The myth of ‘World Order’ and way ahead for timeless India

Every few decades, when global turbulence intensifies, a familiar phrase resurfaces in diplomatic drawing rooms and elite conclaves: World Order. In recent weeks, following a series of provocative statements and actions by US President Donald Trump, the phrase has returned to fashionable currency — now repackaged as the promise or peril of a ‘New World Order.’

Yet history offers little comfort to those who imagine that such an order ever existed, or that it will materialise in the foreseeable future. There has been no world order in the past, there is none today, and there is unlikely to be one tomorrow. The idea itself is a utopia — seductive, moralistic, and fundamentally divorced from the complex grammar of power that governs international relations.

On January 20, US President Trump shared an AI-generated image on his Truth Social platform depicting a dramatically altered map of the United States - one that included Canada, Greenland, and Venezuela as American territory.

The image, displayed as part of a staged Oval Office meeting with prominent European leaders — Emmanuel Macron, Giorgia Meloni, Keir Starmer, Ursula von der Leyen, NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte — was not merely a digital provocation. It was a political statement, blunt and unsettling in its candour.

That bluntness was reinforced days earlier, on January 8, 2026, when Trump told The New York Times: “I don’t need any international law; the only limits on my power are my own morality.”

There is deep historical irony in such assertions. The US itself was born through rebellion against imperial ownership. The American continent had already witnessed a far older and far more brutal assertion of entitlement.

In 1492, Christopher Columbus ‘discovered’ the Americas for the Christian world. Exhausted from a long sea voyage, he was welcomed by indigenous peoples later labelled ‘Red Indians.’

History records, with chilling consistency, how that hospitality was repaid. Entire civilisations were annihilated; cultures reduced to museum exhibits in their own ancestral lands.

For the first time in centuries, Europe appears to feel the pinch of imperial arrogance directed inward. Condemnations of Trump’s ‘imperial ambitions’ ring hollow from a continent whose history is inseparable from conquest, colonisation, and racial hierarchy.

On January 20, French President Emmanuel Macron told the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos that this was ‘not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism.’ Do not miss the irony. France continues to administer a dozen overseas territories scattered across the globe - from Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to Mayotte in the Indian Ocean.

Though legally rebranded as departments of the French Republic and members of the European Union, these territories remain governed through an unmistakably paternalistic lens. As a result, France has 12 (13 if its claim in Antarctica is included), the maximum number of time zones in the world.

Recall Algeria’s bloody war of independence (1954-62), in which nearly 1.5 million Algerians were killed while resisting French colonial rule.

European unease was palpable even before Davos. On January 19, Germany’s Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil warned, “We will not allow ourselves to be blackmailed.” France’s Finance Minister Roland Lescure described a world entering ‘uncharted territory,’ where an ally of 250 years was using tariffs as geopolitical weapons.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney was even more candid. On January 20, he spoke of “a rupture in the world order … the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics is subject to no limits, no constraints.”

Carney’s phrase — pleasant fiction — deserves attention. The so-called world order was never a universal moral compact. It was an arrangement that suited those who wrote its rules.

Western moral authority further collapses under the weight of its civilisational record. In 1542, India encountered one of the most violent faces of European bigotry when Saint Francis Xavier and his Jesuit companions landed in Goa. Their declared mission was explicit: to uproot ‘paganism’ and replace it with Christianity.

The persecution that followed - of Hindus, Muslims, and even indigenous Christians — is not conjecture but documented history. The Portuguese-Catholic Inquisition in Goa employed torture, confiscation of property, forced conversions, and cultural erasure.

In Houses of Goa, Annabel Mascarenhas and Heta Pandit record: “For the next two hundred and sixty years, converts were favoured … churches rose where temples once stood … Hindu priests were banished, their properties confiscated …”

The Catholic Church has acknowledged its crimes selectively. Pope Francis apologised in Canada in 2022 for the ‘catastrophic’ impact of church-run residential schools. But why stop at Canada? Why not Goa, Latin America, Africa, or Asia — lands devastated over centuries in the name of salvation? Selective repentance is not remorse; it is reputation management.

If Europe’s record is one of hypocrisy, America’s is one of strategic self-sabotage. Ironically, the US paved the way for China’s meteoric rise. In 1999, Washington signed a bilateral trade agreement with Beijing. In 2001, with US backing, China entered the World Trade Organisation. The outcome was predictable and devastating: China became the world’s manufacturing hub.

The numbers tell the story. In 2000, China’s GDP was $1.2 trillion; America’s was $10.3 trillion. By 2025, China’s GDP has surged to $19.5 trillion - nearly 65 per cent of America’s $30 trillion economy. What was once dismissed as a third-world agrarian state has become a civilisational challenger. Trump’s trade wars are not aggression; they are belated damage control.

China’s imperial ambitions are neither subtle nor restrained. It annexed Tibet, disputes borders with twenty countries, and asserts expansive claims over international sea lanes. Its Belt and Road Initiative is less partnership than debt-induced dependence.

Yet America, too, has been a bully - Vietnam, Bangladesh in 1971, Iraq in 2003, Afghanistan for two decades. It armed jihadists in the 1980s, only to fight their progeny later. Its ‘good Taliban, bad Taliban’ doctrine fuelled global terror.

America remains a democracy capable of correction. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq - policy failures were eventually acknowledged. Trump himself faces opposition, courts, elections, and term limits.

China faces none of these. Xi Jinping is a lifetime ruler in all but name. There is no dissent, no independent judiciary, no free press. Surveillance, fear, and obedience define the system.

That is why China’s rise is more dangerous than America’s dominance. Speaking at the WEF, US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick declared with rare candour: “Globalisation has failed the West and the United States of America. It’s a failed policy … and it has left America behind.”

This admission is remarkable not merely for its bluntness, but for its source. The WEF — long the high church of globalisation — was once the platform from which Western elites prescribed borderless trade, deregulation, and offshoring as sacrosanct truths. That such a verdict should now be pronounced from its stage signals not reform, but collapse. By 2019, even The Economist conceded: ‘Globalisation has faltered.’

For India — a timeless civilisation rooted in pluralism, memory, and continuity — the choice is clear. Align without submission. Engage without illusion. And above all, never mistake rhetoric for reality. There is no world order. There never was. There is only the eternal contest between power and conscience — and history remembers who surrendered which first. The world is not entering a ‘new order’. It is returning to an old truth: power rules, morality follows.

The writer is an eminent columnist, former Chairman of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication (IIMC), and the author of ‘Tryst with Ayodhya: Decolonisation of India’ and ‘Narrative ka Mayajaal’; views are personal