New world order will be more multipolar and transactional: Jaishankar at HT Leadership Summit

The new world order taking shape will be more multipolar and transactional, with more centres of autonomous decision-making, thereby making it more unstable and setting the stage for sharper competition, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday.External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar speaks at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit in New Delhi on Saturday.Speaking at the 24th Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, Jaishankar said this new order is taking shape at a time when the world is navigating “very stormy seas” because of multiple conflicts, including those in Ukraine and West Asia, the grim situation in parts of Africa, and disruptions and volatility in food and fuel supplies.“The general acceptance is that the new order would be more multipolar, that there’d be many more centres of autonomous decision-making. Countries overall would be much more national in their choices and in their decisions,” he said in a conversation with HT's Editor-In-Chief R Sukumar.“The alliances will be less cohesive because of national interests and more transactional, because they feed into each other — less cohesive, more transactional; more transactional, less cohesive.”The new world order will also be one of “more variables”, and “much more complex [and] less predictable” because there are more players, who are also more self-centered. “That will be the culture or the ethos of the era that we are moving into. I don’t want you to get a sort of picture of an anarchy, but definitely sharper competition, more national assertions, and in that sense inherently more unstable,” Jaishankar said.Jaishankar acknowledged that the world was “in a mess” and charting “very stormy seas”, with global headwinds having consequences for India. The changes underway have been exacerbated by the wars in Ukraine and West Asia, the grim situation in Sudan and Central Africa, the volatility of food and fuel prices, and the continuing fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, he said.“Five years ago, it would have been inconceivable in this day and age, when everything is so globalised and interdependent, that we could have a major war. We’ve actually had that war now into its fifth year,” he said, referring to the Russia-Ukraine conflict.“What you see in the Gulf — the idea that countries would actually be firing missiles at each other, targeting bases, cities, forces, leaderships — would have been something which people would have rated its chances as pretty near zero,” he said, adding that the situation in West Asia had become “much more bitter and intractable” since the terror attacks by Hamas in October 2023.Food exports from Ukraine and Russia were stuck in the Black Sea, impacting global food prices, including those in India, while fuel prices too were rising because of disruptions, he said.Tackling these challenges requires strong, steady and experienced leadership that “knows how to get the country through this, because the compass for navigating it is our national interest”, Jaishankar said.“When we look at all these challenges, when people ask us where do you stand on Ukraine or where do you stand on the Gulf or what is your view on a particular challenge, we will view it understandably through the lens of our national interest. That’s the compass which will guide us,” he said, adding this turbulence will show up in different ways till the end of the current decade.The turbulence on the global stage is being driven by multiple causes, though US-China competition is a “big part of the overall…disturbance or volatility”, Jaishankar said. “One part of it is when countries get caught up in between, but it’s also led to the US itself changing the manner in which it approaches the world,” he said.The changes underway have acquired a greater degree of sharpness amid the US-China competition and a marked change in Washington’s approach towards even its long-standing partners. The US’s focus on reindustrialising to ensure it isn’t excessively dependent on a particular country or geography has also led to vulnerability. “One part of it is to look at a US-China competition in a very orthodox way. But if you look at it more deeply…each one of these feeds into the other and a big part of it is really the changed approach of the US to the world, even to its friends and allies,” Jaishankar said.The US was politically dominant in the world order put in place after World War II because it was willing to underwrite economic arrangements as they served American interests. But things changed, going back to the term of former president Joe Biden, as the US found that the rules “it was underwriting had been gamed to its disadvantage”, he pointed out.“The US, which was a big energy importer from the Gulf, today is self-sufficient and an energy exporter. If it was an energy importer today, I’m not sure many of the events which are happening in the Gulf would still be happening,” Jaishankar said.As the energy scenario has significantly changed, technology gaps have grown, and there has been a revolution in warfare, the political atmosphere has led to greater propensity to take risks. “It’s a more competitive word, it’s also a much more risk-taking word, and not limited to the US,” Jaishankar said. “Other players are also taking risks. Everybody is pushing the envelope [and] the more powerful are able to push the envelope much stronger and on many more issues.”With the world in a transitional phase, there is an expectation that the new order will have a “much stronger role of India or much stronger influence by India”, Jaishankar said. This will require stronger domestic capacities, including through initiatives such as Atmanirbhar Bharat (Self-Reliant India), Make in India and Innovate in India, which are the building blocks of foreign policy.At the same time, India will have to reforge relationships, diversify and de-risk. “In the last decade, we have laid a very solid foundation…with this very strong push for industrialisation because…we missed the manufacturing bus. That for us, [from] the 1960s to the end of the 1990s, we may have had reform, but these were really lost decades. Even the reform was only a correction and a partial correction of what were lost decades before 1992,” he said.India has to build itself into a manufacturing power and acquire the technologies and capabilities needed for the contemporary era, including through schemes such as the Production-Linked Incentives (PLI) initiative. “We have to become economically competitive, which means much better infrastructure and logistics. We have to improve our talent, which means more educational institutions, more skilling. But we’ll also have to invest in semiconductors, We’ll have to invest in upgrading life sciences. We’ll have to look at preparing for the AI era,” he said. “We’ll have to address multiple levels in order to navigate those stormy seas.”