Power politics has never been a smooth sail. It is an ocean always in tumult. That is what the human civilisation has brought to us as a collective experience, from Greeks to Chinese to Indians to Mesopotamians.
The two great wars in the first half of the twentieth century was perhaps the most horrible manifestation of what a global power confrontation can do to humans, their cities and villages. People, like sand grains in a desert, were killed without any count. It was after those horrible wars that the global leadership decided to have institutions and policies in place that could save humanity from such an experience.
Those efforts did not give us a just and harmonious world, but at least maintained an order that prevented any large scale military confrontation. But now that order seems to have lived its life and is on a ventilator soon to be dismounted as a dead body.
The way new global blocks are forming, the way extreme politics is coming to power in many countries, the way old wounds are getting opened up, and the way new conflicts are taking shape – this world is at the brink of a total devastation. National narratives, civilisational visions, capitalists ambitions, and power intoxication – it is a right mix to blow everything apart. This confrontation seems now beyond transnational structures like the UN.
Our region is also in the eye of the storm. The question for us, as people, is how not to allow this dangerous game to unfold in our midst. Though our options are near to naught, but at least we can, in our respective spaces, refuse to be divided in the name of religion, ideology or nationalism.
The present confrontation would not only involve big powers, and state players, but would consume communities and societies in the smaller, yet deep seated, hatreds and animosities. It is at this local level that we can save ourselves from becoming the fodder for this belligerence based on hate, ambition, and perversion of vision.