in its preparation.

    In conclusion, I would add that while it may superficially appear that wars of today have no connection to either Napoleon’s invasion of Russia or how the Battle of Waterloo came to be fought, the truth is that they remain intricately connected. It is this vital connection that Clausewitz minutely examined — namely, what was meant to be achieved by undertaking a war and the factors that governed the formulation of strategy. What he wrote two centuries ago remains relevant, and we can only ignore his views on strategy and the higher direction of war to our own detriment.

  • From the Illusion of Linearity to the Simultaneity of the Non-Simultaneous: Rise of the Major Middle Powers

    From the Illusion of Linearity to the Simultaneity of the Non-Simultaneous: Rise of the Major Middle Powers

    Introduction: The Crisis of Mapping

    The epochal shift of the years 1989/91 marked not only the physical collapse of the Eastern Bloc and the end of the bipolar world order, but it also unleashed a fundamental crisis of historico-philosophical and geopolitical orientation. With the disappearance of the rigidly frozen fronts of the Cold War, political science was confronted with the monumental challenge of conceptually remapping a rapidly changing global reality. Looking back at the central theoretical frameworks that emerged in the decades following this systemic rupture, it becomes apparent that they are often discussed in isolation from one another.

    However, if we move beyond a purely additive comparison and look deeper, a profound logical structure reveals itself: these approaches can be understood as sequential stages on a dialectical ladder of insight. Each stage reacts to the blind spots of the previous one, until the system reaches a threshold where the linear sequence itself collapses, giving way to a completely new phase – the era of hybrid globalisation.

    The Dialectical Ladder of Post-Cold War Theory

    Stage 1: The Liberal Illusion and the Confusion of Phase with Telos

    At the beginning of this movement stands the West’s absolute euphoria, paradigmatically formulated in Francis Fukuyama’s highly influential thesis of “The End of History”. Fukuyama conceived the triumph of the Western model not as a temporary historical victory, but as the final teleological endpoint of humanity’s ideological evolution. His core thesis postulated an unstoppable, universal wave of worldwide democratisation, flanked and stabilised by global regulation through the free market.

    From the perspective of historical movement, Fukuyama reactivated the figure of linear ascent: he assumed that the achievements of liberal democracy could be globalised irreversibly, independent of local contexts. What Fukuyama overlooked, however, was the confusion of a purely local, Western snapshot with a global constant. The disappearance of the grand ideological adversary did not mean the disappearance of politics itself; it merely laid bare deeper structural fractures that market forces could not regulate away.

    Stage 2: The Counter-Strike of Material and Social Reality

    As a direct antithesis to Fukuyama’s hyper-optimistic linearity, a radical disillusionment quickly materialised. In his dystopian essay “The Coming Anarchy,” Robert Kaplan drew the exact counter-image. Instead of worldwide democratisation, Kaplan witnessed the unstoppable decay of state structures, driven by overpopulation, resource scarcity, rampant crime, and the collapse of post-colonial orders.

    Kaplan’s historico-philosophical consequence was the figure of linear decline, coupled with a global imperial imperative: to prevent the global periphery from sliding into total chaos, the remaining Western empire must enforce order worldwide through strategic and military hardness. Kaplan correctly understood that global space contained structural cracks and profound imbalances, yet he remained trapped in the mechanical assumption that a single hegemonic centre could immanently coerce order.

    Stage 3: The Culturalization of Conflict

    Once it became obvious that neither the market nor the American empire disguised as global democracy could guarantee universal pacification, a radical shift in perspective took place at the third stage—away from ideology and geopolitics, and toward culture. Samuel P. Huntington confronted the world with his paradigm of the “Clash of Civilisations”. Huntington rightly recognised that the fault lines of global politics after the Cold War were no longer primarily ideological or economic, but ran along cultural and civilizational identities.

    Huntington’s framework draws heavily on cyclical patterns and the assumption of incommensurable cultural blocs. He argued that the West’s attempt to impose its values as universal would inevitably provoke violent resistance from other civilisations. Although Huntington was justly criticised for his holistic and essentialist understanding of culture, his lasting merit remains the insight that identity politics and the retreat into seemingly unshakeable cultural cores had become the driving forces of modern conflict.

    Stage 4: The De-statization and Privatisation of Violence

    While Huntington still conceptualised the actors as large civilizational collectives, the fourth stage shifted the focus to the micro-political and economic decomposition of warfare itself. Formulated by scholars such as Mary Kaldor and Herfried Münkler, the phenomenon of “New Wars” and the privatisation of warfare moved to the centre of analysis.

    Here, the classic Clausewitzian triad of state, people, and army dissolved completely. In place of state-centric confrontations stepped warlords, private military companies and transnational criminal networks, violent gangs and terrorist cells. These actors no longer utilise violence as a means to achieve a political purpose, but rather as a business model or a permanent form of existence. This stage marks the total loss of an ordering global axis; it describes the oscillation of violence in a state of pure decentralisation, where war feeds upon itself.

    Stages 5 & 6: The Pluralisation of Power and the Return of Great Power Politics

    The subsequent stages of this development describe the geopolitical transformation of the international system in the early twenty-first century. Fareed Zakaria captured this shift with his phrase “The Rise of the Rest” (The Post-American World). This approach definitively breaks with Eurocentric and Western hegemony. The rise of China, India, and other emerging powers is not a mere copycatting of Western modernisation, but an economic and technological shift of epic proportions.

    Closely coupled with “The Rise of the Rest” is the simultaneous phenomenon of the resurgence of Great Powers—the return of classic Great Power Competition between the US, China, and Russia. Zakaria and contemporary realists demonstrate that the world has become multipolar – instead of non-alignment, multi-alignment has become the centre of the major middle powers. The West has lost its monopoly on defining the terms of modernity and globalisation.

    The Culminating Point: Hybrid Globalisation

    When looking back at these six points, the political science debate has mostly treated them as chronological phases: euphoria was followed by shock, then cultural division, asymmetric threats, and finally multipolarity. My central thesis, however, is that these phases are no longer chained together sequentially. They have collapsed into each other and occur simultaneously within the exact same historical moment.

    Traditional linear or purely cyclical thinking fails when facing the complexity of our present. We are not experiencing a succession of eras, but a radical simultaneity of the non-simultaneous. This is precisely the phenomenon I conceptualise as Hybrid Globalisation, a framework I have unfolded in detail in the journal India Quarterly.

    By hybrid globalisation, I mean the highly tense, profoundly paradoxical process in which technological, economic, and digital globalisation advances unstoppably, while at the same time radical local, regional, and cultural fragmentation and rejection take place. It is the simultaneity of total interconnectedness and total isolation. In this process, identities do not simply become fluid; they fragment, creating existential vacuums often filled by reactive violence and the radical construction of friend-enemy binaries.

    The Technology of Re-Feudalisation: Algorithmic Fragmentation and Digital Legalism

    To fully grasp the current mutation of this process, we must expand our diagnostic matrix to include the technological driver of this condition: the “Cultural Revolution from the Right.” Driven by libertarian tech-milliardaires and the ideological vanguard of the “Dark Enlightenment” (such as Peter Thiel), this movement represents a toxic, modern synthesis of radical fragmentation and one-dimensional control. It uses technological acceleration to exploit the structural tensions of hybrid globalisation.

    This dynamic operates through a dual pathology that fundamentally threatens civilizational order:

    1. Engineered Tribalism and Structural Fragmentation

    Modern digital capitalism no longer fosters a unified global village. Instead, by leveraging hyper-targeted algorithms, digital platforms intentionally partition global consciousness into distinct, mutually hostile tribal enclaves. This represents the ultimate radicalisation of neoliberal and post-structuralist dynamics: the total atomization of the social fabric into competing marketplace agents, stripped of any shared meta-narrative or common ethical framework (dharma, li, or asabiyya).

    The algorithmic logic feeds on existential insecurity, transforming the “other” into an absolute enemy. In this hyper-fragmented condition, the capacity for democratic consensus and intercultural recognition implodes under the weight of artificial polarisation.

    1. The Rise of Digital Legalism

    The profound danger of this project lies in its dialectical twist. The systematic induction of chaos and cognitive fragmentation within the planetarian storm is not designed to liberate the individual. Rather, it serves as the necessary precondition and ultimate justification for a new, one-dimensional architecture of total control. Just as the structural breakdown of the Warring States period in ancient China paved the way for the ruthless absolutism of the Qin Dynasty, the engineered chaos of contemporary digital tribalism is utilised to legitimise an algorithmic re-feudalisation.

    This emerging order represents the modern equivalent of an unmitigated, one-dimensional Legalism (Fa). In the Silicon Valley oligarchy’s vision, society is treated as a deterministic machine to be optimised through code. When law is converted into pure, automated algorithms, it loses its human interiority; it becomes an external, unyielding framework of absolute coercion. The tech-ideologists position themselves as sovereign, non-state lawgivers who remain entirely above the very systems they program.

    Historical experience across civilisations demonstrates a universal law: one-dimensional, absolute control structures possess a fatal brittleness. They achieve spectacular short-term mobilisation, but because they eradicate the vital counter-poles of human agency, adaptive moral restraint (Li), and flexible self-regulation, they lack internal resilience. A system that attempts to navigate the planetary storm by compressing society into a rigid, algorithmic straightjacket accumulates massive, invisible structural tensions. Lacking the elasticity of a generative polar complementarity, it becomes fragile like glass. When external shocks hit its unyielding surface, it cannot bend; it can only explode in catastrophic violence or implode through systemic exhaustion.

    The Illusion of Monolithic Success: Why One-Dimensionality Fails Long-Term

    This structural brittleness highlights a broader historical law that directly challenges the contemporary resurgence of strongman politics and neo-authoritarian governance. Across political history, one-dimensional forms of rule often achieve spectacular, highly visible short-term success. By centralising executive authority, dismantling institutional counterweights, and enforcing ideological or nationalistic uniformity, such regimes can rapidly mobilise societies, execute massive infrastructure projects, and project hard power with formidable efficiency. In an era of global volatility, this monolithic decisiveness creates a powerful illusion of stability and progress, making one-dimensional authority appear superior to the messiness of pluralistic negotiation.

    However, this initial triumph is a developmental trap. Long-term civilisational survival demands systemic elasticity—the capacity to absorb internal contradictions and adapt to shifting environments without fracturing. One-dimensional governance achieves short-term momentum precisely by suffocating this adaptability. By substituting the fluid, generative friction of opposite social forces with rigid top-down compliance, these systems systematically blind themselves to their own errors. Corruption goes unchecked, local grievances are suppressed rather than mediated, and the state’s survival becomes precariously tied to the absolute infallibility of a centralised leadership or a singular cultural narrative.

    As a consequence, when the inevitable complex crises of hybrid globalisation hit—be they economic stagnation, demographic pressure, or technological disruptions—the monolithic structure cannot flex. Because it lacks the internal architecture of a floating balance, it accumulates structural fatigue until the tension becomes unbearable. History shows that such systems do not gently evolve; when internal strains peak, they face sudden, catastrophic failure. Short-term hyper-efficiency is thus bought at the expense of terminal, long-term fragility.

    Our Present: The Toxic Synthesis of 3, 5, and 6

    If we want to precisely diagnose today’s world-political situation, we must recognise that we are currently facing a highly dangerous, dynamic combination of stages 3, 5, and 6:

    • The Clash of Civilisations (Stage 3): Global conflicts are increasingly charged with religious, existential, and cultural significance. They are no longer about negotiable material interests, but about incompatible identity claims.
    • The Rise of the Rest (Stage 5): The post-Western world order is a reality. The Global South demands independent, emancipated agency and refuses the West’s moral and political paternalism.
    • The Resurgence of Great Powers (Stage 6): We are witnessing the return of hard, imperial geopolitics, territorial wars, and nuclear deterrence scenarios that echo the darkest times of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

    The unique feature of hybrid globalisation is that classic great-power conflict (Stage 6) is fought across the fault lines of cultural identities (Stage 3), while taking on a completely altered, multipolar dynamic through the rise of new global actors (Stage 5).

    To not only describe this highly volatile condition but to politically and philosophically navigate it, neither the reliance on market forces nor the flight into a universal metanarrative will suffice. We require a return to a methodologically reframed Clausewitzian perspective: the concept of a floating balance of opposites.

    In the era of hybrid globalisation, the goal is not to violently resolve these contradictions through a dialectical finality (Hegel’s mistake), but to structurally balance the permanent tensions between self-assertion and self-transcendence, between global interconnectedness and local identity. Only through such an acknowledgement of unresolvable polarities can we prevent the hybrid world order from sliding into total global anarchy.

    Outlook: The Strategic Mandate of the Major Middle Powers

    It is precisely within this tense matrix of hybrid globalisation—where the dual threats of Great Power collision and algorithmic fragmentation loom large—that a critical, yet frequently underestimated category of actors moves to the centre of world politics: the Major Middle Powers.

    The contemporary international system can no longer be understood solely through the lens of a binary superpower rivalry (the US-China axis) or a fragmented mass of minor states. Instead, Major Middle Powers—such as South Korea, India (acting as a civilizational bridge), Australia, the EU with the UK, France and Germany, or Indonesia—hold the structural key to preventing the polarisation of the global order from turning fatal.

    1. Beyond the Binary: Middle Powers as Buffers against Polarisation

    The defining pathology of both Great Power Competition (Stage 6) and digital tribalism is the eradication of the middle ground. Both systems thrive on binary friend-enemy exclusions. In this volatile environment, Major Middle Powers function as vital systemic shock absorbers. They possess sufficient economic weight, technological sophistication, and diplomatic autonomy to resist being completely swallowed by either the American or the Chinese orbit.

    By refusing to submit to an absolute, one-dimensional alignment, these powers create strategic breathing space in international relations. They establish minilateral coalitions and issue-based partnerships that cut across civilizational and geopolitical divides, diluting the rigid binary blocs that have historically preceded global conflagrations.

    1. Safeguarding Global Interconnectedness against Fragmented Isolation

    Major Middle Powers have the most to lose from both extremes of hybrid globalisation—they are highly vulnerable to the disruption of global supply chains (the threat of total fragmentation) and equally threatened by the extraterritorial coercion of superpowers (the threat of one-dimensional dominance). Consequently, their strategic interest is inherently tied to maintaining a rules-based, yet flexible, international framework.

    They are uniquely positioned to defend global interconnectedness while respecting local and regional sovereignty. Unlike superpowers, which tend to weaponise interdependence to achieve absolute dominance, Major Middle Powers utilise integration to build resilient, multilateral safety nets. They act as the primary custodians of the global commons, ensuring that the planetarian storm does not lead to a total breakdown of international law and commerce.

    1. Institutionalising the Floating Balance

    In the philosophical framework of a generative polar complementarity, the Major Middle Powers can be understood as the concrete, institutional embodiment of the floating balance of opposites. They are mediators by structural necessity. They navigate between the pole of global systemic integration and the pole of local, sovereign self-assertion. They possess the unique civilizational capacity to translate between different cultural frameworks, bridging the gap between the Global South’s demand for emancipated agency (Stage 5) and the necessary preservation of functional global institutions.

    The future of global civilisation in the twenty-first century will not be decided by the absolute victory of Western liberalism, nor by the dystopian triumph of an algorithmic tech-feudalism, nor by the total destruction of Great Power war or a new ethnic—civilisational centrism, which would just supplant Eurocentrism. It will be decided by whether we can build an international architecture capable of holding opposite forces in a creative, non-violent tension.

    The Major Middle Powers are the natural architects of this upcoming order. By anchoring the international system in a dense, flexible network of multilateral counterweights, they provide the pragmatic and philosophical navigation system required to steer humanity through the planetarian storm, transforming a fractured, volatile world into a sustainably balanced, multipolar coexistence.

  • On Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 9/11, the Unfinished Task of Counterterrorism

    On Twenty-fifth Anniversary of 9/11, the Unfinished Task of Counterterrorism

    Introduction

    Twenty-five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the central question is no longer whether the United States and its allies defeated groups like al-Qaeda and the Islamic State (IS). The more consequential question is whether counterterrorism has kept pace with the transformation of terrorism itself.

    The answer is mixed. The post-9/11 counterterrorism campaign achieved a major strategic success: it prevented another attack on the scale of 9/11 and dismantled much of the infrastructure that had enabled al-Qaeda to operate from a secure sanctuary. Yet terrorism was not eliminated. Instead, it adapted, from centralised organisations to decentralised networks, from fixed training camps to dispersed and virtual infrastructure, from directed operations to self-radicalised individuals, and from global terrorist organisations to increasingly localised insurgencies and criminal-terrorist ecosystems.

    The lesson of the past quarter-century is therefore not that the “war on terror” succeeded or failed. It is that counterterrorism became an evolutionary contest.

    The Transformation After 9/11
    The 9/11 attacks fundamentally altered how terrorism was understood. Before 9/11, terrorism was largely treated as a matter of intelligence, policing, border security and criminal justice. Al-Qaeda demonstrated something different: a non-state organisation could maintain leadership structures, financing, recruitment, training, logistics and communications across borders, while exploiting state sanctuary to mount a sophisticated attack thousands of miles away.

    The response consequently became global and preventive. The United States expanded intelligence collection, aviation and border security, financial sanctions, terrorist-financing controls, international intelligence cooperation, targeted operations, and partnerships with local security forces.

    The strategic principle was straightforward: disrupt terrorism before an attack could occur. Governments sought to intervene at every stage—from radicalisation and recruitment to financing, travel, training, communications and operational planning. This created the concept of pre-emption or preventive strikes, which, however, became problematic going forward.

    That strategy produced substantial results. But it also generated difficult questions about surveillance, civil liberties, executive authority, targeted killing, detention and the legal boundaries of counterterrorism. The challenge for democratic states has always been to prevent terrorism without letting counterterrorism undermine democratic institutions.

    Three strategic phases of counterterrorism

    During the first phase, from 2001 through 2003, the goal was to eliminate al-Qaeda’s safe haven in Afghanistan. The international coalition destroyed training camps and operational infrastructure, killed or drove away senior leaders, and deprived the organisation of the relatively secure environment from which it had planned international operations. Al-Qaeda survived, but its centralised operating model was severely damaged.

    The second phase began with the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The removal of Saddam Hussein created political disintegration, insurgency and sectarian conflict that facilitated the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq. That organisation eventually evolved into the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The Iraqi experience demonstrated one of counterterrorism’s most important lessons: military action can eliminate one terrorist ecosystem while inadvertently creating conditions for another.

    The third phase (2011–19) witnessed the killing of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Islamic State (originally named the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria -ISIS). The death of Bin Laden in 2011 in Abbottabad, Pakistan, further decimated al-Qaeda’s central leadership. IS, created by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, was a different challenge. Rather than simply conducting terrorist attacks, it sought territory, administration and political authority. At its height, it functioned as a hybrid of a terrorist organisation, insurgency, and proto-state, complete with taxation, administration, military structures, recruitment, propaganda, and financial systems. This created the conditions for a rush of thousands of fighters and civilian cadres from more than 100 countries to serve the purported Islamic State.

    The destruction of the IS caliphate by 2017 demonstrated the effectiveness of conventional military power against territorial terrorist organisations. But it also demonstrated its limitations: defeating territorial control did not eliminate the ideology, networks or organisational capacity that sustained the movement.

    The Terrorist Threat Has Changed
    The most important development since 9/11 has been organisational fragmentation of key terrorist organisations.

    The al-Qaeda of 2001 depended heavily on hierarchy, centralised leadership, training camps, financing and communications. Today’s terrorist environment is dominated by affiliates, provinces, local insurgencies, clandestine networks and independent actors. Al-Qaeda and IS have both become increasingly dependent on regional branches that possess considerable operational autonomy.

    To be sure, decentralisation has made terrorism less efficient but more resilient. Killing a group leader no longer necessarily cripples an organisation. Destroying a geographical base does not eliminate a network that can relocate. Disrupting one communication channel can simply push operatives toward another.

    The geography of terrorism has also changed. In 2001, the Afghanistan-Pakistan region represented the principal centre of gravity for transnational jihadist terrorism. By 2026, significant activity has expanded across Africa, particularly the Sahel, as well as the Middle East, South Asia and other fragile regions. Weak institutions, porous borders, communal conflict, political instability and local grievances provided fertile environments for terrorist organisations.

    From Global Ideology to Local Grievances
    Another important transformation is the increasing fusion of global ideology with local political grievances.

    Contemporary terrorist organisations frequently exploit ethnic tensions, corruption, poverty, state repression, competition over resources, weak governance and political exclusion. This has blurred the distinction between terrorism and insurgency. In many conflict environments, terrorist groups simultaneously operate as armed organisations, criminal enterprises, political actors and providers of limited governance.

    This means counterterrorism cannot be reduced to kinetic operations alone.  Where governments fail to provide security, legitimacy and political order, terrorist organisations can regenerate even after their military defeat.

    The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan reinforce this point. Military force can disrupt terrorist organisations, but it cannot by itself resolve the political and social conditions that allow violent extremism to regenerate. Governance, legitimacy, economic opportunity and regional diplomacy are therefore not peripheral to counterterrorism; they are part of it.

    The Digital and Lone-Actor Challenge
    The contemporary terrorist threat is also increasingly digital.

    The internet has transformed recruitment, propaganda, communications, fundraising and radicalisation. The shift has been particularly important from “commanded terrorism” to “inspired terrorism.” A terrorist organisation may no longer need to recruit, train and deploy an operative. It can disseminate an ideology, provide encouragement and leave an individual to select the target and method independently.

    This creates a major intelligence challenge. A lone actor may have no international travel history, terrorist bank account, training camp or conventional terrorist communication network. Traditional organisation-focused intelligence can therefore miss individuals who move from online radicalisation to violence.

    Artificial intelligence could intensify this problem. Extremist actors could use automated systems (chatbots) to create propaganda, manipulate audiences, develop persuasive content and radicalise people. Digital ecosystems can also enable polarisation and ideological mobilisation at unprecedented speed.

    Counterterrorism must consequently evolve from simply identifying organisations toward identifying credible pathways to violence while avoiding the dangerous assumption that ideological expression alone constitutes evidence of imminent terrorism.

    What Should Counterterrorism Do Next?

    Twenty-five years of experience suggests several policy priorities.

    First, intelligence must remain the foundation. The greatest achievement since 9/11 has been the ability to disrupt terrorist plots before execution. Intelligence cooperation, financial tracking and international information sharing remain indispensable.

    Second, leadership targeting should remain a tool, not a strategy. Removing terrorist leaders disrupts organisations but rarely eliminates leadership permanently. It must therefore be combined with measures that attack recruitment, financing and organisational regeneration.

    Third, governments must target terrorist ecosystems rather than organisations alone. Financing networks, criminal economies, propaganda systems, local political grievances and permissive environments are increasingly interconnected.

    Fourth, good governance is counterterrorism. Fragile states provide the political and economic space in which terrorist organisations can regenerate. Strengthening legitimate institutions and preventing state collapse should therefore be viewed as preventive counterterrorism.

    Fifth, digital radicalisation requires new methods. Security agencies need capabilities to identify credible pathways from online radicalisation to violence while protecting freedom of expression and avoiding indiscriminate surveillance.

    Finally, democratic resilience must remain central. Terrorist organisations seek more than casualties. They seek fear, polarisation, political overreaction and declining public confidence. A counterterrorism policy that damages the rule of law, institutional legitimacy or social cohesion can inadvertently advance the objectives of terrorists.

    The Unfinished Task
    Twenty-five years after 9/11, the United States is considerably safer from the specific threat posed by the al-Qaeda network that planned the attacks. Its leadership has been decimated, its training camps and logistical, including financial, infrastructure largely destroyed, and its capacity to reproduce a 9/11scale operation has been dramatically reduced.

    But terrorism has adapted.

    From Afghanistan, it has dispersed worldwide – Iraq and Syria and increasingly Africa and other fragile regions. It has shifted from centralised organisations to affiliates, from physical training camps to digital ecosystems, and from tightly controlled operatives to self-directed individuals. Its financing has increasingly diversified into criminal economies.

    The central paradox of the past quarter-century is therefore clear: the world community became better at defeating terrorist organisations, while terrorist organisations became better at surviving defeat.

    The policy objective going forward should accordingly be more realistic than the permanent elimination of terrorism. The goal should be to prevent terrorist organisations from acquiring sanctuary, resources, technology, political opportunity, social legitimacy and organisational capacity necessary to produce another strategic catastrophe.

    That is the unfinished legacy of 9/11: not the elimination of terrorism, but the continuing effort to keep it from becoming a strategic alternative to legitimate political order.

    Feature Image Credit: nypost.com

  • The Mask of Western Liberalism Has Slipped

    The Mask of Western Liberalism Has Slipped

    This is an interesting analysis published by ‘Global Geopolitics’ that highlights the aggressive, ruthlessly ‘might is right’ strategy the US employs to restore or sustain its fast-declining hegemony by disrupting global energy security. India’s petroleum minister announces that India’s LPG procurement from the US has climbed to 67%, from less than 10% last year. Nothing could be economically more unwise and disastrous for India. But the petroleum minister is proud of it!                          – Team TPF

    Western Industrial Policy and the Abandonment of Market Orthodoxy Expose the Class War in the Face of Chinese Competition.

    The ideological edifice upon which Western global dominance was constructed has collapsed with remarkable speed. For decades, the United States and its allies justified their hegemony through a simple formula that presented liberal democracy and free markets as the natural endpoint of human development, with China condemned for its authoritarian state capitalism, its violation of free market principles, and its excessive government intervention in the economy. The entire apparatus of liberal ideology rested upon the claim that decentralised markets, guided by the invisible hand, would always outperform the clumsy, coercive hand of the state, and that any deviation from this path represented a regression toward tyranny and economic stagnation. This narrative proved remarkably durable for as long as the West maintained its productive superiority, but the emergence of China as the world’s second-largest economy and the principal strategic competitor to the United States has exposed the lie at the heart of the liberal project (13).

    The West is now adopting China’s methods to defeat China, and in doing so, it is proving through its own actions that the Marxist analysis of the state was correct all along. The state is not a neutral arbiter of national interest, but an instrument of class rule, and the free market was never a universal principle but a weapon wielded against rivals and a self-serving narrative advertised to the masses. The same ruling class that preached fiscal discipline and limited government is now centralising power on an unprecedented scale, coordinating industrial policy, and weaponising the state not for the benefit of the working class but for the preservation of oligarchic hegemony. The mask has slipped, the class war is explicit, and the consequences will determine the trajectory of the twenty-first century.

    Now, the United States is practising the most ambitious state-directed energy strategy in modern history, constructing a global energy monopoly through deliberate acts of sabotage, sanctions, and military aggression. The Nord Stream pipeline, which supplied cheap Russian gas to Germany for decades, was destroyed in an act of industrial sabotage bearing all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of the world’s oil, is now effectively blockaded through a US-led military encirclement that has deliberately escalated regional conflict to disrupt global energy flows.

    The energy front provides the most dramatic demonstration of this ideological volte-face. The West spent decades lecturing the world on the sanctity of free markets in energy, demanding that governments privatise state oil companies, open resources to foreign investment, and refrain from any interference that might distort the efficient allocation of supply and demand. Now, the United States is practising the most ambitious state-directed energy strategy in modern history, constructing a global energy monopoly through deliberate acts of sabotage, sanctions, and military aggression. The Nord Stream pipeline, which supplied cheap Russian gas to Germany for decades, was destroyed in an act of industrial sabotage bearing all the hallmarks of a state-sponsored attack, and the Strait of Hormuz, through which passes one-fifth of the world’s oil, is now effectively blockaded through a US-led military encirclement that has deliberately escalated regional conflict to disrupt global energy flows. Qatari liquefied natural gas exports, once a major source of energy for Asia, are statistically at zero after Iranian strikes on the Ras Laffan refinery, an attack made possible by the regional conflagration that Washington ignited (1).

    Asian countries that once bought from Qatar are now forced to purchase American LNG at extortionate spot prices that have spiked from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars per million British thermal units, and Japan’s imports of US LNG have increased fifteenfold since February.

    The consequence of this centrally planned energy blockade is the systematic transformation of Asian energy dependency from West Asian producers to American suppliers. Asian countries that once bought from Qatar are now forced to purchase American LNG at extortionate spot prices that have spiked from ten dollars to twenty-five dollars per million British thermal units, and Japan’s imports of US LNG have increased fifteenfold since February. Europe’s gas reserves are so depleted that the entire continent would run out of stored energy in less than six weeks of a cold winter, while American LNG tankers divert to Asia to chase higher profits. This is not a market; it is a centrally planned energy blockade designed to control global energy flows and weaponise them against China, the world’s largest oil importer, whose industrial base depends upon affordable energy imports. The empire’s strategy is to deny China access to affordable energy, fracture its supply chains, and force its vassals into permanent dependency, while the profits for Exxon, Chevron, and the LNG cartel represent a welcome side effect of uncontested global hegemony.

    The financial front reveals an equally stark contradiction between liberal ideology and imperial practice. The West built its ideological dominance on the myth of fiscal responsibility, imposing austerity on the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, while governments that printed money to fund development were condemned as irresponsible populists. Now, the empire is debasing its own currency on a scale that would make the populists blush, borrowing trillions to fund the artificial intelligence arms race, the military buildup, and the energy war, while weaponising the dollar through sanctions, reserve freezes, and exclusion from the SWIFT payment system. The recent intervention to support the Japanese yen reveals the true nature of this financial architecture, as the United States Treasury sold euros to purchase yen in a rare market operation, marking the first American intervention to strengthen the currency since 1998 (1-13).

    The mechanism of dependency is the Federal Reserve’s Foreign and International Monetary Authorities Repo Facility, which allows Japan to swap its US debt holdings for dollars without selling them on the open market, but the price of this facility is permanent financial vassalage. Japan is structurally prevented from diversifying away from the dollar, and the US Treasury now holds effective veto power over Japanese monetary policy, ensuring that Tokyo cannot chart an independent course, trade freely with China, join alternative financial architectures, or refuse to participate in the empire’s economic war. A Japan locked into the FIMA Facility must hold US debt, defend the dollar, and follow Washington’s lead, and this dynamic is being replicated across the empire’s network of vassals. The empire is tightening the leash not merely to enrich Wall Street but to ensure that when the order comes to isolate, embargo, or wage proxy war against China, its vassals have no choice but to obey (13).

    The military front demonstrates the empire’s willingness to abandon its stated values in pursuit of strategic advantage. The United States presented itself as the indispensable nation defending freedom and democracy against tyranny, with NATO portrayed as a defensive alliance and wars justified as humanitarian interventions to liberate the oppressed and spread universal values. Now, the mask has slipped entirely, as Washington constructs the institutional architecture for a global war against multipolarity. NATO is expanding not to defend against a non-existent Russian invasion but to encircle China, and AUKUS, the Quad, and the deepening US-Japan-South Korea trilateral military alliance are not defensive arrangements but the scaffolding of a centrally planned military encirclement designed to control the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the sea lanes on which China’s trade depends (1).

    The US-Israel military merger, which passed the House in late July by a narrow vote, directs the Secretary of Defense to designate a permanent executive agent to accelerate the integration of American and Israeli defence technology, research, and production, authorising seven hundred and fifty million dollars for joint projects and making the relationship institutionally permanent. Once a supply chain is integrated and a production line is established, it becomes nearly impossible to dismantle, and this represents class interest institutionalised through a permanent military alliance that will be used to project power in the Middle East against China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The USS George Washington Carrier Strike Group sails through the South China Sea, challenging Beijing’s territorial claims, while Washington coordinates the defence industries of its vassals, directs their military spending, and integrates their command structures. This is not about selling weapons, though the defence contractors profit handsomely; it is about strategic encirclement, preparing for a confrontation that the empire knows it cannot win through economic competition alone (1).

    The technology front represents the most complete abandonment of liberal ideology, as the West practises the most aggressive state-directed industrial policy since the Soviet Five-Year Plans. The CHIPS Act pours tens of billions of dollars into domestic semiconductor manufacturing, explicitly framed as a response to China’s dominance, and tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, solar panels, and batteries are not temporary adjustments but permanent walls designed to strangle China’s green technology advantage. Export controls on advanced semiconductors, artificial intelligence chips, and chip-making equipment are not about national security but about denying China access to the technological base of the twenty-first century. Japan’s $2.3 trillion industrial revival plan is explicitly dependent on American technology, including 27,500 Nvidia Rubin chips to build artificial intelligence-powered robotics systems to challenge China in manufacturing, ensuring that any challenge to US hegemony would mean economic collapse for the vassal (13).

    The same policies that the West condemned when China practised them, including state subsidies, industrial policy, and protectionism, are now the official doctrine of the empire, and the goal is not to enrich Silicon Valley but to strangle China’s technological independence. A China that controls its own semiconductor supply chain, its own artificial intelligence infrastructure, and its own green energy technology is a China that cannot be stopped, and the empire’s technology strategy is designed to prevent that outcome. The West’s embrace of state-directed industrial policy is the most explicit admission that the “free market” was always a weapon to be wielded against rivals and abandoned when it ceased to serve the interests of the ruling class (5-13).

    The contradictions documented across these four fronts are not accidents, policy mistakes, or temporary deviations from liberal principles; they are the exposure of a lie that was always at the core of the liberal project. The Western ruling class never believed in free markets; it believed in markets when it was winning and abandoned them when it started losing. The rules-based order was a weapon to discipline rivals while the empire did whatever it wanted, and now that the rivals are too strong to discipline, the empire is tearing up the rulebook and revealing its true nature: a centralised capitalist dictatorship organised for class war. The liberals are no longer liberal, because the material conditions no longer permit the luxury of ideological consistency. When the empire was ascendant, it could afford to preach free trade, open markets, and limited government; now that China is overtaking it, the empire must do exactly what it condemned China for doing: plan, direct, and control (5-13).

    This is the class war revealed, with the Western oligarchy consolidating a centralised capitalist dictatorship to defend its global hegemony against China’s socialist-oriented state, while the liberals who once defended freedom and democracy now cheer the empire’s authoritarian turn.

    The difference between these two systems is the class that each serves. China’s planning serves the working class, lifting eight hundred million people from poverty, building the world’s largest high-speed rail network, and leading the green energy transition, while the empire’s planning serves the oligarchy, enriching the few, immiserating the many, and preparing for war. This is the class war revealed, with the Western oligarchy consolidating a centralised capitalist dictatorship to defend its global hegemony against China’s socialist-oriented state, while the liberals who once defended freedom and democracy now cheer the empire’s authoritarian turn. They were never defenders of liberty; they were defenders of a system that benefited their class, and now that the system requires centralised, authoritarian methods to survive, they embrace those methods without hesitation (5-8).

    The mask has slipped, and what remains visible is the reality that Marxism has always insisted upon: the state is an instrument of class rule, and the free market was always a lie sold to the masses while the ruling class did whatever it wanted. The Western ruling class is adopting China’s methods to defeat China, proving that China’s methods were always superior and revealing that the ideological contest was never about freedom versus tyranny but about which class would control the fruits of production. The empire is preparing for a confrontation that will determine the future of humanity, centralising power on every front, sacrificing short-term profits for long-term domination, and willing to immiserate billions to achieve its goal. The struggle continues, and the outcome will be determined not by the sophistication of liberal ideology but by the capacity of the working class to recognise the class war and unite in opposition to the oligarchy that wages it.

     

    References

    China Daily. 2026. “Deepening Geopolitical Differences Highlighted Before Munich Meeting.” China Daily, 11 February.

    China Daily. 2026. “Negotiating the ‘Gracchi Trap’.” China Daily Global, 6 August.

    Dawn. 2026. “Dawn of Highly Volatile Multipolar Order.” Dawn, 23 March.

    Munich Security Conference. 2026. Munich Security Report 2026. Munich: Munich Security Conference Foundation.

    Xinhua Español. 2026. “Latinoamérica y el Caribe Posee Activos para Sortear Nueva Era Geopolítica.” Xinhua, 5 August.

     

    This article was authored and published earlier by Global Geopolitics

    Feature Image Credit: ussc.edu.au

     

     

  • On the wrong side of History

    On the wrong side of History

    So, at a time when Israel finds itself on the back foot and bereft of friends, the question arises as to how have we ended up backing this losing horse? In actual fact, we have, as a nation, leaving aside the odd oligarch, little to gain from this relationship and much to lose.

    Some may be aware of the global internet-based market research and data analytics firm, YouGov, that continuously collects and disseminates data from around the world on all manner of topics, concerns, and opinions, including political opinion polls. In fact, the banner headline on its website reads “YouGov: What the World Thinks”.

    However, a caveat here worth keeping in mind, however accurate their polls, perceptions and opinions tend to be highly subjective and not necessarily an accurate reflection of ground realities.

    For example, the vast majority around the world must necessarily be quite upset with the intemperate behaviour and antics of President Trump, especially his blatant racism, misogyny and the horrendous Epstein allegations. Apart from the horrific devastation he has wrought in Iran, his clampdown on immigration and the tariff fiasco have had a debilitating impact globally.

    Given his multitude of sins, one could easily be forgiven for believing that he must surely be the worst performing and least popular President in American history. One would be wrong in drawing such a conclusion, because YouGov in its latest polls ranks him 38th out of the 45 Presidents to date. Incidentally, not unexpectedly, Abraham Lincoln leads this poll, with George Washington a close second, followed by John F Kennedy.

    Interestingly, among the top three Presidents in popularity, two ended up assassinated. This not only makes popularity a questionable aspiration in the States, but also speaks volumes about the American psyche. Indeed, Trump would probably do well to avoid topping the charts, though if history is any indication, the real threat to his life may well lie elsewhere, and not necessarily from Iran, if some commentators are to be believed.

    There is an interesting series on Substack by US Navy veteran, Rolf Kvalvik, on the JFK assassination that makes fascinating reading—-

    In this eight-part series, he delves into new documentation that has recently been unclassified, ironically enough by President Trump, on the assassination of President Kennedy.

    He points out that President Kennedy was extremely upset with Israel over its secret nuclear weapons programme and had put in motion various robust steps to shut it down. Going so far as to threatening to cut off all aid to that country, apart from clipping the wings of the very influential Zionist lobby in the States. So much so, that his actions were perceived as an existential threat by the Israeli leadership.

    In Kvalvik’s view, he was thus neutralised by the Israeli Intelligence Services working in collusion with rogue elements within the CIA, the Mafia, Zionist lobby groups in the United States and some senior politicians.

    Indeed, following his murder, Israel benefitted the most. Within days President Johnson ensured JFK’s directives against Israel were watered down sufficiently enough to make them ineffective and within two years Israel had produced a workable nuclear bomb.

    Trump must be fully aware of what these and other documents hold, as well as of the brutal truth that the Zionist regime will stop at nothing, including blackmail, assassination, deception and false flag operations, in its pursuit of its Greater Israel agenda.

     

    As remains evident, Zionist influence on Congress and the Government is fairly obvious, and in the circumstances one can clearly understand Trump’s fawning over Netanyahu, and as to why the Israeli tail gets to wag the American dog when it comes to West Asia.

    Unfortunately for Israel, however, their pet project appears to have hit a dead end, thanks to Iran’s intransigence, against which even American military power seems rather ineffectual. Of course, America does have the ability to initiate massive destruction all around, but that in turn is bound to result in a military confrontation with Russia and China. Even Trump’s compromised military leadership must baulk at such a possibility.

    So, at a time when Israel finds itself on the back foot and bereft of friends, the question arises as to how have we ended up backing this losing horse? In actual fact, we have, as a nation, leaving aside the odd oligarch, little to gain from this relationship and much to lose.

    Aside from advanced weaponry, whose value in the transformed conventional warfare environment is highly questionable, seeing their inability to stop Iranian attacks, they have little to give us. In any case, those weapons don’t come cheap.

    Of course, there is the employment factor, as Israel is keen; we provide the menial and blue- collar labour they require as replacement for the Palestinians who performed those tasks earlier. Ironically, one could say we are Israel’s equivalent of the much-maligned Bangladeshi’s here. In any case, this will amount to around a lakh or so at best finding employment.

    Our importance lies in what Brigadier General (Reserve) Erez Winner told a mainstream television channel: “Israel has 1.4 billion Indians as a production line”. We are perceived by them as bonded labour available to them to fulfil their Zionist agenda.

    From the Israeli point of view, however, apart from providing their murdering conscripts a safe and cheap haven to chill out in after completion of their terms, our importance lies in what Brigadier General (Reserve) Erez Winner told a mainstream television channel: “Israel has 1.4 billion Indians as a production line”. We are perceived by them as bonded labour available to them to fulfil their Zionist agenda.

    Being perceived as lackeys of the Israeli-American duopoly is hardly helpful for the government’s reputation and plainly demeaning for us as well. Clearly, in purely geopolitical or socio-economic terms, there is hardly any reason to justify our pro-Israel tilt. Especially given that around 10 million of our citizens are employed around the region, other than in Israel.

    Some opposition politicians, analysts and commentators here tend to believe that our government’s tilt towards Israel is predicated on the fact that the Hindutva and Zionist agenda have much in common, especially in regard to their virulent hatred for the Muslim community. While there may well be some truth to this, it is inconceivable that any government would risk its relationship with other countries of the region over this, given the socio-economic impact that would have.

    In the circumstances, it increasingly appears, as Mr Gandhi and the Congress allege, that our government is being held hostage to other extraneous factors that could well embarrass the government if they ever came into the public domain. One cannot help but wonder what cost the general public will have to pay in the long term to keep these secrets out of the public eye.

     

    Views expressed are the author’s own.

     

     

  • Analysing India’s Trade Bottlenecks

    Analysing India’s Trade Bottlenecks

    U.S. is raising vague arguments and challenges such as ‘forced labour’ and ‘surplus capacity’, while advanced countries do not help with technological development.

    On July 15, the India-U.K. trade deal came into force. That day, India banned the import of goods made using forced labour so as not to get unfavourable treatment from the U.S. under Section 301. A day later came the news that a bipartisan Bill has been proposed by U.S. Senators to levy up to 100% tariff on India and others for buying Russian crude. One way or the other, India’s trade with the U.S. is being buffeted by bottlenecks.

    China’s trade
    In contrast, without a trade deal, China has become India’s largest trading partner. Imports from China in the first half of 2026 have shot up by 21.8% while exports have risen by 37.2%, though on a small base. The already-high trade deficit with China of $116 billion last year is likely to rise since it has already topped $67 billion in the first half of the current year. The imports from China are high- and low-tech items, while exports are mostly low-value-added items.
    India’s dependence on China is overwhelming. Factories and exports increasingly depend on China for machinery and intermediates. For instance, pharmaceuticals depend on imports of API from China. The average wage rates in key sectors such as automobiles and apparel are half to one-third of China’s. Yet, India is unable to outcompete China in global markets because of the huge technological advantage the latter has gained in the past 35 years.
    While multinational companies (MNCs) have invested in China, as a share of total investment, it has been small. Further, to capture markets, China has been investing in other countries under the One Belt, One Road initiative. Thus, net foreign investment in China has been small. Finally, as Chinese companies have become big, they are outcompeting MNCs such as Tesla. And many U.S. companies have left China, including Amazon, Apple, Dell, IBM, and Uber.
    India is unable to finalise a trade deal with the U.S. since at least July 2025, though Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal keeps assuring the nation that it is almost done. Last August, India’s exports were hit by a 50% tariff, leading to a decline in labour-intensive exports of apparel, shrimps, leather goods, and so on. India’s overall trade deficit increased in 2025 to $120 billion from $94 billion in 2024. China faced high US tariffs, but by diversifying trade, it increased its trade surplus in 2025 to $1.19 trillion from $992 billion in 2024.
    Technology and investment
    The lesson is that technology is the key to trade in today’s globalised world. China is accused by the West of currency manipulation and massive government help to cheapen its exports. The implication is that China is draining its surplus to sell to the rest of the world. And, it is supposed to have been doing so for at least the past 35 years. Such trade over long periods of time should have drained resources and made China suffer. Instead, the Chinese economy has boomed and become five times larger than India’s economy.

    The reason is China’s high savings rate of above 35% of GDP since the 1980s and at times reaching close to 50%. This has been able to finance its huge investments of 40% and more, peaking at 47%. Its growth has not depended on foreign investment.
    This massive investment has enabled China to invest in technology development and expand its industry. This has fuelled rapid economic growth, and initial low consumption levels have risen rapidly, as is visible in any modern Chinese city. The U.S. has tried to thwart Chinese advances in technology by putting restrictions, but China has managed to circumvent that and continue upgrading technology. So much so that the U.S. has come to depend on Chinese imports.

    Since Trump has squeezed India, the latter has entered into trade agreements with important trade partners — the U.K., the European Union, the UAE, New Zealand, and so on. But caution is required since the earlier trade agreements with Japan, Korea and Australia led to a larger trade deficit with them. India could not increase its exports as much as others could because of their technological advantage.

    The advanced countries have not helped India with technological development. They want to export but not share technology. The United States Deputy Secretary of State said at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi that the U.S. made a major strategic and economic error roughly 20 years ago by giving China extensive access to American markets, technology, and capital. He said such a mistake would not be made vis-a-vis India. The implication is that India has to develop its own technology; otherwise, it will lag behind the advanced countries and China.

    Forced labour
    By investigating India on “forced labour” under Section 301, the U.S. is seeking to create a bottleneck to extract concessions. Forced labour implies coercion to work. Workers have no choice but to do the bidding of the employer because the option is hunger. Employers take advantage and pay low wages. This gives an exporter an advantage as its produce becomes cheaper. The U.S. says that is unfair to its producers.

    But wages in the developing world are much less than in the advanced nations. Does that mean that all production in the developing world is using forced labour? In India, unorganised labour receives low wages since it has little bargaining power to obtain decent wages. Thus, most of India’s production can be said to be based on forced labour. And its imports from developing nations can be said to be based on forced labour. This is a non-tariff barrier that the U.S. wants to apply to India.
    Another non-tariff barrier the U.S. is threatening to use is “surplus capacity” in steel, textiles, and so on. Any export by any country is over and above what it uses within its own territory. So, all export is based on surplus capacity. The U.S. has a massive agricultural surplus which it wants to dump on India. Its companies provide massive amounts of defence armament to the rest of the world. Which country does not produce for export so that it can import what is needed by its economy? Entire trade depends on these surpluses based on “comparative advantage”. So, what is India being penalised for? Are these bargaining chips to extract concessions?

    India’s trade with the U.S., till recently its largest trading partner, is being buffeted by vague arguments and challenges. Earlier it was the so-called “reciprocal tariffs” and now, Russian crude purchases, “forced labour” and “surplus capacity”. This huge uncertainty is buffeting Indian exporters. Indian officials negotiating a trade deal with the U.S. were hoping for favourable treatment, but that seems unlikely.

    Meanwhile, trade with China has boomed, though there is no trade agreement with it. India avoided joining the RCEP in 2019 to stall Chinese dominance. Given U.S. coercive steps on trade, both India and China have diversified their trade with the rest of the world. That is the way to go. And the lesson from China is that trade deals or not, India needs to upgrade its R&D to become globally competitive.

    This article was published earlier in ‘The Hindu.”

    Feature Image Credit: aninews.in      US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer meeting Union Minister of Commerce and Industry Piyush Goyal in New Delhi in June. | Photo Credit: ANI 

  • The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    The Atheist Who Invented Hindutva: The Mirror Turned Inward

    Series Prologue: Part 3

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices and Civilisational Responsibilities

    The ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    In the previous two posts in this prologue, I traced the material foundations and ideological engine of five centuries of Western domination. I argued that India’s civilisational traditions offer a fundamentally different foundation for the emerging world order: pluralist, ethically grounded, and rooted in the universal kinship expressed in Kanian Poongundranar’s “Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir” and the Thirukkural’s vision of Aram, Porul, and Inbam. But intellectual honesty requires that the mirror be turned inward. Because the logic of exceptionalism — the claim to a uniquely chosen identity that exempts a community from the ethical constraints applying to others — is not exclusively a Western pathology. It is a temptation that every civilisation faces when political power finds it useful. And India is not immune.

    The ideology known as Hindutva, which exercises dominant political influence in India today, must be examined with the same analytical rigour we have applied to Western and Zionist exceptionalism. Not because the comparison is comfortable — it is not — but because intellectual integrity demands it, and because India’s civilisational integrity depends on it. The examination is best conducted in three stages, because the ideology was not built in one.

    Stage One: The Founder Who Separated the Nation from the Faith

    The first and most important fact is one the movement rarely acknowledges: “Hindutva is not Hinduism.” Hindutva was founded by an atheist, and it was not, in its original formulation, a religious idea at all. Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, who coined the term in his 1923 pamphlet ‘Essentials of Hindutva’, was a self-declared atheist, rationalist, and materialist. He rejected scripture, ridiculed cow worship and ritual superstition, and championed European scientific temper over what he saw as the dead weight of religious tradition. He was explicit that Hindutva was not Hinduism. He defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture. A Hindu, in Savarkar’s definition, need not believe in any god at all. What mattered was that India was both his fatherland and his Holyland — a territorial and ethnic test, not a spiritual one.

    Savarkar defined a ‘Hindu’ not by religious belief but by three criteria: Pitribhumi, a common fatherland; Jati, a common race or descent; and Sanskriti, a common culture.

    Johan Caspar Bluntschli

     

    Where did this conception come from? Not from the Vedas, the Upanishads, or any Hindu philosophical source. It came from Europe. Savarkar’s framework of organic ethnic nationalism drew on the nineteenth-century European tradition of the nation as a racial-cultural organism — the tradition of the Swiss-born jurist Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, who worked within German Staatslehre and distinguished between a nation’s racially rooted ‘principal’ people and those he regarded as alien to it. It drew, too, on the ethnic nationalisms then ascendant across Europe, the same intellectual currents that were hardening elsewhere into far darker forms. This is the first irony, and it is foundational: the ideology that today presents itself as the authentic voice of Hindu civilisation was constructed by an atheist using conceptual tools borrowed from European ethnic nationalism — the very tradition most alien to India’s own pluralist philosophical inheritance.

    Stage Two: The Fusion of Ethnic Nationalism with Religious Sentiment

    If Savarkar’s Hindutva was a rationalist, secular-ethnic nationalism, how did it become the religiously charged mass movement we see today — mobilising temple, festival, deity, and devotional feeling for political ends? The answer is that this was a second and distinct stage, carried out by different men, for a different purpose: mass mobilisation.

    M S Golwalkar

    M.S. Golwalkar, who led the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from 1940 to 1973, shifted the register decisively. Where Savarkar grounded the nation in race and territory and had little use for religion as such, Golwalkar infused the project with Hindu spiritual and metaphysical content — the sacredness of Bharat, the dharmic mission of the Hindu people, a civilisational destiny cast in religious language. Deendayal Upadhyaya’s doctrine of ‘Integral Humanism,’ adopted in 1965 and later made the official ideology of the Jana Sangh and then the Bharatiya Janata Party, further anchored the political project in a claimed Hindu spiritual essence. The reason for the shift is not difficult to understand. An abstract theory of ethnic nationalism, however rigorously constructed, cannot move a population. Religious sentiment — festival, symbol, deity, the deep and genuine devotional attachment of hundreds of millions of people — is among the most powerful mobilising forces in human affairs. The movement discovered what its rationalist founder had not prioritised: that to win a nation, you must reach its heart, and in India the heart is substantially religious.

    One need not impute cynical motive to any individual to observe the structural result. A political ideology founded on secular-ethnic lines was, over subsequent decades, fused with the religious devotion of the Hindu masses — and in that fusion, the crucial distinction Savarkar himself had insisted upon, between Hindutva the political-national identity and Hinduism the faith, was quietly erased. The movement that claims to defend Hindu dharma was built on a foundation laid by a man who had little personal use for dharma as religion at all.

    And Savarkar himself never crossed over. He remained an atheist and rationalist to the end of his life — campaigning against ritualism and caste orthodoxy through his Ratnagiri years, opening the Patit Pavan Mandir to all castes, arguing for care of the cow as a useful animal rather than worship of it as a sacred one. His relations with the RSS were notably cool; he scorned its abstention from politics, and Golwalkar’s mysticism belonged to a register the materialist Savarkar never adopted. His death in 1966 was a final statement: he ended his life by voluntarily renouncing food and medicine, justified in a rationalist essay, and his will forbade religious rites — no priests, no rituals, a motorised hearse in place of the traditional bier. The founder kept Hindutva and Hindu religiosity separate for eighty-three years, to the point of a ritual-free funeral. The fusion of the two was not his evolution. It was a second construction, built around him and after him — which is precisely why it can be unbuilt.

    The Zionism Parallel: A Precise Structural Homology

    This two-stage pattern is not unique to Hindutva. It follows, with striking precision, the trajectory of political Zionism — and the comparison is instructive rather than incidental. Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, was a secular, largely non-religious Viennese journalist. His 1896 work Der Judenstaat is a political and national argument, not a religious one; early political Zionism was in large part a secular nationalist movement, and many Orthodox religious authorities initially opposed it precisely because it presumed to force a national project onto what they regarded as a matter of faith and divine timing. Only later did the movement fuse itself with religious claim — the theological reading of the land, the mobilisation of scripture, and the memory of the Holocaust deployed as a unifying and legitimating force. The structure is identical to the Hindutva trajectory: a secular founder formulates an ethnic-national ideology; later leaders infuse it with religious sentiment and collective memory to achieve mass appeal and to place the project beyond ordinary political criticism.

    The Warning: Where this Trajectory Leads

    Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor brought out this report after the first year of war in Gaza by Israel. It has now been on for more than three years and has engulfed the entire West Asia.

    And here the parallel carries a warning that thoughtful Indian people cannot afford to ignore. For if Hindutva’s path resembles Zionism’s in how the ideology is built, we must look honestly at where that path has led. The fusion of a secular-ethnic nationalism with religious claim did not strengthen the moral standing of the project it produced. It corrupted it. The state that emerged now stands, in the aftermath of Gaza, in a condition of profound moral and political isolation — its conduct condemned across much of the world, its claim to act in the name of an ancient faith increasingly repudiated by the faithful themselves. Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    Many Jews who practise Judaism as a religion and a moral tradition have publicly dissociated themselves from the actions of the Israeli state, insisting on the very distinction this essay draws: that a faith is not the same as a political-national project conducted in its name, and that the project does not speak for the faith. Judaism, one of humanity’s great ethical traditions, has been ill-served by what has been done in its name.

    The warning for India is exact. Hindutva today shows every sign of being on a similar trajectory — the same fusion of ethnic nationalism with mobilised religious sentiment, the same erasure of the distinction between a faith and a political project, the same tendency to place that project beyond criticism by wrapping it in the sacred. If it continues down that path, it risks doing to Hinduism what political Zionism’s corruption has done to Judaism: isolating it, discrediting it, and betraying its deepest moral content — all in the name of defending it.

    Why This Matters: And What is at Stake

    This is why the distinction between Hinduism and Hindutva is not academic hair-splitting. It is the difference between a civilisation and an ideology that has captured its name. Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain. Its foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    Hinduism is one of the oldest and most philosophically sophisticated traditions on earth. It has no single founding prophet, no single canonical scripture, no orthodoxy, and no mechanism for excommunicating heretics — because diversity of belief and inquiry is not a problem to be solved but the natural condition of a tradition too vast for any single formulation to contain.

    Hinduism’s foundational statement, from the Rigveda, is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one, the wise call it by many names. It gave the world the Upanishads, the Jain Anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — the Buddha and Mahavira, the Bhakti and Sufi streams, the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. It is, arguably, the most spiritually plural and philosophically generous civilisational inheritance humanity possesses.

    A country with over 200 million Muslim citizens — the second-largest Muslim population in the world — cannot credibly champion the Global South, the voice of universal human dignity, or the reform of the world order, if its dominant political ideology frames those citizens as the internal Other. And an ideology founded by an atheist on borrowed European ethnic-nationalist theory, later dressed in religious sentiment for political mobilisation, cannot be the authentic voice of the tradition of Ekam Sat and Anekantavada. It is, in the most precise sense, that tradition’s negation.

    The strongest argument against Hindutva, therefore, is not secular liberalism, and not the critique of any political party. It is Hindu philosophy itself — the Upanishads, the Thirukkural, the Anekantavada, Vallalar’s Ocean, the Sangam world’s ‘Yaadhum Oorey, Yaavarum Kelir’. These traditions do not need political exceptionalism to survive; they are diminished by it.

    “Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti: truth is one; the wise call it by many names” – Rigveda

    Safeguarding India’s civilisational soul from the exceptionalism now deforming it from within is not an act of opposition to Hindu culture. It is its most authentic defence — and it is a task for every Indian who understands the depth of what is being risked.

    — This is the third and final part of the series prologue. The series proper begins with the next post.

    A companion essay, ‘The Constitution or the Manusmriti: India’s Civilisational Choice,’ extends this argument and is available at thepeninsula.org.in.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that India’s greatest strength is its civilisational pluralism — and that any ideology, domestic or foreign, that threatens that pluralism threatens India itself.

    Further Reading:

    On Savarkar, his atheism, and the formulation of Hindutva:

    Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, Essentials of Hindutva (1923); republished as Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1928).

    Janaki Bakhle, Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (Princeton University Press, 2024).

    The definitive intellectual biography; on Savarkar’s atheism, rationalism, and the territorial-ethnic (not religious) definition of the Hindu.

    Vikram Visana, ‘Savarkar before Hindutva: Sovereignty, Republicanism, and Populism in India, c. 1900–1920,’ Modern Intellectual History (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

    On Savarkar’s debt to European ethnic-nationalist thought, including Bluntschli.

    Johann Kaspar Bluntschli, The Theory of the State (1875; English trans. Clarendon Press, 1885).

    Bluntschli was Swiss-born (Zurich, 1808), working within the German tradition of Staatslehre.

    On the shift to religious mass mobilisation — Golwalkar and Upadhyaya:

    M.S. Golwalkar, We, or Our Nationhood Defined (1939) and Bunch of Thoughts (1966).

    Deendayal Upadhyaya, Integral Humanism (1965).

    Christophe Jaffrelot, The Hindu Nationalist Movement and Indian Politics, 1925 to the 1990s (Hurst, 1996).

    On the RSS’s development and the religious infusion of Savarkar’s originally secular-ethnic framework.

    Chetan Bhatt, Hindu Nationalism: Origins, Ideologies and Modern Myths (Berg, 2001).

    On political Zionism, its secular origins, and Jewish dissent:

    Theodor Herzl, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) (1896).

    Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso, 2009).

    Yakov M. Rabkin, A Threat from Within: A Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism (Fernwood/Zed Books, 2006).

    On the theological and secular Jewish opposition to political Zionism, from its origins to the present.

    On Hindu philosophical pluralism:

    Rigveda, 1.164.46: Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural. Trans. P.S. Sundaram (Penguin, 1990).

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Feature Image Credit: Savarkar and Hindutva – image made with AI assistance.

  • The Constitution or the Manusmriti

    The Constitution or the Manusmriti

    The Indian Constitution is not merely a legal document. It is a civilisational achievement, and arguably the most important moral document India has ever produced — more consequential than any scripture, because it carries the binding force of law and the democratic legitimacy of a sovereign people’s collective commitment to one another.

    On 25 December 1927, in the small coastal town of Mahad in Maharashtra, Dr B.R. Ambedkar stood before a specially constructed pyre and set fire to a copy of the Manusmriti. It was not an act of rage. It was an act of civilisational critique — the most deliberate and consequential symbolic gesture in the history of India’s struggle for human dignity.

    The Manusmriti — the Laws of Manu, composed between approximately 200 BCE and 200 CE — is a Dharmashastra, a text of social and legal prescription that codifies a system of human inequality so comprehensive and so absolute that it assigns worth, rights, duties, and punishments on the basis of birth alone. It is not a text that merely reflects the prejudices of its era. It is a text that systematises those prejudices into an architecture of oppression — and then claims divine sanction for it.

    Its prescriptions are worth stating plainly, because the groups that invoke its authority today rarely quote them. A Shudra, the Manusmriti declares, is created to serve the three higher varnas. Even if emancipated by his master, he is not released from servitude, “since that is innate in him — who can set him free from it?” A Shudra who dares to recite the Vedas shall have hot molten lead poured into his ears. A Shudra who presumes to sit on the same seat as his superior shall be branded and banished.

    On women, the text is equally explicit: “In childhood, a female must be protected by her father; in youth, by her husband; when her lord is dead, by her sons. A woman should never be independent.” Women and Shudras are grouped together in multiple passages — as categories of humanity requiring permanent supervision, incapable of autonomy, and unfit for learning.

    The Manusmriti does not merely describe inequality. It prescribes it as sacred duty — ordained by creation, enforced by punishment, and justified by divine law. It is, by any ethical standard that takes human dignity seriously, a blasphemy against it.

    These are not peripheral verses. They are the structural logic of the text. The Manusmriti does not merely describe inequality. It prescribes it as sacred duty — ordained by creation, enforced by punishment, and justified by divine law. It is, by any ethical standard that takes human dignity seriously, a blasphemy against it. This is what Ambedkar understood — and what he burned.

    But Ambedkar did not stop at rejection. He built the answer. The Indian Constitution, which Ambedkar went on to draft as Chairman of the Drafting Committee and which was adopted on 26 January 1950, is the most comprehensive and systematic repudiation of the Manusmriti’s vision of human society that any civilisation has ever produced. Every foundational provision of the Constitution is the precise negation of a Manusmriti prescription.

    Where the Manusmriti assigns human worth by birth, Article 14 guarantees equality before the law to every person. Where it prescribes differential punishment by caste, Article 15 prohibits discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex, or place of birth. Where it declares that a Shudra is created to serve, Article 17 abolishes untouchability in all its forms and makes its practice a punishable offence. Where it assigns women to perpetual dependency, Articles 15 and 16 guarantee equal rights and opportunities regardless of gender. Where it reserves learning for the upper castes, the Constitution establishes education as a fundamental right for all.

    The Constitution does not merely reject caste. It replaces the entire ontological framework of the Manusmriti — the idea that human beings are born into fixed, divinely ordained hierarchies — with a radically different proposition: that sovereignty resides in the people, that every citizen carries equal dignity, and that the state exists to serve all of them without distinction. This is not merely a legal document. It is a civilisational achievement, and arguably the most important moral document India has ever produced — more consequential than any scripture, because it carries the binding force of law and the democratic legitimacy of a sovereign people’s collective commitment to one another.

    Which brings us to the present. There are political forces in India today that invoke the Manusmriti — not always openly, but through the framework of social hierarchy and caste assertion it codifies — and regard the Constitution’s egalitarianism not as India’s greatest moral achievement but as an obstacle, an imposition of Western liberal values on an ancient civilisation. This argument must be met head-on, because it is both historically false and civilisationally dangerous.

    The Constitution is as Indian as the Rigveda. It is more Indian than the Manusmriti, which codifies a hierarchy that India’s own deepest philosophical traditions — the Upanishadic teaching that the Atman is one in all beings, the Thirukkural’s insistence on a common human dignity, the Tamil Sangam’s declaration that every person is kin — explicitly reject.

    First, the Constitution is not a Western import. It was drafted by an Indian — among the most intellectually formidable Indians of the 20th century — who drew not only on Western constitutional traditions but on the Buddhist principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, on the Bhakti movement’s radical egalitarianism, and on his own lived experience as a Dalit denied water from a public well because of his birth. The Constitution is as Indian as the Rigveda. It is more Indian than the Manusmriti, which codifies a hierarchy that India’s own deepest philosophical traditions — the Upanishadic teaching that the Atman is one in all beings, the Thirukkural’s insistence on a common human dignity, the Tamil Sangam’s declaration that every person is kin — explicitly reject.

    Second, to elevate the Manusmriti above the Constitution is not a defence of Hindu civilisation. It is its betrayal. Hindu civilisation at its greatest has always been characterised by philosophical openness and the recognition that truth cannot be confined to a single text. The Manusmriti is not the tradition. It is a single prescriptive text from a single period — and it is contradicted by the tradition’s own deepest currents.

    Third — and this is the point that must be made most clearly — the Indian Constitution is the instrument through which India chose, as a sovereign people, to become something better than its worst historical inheritance. Every nation has texts and traditions that codify inequality. What distinguishes a civilisation is not the absence of such texts but the courage to repudiate them and the wisdom to build something better. Ambedkar gave India both: the courage to burn the Manusmriti, and the wisdom to write the Constitution.

    The choice India faces today is the same one Ambedkar posed in 1927, and the same one the Constituent Assembly resolved in 1950: whether India’s social and political order will be governed by a text that assigns human worth by birth — or by a document that declares, with the full force of democratic sovereignty, that every Indian citizen is born equal, lives equal, and deserves equal dignity, opportunity, and protection under the law. That is not a political question. It is a civilisational one. And for those of us who believe in India’s civilisational greatness — in the Rigveda’s declaration that truth has many names, in the Thirukkural’s universalism, in the Sangam poet’s conviction that every person is kin — the answer is not in doubt.

    The Constitution is not the enemy of Hindu civilisation. It is its finest modern expression.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), an independent policy research think tank in Chennai, grounded in the conviction that India’s civilisational greatness lies in its pluralism — and that the Indian Constitution is its most important institutional guarantee.

    This essay is a companion to the third article in the prologue in the series ‘India’s Strategic Choices and Civilisational Responsibilities,’ published at thepeninsula.org.in.

    Further Reading:

    On the Manusmriti

    Patrick Olivelle, Manu’s Code of Law: A Critical Edition and Translation of the Manava-Dharmasastra (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    The authoritative modern critical edition and translation; source for all verse citations in this essay.

    Wendy Doniger and Brian K. Smith, trans., The Laws of Manu (Penguin, 1991).

    On Ambedkar and the Mahad Satyagraha

    B.R. Ambedkar, Writings and Speeches, vols. 1–17 (Government of Maharashtra, 1979–2003).

    Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability: Analysing and Fighting Caste (Hurst, 2005).

    Eleanor Zelliot, Ambedkar’s World: The Making of Babasaheb and the Dalit Movement (Navayana, 2013).

    On the Mahad Satyagraha and the Manusmriti burning of 25 December 1927.

    On the Indian Constitution

    Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (Oxford University Press, 1966).

    Granville Austin, Working a Democratic Constitution (Oxford University Press, 1999).

    Rohit De, A People’s Constitution: The Everyday Life of Law in the Indian Republic (Princeton University Press, 2018).

    On Ambedkar’s intellectual sources

    B.R. Ambedkar, The Buddha and His Dhamma (1957; repr. Oxford University Press, 2011).

    On the grounding of the Constitution’s egalitarian principles in Buddhist philosophy and the Bhakti tradition.

    On Hindu philosophical pluralism

    Rigveda, 1.164.46: Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti.

    Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural. Trans. P.S. Sundaram (Penguin, 1990).

    Kaniyan Poongundranar, Purananuru 192: ‘Yaadhum Oorey, Yavarum Kelir.’

     

    Feature Image Credit: liberation.org.in

  • The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    The Ideological Engine: Exceptionalism, Religion, and the Civilisational Alternative

    Series: India’s Strategic Choices, Civilisational Responsibilities, and the Contest for the Emerging World Order

    This is the second of a three-part prologue to a series on India’s strategic choices, civilisational responsibilities, and the contest for the emerging world order.

    Ideological Engine crafted with Religious Endorsement

    In my previous post, I traced the material foundations of the current world order — the knowledge borrowed from the Islamic world, the wealth extracted from the Americas, two-thirds of humanity colonised and enslaved. It was the extraction, the enslavement, and the colonial architecture that built Western dominance. But material power alone does not sustain five centuries of global domination. It requires an ideological engine — a moral framework that converts extraction into mission, conquest into duty, and atrocity into the necessary price of civilisation. That engine was exceptionalism. And it was powered by religion.

    The mechanism was constructed with precision. In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bull Dum Diversas, authorising the King of Portugal to “capture, vanquish, and subdue the Saracens, pagans, and any other unbelievers and enemies of Christ” and “reduce their persons to perpetual servitude.” Three years later, Romanus Pontifex extended this authority to conquer the lands of infidels for “the salvation of all”. In 1493, following Columbus’s return from the Americas, Pope Alexander VI issued Inter Caetera — the foundational document of the Doctrine of Discovery — declaring that any land not under Christian rule could be seized, its peoples subjugated, and its resources claimed, in the service of Christianising the world.

    Columbus at the court of Barcelona. Christopher Columbus standing before the King and Queen of Spain, presenting Indians and treasures from the New World, 1493. (Newscom TagID: whphotos146159.jpg) [Photo via Newscom]

    These were not peripheral theological documents. They were the legal and moral architecture of the colonial project, establishing in explicit terms sanctioned by the highest religious authority in the Western world that non-Christians were less than human, that killing them was not a sin, and that converting or enslaving them was a sacred duty. The Doctrine of Discovery was subsequently incorporated into the legal systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, and other settler-colonial states, where it shaped land law, property rights, and indigenous dispossession for centuries. The Vatican formally repudiated the Doctrine of Discovery only in 2023 — more than five centuries after the damage was done.

    And here is what makes that repudiation hollow: the doctrine did not stay in the fifteenth century. It became the operating law of the settler-colonial states, and it remains so.

    In 1823, the United States Supreme Court, in Johnson v. McIntosh, formally incorporated the Doctrine of Discovery into American law. Chief Justice John Marshall ruled that Indigenous peoples did not own their lands once those lands had been “discovered” by Christian colonists — that discovery itself conferred title on the discovering Christian nation, reducing the original inhabitants to mere occupants on their own soil. Marshall himself conceded the principle was “extravagant.” He made it law regardless. It has never been overturned. Two centuries later, it remains the foundation of all federal Indian law in the United States.

    Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place.

    The living force of this doctrine was demonstrated in 2023 — the very year of the Vatican’s repudiation. In Haaland v. Brackeen, the US Supreme Court affirmed the modern form of the doctrine: the “plenary power” of the federal government over Native peoples. The term is not incidental. Plenary power — plenitudo potestatis, the fullness of power — is the exact phrase by which the fifteenth-century Popes claimed the authority to authorise conquest and enslavement in the first place. The Vatican renounced the doctrine in March 2023. Three months later, in June, the highest court of the United States reaffirmed its modern expression as settled law. One institution let go of the fiction. The other continued to build on it.

    Terra Nullius and the Concepts of Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny

    The pattern is not confined to the Americas. In Australia, the entire continent was claimed under the doctrine of terra nullius — the legal fiction that the land belonged to no one, that sixty thousand years of continuous Aboriginal civilisation and hundreds of distinct nations simply did not count as habitation. The Australian Constitution, when it came into force in 1901, contained Section 127, which declared that “in reckoning the numbers of the people of the Commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not be counted.” The original inhabitants of the continent were constitutionally excluded from the population of their own country. That exclusion was not removed until a referendum in 1967. The fiction of terra nullius itself was not overturned until the High Court’s Mabo judgment in 1992 — one hundred and ninety-two years after colonisation began.

    The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is the point that must be understood clearly. The Doctrine of Discovery is not a historical curiosity to be studied and regretted. It is the living legal architecture on which the settler-colonial states were built, and on which — as the events of 2023 demonstrate — they continue to stand. The exceptionalism that authorised conquest in 1452 was not repented and abandoned. It was secularised, constitutionalised, and preserved.

    This is not a distortion of Christianity. It is the documented institutional expression of a specific tradition within it: the doctrine that one’s own community occupies a uniquely chosen position in the divine order — that the Other is not merely different but lesser, and that this difference legitimates domination.

    The same logic operated, in different institutional forms, across other traditions. The conquering caliphates that used the concept of jihad to justify forced conversion were not the whole of Islamic tradition, which contains rich pluralist and humanistic streams. They were the weaponisation of religious exceptionalism by those who held political and military power. Political Zionism, in its most extreme contemporary expressions, follows the same pattern: the theological claim to exclusive divine right over territory and the dehumanisation of non-Jewish populations, ruthlessly visible from the Nakba in 1947-48 to the present conduct of the Gaza war, in full view of the world and with endorsement by the West. It follows the same pattern: religious exceptionalism converted into political licence for dispossession and violence.

    The pattern is not one religion. It is a specific logic — the claim to divine chosenness that exempts a community from the moral constraints that apply to others – that has been institutionalised, at different moments and in different traditions, wherever political power has found it useful.

    In Western civilisation, this logic found its most durable and consequential expression in American exceptionalism. In 1630, Puritan leader John Winthrop, preparing to establish the Massachusetts Bay Colony, called for the creation of a community that would be “as a City upon a Hill, the eyes of all people upon us.” This was not yet a global claim.  It was a theological self-conception: a chosen people, on a divinely appointed errand, under special divine scrutiny. But the seed was planted. Two centuries later, in 1845, John L. O’Sullivan gave it political form: “our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” God-given expansion across a continent — regardless of the peoples already living on it — was reframed as destiny, not conquest.

    The indigenous peoples of North America experienced what that destiny meant in practice. At Sand Creek in November 1864, a Colorado militia under Colonel John Chivington attacked a Cheyenne and Arapaho village whose chief, Black Kettle, was flying both an American flag and a white flag of truce. Roughly 150 people were killed, the majority of them women, children, and the elderly; the soldiers mutilated the dead and paraded body parts through the streets of Denver. Three separate investigations — two congressional, one military — condemned it as a massacre. Not one man was ever indicted. The campaigns that defined the conquest of the West — villages destroyed, food supplies burned, non-combatants killed as a matter of strategy — were not the excesses of rogue commanders. They were the method.

    And the men who carried them out were not disgraced but memorialised. George Armstrong Custer, who at dawn on the Washita River in 1868 attacked the village of that same Black Kettle, who had survived Sand Creek and was again seeking peace, killed him and his wife in the assault,  while his aggressive forces killed a large number of unarmed women and children. Custer was mythologised into a national hero, his death at the Little Bighorn recast as a noble sacrifice. This is exceptionalism completing its work: not merely committing the atrocity, but converting it, in the national memory, into valour. The conversion of conquest into heroism is not a distortion of the exceptionalist project. It is the project.

    It is worth pausing to see precisely how this engine is built, because it reveals something the comfortable version of history conceals. There are two broad models of colonialism, and they are not the same. Extractive colonialism — the Spanish in Peru, the British in India — needs the colonised population alive: to mine the silver, to work the plantations, to pay the taxes. It subjugates.

    But settler colonialism, of the kind practised in North America and Australia, does not primarily want the people. It wants the land. And a population that comes to stay on land already inhabited requires something darker than subjugation: it requires removal. The historian Patrick Wolfe named this the ‘logic of elimination’ — the observation that in the settler-colonial project, invasion is not an event but a structure, and the indigenous inhabitant is not a labour force to be exploited but an obstacle to be cleared. This is why the settler variant needed its ideological engine to run at maximum power. To subjugate a people, you need only believe they are lesser. To eliminate them, you must first erase them — conceptually, legally, theologically — before you erase them in fact. Terra nullius, the empty land; the savage without real title; the wilderness awaiting God’s chosen — these were not decorative rhetoric. They were the necessary vocabulary of replacement.

    A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    And here is the fact that removes every excuse: the conscience was present. It was not that no one knew, or that no one objected. Roger Williams argued in the 1630s that the Crown had no right to grant land it did not own, that it had to be purchased from its actual inhabitants — and he was banished for saying so. The Quaker John Woolman condemned the dispossession on moral grounds a century before it reached the Mississippi. When the Indian Removal Act came before the United States Congress in 1830, it passed by 102 votes to 97 — a bitter, closely fought debate, not a silent consensus. When the Cherokee took their case to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall ruled in Worcester v. Georgia that they possessed sovereign rights the state was bound to respect. President Andrew Jackson ignored the ruling and carried out the removal regardless; on the Trail of Tears that followed, thousands died. This is the point that must be held onto. A society that never hears the moral objection is merely benighted. A society that hears it clearly, debates it in its legislature, affirms it in its highest court — and proceeds anyway, in the name of Providence — has not failed to find its conscience. It has chosen to override it. That is what the ideological engine is for: not to fill a silence where conscience is absent, but to drown out a conscience that is present.

    The same logic was exported globally. In 1898, the United States entered the Spanish-American War, having suggested to Filipino independence fighters that it was their ally against Spanish colonial rule. When Spain was defeated, the Philippines was not given its independence. It was purchased for twenty million dollars and then colonised. The Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of over 20,000 Filipino combatants and as many as 200,000 Filipino civilians through violence, famine, and disease. McKinley called his policy “Benevolent Assimilation.” The Philippines did not receive full independence until 1946 — forty-eight years after the liberation that was promised.

    This is the pattern that repeats from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan to Iran: intervention justified as liberation, freedom invoked to mask extraction, and sovereignty violated in the name of the values that sovereignty was supposed to protect.

    The Civilisational Alternative 

    Now consider the contrast. India, China, and Persia are rooted in civilisational traditions that are fundamentally pluralist in their relationship to truth and the divine. Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Zoroastrianism do not claim exclusive possession of truth. They understand the search for ultimate reality as a path that admits multiple valid routes — that the divine is too vast and complex for any single tradition to comprehend fully. This epistemological humility produces a fundamentally different relationship to the Other: not as a lesser being to be converted or eliminated, but as a fellow traveller on a different path through the same reality — or, in the Tamil saint Vallalar’s image, rivers of many names flowing to a single shoreless ocean.

    A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    The distinction I am drawing must be stated carefully, because it is easy to misread as a claim that one civilisation is virtuous and another is wicked. That is not the claim, and it would be false. The impulse to dress conquest in sacred language is close to universal — it appears wherever power seeks to launder its crimes, and no civilisation, India’s included, is innocent of it. Ashoka built his empire by the sword before he turned to the dharma. India’s own caste hierarchy was given cosmic sanction, as I have argued elsewhere in examining the Manusmriti. The human capacity to summon the transcendent in defence of the indefensible is not the property of any one people. What differs is not the impulse to justify but what each tradition installs as its highest principle — and therefore what any justification of atrocity must first overcome. A tradition whose foundational claim is Ekam Sat Vipra Bahudha Vadanti — truth is one, the wise call it by many names — or the Jain Anekantavada, the many-sidedness of truth, or the Tamil Yaadhum Oorey-Yaavarum Kelir, that every place is home and every person kin, is structurally resistant to exceptionalism, because its highest ideal explicitly denies the premise exceptionalism requires: that a single community owns the truth and stands chosen above the rest.

    One can still commit atrocity within such a tradition — humans always can — but one cannot easily make the tradition’s own highest principle bless it. A covenantal structure built on a chosen people, an exclusive truth, and a promised land contains that raw material at its theological core. It does not compel atrocity, and most who inherit it are decent people who read it toward mercy — the abolitionists and Roger Williams drew on it too. But the doctrine of chosenness is available to be weaponised in a way that Ekam Sat structurally is not. That is the civilisational difference that matters: not that one people is depraved and another pure, but that traditions differ in whether their deepest ideal resists the engine of exceptionalism or supplies its fuel.

    Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    This civilisational disposition is not merely philosophical. It expresses itself in conduct. In December 1971, India made the decision to intervene militarily in East Pakistan in response to one of the most egregious humanitarian catastrophes of the 20th century — the Bangladesh genocide. The intervention was swift and decisive. Indian military forces liberated Bangladesh in thirteen days of formal war. Pakistani forces surrendered on December 16, 1971. The Indian military then withdrew completely. No occupation. No extraction. No installation of a client government. No strategic bases retained. Full sovereignty was transferred immediately to the people of Bangladesh. India returned over 90,000 Pakistani prisoners of war through the Simla Agreement. Scholarly analysis consistently describes India’s conduct as just war traditions with no ulterior motive of imperialism or fiscal interest. There is no comparable example in the modern history of any Western military power.

    These are not coincidental differences. They are civilisational ones. The world is now in contest over what the emerging order will be built upon. The declining Western order was built on exceptionalism — the claim to divine chosenness that converts domination into duty, secularised into legal doctrine but never abandoned. The Asian civilisational alternative — pluralist, non-exclusivist, epistemologically humble — offers a different foundation. India’s 1971 conduct is the most precise proof available that this alternative is not merely philosophical. It has been demonstrated operationally.

    The question is whether India — in Gaza, in Iran, in the institutions of the emerging world order — is willing to act consistently with the civilisational tradition it inherits.

    — This is the second in the series prologue.

    Air Marshal M Matheswaran (Retd) is the Founder-President of The Peninsula Foundation (@TPF_Chennai), grounded in the conviction that power without ethics is tyranny — and that India’s civilisational traditions offer the world something Western exceptionalism cannot.

     

    Further Reading:

    On the Doctrine of Discovery and the Papal Bulls

    Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas, 18 June 1452. Full Latin text and English translation: Doctrine of Discovery Project, doctrineofdiscovery.org.

    Pope Nicholas V, Romanus Pontifex, 8 January 1455.

    Pope Alexander VI, Inter Caetera, 4 May 1493.

    Robert J. Miller, Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, and Tracey Lindberg, Discovering Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies (Oxford University Press, 2010).

    Steven T. Newcomb, Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (Fulcrum, 2008).

    On the Vatican’s 2023 repudiation

    Dicastery for Culture and Education and Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, ‘Joint Statement on the Doctrine of Discovery,’ Vatican, 30 March 2023.

    On the incorporation and persistence of the Doctrine of Discovery in US law

    Johnson v. McIntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

    Haaland v. Brackeen, 599 U.S. 255 (2023).

    On the affirmation of ‘plenary power’ over Native peoples as the modern descendant of the Doctrine of Discovery, see the analysis by Peter d’Errico and the essays in the ‘200 Years of Johnson v. M’Intosh’ series, Canopy Forum, 2023.

    Robert J. Miller, ‘The Doctrine of Discovery in American Indian Law,’ Idaho Law Review, 42 (2005).

    Lindsay G. Robertson, Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands (Oxford University Press, 2005).

    On Australia, terra nullius, and constitutional exclusion

    Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) (1992) 175 CLR 1.

    Section 127, Constitution of Australia (repealed by referendum, 1967).

    Henry Reynolds, The Law of the Land (Penguin, 1987).

    Bain Attwood, Rights for Aborigines (Allen & Unwin, 2003).

    On Section 127 and the 1967 referendum: National Museum of Australia, ‘Indigenous Referendum,’ and George Williams’ analysis of the ‘race power’ in Australia’s constitutional history.

    On American exceptionalism — Puritan origins and Manifest Destiny

    John Winthrop, ‘A Modell of Christian Charity’ (1630).

    John L. O’Sullivan, ‘Annexation,’ The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 17(1), July–August 1845.

    Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (Hill and Wang, 1995).

    Hilde Eliassen Restad, American Exceptionalism: An Idea That Made a Nation and Remade the World (Routledge, 2014).

    On the Sand Creek Massacre and the conquest of the Plains

    U.S. Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians (38th Congress, 2nd Session, 1865).

    The contemporary Congressional investigation that condemned the massacre; the primary documentary record.

    Ari Kelman, A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970).

    On the Washita (1868), the killing of Black Kettle, and the pattern of village attacks; also on the mythologisation of George Armstrong Custer.

    Nathaniel Philbrick, The Last Stand: Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (Viking, 2010).

    On the Philippines, 1898–1946

    Stanley Karnow, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines (Random House, 1989).

    Paul A. Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

    On India’s 1971 Bangladesh liberation

    Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Harvard University Press, 2013).

    Gary J. Bass, The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide (Knopf, 2013).

    On Asian civilisational pluralism

    Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity (Penguin, 2005).

    Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin, 2009).

    Ramalinga Adigalar (Vallalar), Thiru Arutpa, Sixth Thirumurai, Verse 3907.

    The metaphor of the many religions as rivers merging into a single shoreless ocean. See thiruarutpa.org.

     

  • Venezuela’s Earthquake Tragedy: A Natural Disaster that Worsened an Already Crisis-Stricken Nation

    Venezuela’s Earthquake Tragedy: A Natural Disaster that Worsened an Already Crisis-Stricken Nation

    On June 24, 2026 Venezuela experienced one of the most devastating natural disasters in its modern history when two powerful earthquakes measuring 7.2 and 7.5 struck within seconds of each other along the country’s north-central Caribbean coast. The shallow earthquakes, centred near Morón, sent powerful tremors across Caracas, La Guaira, Carabobo, Yaracuy and Miranda, causing widespread structural collapse, crippling transport networks, disrupting electricity supplies and severely damaging hospitals and other critical infrastructure. Hundreds of aftershocks further complicated rescue operations, making this the country’s strongest seismic event in more than a century.

    The Humanitarian Catastrophe

    The scale of destruction has been staggering. Thousands of buildings—including residential apartments, schools, hospitals and public facilities—either collapsed or suffered extensive damage. Rescue teams, supported by international search-and-rescue missions, continue to search through debris for survivors. Recent estimates place the death toll at well over 1,450, with more than 3,000 injured and tens of thousands displaced from their homes. While international humanitarian assistance has begun arriving from multiple countries, damaged roads, disrupted communications and recurring aftershocks have slowed relief efforts considerably. India on its part has sent two C-17 Indian Air Force aircrafts under Operation Amistad to aid the crisis stricken country.

    From a disaster management perspective, the earthquakes have exposed the vulnerability of ageing infrastructure and inadequate urban preparedness. Hospitals already operating with limited resources have struggled to cope with the influx of trauma patients, while shortages of medical equipment, emergency supplies and trained personnel have further constrained rescue and relief operations. As in many fragile states, the disaster has demonstrated how natural hazards become significantly more destructive when institutional capacity is weak.

    Geopolitics, Sovereignty and Venezuela’s Oil

    The earthquake also unfolded against an exceptionally volatile geopolitical backdrop. Barely six months earlier, Venezuela underwent a dramatic political transition following a U.S. military operation that resulted in the capture and removal of former President Nicolás Maduro. The operation generated widespread international debate, with several international law scholars, United Nations experts and governments describing it as a violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and questioning its compatibility with the principles of the UN Charter.

    The post-Maduro transition has also reshaped U.S.–Venezuela relations. Washington has moved towards supporting Venezuela’s interim administration, easing selected sanctions and reopening engagement with the country’s energy sector. Given that Venezuela possesses the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves, renewed American interest in rebuilding the country’s petroleum industry has inevitably fueled geopolitical debate regarding the strategic importance of energy security in shaping U.S. policy. While some commentators argue that access to Venezuela’s vast oil resources has become a central strategic consideration, others view the engagement primarily through the lens of regional stability, democratic transition and humanitarian assistance. These competing interpretations continue to shape international discourse surrounding Venezuela’s future.

    A Disaster that Struck a Nation Already in Crisis

    This national tragedy is particularly severe because it has struck a country that has spent over a decade grappling with profound political, economic and humanitarian challenges. Years of economic contraction, hyperinflation, international sanctions, declining oil production, institutional deterioration and the migration of millions of Venezuelans have considerably weakened the state’s ability to prepare for and respond to major disasters. Public investment in infrastructure maintenance, healthcare and emergency management had already declined substantially before the earthquake, leaving many critical facilities vulnerable to seismic damage.

    Consequently, the earthquake has not merely created a humanitarian emergency; it has compounded an already fragile national situation. Reconstruction costs are expected to run into several billions of dollars at a time when Venezuela continues to face severe fiscal constraints. Although the country’s oil production infrastructure largely escaped catastrophic damage, disruptions to electricity networks, ports and petrochemical facilities have slowed industrial activity and complicated recovery efforts. The earthquake has therefore added another layer of economic uncertainty to a nation that was only beginning to show modest signs of stabilization after years of decline.

    Conclusion

    Venezuela’s twin earthquakes illustrate how natural disasters rarely occur in isolation. Instead, they intersect with existing political instability, economic fragility and geopolitical competition, magnifying their human and developmental consequences. While international relief efforts may alleviate immediate suffering, long-term recovery will require far more than rebuilding damaged infrastructure. It will depend upon restoring institutional capacity, strengthening governance, revitalizing the economy and ensuring that humanitarian assistance remains insulated from geopolitical contestation. For Venezuela, recovery is therefore not merely a question of reconstruction—it is a test of whether a nation burdened by years of crisis can rebuild both its physical landscape and its political future.