New Delhi: A new multipolar world order marked by sharp competition, a growing number of autonomous decision-making centres and a more transactional global approach is taking shape amid the major conflicts in West Asia and Ukraine, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar said on Saturday.
Jaishankar said the world is undergoing a major transition and it will be much more complex and less predictable because of the increasing number of “self-centred” players, citing multiple conflicts, frictions, uncertainty and volatility impacting countries across geographies.
“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 anarchy, but definitely sharper competition, more national assertions, and in that sense inherently a more unstable (world),” he said at the HT Leadership Summit.
Jaishankar said the new order would be more multipolar and would have many more centres of autonomous decision-making.
“Countries overall would be much more national in their choices and decisions. Alliances will be less cohesive because of national interests and more transactional because they feed into each other: less cohesive, more transactional,” he said.
The external affairs minister said India will have to deal with the new reality by developing greater capacities within the country and underlined the importance of the Modi government’s “Atmanirbhar Bharat” and “Make in India” initiatives.
“For me, these are the building blocks of our foreign policy because you cannot have an effective foreign policy in this era without much stronger national capacities.”
The minister also underlined the importance of industrialisation within the country and said the last decade saw the laying of a “very solid foundation” in this regard.
Jaishankar said India missed the “manufacturing bus” during the 1960s to the end of the 1990s in many ways. “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. Today, we have to build ourselves into a manufacturing power. At the same time, we have to also aim to get into the technologies and capabilities which are required for the contemporary era,” he said.
In response to a question, Jaishankar said the US-China competition is a “big part” of the global volatility, but noted that many other factors are also at play triggering the overall changes in the global landscape.
“You can’t say US-China turbulence is driving the Gulf or driving what’s happening in Ukraine. I think you have multiple causations here. But definitely the US-China competition is a big part of the overall disturbance or volatility,” he said.
“Because what it has done, 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.”
Jaishankar also cautiously responded to a question on whether the result of US midterm polls will bring any changes to the bilateral ties.
“I’m normally chary about commenting on the domestic politics of other countries in public. That’s your job; it’s not my job. Will it change something? Of course, it would change something. It would change many things.”
“Would it change our relationship? I would say on many issues which we are working on, there is either a consensus, let us say, defence and security cooperation or the technology side.”
