Neo-Colonialism is here. The brute power of the gun has always been the key factor in deciding the fate of conflicts in human history except for a brief period after World War II. And even then, it was limited. Great Britain handed over its economic superpower status to the United States peacefully at the Bretton Woods summit. But Britain was already staring at financial bankruptcy due to the war. The Lend Lease agreements and loans from the US further pushed it into decline, forcing it to sell its global assets dirt-cheap and eliminating the extremely profitable preferential trade in pound-sterling with its colonies.

This gave us an illusion of the non-violent transfer of power from one superpower to another. But this was an exception and an artifact. Ancient Greece and Rome were swallowed up in violence, and the civilizations of India and China were forced to bend at the point of the gun. Spain was defeated by the British in the 16th and 17th centuries and the Ottoman empire decimated in World War after a period of internal decline. Every great power declines under the immediate threat or use of the gun.

It seems like brute power has returned and even the semblance of maintaining the world order which the West has espoused for the last eight decades or so has........

© News18