Beyond the diplomatese — Darwin was right, it's a jungle out there

The generally received wisdom is that international affairs is so arcane a subject that it should be left to experts and diplomats to interpret. Which they usually do, in language that no one understands. But even that is fine, as long as we can make sense of the moves on the global chessboard.

That is not, however, the case today, post-Trump, as we see the before our eyes, open licence being granted for slaughter of innocents, the legitimisation of a new era of colonisation and genocide.

We would, therefore, be justified in feeling that the future of billions cannot be left to the mercy of diplomats, just as war cannot be left only to generals for, as Shylock asked in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice: "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" The world is bleeding now, and we, the common citizens, have every right to ask: what the hell is happening?

The world is now dominated, and dictated to, by three unscrupulous leaders; one has been convicted on 34 counts of felony and would have been in jail if only the American Democrats had played their cards better, the other two are , accused of crimes against humanity for whom arrest warrants have been issued by the ICC (International Criminal Court).

They have now joined forces to carve out the world among themselves, in a macabre replay of the Yalta Conference of February 1945. But whereas Yalta marked the end of a period of violence and killing, this new meeting of minds marks the beginning of a period of renewed killings and oppression.

These three have completely upended the rules-based international order (RBO), which has more or less governed international relations since the UN came into existence on 24 October 1945.

The use of the veto and military power has ensured that the RBO has been replaced by the law of the jungle — open annexation of sovereign territories, blatant genocide, forcible grabbing of mineral resources.

will be gifted Ukraine as the main course and can help himself to eastern Europe and the Baltics as dessert, while Donald Trump gets his and Benjamin Netanyahu swallows up most of the Middle East. China will probably pocket Taiwan and all the islands within the nine dash line.

International cooperation, and the organisations meant to ensure this, are as good as dead. The United Nations has been put in moth balls for all the influence it has on the world right now. It's just a debating club, and not even in the same league as the Oxford Union Debating Society.

Its impotence has been underlined by the fact that Israel — a member state — has of the UN secretary-general into the country, killed more than 200 of its staff, disallowed the functioning of its aid organisations like UNRWA in Gaza, attacked its schools, hospitals and refugee camps, and there's nothing that can be done about it. Indeed, Working for UNRWA can now get one arrested and deported in the USA.

The ICC arrest warrants and orders to end genocide in Gaza are not worth the paper they are written on — in fact, Netanyahu has now extended the genocide to the West Bank and the USA is issuing sanctions against the judges of the ICJ (International Court of Justice)!

The WTO (World Trade Organization) is in a shambles, with Trump imposing and other countries retaliating in similar fashion. The WHO (World Health Organization) is facing collapse, with the USA backing out, ditto for any effective climate accord as the world's largest polluter disassociates itself from climate change agreements and expands its fossil fuel extraction. A huge sink hole has just opened up under the edifice of global cooperation.

Other portents are even more worrying for the future of humankind. We were all aware of a creeping right wing, intolerant and authoritarian wave moving across nations, but now Italian Prime Minister Georgia Meloni has proposed a confederation or alliance of right-wing rulers: Trump, Narendra Modi, Argentinian President Javier Milei, Netanyahu and herself to begin with.

No doubt, the likes of Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, , and other wannabe strongmen will also be lining up to join this unholy gang. This can only spell more danger for a world where democracy has been in retreat since the late 1990s.

In fact, the world is in a more dangerous place today than it has ever been since 1948, with this powerful troika abandoning all principles of international law and the sovereignty of nations, crushing underfoot the hard fought-for values of human rights, negating agreements built over decades by painstakingly achieved consensus, withdrawing from international organisations established to bring about cohesion and equal development, repudiating global covenants such as the climate accords, intimidating other nations by the use of their military prowess.

Even more alarmingly, their lawlessness and unpredictability are forcing other countries like Japan, South Korea and Poland to consider acquiring nuclear capabilities to hedge their safety bets.

And where does India stand amidst all this chaos, I wonder? It appears to me that we — we are not what we are, we are what we are not. The traditional bedrocks of our foreign policy — the Panchsheel principles, support for Palestine, anti-colonialism, a nuanced neutrality, the values of liberal democracy — have all been jettisoned in favour of cronyism-inspired GDP, the image of one man, and to sit at the high table of global politics.

This is sought to be achieved by a supine surrender to the new Satan on the block, shameful abstentions in the United Nations, silence when our own citizens are , putting money over morals. This is all disguised as 'neutrality', but is just . And it's not working.

We have zero influence today over global affairs, we can no longer claim any leadership of the Global South, we are isolated within BRICS, Trump doesn't give a tinker's curse for us, nobody knows what we stand for anymore notwithstanding a pulpit-thumping external affairs minister who sounds more and more like Mr Micawber and Uriah Heep combined from Charles Dickens' David Copperfield every day.

The 'experts' will probably say all this is very naive and simplistic, that what we are witnessing is unilateralism vs multilateralism, or a battle between liberal humanism and evolutionary humanism, or a tussle between Marxist socialism and neo-capitalism.

But the truth is far more simple, as all great truths are. And the truth is that the bloodthirsty phenomenon we are observing today is pure and simple Darwinism — the survival of the fittest. Which may have been acceptable 200,000 years ago when homo sapiens was still at the hunter-gatherer stage of our evolution, but not today after millennia of progress.

Today, it is evil, a threat to humanity itself, which cannot be removed by armies or the law but only by the people themselves, the people who have birthed these mutants in the first place.

These are, as I said, dangerous times for all nations, but do we have the leadership that can navigate the country safely through these troubled waters? I don't know because right now, it is busy trashing , demolishing houses, demonising live-in relationships, digging up mosques, figuring out more novel ways of winning elections, taking over , and declaring more meat-free zones. World affairs can wait.

Views are personal

 is a retired IAS officer and author of Disappearing Democracy: Dismantling of a Nation and other works. He blogs at