Order has always carried within it a quiet anxiety, for its opposite is chaos. The US-led New World Order unveiled at the end of the Cold War in 1988–89 was no exception. It promised stability, prosperity, and predictability, but it also rested on immense economic, military, and political costs that only one power was expected to bear. Today, as that order visibly erodes, the anxiety that lay dormant at its core has returned to the surface.

This was acknowledged, perhaps inadvertently, by former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who described the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 as a blow to the US-led world order. What she was mourning was not merely territorial aggression in Europe, but the strain on a global system built around free trade, financial dominance, Western-style democratic governance, and American military supremacy. The question is no longer whether this order is weakening, but who is positioning themselves to shape what comes next.

This reality formed the backdrop of discussions over the past two weeks on Political Zone, the geopolitical programme on Federal Post. In an episode titled “Greater Bangladesh, India’s Karma”, we examined the historical and contemporary forces shaping the surge of anti-India sentiment in Bangladesh, a country whose birth India facilitated in 1971 through military intervention. History, however, has a way of circling back. The hostility towards Pakistan once cultivated by India among Bengalis has, over time, morphed into resentment directed at India itself.

What is often overlooked in New Delhi is that the movement against........

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