We are living through a period of structural breakdown much more severe than the shifts of 1991. Thirty-five years ago, the global elite toasted the “end of history”. The collapse of the Soviet Union was supposed to herald a golden era of universal democracy, liberal economic integration, and the uncontested triumph of Western values. For India, that milestone was a baptism by fire. On the verge of national bankruptcy, mourning an assassinated prime minister, and watching its sole strategic anchor in Moscow dissolve in real time, New Delhi was forced to reinvent itself. And it did so with remarkable resilience.
But if 1991 was an invitation to a rules-based order, 2026 is its explicit obituary.
I recently had the privilege of hosting a profound, unflinchingly candid conversation on my “Khanversations” YouTube channel with one of India’s most seasoned diplomatic minds, Ambassador Pankaj Saran. Having served as India’s Deputy National Security Advisor and as Ambassador to both Russia and Bangladesh, Saran possesses that rare vantage point where high-stakes diplomacy meets hard-nosed national security execution.
Our dialogue unpeeled the layers of a deeply dangerous global landscape, one dominated by what can only be termed a “Trumpian rupture” in international relations—a phenomenon that has utterly shattered the baseline assumptions of the past eighty years.
The core crisis of our current moment is not just that old alliances are fraying, but that the fundamental compact governing great-power behaviour has vanished. As Saran observed with sharp dismay, we have entered a world completely devoid of restraint.
Major powers now act with naked, unapologetic unilateralism. The norms built to prevent the worst impulses of the jungle have been thrown out the window. Whether it is the destruction of civilian societies, the bombing of hospitals, the abduction of foreign leaders, or the sudden, chaotic abandonment of entire nations—as witnessed during the American retreat from Afghanistan—the rules no longer apply.
This erosion is not uniquely American, but the sheer velocity of the breakdown is undeniably emanating from Washington. What makes the current political reality under Donald Trump so unprecedented is that a superpower’s political establishment has successfully won power on the explicit premise that the entire global order is a mistake.
For the first time, we are hearing American leaders use the language of revisionist powers like Russia or China to denounce globalisation, declare international bodies like the UN a waste of time, and wash their hands of any global burden-sharing. The message to the world, and to India specifically, is stark: Your prosperity is none of our business.
India-US ties
This brings us to the agonising central question animating contemporary Indian foreign policy: Was the intimate US-India strategic partnership of the early 2020s merely a fleeting historical blip?
To call the current chill in Washington-Delhi relations a “blip” is to fundamentally misread the undercurrents of American power. While it is true that under the previous Joe Biden administration, the US-India partnership was treated as the indispensable axis to manage the Indo-Pacific and counter a rising China, the negative impulses we see today were always festering beneath the surface inside the Beltway.
Long before Trump’s second term, sections of the Washington elite quietly viewed India as a “free rider”—a hesitant partner that refused to put its eggs in the American basket, stubbornly maintained its historical ties with Moscow, and dragged its feet within the Quad framework.
The rupture of 2026 is that these hidden resentments have erupted into open hostility. When figures like Christopher Landau stand before the strategic elite at the Raisina Dialogue in New Delhi and boldly proclaim that America “will not make the same mistake with India that it made with China”, the mask is officially off.
The American establishment has effectively downgraded India’s strategic weight. It no longer views New Delhi as an irreplaceable partner in a grand ideological battle against authoritarianism; rather, it views India through a cold, transaction-first lens: What have you done to help me Make America Great Again today?
This shifting landscape has forced India to make hard, uncomfortable choices, nowhere more visible than in the volatile theatre of West Asia. For decades, India’s diplomatic holy grail was “multi-alignment”—a sophisticated balancing act that allowed New Delhi to maintain deep ties with Iran, cultivate the wealthy Gulf monarchies, and build a quiet security partnership with Israel.
Yet, as I pushed Saran to acknowledge during our discussion, the brutal conflicts of the last two years have severely strained, if not outright broken, this policy. When Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood in solidarity with Israel at the outbreak of hostilities, he was not just offering a standard diplomatic condolence, he was signalling a profound ideological alignment.
Throughout the subsequent regional conflagration—even as global outcry grew over human rights violations and the devastation of Gaza—New Delhi consistently refrained from directly condemning Israeli or American actions. India even acted to soften anti-Israel consensus statements within multilateral forums such as the SCO and BRICS.
In this image posted on May 15, 2026, External Affairs Minister Dr S. Jaishankar (right) with his Iranian counterpart Abbas Araghchi during the BRICS Foreign Ministers’ meeting, in New Delhi.
| Photo Credit:
PTI
This transactional stance, however, leaves a massive question mark over India’s future with a resurgent Iran. Many strategic analysts believe the US has fundamentally blundered and lost its proxy war with Tehran, paving the way for a more confident, aggressive, and potentially nuclear-armed Iranian state.
The bond with Iran
During Iran’s hours of maximum crisis, India was conspicuously absent. Yet Saran remains surprisingly optimistic about the durability of India-Iran ties. He revealed that even during the highest pitch of recent maritime tensions, New Delhi maintained quiet, constant backchannels with Tehran that ensured Indian energy cargos were uniquely permitted safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
The civilisational bond between the two nations is structurally deep, and as Saran dryly noted, the historical fault lines between Iran and Pakistan will always remain far wider than any temporary friction between Tehran and Delhi.
This brings us to the broader theatre of Eurasia and the global south’s shifting allegiances. Much was made in Western media of the famous “Tianjin photograph”—the striking image of Prime Minister Modi standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the SCO summit, hot on the heels of Donald Trump slapping a devastating 50 per cent tariff on Indian goods. The West panicked, decrying a revival of the Russia-India-China (RIC) strategic triad.
In reality, the Western hysteria over the RIC grouping exposes a bizarre historical amnesia. As Saran pointed out, the RIC has existed as a formal diplomatic concept for nearly two decades. It is an organic reflection of non-Western, civilisational powers in Eurasia who share a pride in their independent identities. However, as a functional geopolitical bloc, the RIC will always remain crippled by the intense bilateral fractures between New Delhi and Beijing.
The Tianjin photo-op was not a grand strategic pivot; it was a tactical reaction driven by immense, righteous anger within India. The hyper-aggressive warmongering coming out of Washington, alongside absurd accusations from US cabinet officials claiming India was single-handedly funding the Ukraine war, destroyed American credibility overnight in the eyes of the Indian public.
For 60 years, western Europe built its entire economic prosperity on cheap, uninterrupted Russian energy. For the West to turn around and demand that a developing nation like India sacrifice its economic stability by halting its own energy imports was a display of hypocrisy so staggering that New Delhi felt entirely justified in reminding Washington that it has other geopolitical options on the table.
Yet, while India can deftly navigate great-power hypocrisy on the global stage, it continues to stumble in its own backyard. The “neighborhood first” policy is facing severe structural headwinds. From the “India out” movements in the Maldives to the dramatic, chaotic ousting of Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, India appears increasingly isolated among its immediate neighbours.
Mending fences
In a fascinating historical twist, India’s smoothest relationship in South Asia right now is arguably with the Taliban (in Afghanistan), the radical Islamist group that was originally nurtured by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to undermine Indian interests, but is now actively seeking New Delhi’s economic embrace to shield itself from its former Pakistani masters.
Conversely, in Bangladesh, where Saran personally helped resolve decades-old border and land disputes during the heyday of secular Awami League rule, the transition to a right-of-centre, deeply Islamic dispensation under Muhammad Yunus and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) has created a dangerous vacuum.
Make no mistake: ISI and Chinese intelligence are actively fishing in these troubled waters, attempting to foster an artificial, pan-Islamic sentiment to isolate India. Yet Saran urges against fatalism. Geography is an absolute, unyielding determinant of life. Bangladesh cannot escape its geography; its economic destiny, its history, and its triumphant pride in its 1971 liberation victory mean it can never truly regress into a Pakistani satellite.
The friction India experiences with its neighbours is not a failure of individual policies; it is an unyielding structural reality. When you are a colossus sitting in the middle of a subcontinent, surrounded by tiny nations whose entire domestic political project relies on 24/7 assertions of sovereignty and identity against your shadow, you are destined to be a permanent regional punching bag.
For India, the path forward in this restive, restraint-less world requires a total abandonment of past illusions. The old, predictable US is not coming back. Regional multilateral frameworks like SAARC are functionally dead—long since weaponised and sabotaged by Pakistan to embarrass New Delhi on the international stage.
India must instead build a hard-nosed, hyper-flexible model of sub-regional cooperation, sitting only in rooms with those willing to work. In the dangerous, transactional world of 2026, survival belongs not to the ideologues, but to the resilient and the unblinkingly realistic.
Dr Muqtedar Khan is Professor of International Relations at the University of Delaware. He is also a Senior Non-Resident Fellow at the Middle East Policy Council and hosts a YouTube channel on global affairs called “Khanversations”.
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