Russian President Vladimir Putin’s arrival in New Delhi later this week for his annual summit with Narendra Modi almost feels as if the trip harks back to a different era, five and a half decades back, when the Soviet Union was joining hands with India’s Indira Gandhi for a ‘Treaty of Friendship’ ahead of a definitive involvement to end a genocide in East Pakistan.

However, the world has long changed from the post-World War II era when the globe was riven between two camps led by two superpowers. Yet, what looms over this year’s meeting is not a memory but the sense that the international order itself has slipped into a new, uncharted phase, never witnessed before in the last two centuries.

For a generation, after the Cold War ended with the disintegration of the Soviet empire, geopolitics seemed to move along a predictable arc: a briefly unchallenged United States at the helm, a rising China jostling for space, and a set of middle powers largely orbiting these two giants.

By the time 2025 came about, the world realised the old bipolar and unipolar templates no longer describe the world with any accuracy. What is emerging instead resembles the early scaffolding of a multipolar system, one in which the United States remains powerful but less reliable. China continues its ascent while generating increasing anxiety among all other rising nations. Europe gropes towards greater autonomy, and India and Russia find themselves drifting, almost by necessity, into a renewed strategic compact.

This drift’s origins lie in the erosion of confidence in American consistency, compounded by Washington’s long, inconclusive wars, its domestic breakdown, and, most recently, the new tariff wars. For India, an inexplicable 50 per cent duty on most........

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