Would America have dared to carry out the abduction of the President and his wife of a country, as part of planned pulverisation of the enshrined principle of national sovereignty, if that country was a nuclear weapon’s power, and could also inflict, even if not in the same measure, unacceptable damage to America? The answer is clearly in the negative. So, the only inference to draw from the lawless world in which we live today is that, irrespective of the real merits of any situation, the only wrong that one can commit is to be helpless and vulnerable to the lunatic domination of the powerful.

The blunt truth is that brute power is synonymous with the new world order. The grammar of diplomacy still invokes the United Nations, international law, human rights, democracy, sovereignty, and a rules-based order. Yet the lived reality of global politics increasingly suggests another, older language—one in which brute power speaks more fluently than principle, and outcomes are shaped less by norms than by naked capacity.

True, the world has rarely been governed by idealism alone. Notions like the balance of power, spheres of influence, and realpolitik are not modern inventions; they are as old as Chanakya. What is different today is not the existence of might is right, but its brazenness—and the erosion of any shared moral embarrassment about its use.

The post-Second World War order, painstakingly constructed amidst the ruins of unrestrained violence, sought to place some........

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